Frontline

by Warren Hately

  “But that’s not exactly true, though,” Anna said and offered a slight smile.

  “We have learnt the first of these incidences of attack started as far back as what is now nearly sixty hours ago, perhaps even Friday evening.

  “Now, we are getting reports from our affiliates that this crisis, this Emergency, has extended across six States.

  “Earlier today, at a City press conference you can access direct from our website – that’s www.springfieldgazette.com – we were told the FBI is investigating this unprecedented spate of attacks and criminal damage as a potential terror threat.

  Yet no explanation has been offered as to how any contamination of the water supply could possibly be co-ordinated to affect Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

  “So therefore, we have to ask, ‘What is the nature of these attacks?’” Anna said. “And the truth is, we still don’t know.”

  Iskov’s voice in her ear-piece told Anna he was playing the muted Freeman video, and so she let her face relax – but only slightly. She expected technical faults, just like she’d said, but Anna wasn’t going to make things any worse by letting herself relax on the job, the stress of it all be damned.

  She glanced to her tablet and then at the monitor on a trolley letting her watch the live feed transmission too. Now that she didn’t have to watch herself impersonate a TV journalist, it was a lot easier to look. Iskov had rigged an animated crawl across the bottom of the screen with the Gazette’s web address on it. They’d be able to use it for rolling headlines, too.

  Anna continued her narration.

  “Footage obtained by the Springfield Gazette earlier today shows firsthand the evidence of the unusual, violent, dangerous behavior now running like a fever across those six States I just listed,” Anna said.

  She blinked at the ramification of her own words, and felt a terrible fluster – a mixture of surprise and self-directed anger, fear and stage fright, and also a somehow deep well of unresolved shame as she swiftly cursed herself for daring to think she could narrate this apocalypse without having any real insight into what was going on.

  Language masked and also revealed the numerous traps and pitfalls of describing the symptoms, rather than the causes, and in the process risking making matters worse.

  Anna forced a hard swallow, telling herself the ghoulish images playing out on the Freeman video were sufficient cover for her to pretend like she was a measured, unhurried reporter, rather than one trying to choke out her own panic attack through force of will alone. It was a steep learning curve. Next time, she’d have a glass of water on hand as well.

  “I have to be honest with you, as you watch these images,” Anna said in a soft, almost reverent voice. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here either. These shocking images confirm inexplicable behavior we are hearing coming from our loved ones, our neighbors, the people we share our homes with, our work lives, and our hearts.”

  The grandmother’s frenzied attack on the teenage girl hit its peak, and Iskov switched the feed back to Anna as they’d agreed. She summoned her most authentic look, directing sincerity to the LD1 and its lime-green light blinking back at her to confirm she was live on air.

  “The FBI investigation has yet to provide an answer,” she said. “We have no further word from City Hall about deployment of the National Guard. CDC and other health-related Government agencies were mobilized earlier today, with no announcements forthcoming. Social media reports scores of cases in Springfield alone.”

  There were too many challenges in showing webpages on their feed, so the studio camera only showed Anna consulting her tablet with her fine blonde eyebrows gravely set. She pulled up the local Reddit thread, now with more than a thousand comments, and started to read through the highlights of the madness reported across the city.

  THE RIDE TO Anna’s apartment was surreal, and mostly because of how normal things seemed. There was a constant sound of sirens, many of them off in the distance, but the street life of late workers going to or from their buildings, or headed out shopping or for something to eat, seemed blissfully unaware about the more than eighty active crime scenes across Springfield and surrounds.

  That knowledge was no boon for Anna, who sat slumped in the shotgun seat of Melina Martelle’s old Citroen as the younger reporter changed gears like a rally driver on their way hurtling towards Anna’s flat.

  “Do you always drive this fast?”

  Melina snickered, and shot a quick look at her.

  “You’ve heard of ‘defensive driving,’ right?”

  Melina refastened her double-handed grip on the wheel.

  “I prefer ‘offensive’ driving.”

  Late night traffic was light, at least headed Anna’s way, though they passed two big cordoned-off scenes where police and emergency vehicles bespackled the night with flashing lights and sirens. The second scene involved honest-to-God riot police, twenty officers closing in on a late-night market and a gang of youths taking advantage of the chaos trying to make off with its liquor supply. Melina slowed so Anna could catch the footage with Melina’s LD1 from the City Hall run. Now Anna felt anything but the impassioned veteran journalist with her teeth firmly stuck into the story of her career. Deep existential dread churned through her bowels instead.

  “I’m thinking about my family,” Anna said.

  She switched off the camera and set it in her lap as Melina gave one final glance at the blockade and started working up the gears again as they drove away.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  They reached Anna’s place in pensive silence echoed by their surroundings.

  Her threadbare new apartment was in the fourth level of a five-floor tenement surrounded by similar buildings and little else. The delicatessen at the corner was shuttered for the night, as always, with nothing but parked cars in the street.

  Anna handed the LD1 to Melina as she got out.

  “See you tomorrow?”

  Melina accepted the camera with a wry grin and nodded, settling back as Anna pushed off from the open door and turned to swing it shut.

  “Not if I see you first,” Melina said.

  Anna gave the necessary smile, shut the door, and watched Melina maneuver the Citroen away. Then another peal of sirens sprang to life nearby and Anna quickly turned and hurried her way home.

  THERE WAS NOTHING wrong with Anna’s appetite. Despite eating her own bodyweight in pasta before, her first order of business involved irradiating leftover Chow Mein – about the only thing in her apartment’s tiny refrigerator apart from a bottle of complimentary rosé. As the fresh meal heated, Anna slipped out of her shoes, set her phone to recharge, and fired up her home laptop as the only other source of light apart from two minutes on the microwave before she was ready to eat.

  Despite her palpable sense of exhaustion, there were few other indicators Anna was ready to sleep. She forked up the Chinese food while loading up her personal channels, and her arrival online must’ve cued someone’s attention because the phone charging in the small kitchen lit up with a call. Anna hurried over, her brother Stefan on the other end as she pressed the phone between her cheek and shoulder and returned to the sofa, the open laptop on a coffee table that came with precious little other furniture in the “fully furnished” apartment.

  “I was calling to see if you were OK,” her brother said.

  “Stefan,” she said and a genuine smile arose in her. “How’s Berlin?”

  “Berlin?” He laughed. “I was just watching you on TV – or on the internet, anyway. You were amazing, sis. Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Anna said. “It’s quiet here – or … sorta quiet. You were watching me? How did you find the Gazette’s live feed? Sorry, professional curiosity.”

  “Mom tagged me,” Stefan said.

  The statement was a bum note in the closeness between them.

  “I had no idea,” Stefan said as some sort of recovery.

  “Hmm,” A
nna replied. “How is she? OK?”

  “Well, yeah, but… .”

  Her brother’s voice grew even more concerned.

  “I listened to your broadcast, all the way through,” he said. “Mom’s worried.

  I’m worried. Why not call her? I’m going to put in a few calls for you.”

  Anna’s jaw tightened, focusing on the last thing he said.

  “You’re going to use … company resources?” Anna asked and baulked, always nonplussed at how normal her brother painted his work for the CIA. “Jeez, bro, should we even be discussing this on the phone?”

  “You’ve watched too many movies,” Stefan replied. “I’m concerned.”

  “‘Concerned’,” Anna chortled. “It’s OK. This is … well, like I said, you saw the live stream –”

  “That’s what we’re calling it these days, is it?”

  “Well, it’s technically not a ‘broadcast’ as you called it.”

  “OK, I’ve been schooled –”

  “Not for the first time.”

  “Certainly not for the first time,” her brother agreed and chuckled too. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” Anna said, and at least, in that moment, believed it. “What about you and that cute kid?”

  “And Amanda.”

  “Yeah, of course, Amanda too.”

  Anna had to restrain her sigh as Stefan paused, in case he was gonna make a big deal about the latest spat with her sister-in-law. The bad blood had congealed, as far as Anna cared, and mostly because she didn’t. It was her brother who had to live with her. Stefan merely thought Anna over-protective. The same as with Tom Vanicek, Anna could see misery on the horizon for the so-called happy couple and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

  “Things are good here, in Berlin,” Stefan said instead. “When are you going to come and see us und sprechen Sie deutsch?”

  Anna chuckled with renewed good humor and they switched to German.

  “You know I’ll come as soon as I’m able,” Anna said to him. “It’s really not a me-and-Amanda thing, Stef. I’ve just moved for work. First day on the job.”

  “I know.”

  “And I didn’t make any friends taking a personal appointment on the first day already,” Anna said. “It might be a month or two before I can book a whole week away.”

  Anna caught herself stuck on the thought of what her life might even look like in a month – of whether the Emergency would abate. Her brother instead adopted the somewhat queenly voice he sometimes put on when piqued by any suggestion his sister might have a personal life.

  “Personal appointment, eh?” he said. “And on the first day. Sounds serious.”

  Anna groaned, also in German.

  “It was … Tom Vanicek happened to be in town.”

  Stefan groaned, and then switched language again.

  “Ah, the Czech,” he said dourly in their father’s tongue.

  “Please don’t start,” Anna said to him in kind.

  “I’m not able to,” Stefan replied. “It’s 6am here. Time to get on the autobahn.”

  “That little village of yours looked really cute,” Anna said in English. “It’s really just thirty minutes outside Berlin? I’m definitely coming to see you and Jessica and Amanda soon, OK?”

  “Yeah, cool,” Stefan said.

  Stefan said his farewells, renewing his pledge to make inquiries in his role as a middle-grade CIA analyst. Then he signed off.

  And left Anna with thoughts of Tom. Phone still in her hand, she scrolled through her contacts and tried to call him again.

  TOM ANSWERED JUST as Anna anticipated voicemail, so his distracted voice somehow took her by surprise.

  “Hi Anna, it’s Tom,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  “Do you have a couple of minutes?”

  “Yeah, I’m hands-free,” he said. “I heard the news when I landed. Local media’s going nuts, speculating.”

  “We heard this has spread to Tennessee,” Anna said. “I was just checking in, making sure you made it home alright.”

  “Kind of you,” Tom said and quickly moved on. “Home’s still an hour away. I called ahead to my kids, woke them up.”

  “You have someone … staying with you?” Anna asked. “At your dad’s place.”

  “Pretty much my place these days,” Tom said. “But no, they’re in Knoxville . . . I have to pick them up.”

  “Oh, they’re with their mom?”

  “No,” Tom said. “They don’t see her much. I … I hired someone, a woman I know pretty well.” He added, “An older lady.”

  “Mrs Doubtfire.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Yeah, right,” Anna said and laughed and screwed her nose up at herself and how fucking stupidly awkward she felt. She’d forgotten Mrs Doubtfire was secretly a dude. And a divorced father. “You’re OK, though? I just… .”

  “I should be asking you,” Tom said. “Sounds like you’re in the thick of it.”

  Tom knew better than to ask her questions about things no one had reported –

  like the origin of the Emergency – because if the press had those answers, they’d be known far and wide. Instead, he asked, “You’re somewhere safe now?”

  “At home,” Anna said. “What passes for home, anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to be having regrets, with a story like this unfolding around you,” Tom said.

  “No, but I’m … spooked.”

  She remembered Lenore Barrett’s mockery earlier that night and felt a slight flush come over her. She distracted herself returning focus to the muted laptop, now the apartment’s only source of light, and a live feed from CNN. Graphics mapped out seven States in red, with Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama shaded in a belt of toxic-looking green. Two talking heads in boxes conversed with the newsreader who’d had his make-up department apply his appropriately concerned face.

  “Yeah, it’s … worrying,” Tom said at last. “What are you going to do?”

  “Do?”

  “If things don’t get better,” he said. “If things get worse.”

  “And what, Tom?”

  Anna actually laughed, in a moment she’d replay often, in hindsight.

  “Are you asking what if this is the start of some kind of biblical world-ending collapse?”

  “Anna,” Tom said. “Europe’s only just waking up to what’s happening here.

  How’s it getting spread? It must be a pandemic.”

  “An epidemic, not a pandemic” she corrected him, and her throat tightened to do it because of the grim danger it acknowledged. “Because if it’s an epidemic, it started here.”

  “Yeah.”

  They went silent for almost a minute, during which Anna eventually moved from the fear of the moment and on into all the wistful things she wished she might say.

  “Keep in touch, Anna,” Tom said. “And be safe, OK?”

  Anna felt gutted knowing the moment was gone, though her sadness manifested in a monstrous yawn making her wonder if it wasn’t for the best after all.

  “Anna?”

  “Yeah, Tom, it’s late,” she said.

  “OK,” he said to end it. “Would you give me another call? I’d like to know….”

  Anna brightened – and then Tom closed the call with a Hannibal Lecter quote rather than any more personal sentiment.

  “The world’s more interesting with you in it.”

  ANNA STARED AT her phone with a dejected funk, releasing a long and shaky exhale as she felt the day’s tension drain from her.

  Abruptly, a crashing noise in the street outside set her heart pounding once again, and Anna stood as the sound became a growling snarl of metal against metal and the screeching of tires. A trendy sports SUV reversed in and out of a narrow park with no regard for the other vehicles, half-demolishing its own headlights before squealing away down the street like a beast released to its freedom.

  A woman’s shouts emerged in the wake of the departe
d car. Anna opened the sliding window a crack better to hear.

  “Gavin?” the woman called woefully. “Gavin?”

  A door slammed loudly in the corridor just outside Anna’s unit, which set her heart racing further still. Phone still in hand, Anna eased her window shut again, drawing the curtains and then standing immobile and uncertain in the living room.

  She couldn’t tell if it was her superstition or paranoia at work. Eventually, her laptop beckoned. The hall outside stayed quiet. Anna tiptoed back through the apartment to check the peephole, but there was nothing except empty corridor.

  She headed for the bedroom, but if she slept, it was no more than twenty minutes. Her phone buzzed to life on the pillow across from her, its milky light showing an international number not in her contacts.

  Anna sat up in bed and brushed loose blonde wisps from her face as she coughed to clear her voice and thumbed the call.

  “Anna Novak.”

  THE CHEERY ENGLISH voice on the other end of the line said his name twice before Anna remembered Mark Twining.

  “We’re friends on LinkedIn,” the British reporter said. “I didn’t know you’d flown the coop on Fleet Street. I’m with the BBC now.”

  “The BBC?”

  “And, look,” Twining went on. “Someone showed us the piece you did on that website of yours, there in … Springfield, is it?”

  “The one in Illinois,” Anna said dully.

  She scooted to the edge of the bed and got up, coughing again to clear her throat. She’d stripped to her briefs trusting to the warmth of her comforter, a long-trusted buddy on her travels everywhere, but it felt odd talking to Mark Twining topless, remembering him, like most of the Fleet Street crew, as a bit of a sleaze.

  “Listen, Anna, this story is huge,” Twining said. “Are you ready to become famous? I’m looking for someone local we can get on air.”

  Anna scowled at the lame sweetener, knowing, again, how the Fleet Street types lured contacts just like child molesters did with their own kind of candy. As Anna knew from the UK, that kind of thinking was endemic in all of the big news companies that couldn’t afford not to burn their sources for the sake of squeezing every second of lurid controversy from the world’s passing news feast.