The crowd gathered around the geyser, marvelling at every eruption of scorching hot water it jettisoned several hundred feet into the air. It was as if they'd never seen one before and they hadn't, at least not one that appeared overnight in the middle of a central junction the way this one had.
It wasn't as if nobody had noticed it the night before, they just assumed that the bump in the road was just bad tarmac and carried on driving without any further comment. Some time between 2200 and 0500 hours, that had changed and now there was an entire geyser just sitting there.
That in itself was a tad worrying but not quite as much as the frequency and ferocity of the discharges it emitted. Every five minutes it seemed to breathe in and expand. Every five minutes another burst of steam and water filled the sky and scalded the occasional person who was foolish enough to stand too close.
When the road around the geyser started moving in tandem, they shut the whole junction down and the roads leading to it. Large fences were set up in a matter of hours and we figured we'd heard the last of it until the earthquake.
We aren't anywhere near a fault line and everyone's immediate thoughts were "oh god, where's the epicentre and how bad is it for those poor bastards?" or they thought the end of the world had finally come and we were all in the middle of the rapture.
They were the first to be eaten, the ones who ran out into the streets to greet their maker and ended up meeting their maker instead. Via teeth. So many teeth. It was like the sky was full of shark jaws just oscillating around each other before diving onto the closest moving thing.
Needless to say, it breathed in great jets of steaming water with gills that were fairly calcified by the high limestone content of the local water where it had presumably been buried for god knows how long. I suppose with enough heavy traffic over a long enough period of time it waswoken up.
And it woke up hungry.
It wasn't as if nobody had noticed it the night before, they just assumed that the bump in the road was just bad tarmac and carried on driving without any further comment. Some time between 2200 and 0500 hours, that had changed and now there was an entire geyser just sitting there.
That in itself was a tad worrying but not quite as much as the frequency and ferocity of the discharges it emitted. Every five minutes it seemed to breathe in and expand. Every five minutes another burst of steam and water filled the sky and scalded the occasional person who was foolish enough to stand too close.
When the road around the geyser started moving in tandem, they shut the whole junction down and the roads leading to it. Large fences were set up in a matter of hours and we figured we'd heard the last of it until the earthquake.
We aren't anywhere near a fault line and everyone's immediate thoughts were "oh god, where's the epicentre and how bad is it for those poor bastards?" or they thought the end of the world had finally come and we were all in the middle of the rapture.
They were the first to be eaten, the ones who ran out into the streets to greet their maker and ended up meeting their maker instead. Via teeth. So many teeth. It was like the sky was full of shark jaws just oscillating around each other before diving onto the closest moving thing.
Needless to say, it breathed in great jets of steaming water with gills that were fairly calcified by the high limestone content of the local water where it had presumably been buried for god knows how long. I suppose with enough heavy traffic over a long enough period of time it waswoken up.
And it woke up hungry.
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