Fire in the Hole || Rogers and Shepherd
Tommy typically made a habit out of avoiding places where lots of people went. He didn’t mesh well with crowds. Still, when you find out that there’s an office building on fire, it could scarcely be avoided.
He would have called the others for backup, but there wasn’t any time; when he ground to a halt nearby, smoke was billowing heavily from the top. Whatever had caused the fire, it had happened very suddenly. The building itself wasn’t huge—only five or six storeys—but from the sound of it, the fire was blocking off the top two from being evacuated.
Pulling his goggles down over his eyes, Tommy zipped past the human barricade blocking anyone from approaching the bottom of the building, too fast to be seen. So long as he moved quickly, he didn’t have to breathe in too much smoke; he ferried the people out two at a time, dumping them inelegantly out the main entry before dashing back in. He could feel the heat getting to him, though; even when he was fast enough to not spend more than a few seconds in the top floor at a time, a few seconds was a lot of time to a person like him.
He was just on his way out for the last time, a semi-conscious older man draped over his shoulders, when he returned to the stairwell to find part of it had collapsed. Tommy coughed, looking around for another way out. They couldn’t use a window; he wasn’t invulnerable and they were too high. The only way out was down the stairs. Groaning, Tommy let the man go, approaching the pile of rubble and struggling to stay focused long enough to vaporise it.
He sensed he’d done something wrong almost immediately; instead of the blockage disappearing, the entire stairwell began to shake. Tommy picked up on it just in time to grab the unconscious man behind him while the stairs underneath their feet lost their structure and collapsed. They landed painfully on the flight underneath, and Tommy started running again almost immediately, fast enough to get ahead as the already-weakened building structure started to collapse in proper.
Tommy staggered out of the front of the building just as fell in on itself behind him, only just managing to get far enough away. He dropped the unconscious man he was carrying at the feet of the bewildered onlookers. By now, he was dizzy with fatigue; his costume was clingy with sweat, and his vision was swimming. He could hear some people talking, pointing at him, but not what they were saying.
He got the gist of it a few seconds later though, when he suddenly felt the cool metal of a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Even then, his sluggish brain took an extra moment to register it. What the hell? He’d just saved all those people. Tommy shot the officer a blank look, but was unable to respond, not yet.
