What It Looks Like From Down Here

I was three blocks from the corner of Wacker and Michigan when the second shockwave hit.

You do not understand what a shockwave from a Viltrumite fight feels like until you have lived through one. It is not like thunder. Thunder rolls. This was a wall — a single flat impact that popped every window on the block simultaneously and knocked my sound guy, Darius, off his feet. I stayed upright only because I grabbed a parking meter. The meter bent.

By the time I got my footage rolling, whatever they were fighting had already moved east over the lake. The sky had that color it gets now — that bruised amber the atmosphere makes when something supersonic punches through it repeatedly. People on the street were not running. They were standing still, staring up, the way you do when you have already accepted that running will not help.

An older woman on the corner — I would put her at seventy — had her hands folded in front of her like she was waiting for a bus. I asked her if she was okay. She said, "I have learned not to bother being scared until the noise stops." Then she looked at me and said, "Does the noise ever actually stop?"

I did not have an answer for her. I have been covering the superhuman beat for four years. I have filed dispatches from the wreckage of three GDA containment failures, from two separate incidents the official reports called training exercises and local ER logs called mass casualty events, and from one afternoon in Cincinnati I am still trying to get my press credentials to acknowledge actually happened. I do not have an answer for that woman.

What I can tell you is what I counted: eleven shattered storefronts on a two-block stretch, four cars with their windshields blown in, one food cart on its side with its owner sitting next to it with his hands on his knees, looking at the saffron rice scattered across the pavement in a way that made me not want to ask him anything.

The GDA was on scene in eleven minutes. That is actually fast for them. The agent who spoke to me — young, rehearsed, name tag that said MORALES — told me the situation had been resolved with minimal civilian impact and that I should direct further questions to the public affairs office. I asked what the thing they were fighting had been. He said he was not able to confirm operational details. I asked if the food cart vendor would receive any compensation. He said there were assistance programs available and gave me a pamphlet that turned out to be for grief counseling.

The vendor's name was Hassan. He had been at that corner for six years. He told me the cart was paid off last winter.

I filed my footage. I wrote this. The sky is clear now — that false clear it gets after something big moves on, too blue, too still, the air with that ozone charge that used to mean a thunderstorm and now means something else.

The noise stopped. I still do not have an answer.