“Slow down,” Anna said. “We’re here.”
“What’s with all the pedestrians?” Dwayne asked.
He eased on the brakes and the TV van glided towards the people spilling out onto the road. The crowd parted for them like they’d been waiting.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “Fire up that camera and let’s find out.”
BUDDY AND DWAYNE carted the bare essentials from the back of the van, the older of the two men hoisting the heavy camera onto his brawny shoulder, the comically thin Dwayne slipping on a tennis headband to pin his greasy hair in place as he tightened a leather harness and fitted the boom mic. Completely caught out by the chaos, Anna had the chilling realization she was their de facto “weather girl” now, and she quickly primped her hair and wished she’d not had it cut it so short before flying in for the job. She managed to get most of her fine blonde hair into the tightest indie rock ponytail imaginable, wisps at the front just enough to be annoying as she threw her satchel over her shoulder and tried to look reporterly. She was dressed well enough for the part. Whether it was the right outfit to be wearing for a rescue mission was a whole other question.
Shadowed by her two-man crew, Anna headed for the women and mostly older men gathered tightest blocking the steps to the building lobby.
“Hey, what’s going on?” she asked.
“There’s one of those things in there,” a woman shouted.
“And it’s one of your people,” others added.
“Are you from the news?” someone else asked.
“Why is this happening?”
“What’s happening?”
“Where are the police?”
“Why isn’t anybody coming?”
“What’s happened to 911?”
Anna demurred their questions with a slow motion kung fu move. She glanced once, pained, confirming she was on camera, then reoriented herself to the entrance.
“This way,” she told her two-man crew.
BUDDY SWITCHED OFF the camera, but kept it on his shoulder as they passed the remaining onlookers and entered the cool lobby while Anna moved across and called for the lift. She found the other two men staring back at her watchfully.
“How do you want to play this?” Buddy asked.
“I don’t really know.”
Dwayne removed a multi-tool from his belt and flicked out a pointed blade.
“I’m thinking we can leave the news till after, yeah?”
“Yeah,” his partner agreed. “I’m not much use to you if I’m carrying this thing.”
Buddy looked around the empty lobby, then stashed the expensive TV camera behind the vacant concierge desk. He wore a thick length of electrical cable across his chest like a bandolier, and once his hands were free, he removed the thing and started unspooling one end.
He looked up at Anna’s raised eyebrow.
“We’re going to try to … to catch him, right?”
Anna opened her mouth, but she had no reply, rapidly feeling terminally unprepared about whatever the hell she thought they were doing here. To cover that, she tried calling 911 one final time.
And 911 went through to the pre-recorded message.
“Jesus,” Anna said with a slow exhale.
Buddy Lang looked around the lobby dubiously.
“Does the black guy in Ghostbusters get killed at the end?”
“I don’t think so,” Anna said.
The lift chimed and the doors opened.
“Going up?” she asked.
Buddy and Dwayne nodded, and all three of them stepped into the car.
THE LIFT OPENED with another chime and now Anna felt the adrenalin really kicking in – along with a host of regrets. Her father taught them all how to shoot when she was a kid, but after he died, none of them kept it up, and as a firm Democrat, their mother was horrified at the thought of any of her children going armed. Anna’s non-identical twin sisters hadn’t bucked that mold, and Stefan’s Agency role never required a firearm – though he’d had the training. And stationed in Europe – Paris, before Berlin, after a brief stint in Istanbul – made getting a carry permit far too difficult, as well as not really necessary.
The hallway was empty except for a woman’s handbag that’d vomited up her secrets across the faded, piss-yellow carpet. The Gazette’s heavy glass doors remained shut, though unlocked. A shadow of some sort moved in the newspaper office foyer –
Anna, Buddy and Dwayne couldn’t see what, from their angle, but only the suggestion of movement as someone passed in and under the fluorescent lights.
Anna grabbed the barrel-shaped trashcan beside the elevator and shrugged at Buddy’s look wondering what the hell use it was going to be. The thin cylinder was better than clutching a pillow and hiding behind the sofa from the horror movie she wished she was watching. Instead, her life – along with everyone else’s – had taken a severe lurch to the left when it came to the ordinary way of things.
“I’ll get the door,” Dwayne whispered. “What’s this guy’s name? Fitz?”
“He’s big, too,” Anna whispered back. “Be careful.”
“You be careful,” the sound technician said. “You’re going in there too.”
“Listen,” Anna said to them quietly. “I’m not sure … I’m not sure if these things – these people – aren’t already dead.”
Buddy tsk-ed.
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
Dwayne joined his buddy Buddy in a look of skepticism.
“You’re saying this is like one of those old black-and-white zombie movies they had when we was kids?”
Anna only mutely shrugged her shoulders in reply, holding the trashcan against herself like a cheerleader holding her books.
“I don’t know,” she said. “In those old movies, the zombies didn’t move so fast, and they weren’t so … scary.”
Something fell over inside the office with a gentle crash beyond the outer wall.
Anna swallowed hard and Dwayne did as he’d said, moving along the frosted glass to unlatch the door with one hand, pocket knife in the other. Then he looked to Anna and Buddy, and with their nod, pulled the door open wide.
“I feel like I’m in ‘Nam or something,” Buddy said and stepped in front of Anna, leading the way in.
THE NOISE CAME from one of Irene Mengele’s decorative ceramic urns, the plant and its potting mix now exploded across the drab gray carpet.
Gus Fitzwilliams looked up at them as if caught in the act, but the blood around his mouth and now dried on his jowls and the front of his shirt showed there was much more wrong with this picture than another embarrassing mess.
Fitz’s mouth flew open and a leering dog’s growl came from his throat.
The manager lunged out from behind the horseshoe-shaped reception counter, but immediately fell over. His pants were bunched around his ankles and he didn’t seem to understand why, checking down at his swaddled feet and naked legs and then snapping around to glare at Buddy and then Anna, frozen in the doorway as Fitz growled again, and then started barreling towards them, only to stagger and fall once more onto the carpet five yards short of where they stood.
“Holy shit!”
Buddy Lang twitched at Anna’s curse as if shocked out of a reverie, staring as the Gazette’s general manager lunged once again. Now the intruders moved to safety, Buddy more wisely headed left, the other way around the counter, while Anna tried not to squeal as she foolishly hurried to the right, in along behind the Gazette’s front glass wall and only managing to corral herself into the corner as Fitz whipped, feral as he followed her movements, and then Dwayne stepped into the office also reeling at what his eyes told them.
Fitzwilliams’ trapped feet were all that saved Anna from immediate attack as she clutched the waste bin uselessly and hyperventilated, wondering what on earth she was thinking to plunge herself into such madness. Fitz scuttled on his hands across the carpet towards her with surprising. His ample belly fla
shed beneath his unbuttoned and blood-soaked shirt as he pursued her.
“Move!” Dwayne yelled.
Anna did shriek now, hating herself for it, even as she continued around the wall, forced to hop onto and then over several padded chairs. Pants around his ankles reducing Fitzwilliams to some kind of rabid man-snake, snapped his jaws as he gave chase.
Buddy threw the looped electrical cable neatly around Fitz’s head and one of his arms, and the now savage-looking general manager twisted back around with a ferocity far beyond mere angry surprise. He snarled, like the child at the intersection, blood-flecked saliva battering his cheeks as a pink foam, for all the world like a dog with rabies.
And then his left shoe came off and his leg slipped clear.
Fitz snarled once more, stood in the same heartbeat, and grabbed the electrical cord hard enough that Buddy came off balance and tilted towards the demonically-possessed man. Anna leapt then from the last of settees, deliberately right into the cameraman, pushing him and herself to safety. Fitzwilliams’ red-rimmed eyes turned on Dwayne standing beyond them.
“Ho-ly shit,” the sound tech said.
Fitz was after him in an instant, and it might’ve been hilarious if it also wasn’t completely terrifying. Fitz’s pants leg flapped behind him and his bare genitals slapped in time with his lurching belly as he hissed and chased Dwayne around the horseshoe counter with hands reaching out for the merest grasp of far skinnier man.
Despite his bulk, Fitz moved with frightening speed, and Dwayne circled around to Anna and Buddy before they’d even halfway risen from their unintended clinch.
It was hard not to think of the general manager as dead already. He came at them like an utter madman, his chest and face mottled with arterial damage beyond what any normal person could survive. Worse were his eyes, the pupils shrunken into savage pinpricks, the skin of his face puffy and swollen, discolored and unwell.
The electrical lasso was still around his head and arm, and Buddy moved in a crouch, out from under the path of Fitzwilliam’s attack such that the cable he still held wound around the madman again. Buddy trusted Anna to get to safety – though maybe not the awkward backwards bum-shuffle she managed until she could roll beyond the end of the reception counter once again – and the cameraman pulled hard on the improvised lasso with all his strength.
The cord caught on the far side of the counter Fit circumnavigated, then broke loose and went slack again, and Fitz turned on Buddy with clear sadistic delight.
DWAYNE STABBED THE multi-tool into the back of Fitzwilliams’ neck just as he reached for Buddy Lang. Fitz clearly felt the wound, whipping back around to clutch at Dwayne to defend himself against further attacks, thus letting Buddy throw a big arm around his neck from behind.
The cameraman pinned Fitzwilliams with bearish strength and Dwayne immediately shivved the living bejesus out of Fitz’s throat with such ferocity that his attacks missed their mark twice and carved out Buddy’s forearm instead. The cameraman barely made a sound, locked into a life-and-death wrestling match with a foe ultimately far more powerful than him.
Fitzwilliams broke free and ploughed straight into Dwayne, who dropped flat so that his attacker continued on, smashing face-first into the edge of the reception counter.
The noise of breaking face bones filled the foyer with a sickening noise that quickly became wet rather than sharp. Anna was on her feet again by then, in time to witness firsthand as Gus Fitzwilliams once again lurched around, unperturbed at all by his nose and cheek bones pushed deep into his split-open face.
Blood oozed around his eyeballs and leaked out like tears, but it was the same frenzied madman’s look he lit on them as his hands flew wide, like talons, like some monstrous eagle as Dwayne stood up behind him and stabbed once again.
“Get down!”
Buddy probably played high school football, but those skills had long since deserted him, and he smashed into Fitzwilliams with the grace of a poleaxed steer. It was enough to force him and Fitz clattering across the counter and down onto one of the swivel chairs, which promptly shot sideways under the attack sending both men –to call Fitz that – onto the hard office carpet.
Anna grabbed the cable unspooled across the floor as Dwayne dropped his knee onto the side of Fitzwilliams’ blood-soaked neck, pinning him to the ground for the moment while Anna hauled in the slack on the rope and the second loop pinned the Fitz’s arm to his body.
“Stand back!”
Serik Iskov appeared from nowhere with a samurai sword he plunged double-handed into the side of Fitz’s head.
There was an awful cracking noise followed by a fetid wheezing, and the general manager went still at once, and forever.
The only sound in the office was the heavy breathing of those left alive, but that wasn’t for long.
A god-awful hammering sounded deeper in the newspaper office, past the newsroom, and far up the other end of the corridor where Anna, Serik, Buddy and Dwayne crouched.
“What now?” Anna gasped.
“That’s Ms Barrett,” Iskov said with no apparent feeling. “She’s trapped in Fitz’s office – and she’s like him, too.”
ISKOV WITHDREW THE word and looked around for something to wipe it with.
“Where the hell did you get that katana from?”
Anna took a final look at Fitz, dead and grisly right in front of her, then rose shakily to her feet. Buddy Lang clutched her shoulder – for his benefit or hers, she couldn’t tell – while Dwayne discreetly wiped his multi-tool on a clean part of Fitz’s shirt.
“Ms Barrett’s like him too,” Iskov said. “We think he killed her. Demien says she got infected.”
Anna gestured violently at Fitz’s corpse, unable to explain why she was so angry at the dead man.
“It looks like he died having sex,” she snarled.
“What a way to go,” Buddy said.
“Tell that to Lenore Barrett,” Anna said.
Neither newcomer knew who she was referring to, so Anna’s eyes found Iskov’s for some kind of shared compassion, which was clearly a mistake. Iskov merely shrugged as he retracted the bloody sword blade through a clutch of his own bunched-up t-shirt to clean it.
“Where are the others?” Anna asked.
“I’ve been texting them out back.”
“You were in the control room the whole time?”
“Yeah,” Iskov said. “I came out when I heard you.”
“What are we running right now?”
Iskov didn’t say anything a moment, focused instead with something like an expression of bemused curiosity as he looked at Buddy and Wayne.
“You want to know if we’re still transmitting?” Iskov asked.
“Have you heard from Melina?”
“Nope,” Serik said. “But I’ve been on the phone with the others.”
“Where are they again?” Anna asked. “There’s a safe room?”
“Through here.”
Iskov motioned the direction, and then played tour guide as they headed up the hall. Buddy and Dwayne introduced themselves, but the technician looked unconcerned.
Past the open newsroom, the doorway to the Oval Office, then the live studio suite and its restrooms on the opposite side, the door to Gus Fitzwilliams’ office shuddered harder as they approached. Anna and the newcomers moved to the farthest side of the hall as they inched and hurried past, though Iskov merely appraised the shut door and nodded as he walked ahead to where blank sheets of fake, wood-colored wall framed a dead end.
“Why couldn’t they put a water cooler here?” Anna asked.
Iskov sighed, Anna registering a soon-to-be-explained reluctance on Serik’s behalf as he turned to the right-hand wall and pressed on it. With a gentle click, the whole wall moved aside on concealed wheels to reveal a deep, narrow room, with the remaining Gazette staff huddled within.
It was Anna’s turn for some startled, cussword-riddled wonderment.
Demien came out of the safe room at once, te
rrified and also obviously ashamed at his piss-stained corduroy slacks. Alex Ngo, the freckled Eurasian advertising rep, stepped cautiously out from behind Demien, while Charlotte Francis sat at the far reaches of the secret chamber on what looked like the edge of a camp bed.
“What the hell is this?” Anna asked. “A safe room or a bachelor pad?”
“I always figured Fitzwilliams played a lot of D&D, as a kid,” Iskov said.
“No,” Alexandra said and then looked nervous for speaking up. “Gus insisted we build this, in case we had to protect the journalists.”
“After Annapolis,” Demien Christopher said.
The idea that, for all his failings, Gus Fitzwilliams had a safe room built in case a disturbed gunmen ever tried to attack his staff only made the sad fact of his very recent murder even more tragic and awful. Tears started running down Anna’s cheeks without permission, and she told herself it was an understandable stress response. She brushed off Buddy’s concern, moving deeper into the strange, secret room, which more and more resembled someone’s bedchamber as she’d thought – bedroom mixed with prison cell, maybe – as she reached Charlotte looking pale and distraught on the bed. The back of the long room also held a desk, an office chair, several filing cabinets, and the walls were covered with posters for bands, movies, and classical art.
Charlotte clutched a blood-soaked towel against her right forearm and looked up at Anna with a trembling lip, any sort of rivalry between them dispelled. For her part, Anna refused to ask anything as stupid as if Charlotte was OK, because she quite clearly wasn’t.
“Fitz attacked you?”
“I knocked on the door,” Charlotte said. “There was a noise, and I thought he said ‘come in’ … but he didn’t say come in.”
Fresh tears started, but Anna was far more concerned by the amount of blood on the towel which had also spattered the edge of the unmade bed. A few items of clothing and some dirty underwear – Iskov’s brand of underwear, as Anna now knew – was pushed up against the wall on the bare concrete floor.
Frontline Page 14