Phil waited for the impact. His body was tensed, his eyes were closed. Mentally, he had devolved from pleading for mercy into an endless string of expletives. The only thing close to a thought he had left was the vague hope that he didn’t soil himself prior to becoming one with the pavement.
Phil continued to wait. His body was still tensed, although his feet were starting to feel pretty comfortable. Likewise, his brain eased up for the briefest of moments, squeezing out, “These last few seconds certainly are taking a good long while to pass,” in between the frenzied cussing.
Phil waited a little while longer. Hesitantly, he opened his eyes and peered through the fingers still clenched around his face. He was expecting to see Heaven, or Hell, or maybe Quetzalcoatl holding his ankle and laughing, or about eight hundred equally as unlikely scenarios.
“What… the fuck?” said Phil.
Nowhere on that list was there a squirrel.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the squirrel. “My name is Timmy.”
Yet that’s what Phil was looking at. A squirrel. An atypical, extraordinary, preternaturally intelligent, telekinetic, cape-wearing squirrel.
“You can… talk?”
“Do you see my lips moving?”
“Well, no.”
“Right. Squirrels don’t have vocal chords. I’m communicating with you the same way I’m holding you three inches from the ground: with my brain. Quit being such a fucking idiot.”
There was a time when Timmy was just like any other squirrel. But there was this other time where he got experimented on and gained telekinetic powers. And then there was this third time where Timmy almost got hit by a car but, at the last second, pulled a rock from the side of the road and into harm’s way, thus saving his ass and, surely, causing the inhabitants of the car, and anyone else somehow privy to the goings-on of said car, to believe that he had been run over. But he hadn’t.
Instead, Timmy lived, and decided to use his newfound ass-saving abilities for the good of the world. He started small, avenging mistreated animals and the like, before quite literally moving his way up the food-chain, always searching for the bigger picture, the best way to help the most creatures.
Which is why when an overweight philosopher fell past Timmy as he climbed up a faux French monument in Las Vegas en route to killing Quetzalcoatl, Timmy didn’t even blink.
Saving lives was just what Timmy did.