Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,18

UP!

Randall opened his eyes.

A blur greeted him, but not the nothing miasma he’d been in moments before. It was a solid and real blur, and he knew he was no longer floating because he could feel things pressing into his body from all sides. It hurt. This was real and he was conscious.

Sound was a strange thing to him now because it didn’t match what he was seeing. Several seconds after he’d opened his eyes, he realized his world was strangely silent. The piano music was gone. In its place was a thick, cotton-like muffling of something else, something indistinct.

The blur around him solidified enough for him to see that he was on the ground; the asphalt of a city street slashed vertical through his vision. He tried to push himself up, to clear himself away from the chaos of the blur and muffle and regain his bearings, but he couldn’t move his arms.

They’re trapped, he realized. He blinked several times and the area around him began to come into focus. He was absolutely in the middle of the street. He was on his side, and his body was the weight that trapped his left arm, squeezing it beneath him between his chest and the tarmac. Something was also indeed laying on top of him, trapping his other arm. It was brown, probably wood, but it was covered in a layer of dust or ash and there were other things laying on top of the object, obscuring its identity.

He frowned and looked closer, concentrating on the shape of it in an attempt to find something familiar. It’s a shelf, he finally realized. It’s part of one of the library shelves. He peered at it a little longer, his gaze skirting the line of its closest edge until he could barely make the outline of what appeared to be a label. A library label.

This is one of the shelves from the psychology section, he thought as he recognized the “ychol” letters from the label. That was all he could see. But it was enough to let him rebuild the shelf in his head based on where he knew the label was normally located. Once he’d done that, he knew where to lean, how far to lean, and which direction to lean in so that he could get out from underneath the shelf.

He tried to lean in that direction and lift his arm even just a little to help leverage him out from beneath the wooden weight. But it hurt. And he had no control over his fingers; he attempted to wiggle them and failed. It’s broken, he realized hopelessly. When the shelf had fallen and trapped him, it had broken his arm. He knew the ledge had fallen perpendicular to his bone, and it was most likely snapped in half. That was the real reason he couldn’t move it.

But he could still lean, and if he didn’t mind a serious case of road rash, he could slide inch by inch out from beneath the shelf.

Randall closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his blood pulsing past his eardrums. He couldn’t hear any sirens. He couldn’t hear anything but the crackling of a fire somewhere nearby, and the zapping of some kind of electrical wiring that had most likely been severed. He didn’t know where either were, and he couldn’t see anything beyond the shelf, the street under his head, and the dust that filled the air. He had no idea whether help was on its way.

It’s up to me, he realized. He tried to mentally prepare himself for the painful task ahead and then gave up and just gritted his teeth. He began to lean, pulling hard on his legs to curl them under him so he could try to grip the street with the soles of his boots. But suddenly, when he leaned, he was simultaneously moving his right arm – fingers and all.

What the hell?

He frowned and turned his head to look down at his arm. Blood soaked the sleeve of his shirt; he couldn’t tell what was going on under the material, but if he wasn’t imagining things, his arm wasn’t broken after all. In fact… it didn’t even hurt.

“Impossible,” he whispered as he angled his right arm to grip the ledge of the shelf with his now movable fingers. He managed a grip and shoved with all his strength into the bulk of the wood. It shifted slightly, scraping against the street. He growled low,