BOOM!

A heavy impact detonated, shaking the earth and shattering the silence that had briefly cocooned Wildan’s consciousness. The shockwave forced his long-numb body to violently snap awake.

Yet he did not wake up on the soft kapok mattress of his bedroom. He saw no plywood ceiling beginning to warp overhead. When his eyes were forced open, his vision slammed straight into a pitch-black, suffocating, airless dark. The air dragging into his lungs tasted like a foul mix of cement powder and charcoal—coarse, toxic, and searingly hot against his throat.

Wildan tried to move his arm, but his limb struck something hard and solid mere inches above his face. He was trapped. He was wedged inside a tight fissure that crushed his body from all sides. The reek of burning flesh that had poisoned his dreams moments ago now morphed into the raw, pure scent of a post-disaster nightmare: scorched wood drenched in torrents of water, sulfur vapor, and the heavy aroma of charred, baked fabrics.

This was no safe haven of a home. This was a horrifying reality.

Beyond that narrow crack, dawn in the real world was just breaking, casting a bruised gray light that filtered through the lingering plumes of black smoke still billowing from the ruins of the two-story shop house flattened to the ground. The shop complex had transformed into a devastated battlefield. The main inferno had finally been subdued by the fire brigade after a grueling dozen-hour struggle, but glowing embers still flickered deep beneath the piles of collapsed concrete and shattered timber.

Amidst the smoking, heat-radiating rubble, a dozen Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel clad in thick orange jackets moved like ants across the coals. Their faces were blackened with soot, their breath coming in ragged pants behind respirator masks, and their gazes radiating a grueling exhaustion fused with unyielding resolve.

"Lift that right-hand timber first! Careful, the structure is still unstable!" shouted Danu, the SAR commander leading the morning evacuation. His voice was raw and spent from shouting over the roaring inferno since the night before.

Two SAR officers operated a hydraulic cutter to clear a web of reinforcing steel rebar twisting like black tentacles. Each time a bar snapped, a flurry of dust and ash erupted, blinding their visibility. They had already hauled out three bodies hours earlier from the center of the shop house—a middle-aged man, a woman, and a young child. The hope of finding any signs of life in this utterly gutted building hovered dangerously close to zero.

Yet, Danu refused to surrender. Based on a rough sketch of witness testimonies, one family member—the eldest son, Wildan—remained unaccounted for.

"Run thermal imaging on the rear-left corner again! That used to be the bedroom area!" Danu ordered, wiping sweat mixed with soot from his brow.

An officer crawled across the dented sheet-metal roof debris. He swept the sensor across the area, but the residual heat from the fire played havoc with the device, making it struggle to read human thermal signatures. Just as despair threatened to take root, an officer named Dika in the front line caught sight of something behind the blown-out remains of the master bedroom wall.

An old iron bed frame was warped severely under the weight of a collapsed roof beam. Beneath that iron bed holding up hundreds of kilograms of debris lay a series of exceptionally thick teak wood planks—a secret sub-floor hatch commonly installed in old-school shop houses to stash valuables in a mini basement. The wood looked ancient, its upper surface charred black, but the structural integrity remained intact, shielding the void beneath from the crushing weight above.

"Commander! Over here! There's a cavity beneath this bed frame!" Dika yelled out.

Danu and three other officers leaped down to the designated spot. They grabbed iron crowbars and shovels, tearing away the shattered roof tiles burying the teak hatch. Their gloved hands worked in a rapid yet hyper-cautious rhythm. Shift a single timber wrong, and the entire pile above could collapse, crushing whatever lay breathing below.

"One... two... lift!"

With a heavy, guttural heave, the structural roof timber was rolled away. Dika dropped immediately onto the blackened tiles, flicking on his tactical flashlight and angling its beam down into the narrow gaps between the old wooden planks, which had warped slightly from the impact.

Down within the dark, cramped cleft, Wildan—drifting on the edge of unconsciousness—suddenly spotted a sharp, piercing pinprick of white light cutting through the floating dust motes. The beam flickered, slicing through the absolute darkness.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

The wooden planks above him were struck from the outside.

"Hello! Is anyone in there?! If you can hear me, tap back on the wood!" a heavy voice bellowed through the crack of light.

The remnants of Wildan’s rational mind raced. The vision of his family turning into mannequins, their freezing embrace holding him back, and his mother's shrieks ordering him not to go outside... it all clicked into place now. They hadn't been torturing him. They had anchored his soul inside that spiritual waiting room so his physical body could endure beneath the protective shield of this teak hatch, guarding him against the panic that might have driven him outside to burn alive under the collapsing roof. They had shielded him until help could arrive.

With the last ounce of strength flickering in his trembling, blistered fingertips, Wildan pried loose a small fragment of fallen tile beside him. He struck it against the underside of the teak plank hovering directly over his face.

Tap... Tap...

Only two feeble taps. Yet to the ears of the SAR officers above, the sound rang out like the loudest, most triumphant bell of life.

"WE HAVE A SURVIVOR DOWN HERE! BRING A CROWBAR AND OXYGEN RESUSCITATOR FAST!" Dika's heart hammered frantically as he roared the command.

The exhausted atmosphere instantly morphed into high-speed, organized panic. Two officers immediately shoved a portable oxygen tube down through the widened gap to prevent the victim below from suffocating on asphyxiation.

"Hang in there, kid! Keep your eyes open! We're getting you out!" Danu shouted, pitching his weight onto a massive crowbar to pry open the aged teak planks locked beneath the heavy iron bed frame.

The muscles in the SAR officers' arms strained until their veins bulged. With a dramatic, collective heave, the old teak hatch groaned loudly, splintered down the center, and swung wide open, allowing the morning sun and fresh air to storm directly into the stuffy, narrow cavity.

Wildan’s face, caked in black ash and dried tears, was finally revealed. His eyes blinked weakly, gazing up at the silhouettes of the orange-jacketed SAR officers who gathered him up with infinite care, hoisting him out of the sub-floor grave that had just saved his life from the previous night's inferno.

As his stretcher was carried past the ruined debris and flattened shop houses toward the ambulance whose wail now echoed piercingly clear, Wildan stared up at the gray sky. His tears fell in silent streams. He had survived; light had broken through the rubble. Yet he knew deep down that the three souls who had held him back within that third-day dream had slipped away, leaving him behind with an eternal, unhealing scar.