Excerpt: BURST

BURST
Prologue
Michael Boehm

The video starts with a scratchy, staccato eruption of visual data. There are flashes of hard blue sky, black cement, grey iron. The cameraman is running, the viewpoint moving in a vertigo-inducing gyroscopic manner. A mass of stopped cars are visible now, up ahead; the cameraman is heading towards them at a steady jog. The camera pans left for a moment, revealing a latticework of girders, and beyond, far below, an expanse of green water; tankers and freighters move past surrounded by white dots that might be sailboats.

The point of view stabilizes and returns to the vehicles ahead. They are tangled, twisted, contrived into unwholesome positions. Dominant among them all is the gleaming silver of a double-trailer gasoline tanker truck. The tanker has fishtailed, turning sideways, blocking most of the lanes of traffic, the cars piling up against it like sticks and leaves against a dam. Except this river flowed uphill. Down away some five hundred yards east and two hundred feet below, the bridge abuts the eastern shore, with the toll plaza visible there and, beyond it, the smudged skyline of the city.

The crash must have just happened. The cameraman moves right, to the far edge of the bridge, against the guard rail, to be able to see around the tanker truck, to get a better view downhill. Clouds of dust and tire-smoke are still dispersing. The camera refocuses, and the people in the first few rows of cars are visible. Cell phones came out, slack-jawed commuters punching buttons with shaking fingers, calling 911 or their family members to tell them they were all right, but turn on the news, there’s a terrible accident on the bridge.

The drivers’ side door to the cab opens, and a man emerges, tall, lanky, dark-skinned, dressed in jeans and a work shirt. The driver moves to the underside of the first trailer and begins opening the valves underneath. One by one, using a large wrench, he turns the valves, and thick streams of 92-octane gasoline issue forth, cascading onto the pavement. The yuppies are watching, still thinking, still wondering. Still in denial. Perhaps they are thinking it’s something he needs to do to release pressure.

The camera pans to capture a man in a good suit emerging from a Mercedes with a crumpled fender. His face is red. “Motherfucker! You could have killed someone. I’ll make sure the DMV takes your license. What the fuck were you thinking?”

A motorcycle is coming uphill, moving forwards in between cars. As it reaches the gasoline slick, the rear tire loses traction and spins up. The bike falls against an SUV with a clunk and a curse from the rider.

Mercedes-man is up in the truck driver’s face, screaming. The driver hardly even notices him. He is all business, opening the valves. “Excuse me,” he says to the man in the suit, moving past him to get to the valves under the rear trailer. The camera pans back out, capturing a wide view of the scene. In the heat, the gasoline vapors are evaporating into a visible haze as thick streams of liquid run down the asphalt of the bridge surface in thick streams under the cars.

Mercedes-man stops his tirade, noticing the camcorder. “Hey, what are you doing there?” he says directly to the camera.

The camerman ignores him, panning back to the crashed truck. The driver has all the valves open now and a torrent of gasoline shoots out, dousing the crumpled hoods of the vehicles in front, dripping off of side mirrors and rolling down fenders. Then he returns to the cab, reaches in, retrieves a small red object, and returns to stand in the center lane, directly in the stream of gasoline. He is covered by it now, a waterfall of fuel, showering him. It is dripping off of his nose, his shoulders, his hands.

The camera zooms in on the object in his hand. It is a highway flare. A pan out shows the driver standing with his back to the stream, arms extending, lips moving, eyes closed.

Now they begin to figure it out. Hands frantically work the handles of doors wedged shut in the initial crash. Some try climbing out through windows. A few manage to extricate themselves from their vehicles. Shocked looks on their faces, they begin backing away from the man with the flare, not wanting to believe what they are seeing; realizing in the deep reptilian portion of their brains what must come next. Mercedes-man, standing nearby, goes pale and says “Oh, God.”

The driver says something that isn’t quite picked up by the audio on the camcorder. It could be “Allah Akbar.” The driver brings his arms together and strikes the flare, and in the next two seconds, fifty meters of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge becomes a little corner of Hell on earth.

The gasoline vapor hanging in the still, hot midafternoon air ignites first, creating a thermobaric shockwave. The American Army used bombs like this in Vietnam to blast down jungle to create helicopter landing zones. The Russian army used similar fuel-air explosives in Chechnya to destroy apartment buildings. Now the explosion crushes cars like aluminum cans. Broken glass penetrates deep into flesh, bones shatter, organs rupture.

A split-second later, the shock wave hits the cameraman. The camera view goes wild, static meshed with sky as the man is blown backwards, knocked against the guard rail, flattened to the roadway. He somehow retains his grip on the camera, and shakily rises to his feet, pointing the camera back downhill.

The liquid gasoline has ignited. Broad velvety rivers of fuel roar to life where they had cascaded under sedans, delivery trucks, coupes, minivans, and SUVs. A hundred vehicles are enveloped in flames within moments. A few people manage to escape the initial blast, running downhill in between the lines of cars back towards Oakland, but the flames are swift and catch up with them. Other people, already aflame, crawl from their cars and fling themselves over the sides, preferring the dark cold oblivion of the Bay, two hundred feet below. The traffic helicopters hovering nearby capture the smoky arcs of the anthropomorphic comets in high-definition detail.

The man with the camcorder is fifty feet uphill from the inferno on the upper deck and walking backwards quickly. There is a sound like a minivan’s side door sliding open. Someone says “That’s enough. Get in. Hurry.” The cameraman pans quickly, revealing a pale blue fender, before the camera snaps off and the video ends.