That sound. The thing swelled, crescendoed, then wound down beyond hearing, yet I knew it didn’t stop. It had moved on. Like a siren, turning its blare at you, then away. Like a wave.
Car wrecks happen on bridges. Emergency sirens come with rush hour. But this rolling, shadowed wave? This waving dude? His gun’s report. Indeed, what did it report? It reminded me very much of a race’s starting gun.
Oh, how prescient. Because I haven’t stopped running since.
And that wave? A tiny tsunami, the aftershock of a giant heave. But I hadn’t felt an earthquake. Even if that was the cause, how in the hell did that wave come here from the sea? All the way up the Colorado, hundreds of dammed-up miles?
How would I assume it came from the sea? It just felt that way. No matter how improbable it was for me to be standing at Mount Bonnell in Austin, central Texas, to have experienced what I did, I did. And something deep within me knew—down there in the “mandala of my solar plexus,” what Mr. English called it, my visceral reaction—it came from the sea. Every instinct cried out that truth.
It did. It came from the sea. I know, sounds like a fifties horror film. But what proceeded was exactly that, and worse because it didn’t end, hasn’t ended, the terror. The not knowing, which is so much worse than knowing. Things being over, as awful as the over is, is the better place to be. I know that’s true if I know nothing else. Because right now I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but I know it’s a when, not if. And that’s the terror.
I wasn’t late for school, but a tight panic in my chest made me feel like I was late. The eeriness of faraway sirens and the otherwise quiet of the mountain pervaded, spooked me, and I grabbed my bag of shake, stuffed it, my lighter, and pipe into my pockets as I ran past the viewing platform to the stone stairs.
I remember looking at my watch, 7:47, and I thought: airplane preparing for takeoff. That’s what I did. One hundred limestone stairs, burnished by time and many soles. Flying down those steps two at a time, my hand on the rail running down the middle, a canopy of oaks forming a tunnel which would lead me down into another world, my life as I knew it not only altered, but erased.
Normally, in a half hour or so, people, alone or breathlessly yammering with a friend, would be running these stairs. The moms in their tight lycras. Tourists mounting the steps, looking up to see how far they still had to go and would-it-be-worth-it on their faces.
These people weren’t coming today.
I’d be hearing the marching band practicing soon. Hoped I would.
Whatever buzz I had acquired was gone, my adrenalized blood having overwhelmed the THC. I had to get home. Though it was my job to take Johnny to middle school and on the way pick up his classmate Travis, a nice kid but a confirmed nose-picker, this wasn’t a regular day anymore. Friday’s morning rigmarole no longer applied.
I ran down Mount Bonnell road to where my car was parked on a side street so as not to invite a cop’s attention. I jumped in my beater beige Accord, fading and peeling W window sticker from however-many-years ago included. Martin had agreed to give me his car if I’d pay for the amount insurance went up because a man-child with a nascent brain was its driver.
The ignition keyed, I’m reversing, and immediately two police cars with sirens howling come whipping around the curve blowing by me. My heart thudded and rose in my throat as they came because of the old-world fears of being busted for having a baggie of shake and stinking paraphernalia on my person. So relieved when they blew past. Then it hit me why.
They ignored some kid who, because he got kicked out of marching band despite being the key trombonist high-stepping on Friday nights, has been smoking bad grass before school lately, twice a week. They’re not stopping for that kid who works at the Dollar Tree to pay the man-child insurance premiums, that college-bound kid with the grades to qualify for automatic entry into UT, that kid with the sort-of girlfriend Kodie who also works at the Dollar Tree. Nobody of authority cares about that kid, won’t ever again. Not after what happened at dawn the day of.
I snapped on the radio and found news-talk, expecting to hear bulletin voices. What I heard winding through the tony Balcones neighborhood of wide yawning lawns was a jolly jingle for some auto collision repair company. Then another for Thunder Cloud Subs. On every station an ad. No music, no talk. Not even on NPR carrier KUT, or the classical station, both airing calls for fundraising. No programming, no content. All smiles and jingles and shaking the moneymaker, we’ll be back in a moment after these brief words from our sponsor, nothing weird going on.
In my rearview came a massive Suburban with blackout windows. It swerved around me and gunned it up the hill and gone. I gulped, put two hands on the wheel, and drove over to the right a bit. Another blackened SUV did the same thing, but this one honked once, then jerked around me.
For a stretch there were no trees. I could see the whole sky. Though I didn’t know what was happening, I knew it was bad and I wondered how catastrophes happened on gorgeous blue-sky days like this, autumn crisp and perfect.
At the first lighted intersection I get to, two cars are crumpled at front ends, steam hurling from under rent hoods, driver doors open. No drivers slumped in either car. As strange as this is, what’s more strange is that I’m the only other car here, save for yet another police car which just blows by.
I pull over next to the coffee shop which is usually packed at this hour but which is deserted, no life but the neon blinking open sign in the shape of a mug. I flip on my hazards and walk over to the first hissing car I come to and peer inside. The door chime dings and the radio blares a jolly jingle. In the other car, a yippy little dog with a studded collar snarls at me, hunching down and baring its teeth.
I considered the right thing to do here. Call it in? Nobody’s even here. No crowd streams from the coffeehouse to onlook. Nothing. Just this growling dog who now leaps at me, its teeth and nails scratching the window, its spit smearing the glass.
Up the street I see a blue city bus parked at the side of the road atop the bridge crossing the MoPac expressway. Tall chain-link fencing curls over the pedestrian walkway.
Dueling jingles going, apoplectic dog. I blinked my eyes hard at that fencing. It’s a couple hundred yards away and the sun is right there so I’m not sure, but what I think I’m seeing is something crawling, several somethings, crawling up the fence. From here it’s just black dots advancing upward.
The way home is over the bridge so I run and jump back into my car and take off in that direction. In seconds I see that it’s people—people probably from the bus, which I see has its doors open—climbing the fence.
Why in the hell are they climbing the fence?
This sight made my heart thrash about inside me like it wanted out, that it knew something I didn’t yet and wanted no part.
I stepped on the pedal, mounted the hill, engine roaring. Ten of them, giggling and laughing. I remember how confusing that was. I remember my mind doing flips and thinking to myself that I’d smoked someone else’s weed by accident and it was laced and now I’m seeing shit because this is insane, what I’m seeing. I jump out and yell up at them, “Hey! Hey!”
None look down at me save one, a woman in green nurse scrubs. She looks down at me under her armpit as she reached up to get another hand hold of chain-link.
The smile on her face, the wild glamour in her eyes.
I remember how bright and insane her lipstick was, as if she’d applied it thickly just before departing the bus. I can imagine her giggling and huffing with delight on the bus, looking with wonder out the window at the MoPac below, applying her lipstick, laying it on so hard that it smears and then she rolls her lips over each other to spread it and gives these big satisfied smacks when done and she drops the lipstick and it rolls on the floor to the front of the bus, following her under the seats as she shuffles to the door.