“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 Golden 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?”