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Another boom shook the entire room, and the force of the second explosion knocked us into a wall. Flames roared across the entire room now, and smoke choked me. Alarms rang in the distance. Heat soaked the air, making breathing even more painful.
I tried to stand, but pain spiked through my leg, and I collapsed, groaning. A quick check of my leg showed the reason. It was bent in a way that couldn’t happen without a few bones being broken.
The pain radiated now from my leg to the rest of my body. My leg throbbed, and I tried not to
vomit from the pain.
I shook George. “Get the hell out of here,” I said. “Get up and run.” I didn’t need to be an engineer to know the ceiling was going to come down any second.
He groaned. Large pieces of the ceiling started falling to the ground.
“Move, damn it, George. Move.”
Strangely, my heart didn’t pound. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I started crawling forward, gritting my teeth, the pain in my leg unbelievable. I stopped every few seconds to pull George along. I hoped he’d wake up and run, but there was no way I was going to leave him there.
I glanced back at the welder, but he was already buried under a pile of crap. For all I knew, he’d died in the first explosion. Now it was time to concentrate on the living.
One inch. Two inches. One foot. One yard.
“Fuck!” I screamed. I’d managed to spend four years in the Army and two years in Afghanistan and not see much more than bored soldiers and excited Afghan villagers. I knew guys who’d lost friends or got injured or killed themselves.
I’ve survived all that just so I could die in some shitty, half-built warehouse in Texas. I wasn’t one to question the man upstairs, but his sense of humor was way too twisted for me to understand.
With a loud grunt, I crawled forward. I coughed, the smoke starting to overwhelm me. I could do it. I knew I could. Nothing but a shattered leg. No big deal, right?
Chunks of the wall and ceiling collapsed behind George and me. I let out a nervous laugh. If I’d not started moving when I had, then both of us would have been already buried.
My vision blurred. It was hard to see. I let out another laugh. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the smoke or if I was losing my mind in the end.
Heavy footfalls caught my attention, and I could see three men rushing toward me.
I tried to lift my arm, but all I could manage was a groan at this point.
“We got you, Alex. We got you,” said one of the men as they hoisted me up. Another man grabbed George, and soon, we were hurrying away from the spreading fire.
The last thing I heard before passing out was a moaning creak and another loud crash.
* * *
The smoke filled my lungs. I coughed and hacked. I couldn’t breathe. The pain overwhelmed me, making it hard for me to even think.
I crawled. Cement, metal, and wood crashed in front of me.
“You’re gonna die, you know,” a man in a welder’s mask said. He was standing in front of me like a statue, not moving, not even breathing, but I could still hear him. “Just like I did.”
“I’m not dead yet.”
“Soon. Soon enough.”
More smoked filled the room. I couldn’t see anything.
“Somebody help me,” I screamed.
My eyes snapped open. My leg was in traction, and I had more tubes running into and on me than I could count.
A doctor smiled down at me. “Ah, it’s okay, Alex. Can I call you Alex?”
I gave him a careful nod, but the movement made my neck hurt. My mind was muddled, cloudy, and slow. It was like trying to force a car through a pool of molasses.
