There were accidents.
Quite a lot of them.
Congress eventually needed to devise a term for them, if only to appease the insurance industry, and so smoke-related accidents and injuries generally fell under the heading of Unintended Collateral Results.
For instance.
A Town Hall meeting was held in Encinitas, California in July. There’d been a marked increase in looting and crime downtown since the smokes had appeared; several shops had had their windows broken and a jewelry store, nearly its entire inventory taken. The city council and the sheriff, begrudgingly, came up with a rotating roster of officers to patrol the downtown area twenty-four hours a day.
“It’s a stop-gap measure,” the sheriff said, but the people didn’t care. The town’s biggest industry was poinsettias, for God’s sake; let someone else, let San Diego have its jewelry heists and crime. People lived in goddamned Encinitas to get away from that.
During the town’s Classic Car Cruise Night a week later, loads of purring, finned Corvettes and low-slung Mustangs cruised up and down the town’s stretch of 101, the air heady with the scent of exhaust and cotton candy, mothers pushing babies in strollers, sticky-faced toddlers being pulled alongside, with couples in sunglasses walking arm in arm.
A monthly affair, Cruise Night, and the usual sense of frivolity and raucousness was tampered only slightly by the pairs of police officers stationed every few blocks.
It was a beautiful evening, the purr of the surf heard beneath the rumbling of the cars, the laughter and clamor of the kids. The moon hung fat over the sea. The police felt prepared, pairs of men glancing steel-eyed among the pedestrians. Prepped for anything: any one of these people could be the mastermind behind a jewelry heist, could be poised to burn down a poinsettia farm for kicks or deface the side of Swami’s. They were ready for anything.
Anything except the ghost of a Viet Cong soldier appearing in the middle of 101.
Wearing sandals and dark fatigues that faded to nothingness. A ghost man brandishing a ghost AK-47. Right there in the highway, his eyes wide white O’s.
Bedlam ensued. People bolted, single flip-flops lay scattered on the sidewalks like strange carapaces. People dropped water bottles, iPhones. Someone ran their Barracuda into a fire hydrant. Car alarms blared. Babies crying.
The nearest deputies, both terrified—neither having seen a smoke in person before, both of them thinking more than a little bit that it was all probably some kind of joke—ordered the VC to drop to his knees and release his weapon.
When the man did not comply, did not even seem to hear them, one of the deputies opened fire. He fired eleven rounds, all the rounds in his pistol, none of which had any effect on the apparition.
Two rounds, however, entered the chest cavity and exited the back of an eight-year-old boy who had been watching the cars with his father before they were to meet the boy’s mother at a nearby restaurant.
These things happened. These and more.
Unintended Collateral Results.