URBAN DECAY
Each of us, I think, had to understand it on our own terms, the totality of the desolation, the speed at which the old world had fallen away. Each of us, I think, had something of an epiphany looking down at it.
For me, it was seeing the helicopter’s shadow slink wraith-like over the hulk-jammed freeways and overgrown downtown intersections, realizing that shadow was the only thing—the only human thing—moving in any direction. For Sam it may have been the aircraft carrier—the USS Nimitz, Roman had said—run aground between Pike Street Market and the big Ferris wheel (and presumably straight into the State Route 99 tunnel). Leastwise that’s what she was looking at as she gasped audibly and the helicopter swung north by north-east, over what would have been Belltown, toward the
