The morning hours had all but ticked away as the police closed off all roads leading to the Harrington Tower letting only fire trucks and ambulances. Captain Jarred Snow had taken the role of incident commander until the police commissioner and fire chief could arrive to relieve him. Jarred had ordered a complete evacuation of the Center which was three quarters complete as the command center was and staging areas were set up. It was early April but the day itself was unusually warm and calm for a early spring day and this day would most certainly have been an excellent day for April showers. The television and cable news crews were already set up and reporting the minute by minute and had been since before the first fire truck had arrived. Jared was screaming to his people asking why they were not as efficient. Then remarked that it was human nature to want to see the horror of death rather than the heroics of life. Suddenly the cameras began pointing to the sky and then Jared looked up too. Everyone watched as the flying man flew over the harbor and directly into the towering inferno.
Wade flew into the charring blackness of the billowing cloud of noxious smoke and for a brief instant believed he could feel the heat of the inferno he was penetrating. Through the smoke he quickly located every person left alive on the 175th floor of the Harrington Tower using his heightened sense of hearing to single out screams, breathing, and heartbeats. Despite his heightened sense of sight he found his eyes were utterly useless in the utter blackness surrounding him. Wade focused on the nearest heartbeat and reflexively shot at phenomenal speed toward the sound of rapidly diminishing life. As he came to a stop in front of the person he intended to rescue his ears sent warning of a problem Wade had not anticipated and realized only too late would prove fatal to the person he intended to rescue.
Wade had moved so swiftly he failed to anticipate the small yet powerful vacuum his frame would create by displacing the air around him. As the air rushed back in to fill the void he crated it sucked the raging flames into a vortex of flaming death that followed him. Wade tried in vein to use his own seemingly invulnerable body to protect the person he was desperate to save as he had seen Superman do in countless comics of his youth. The true laws of physics however are not as kind and Wade's body could not protect the person he was trying to save. Wade could only scream in horror as he felt the poor souls body disintegrate in his arms from the fierce heat that enveloped them both. The whole process took less than five seconds before Wade was left holding only charred pieces of human remains.
Wade forced himself to snap out of the horror his negligence had created and moved much more cautiously toward the remaining, and ever fewer, hearts that were still beating. As gently and slowly as he safely could he charged in and out of the incinerating 175th floor fourteen more times before there were finally no more heartbeats to rescue. He wished he had Superman's breath to put out the flames but in the real world no living creature, powers or not, had the lung capacity for such a feat. Even if he did, even if it was like Superman's freeze breath, it would have done little more than to fan the inferno. What Wade could do was have the fire department give him a hose so he could fly it up to the 173rd floor, where the plumbing, and therefore the built in fire hose stations, were still in working order. Once this was accomplished he began showering the entire area with water, even so the building had suffered a massive explosion, cause as yet undetermined, and temperatures were such that ending the blaze would take some time with only one hose.
After about an hour of bombarding the whole floor with a ceaseless stream of water the thick cloud of dark smoke finally began to clear and Wade could see that he had gotten the blaze under control for the most part. The walls had been stripped of most of their outer layers and the steel girders laid bare. The subtle squealing and moaning the structure began to make Wade uneasy and a sense of dread began to wash over him. As the steel supports holding the floor in place began to give in to the abuse they had suffered Wade used his heightened sense of sight in the increasing clear environment to isolate a support beam crossing the middle of the floor above him and likely the most stable support from which attempt preventing the floors collapse.
Again the reality of the physics and non-comic book world proved just how uncaring and deadly it could be on a whim. Even as Wade centered himself after levitating up to the beam to give himself the best position for stability and control the entire steel structure of the floor collapsed around him. The Harrington Tower was 203 stories tall, as floor number 175 collapsed, so did the support for the floors above it. In what seemed like an agonizingly slow motion disaster reel he was powerless to stop, Wade watched in horror as the top 28 floors fell around him and brought about the total collapse of the Harrington Tower. As the concrete, steel, and remaining humanity fell around him he could only watch in continuous shock as the building fell. Wade attempted to save some of the emergency workers stationed below only to have the rush of air ahead of him blow them into the very danger he was now desperate to save even just one soul from. In the end he saved none other than the fourteen he was able to get to. Somehow holding himself together he searched the wreckage of the Harrington Tower for survivors but found none. All within 300 feet of the building had died.
Wade flew off as fast and as high as he could. Hovering in the Stratosphere he sobbed violently and felt himself on the verge of madness.
“Why give me these powers if all I can do is watch people die?” Wade asked the extremely thin air around him.
Wade never knew how or why he developed his abilities and no longer cared. He hated them, he hated himself, he hated God if God truly existed which he felt now more than ever that he did not. God had sent Jesus to ease the suffering of others through self sacrifice and the divine gifts bestowed upon him. Wade was given the gifts, but denied the ability to sacrifice, and now it seemed he had also been deprived of ability to save.
Consumed by grief, rage, and an aching loneliness which Wade believed would never be filled he let out a aching scream which only the nitrogen surrounding him could hear.
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