He was just finishing up grading the freshman English quiz that he had given to the four classes he taught at the university. He was pleased that a number of them had aced the quiz and gotten every question correct. That either meant that he was reaching them and getting them to review that material he told them was important, or else he was making the quizzes too easy. He preferred to believe that he was reaching them. He was after all the same age as most of them, eighteen, although he would technically be nineteen in another month. He laughed to himself at that thought, and since it was an English literature class he was teaching he asked “To be eighteen or twenty-three, that is the question?”
No, there was no question that he had been born almost nineteen years ago. Both his mother and father had repeatedly answered the question of how old their son was. They knew when his birthday was and they had the birth certificate to prove it. It was true they would tell you that he looked older than his age but that was just the way he looked. It was also true that he was one of the brightest students at the university and that was one of the reasons he had been given a teaching assistant’s job as soon as he had finished his bachelor’s degree.
He finished entering the quiz scores on his laptop computer and followed through with the transfer of the records to the university’s mainframe. He was nothing if not meticulous. It was as he was powering down his computer that he heard it. At first he couldn’t place the sound but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew what it was and it made the hairs on the back of his sandy blond head rise.
He stepped out of the classroom to better hear the sound. He looked around to see if anyone else heard it, but then realized that he was probably the only one left in the building at this late hour. There it came again. It started out fairly low but then rose in pitch until he was fairly sure that only the dogs in the neighborhood could hear it. He went in the direction he thought the sound was coming from. As he was running down the hallway the sound came again and this time he had to admit that it was the sound of someone screaming. He got to the end of the hallway and stopped at the stairs to decide if the sound was coming from the floor above or below.
It was coming from the floors above him and now he was sure that it was a woman’s voice, screaming. A woman who was terrified. He ran up one flight of stairs and was certain that it was coming from that floor. He began to run down the hall in the direction the screaming was coming from. When she screamed again, he could tell that it was coming from the wing of the building that housed the science labs. As he turned down that corridor that he could see the smoke and it only took several steps before he could feel the heat.
He grabbed the fire alarm as he went past it and pulled down on the red handle to call the fire department. He charged down to where the flames were now reaching out into the hall way. There were three labs at the end of that hall way. The one on the right was the one on fire. There in a wall nitch was a fire extinguisher. He opened the door that covered the extinguisher and grabbed it. It was lighter than he thought it should be and as soon as he looked at the dial on the top he knew why. The dial was fully into the red zone, which meant the thing was empty.
He threw it down and looked for another but there weren’t any in sight, nor was there a fire hose in the hall way. Short of cupping his hands and getting some water from the water fountain that was several feet away he didn’t have any means of fighting the fire.
The woman screamed again and now he could tell that she was in a full panic mode. That, he guessed, meant that she didn’t have any means of fighting the fire either. There was a lot of smoke coming out of the room but he could see the screaming woman flattened against the far wall. There was a long laboratory counter between him and the woman, and flames were reaching out from the counter toward her. The way the fire was growing there were only a few minutes left before she would be engulfed by the flames. She was trapped with no way out and with all the smoke she probably couldn’t even tell that he was out there trying to help. His mind was racing through possible things he could do to help, but everything was coming up ashes, just as the woman would be if he stood there frozen.
The fire alarm was ringing but he knew that help would come too late for the woman in the lab. That only left him with one thing to do that could save her.
If you want to find out what he does, you’ll have to follow the icon to the right to get “Time Out.”
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