‘Did you feel that?’ I asked my wife, gently tapping her on the shoulder. She stopped scolding the kids in the backseat for a second to look at me.
‘No,’ she frowned, confused. ‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I checked all of the mirrors, puzzled. ‘Some kind of… rumble, I guess.’
A car ahead of us beeped, but the rush-hour gridlock meant no traffic was moving on the bridge. A quick smattering of reciprocating beeps flowed out amongst the rest of the crowd, but soon died down.
There.
‘Did you feel that?’ I asked, feeling unexpectedly frantic. I couldn’t see anything, but… what was that?
‘Honey,’ my wife soothed me, placing a calming hand on my shoulder. ‘I know that you get stressed whenever we have your podiatry appointments near the Melbourne CBD, but you need to take a breath.’
‘I know, I know,’ I half-responded, eyes still glued to the bridge behind us.
Was that smoke? Was that–
‘Oh my god,’ I whispered.
‘That’s Spy-Door Man!’ my son cheered from the backseat.
He was right! Spy-Door Man flew past our car, then disappeared under the bridge, chasing something.
‘What the…’ my wife breathed.
The honks behind us began to increase, more people hammering harder on their horns. I twisted around to look, people now streaming onto the bridge, cars abandoned.
Boom! Boom!
The road underneath us rippled as if it were rubber, as something massive exploded underneath us.
‘The arch supports!’ somebody yelled from the crowd, and a scream went up.
‘We’ve got to run for it,’ I said to my family, leaning back to unbuckle my son, as my wife grabbed our daughter. ‘We have to–’
There was another loud boom! and a sickening lurching feeling, as the road underneath us disappeared with a crash of rubble.
‘No, no, no, no,’ I found myself screaming, hanging onto my family as we plunged toward the water below.
Thwip.
We stopped falling with another lurch, suspended in midair by a single thread. It was thin, but I somehow knew that it would hold.
‘Thank you, Spy-Door Man,’ I whispered.