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Son of The Tank Man Page 7
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“No, no, no that way,” she squawked in my ears in a way that it sounded like Aaron's favorite song, leaning so close to me that my arm could feel the touch of her chest.
But at that time I had already been blinded by the deadly smoke that had mutated into tear gas, which was even more irritating than the poor air outside, and was desperately uncertain about what she meant when she said ‘that way’.
“I can't see. And I had absolutely no idea about what you're trying to tell me.” I patted her arm to grab her attention, then lightly two-fingered at both of my closed eyes for three times, praying she would understand what I was conveying.
Thus she, holding my hand so tightly that I could feel the tiniest perspiration creeping its way through the pores of her hand, started leading the way, and I felt weird to be pulled here and there without actually knowing where the destination was by a complete stranger, especially in such a jeopardy. So, imbued with this immense sense of insecurity, I tried to lift up my stiff and dry eyelids with my thumb as the feeling of weirdness then inevitably evolved into a sense of doubt because I felt like we were just stumbling around on the same floor, instead of going down a flight of stairs or something like that to somewhere safe, but I couldn't.
“Where are you taking me!? Aren't we supposed to go down and leave this building!?” I asked, eagerly massaging my eyes with my thumb to help speeding up the recovery of my sight like I had just worn myself out by straining my eyes too much.
“No. No. This way to heaven. To heaven. Safe, safe,” she said.
With my adrenaline pumping, “What? I'm not going to heaven! I don't want to die here!” I barked loudly and instantly hauled back my arm with every ounce of strength I'd ever possessed, sending her to the ground, with my fist clenched.
And I stormed away, with my eyes fully open in spite of the increasing discomfort stemmed from the thick walls of impenetrable smoke, and sprinted back to where the others had gone. The evacuation guidance light was much more difficult to find than before at that time since the entire floor was already engulfed. I could only grope my way around until I magically laid my hand on one of those melting canvases, which seemed very sarcastic at that moment, hanging on the walls, and espied a tiny margin of dying heavenly light emitted by the half-broken system.
Following its guidance, passing by the elevators, turning left, then right along the corridor, I reached a fire exit door and pushed it open without a second thought, then regretted for the massive wisps of dark smoke that swirled out from the sweltering emergency exit at the next second. The entire escape route was working like a chimney without an opening, which trapped all smoke, and was probably heating up at an unimaginable rate, and it forced me to recede a step before I could enter, nevertheless, that was not the most horrific thing I'd seen there. The most horrendous thing of all was seeing the piles of bodies of people stacked up at the bottom of the stairs that made me shudder.
It was only a quick glance, but still, I was able to see one of them floundering, trying to crawl out of the piles like a zombie rising from its tomb. He seemed to be sober, half alive and suffering greatly, but was moving like a turtle. I bet he wouldn't last another minute without my help. My instinctive selfishness that made me tiptoe away from the door wanted me to find another route and get myself out of this blazing hell as soon as possible, but the contemptible shamefulness of not helping the headband man accumulated in my mind told me the exact opposite and prompted me to edge closer to the door. The internal conflict was tearing me apart and wasn't settled until a voice within cross-examined me. How could I in all conscience justify the thought of turning a blind eye to someone in dire need of help again?
Looking back now, I know that's the exact same question – a rather easy one when compared to others' – that changed my life because that's what I was asked when facing Gradius before the pearly gate for the first time. And I would say it's kind of the most unexpected question I'd imagined. But my answer was quick and simple. There is no justifying anything for my hands have already been tainted with sin but confession.
That being said, at that time, I wouldn't dare to rush in there brainlessly like mounting a final banzai charge and got myself a free ride to the heaven. Then I thought of one thing in my suitcase that could help me accomplish this, so I darted back to where I dropped it off, found it, unzipped it, rummaged around for the mask, and clamped it over my face. It wasn't one of those polished fire resistant masks that could repel lethal smoke particles, but it was fairly useful in terms of alleviating the impact of breathing in hot fumes of smoke. And I rushed back, pushed open the door and stomped down the stairs, crouching, to the crawling man, who had a crimson face that seemed to augur ill.
“Hey,” I said, jiggled his shoulder, checked his vital signs and found a throbbing pulse, his skin red hot like a branding iron.
“He...lp......” He, a man who appeared to be in his early fifties, emitted the word so weakly that I had to guess what he was trying to say.
“Don't worry. You'll be all right. I'll get you out of here.” I injected confidence into my tone even though I was utterly clueless about how I was going to get out of this place with a fainted man on my shoulder and thought for a moment. I wasn't sure about anything but that the thick layers of smoke would definitely kill us in less than ten minutes if I kept on being indecisive.
So, assuming it was a suicide mission to carry him further down the stairs, where the densest clouds of smoke could be found, I arduously dragged him back up to the third floor and grinded my teeth as my brain raced to think of a possible way out. Why did the staff want to get us to the other side? I pondered and decided to go back the old way, realizing maybe I had been wrong, maybe she knew it would be a fatal mistake to have gone to the fire escape but was just unable to conquer the language barrier. And I felt terribly ashamed as well as embarrassed for the gratuitous pain inflicted on her.
With the man on my right shoulder and my arm securing him in position, his legs dangling wildly over my spine, I, inch by inch, began hobbling along the way I'd walked once and let nothing stop me until a windowless dead end, where a despairing, solid-looking brick wall shattered my fragile hope, faced me. Initially I thought there was simply no way out and was then learning to accept my faith, but if it was true, where was she? Either she had vanished without a trace, or there must be a hidden way out of here.
A new hope was ignited, and I poked around vigorously and relentlessly, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and keep on ferreting around despite the growing-grim situation. And when I bent over to check the corners, an unusually high-pitched air streaking sound that indicated there was a small crack somewhere on the walls around captured my full attention and reminded me of what she had said about a ladder.
“Find the crack, find the ladder,” I stood back up, removed the mask, put it into my trousers pocket, and mumbled. “Find the crack, find the ladder, find the exit!”
But then I tripped over something soft and clumsily stumbled forward. The momentum carried me to the brick wall, and I had to slam my arms against it to avoid smacking my skull into it.
And when I looked down to see what I'd tripped over, I discovered it's his hand. The man had meekly held up his hand. He was awake.
So I went to him and tried to help him up with my arm round him, “Hey, how are you feeling?” I asked and was slightly surprised by a deep scar that went from the top of his forehead down to his right eye, which was unobservable back in the fire escape due to the stifling smoke. It wasn't a fresh wound, but if he told me he had fought in a war, I'd believe him without a doubt.
“Water,” he, sitting upright, gently grasped my arm and moaned. “I need water.”
“You surely look like you could use a drink, but first of all we need to get out of here. Can you stand up?”
He looked around with his soulless eyes that made him seem very perplexed about the current circumstances.
“Look, we're trapped here on the third floor of the Gold
en Hotel. I found you behind the emergency exit door. You were dying, so I carried you out. The fire has rendered all the elevators unusable, and the other means of escape has become impassable, except a ladder I believe to be at somewhere around this area. Find it, we find our way out.”
“A ladder?” He, sitting up slowly, gawked at me blankly and pointed to the bottom part of the wall behind me. “Is that the ladder?”
I directed my gaze in the direction he pointed, craned forward for a better look and noticed there was a ray of dappled light that could be easily overlooked streaming through a tiny vertical crack that would hardly fit my finger at the floor-wall junction, where I could barely see the top of a wooden ladder seemingly stretching down to the lower floor.
“It is!” I exclaimed, leapt forward, squatted down and fumbled over the section of the wall above it, trying to find some sort of a secret button, but tumbled down as I failed to keep my balance.
“It should be removable. Try sticking a finger through the crack,” he suggested.
I listened. At first, my finger was getting chewed by the thin crack, but luckily, the lower part was easier once I ran my first knuckle through.
“Then what?” I asked.
“I don't know. Pull it, push it, shake it, whatever you can.” His voice was vivider than before.
I knew it was nothing short of a miracle when I somehow managed to rip that section of the wall off effortlessly by a simple tug. It was much more straightforward than I'd imagined, but the only reason why I could do it was mainly because it was already detached from the main concrete wall when I exerted force on it.
I felt relieved and turned around to look at him with a smile on my face. “I did it!”
“Well done,” he praised.
“I'm Ashton.”
“I'm Jack,” he replied. “It's nice to meet you, Ashton. Thank you for saving my life.”
“Let's get out of this place together, Jack,” I said in an encouraging tone that I once thought I'd already forgotten. “Can you stand up?”
“Yes, I am feeling much better now, thank you,” he said, as he almost pitched forward while trying to stand up, luckily, he managed to maintain his balance by tottering backward.
“Do you think you can make it down the ladder?”
“Sure. Don't worry about me. After you.”
Thus, I scrambled down the wobbly ladder, gingerly and very slowly, as it seemed to be a little bit antiquated and shaky, not to mention how difficult it was to breathe and move normally in such an unlivable environment; my hand did slip off the ladder once, but I was able to hold on to it. And I was anxious about Jack when I set foot on the second floor, which the layout was identical as the third floor, but it turned out he was doing even better than me. Only by judging his swift and deft movements of limbs, no one, not excluding me, would believe he had just escaped death moments ago, and I wondered for a minute if he was a member of some kind of a special forces or not.
Realizing my concern was counter-productive and not needed, I chased it away and had my mind focused on searching for the same tiny crack on the floor-wall junction at the same spot. It took me almost no time to locate it, though the tug required more strength this time, and then we began climbing down the second ladder again.
“One last ladder,” I said to Jack, as I drew in a gasp of air and pulled out the removable part of the wall on the first floor, but was then dazed by what I saw.
The ladder connecting where we were and the foyer was not there. It was lying on the ground right below us as if it were one of those dead men I was seeing right besides it, and as an unparalleled but familiar tumult of ranting and raving broke out, my daze ceased.
“Are you hearing the same thing that I am hearing?”
“Yeah, it sounds exactly the same as the commotion I have heard earlier today,” Jack said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
Neither one of us spoke a word, nor made the least audible noise, in the next ten minutes. It's like we were anti-melting snowmen in a burning hell.
Gulped down the ridiculously hefty yet invisible nervousness, “I think...” I whispered at the lowest voice possible, bringing the quietness to an end, but paused when we supported each other with a profound exchanged look.
“I think we're temporarily safe. They are just shouting crazily at somewhere outside the hotel. They're not in here, at least, for now, and hopefully they won't be able to find a way to get in,” he picked up at where I stopped, staring into my eyes.
“I think so, too.”
“So let's forget about those protestors first. We'll deal with them later. Now we should concentrate on finding a way to lift the ladder up off the ground so that we could get down there.”
“Maybe I could jump down there and lift it up for you?” I suggested, ruffling my hair.
“It won't work. You will break your legs and won't be able to walk again for a month.”
“So what should we do?” I asked when a nourishing breeze of fresh air that I had never really appreciated before, probably because I had always been taking it for granted for my whole life, wafted into my nose, and I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Wait, do you notice that?”
Deliberately making loud inhaling and exhaling sounds, he said, “Smells like fresh roses.”
“Perhaps the fire is extinguished. The fire alarm has stopped as well,” I said, as I happened to see a man pacing back and forth in an apprehensive gait through the opening part of the wall, it's now or never. “Hey! Over here!”
The man looked up at me before I could finish my sentence, and a coruscating chain on his neck caught my eyes.
“It's you!” The words automatically blurted out of my tongue when his subtly amiable grin then spurred my memory.
He seemed speechless because of astonishment for a moment, with his eyes popped out in the ‘popping’ way and the same went for me – that amazed face on him back then was exactly what he looked like when we first came across each other in the house and I did titter at him for that.
“I've been looking around for you, my friend. So glad to see you in one piece. I am worried about you,” he stopped walking and caroled, his smile gradually growing into a full beaming grin that completely manifested the sincere happiness he was experiencing; this beaming grin was much wider than that signature smile he had.
I didn't know why he was so happy when he saw a man he barely knew, nor the reason why he was here, but it never bothered me as at that time I was only concerned with getting a helping hand, yet it seemed my lurking curiosity had found itself a place to make me remember this happy face. And that's why when I later found out he knew Jack, I immediately figured out that the happy face had more to do with seeing Jack than seeing me.
“Well, I'm glad to see you too, driver,” I said despite feeling a strong disinclination to be considered a friend of him, especially after meeting the fearsome police, and so I veiled my reluctance behind a curtain of fake smile I learnt from the people in the Port. “Can you please lift the ladder up so that we can come down?”
“Of course,” he replied quickly and looked down on the ladder.
Then he crouched, tightly clenched both sides of the ladder and lifted it up like it was the weight of a feather. “I'll keep it in place. Just climb down slowly.”
And after I threw Jack a jubilantly wondering look, “After you,” Jack said.
So I scaled down the rickety-rackety ladder energetically to the lavishly adorned foyer, where all the gold used in decoration was able to stand through the test of real blaze of fire and shined even brighter like a reincarnated phoenix out of its flaxen ashes, and was impressed by the view I was regarding at; make no mistake about this, it's still incomparable to where I am now.
And when I made it down there and placed my foot on the solid ground, the ranting raving maniacs rallied right outside of an automatic steel gate that acted as the last barrier between us and them at the main entrance started striking, bashing and
smashing the gate with whatever they had in possession and resumed roaring in a way that it resembled an ancient and primitive war cry uttered by a clan of vicious intruders from across the sea.
“Can someone please explain to me what is going on?” I said, as immense confusion flooded me.
I was eager to know what was going on. And I looked around aimlessly for my answer and happened to discover there were approximately eleven scared people, excluding me and Jack, scattered in this place, most of them had put on their masks, and multiple corpses strewn across this giant foyer. Also the surroundings were chaotic; the chandelier, which was supposed to be hanging in midair, was brought down and was viciously dismantled, only the wire linking the ceiling was intact, and the piece of fine gold was missing, the debris of the protective plastic box showered around.
“I've warned you about this. And obviously, you – ” the driver, looking over his shoulder, said while holding the ladder for Jack.
Slightly enraged, “You told me the government would close the border in two days, but you never told me anything about this bad, and your appearance got me into a real trouble. A police officer knocked on my door this morning and asked me some questions about you,” I said, blaming him for what I'd been through because I deceived myself into believing he was the one who got me into this even I had no doubt it wasn't his responsibility. Blaming others for what I thought I didn't deserve just made me feel better. “Anyway, why do they hate us so much that it seems they want to barge in and slaughter us like we are the evil-doers instead?” Abruptly changing the subject after wrongly accusing someone was my usual tactic to avoid stirring up any further possible conflict.