Keeping her head down, he stood watching her over the top of her computer before he spoke. Eww. Creepy.
“You seen Michelle?” he asked, checking his phone. You would think he would make eye contact considering how often he watches me from across the room. I’d put money he is using the camera app, it is about time for his daily work selfie.
“No, I think she called in sick. Some sort of flu, but knowing her, she’s probably too hungover from last night’s happy hour at The Hoof and Plow.”
Cory bent down, a little too close for comfort, but she tolerated it.
“Say, did you see this crazy video online? These fascist cops totally shoot some homeless guy who’s eating another guy,” he said, shoving his phone near Gwen’s face.
“Gross, Cory. Please, I don’t want to see that.” He gave her a dismissive shrug.
“I guess it was bath salts or something, but they could have just shot the guy in the leg,” he said, standing up. Gwen had read somewhere that bath salts, a common name for a designer recreational drug, could in fact make people do crazy things.
“Evan and Amy are gone today, too. Must be something going around. Say, you want to grab a drink or maybe some sushi after work? Love the necklace, by the way. Are those pearls real?” He gave her a white-toothed half smile.
Gwen knew this was coming. His real motive in asking about Michelle was so he could segue into a proposition for a date. This guy had a lot of nerve, and was relentless with his pursuit of her. She was pretty sure that if she switched jobs, he would have one at the same place within a week.
She gave him a look of contempt. “Thank you, Cory, but you know I have a boyfriend. And even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t date someone from the office. And yes, the pearls are real. They were a gift from Mark for my birthday,” Gwen said, turning back to her computer with a large sigh. Take a hint, buddy.
Cory held his hands up defensively. “Don’t shoot, all right. It was only a friendly invitation. No need to get all crazy acting like I asked you to marry me.”
So, now I’m the fool for thinking that the coworker, who has asked me out a handful of times, wasn’t asking me out on a date. She just wanted this conversation to end so she could go about her business, regardless if it meant worrying about Mark.
“I am declining on dinner,” she said in a curt tone.
Cory checked his nails, grooming his cuticles. “How is ‘Captain America,’ anyway?” he said with a haughty smile.
“He is fine,” she said, grinding her teeth. Her politeness stretched to the limit. Cory had been insistent that either Mark was a fabrication or some sort of bum, because Gwen had never brought him out to a work function due to his frequent deployment schedule. All she had told him was that he worked for the government, and that only seemed to make Cory’s imagination run even wilder.
“Gwen. You need a guy who’s around. Someone you can spend time with everyday. Somebody who chooses you over their work. Even if it’s not me, you could do better. I know how his kind operate, they are inherently cheaters.” He walked away not a moment too soon.
Gwen shook her head as he left. How can I get any work done with his constant harassment? His words made her think though. It wasn’t that Mark didn’t have his faults, but he was a good man. His loyalty was not in question. Cory did have a point, about him being gone all the time. It would be nice to have him around more. Gwen continued typing her report in disgust. Cory sickened her with his arrogance and his presumption that she had no choice in the matter of who she dated. It was as if Cory were waiting his turn in a long line of established suitors. To her it sounded like he suffered from symptoms plaguing beta males. They always hovered about when Mark wasn’t around, trying to force their way into her life. She didn’t want someone to trick her into liking them; she wanted somebody who was genuine, not a self-involved jerk.
Gwen had always been too nice. She didn’t want to discourage men from reaching out by ruining their lives through rejection, but she also wanted them to leave her alone when she wasn’t interested. Men never understood anything. If an attractive woman talked to some guy, he immediately thought he was going to get laid. Seriously, could there be a more adolescent line of thought?
After every sentence she typed, she felt herself being drawn back to the television screens. She couldn’t keep her eyes away from it. Her report would never be finished.
One news station had reported it as a terrorist attack, and demanded the President to make a statement. It seemed that any incident would be thrown in the President’s face. She knew Steele felt differently about him, but she liked the guy. The plight of regular American people seemed to be his focus. Having met him a few times through her work, she was partial toward him.
She scanned the office properly for the first time. How is this place supposed to function only half-staffed? Where is everybody? They can’t all be hung over from last night. Sirens blared as emergency vehicles drove past the building like the President himself going somewhere in a hurry.
The disturbing footage of a large truck ramming the embassy gates shocked her. People ran into the embassy compound. Oh my God. A tingling feeling rippled down her spine. This is going to get much, much worse.
A rival news station reported a ‘Breaking News’ story from New York. Some sort of protest was happening in Times Square and the police were skirmishing with protesters.
The footage was jumbled at first. The camera bounced up and quickly panned across the iconic giant advertisement boards and the scrolling stock tickers as it zeroed in on the protest. Looks more like a riot.
A shirtless man with blood running down his face grappled with a NYPD officer. Looks like some Occupiers getting out of hand again. The rioters mesmerized Gwen, but she snapped out of her news-induced trance as her boss called her into her office. She walked over to Kim’s office unable to remove her eyes from the talking heads.
Settling in a chair, she clasped her hands on her lap. Her supervisor, Kim Smith, was the Director of Relief Operations and gave Gwen a pleasant smile. Pictures of her and various people she had helped adorned every inch of her office.
“Gwen, how ‘bout you head home early tonight? We will be needing you to deploy to one of these crisis zones in the next few days.”
Gwen frowned. She had heard of a few issues, but was unsure as to the magnitude. “How many relief operations are we talking about?”
“Well,” Kim said, skimming through a stack of papers. “It looks like we’re having some big problems across Africa and the Middle East. Some sort of flu is overloading the limited medical infrastructure of almost the entire region.”
“Like Ebola?”
Kim shook her head, flipping through papers. “I don’t know. It says in here somewhere. All of our incoming information has been relatively vague, but they will need assistance. Scientists are projecting a high infection rate.”
“I just want to be prepared for anything.”
Kim smiled. “You are on top of things. We’re going to need good people on the ground to determine the severity of these situations, and what resources we need to help the afflicted. So get your affairs in order, because we’ll need you TDY, ASAP. Your division’s down a few folks due to illness, so you’ll be heading up the team to Guinea.”
Gwen beamed. Finally she could get her hands dirty in the field. “Thank you, Kim. I’ll prep my bags for deployment immediately.” They’ve been prepped for months. Gwen could hardly stop herself from wringing her hands together in glee. Not that she would wish a disaster upon anyone, but she desperately wanted to be on the front lines against human suffering.
“We’ll get ahold of you tomorrow with the flight details. Oh, and Gwen, keep up the good work out there. It is so nice to see someone with so much vigor and life still left in them.”
Gwen was beside herself with excitement. She practically sprinted out of the office. She bustled her way to the Foggy Bottom Metro station elated.
She trooped awkwardly down
a perpetually broken escalator to the lower level of the crowded Metro station. Might as well just call them metal stairs. Her heels clopped loudly on the steel-grated steps as she tiptoed gingerly down the escalator. A man brushed by her on her right-hand side hacking a lung onto her shoulder. She was appalled, but he was impervious to her look of disdain.
When she reached the bottom, the station was packed as if there were a Nationals home game that night. She called her dad first as she navigated her way toward the turnstiles.
“Yes, I am taking the metro. Yes, my car is fine.” Her father would never understand the merits of commuting via anything except a car. He would also never understand why she would want to live in a large city. She was beginning to question whether there may be a nugget of truth in his rantings somewhere.
The mass of people were a herd of cattle moving sluggishly toward the turnstiles. Her fellow patrons’ proximity to her made her claustrophobically hot. Trying her best to not sweat in her crisp newly dry cleaned suit, she stood on her toes to see what the hold-up was. Unable to see over the people around her, she gave up trying to figure out the reasons for her delay.
“Of course it’ll be safe, Dad,” she lied. It wouldn’t be a deployment if she wasn’t in at least some danger. Whether it was disease, famine, insurrection, or hostile governments, there was always something that made the deployments a challenge. Just the way she liked it, a little danger made her feel alive. Getting impatient, she fished inside her purse for her Metro pass so, at the very least, she would be ready to scan her way through.
The sound of yelling drew her interest away from her father’s play by play rendition of his day. The police had a couple of suspects handcuffed on the ground. They appeared homeless, garbed in soiled raggedy clothing. It wouldn’t be a day in the District without its fair share of homeless. She passed them keeping a safe distance.
Locating her Metro pass, she scanned her way onto the platform. She politely squeezed into a train car filled to maximum capacity with D.C. denizens, the pleasures of a perpetual rush hour. An older gentleman was nice enough to give her his seat as she dialed her sister Becky. Her parents divorced when she was six, and she had always cared for her younger sister.
“Hi Becky, how was school?”
“Meh, those little brats are running me into the ground, but its a job. I’m running by the daycare right now to get Haley.”
“I got a deployment,” Gwen said ecstatic.
“Wow, that’s great. How exciting to leave the city to go to a place without running water. When do you leave?”
“As soon as possible. Its some sort of disease outbreak in Africa. Isn’t that great?” she exclaimed.
“Huh, yeah. I am happy for you. I think you are crazy, but everybody has their thing.”
“Listen Becky. I didn’t badger you when you took up roller derby or decided to date Rory.” Becky audibly sighed on the other end.
“You finished? That reminds me. I almost forgot to tell you.” Every conversation with her sister eventually led to a discussion on the latest small town gossip.
“They found Old Man Waverly out wandering in the cornfields the other day. Deputies had to bring him in after he attacked them. They got him up in county lockup. They say he’s got something wrong with his brain making him crazy.”
Gwen would never let go of her love for small Midwest town life, but she had always been driven to make a global impact. As she grew older, who won the county fair became less and less a part of her identity. Daylight disappeared ahead announcing an upcoming tunnel.
“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s always been a little off. I’ll talk to you later. I’m about to lose service. Just wanted to share the good news. Give Haley a kiss for me and tell her she is one of my favorite people of all time,” Gwen said, hanging up.
The train rocketed forward at full throttle, zipping through the dark tunnels. After a few stops, darkness gave way to bright light. The Metro had crossed the D.C. city limits into Arlington, Virginia. Once the Orange Line train reached Virginia, it traveled above ground, more or less mirroring Interstate 66. Office buildings and apartments whipped by.
Casually she glanced at the traffic on Interstate 66, thanking God she wasn’t wasting her time stuck in that. It was one of the most traffic-ridden highways in the country and, per usual, it resembled a parking lot. On a good day, it could take more than an hour to travel fifteen miles.
The District of Columbia had recently overtaken Los Angeles as the city with the worst traffic in the country. It was surprising that a city of nine million people had less congestion than a city boasting a fraction of the population at just under a million, especially given that it was the nation’s capital, where updated and efficient infrastructure was expected. Expected and rarely seen.
The Metro train rolled to a stop. Bored by her lack of forward progress she watched the people on the highway. A swarthy man in expensive jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt exited his BMW and gestured wildly at another driver, who walked toward him. They became entangled and the fight dragged them both to the ground.
I will have to tell Mark I saw a fight on the highway. She tried to catch a picture of it on her phone, but the train lurched forward again before she could take the shot. Nothing really surprised her in this region. The people were so much more pretentious than in the Midwest, as though they thought being rude was a constitutional right.
Her phone rang and she tentatively picked up her mother’s call. Becky must have ratted me out. Keeping this a secret from her mother would have been ideal, until she was about to leave the country.
Her mother blazed on the other end, complaining about how Gwen never visited and that she never called. The train continued its single linear motion, causing people hanging on to the handrails to sway back and forth like palm trees. Thank God. The Metro train sailed past the Interstate 66 traffic.
She had been tuning out most of what her mom said.
“I can handle myself. I know the rest of the world isn’t like Iowa. You know this is why I live here in D.C., so I can help.”
The train ground to a halt with a screech of the brakes. Gwen slid forward in her seat, almost losing her phone in the process. Jesus, who is driving this thing?
Peering out the window, she looked for a source of stoppage. God damn it. They were stuck on the tracks somewhere between Dunn Loring and West Falls Church. So close, yet so far from Vienna.
“Mom, hold on. Let me call you back.”
“What is it honey? Is everything okay. I saw on the news.”
“Everything is fine. I’ll call you later.” That woman would never stop worrying.
The lights flickered and sputtered out as the power disappeared from the Metro car. It wasn’t a big deal, it happened all the time. At least, she thought it did. The power on the Metro line was sometimes shut off, and the cars would be turned off while they repaired the line. However, the city usually did Metro maintenance during the night rather than during the day for precisely this reason.
Thirty long minutes passed. The car sat dark and the air conditioning stayed off. Gwen was furious. Figures, I would get stuck on the metro the one time I get let out early.
Take seventy-five D.C. Metro goers, people impatient at the best of times, and lock them inside a Metro car toward the final days of summer with no air conditioning and prepare for congressional legislation.
Cell phones were out and the complaints were coming in. “I’m calling my lawyer. This is ridiculous,” said a businesswoman in the seat across from Gwen. Gwen agreed, but then again, relying on public transportation meant they were at the whims of the public system. Gwen took to social media leaving a status update. Out of work early. Stuck on Metro. #DCproblems.
“They can’t just keep us in here,” complained a man in a suit with an ID card dangling around his neck.
“No shit. I was supposed to pick my daughter from daycare fifteen minutes ago,” another man said, checking his watch.
No a
nnouncements were mumbled from the driver, adding more uncertainty to the metro riders’ dilemma. The decibels inside the train car grew louder and louder as people cursed the transport system, Congress and the President for their predicament. Gwen rested her chin on her hands, completely over the Metro, D.C. and its citizenry alike. She would welcome the deployment with no running water, limited culinary options and sick people, as long as it got her out of here.
A couple of men near the sliding doors started to search for a way to open them. These were people after her own heart. She could not sit there and wait for a Metro or government official to rescue her from the train car. It was time to take actions into her own hands. She got up and squeezed past the other commuters, making her way toward the exit. I am getting out of here, even if I have to walk.
The situation reminded her of the ‘Snowpocalypse’ of 2011. The traffic had deadlocked and stopped as over twenty-four inches blanketed the D.C. Metro region. People left their cars stranded on the highway, walking to side streets to be picked up by friends and family.
People exited the car in front of her and were jumping down onto the tracks. That’s exactly what I want to do. She wriggled her fingers into the sliding train doors and pried the doors apart from the middle.
“A little help?” she said to the two men that were hunting for a release lever.
The two men in business suits, probably former military by the looks of their closely cut hair, gripped the sliding doors on either side. She strained her arms and back. Damn, this door is heavy.
“Come on guys, put some back into it,” she grunted. The men laughed a bit and pushed it harder.
She strained again, and a pair of hands shot through the space, wrenching it open from the outside. With a roll, the train doors shifted apart. Eager hands cupped her armpits as she jumped down onto the tracks. She stared upward at a tall black police officer in full tactical gear. Sweat drenched his face, and he had the wide-eyed look of someone who was clearly under a tremendous amount of stress.
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