Thank you for your patience and your kindness. I apologize for any mistakes there may be in this document. I wanted to get it to you as quick as possible.
^.^ Thank you for your kind words as well. I am getting better.
Chapter 6
A female voice I didn't know brought in the night sky, or rather, a sky of smoke lit up by an unseemly mix or orange, blue, and red.
"Mai, can you hear me? How old are you?"
"Oliver?" I could barely hear myself. First off, my voice sounded like I had smoked six packs a day for most of my life. Secondly, something had been put over my mouth and nose. I reached up to pull it off but was stopped by a cool hand, which brought me to the face of the speaker: a sharp faced woman somewhere in her thirties with kind eyes.
"Your husband's okay, Mai. He's right ahead of us getting some oxygen. Just breathed in a bit of smoke, everything will be all right. Can you tell me how old you are?"
But I was pushing my head to the side, searching for him even as I took in that I was laying down on something being pushed by the woman as well as another person on the other side. They wore the black uniform of paramedics. I didn't care what that meant. It only made me flustered because I couldn't see past their arms and torsos. I couldn't see Naru.
"Mai? Can you hear me?"
"Eighteen," I rasped.
"Wow, and already married? Well, you picked right, you can tell from a mile away how much he loves you."
The top of the stretcher hit something metal and the white interior light of the ambulance mixed in with the red, blue, and orange. Radios buzzed, people shouted, and beneath it all I could hear the quiet hum of an idling engine.
It wasn't till the paramedics had folded up the bottom of the stretcher and started pushing me in that I registered the dark figure of my husband holding a plastic breath mask to his face, the same I figured was on my face as well. He still wore his yukata and a blanket had been tossed over him.
Despite the pain, I reached for him. He reached for me too, but as his pale hand came close to mine the more apparent the pink tinge of my own skin became.
He took my fingers gingerly and I ignored how my skin smarted at the contact. The pain was what you would expect of a light sunburn. I opened my mouth to ask him if he was okay, to tell him I loved him, to tell him he was right about me being a stupid, freaking magnet for trouble.
But something else came out instead.
"We can't leave yet."
His eyebrows knitted up. Before he could remove the breathing mask to speak, the paramedics climbed into the back and closed the back doors of the ambulance.
The urgency I didn't quite understand jumped in my chest. I tried to sit up, realizing my legs had been strapped down in the process. My head only teetered a bit from the sudden movement, for which I was glad.
"Stop!" My raspy throat caught, forcing me into a fit of coughing.
The older, male paramedic rushed to my side. "It's alright, no one else was hurt. The fire was contained."
My head started to spin for a whole other reason. My alarm was growing, but my raw throat wouldn't unstick. We had to stop. The ambulance shouldn't leave. I didn't know why, all I knew was that something terrible would happen if it did.
The ambulance gave a gravel crunch of tires and jerked into motion. The female paramedic had taken hold of my hand to clip a small device onto my finger. I felt a prick, and she pulled it back. "Her oxygen levels are still too low," she said, reading the numbers on the tiny screen of the poking device.
"Can you tell us where it hurts?" asked the other paramedic.
Naru watched me, the only person in the ambulance who seemed to really be hearing what I was saying. He squeezed my hand.
"Is something bad coming?" he asked quietly. "Is it one of those feelings?"
I nodded fervently. Tears prickled to my irritated eyes as my coughs subsided, but left my throat feeling raw and tender.
He returned the nod, then reached out to jerk the sleeve of the woman paramedic. "Stop the ambulance."
"Sir, the effects of high levels of smoke inhalation untreated-"
"I'm well aware of them," said Naru evenly. "But something worse will happen if you don't listen to her."
Her eyes narrowed. "Is that a threat, young man?"
"No. It's a warning. My wife is sensitive to possible danger. If she says the ambulance should stay at the hotel, you should listen."
The woman didn't say anything to verify it, but her disbelief was more than clear as she urged Naru to return the breathing apparatus to his face. The older paramedic, who was checking the skin beneath my yukata sleeves and around my neck, seemed intent to just stay out of it.
"Have her feelings ever been wrong?" she asked.
"Not that I'm aware of."
Embarrassment was starting to cloud up my sense of dread. How long had the road been zipping beneath us? How far had we already gotten?
"Naru," I rasped.
The older paramedic pushed gently on my shoulder. "Just relax, little miss. Nothing's going to happen. You're safe now."
"You can't force people to the hospital who don't want to go," said Naru. "Can't you at least stop for a few moments?"
"Other people need us," said the woman, her voice taking on a wiry, impatient quality. "If every ambulance waited around for someone to feel comfortable, people would die."
I heard a loud 'pop!' as though a tire had run over a particularly large rock. My stomach contracted, and unbidden came the thought to my mind that it didn't matter anymore.
Before I could even begin to doubt myself, the world upended in a dragon-isk groan of metal. The inside of the ambulance became the tumble of a clothing dryer. Only I stayed in place, strapped to the gurney which apparently had been locked to the floor. But Naru, along with the other paramedics, went high.
A strange pressure balled in my head, as though great hands were pressing in on my skull. My hand that had been holding Naru's clenched hard, pulling him in, even as the hurricane roars of crunching metal burst my ears. I felt his weight on me, his arms respond.
Then it all cracked to a stop. The white light went out, plunging us into darkness. In the tumble I had somehow managed to get my arms tight around Naru and I could feel his racing heartbeat. We had stopped at an angle, and the straps of the gurney were digging into my legs to keep me there.
My hands raced up and down my husband in the darkness, searching for wounds as I croaked his name.
"Mai, Mai, I'm okay. You-the paramedics-"
"You sure? If you're lying to me for manliness sake, I swear I-"
"I mean it. You...lord, you pulled me in like..." he paused. "Shh."
I listened too, but it was hard to hear anything past my racing, frantic blood. All I could pick up was the sound of a river. Had we rolled into one? What had made the ambulance crash? It wasn't an altogether happy feeling to know that my instincts had been correct.
Suddenly, Naru was in motion. He pulled off the mask from my face and tore open the velcro of the gurney straps. I stumbled against the steepfloor, sliding into something soft-a body.
"Naru, we have to-"
"Move!"
I then took notice of a sharp, pungent odor that had filled the cabin.
Naru kicked the back doors open and threw us out, even as I fought against his grip. We broke out into the cool, late afternoon and into the shallow shore of the same creek I had heard. The road was some distance away up a steep hill, which, based off the broken trees and scrapes through the ground covering, had been what the ambulance had tumbled off of.
I only got a moment to register all this before fire burst into being around the cab of the ambulance.
This couldn't be happening. It just wasn't rational. It was just way too much.
"The driver!" But my throat couldn't handle the scream and cracked me over. Without the breathing mask I found myself doubled over, coughing through the head splitting pain of my abused throat.
But Naru moved. He scrambled up the bank side to the doors and took hold of an arm of each unconscious paramedic and pulled. They ungraciously slid out of the back, even as the fire swallowed it whole like the maw of a great python. Naru let the bodies tumble down into the creek, even as he jumped down as well with a great splash.
"Get down, Mai!"
I moved too slowly and Naru through himself over me. He didn't a moment too soon as a thundercrack roared and smashed us down into the water. I watched in bewilderment as the water lit up with fire before clenching my eyes close and focused on not getting dragged away by the current. It wasn't a large river, but the middle in which Naru had thrown ourselves into was still hip deep-deep enough to bury us from the flames.
We came up gasping. I clung to his arm as he pulled me to the other side.
"Stay," he said firmly.
I watched, shivering, fighting for breath, as he sloshed to the other side to the paramedics and turned them so their clothes that hadn't been submerged in the water could have the fire dancing on them put out. He crouched down between them, a finger to each throat. I turned my eyes from him to the blackened, ruptured corpse of the ambulance. The unmistakable blackened arm and head of a person hung out of the driver side door.
Something within me broke and I went numb. Everything became distant, as though it were happening to someone else in a movie and I was just an observer.
Naru came back to me, his yukata torn and wet. He had some scratches on his arms and what looked to be a reddening bruise on his jaw, but otherwise looked unharmed.
"Come on, sweet." He reached out to help me out of the water. He put a hand over my eyes. "That's enough. Don't look anymore. You're going to be okay."
"Are they okay?" I rasped.
"We're not that far from the hotel. Someone's had to have heard the crash, they'll be here in a minute."
Once I had stumbled onto the shore, my feet numb from cold, he put an arm around my shoulders and underneath my knees, lifting me like the bemused little bride that I was. I clung to his soaked clothing, yearning for his heat even as I stressed about his own chill.
"I can walk," I said.
"Humor me," he breathed. "I just want to hold you...just for a bit...please..."
I clung to his neck, letting my chin rest on my wrist. I forced myself not to look at the flaming wreckage we were leaving, but rather the river and the tunnel beneath the freeway that it ran into. I hadn't noticed it until now. So the river ran beneath the road. The tunnel itself looked big enough for someone to walk through, if they bent over.
Even as I thought that, I made out a hunched shadow next to the opening, half hidden by brown autumn grass and bushes.
I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. The only thing that kept my mind working was the cool numbness that had broken over me. This wasn't happening.
"It's here," I whispered.
I knew he heard, but he just kept on going. He headed towards a more gentle slop upwards that ran alongside the road, rather than trying to scale the steep incline straight to it.
I watched the dark, hunched figure, and I sensed it watched me back, until a large tree blocked my view.
"I think you saved my life," said Naru, starting to sound a bit out of breath, which was phenomenal considering all that happened. When I didn't say anything, just kept starting at the spot where the trees blocked off the figure, he said, "There's no way you could have pulled me to you in all that. The centrifugal force, my weight...and I recognize the feeling. The energy, it...but that's insane. It happened to quick, I must be mistaken. Though...you've never had any inkling that you might have PK, have you?"
That made me smile. "That's funny."
"I thought so. Maybe it was just me. Some probably leaked out of me in the chaos."
My grip tightened painfully. "Are you okay?"
"I feel fine. Besides freezing and a bit bruised, fine. You?"
"It's mostly my throat."
"Yeah, you sound horrendous. Mai..." His voice suddenly broke. His next words came out more of a gasp or a sob. "Mai, I love you." He stopped, his arms about me trembling. "Mai. Mai."
I hugged his head to me, letting his shaking roll over into me. He repeated my name like a child's sobbing mantra of 'Mommy.'
All the while, I kept watch for the shadow, numb and raw like a raw wound to open air. The smoke of the ambulance poured up from the trees, lit by escaped tongues of flame.