"Where is she?"
"She?" I ask, double-checking my luggage and shifting my backpack's weight slightly as we stand there under orangish-tinged lights on a hot night in late August.
We find ourselves in this moment standing in front of our recently parked car, hopefully scanning for a shuttle that will, if it comes in the next few minutes, allow us plenty of time to get to the airport's campus, through security, and onto our red-eye flight departing Denver for Boston.
"Yeah, I've always thought of this shuttle as having a more feminine energy," my wife (then girlfriend) says.
This parking lot is a known entity, an unwelcome but convenient node in our travel routine. As such I've been there at all kinds of inconvenient hours, and each time I arrive I encounter the same intrusive thought: this would be the perfect tableau for the beginning of a zombie apocalypse.
Cinematically, admittedly, you could do better.
This parking lot sits not far off a six-lane pseudo-highway named Peña Boulevard, surrounded by rental car lots, in a stretch of land that's only technically still Denver thanks to some creative map-making.
An old truism of people arriving in Denver by plane for the first time is confusion: isn't Denver a mountain town? Why are we in the middle of the prairie? Did we accidentally land in Kansas instead?
This is the result of the city of Denver deciding, back in the 1980s, to move the airport from Stapleton, an old field just a few miles from downtown, out to a newly incorporated slice of land twenty-five miles northeast - closer, in fact, to the neighboring city of Aurora than to Denver itself. The idea was that this would give the airport room to expand and let Denver become a bigger hub. In 1995 the move became official with the opening of Denver International Airport. It worked: DIA is now the third-busiest airport in the country, and one of the ten busiest in the world.
What came along with the move was a lot of rumor and speculation, too.
The story goes that you don't relocate a perfectly good airport from inside the proper city limits to the middle of nowhere unless you've got a nefarious, clandestine reason to sell to the powers that be (whomever you believe those are). From the beginning, secret fallout shelters for the wealthy and connected were floated as the real reason, with conspiracy theories pointing fingers at the Illuminati as the obvious organizers. There have also been accusations of ghosts, and claims that several of the murals in the terminal foretell the end of all things.
This is backed up by some truly odd choices that are still on display today.
The main terminal is a set of tents - one of the largest "tensile membrane structures" in the world - and the first thing to greet you on the drive in is a thirty-two-foot fiberglass horse, electric blue, reared up on its hind legs, red eyes glowing out at the highway like something summoned rather than sculpted, affectionately called Blucifer. It's said to have killed its own creator - a rumor that happens to be true: a section of the unfinished sculpture broke loose in the artist's studio and severed an artery in his leg. His sons finished the piece. It was installed anyway.
In this set of oddities there isn't, as far as I know, any established legend about zombies, which, standing among the endless rows of dark, parked cars, strikes me as strange.
Who is closer to a zombie already than the airport traveler?
We, as a group, often move seemingly mindlessly in a cloud of undercaffeinated tiredness - groggy from waking up too early or arriving too late, staring blankly into the middle distance as they scan the departure screens or shuffle one space forward in the boarding line.
This parking lot, therefore, feels to me like the perfect place for travelers to finally drop their mask of faux tranquility - to lock eyes on me and, without ever setting down their rolling luggage, begin walking determinedly in my direction, gravely muttering over and over, "brains."
But no undead, or living for that matter, are in the vicinity when I look up and see the headlights of a shuttle taking the left to enter our row in this vast maze of cars.
"Ahh, we're saved."
The shuttle comes silently to a halt, its doors open, and we board. Finding a seat at the back, we begin running through the beats of the next part of our travel in hushed voices, so as not to disturb the sepulchral silence previously established by the flight attendant staring blearily into the middle distance and the business traveler looking down at his phone, bluish glow illuminating a blank face, their presence, oddly, enforcing rather than dissolving the feeling that tonight we're alone in this world.
Turning to me she asks “Ok so when we get to Boston how are we getting to the pickup spot for the car?"
"We'll take the silver line to South Station and then take a different line to downtown. We'll have about an hour to kill so we'll go find coffee and walk around Faneuil Hall for a bit," I respond.
"Is there going to be anything open that early?”
"Yes, coffee shops are open early - we'll be fine."
"I don't want Dunkin's coffee," she closes.
"Sure," says I.
—
Part 2 arriving next week...