Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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 144              Parking Structure Three  white boned face of a broken-toothed skeleton which stared sightlessly at him from a tangle of grey hair.    John screamed in terror. He gunned the engine and raced, tires howling, up through the next three levels, weav- ing and darting at random, nearly spinning out of control on the ice slickened concrete surface of the parking struc- ture. He had to reach the turning point and get back down to the surface, call 911, and then maybe all these crazy things would be okay, and Millie would be Millie again.    John drove on, zipping through level after level. Finally, as he passed under the sign that said, Level 449, he thought, this is the second time I've passed the 449th level. God- we're thousands of feet up in the air. Four level structure in- deed. John's ears popped with the altitude. A frozen seagull lay off to the side, by the wall, with its stiff feet in the air. He remembered passing it a minute earlier.    A minute later, he passed the gull again, even though he could swear he was still driving uphill steadily. He was still on level 449. 'This must be the top level at last,' he said loudly, cheerfully, pretending that somehow Millie could hear him.    But top level or not, there was still no down ramp. They were still stuck, he realized, as they passed the gull a third time. He stopped the car and then backed down around the turn until he reached another set of the one way tire spikes. He stopped and set the hand brake. John climbed out of the car and ran back around one bend after another, heading downward, searching, slipping on the ice, shivering, waving his arms in the sub zero cold winds that moaned at him. If only he could find there was some way down, then he would drive the wrong way in the car-who cares about tire damage. His heart pounded in his chest.    In a minute, he again came upon the gull, this time from the other direction. For some crazy reason, when you were at 449, there was no way up and there was no way down.    John shouted into the freezing gale. 'Stupid car.' The words echoed once on the concrete walls, and then were lost, absorbed by the white mounds of soft snow which lay along the sides of the drive path. He kicked the frozen gull,
  
                            Wes Alderson                   145  sending it sailing through the air, where it crunched against a cement post and tumbled to the iced pavement. The gull lay still while it was covered by a settling cloud of its own feathers. John turned and walked slowly back to the car, head hung low.    When he reached the vehicle, he saw that all four tires were flat. He groaned.    'Why, why?' he said. He hadn't even driven over the one way spikes yet. He pulled at the door and it came off the rusted hinges right into his hand. The car had been brand new just a few hours ago. The door dropped clattering onto the concrete. Millie's clothes lay in tattered pieces on the floor of the car, exposing her bare white skeleton to the cold winds.    Seeing Millie like this made John quake. He gasped for breath and reached out for her with a trembling hand, just to touch something that was somehow, someway, her, and to reassure himself that he was still sane.    'I'm sorry, Millie. I'm so awful sorry.' He stroked at her shoulder bones and her skeleton crumbled into chunky grey ashes right before his eyes, wafting little puffs of acrid dust into the cold air.    John screamed 'Noooo.' He sneezed. He ran over to the side of the structure and looked out over what had been the city. There were no buildings left. Here and there, a few steel girders and tumbled concrete blocks poked up through the otherwise uninterrupted expanse of a white ice field. A tired red sun sat low above the horizon.    John shook his head. He looked at his watch. It read 9378. He reached up and felt at his face, searching for wrinkles and missing teeth. His face felt just like it always did. He didn't even have a stubble of whiskers ... because he had shaved just this morning, or nearly 7,000 years ago, depending on how he looked at it. He thought of what Millie said, it seemed like just a few minutes ago... everything else changes ... You never change ... reality wins every time.    John took one final look at the forlorn sight, and then he climbed to the top of the concrete wall overlooking the frozen expanses of rusted girders. He swayed back and

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