by alex lei
the earth movers scraped it off the pavement. they’d let it sit for almost two weeks, iced over and melted and iced over again and again. at first they pushed it to the sides of the roads, but those got too big and blocked all visibility for pedestrians or anyone making a turn. there were a number of broadsides at the busier intersections, but to the best of our knowledge, only one non-car was hit—a dog walker at the age of twenty-three, hounds scattered to alleys and apocryphally sighted on nextdoor. the city began a new midnight operation, blocking whole streets in the wee hours while dumptrucks collected the glacial piles and carried them off into the night like coal trains. all roads spilled just east of downtown at the abandoned old town mall; usually just an open-air drug market, but in october they turn it into a haunted house for the kids. the filthy ice and snow began to climb higher and higher in the old parking lot, burying streetlights and disused utility poles as truck after truck dropped another load from the bygone storm. the snow melted everywhere in baltimore but at the pile. people said it’d sometimes move; not melt, but move. a living landscape that should’ve been frozen. soon many heard sounds coming out of the pile—hammer clangs, buzzing saws, muffled voices. a citizen journalist went as far as to climb the pile, finding that it did not have a singular summit but a vast caldera at its center. from the rim, he proved in pixelated vision that, in the interior of the pile, there was an opening to a tunnel. bpd helicopters whirled overhead while riot police kept the reporters back. swat teams descended into the pile. the hole was wide enough for a full-grown male to crouch through. they sent in a small rc car first, but lost the signal after about eighty-foot. when they moved in the cavern widened enough for them to advance two-abreast. the corridor split, and the squad leader called in for backup but nothing came through on the radio. they were supposed to turn back if they lost contact, but broke in half as they split themselves between tunnels. the team on the left came under heavy fire, leaving two wounded and forced to retreat. they called out to the others at the intersection, but never heard anything in response. they had been swallowed whole by the pile; no rescue attempt was made. the mayor declared a state of emergency. national guard was brought in, running checkpoints and cordoning off everything within a hundred yards of the pile. police dogs couldn’t find anything, and survey teams were sent under armed escort to examine the sewer system beneath the pile. ground penetrating radar showed the mass to be solid. still, the sounds of machining continued to come out of the pile; one man even said he heard laughter before a muted dynamite blast (seismic scans were inconclusive). the city went from a once-in-a-generation winter to the hottest summer on record. somehow, the pile kept growing. boomers on facebook argued about if the pile should be used to cool off the homeless in a hundred-ten degree heat or be declared a historic monument. national guardsmen continued laying siege to the pile, although nothing changed besides the occasional snow drift while its peaks apparently became higher. they cleared out old town mall of any of its remaining inhabitants for good measure. the soldiers even started to take up residence in the abandoned structures, which caused a brief news cycle and failed lawsuit citing third amendment violations. despite twenty-four/seven surveillance, no one and no thing ever came in or out of the tunnel. regardless, it was the only way the city could find in and out of the pile’s bowels, so they devised a plan to seal it off. engineers proposed filling it with cement (too cumbersome to get up and over the pile’s walls, to easy to dig around), digging under it to collapse it beneath the city (too dangerous and complicated in re-routing underground infrastructure), and one crackpot even proposed a chernobyl-like “sarcophogus” to entomb the pile (too expensive). ultimately, the city decided on blasting the inside walls of the pile to create a man-made avalanche in the caldera, presumably cutting off oxygen flow to the inside of the pile’s tunnel network. the operation was called a "surprisingly simple success” by the baltimore sun, and a memorial was set up for the officers lost in the pile. at the commemoration ceremony, the governor declared it “pile day.” two weeks later, a news helicopter saw the hole had opened back up. outrage flooded social media, and the police commissioner resigned after multiple failed attempts to force snow back over the hole. the new commissioner, a hardliner, coordinated a scheme with hopkins researchers to flood the hole with a sarin-like nerve agent, although it was canned after the plan was leaked to the media and numerous human rights groups protested this “cruel and unusual” proposal. the commissioner denied the existence of such a plan. fall was barely on the horizon, the government was getting more desperate. through lobbying by both the state legislature and maryland’s congressional delegation, funding was secured to import more snow, mostly coming from what was left this late into the summer on new hampshire’s presidential range (despite the outcries from environmental groups). there were unconfirmed rumors abound that much of the snow was actually being imported from the laurentians in a backroom deal which was lining the pockets of parti québécois. the caldera was filled up, but they expanded the pile, consuming what was left of old town mall itself. this snow was cleaner, turning the pile’s signature brown-gray into a luminous white. in a move to address the pile’s pr problem, the city started shutting off the street lights around the pile during full moons, saying the “brilliant reflection off our city’s newest landmark was enough to keep the night bright.” this campaign was scrapped after the first full moon in september came on a clouded night, and the city feared the optics of potential muggings taking place in unlit streets under the pile’s gaze. halloween came around, but there was no haunted house at old town mall, just a mass of ice and dirt that teenagers would sneak onto in the middle of the night to smoke and drink on. some of them swore it was sinking in the center, and that voices still rose from beneath the pile’s frozen veneer. it was late fall, and snow was forecast early this year.
Alex Lei is a writer, filmmaker, and bartender in Baltimore. He is the nonfic editor at BRUISER.