disaster

We were sitting in a room with raked seating, much like a theatre or a cinema, except where the stage or screen would have been were giant windows looking out over Brisbane. We were high up as though the building was perched on Mount Cootha as we could see a great expanse of night sky. As we watched, aeroplanes passed across the skyline, flying in a line sloping up from left to right, having taken off at Brisbane Airport, until they disappeared out of view. From our vantage point, we witnessed one after the other, depart Brisbane. At first, they left only one every minute or so, but soon, they dovetailed one another, enormous people carriers flying in front of jets that were flying in front of domestic aeroplanes. There rose a sense of panic in the theatre: surely this couldn't be right. Planes were evacuating the city at an alarming rate as though something dire was about to occur. We wondered if there was enough air space and navigational space to allow for so many planes in the sky at once. Though the aeroplanes were a couple of kilometres from the theatre, we could see in some of the windows and identify the faces of passengers. There seemed to be lots of international jumbo jets carrying hundreds of people out of Brisbane. Suddenly, one of the large people carriers which seemed to be an American plane, exploded in the sky. I saw the faces of some of the passengers just a fraction of a second before it blew up and there was one man that stood out to me: a tall looking African American man of about 45 to 55 years old. We didn't know if the plane had been bombed or what had happened and the quiet panic that had been growing erupted into terror. I was desperate to find B and I thought she was sitting toward the front of the theatre, so I raced down the central aisle stairs to the front of the room. For a moment, as I stood at the front of the room, I realised that I was the only person running and I wondered if I had succumbed to panic too quickly, but there was little I could do about it. From there I could see B and ran up two steps to where she was sitting and ushered her out of her seat and up the aisle, back to where I had saved a spot for her. I didn't want to be apart in the face of disaster. She sat down then wanted to sit on right hand side of me as she wasn't comfortable on my left, so I swapped seats and covered her with a grey blanket to ensure she was comfortable. We then watched a news broadcast on a screen that appeared to the right of the windows where places still passed and sometimes exploded.