the house property backs onto an escarpment, at the bottom of which is a frozen river which runs through the city. all along the escarpment, to one side of the house, several adjacent city blocks are missing. empty, removed, and soon to be replaced. looking out from a window of the house on the hill, i can see new units being moved up to the edge of the escarpment in one of the nearby lots, slotted into place one after another like tiles, only they’re huge: entire properties, with buildings, pavements, lawns, sidewalks already assembled together on ultrawide flatbeds, pushed and pulled by purpose-built “mover” trucks that look like grossly oversized big-rig/tow-truck hybrids. they’re moving quickly; the whole block’ll be assembled by morning.
but something’s wrong; the newest piece to arrive doesn’t stop in time and smashes through the property markers near the escarpment. i look closer: there is one of those big mover trucks at either end, and something’s going wrong with them. the whole thing comes to a shuddering stop, and then the rear “pushing” mover-truck lurches back the way it came. the property/building tile-piece is coming detached from the other mover, the one near the escarpment. the truck’s grappling mechanism is going haywire, jerking up and down, barely attached to the property any more. the workers swarm around the malfunctioning movers and the piece caught between them, looking from up here like panicked ants after a kid stomps their colony. with a huge tug, the rear-facing truck pulls the property completely free of the one facing the escarpment and surges forward, running over some workers, and sending those who had been standing on the attached property flying through the air as their footing is pulled out from underneath. one worker gets thrown under the grappling mechanism of the other truck, which keeps moving up and down, crushing him repeatedly against the body of the vehicle. then the whole truck abruptly drives forward, rushing headlong over the edge and down, down, crashing through the frozen surface of the river.
in a panic, some workers leap to their smaller pickup trucks and head down a narrow, treacherous dirt path to the bottom of the escarpment. but they’re driving too fast; before it gets even halfway to the bottom, the first truck loses control, flips, flies through the air, and skids across the ice. a couple of passengers stagger out, even as a second, third, then fourth truck follow suit, each more disastrously than the last, crashing into the other trucks and the survivours who crawled out of them.
not a single sound of all the chaos and carnage enters the house. an unnervingly constant silence fills my ears throughout it all.
...the next morning, the view of the accident scene is blocked by a row of buildings; the lot next to our old house has been filled. “the helicopters must have set them down there last night,” someone says...
