Holiday

At five a.m. the drive to the airport is spookily quiet. All of the other times that Sarah’s been this way during the day, in rush hour or just in normal daily traffic, they seem like a nightmare compared to this. The fog adds to the surreal feeling, there aren’t any other cars, just the orange halo of streetlights to follow. For some reason the radio isn’t working either, when she left the driveway she fiddled with the buttons but without any success. The quiet seems to fit the early morning best anyway, so it’s just her and her thoughts as she heads along the suburban arteries towards the motorway. There’ll be traffic once she gets closer she supposes, for now why not just enjoy the solitude.

At the motorway on-ramp the absence of cars seems ever weirder. But Sarah is in a quiet early morning foggy zone now, it’s stopped being strange and now it just is. Something about the small numbers on the clock and the quiet dark always do that to people, it’s like they’re dreaming. She’s awake enough to steer the car though, and when she arrives at the international terminal twenty minutes earlier than expected, the odd feeling comes back to her in the long term car park. Shouldn’t there be other people parking? Shouldn’t there be a little bit more bustle by now. She gets her bag from the back seat, pulls the handle up and wheels it towards the entrance. Click-click, click-click in the near silence.

If the quiet on the roads was a bit strange, then the scene at the check in desks was plain creepy. A vast empty room, nobody to be seen. The dreamy feeling has well and truly worn off now, it’s quickly being replaced by panic and fear. “What on earth is going on?” she murmured to herself. She walks almost the length of the building, her wheels rattling behind her the only sound to accompany her footsteps. When she reaches the entrance at the other end, the arrivals gate, she finally sees someone else. An airport staff member walking quickly, with a radio in his hand and a stressed look on his face. “Where are you supposed to be going to today?” he blurted at her.

“Um, Australia, Melbourne at 6.15”

“Good, there’s one last plane that’s heading to Sydney, we can get on that if we hurry.”

Leading her off through the arrivals gate and into the bowels of the airport. Back doors and corridors running around and behind the shopping and ubiquitous fast food that she was expecting when she left home this morning. The man breathlessly barks into the radio again, Sarah doesn’t quite have time to ask what was going on, she’s not on the plane yet but a passenger already. One thing she does manage hear was the muffled response crackling out of the radio, “hurry!”, the voice left no ambiguity.

Walking out onto the tarmac is a strange sensation at this airport that normally only uses air bridges. There’s a 737 to their right with stairs leading up to the front door, a man’s standing in the doorway, he shouted at them “run”.

They scramble on board the plane, it started moving before they could take a seat, the plane’s almost full and everyone seems to be in some kind of uniform, customs, and airport staff, and duty free sales people. The whole operation was getting out of there.

As they taxied towards the runway the calm they left in the terminal seemed to have ended, there are people everywhere now. They look unwell, all of them. They limp and look hunched and more of them appeared from everywhere every second. They were all lurching towards the plane as it turned west and pointed down the runway. A voice came on over the PA system “don’t worry guys, they wont be fast enough to get to the plane, but make sure you’ve got your seatbelt on, we’re taking off asap”.

Dawn was creeping up behind the airport as well, light started to drift across the isthmus. As the plane banked and set a course across the Tasman, Sarah could see smoke billowing across the city, dozens of little fires burning. There’s no morning traffic still, but people all over the streets, hobbling around like the crowd at the airport, it was a strange view of her home town, it looked in ruins. It all got too much for Sarah, she started to sob “can someone please tell me what’s going on...” she shouted.