In the seconds that passed, Carl registered that it was that jerk in the blue car. The car jumped the curb, slid through the entrance on its own momentum, and there was a great flash of light.
Suddenly Carl felt like he was punched in the face, he was upside down and his ears were ringing. His head was throbbing from the cacophonous blast and the car was sliding into the parking lot on its roof.
He felt the sting of broken glass and nitrogen from his deployed air bag, and he heard the muffled sounds of people screaming. After some undetermined period of time that felt like several minutes, some man had opened the door to his car, disengaged the seat belt, and pulled him out.
He got to his feet, and the man was shouting something to him, but he could not make out what it was. People were standing in the parking lot in the rain staring at a rather gaping hole in the front of the mall where the elegant glass entrance had once been.
Smoke was billowing out of the yawning gap, and the uneven concrete around the opening was black. It took Carl a moment to get his bearings, when he remembered his mother. He began to walk towards the smoking mall. A few other onlookers passed him, brushing his shoulders as they ran up to the scene.
Where was his mother? He thought back to before the blast. Was she standing by the glass doors when the blue car drove through? Did she get out of the way?
It was impossible to see through the gray smoke pouring out of the mall. There was a hysterical woman crying and tugging on his arm. She might have been shouting at him, or shouting at no one in particular and simply hysterical, but he did not hear her words.
He choked on the smoke and dust that filled the air as he strained to look for his mother. It appeared that only the entrance had been hit. The bulk of the mall appeared to be unaffected, and Carl foolishly hoped that his mother was somewhere in the recesses of the structure, scared out of her wits.
He heard on-lookers calling various names into the smoke—husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters. However, at the moment, he only cared about one. So he joined the panicked chorus.
“Mom. MOOOOOM. MARLA. MAAAARLAAAA.”
Ash wafted in the air like snowflakes drowning out the rain all around them.
“MAAAARLAAAAA!”
His eyes welled up with hot tears as he choked back a horrible inevitability that he did not want to accept.
To add insult to injury, part of the roof collapsed, sending the onlookers reeling back towards the parking lot. Concrete and steel crashed down into the smoke and on top of the bodies of those whose names were being called out.
There was more screaming and sobbing as the smoke reflected flashing red and blue lights. The first responders had arrived. Police officers pulled people back away from the mall as firefighters rushed into the smoke and disappeared, consumed in clouds of gray and black.
A police officer, around his age, pulled Carl back. He was a man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and a frightened expression on his face. He was led into the arms of a paramedic who wrapped a blanked around him and led him over to an ambulance.
Carl gazed in horror as police officers set up a perimeter and firefighters fought the blaze. The interior of the mall was still obscured by smoke, dust, and debris.
A paramedic was talking to him, but to Carl it sounded like they were underwater. The man checked the cuts on his face from broken glass as more ambulances piled into the parking lot, which had become quite the scene. The press arrived only moments later. The whole scene had become some kind of circus.
A police officer came over. “Are you alright, sir?”
That was not why he came over. “Yes, I’m okay.”
“Did you see anything?”
Ah, there it was. “There was a man in a blue car.”
“A man in a blue car?”
Carl’s Mini-com was vibrating. It was his father. “Yes, a blue car. Hold on a moment…” He answered the phone. “Hello…hello?”
He couldn’t hear his father over the phone. The ringing in his ears was too loud. He passed the phone over to the officer.
The officer took it. “Yes…yes…hold on, sir…” He looked at Carl. “Are you Carl?”
Carl nodded. The officer spoke into the phone. “Yes…yes, sir…he’s okay…what…who…” The officer