Blogbuster - A comedy-laced blogger sci-fi thriller

5 - Drone crash

Bam, meet drone. Drone, meet Bam.

He never saw it coming, but in midair, an itsy-bitsy drone floated just as high as Bam. Worse, it jetted into him. Meat and metal collided. 

Instant pain tango for two.

Sky became asphalt. 

Man and machine hit the ground together. Bam experienced it in slowmo. The impact spread like a numbing virus throughout his body. A blunt pressure that choked his breath, squeezed his body. Flat on the ground, he saw the drone shattering to pieces. Sparkle effects everywhere he looked, a free fireworks show with pretty lights. 

“Oh jeez.”

With his face planted flat on the asphalt, Bam tried to turn around, but gravity pulled him down into the concrete surface. A stabbing sensation scratched from his stomach’s inside. Breathing was shallow. Bam grasped for air but it seemed to elude him. He crawled and cringed at the same time, heard shouting from the sidewalk. Turned his head to the right, saw people dropping signs and running towards him. Girls covered their mouths, guys their eyes. The air carried their words of concern, but the pain tuned out their meaning. Only blurry images and muffled sounds were discernible. Barely.

“Not today, please,” Bam said to himself.

As in, Grim Reaper, let me die another day.

Bam kept on crawling, touching his stomach ever so often to feel a lukewarm liquid dripping down his navel. Bam tilted his head, noticed the blood soaking through his shredded Pirate Skull T-shirt. Dang. No matter how hard he pressed, the crimson liquid kept pushing through his finger cracks. Bam wanted to say something, but with so much pain and blood, he only unleashed animal-like sounds. 

Ohhrrrghh.

Arghghghghghghg.

And a few expletives rated R.

He pushed the palm of his hand harder against his chest to make the bleeding stop. The freaked out bystanders walked up to be close to him.

“Crap.”

“Oh my.”

“Do you need help ?”

One statement stupider than the other. Bam moaned as his eyes blinked in rapid succession. He coughed up some blood to show his predicament.

Yep, some help would be swell.

Someone in the crowd finally got it. Three people stepped forward and helped him up. Two of them steadied him back to his feet but then the short guy with the shaved head said, “No, lay him down or else he’ll bleed to death.” 

Bam didn’t know any better, and with all the blood loss, he was in no state of making smart decisions. 

Help me. 

The girl with the red hair laid her hands on his wound and pressed. Bam wanted to say thanks, but it turned into a blood-filled cough instead. He couldn’t even nod without feeling the pain stealing his breath away.

In the distance, someone said, “Call the ambulance,” and someone did. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell when your head felt sandwiched between two titanium tanks and your thoughts shook like fruity meat in a blender.

Which sounded more lyrical than bleeding to death and having your head go insane from all the pain. 

Help me.

Amongst all the worried faces, one strange little guy smiled, it must have been the troll who flipped him off. Funny how you concentrate only on the negative in this type of situation. Faces blurred in and out, because Bam’s vision decided to play mind tricks now. The girl with the red hair said, “Listen to me. You’ve got to stay awake.”

 And Bam tried, he really did. But the voices faded out except for one.

“Are you ok ?” the same girl said, the one who held up the ‘Bam into me’ sign. She saw the blood on Bam’s shirt, saw how it dripped down on his trousers, back into the crimson pond around his feet. Bam wanted to say, does it look like I’m ok ? But instead, he said,

“I’m ok.”

Because you gotta be nice to the fans.

Because the fans, man. 

The fans.

“You don’t look okay,” she said.

D’uh. Someone in the group said he called the ambulance, finally. That part was taken care of, so now onto the most important one. 

“Hwymnvwz?”

“What ?” the girl said.

“Views,” Bam said through clutched teeth.

“How. Many. Views ?” he said again, which made the girl swallow. She understood and checked the stats. The video was online now, and it better pull in some viewers —  Bam put a lot of blood and sweat into it, literally. The girl wiped her finger over the screen and gasped. Bam moaned.

“How many ?”

“About five hundred and seventy-one now.”

Bam’s head span around, so he asked her again, told her to say it more slowly.

“Tell it to me like I’m a five year old with a brain injury.”

The girl nodded, stressed every single number. Bam grimaced and fell back into his bloody lake. Splash. Less than a thousand views for the stunt of his life. 

It wasn’t fair.

The girl smiled at him with a wink, but Bam couldn’t see it because he blacked out.