Flight Time

No one knows, really, because it’s not the kind of thing you prepare for. Even if you’d’ve given it some thought it comes on faster in the moment in some ways and slower in others such that it breaks all the plans you might have made.

Everything cuts out and there are breaking reports of it launching and then the questions about its direction and then it’s clear which way it’s coming and you’re helpless as some egghead in Canberra works it out and calls it in and the stations relay what they’ve heard and it’s where you are. 

What follows next is the horrible truth that it’s too late. 

What follows next is the bargaining, the negotiation, the rationalisation that comes with wondering why here and why not elsewhere and your train of thought is broken by the first in a stream of notifications that won’t end now until it all does and you look at the screen and can’t decide what to do for the paralysis of it all saving nothing.

But where are you?

If you’re lucky you’re up high enough to watch it all end quickly or you’re low down enough to perhaps go deeper where you might be saved but your memory fails on whether that will work based on what little experience we have with these kinds of things. And even if you had that natural impulse to look it up the networks are so flooded with everything else, with calls and messages and searches and rich media flying all about, that you’d get nothing. Not sending, just receiving, broadcasting now one way in the frenzy. You’ve probably barely even noticed the noise of a city falling apart before it has.

What doesn’t help is the news turning into a countdown as if it’s supposed to give you time to act but instead it transfixes you and so many others with the inescapable anxiety. You think of all the names appearing across your phone screen and you wonder what they’re thinking of you the way that you’re thinking of them right now, safe and scared, and it feels like all this will last forever. But you look back up to the sky and there’s smoke coming now.

So it doesn’t last forever. It turns out that you don’t see what you’ve been waiting for because you’ve forgotten until now that they explode above the ground but it comes through in the moment after the blinding white as a thick crash through the ground like a tower spearing the earth. You’re atomised before the sound arrives but when it comes the bomb’s already crushed downtown and flattened everything faster than you would have been able to believe. Concrete to dust and the water in the river sizzles as steam and it’s so loud the sound blows over more than the explosion itself in the suburbs. In its wake, the air broken apart, there’s hideous silence and nothing left to save because it came towards you as a message, as a show of force, proof positive of a fearsome strength that’s undone you more than a thousand years underground would have. 

The sound falls back like a heavy cloth that ripples and folds as it drops with the fallout beginning its descent.

Read part two.