My phone buzzed against my leg in a daring attempt to escape my pocket. I juggled my coffee and my suitcase to reach for it, but it stopped ringing before I could take it out. Leaving it as a lost cause, I wiped a streak of coffee off my jacket.

Somewhere in the building behind me, an old-fashioned landline shrilled loudly without response. The sound got annoying, so I moved away from it toward the curb. I looked for the car that was supposed to pick me up, squinting at passing car models and license plates.

Across the street, I noticed two separate people answering their cell phones at the same time. One put his to his ear a few times, looked at it in confusion, and then returned it to his pocket. The other person said hello once, then went back to scrolling on it while walking.

It reminded me of my missed call, and I risked another coffee bath to pull out my phone. But I didn't have any missed calls or messages, even though I could've sworn I felt it buzzing. The only notification I had was to take my turn in Pictionary.

As I was drawing a porcupine, someone walked by behind me saying, "Hello? Hello?"

I checked on my ride again, but it looked like they'd been caught in some nasty traffic nearby. I debated walking or taking a bus, but I still had my suitcase with me. So I stayed put and craned my neck to look down the street, bouncing with impatience.

Then suddenly it felt quiet. The landline behind me had finally given up, leaving a little pocket of silence. At the same time, there happened to be a lull in street traffic. For a moment, there was just the shuffle of people walking by.

As I was listening to the quiet, I noticed a beeping sound in the distance. A bright flash caught my eye, and I turned to look at a building down the street. A light on its side was blinking in time with the sound, which gradually resolved into a fire alarm.

The alarm spread quickly to nearby buildings, the slightly offset beeps ruining the quiet. People on the street stopped and looked for the fire, but I couldn't see anything wrong. Still, the alarms continued to spread all the way down the street, until it even reached the building behind me. I tried in vain to plug my ear with my coffee cup as the air filled with shrill ringing.

People began trickling out to the sidewalk from every building on the block. Soon the street was overcrowded with disrupted office workers wondering what was going on and when they could go back inside. I pulled my suitcase closer to myself, trying not to get jostled off the curb.

Soon, the sound of sirens began to compete with the continued shrilling of the alarms and the people shouting over each other. The last thing I heard before the sirens drowned everything out was the woman standing next to me complaining that her phone didn't work.

Before long, the street was lit up in red and blue as an entire fleet of emergency vehicles blazed down its center. I counted at least six ambulances and six fire trucks and wondered how they had all responded on such short notice. Then I wondered even more when all twelve of them sped right past us, ignoring the shrieking alarms.

Behind the emergency vehicles came what looked like every city bus and shuttle service in town. They barrelled down the street in a rumbling herd, taking up every available lane. One grazed a car parked on the shoulder, and its tiny car alarm joined the cacophony of sound around it.

Then, almost as one, the buses began to slow. Down the street, some of them peeled away and pulled up to the sidewalk. Near me, an unmarked tour bus pulled in at a crazy angle, butting its nose between two parked cars. The driver flashed the lights and honked the horn, then opened the door.

At first everyone near the bus stepped back, intimidated by the press of vehicles. The people closest to the open door were shouting something back and forth with the driver, but all I could hear were the others around me asking what was being said.

Eventually, the people shouting to the driver started boarding the bus. Those behind them were still shouting back and forth in confusion, wondering what was going on, but the movement started a mass panic. Soon everyone was shoving each other to get on board first, and the press of people reversed direction to surge toward the vehicles.

Someone tripped over my suitcase and I lost my grip on it. When I tried to grab it, someone elbowed me and I spilled my coffee all over my arm. By the time I turned back, I couldn't even see my suitcase through the crowd. I had no choice but to let myself get funneled onto the bus.

I stumbled into the first seat I found, next to a woman with a wailing baby on her lap. Even sitting next to them, I could barely hear the baby over the shouting, honking, and beeping. I tried to cover my ears and realized that I was still clutching my newly empty coffee cup. Looking around, I couldn't see a good place to dispose of it. Eventually I just put it under the seat in front of me. The floor of the bus was already littered with dropped belongings anyway.

Once we couldn't shove anyone else on board, the driver closed the door and pulled away from the curb. We left behind a huge crowd of people still waiting for buses, with more still coming out of the buildings. A city bus pulled in behind us, and the crowd surged forward to meet it as our bus accelerated away.

We sped down the middle of the four-lane road, past block after block of people and buses. Every building we passed had its fire alarm ringing, like the whole city was trying to drive us out. When we passed into a smaller neighborhood, the alarms were replaced by an air-raid siren that blasted every thought out of my head.

The blaring was audible until we were well out of city limits. Even then, the echo of it continued in my head, filling in the sudden quiet. Despite the crowded bus, everything seemed hushed and muted. Nobody spoke above a whisper, and even the baby next to me was silent. It felt like I had gone partly deaf.

The bus continued down the rural highway until the daylight faded. I checked my phone a couple times, but I couldn't get a signal. All I had was the same notification that it was my turn in Pictionary. But the app wouldn't work without an internet connection, so I put my phone away and drifted off to sleep.

I woke when the bus peeled off the highway and pulled over at a rest stop in the mountains. The driver cut the engines, and we were plunged into an eerie silence. His voice sounded tinny and far away as he informed us that we would all stay here tonight.

Without a word, everyone filed off of the bus and into a motel at the side of the highway. For a while, the silence was kept at bay by the gentle shuffle of people moving and interacting without talking. But once I got to my motel room, the quiet settled back in. It took a long time for me to fall asleep.

The next morning, I was woken by people talking in the hallways. The chattering continued throughout breakfast, packing, and checking out, with barely a lull for the bus driver honking at us to get on board. Everyone seemed to be talking about everything at once, and the bus was filled with the constant hum of conversation.

As we got closer to the city, people began turning to the windows. By the time we reached the suburbs, the chatter had died out. The city was also quiet, like it was holding its breath with us. All the fire alarms had gone silent, and there was no one on the streets to shout or honk. The air-raid siren was a distant echo in my memory.

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out. I had several missed messages from my dad, and a notification that my driver had canceled my ride. And it was still my turn in Pictionary. I looked up and saw that everyone around me was on their phones too. The bus filled with the sound of buzzing and pinging, and people began making calls. Soon it was hard to hear anything over the talking and ringing.

I tried to search up what happened, but nobody seemed to know. The further I scrolled, the wilder the theories became. But nobody could say for sure what had happened, and some people claimed it didn't happen at all. It was like the alarms and sirens from earlier were a fever dream that was already being forgotten.

Our bus meandered through the city until we got back to the block we'd come from. Without ceremony, the driver pulled up to the side of the road and opened the door. Silently, we all filed off and went our separate ways.

I pulled out my phone again and called another ride. The app told me it would take a while due to "unusually high demand." As I waited, I wandered the sidewalk looking for my suitcase. The scattered belongings strewn all over the ground were one of the few indications that anything strange had happened here. All around me, the city was settling into its usual daily rhythm. Even the sound of traffic was starting back up.

I didn't find my suitcase by the time my ride pulled up, so I gave it up as a lost cause and got into the back seat of the car. The driver didn't look at all curious about what had happened, so I let him drive me home in silence. On the way, I pulled out my phone and finished drawing a porcupine.