At the beginning nobody was too surprised that they just kept advancing. After all, that was the direction they’d been going in, and those waiting were doing so in the hope of seeing them: the closer they got, the better they’d see them. But at the same time as their curiosity was being satisfied, an alarm was raised, preceded by fleeting incomprehension. What was going on? Although everybody knew what was going on, the question was justified: the irresponsibly festive atmosphere that infused the crowd (because it was Saturday night, because it was an occasion for a large community gathering, so much less frequent since they’d stopped celebrating National Independence Day and the decadent activities of Carnival had begun) led everyone to think that the marksmen would only have to show off their marksmanship and be rewarded with applause and bravos; the older people were making associations with outdated images of shooting galleries at the now-extinct fairs of the Spanish Pilgrimages, the young people with the facile annihilating clicks of video games.
But it wasn’t like that, not at all. The bullets passed right through the dead, without causing them the least disturbance, not even an extra tremor in their steps, which already were so clumsy. Taking aim and shooting at their heads caused them no more consternation than shooting at their bodies: their skulls got cracked, pierced, splintered, but stayed in place, and the shabby mannequins on whose shoulders these sat continued to move forward.
If they had “seen” them a few seconds before, now they really saw them, saw them leap in one bound onto the hoods of the cars that were supposed to be an insurmountable barrier, saw one lean over to drink the brains of a marksman who, with one frenetic finger on the trigger of his Luger or Colt, kept firing bullets at the fingerboard of ribs, bullets that were as futile as a wave of welcome. Nobody stayed to watch that operation to the end, not only because it was too disgusting but because the second row was already jumping over the ferocious vampire lobotomies now in progress and throwing themselves at the bystanders.
A general stampede began all along the Line. There were many casualties during those first few moments because of the sheer size of the crowd that impeded dispersal. As soon as the living saw an opening, they ran, and if they turned back to look and saw the dead chasing them, they ran faster. They also ran faster, and even faster still, if they saw that one of the dead had caught up with somebody and was sucking his head. Those who tried to get into their cars and start them up lost. Friends abandoned friends, children their parents, husbands their wives. Not everybody. Overcoming their terror, some went back to help their loved ones; in those cases, instead of one victim, there were two.
The streets were filled with shouting and running, and the darkness increased, psychologically: those who were fleeing were afraid that Death, or one of its representatives, would appear out of every shadowy volume, something that was in fact occurring with implacable frequency. There was nobody who didn’t regret the community’s insistence on lining the streets with trees. Now they were all thinking that the authorities had been too responsive, because the town had turned into a forest of gruesome foliage. The Plaza, one of the places where the Line of Defense had first collapsed, was empty, and its pathways became the unobstructed corridor down which legions of corpses of all shapes and sizes marched toward the cobblestone streets of downtown Pringles.
On an oval-shaped islet between the two square blocks of the Plaza stood the Palacio Municipal, that famous art-deco slab, that inside-out piano of white cement, and from its windows the mayor and his cohorts were watching the catastrophe. For some reason, the attackers had skipped it. The moment they saw that the Line had been breached, the occupants of the Palacio took the precaution of turning off all the lights. Even so, they knew their fate hung by a thread: if even a small group of the corpses they were watching pass through the Plaza decided to pay them a visit, it would all be over. The flight of the crowd probably worked in their favor — they constituted so much more visible and numerous prey than could possibly be concealed inside the wings of the Palacio. The police headquarters across the street hadn’t been so lucky: the policemen had tried to put up a fight, and were annihilated, along with the drunkards sleeping it off in their cells. The same thing happened at the church, on the other side of the Plaza, though with fewer victims. Only the priest was in the rectory, along with his wife and two children (in open rebellion against the archbishop of Bahía Blanca, the parish priest was defiantly living with his family).
The mayor did not have a Plan B. It would have to be improvised. The lines of communication with the police having gone dead, there was nobody with whom to coordinate emergency measures. Out of the confused discussions taking place at the windows emerged the only course of action that seemed reasonable: to evacuate Pringles, using all available vehicles. But how would he give the order? The cell phones were functioning at white heat, but for the first time, word of mouth didn’t appear to be fast enough. One news item that reached them that way made even more urgent the need for overall coordination: many people, most in fact, were making the mistake of locking themselves in their houses, which then became fatal traps. They had to find a way to warn those who still had time to escape. An old civil servant had the idea of using the Propaladora. This ancient system of communication hadn’t been used for exactly fifty years, to the day, but they trusted it would still function, considering that in the first half of the last century electrical equipment was built with craftsmanship, with a view to permanence. The fact that it was still in place (though unplugged: but that could easily be remedied) was due to historico-sentimental circumstances: the last transmission by Propaladora was made on the night of the sixteenth of September 1955, when the last Peronist mayor of Pringles, in an heroic gesture, ordered the Marcha—the national anthem — sung by Hugo del Carril to be played throughout the blacked-out town in order to drown out the sounds of the bombs being dropped by the air force on nearby Pillahuinco. This mayor’s unforgettable civic courage, this posthumous proof of loyalty after the popular regime had already fallen, guaranteed that nobody would dismantle the device nor remove the cables from the metal loudspeakers, which continued to rust away atop the town’s cornices and electric poles.