It was a thick overcast, and the sun's powerful glow was scattered through the scene. The old bridge seemed tired and weary of its thirty years in the suffused light. Traffic was low for a large city; every car that drove on felt it was intruding on the lazy morning. Kim Harding was not paying any attention, because that's what tinted window and half-blown car speakers are for - to make you forget. She paid her five dollars to the man aat the toll booth and drove up the bridge's slight incline. At the crest of the ark, she slowed. And stopped. And rolled down her right side window. And turned down her music. She stared for a couple seconds. And then, instinctively, she slammed on the gas pedal and was off the bridge an instant before it was smashed to peices.
The man in the toll booth was reported missing. The newspapers were livid for about two days, called it everything from a flash flood to an act of a restless god. One witness claimed he saw the water "bulge up, and then go flat down". Scientists from geothermal to erosion to aquatic biologists were called in and hung about for days, measuring things and capturing fish and digging little holes. The biggest mystery, though, was just completely gone the bride was. Hundreds of tons of metal were demolished in a clean line on the shore. And nobody seemed to know where the entire middle of it had gone.
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