The tires of Bus #04 screamed across the wet iron grating of Canal Bridge 9.
Beneath the steel floorboards, black canal water churned between stone lock gates. Clara Vance gripped the tubular steel handrail behind the driver’s seat until her knuckles turned white.
In her ears, the blacked-out city didn’t sound like quiet fog.
It sounded like a wall of physical pressure. Ever since she was twelve, her auditory nerves had been locked to a 4,200 Hz reference pitch. She could hear the sixty-cycle buzz of buried copper mains beneath the street pavers and the micro-second relay jitter inside every transformer box.
Right now, the acoustic pressure coming off the bridge towers made her back molars ache.
Something is riding the PA line, Clara thought, pressing her palm over her right ear. That isn’t a civil-defense siren. That’s a magnetic tape loop.
“Mac, look at the bridge deck!” Clara cried out, pointing through the wire-mesh windshield.
Mac Cole stood hard on the air-brake treadle. The bus’s heavy brake shoes clamped against the drums with a shuddering groan, slowing the twenty-ton coach to a crawl at the eastern approach.
