Chapter 29
MARY CATHERINE
The parking garage smelled like oil and concrete and the chill of a structure that never quite caught the sun.
Daniel had both bags. I had my phone and my boarding pass and the restless, unfinished feeling of a woman who had left something important unsaid, which was accurate in more ways than I'd been able to fully count yet.
We walked the crosswalk from the garage to the terminal in the ordinary way of Sunday travelers.
I was already composing the call I was going to make from the gate—what I would say to Brock, how I would explain the things I'd folded up and put away, how I was going to have that conversation like a person who'd learned something about honesty in the last forty-eight hours.
I was about halfway across when something made me slow.
Not a sound, exactly. Or not a specific sound—more like a change in the quality of the air.
A shift in the ambient noise of the arrivals lane to my left, something that didn't belong in the ordinary grammar of drop-offs and pickups.
A voice raised with a particular urgency.
An engine sound that was wrong—laboring, coughing, not the smooth pull of a car finding a curb but something older and more ragged and moving with an intention that prickled the back of my neck.
I stopped walking.
Daniel, two steps ahead, turned. “What is it?”
I looked left. Just traffic. Just the usual organized flow of it. A porter at the curb.
Nothing.
Nothing I could point to. Nothing I could name.
You're on edge, I told myself. You have been on edge and your nervous system is running everything through a threat filter that is currently miscalibrated.
I opened my mouth to say nothing, let's go, and that was when the sound arrived.
Not the coughing engine. Something else.
Something that punched through the ordinary Sunday air and rearranged it permanently.
My body knew what it was before my mind did because my body dropped—pure reflex, no decision, knees hitting the crosswalk.
Daniel was saying my name and someone was screaming and the sound came again, and again.
I pressed myself flat against the concrete and put my arms over my head the way I had been taught to do in elementary school drills for things that were never supposed to actually happen.
The world had gone very loud and very wrong all at once.
I could hear my own breathing. I could hear the screaming multiplying, other voices joining it, the sound of a crowd discovering it is in danger—the pitch of it, human and ancient and awful.
I could hear the coughing engine, still.
I could hear something else I couldn't identify, a physical concussion in the air, and somewhere very close, something shattered—glass, I thought, a lot of it.
I pressed harder against the ground and I thought about nothing coherent at all except stay down stay down stay down.
Daniel's voice, close: "Mary Catherine, don't move, stay down, I'm right here—"
I felt rather than saw him—close, on the ground, the warmth of him nearby. Then, another sound, very close, and then, Daniel's voice stopped.
Just stopped.
I didn't understand what that meant yet. I lay on the concrete of that crosswalk with my arms over my head. The world exploded all around me.