8/23/22 — Waiting for Go

Come on, Hildy thought.

It had been an hour since she’d texted Dan to pick her up. A text that went unanswered, by the way, but what else what she gonna do. Uber and Lyft were both down for some reason. Thank every company for using Amazon for their back end, she supposed. No redundancies, no failovers, one goes down they all go down.

He got the message. She knew he got the message. Neither of them have read receipts turned on — how badly do you have to not trust someone to make them tell you when they read your texts — but she’d seen the 3 dot bubble pop up. Then disappear. Probably he was driving.

In the distance the lights downtown were burning an odd amber color, like a campfire. She could see a lot of aerial lights too — helicopters, probably. Well she had seen them, but they’ve been gone for a minute. Must be a heavy smog night to make the lights glow that way. Dangerous to fly, probably.

It was getting chilly up in the hills. Dan would be there any minute, she was sure. And if he wasn’t… well… not much she could do about it. Nobody was answering her texts or calls, and she couldn’t get on Facebook or Insta either. One goes down, they all go down.

In the distance she heard what sounded like the roar of some great beast echoing off the buildings from downtown. The skyline seemed to shift as neighborhood after neighborhood, grid by grid, the power went out, blanketing the valley below in darkness. The only light was the glow, the eerie, ethereal glow, creating a silhouette of the downtown skyline.

Another piercing howl made its way from the city up to her perch on the bench outside the rock climbing gym. It felt closer. She wondered if she could climb the cliff wall behind her, if it came to that.

Come on, Dan.