“Was Irene out there?” Charlotte asked.
“No,” Anna said reluctantly and watched Charlotte’s face collapse. “I’m sorry.”
Demien bulled in on their moment, his bearded face haggard with a mix of panic and rage.
“I told her, we need to amputate, and quickly,” he said.
Charlotte started to cry more forcefully, and Anna smothered her urge to rebuke Demien, glancing instead back to Charlotte’s wound and the now-unchecked blood loss as she eased the pressure off to show Anna the strips of her pale freckled arm meat now ragged and dark with clots.
“Oh my God,” Anna said and worried she might barf.
“He – he pulled it with his teeth,” Charlotte sobbed.
Anna now shared a look of nearly equal alarm with Demien, but the science reporter didn’t register it, locked into his own shock and terror. Anna glanced past him and caught Buddy’s somber look, while Dwayne, Alexandra, and Iskov watched on as the cameraman joined Anna examining Charlotte’s terrible injury.
“If she’s been bitten, she’s been infected,” Demien said over them.
“Hold on,” Anna said. “We don’t know that.”
“We don’t have time,” Demien said. “It might already be too late … before she turns into one of them.”
He cast a meaningful thumb towards the doorway back where Lenore Barrett’s clamor continued. Anna gently took the hand of Charlotte’s savaged arm.
“Has anyone looked at this?”
“Oh, we’ve all looked at it,” Alexandra Ngo said.
“You know what I mean –”
“There’s no time for this!” Demien yelled.
“Anna,” Buddy said. “It does look pretty bad.”
“It needs a decent fucking tourniquet, to start with,” she snapped.
Buddy soothed Anna’s alarm by unbuckling his belt and moving into to help.
Renewed crashing noises sounded from the hall and Iskov moved his Japanese sword around, clearly liking how it made him look.
“You live here?” Anna barked at him.
“I was between places,” he said and shrugged, eyes warding the hallway. “Fitz said it was OK.”
“That’s Lenore in there? In his office?”
Anna asked the question even though it was redundant. She was a reporter, after all. She wanted definitive confirmation, and she got it. Everyone who knew the news editor nodded back at her dumbly.
“Jesus,” Anna sighed. “Lenore said Gus had a bad heart.”
“You think he died boning her?”
Dwayne didn’t seem too concerned about talking ill of the dead – or one of their co-workers, for that matter. The others only voiced their assent.
“I guess that’s what it looked like,” Anna agreed. “He died – coitus interruptus – and Lenore’s in there trying to help him, and he. …”
“Yeah… ?” Alexandra asked.
“That’s where the picture gets a little hazy for me too,” Buddy said.
“And then he turned into one of them!” Demien said too loudly again. “Those things! It’s just like the Freeman video … and now, all the other videos.”
He looked ready to start crying as well.
“That’s why there’s no time,” Demien said. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
The science reporter then looked meaningfully back at Charlotte, who despite her abject weeping, slowly nodded her agreement.
THEY WANTED TO use Iskov’s katana, but he had to explain that he’d ordered the sword online and it probably wasn’t as sharp as the ancestral blades shown in Japanese samurai films. For whatever reason, Buddy had a machete in the TV van – and why he hadn’t thought to bring it with him in the first place was a question for another time – and they relocated from Serik’s bedroom to the reception area where they covered Fitzwilliams with an old painter’s ground cover and set up Charlotte on a bare patch of carpet with a cushion under her head.
“This is gonna hurt,” Buddy said.
The others refrained from rolling their eyes at the remark. Anna craned her neck around as Alexandra Ngo sat herself back at the reception counter and rearranged the phones, which continued blinking sporadically though they’d long since killed the ringtone for sanity’s sake.
“Where’s O’Dowd?”
“I can call him?” Alexandra offered.
Anna dusted herself off and moved to join the Eurasian woman who looked stylish in her own understated way, dressed head-to-toe in pinstriped black and gray as if ready for a turn on the catwalk.
“You’ve been working the front counter all day today?”
“Yeah,” Ngo said. “Not getting a lot of sales inquiries.”
“But you didn’t take off as well?”
“And go home?” the woman asked. “No, I … I just wanted to help out, you know?”
“Well, it’s appreciated.”
Alex nodded, narrow eyes flicking to where the men arranged and rearranged themselves around Charlotte, clearly hesitating.
“I respect what you guys are doing, you know,” Alexandra said and looked more sheepish than a hard-nosed corporate professional should. “I never set out to wind up selling advertising, you know?”
Anna couldn’t conjure much more to say because of the distraction behind her and the incessant desire for ten minutes alone in the bathroom. Distracting herself by checking the dozen unfamiliar missed calls on her phone didn’t help either. Anna straightened and eyed Buddy circling Charlotte with the machete in his hand.
“Are we seriously doing this?” Anna asked.
“Yeah, man,” Buddy said with equal trepidation. “I’m actually not sure I can.”
“I’ll do it.”
Iskov took the machete and gave Charlotte’s arm a dispassionate look, surprising the crap out of Anna and the other men. Laid out on the carpet with the belt tight around her wounded limb, Charlotte had her other thin arm across her eyes as she twisted back and forth with anxiety.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to become like Mr Fitzwilliams … or Lenore.”
Anna was speechless that everyday life had deteriorate to this already, and she was equally astonished that Iskov looked so calm. Almost eager. Dwayne knelt to one side with the contents of the Gazette’s pathetic first-aid kit autopsied across the bland carpet. Demien watched on from a safe distance, arms crossed, fingers under his chin as if he had some sort of expertise to share.
“Get those napkins ready,” Iskov said quietly to Dwayne.
Anna’s stomach heaved and she hurried away up the hall.
ANNA WASN’T FAST enough to escape the meaty thwacking noises, and certainly not Charlotte’s scream – though it was cut mercifully short with the newly-minted young amputee going unconscious at the third nasty hacking attempt. The noise only aroused – or re-aroused – Lenore Barrett’s allegedly animated cadaver trapped in the general manager’s office, and Anna took one look down the hall at the flimsy-looking door and felt her stomach drop another notch. She veered left instead, and entered the live studio.
The main monitor showed Melina fussing with the LD1, disappearing and reappearing in front of the camera as she checked her equipment over. A well-framed view of the City Hall building showed in the background. The day was overcast, and the shot was desperately in need of more light.
The images weren’t live on the website. In fact, the website sat idle – not that its four million unique visitors seemed to mind, trawling back through the panel discussions and press conferences they could download, as well as more than a dozen unique video packages, most filmed by Melina and Anna. Zero moderation whatsoever was going on in the comments section of the Gazette website, where entire factions, conspiracies, and counter-groups of terrified citizenry arose and dissolved in rapid succession amid flame wars, breakout posts, and breakaway discussion groups none of the Gazette’s actual living reporters would likely ever have time to read as they emigrated across a host of fast-evolving websites and other social
media forums springing up in response to the Emergency.
Her colleagues’ animated discussion came muffled from outside. Anna ignored them, steadying her breathing, and drew out her phone.
On the monitor, Melina Martelle stepped back into frame as she answered.
“God damn, I’ve been waiting for your call,” the other woman said. “What took you so long, white girl?”
“Yes, I survived,” Anna said with a muted snicker. “Thanks for asking.”
“Why do you think I was so worried?”
Anna fought off a momentary fluster at Melina’s reply while also trying not to listen as the voices in the foyer rose louder and louder yet, driving Lenore Barrett’s hammering into a dangerous fury.
“Listen, things are still pretty rough here,” Anna said. “There’s no emergency response whatsoever, and … Fitzwilliams is dead. Probably Lenore too.”
“Lenore too? I kinda gathered about Fitz, but fuck,” Melina said. “What’s happening to everyone, Anna?”
“That’s what I need you to get someone to tell us,” Anna replied. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll come back to you. We’ll do a live cross, so get something ready.”
“I was born ready.”
“You deliver that line so well,” Anna said and winked at her, then remembered the viewfinder only went one way.
She chuckled, frozen in her response, then letting herself truly examine the reporter on her monitor for a moment. She was grateful for the dropped hostilities, but it was still hard to parse how, in just two days, some kind of wartime loyalty hung between them.
Melina assumed she’d been disconnected, and so went about her business.
And Anna did as she’d said, rolling up her headphones and slipping them with her phone into her jacket pocket and only then noticing someone’s blood staining her lapel. She would’ve made a face, but Charlotte’s shrill yells joined the fray outside.
A BLACK MAN in an off-the-rack suit stood glowering in astonishment at the other men in the bloody foyer. A briefcase rested next to where he’d entered, but he whipped off his jacket and started rolling up his sleeves as he knelt instead beside Charlotte with an air of expertise. The young woman’s fiery red hair looked only more fierce against her ashen face, and Anna’s stomach roiled once more when she took in Charlotte’s grisly stump swaddled with a giant red-soaking wad of paper towelettes.
“What on earth were you thinking?” the newcomer barked. “Do you have surgical gloves? Do you have anything of use in that godforsaken medical kit if you had to attempt an amputation with serviettes for gauze?”
Buddy looked Anna’s way and managed a fey look surprisingly well for a man in his fifties.
“Good news,” he said to her. “The Professor here’s a doctor.”
Anna nodded, but looked instead to Alexandra Ngo watching them aghast from the blinking telephones.
“Alex, please call Douglas, find out where he’s at?”
“Onto it,” she said.
Anna then moved closer to the impromptu surgery, a hand across her fluttering stomach. The Professor looked up at Anna as if thinking she pulled rank around here, which now she kinda did. The reality of it clung to her as unwanted as a wet dog blanket.
“I’m an immunologist, not a practicing medical doctor,” the newcomer said.
“But I trained as a surgeon. These are totally unsuitable conditions … not to mention, a completely unnecessary solution. What on earth were you thinking?”
“You said that already,” Dwayne chipped in from the side.
Charlotte whimpered, trying to sit up with the Professor and then Dwayne’s help. But her face was alight, looking more than a little feral herself.
“What are you saying?” the young woman barked at the doctor.
The surgeon ignored her question until he’d finished tying off the wound far more adequately than before, several of Serik Iskov’s bath towels soaked with blood carpeting the floor around them. Then the Professor gave Charlotte a pained and profoundly sad look, nodding to Dwayne to help ease her back to the ground.
“Does anyone have any painkillers?” he asked. “Sedatives? Heroin?”
“Doctor –” Anna began.
“Professor,” the black man said. “Theodore Irving. USC. I was in town for a conference when I got young Demien’s call this morning. I didn’t have any time free . . . until my diary suddenly became empty.”
“Professor,” Anna said. “Tell us what you mean about ‘unnecessary’? Some of us were worried Charlotte might also become … affected, after she was bitten by one of the carriers of this … disease, or whatever it is.”
The corpse in question lay disturbingly close by, all but Fitz’s foot and solitary shoe covered by the paint-spotted ground cover. Professor Irving glanced at the hidden body, shaking his head at sight of it, and then back to Anna.
“We don’t have any evidence yet that this is an infectious disease,” he said.
“And at any rate, amputation to safeguard against the spread of infection … How long between the attack and when you carried out the amputation?”
Charlotte interjected woozily from the floor.
“Is he saying … you didn’t need to cut off my arm?”
Dwayne hushed her, and Demien looked like he wanted to take off running, but the Professor was here at his invite – and also, there was nowhere to hide.
“If it were an infected bite, amputation would need to be almost instantaneous to avoid contaminants entering the wider circulatory system,” Irving said.
The college professor stood with a slight hiss at his ageing knees, somber, like he knew his insights were likely wasted on a room full of idiots.
“As it is … there’s any number of causes,” he said. “There’s no shortage of ways to spread disease.”
Anna knew the conversation she wanted was the one for the website’s panel discussion, once they could crew the live studio – and Melina was waiting to do her piece too – but Lenore Barrett’s insistent banging and the flimsiness of Fitz’s plywood door couldn’t be ignored much longer.
Iskov walked back into the room no one realized he’d left, a phial of prescription meds in one hand.
“I’ve got Xanax or Valium,” he said to the Professor. “What’s your poison?”
The Professor took the pills and knelt down beside his erstwhile patient.
Demien shuffled away, mute at last, and Anna gathered herself before motioning to Iskov and the two TV men.
BUDDY AND DWAYNE retrieved their equipment from the lobby while Iskov re-entered the live studio with the casual air of a man who hadn’t just cut off his colleague’s arm in a half-assed home surgical procedure.
“Miss Novak?”
Anna almost didn’t recognize her own name spoken on Alexandra Ngo’s lips.
The deference didn’t suit the well-dressed woman well, though Anna wondered that might be her own intimidation at the saleswoman’s strange, bird-like beauty.
“Alex, please,” Anna said. “Jesus, don’t call me that.”
“I just … you’re in charge now.”
“And you don’t work for me,” Anna said.
She didn’t expect Alexandra’s face to drop, nor could she restraint the head tilt as she forced a closer look at the other woman’s crestfallen expression.
“Hey, what is it?”
“Mr O’Dowd’s on his way back into the office,” Alex said.
“No, Alex,” Anna said. “I meant … are you OK?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Serious question,” Anna said flatly. “Do I need to repeat it?”
The terse reply forced an oddly genuine laugh from the woman.
“You guys,” Alexandra said. “Reporters … I love how you cut to the bullshit.”
“You’re here now, in the thick of it,” Anna said and smiled as convincingly as her own fraught nerves allowed. “You’re one of us.”
She might’ve said more, except Buddy and Dwayne re-ente
red hauling their stashed gear, including several more equipment cases from their truck. Buddy’s dark look made the fine blonde hackles on Anna’s arms and neck tingle.
“There’s a heap o’ people still outside the building,” he said to her.
“Bad news for you guys,” Dwayne added more bluntly. “They seem to think you might have the answers.”
“How many people?” Anna asked.
“I dunno,” Buddy said. “Easily three hundred.”
“Jesus.”
“We can’t have them all up here,” Alex said.
As if on cue, a younger man and woman appeared beyond the glass escorting an old man in a wheelchair: Lenore Barrett’s crass diversity wish come true.
Alexandra wore a timid look, as if again at her temerity for speaking up. Her piece said, she turned back to the blinking phones and chose one at random.
“Alex,” Anna said. “Hold on.”
The saleswoman froze, returning a cautious and slightly curious look.
A trajectory was unfolding in Anna’s mind with surprising rapidity given the shock of the morning, Lenore Barrett’s banging from the hallway, the static website, the blood stains on the carpet, Melina Martelle’s strange friendship, and maybe even a little dash of worry for Tom Vanicek and hoping he made it home safely. Despite it all, the strategy for how best to harness their news capacity came almost unbidden.
“I think we’re going to leave the phones for now,” she said.
Alexandra nodded and slowly reset the phone like it might bite her.
“We’ll organize a new voicemail message as soon as we get the chance,”
Anna said. “But I have a job for you.”
Anna motioned to Buddy and Dwayne as well.
“You too, if you’re still in the news business?”
Buddy chuckled and visibly relaxed. Dwayne only shot his partner a weird glance, maybe wondering why there was any doubt at all about their allegiances.
“Dwayne and Buddy lost their front person,” Anna said to Alex. “How do you feel about filling in?”
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