But knocking on the door – already taking a battering from the other side – didn’t do them much good. The cops exchanged looks and the bigger of the two turned the key jutting from the lock and pushed forwards.
The camera swam out of focus with the grand-daughter’s surprise at the hellion form of a skinny old woman leaping from the doorway and colliding at once with the bigger cop.
His partner staggered back down three or four steps as the old woman and the other patrolman grappled and then fell together down the stairs. The cop and Mrs Freeman tumbled end over end and the cop’s partner hurried down even more steps in case they piled on top of him too.
“Oh my God!” the girl shrieked loud enough for it to distort in the cheap microphone. “Granny! Granny! What are you doin’?”
“Please try to remain calm –”the younger cop said.
“Derek!”
It was his partner, now screaming at the top of his lungs as the old woman atop him somehow got free, hands outstretched at the second patrolman blocking her way.
The cop, Derek, drew his pistol without hesitation.
But he was too late.
Mrs Freeman smashed into him and they both went down, exactly the same as with the older patrolman above. The only difference was Officer Derek slammed into the floor at the bottom of the carpeted stairs and the impact knocked the frenzied Mrs Freeman free.
The phone camera twitched, moved, capturing a shot of the woman’s horrified husband standing in the hall watching – and then the deranged grandmother twisted about, saw her grand-daughter, and charged amid screams a guttural growls.
The phone knocked loose. By some miracle, it landed on its back in a close-up shot of a dumpy-looking teenage girl with thick pigtails shrieking as her grandmother sank teeth into her vulnerable throat. The crunching noise was as distinct as it was sickening. Worse were the red droplet landing on the camera lens and turning the whole thing into an indistinct, gory blur.
Mercifully, the blood almost fully obscured the carnage that followed.
But the girl’s screams went on and on.
“IT KEEPS PLAYING,” the dead girl’s grandfather said morosely. “Not much to see after that, but I found Teresa’s phone after they put my Emily in the ambulance.”
Anna was still shocked at the intensity of what they’d seen. She weighed the iPhone in her hand as if heavily.
“Do you … Don’t the police need this footage, Mr Freeman?”
“They just left the phone there,” he said.
Melina Martelle spoke softly to the shaken man.
“And your … wife, Mr Freeman?”
He drew a shaky breath, sniffling back more tears.
“The police, they managed to cuff her,” he said. “Not before one got bit, too . . . but not as bad as Teresa. Poor little girl, God… .”
“And they were taking her… ?”
“To the hospital,” Mr Freeman said. “St John’s.”
“OK,” Anna said and then held the phone up directly in front of him. “Are we OK to hold onto this footage for a little while please, sir? I think you need some help, and we have some questions of the authorities. Is there anyone we can call for you?”
“Teresa’s mother’s in no fit state,” Mr Freeman said. “I have a brother.”
Anna guided him to a chair and asked Irene Mengele to fetch Mr Freeman a coffee. One of the advertising reps emerged from their separate office to eyeball the scene and Melina Martelle motioned the Eurasian woman away.
Then she and Anna locked eyes, excitement, curiosity and fear trumping anything else still lying unsorted between them.
CHARLOTTE STAYED WITH Mr Freeman and Anna and Melina hit the bullpen in record time. Melina took the man’s phone and hurried to her desk to download the footage as Douglas “Don’t Call Me Doug” O’Dowd finished what seemed to be an angry phone call, then glanced to Anna with an annoyed, but thankfully still faraway look. Then he and Demien Christopher stood from their desks, alerted by the growing sense that something was definitely going down.
“Those police incidents haven’t let up,” Douglas said. “I just got a call from the woman who posed for that firefighter calendar last year. We did a story on it, and then after, when she quit and sued the City. Her family’s locked down in their apartment because someone in the building’s on some kind of rampage.
“What?”
Anna said it just because it was a lot to take in.
“I just got off the phone from the Fire Chief,” O’Dowd said, citing the cause of his annoyance. “I’ve known Gary for five years, and now he can’t get off the line from me fast enough.”
“Wait until you see what we’ve got here, Doug,” Melina said.
O’Dowd sniffed at the abbreviated epithet, too curious to say more as Melina waited for the contents of the iPhone to arrive in her online storage folder. She dug through a few folders to double click on the video, but of course, because it was Windows 10, they all then stood there for a full minute waiting for the operating system to catch up.
“What’s the … what’s the footage?” Demien asked.
“Old lady going crazy and biting some cops and then killing her teenage granddaughter,” Melina said.
O’Dowd took a sharp intake of breath, but Anna was impressed at Melina’s concise summary. She flicked her watery blue eyes O’Dowd’s way.
“It’s a pretty hardcore video,” she warned him. “Do I need to get Iskov in to grab some high-resolution stills? You know this’ll be front page.”
Melina only laughed at the idea they needed the technician for such basic chores. In tandem, O’Dowd’s expression faltered, then grew dark.
“You’re bumping my story from the front?”
“Hey, it’s not my call,” Anna said, and then thought about it quickly, snapping her fingers at Demien without it seeming like she was ordering him around – and then ordered him to go retrieve Lenore Barrett from her office.
“Yeah, I was wondering who died and left you in charge,” O’Dowd said to her. “I went to a lot of fucking effort on my own hours to get that fire shot. It’s good enough to beat anything you’ve got.”
Melina shook her head with obvious doubt.
“It’s old news now, Douglas,” Anna said.
The older reporter’s face inflamed at that.
“What, because you plastered my fire pics online and across Facebook?”
Anna would’ve answered, but no one had noticed Charlotte return to the bullpen. Now she interrupted, looking up from her own desk monitor.
“You might actually want to check some of the comments on our page.”
O’Dowd huffed at the suggestion, but like before, something about Charlotte’s slightly shell-shocked tone hinted at them ominously.
“Where’s Mr Freeman?” Anna asked.
“He’s with Irene.”
Melina drew their attention to the video, which now finally started playing, and O’Dowd was sucked in at once. Anna moved across to look over Charlotte’s shoulder and Lenore Barrett and Demien walked in just as the old lady burst out of the bedroom door with a hellish shriek.
“Jesus, what’s that?” Lenore barked.
“I’d say Page One,” Anna replied.
Then she dropped her eyes to Charlotte’s screen, the redhead waiting dutifully for her attention before starting a slow-motion scroll down through dozens and dozens of comments appended to O’Dowd’s article put online nearly three hours earlier.
Although plenty of the comments were vague or anecdotal, at least several readers left stark warnings about similar crimes underway and no explanation about why they were browsing Facebook instead of notifying authorities. Anna felt a slight twist in her guts, remembering how little she’d eaten so far today.
The Freeman video played out to its inevitable end.
Lenore Barrett clutched her face like some 50s movie starlet twenty years too late to her audition. Then Melina clicked to save and transfer the folder, and pu
lled her chair out and got down to work, as effective as any other sign language to tell the others to leave her alone for the moment.
“Congratulations,” Anna said to Douglas as he and Lenore drifted across.
O’Dowd gave her a sour look. “What is it?”
“Your article about the ambulance attack’s the highest-read piece the Gazette’s put online since the revamp – and by a … by quite a phenomenal margin.”
Warring emotions played across the silver-haired reporter’s face and everyone around him except for Melina Martelle stayed glued to the performance, curious as hell to know how it was going to turn out. Before Douglas was done digesting the unwanted honor, Serik Iskov walked casually into the newsroom.
“Have any of you guys been checking social media?”
SO-CALLED CITIZEN journalists were sprouting as fast as the patchwork tales of numerous other incidents of violence and mayhem breaking out across Springfield.
“What the hell is going on?” Anna asked aloud.
“I told you something was going on,” O’Dowd told her. “The City and the police, they’re trying to keep the lid on something.”
“Then I don’t think it’s working out for them.”
Iskov sniffed at Anna’s remark, seemingly reluctant to speak much more, yet sucked into the drama and confusion because of whatever he’d seen online.
“The local Twitter feed and community pages are busy,” he said with only a trace of his Kazakh accent. “I don’t see too much outside of that.”
“You can localize Twitter?”
Charlotte smiled at the technician, but Iskov actually made a slightly repulsed face, which was likewise fascinating to see reflected in the pretty girl’s astonished and hurt look. Anna was too busy pondering what Iskov had said to appreciate that rare backfire for the absurdly good-looking young reporter.
Anna threw her gaze to Demien Christopher looking gormless and useless at the back of the group.
“You have cable news and stuff over there, right?” and she gestured to his strangely acerbic desk area. “Would you skim those reports, see if anything comes up like this anywhere else?”
Lenore then nodded to Anna.
“I’m going to put in a call to our affiliates.”
“And ask them … what?”
Lenore went to answer the question and then realized there wasn’t any adequate answer she could supply.
“We don’t have a lot of details to go on, obviously,” the editor said. “Mass hysteria? Can you put in a call to the Department of Public Works and make sure there’s no problem with the City’s water supply? This could be … well, like I said, we don’t have a lot of details.”
Anna blanched at the thought of the tall glass of tap water she’d downed only an hour before. Lenore’s brown-eyed gaze swept the room and somehow even collected Melina’s attention thanks to the gravitas she conjured in the act.
“This could be something to do with the water supply,” Lenore said. “There could be other explanations –”
“Terror attack,” Melina said.
“Or a … disease,” Demien said as if reluctant to curse them with the idea, or somehow make it real in calling it thus.
The other reporters looked over at him ensconced amid his monitors, the BBC playing and Demien now with a single iPod bud in one ear.
“What’s the general news saying?” Lenore asked.
“There’s … nothing,” he said. “Local TVs are out on the streets. Police have shut down a daycare center, something about a hostage crisis. They’ve also closed streets around City Hall and Memorial. Historic sites are in lockdown.”
“We have to get out there,” Anna said.
Lenore looked at her and nodded, but contradicted her agreement instead.
THEY AGREED IT was far too soon to jump to any conclusions, but they also needed more details – and as Douglas O’Dowd reminded them, twice, they still had a 7pm deadline for the morning edition.
Lenore was clearly in her element, and Anna was glad to see her take her field commander role seriously as she divided tasks, ordering them to ignore the persistent ringing phones until they had their inquiries out, telling the reporters she’d still go email the affiliates regardless – “Ask ‘em if they’ve seen anything weird, you know, maybe explain a little about what’s going on here” – and also get cracking with tomorrow’s page allocations.
Too many of Anna’s past bosses had little to do with their papers except to claim the credit – plus the lion’s share of salaries – and good little soldiers like Anna got left the bulk of the work. She’d enjoyed it – relished it, even – when working in a team under Tom, but after he was poached to the bright lights of TV, few other teams, including the one she eventually led, matched those heady early days when she was still fresh out of college and learning everything for the first time.
With Lenore gone, Anna realized she’d let herself get sucked into the other journalists’ work and had responsibilities of her own to fulfil. The realization left her torn, and not for the first time doubting herself in the new role – not because of her capabilities, but that it kept her at an arm’s length from the news she loved.
Painfully aware she wasn’t doing anything to generate content herself – that hated word, and rightly so, but also paradoxically the best way to explain how those damned news holes had to be filled, one way or the other – Anna retreated to her desk and was surprised to find herself almost immediately shadowed by Melina.
“How do you want to handle this video?”
Anna considered the question and also that the other woman bothered asking it. Melina was within her rights – especially if she wanted to push it – to muscle in on the Giles Freeman story and run with it, which included putting the footage online.
“We’ll have to cut that ending,” Anna said.
“Yeah,” Melina agreed. “But not till that last second.”
“Absolutely.”
“What else?”
“We have to put some calls into the City,” Anna said.
Melina looked across at O’Dowd and clicked her fingers, making no pretense she was doing anything other than summoning their erstwhile senior team member.
O’Dowd somehow favored Melina with a curmudgeon’s grin, joining them in his own goddamned time, thanks very much, battered notebook in hand as always.
“We have to throw together for this,” Melina said.
“I’ve already got inquiries into three department chiefs,” Douglas said.
“You mean their media departments,” Anna muttered, then lifted her eyes up to him from where she sat. “Are you going over there, to Council chambers? Demien says there’s a police shutdown.”
The other two reporters looked at her a second, maybe wondering if Fleet Street coddled her to the fact journalists these days could barely spare the time for lunch, let alone actual site visits. Three years earlier, the Gazette had an editorial staff of eighteen, and that didn’t include the photogs and paid contributors.
“I actually have something else I’m headed out for,” O’Dowd said and offered a conspiratorial grin of good cheer. “That ambulance guy? We’re having coffee in fifteen.”
“Cool,” Anna said. “Take one of the LD1s?”
“She’s not gonna agree to be on camera,” O’Dowd snapped. “I’ve got my notepad. That’s all I need.”
“OK, cool,” Anna said and swallowed anything else she might’ve said.
Melina motioned towards the exit.
“I’m going to grab one of those new-fangled cameras and get Mr Freeman on record while he’s still here,” she said.
Anna nodded. The old man mightn’t be up to it, but he was an adult and had walked into the Gazette offices himself.
“OK,” she said. “Just let it roll, one take. Do you have any video editing in your background.”
“Isn’t that on my file too?”
She locked eyes with Anna a moment more, then relented.
&
nbsp; “I’ve got enough,” Melina said. “It won’t take me long to catch up.”
“Cool.”
WITH MELINA AND O’Dowd gone, and conscious of Lenore Barrett’s summons to a five-minute catch-up, Anna quickly fired up Newsgate for the first time in the day and rechecked her emails, answering a quick one from Iskov about installing the control desk in the studio. With Melina’s incoming footage in mind, Anna asked the Kazakh IT guy to fast-track prepping the studio for live broadcasts.
Newsgate loaded at last. The content-management system integrated the dummy for the print edition with individual packages Anna could assign straight to the website. The team of sub-editors had gone the way of the dodo. Lenore and
Douglas managed most of the design duties. Although it wasn’t exactly in his job description as a non-reporter, Iskov had his own Newsgate access, apparently sometimes jumping in on pages when the Gazette was running past deadline. The other reporters had their own, more limited CMS access, though everyone knew Melina had an unofficial workaround, and the editor turned a blind eye because the extra hands on deck were another unwritten job requirement since Casabian bailed out the company and so many still had to be let go.
Anna scanned the short list of scheduled packages on the website, again pausing to appreciate the unexpectedly high tally of page views on O’Dowd’s report on the ambulance crash and associated building fire. Practically mesmerized, Anna glanced aside to get Charlotte’s attention.
“These comments on Douglas’ piece,” she said to her. “Can you do a quick skim and extract anything that might be useful and maybe work it into a social media piece … the city reacts to the night of violence, that sort of thing?”
“Sure.”
“Cool,” Anna said.
Charlotte smiled prettily and returned to her own screen.
Anna watched her profile a moment, then added, “Now?”
“Right now?”
Anna laughed, feigning patience and amusement as she nodded.
“Yes, we need to keep the momentum on the website,” she said. “And it means you’ll have the next byline … unless you want to focus on that gallery piece?”
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