Dozens of people scurried around our car. People in uniforms: city police, lab security, firefighters, HAZMAT teams. Sirens and shouting ricocheted, adding to the thick, impenetrable morass engulfing us. Rotating lights splattered the air in eerie shafts of blue and red. An acrid taste coated my mouth. Dad leapt from the car and ran into obscurity.
I opened my door, hesitating, fingering the handle. I strained to see past the haze and gloom, struggled to use some inner eye to find clarity and explanation-in both my real and mental worlds. No one would talk to me; they hurried past me as if I were invisible. And then a light breeze kicked up and I squinted, grit pelting my eyes.
When my hair stopped whipping my face and the stinging lightened, I opened one eye and peeked out. My breath caught in my chest and a lump the size of a grapefruit lodged in the back of my throat.
The laser lab-acres of buildings, equipment, and personnel-was gone. Not demolished into piles of concrete rubble and twisted steel girders, like you see on TV surveying the aftermath of an earthquake.
Just . . . gone.
A gray dust spread across the ground for blocks on end, like a peculiar sandbox of wavering dunes made of fine dust that kicked up in whorls with the slightest disturbance. A Martian landscape, like the photos Dad had pinned on his office wall. Desolate, barren wasteland. Only then did I stop to wonder what father in his right mind would drag his children to such a scene. But my dad was never one to weigh decisions when an emergency struck. He just acted on autopilot.
The rest of the afternoon blurred. Dad coming back to the car, talking to one person after another, huddling in conversation. Dylan unmoving in the backseat, someone running to the car and smothering me in a hug, babbling, crying, stroking my hair (which I really hate). My eyes stinging and itching, my skin coated in gray dust-the dust making everyone around me look like zombies emerging out of the earth.
At some point the sky darkened and I knew it was night. My stomach rumbled, reminding me of the ordinary life I left behind-a place where meals were cooked and eaten, where Mom would ask me how my day went and what happened at school. A place where my mom would get up in the morning, dress for work, and hurry out the door after a quick peck on my cheek. A place now remote and foreign. It stung me to realize those ordinary activities would now be relegated to the realm of memory. I would now have to try hard to recall every image of my mother before I forgot the simple things-her face, the way she brushed her hair, the little chuckle she'd make at Dad's bad jokes.