A solid cloud of grey dust hangs over the road as Judd and Corey emerge from the car park entrance. Judd holds his hand over his mouth and nose, remembers how dust from the Twin Towers made so many sick after 9/11. Corey follows suit.
They turn back to where the CNN building once stood and see a thick column of the same grey dust rise in its place. Judd looks up at the sky. The usual smog that hovers above the city is darker now, fed by columns of black smoke. It dulls the sun, casts an eerie orange pall across the city.
People emerge from surrounding buildings, scared, stunned and confused. Something strikes Judd as odd. Usually, if this happened in the middle of a major city, ambulances and fire trucks and police cruisers would quickly converge on the scene with engines roaring and sirens blaring. But there are no emergency vehicles to be seen and no sirens to be heard. The only sounds are the regular thud of explosions, some distant, some close, which are, he is sure, vehicles detonating. Something terrible is happening in this city, something that makes the collapse of a large office building almost inconsequential.
Corey turns to him. ‘Why is this happening?’
Judd thinks it through. ‘It’s the engines, isn’t it? Before that police cruiser exploded it sounded — strange, and its exhaust was purple, right?’
‘Yeah. As it accelerated it got darker, turned black right before it blew up.’
‘That must have something to do with it —’
A flash of yellow to the right. Judd turns, notices a school bus fifty metres away. He looks closer. There are children on board. Lots of them. It turns down Sunset Boulevard. Judd shifts position, focuses on its exhaust.
It’s a light purple colour.
‘No.’
‘What? What’s “No”?’
‘We’ve got to stop that bus.’
‘Bus? What bus?’ Confused, Corey turns, follows Judd’s eye line, catches sight of the school bus — and sees its purple exhaust. ‘Oh, that bus.’
Judd takes off after it and Corey follows, Spike just behind. They circumnavigate the debris field and sprint towards Vine Street.
It is horrifying.
The street is littered with the twisted, flaming hulks of vehicles which loom through the smoke haze. Worse, there are burned bodies everywhere, many still alight. The bus swerves past a series of blazing wrecks, then slows as it reaches a bottleneck where two abandoned cars almost block the road. The bus noses into the gap between them.
Judd runs towards it. Blistering heat radiates off the burning cars, forces him to duck his head and shield his face. He keeps moving, focuses on the bus’s exhaust, which he can’t quite see through the haze. Corey and Spike are right behind him.
The dog barks.
Corey looks at him. ‘I don’t care if you’re tired, there’s no time to have a rest!’
Judd glances back. ‘Is that exhaust black?’
Corey peers at the bus. ‘Can’t really see it properly.’
‘No, not the bus, that!’
Thirty metres away Corey sees an old Mercedes pull out of a parking station. Its exhaust is dark purple, very dark purple. ‘Almost.’
Judd veers towards the car, shouts at the top of his lungs: ‘Turn it off! Turn off the car!’ The young blond guy behind the wheel takes in the destruction on the street, stunned, then sees a shouting man run towards him, clunks the car into reverse and backs up.
‘No, no! Don’t do that!’
The Merc’s engine note shifts to a sound that resembles gravel in a cement mixer and its exhaust turns black.
‘Turn! It! Off!’
Boom. The explosion is even bigger than the police cruiser. The parking station protects the street from the full brunt of the blast but the gush of hot air slaps Judd and Corey to the ground.
A moment passes. Dazed, they pull themselves up. Judd looks at Corey unhappily. ‘He didn’t turn it off.’
The Australian turns, sees his dog lying on the road. ‘Spike!’ He scrambles over to the animal, kneels beside him, heart in throat. The dog’s eyes are closed. ‘Mate, you okay?’
There’s no response.
‘Oh God.’ Terrified, Corey puts a hand on Spike’s chest, feels for a heartbeat, looks for an injury. The heartbeat is there — and there’s no sign of an injury. Corey leans closer, confused. ‘You all right?’
The dog’s eyes blink open and he lets out a sharp bark.
‘You’re having a rest?’
Another bark.
‘I don’t care if you told me you were tired. Get up!’
Judd focuses on the bus as it scrapes between the two burning cars. ‘We have to go.’ He takes off after it. He’s a little unsteady at first but quickly finds his balance. Corey and Spike follow.
They close in on the vehicle. Judd can see its exhaust is darker. Three kids, two girls and a boy, no older than ten, look out the back window. Too scared to cry, they stare out in horror at the destruction on the street — and the two strange men with a dog who follows them.
The bus turns sharply onto another street and heads east. This road is not as congested as the last, only a few burning vehicles which don’t block the way. The bus picks up speed.
So do Judd and Corey. Judd’s chest is tight from inhaling smoke but he ignores it, keeps moving.
The bus rides up onto the sidewalk, knocks over two garbage bins and takes a sharp turn to the left.
The boys follow it, cross a parking lot, reach another street. It’s untouched by explosions, save the burning motorcycle flopped over in a driveway next to the remains of an unlucky dude in a helmet.
They glimpse a flash of yellow in the distance, run on, duck down an alleyway, overgrown with brush, pass a row of single-storey houses, then emerge onto a narrow street.
Directly below is the Hollywood Freeway. Its eight lanes are peppered with burning vehicles but it’s not impassable. Cars, trucks and motorcycles zip past, swerve around anything that’s stationary.
‘They’re all purple.’
Judd looks closer. Corey’s right. Every vehicle’s exhaust is a shade of purple. He turns, takes in an overpass that crosses the eight lanes, scans the freeway. He can’t see the bus—
Corey points. ‘There!’
It heads down an on-ramp towards the freeway, takes to the grass verge to avoid a burning van, then drives directly towards them. Judd can see its exhaust is dark purple.
‘Come on!’ He moves fast, reaches an embankment, looks over the railing at the freeway below. There’s a steep, fifty-foot slope of dirt and gravel that runs down to the shoulder of the roadway. Corey arrives beside him. ‘So what are we going to do — oh Jesuschweppes!’
Judd vaults the guardrail, plummets to the embankment five metres below and roll-thumps to the bottom. He finds his feet beside the freeway and swings around to stop the approaching bus.
Honk! A Mack truck fills his world and careers straight towards him as pitch-black exhaust blasts from its stack. It’s barely thirty metres away when the sound of its thundering engine mutates into that horrible noise Judd now knows too well—
Boom, The truck’s cab vaporises in a vivid fireball and its tanker jack-knifes, flips over — and rolls directly towards him.
‘Oh faark!’ He turns and sprints, the giant flaming rolling pin right behind him and closing fast. To the right a burning vehicle blocks his path so he veers left, towards the metre-high cement divider that separates the left and right lanes of traffic. He vaults it and lands in the middle of the next lane—
Honk. A Corvette roars towards him from the opposite direction. Judd pivots left and it brushes past with an inch to spare — then ploughs into the rolling tanker as it crashes over the cement divider—