“Are you ok?” Clark asked as he knelt. He could hear the sounds of two heartbeats, one fast and the other erratic and slow.
A growling noise was his only warning as a muzzle snapped at him. He felt teeth on his hand, but it didn’t hurt.
A large dog stood up slowly from where it had been laying on its owner, keeping him warm with its body. It was brown and white, a Saint Bernard and it probably weighed more than Clark himself did. It had a heavy coat of fur that doubtlessly kept it warm, although Clark could see old scars on its face.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” Clark said slowly, his voice calm and soothing. In his foster families he’d had to deal with strange dogs more than he would have had to admit, and he’d learned how to deal with them. He turned his body to the side and didn’t look the dog straight in the eyes, but he kept himself loose and didn’t become tense. Body language carried a lot of weight with dogs
He slowly put his hand out for the dog to smell. They could sense fear, and sometimes his alien smell confused them, yet another reason for him to have trouble fitting into families. He always won them in the end, though, because he genuinely liked dogs.
“I’m here to help,” he said. He smiled without showing his teeth.
The dog allowed him to slowly pet it as he got a better look at the man on the ground.
The man was older, in his sixties, heavily bundled in multiple layers of clothing, a heavy beard on his face, cap on his head and his clothing obviously stuffed with newspapers. He was black, but his hair and beard were salt and pepper and graying.
“Are you ok?” Clark asked, even though he knew the man wasn’t from the sound of his heart. He carefully reached out to shake the man.
“Wake up!”
He shook the man, but the man didn’t wake up.
Clark stood up. “Help! This man needs help!”
The street was deserted; they were in a business district in a bad neighborhood after dark. With the snow, even the people who normally would have been likely to be out were staying in.
There weren’t even anyone living close enough to hear them.
If Clark didn’t do something, the man would be found frozen by morning, dead. He grimaced; he’d heard something about not putting frostbitten people in hot water, but he didn’t know what frostbite looked like, or even if the cold was the man’s main problem. He didn’t smell drunk, although he could have had a heart attack or something worse.
Clark was afraid of setting the man on fire with
his vision; if he set himself on fire all he’d lose was a set of clothes. Set a normal person on fire, and he’d have to have scars, skin grafts or even worse.
Clark didn’t see any other choice. He used his heat vision as carefully as he could, fearful of hurting the man. It seemed to be forever before the man woke, but even so his heart remained unsteady, skipping beats.
“Wha…?” the man asked.
“We need to get you some help,” Clark said. “Can you stand up?”
“Rufus?” the man asked, reaching out.
The dog pricked its ears and shoved its face under the man’s hand.
No matter what Clark did, he couldn’t get the man to wake up.
Reluctantly, he bent down and picked the man up. Clark only weighed one hundred fifty pounds, and this was a large man to go with his large dog. He must have weighed over two hundred pounds.
Despite Clark’s strength, leverage should have been a problem, but for some reason, in this the laws of physics had never been an issue for Clark.
He picked the man up and cradled him in his arms carefully held out before him. He could have put him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, but he didn’t know what kind of injuries the man might have and he didn’t want to risk injuring him any more than he had to. Besides, Clark was wearing his backpack.
Moving him at all was a risk, but Clark wasn’t sure how much time the man had left.
He started out at a jog and he could hear the dog
leaping up to follow him with an anxious whine.
“Try to keep up,” Clark said.
The man opened his eyes and stared up at him. “Are you an angel?”
Before Clark could reply, he was passed out again.
**************
“This man needs help!” Clark shouted as he entered the emergency room. He’d entered through the Ambulance entrance instead of the general entrance.
“You can’t bring that dog in here!” a man in blue scrubs snapped, but several people moved to take the man out of his arms.
Two orderlies grunted as they put the unconscious man on a gurney. One of them glanced back at him, an assessing look in his eyes. They rushed the man through a set of metal doors directly in front of him.
Clark looked away quickly, uncomfortably aware that he shouldn’t have been able to lift someone that heavy.
He turned to leave when someone grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Hold on,” an older black woman in scrubs said.
“They said I couldn’t keep the dog in here,” Clark mumbled. He was suddenly exhausted, tired not from the effort of carrying a two hundred pound man for thirty minutes, but from the emotional stress. A man’s life had been in his hands, and all he could think was to wonder if he’d done the right things or if he’d made things worse.
“We can worry about that in a moment,” she said. She looked at him with a piercing, intelligent expression that made Clark feel uncomfortable that she knew exactly how old he was. “There’s paperwork to be filled out.”
“I don’t have any money,” Clark said quickly. “I don’t even know the guy. I just found him lying out by an alley.”
“How’d you get him here?” she asked.
Clark’s mind raced. “I put him in my car and I turned the heater up. I didn’t know where the hospital was, and it took a while.”
Her hand on his shoulder was reassuring. “I’m sure you did your best. Why don’t you sit down? Maybe I can get you something warm to drink.”
She led him through a hallway to the right a short distance, and into a small lounge area.
“This is the paramedics lounge,” she said. “Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll get you something to drink.”
It had been almost twelve hours since he’d eaten, and Clark realized suddenly that he was hungry and thirsty as well.
Clark sat down blindly, his hand absently petting the dog’s head as he stared into space.
He felt overwhelmed, not just from the close call, but from his whole life. In the space of twenty four hours his life had collapsed entirely
and he’d become the one thing he’d always sworn he’d never be. He was a runaway, a statistic.
The other kids had made fun of him for his ambitions. He’d planned to make something of himself. He’d wanted to go to college and become someone who made the world a better place instead of someone who made everything worse.
Maybe he’d become a policeman, or a fireman. Given his special abilities, he’d have been good at those professions.
They’d tried to convince him that being in foster care meant that every door was closed. No one cared, really, and the odds of becoming adopted dropped exponentially after someone was out of the cute baby stage. Foster kids had too many problems for most people.
At the time, he hadn’t recognized the expressions in their eyes as they’d taunted him. It had only been later that what he’d seen in their eyes hadn’t been mockery. It had been a hollow sort of fear as they’d confronted their own view of the future.
A lifetime of minimum wage jobs while being labeled white trash had been Clark’s worst nightmare. It only went to show that as worldly as Clark had thought he’d been, he hadn’t known anything.
His worst nightmare had changed. He was now living it.
Rufus leaned against his leg and looked up at him mournfully. He could almost imagine he could see a question in the canine’s eyes.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he
admitted in a small voice. He couldn’t be sure
whether he was talking about what was going to
happen to the dog’s master, or what was going to
happen to him.
Yet despite himself, as he stroked the dog’s fur
he found himself relaxing.
****************
“You look like you haven’t had anything to eat in a while,” the nurse said. She handed him a mug of hot chocolate and a candy bar. “It’s the most filling thing in the vending machine.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then looked at the food and drink she was carrying.
Clark’s eyes felt blurry and odd, and it took him a moment to realize that what he felt was tears. He felt ashamed and he quickly looked away, blinking his eyes.
He hadn’t cried since his parents had died, and now all it took was a snickers bar and a cup of hot chocolate? He owed his parents more than that.
“Thank you,” he said. His voice was rougher than he would have liked, but he took the offerings thankfully.
It wasn’t the food that made him cry. It was the kindness.
Despite everything he’d heard about hospital food, it was the best chocolate he’d ever had in his life.
She left him alone, and before he knew it, for the second time in twenty four hours he fell asleep.
