Hidden Tracks (Short Story)

For A. & T.
For having put up with me.

“Number. Number. Number. What is your emergency?”
These are the first words in a short videoclip that went around the world. No one knows who said them.
In fact, many, by the time they finished watching the video, most people seemed to forget these words were even said. Words that provided context of what was about to transpire on the screen.

The young man making the call is called Ignus. His companion, who is filming the scene, is Manu.
In close-up Ignus is breathing heavily. His tanned face drained of blood. Pearls of heavy sweat springing from every pore before being pulled south by gravity. The camera pulls back as if to give him more room to breathe.
We see him dressed in athletic wear. On the ground next to him a bicycle designed to conquer all terrain.
The camera focuses back on his face. With squinting eyes he’s looking at his phone. The glaring sun and his leaking skin making that harder than he would like.

It has been only about 3 seconds into the clip, and he is yet to utter a word.
He takes a deep breath and finally opens his mouth:

“I… we…. We just saw a helicopter crash into a house in the woods. We are on a hill near (unintelligible word).
You need to send someone or something quick before the whole forest burns down.”
After having AK-ed these words he takes another deep breath.
The person on the other ends starts to talk. Ignus having reloaded his lungs is having none of it.

“No! You listen to me. You send someone here. I am sure they’re gonna see the smoke from far enough away. There’s nothing more I can do for you, or them.”
He pauses for a moment as if to contemplate if there is, after all, something else he can do.
“I’ve done my duty. I called you guys so you can do your job. Now fucking do your job!”

The camera’s field of vision moves towards the floor as laughter can be heard off-screen before fading to black.

We will never know how many people saw this video before the story made the news. Nor will we ever know how many of them thought it was a real emergency call. And who suspected it was an elaborate prank.
What we do know is that out of respect for the victims, the video was soon removed from any media platforms. But one can rest assured there are many copies still out there in the data hyperspace.

As someone who had always shunned media spectacles I had only heard about this much later. An old friend mentioned it apropos of nothing. He described it as not so much looking death in the eye, but rather looking in the eye of someone who just looked at death without quite making eye-contact. Like seeing a reflection of death dealing with someone else in the side mirror of your car while driving past.

Months after the public had all but forgotten about this unfortunate incident and the two young people, who were, however briefly, at the centre of the media whirlwind, I reached out to them.
Due to the high-profile nature of the victims, the two nobodies from the middle of nowhere quickly disappeared from the public eye.
I however, as so many times, was more interested in the backstories of the so-called real story.

*

Over a series of video calls the unsung heroes relayed the day’s events and what followed to me:

Hailing from Hawiescoft they rose early that day and drove for a couple of hours to the foot of the Emberfolt Hills. For years they had travelled the lands looking for new places to ride their bikes.
Their larger journeys, such as this one, were usually documented on film and photo.

During their lunch break some ways up the hill they explored the wider area using binoculars and a drone. They spotted a helicopter landing in a larger clearing in the forest several hundred meters away. It was too far to recognise anything but whoever was down there seemed like a big deal. They paid it no further mind and after finishing their meal continued their route.
Several hours later, on the way down they noticed the helicopter take off again. But only briefly. It could not have been much above the crowns of the surrounding trees before it tilted to one side and disappeared behind their field of vision. An instant later the impact was heard and small cloud of smoke seen raising up.
The young couple stopped their bikes and after quickly agreeing that what they had witnessed was real, Ignus took out his phone.
Manu, convinced there will never be another chance of anything like this ever happening again, took out her own phone to film her husband making the call.

They showed me the video to provide context for what happened after the camera cut to black.

Manu had started to laugh after hearing Ignus swear at the emergency services. Her laughter subsided very quickly when he bent over and spread the undigested bits of sandwich on the forest floor, before stumbling backwards and bumping into a tree, causing him to fall over.
Coming to rest on the ground he pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. He just lay on ground, curled up and shivering. Manu had never seen him or anyone else like that.

Not knowing what to do with her loved one in, what seemed to her, a catatonic state. She considered calling for an ambulance, but had to admit to herself, she’d have a really hard time to explaining them what just happened. She decided to reach out to her friends instead and posted the clip in their chat group asking them for advice.
The responses she got ranged from “oh dearie me, what happened?” to “you crazy motherfuckers – did you really prank the emergency services?”. None of them was able to tell her anything useful, and it is safe to assume that at least one of them shared that clip with someone outside their group.
Neither Ignus nor Manu could muster the energy to ask each of them directly if they were behind what was eventually known virally as “crazy cyclists troll emergency operators”.

After Ignus regained control over his body the two slowly made their way back to the car and drove home in almost complete silence. They were still trying to process what happened this afternoon. And they were completely oblivious of what was yet ahead of them.

*

When Ignus keeled over he dropped his phone. It broke on impact before he had even hung up the call.
Authorities later tracked the couple down to investigate both the call and the video that went with it. They were cleared of any wrongdoing as evidence showed that their call was the first to come in and helped saving lives. Furthermore, Manu could prove by way of additional recordings of her foetal hubby, that she had her own little crisis to deal with.

Ignus explained to me his side of the story as best as he could.
After witnessing the explosion and punching the numbers into his phone he felt as though he had to yet fully comprehended what he had just witnessed. It was only after saying it out loud that it hit him.
And hit him it did. He described it as first seeing, in his mental eye, every exploding helicopter he had ever seen, in movies, video games, pictures, in rapid succession; and then feeling the combined force of the resulting blast at the bottom of his guts. The initial impact caused his stomach to turn upside down and the subsequent shock wave push him backwards. After hitting some kind of obstacle, he collapsed on the floor. He has only faint and fragmented recollection of coming to, riding his bike down the hill and loading their gear into the car and dozing off while Manu drove the car home.

*

The public reaction to the short videoclip, at least initially, was not exactly sympathetic. By the time my new friends had reached home, their social media profiles as well as any message boards and chat room they frequented were flooded with opinions.
Some praising them for a sense of duty. Others for making the best prank ever.
Some chastising them for exploiting the unfortunate accident for online fame. Others giving them serious shit for the most tasteless practical joke in the history of mankind.
If there’s an insult you can think of, it was probably hurled their way.
Any questions about their side of the story, was easily drowned.

Utterly overwhelmed by the sudden and drastic increase in exposure to the world at large, the two quickly disappeared from the public space, closing any online accounts they had. Profiles that documented years and years of bicycle trips and landscapes gone in an instant.

Their passion they kept, both inside their hearts and through hundreds of hours of video material and thousands of photos they amassed in almost a decade.
A large chunk of the material was carefully selected and shared with friends and strangers across the internet. Each of these connections with the world, however, was gone about as quick as a crashing helicopter.

*

During one of our conversations the two invited me to visit them, they had something else they wanted to show me. They still bike as hard as ever. They still record a lot of their adventures. But they no longer show it to the public.
Instead, they invest the time previously spent selecting shots and editing their footage, into creating original video ideas. Ignus claims that something about the experience gave him an idea on what to do with the skills and equipment they had gathered over time.
These days they only show their work in person at home. Friends visit them or the other way round.
Everyone else, according to Manu & Ignus, can suck it. They asked me to make that clear, and that this statement is only directed at the people who bear no responsibility for anything that happened yet ought to shoulder at least some of the blame.

Sincerely,

Arthur C. Millen

Author’s Note:
For the sake of completeness I feel I must include the following information for those who, like myself, had missed the news at the time:
The two teenaged sons of the host celebrating a major birthday, a person, who I much, much later found out, was known to a dear friend of mine as James, had managed to get access to the helicopter with which one of the guests arrived.
Using the pilot skills acquired from years of videos and games the older boy did manage to take off quick enough before anyone could intervene.
The official investigation concluded that the younger boy must have grabbed and pulled the cyclic stick into his direction, causing the aircraft to swerve and subsequently crash into the ground before the junior pilot had time to correct the course.
It was fortunate that at that very moment, all other guests had enough distance between themselves and the impact site to avoid major physical injury.