Everyone who could, continued. That left many paused in stunned silence.
Pilston paused just beyond the entrance to the breakwater. The sopping roar that scratched the jet of air far over his head pulled at the fabric of his windbreaker. The car had brought him here.
At the bottom of the puddled concrete stair, the open boxed corridor led into a darkness flecked with silver. Beyond that, nothing could be seen but an intermittent sweep of light that would freeze a moment of fluid chaos. He shivered a bit despite his resolve and splashed to the bottom of the steps.
His remote buzzed in his breast pocket. It was the car. A sharp arrow of placid blue glided smoothly toward the open flashing chaos. Buzzing again, with urgency this time, he thought. The concrete was wet here too, with perhaps a couple of centimeters of water covering it. Every step toward the opening cast a shower of echoing reverberations up the gray walls and into the monstrous roar overhead.
He was already soaked through his windbreaker to his cotton shirt as he approached the opening. His pace slowed to a stop and he stood with one hand on the rough, stone-end of the concrete wall and looked out to where the slicked wet breakwater of jagged boulders pointed into the screaming tumult like a shattered and reset appendage. His guts tightened. The pain in his head began to return, despite the handful of tylenol-3 he’d choked down, with a flood of warm coca-cola foam, only an hour ago.
There was no time to gasp in a soothingly dramatic manner. The car wanted him to continue. The outline of footprints glowed into existence in the same blue, describing a passage over the uneven boulders. This way, Pilston thought, the car can’t go on it’s own.
Like almost everyone else, Pilston did not own a car. Most of the time, he felt as though one car or another owned at least part of him.
