"PEDESTRIAN"

BY

JON STALK

*** *** *** *** *** ***

            Today I wore sneakers. Thank God for that.

            New York City bustles no matter the time of day, temperature or weather conditions. Today happened to be bright and warm for an autumn day, with people scattered across the dense conurbation as far as the eye can see; from Fifth Avenue to Sixth, from 33^rd Street to 34^th. People and taxis and buses and cars, their sounds all stitched together, mended into an appended commotion which on such a day as today could have been easily misconstrued as tranquility.

            As green streetlights turned red, crosswalks overflowed with pedestrians; some wearing sneakers (the lucky ones), some wearing high heels and some wearing expensive patent leathers. A select few, still clutching onto the remnants of summer, wore open-toed sandals.

           I wore sneakers. And like I said, thank God for that. With the red streetlights came the stodgy sound of air releasing from the bus air braking systems, and the irritating whistling of overheated, and overdue disc brakes. Street musicians banged on garbage cans and slithered eclectic tunes from their Saxes and trumpets, as if midtown were some huge and overcrowded open-air jazz club where the admission is free and you're still able to smoke.

            To sum it all up, things were as normal as they could have been on a Monday afternoon.

            But that was 2:58 p.m. By 3:08, things were anything but normal.

            When the red lights turned green, engines hissed and horns honked. But the here pedestrians don't stop crossing just because the flashing sign tells them to stop. They all kept walking, kept moving they way New Yorkers tend to do when they are in a hurry (which is always). An assembly line of pedestrians, one shuffling after the other - shoes after pumps after sneakers and back again - continued on through the intersection. Somewhere in that bunch was me, wearing sneakers and not yet needing to thank God for having made that decision.

             "C'mon! Please! Move it!  Please!" Desperately pleaded a intonation from somewhere beyond our marching column. I turned toward it (as did a few others around me), eager to find the source of the angry voice. At first I couldn't, but after hearing a second desperate plea from the same voice, I noticed a thin, gaunt man hanging out of the driver's side window of a late model black Cadillac. Buoyant gray smoke poured from the car's grille and I noticed a good portion of the driver's side headlight casing was missing. Car's probably overheating, I thought and continued walking.

            "C'mon, please move it!  The light's green!"

            "Hey, man, hold your dick."  A young Yuppie walking in front of me denigrated, smiling smugly. "We'll move when we're ready."  One or two people in the line laughed.

            "But the light is green!" The driver shouted, and the very urgency in his voice startled me. It was urgent, yet so much more, as if every second of his life was being accounted for, as if his heartbeat was a clock ticking down to something vital, something insistent, something serious. He looked sickly and frightened.   

              He laid on the horn, startling more than a couple of the pedestrians in the crosswalk.

            "Hey! Your dick'll still be there when you're done." The arrogant Yuppie chortled again, adjusting his too-cool-for-you sunglasses. "Real people with real jobs are crossing here."  He laughed again, thumbing the undersized waist of his Dockers. "You ought to think about getting a new car, bro. That one's just about had it."  A few more people laughed, but mostly everyone kept moving, minding their own.

            Once again, the light turned red.

            The sedan charged ahead, then briskly screeched to a halt just inches before him. If the driver was trying to scare the arrogant man, it didn't work.

            "What's your fuckin' problem, dude?"  The Yuppie held his hands outward, foreboding dissent. "Wait your ******* turn, loser. This is New York!  Pedestrians have the right of way!"  He tapped the smoldering hood of the Caddy and repeated. "Right of way."

            Again the horn raged, and most of the people around me scoffed.

            "You don't understand!" The driver howled from out of the window. Please! Get out of my way!  You don't understand." 

            Smoke, still thin and watery, continued to flutter upward from the grille, and when I was able to get closer look I noticed the driver's side headlight casing was not just missing. It was cracked. It looked like the Caddy might have been involved in a fender-bender.

            As I crossed in front of the grille the scent of the air altered from its previous aroma of day-old pretzels and steaming hot dogs to sweet ether and evaporated anti-freeze and I listened as the car's motor puttered, on the verge of stalling, but always seeming to catch itself before failing.

            " **** you, loser!" The Yuppie trotted. "You'll have to wait."

            "No! **** you!  I'll run you the **** over!"

            The gaunt driver's eyes were bloodshot, and bulged from inside scaly, pale sockets. To me, he looked sick - dying even.

           "Yeah, then I'd sue you."  The brash young Yuppie retorted. "But I probably won't get much, seeing as your car here ain't worth as much as my tie."

He laughed at his own pompous yarn, as did a few others.

            Again the horn wailed, now weaker, as if the battery was being drained.

            Festered, The Yuppie skipped out of line, crossing through two neat conveyor rows of pedestrians.  He raised his finger in protest. "Blow that ******* horn again and I'm going to **** you up!"

            I giggled to myself at the scrawny Yuppie's confidence and simply watched, in childlike anticipation of a street fight.

            "Listen," The sickly driver said, not yielding, yet not apprehensive either. "I'm not looking to fight you. But you have to get out of my way!" He pleaded louder, "Please! You all have to get out of my way."  His large, disturbed eyes darted back and forth from The Yuppie to the traffic. Cabs and buses passed the northbound side of Sixth Avenue effortlessly, the unconcerned drivers of which neither noticing nor caring about what was happening on the other side of the double yellow lines.

            The gaunt man stole an apprehensive glance at the traffic behind him, two blocks of which had accumulated. "Please! My God, you little ****** punk!  LET ME GO!"

            The Yuppie kicked the Cadillac's grille, sending fragments of aged chrome to the pavement. "Call me a ******? **** you, loser!"

            The man bit his lips. His loose cheeks trembled on his face, as did his arms and fingers.   A stone tear fell from one opaque eye down his leathery cheek. "Please. Please. Just let me go...before..."

            "Before what?" The Yuppie raised his arm and leaped toward the emaciated driver. I interjected - against my better judgment - trying to hold him back.

            "Hey, loser!  Get the **** off of me!" The Yuppie demanded. But I held his bony arm with all my might, calmly advising him to cool it.

            "I need to go!"

            The Cadillac's driver stolidly retreated to the seat of his car, as if conceding to the argument and accepting defeat from the impetuous Yuppie.

            "Get the **** off of me, loser!" The Yuppie said again, then wrestled his arm free. "Who are you to touch me?  I'll ******* buy and sell you."

            "Listen, dude," I raised my hands. "I'm just trying to save you from getting yourself arrested for assault. There are a lot of witnesses out here."

            " **** them. And **** you, too. Let them arrest me. I can afford the bail. Maybe you can't, but I can!"

            The condescending little twerp shoved me back into the line of walking New Yorkers. I wanted to go back at him, but decided it was in my own best interest to let it go. So I did.

            Annoyed, I walked away and crossed to the other side of Sixth and 33^rd, eager to put this petty madness behind me. But before I made it to the curb I heard an incredibly loud screech followed by a muted thump. Startled, I turned just in time to see the condescending Yuppie flying through the air, about six feet off of the ground. He landed on his back in the intersection, maybe thirty feet away. Luckily for him, the light had turned red. The Cadillac, which had obviously struck him, idled for a moment underneath the streetlight before finally stalling.

            A crowd hurriedly gathered around the Yuppie. Some of them knelt to help him, while others just watched with their palms clasping their mouths in horror.

            "What happened?" A woman asked.

            "That car just...just hit him!  On purpose!" A well-dressed man replied.

            Walking the crosswalk back to the southbound side, I examined the gaunt driver of the Caddy. His hands were gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white and trembling, and he appeared as though he thought he was still driving, obviously suffering from some sort of delirium. His eyes were focused straight ahead, but it didn't appear (to me, at least) that he was focused on the Yuppie. It didn't appear he was focused on anything.

            "You okay, man?" I asked, once again crossing in front of the beaten Caddy. He didn't hear me, and if he did he didn't pay me any mind.

            Steaming from the hood, the ether smell once again overcame me. I put my hand over my mouth to screen the scent. Mist continued to billow from the radiator, dividing my direct view through the windshield. From behind the smoke, I could faintly see that the Caddy's driver was looking nervously behind him.

            "Call an ambulance!" Someone from within the circle where the Yuppie was laying screamed. "He's bleeding from his head!  He's losing a lot of blood!"

            Had I just witnessed someone murdered by a Cadillac in Mid-Town Manhattan?  It just didn't seem real. It was like I was hallucinating or something. Could the brash Yuppie, the Gaunt Driver, and the beaten Caddy all have been figments of a bad dream of bad pot?  Was I dreaming?  No. I wasn't.

              This was real, surreal as it was.

              I'd never seen a person hit by a car before, and as my mind replayed the Yuppie's mid-air dive over and over I felt my spine shake and my scalp tingle.  From where I stood I could not see him lying there.  I didn't want to.

            But I could see his fresh blood dripping off the Caddy's cracked grille. The blood on the headlight casing, however, was dried, and seemed an odd color mixture of red, yellow and green.

            "Mister!" I called to the driver. "The police are coming." I don't know why I told him that. I guess within all of the surrealism it just came out.

            But he paid me no mind, just kept looking behind him, as if already expecting the police, or someone.

            A harsh scream came from the distance. The Yuppie must have died, I thought, and turned toward the commotion in the intersection.

            Another scream, but now it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else. From behind me.

            From the north.

            From behind the Cadillac.

            Screams, now from a choir of different voices.

            More screams, now more than one; more than two; a half-dozen. A dozen. More.

            "Oh my God! It's coming!" The Gaunt man screamed, frantically trying to start the Caddy. The engine turned over, idled weakly, then died. It turned over again and the driver revved the gas. The car jerked forward and I jumped out of the way.  It lunged, tires spinning radically, fishtailed through the intersection and crashed into the circle of spectators that were hovering around the fallen Yuppie. People scattered, some of them flew outward and some of them tumbled over the hood of the Caddy. The car careened forward clumsily and thumped over the Yuppie, killing him. Finally it came to an abrupt rest in a store front on 33^rd street.

            I looked on in terror as pedestrians lie scattered all over the intersection, some of them dead, some unconscious, some merely licking their wounds. All of them, however, were traumatized.

            My sneakers took me across the intersection to the Cadillac, where the impact with the building had left the driver wedged in the windshield. He was breathing - trying to breathe, anyway - and his opaque eyeballs danced unhinged.

            "R - Run." He stammered, gurgling through accumulating blood in his throat. "I, I hit it. It was...It was an accident."

             "Hit what?"  I asked, shocked by the amount of blood that had been splattered onto the windshield and dashboard of the Caddy.

             "I - I don't know. It just...came out of...nowhere...down on Forty-Second...It..."  He coughed and huge clots of blood soared from his throat.     "It...It's not..."

              "What?" I asked. My mouth had gone dry and the impaled look in his eyes had already begun to haunt my dreams.

               "...Human."

               "What's not human?"

               He tried to point, but with his lower body was still inside of the car I couldn't tell toward what. He struggled weakly to free himself, but was met with no success. Surrendering, he spat out a few shards of blood-stained glass.

               "That..."  He said and burped a final gasp. He died right there, eyes open - wide and fearful. Thick glass-laced blood continued to drip from his open mouth.

                I turned toward the north, from where I could now hear a symphony of petrified shrieks.  And that's when I saw whatever it was that I saw - whatever it was that the driver of the Caddy had hit - traversing Sixth Avenue, bloody and angry, and...hungry.

                "Run!" I called, and like a coward I took off westward down Thirty-Third Street, toward the subway, not once looking back, never again laying eyes on the abhorrent creature that was running toward us.

                 I heard the screams until I had run far enough to where I couldn't hear them anymore. I'll never forget them, nor will I ever forget the sickened grunting accompaniment that came from whatever that thing was. I heard the screams until I couldn't hear them anymore. They were screams of death.

                  I ran and ran, as if I were running for my life.

                  I was.

                  I still don't know what it was I was running from, and I don't think I ever want to know.

                  I wore sneakers today. Did I tell you that I wore sneakers today? 

                  Thank God for that.