Читать книгу Clouds Of Smoke… The Story - Gianluigi Ciaramellari - Страница 14

She ran towards the bus stop, the bus no. 29 was scheduled for 9:15 and, if her watch hadn’t stopped, calculating her twenty minute stopover at the store, she had probably lost it. The next one would pass at 9:40. So there was no need to rush. Walking, she removed her watch from her wrist and checked the dial, which appeared to be running again and it signed 9:10. Sonia thought that some juice would do her good, to regain a little strength following the bad news she had received and her strange encounter. She entered the bar close to Damien’s store, the same one where Massimo had stopped due to his urge to smoke a cigarette.

It wasn’t a relaxing drink. As soon as they served it to her, outside she saw a parade of ambulances and police cars with their sirens on. People rushed out to see what had happened, even Sonia, who looked out and saw the cars trying to convey to a single lane, leaving room for the emergency vehicles, which were desperately trying to find a passage way in the traffic. From a distance, less than a kilometre away from her viewpoint, she could clearly see a black smoke cloud rising to the sky. For about fifteen minutes, she and many others, some patrons of the bar and others just passers-by, kept watching in order to understand what had happened. It had to be something serious.

Some rumours were passed from one person to the other, bringing back news that was mostly unreliable. Some said it was a bomb, some claimed that a tank truck had exploded, some already shouted about a terrorist attack, others said that it was a terrible car accident.

Sonia realized that the situation was getting worse. She would not have made it to the Office on time for her morning meeting, as she had promised her colleague who had called her earlier, so she thought it best to warn him of her delay or maybe even her impossibility to attend, which seemed to be the case. She went back into the bar and dialled her Office’s number.

Stefano, her colleague, anxiously answered following the first ring: “Sonia, finally! Is everything alright?”

“Yes, of course Stefano, why do you ask?”

“So you weren’t on that bus?”

“My God, no, - said Sonia, alarmed – what happened?”

“A bad accident, Sonia, they’re talking about it on the local radio station, the bus that you usually take, number twenty-nine, collided into a truck and caught fire. A disaster, they say that one person is dead and several wounded!”

Sonia recoiled. She couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened and that it had happened to her bus that morning, and at that hour. Yes... That hour... The hour her watch had stopped on, allowing her to avoid such a tragedy.

“I was late Stefano – said Sonia reassuring her colleague – so thankfully I didn’t take that bus. Now I see that there is a lot of traffic and I won’t be able to make it on time for the morning meeting. You can go ahead without me; we’ll catch up later, okay?”

“Okay Sonia, don’t worry!” And as Stefano hung up, she could hear the relief in his voice.

It was almost ten o’clock. Sonia considered that it would be better to go back home by foot, it wasn’t that far away.

The morning was gone now. Once home, she would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together, the absurd picture of a nightmarish morning, which ended luckily for her, compared to the tragedy if she had taken that unlucky bus no. 29.