The screaming of five hundred thousand people was louder than the earth-shaking rupture itself.
Across the four-hundred-foot dark rock tiers of the Grand Coliseum, mass hysteria had taken hold. Spectators dropped their silk cloaks, abandoned their jade jewelry. Then they trampled over overturned chairs. They surged down the narrow stone stairs toward the exit concourses. Clouds of pungent, foul-smelling sewer steam continued to roar from the cracked arena floor. It cast a world-ending grey haze over the darkening sky as the northern foundation pier settled by another two inches.
And then, the stampede met an unmoving, criminal obstacle.
At the main northern way out portals, thirty thousand panicked citizens smashed against a row of massive, eight-foot-tall fancy bronze gates.
The heavy gates were not open.
They were bound together by heavy iron chains as thick as a man’s forearm, secured by massive, two-hundred-pound iron padlocks stamped with the official seal of the Imperial Coliseum Management Board.
“THE GATES ARE LOCKED!” a merchant screamed, his face pressed against the bronze bars. “OPEN THE GATES! THE UPPER DECK IS BUCKLING!”
“LET US OUT! BY THE ANCESTORS, WE ARE Choking IN HERE!”
