Short Fiction: “Gas Day”

[copyright, so on and so forth, © 2010 by John E. Simpson]

Gas Day

If you were keeping score, I guess you could say that I lucked out. True, it would have to be a finely-calibrated scorecard, on a scale of hundreds of thousands of points, with the luckier and unluckier separated from their neighbors by distances the width of a full stop. But yes, I’m here telling you about it. Lucky me.

I’d just gotten out of my car, at not even nine o’clock that morning. Early, at least for me. The hope of “accidentally” running into a particular girl can motivate a young man in surprising ways.

So it was early. But the main student parking lot, Lot W, had already begun to ripple with heat. I beeped the doors locked and thought, A scorcher. Nodded to this little curly-haired, eyeglassed guy a couple parking spaces away who’d gotten out of his car at the same time. I knew him, vaguely, from the posters for the campus radio station where he DJed; his name was Mose. Slung my shoulder bag over my back. And then set out across the lot in the direction of the eight or ten buildings there at the state college’s main — all right, only — campus.

Mose, meanwhile, had zigged over in my direction and was weaving with me through the painted lanes, among the parked cars already crowding the lot. I got the sense that he wanted to make small talk; we didn’t know each other well enough for any other kind. But I pretended to be lost in thought, even stepped up my pace a bit as though late for something official like a class and not just suffering the pangs of sublimated horniness.

I — we — had crossed half the distance to the sidewalks and lawns which ringed the lot when we heard it.

—-

You heard it then too, I know. You heard it even if actually in the midst of it, even if powerfully distracted by your other senses (one in particular). You heard it if you were deaf as a brick, even if you had no ears at all, because anyone with a skeleton “heard” it in his or her bones. But here’s what it was like for me:

It began as a dull roar, apparently from the direction of the campus. (It took a few minutes to appreciate that it came from everywhere at once — that the sound from the buildings before us had just reached us before the sound from elsewhere.) I broke stride, and Mose plowed into me from behind because he too had heard it and forgotten to pay attention to what he was about. He didn’t apologize and I didn’t ask or expect him to. We were still listening to it. It: the rolling thunder of several thousand feet running in the same direction, across old wooden floors and newer tiled ones. Not all the feet were running, we later learned: some were hitting rooftops and the ground as their owners leapt from greater heights, and others b-b-b-bumping down stairways. As we listened, we heard smaller sonic punctuation marks, so to speak, bangs and pops which we would later understand as windows being flung open or smashed, doors banging into hallways, the pounding of restroom stalls as their occupants fell against the walls in their haste to exit, the frantic-rodent squeaking of wheelchairs.

And then came the metallic clanks and clatters, thumps and booms from behind and around us: dozens of car doors thrown open, banging against their own hinges and against the doors and fenders of cars next to them, one larger bang a moment after one driver simply exited his Jeep without coming to a stop first. After all of which, the slapping sound of sandals and flip-flops and sneakers and bare feet and knees hitting the Lot W asphalt.

Less obvious was the mottled backdrop of sounds, which (as Mose and I later discussed) had been there all along: voices. Shouts, cries of alarm and despair, verbal and non-verbal, sudden random wordless vocalizations, grunts and groans and even some screams. Somewhere behind us, a girl shrieked, her voice shattering, “Jeezus Christ the fuck oh my god oh my god oh my god my god what the fuck—!” before breaking off in an Oof! as someone shoved her silent.

Because, yes, now people were running there in Lot W, too, running into one another and running across the lawn on both sides of the driveway leading to it, their cars abandoned. I said earlier that all the feet were running in the same direction, but that wasn’t really true — at least not in a standard, four-points-of-the-compass way. They were running in the same direction only if you understood the same direction to mean any direction which takes me away from here as fast as possible: fleeing the spot where they were standing, sitting, walking, at that exact instant.

More: everyone in the world was running, or at least everyone inside a building or vehicle, an enclosed space of any kind anywhere. It wasn’t just the sound of thousands of feet running on the campus of our little public college. It was the sound of nine billion pairs of feet hitting the floors and ground and snow and puddles and pavements all at once, and the sound rolled from place to adjoining place for probably hours before dissipating. Because it eventually did stop.

And locally — again, everywhere — it stopped shortly afterwards: the moment you got outdoors, and only then.

Here is the point where  your experience versus mine and Mose’s most sharply diverged, because you had probably been indoors somewhere, and we — and the “lucky” ones — were already outside. But you, we could see you even if we couldn’t be you: you came to a standstill, stood there breathless, your eyes and nose streaming, chest heaving, shaking your head, hugging yourself, feet still shifting slightly, shuffling restlessly in place. You were wondering what had really just happened, you would come to tell us — happened to you — even though you knew what had seemed to happen. The Gas.

—-

[Want more? The whole thing — just what I wrote over the course of five(ish) hours on June 12, 2010 — is here (74KB PDF).]