CHAPTER 18

The Highway

The first vehicle to wreck on the sunken highway is a large truck pulling two trailers with canvas sides. The trailers are empty, light, and in the wind and rain that’s pressing into this man-made trench, the trailers become a set of sails, wobbling separately, yanking against each other, but then the wind builds, the rain as well, and the canvas sides bow inward, purely concave surfaces catching the wind in all its force, both trailers tilting, twin sailboats listing beautifully.

A storm has come. As if launched from a weapon meant to harm.

Storms come often here. Rising off the water to the north. Lightning in them. Small tornadoes.

But this is a storm that casts total shadows. In some places, there’s no longer light.

The leading edge of the wind has reached the western end of the highway trench. The trailers tip first, falling over, pulling the truck onto its side as well. The noise would be horrific, except the rain and wind strip every other sound away.

The trailers and the truck are splayed across the four westbound lanes of the highway, looking, from a distance, like a child’s toy left in the gutter.

This is where it starts.

The first car to reach the scene is going seventy, maybe seventy-five, when it hits a trailer.

Another car had been following the first car very closely, using it as a guide through the heavy rain, a bad strategy made tragic as it slams into the cab of the truck.

Seventy to zero, in just a millisecond.

The first car held only a single driver, a man, twenty, on his way to work.

The second car held a driver and three passengers. Father at the wheel, daughter and two friends late for practice in the back.

The truck driver had survived his crash, but was killed by the second car.

The third car hits a trailer, careening through the aluminum roof, but stopped immediately by the truck’s heavy, steel frame.

Another two people have died.

A pickup truck approaches the scene at full speed, even in this rain, but through the haze of the storm the driver somehow sees the wreck ahead. He veers left, toward the shoulder, the truck beginning to spin then slide in the mess of long untended debris along the highway shoulder. The truck flips soon, twice, then again.

Another driver dead.

More cars come through the rain, undaunted by what seems like just another storm. Some even rushing to escape this part of the highway, where sometimes water builds up, slowing the traffic to a crawl. Four cars seem to fear this possibility, driving faster as the storm descends, a pack of sorts trying to get far from here before things become worse. The first car, driver panicking, manages to weave her way through the wreckage, threading the needle, her driver-side mirror is clipped; it flies off, hits a car behind her. But the other three cars all crash, two sliding sideways as they wildly brake; one hits the end of a trailer, bounces off into the shoulder, then slams into the concrete wall of this highway trench.

Airbags, screaming.

But everyone in that car is fine.

The other car, also sliding, hits another vehicle. The car is now rolling backward, the front seats breaking on impact, hurling both people into the backseat where they crush the passengers.

The next car never sees a thing. The driver hits one of the trailers at full speed.

And the storm has only begun to arrive. The force of it is still north of here. Building. Moving south, as all the storms here do now. Adding to itself. Gathering rain. Gathering wind. Gathering debris from the ground.

In a sense, all that’s hit the highway so far is the air and rain that the storm itself pushes out of its way.

The storm moves over neighborhoods and factories abandoned so long ago in the North End. Levees break. Canals are flooded, combining with other canals a block away.

But there are so few people in the North End, that, so far, no one there has died. No one’s even injured.

On the highway, there are fifteen dead. Another thirty injured. Almost forty vehicles wrecked so far.

And the wind only rises.

And the rain blinds everyone it touches. West of the city. And east. Even the streetlights lining this highway are of little use, mere pinpoints of light in the violence of the rain and clouds, stars almost, rendered tiny by the storm. The mass of cars and trucks and buses minutes ago had only been traveling through the usual gray dark and constant rain. But now, the storm has reached the full length of the trench. Rain and wind flood over the walls. Darkness. Gusts that snap cars left and right. A violence so far beyond what seemed possible just moments ago.

The crashes are now happening along this entire stretch of sunken highway. The wreckage of the vehicles grows, loosely gathered piles of steel and tires and glass.

And humans. There are injured people everywhere.

Now a semi pulling a tanker filled with chemicals hits the first pileup to the west. The driver had slowed, going forty, or is it thirty; the storm had made him cautious. But he has too much momentum to consider stopping. The cab of the truck hits two cars, killing both drivers who’d until then survived their wrecks. The tanker, sliding outward, to the left, whipping around, breaking free of the cab, moving backward through the vehicles all stopped across eight lanes of this highway.

When the tanker tumbles over, the seals on the tank are broken and a mist releases, upward, straight up, in defiance of the wind.

Yet whatever chemical it is that escapes repels all water, so that the rain that falls, now falls elsewhere, outside the cone of escaping mist that rises from this stretch of highway. The mist is yellow, it sheds water, and for cars not far away, most stopped, some wrecked, others that are only just slowing down, the mist is visible, even with the rain and wind and darkness of the arriving storm.

Cars still wreck, a few more people die, but now, at this end of the highway, everyone has begun to slow.

Brake lights glow from cars and trucks and semis, the vehicles themselves barely visible in the rain, but their lights send a warning to those that follow, sudden and brilliant harbingers of what most people on the highway think is a simple wreck ahead.

A mile to the east, the rain breaks for a few minutes. It has the perverse effect of leading cars there to speed up, even though they are able to see the lighted trail of stopping vehicles ahead of them.

This is just the rain we’ve had for years.

Another wave of crashing starts. As the cars enter the descending, darkened clouds that continue to reach down into this concrete trench. A few drivers see the lights of the cars stopped ahead of them. But it’s too late.

And others are distracted by the sight of a yellow, rising cone some quarter mile away, distinct and unknown in the otherwise gray, enveloping storm.

What is that?

And for them it’s too late also.

Twenty cars and trucks have slammed into each other in this new wave. Another twenty will soon follow.

Ten more dead. Three more children.

The screaming is unbearable. But few hear it. The storm, the cars themselves, all of it is just too loud.

And the light, the light of streetlights above the highway and headlights on all these cars and the taillights, all lit red, and the light of buildings and homes in the two cities created by this highway, the storm has progressively absorbed and defeated all this light.

Now, many cars, when they wreck, their inhabitants die in darkness.

The wrecks have begun to occur in an almost controlled slow motion. Cars for miles have decelerated, many have already stopped. Yet throughout the line of vehicles, cars and trucks keep hitting one another. Distracted by the traffic, or the tall and glowing streetlights that now flicker again then go dark, leaving the sunken highway in an even darker abyss, or the drivers are distracted by the cone of yellow mist that rises just ahead of them, or they’re distracted by the violence of a tornado that hops from one side of the highway to the other, lifting, suspended above the heads of hundreds and hundreds of people who watch, screaming, but the tornado only jumps, one side to another; the trench in this moment saved everyone underneath that cyclone, because here there are only wrecks, cars careening, trucks that slide across the median; it’s total madness here. The impossible come true.