You can laugh, only if you laugh with me
You can cry, only if you cry for me
Don't forget that you're condemned to me…
-"The Rules," Shakira
Whirring blue and red lights flashed against the white blanket of the snow. Bundled-up paramedics wrapped up shivering, crying fourth-graders in blankets, bandaging small cuts and sprains. Children were hustled into squad cars, ambulances, any available vehicle to take them to the nearest hospital.
Phoebe and Gerald watched the plight of their best friends from the other side of the yellow police tape, despite the emergency personnel's efforts to get them into a car and out of the accident scene. Paramedics hovered around Arnold and Helga's unconscious bodies, easing them onto stretches and carrying them into the ambulance, where they were hooked up to oxygen, IV's, heart monitors. Then the paramedics began the laborious process of cleaning their burns.
The heavy white doors of the ambulance slammed shut, and with some gentle coaxing from Mr. Simmons, Gerald and Phoebe were convinced to get into a squad car and follow the ambulance to the hospital. Gerald had shed his normally cool façade and was weeping openly; from shock and reaction, from fear, from worry for his best friend and a girl he had not known how much he cared about until she hung very near death. Phoebe, surprisingly, was stoic, or perhaps just numb, staring at the icy landscape through her window, a landscape that was perhaps not colder than her eyes.
In the ambulance, there was a problem. The two children's hands, clasped tightly as they were, had been burned together. The blistering skin had sealed their hands to each other, in a kind of deathly embrace. The paramedics would have to cut their hands apart to prevent them from a sort of artificial Siamese twinship, if they lived—which was no great likelihood, at the moment. Both would probably need blood transplants, if they made it through the ride to the hospital.
Down the frozen road a pack of ambulances and squad cars sped, racing against the clock, fate, and the ever-dwindling drumbeats of two hearts, beating in erratic rhythm in the ribcages of two little blond children, over whom the Grim Reaper's scythe hung at a precarious and persistent angle.