Getting Back On Track

            He opened his eyes and everything was still a little blurry from his concussion. He saw a uniformed man with gloves about to seemingly grab him. He pushed himself away, shook his head and looked around, only to find what seemed to be hundreds of humans around him. They were restrained from coming closer because of a yellow “DANGER DO NOT TRESPASS” tape that surrounded the situation, but a few of them were permitted to enter and stay in the zone because they wore special uniforms. The situation happened to be right in the middle of a street, where he and Chickle had landed from the fall. He shot a panicked glance at his right, and Tony was right there too, with only minor bruises and scratches. Chickle had fled. A lot of broken bricks and parts of the building that Pascal had shot at were around him, plus all the policemen and investigators that scrutinized the area. “Little boy, don’t move and stay calm, we’re here to help you.” The uniformed man said while two others pulled a sort of tray near him.

            “No no, I’m alright,” Pascal said as he warded off the paramedic with his hand. He stood up, still dizzy and confused, but not as confused as the crowd’s face after witnessing the impossible feet of standing up after such a fall, especially since it was already impossible to survive or even stay in one piece from falling from this far up. There was then loud applause from all around, followed by the flashes of cameras. “What the hell is going on?” He asked out loud, to no one in particular.

  “It’s a miracle of god!” Someone called out. Another woman shuffled out of the crowd with a microphone, followed by a rushing cameraman, running right at him.

            “Young man, what is your name? The interviewer asked.

            “W-what’s all this about?” The interviewee asked in response.

            “Young sir, don’t you remember what happened?”

            “Yes, yes I remember everything, but�"

            “He’s okay, he remembers!” She said at the camera, and then turned around to Pascal again. “Perfect then, you’ll be able to explain every detail, right? But first, little champion, tell us your name!”

            “Euh, Pascal…”

            “Pascal! Your last name is?”

  Pascal frowned at the question, and then he remembered what Tony had told him:
 “People all have two names, one for themselves and one from their family. Since you don’t have a family, you don’t have a second name.”

“Well then, my real name would be Pascal Cloudfire, right?” Pascal had answered at the time.

“Technically, yeah, but I mean that would never sound plausible from where I come from so no one would believe you.”

            D****t, he thought. He wasn’t aware that second names were that important. Pascal looked around, a little stressed because of the unfamiliar situation and because of this stranger that pointed a weird apparatus in front of his face, and to him, it was very intrusive and disturbing, but then he noticed the shattered sign of the building beside them. “Rickard,” He finally stated to the lady, “Pascal Rickard.”

“Pascal Rickard!” The interviewer confirmed with joy, “And where do you come from?”

“Brazin Island.”

“Brazin Island…isn’t that an inhabited island in the pacific? Young man, I’m surprised that you know about the place, how cultivated! But I meant, where do you live with your mom and dad?”

“Mom and dad? No, I lived on top of the Fiery Cliff on Brazin Island… with Cloudfire.”

The interviewer giggled a little, amused by the child’s “imagination”. “Is Cloudfire your father?” She asked.

“Eh…yes, Cloudfire’s my dad. But he’s dead now.”

“Uhm, and your mother?”

“No, I don’t have a mother.”

The woman smiled, but she was visibly a little irritated to not get the answers she wanted. Tony, knocked out further ahead, uttered a little groan and started moving a little. The woman noticed it and quickly rushed past Pascal as if she never talked to him. “Little man, what’s your name? How do you feel about all this?”

Tony opened his eyes, looked around, threw up all over his shirt, then fainted back to unconsciousness.

“His name is Tony,” Pascal stated, and with a brief pause of remembrance, he added: “Gardens.” The interviewer turned around to look at him, pointing her strange thing at Pascal’s face again, making him uncomfortable. No matter which side he tilted or rotated his head, the thing would always carefully follow his mouth… creepy. “He lives in Val-d’Or, with his mom and dad.”

“Ah, okay!” And where is Val-d’Or?”

Pascal shrugged. “I dunno. Far away from here I think.”

The interviewer turned towards the camera and started talking, ignoring him for the rest of the time. Pascal felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned around to see another paramedic. “Don’t worry boy, hop in the back of that ambulance car and we’ll call your parents and we’ll take care of any injury you have.” The man said.

“Okay, but I’m bringing Tony along.” He walked towards Tony when another paramedic pulled him slightly by the shoulders and told him: “Of course we’ll bring him too. Leave it to us.”

“Nah, I’ll bring him myself, no need for that platform and four guys to take him I’ll just carry him on my shoulders.” He kept walking, but the paramedic took a strong hold of him now.

“No no, you can’t do that he’s maybe injured leave him to us don’t worry�"

“I said I’ll bring him!” Pascal shouted and swung the man over his shoulder.

When they reached the hospital after many quarrels with the blond boy who kept insisting that he should drive, they were able to convince him that he had to wait outside in the waiting room for his best friend to heal completely from his wounds. The nurses took away the wheelchair he had found, got him off the rolling beds, and they even caught him playing with a syringe, which after injection got him doozy for a good hour or two, making him sit down and give the nurses a break. In a normal adult male, the doze of sodium thiopental that Pascal shot in his arm would have made him immediately fall asleep and anaesthetic for many hours, but his immune system was greatly stronger than that of a human. A short while after Pascal recovered from his overdose, the doctor came by to give the news to the impatient little boy.

“Your parents haven’t arrived yet?” The doctor asked. A whole gang of people had kept asking him what were the names of his parents, legal guardians or any sort of family link he had with anyone, but Pascal kept responding that he had no one, and assuming he was lying or he hadn’t understood the question, they calmly repeated the question, which led to the same cycle over and over again. The secretaries have been occupied for hours trying to search for his name somewhere on Internet but it just didn’t work. They asked him if it was his real name and he insisted that it was, and he had to repeat numerous times that he had no idea what a social insurance number or identity card was. Tony was sound asleep and all the questions that could have been answered were now impossible to retrieve.

After getting affirmation with the secretaries that Pascal still didn’t exist on the face of the Earth, the doctor then gave his report: “The boy is in good condition now, with only a flesh wound on his right shoulder, which he can’t move for at least two weeks if he wants the injury to completely recover. The rest is just minor scrapes and bruises. He only needs a day’s rest and then to get his parents here when he wakes up and you two are good to go.”

“So he only needs to rest? We don’t need his parents we can leave and I’ll make him rest somewhere.”

“No no, it’s very important that he stays here until the parents arrive�"

“So you’re saying that the only thing left for him is to rest a day?”

“AND that his parents arrive or else you two are not going�"

And in a mere second, Pascal was gone with Tony…through a freshly made hole in the wall.

 

***

 

Tony’s parents arrived too late, of course, and thanks to Tony’s mother, Pascal was wanted in every journal of Quebec and in almost every news channel for having kidnapped a child and for using illegal weapons (grenades and a jetpack, that’s all they could come up with to explain the unexplainable). Like the reporters said, if you look up at the sky one day and find a flying little boy, big chances are that’s him…and you should always call the police when something of the sort happens anyway. After making sure that through the media anybody would be able to recognize Tony at first sight, Tony’s mother drove back with Tony’s father to their hometown of Val-d’Or, eight hours away from the Quebec City’s Children’s Hospital.  She would then go back to her life of denial, like making two lunches in the morning before school time, or still setting the table for four at supper time, which in both cases Jimmy just ate the extra servings. Why would she stop, now that she had the confirmation that Tony was still well alive? Any time her beloved son could arrive home and he’d have his supper waiting for him! She still had some doubts that it was her very own son that had gotten slaughtered at the hand of that horrid reptilian beast on TV, but she had probably been mistaken, too much obsessed on the image of her child and imagining him every time she saw a small boy of Tony’s age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

***

 

Tony kept screaming. Over and over again.

“Goddammit Tony,” Pascal sighed, “Will you ever get used to it? You fly on your own sometimes and you don’t always scream like a squirrel giving birth, do you?”

“I’d bet you really saw it.” Tony answered.

“I’ve lived in the woods all my life.”

“I’m not the one flying! I’m just a normal kid going to school. He’s the one flying and doing all the super cool stuff that I can’t do.”

“Who’s he?” Pascal asked.

“That alien part of me.” Tony replied, and then he continued to cry.

 Pascal was holding Tony from under his armpits as they flew over Quebec City, blindly guessing in which direction to go. He told himself that going forward would be more beneficial than staying on place (What he didn’t consider though was the fifty percent chance that he may actually go backwards). After exhausting himself by wiggling, punching and kicking in emptiness and of course, by screaming, Tony fell asleep and was getting the rest that the doctor had recommended to him. Dawn was breaking after the long and arduous day, and Pascal was starting to get sleepy too. After a kilometre or so of waving up and down in the air because of repetitive, rhythmic awakenings, his head lowered, his eyes closed and after the first snore, he dropped his friend down to the heights below. He just heard a faint little squeal and he snapped out of his sleep.

“Well then,” he said to himself, “His landmark will decide where we sleep tonight.”