The saleswoman was too stunned to say anything.
“We’re doing a live cross to City Hall in a couple of minutes,” Anna said to the two TV men. “I need you two to work out how to broadcast from your van in some way so that we can use it as a second feed. We have to get our panel back up, the minute we’re not live, so I want you three down on the street with all those people, OK?”
“Anna,” Alex said. “I’m an advertising executive, not a… .”
“You’re one of us now, right?”
“But I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“Do you know how to have a conversation?”
“What? Yes, of course.”
“So go down there and have some conversations,” Anna said. “We’ll find a way to relay it to the website as soon as we can. The Gazette needs to be out there, in the streets, with its people.”
The young visitors and their elderly charge entered the lobby. The lapel pins of some sort of religious organization adorned their jackets.
Anna turned her attention to the three new arrivals and forced on her tightest smile yet, never one for airing the “family laundry” in front of the general public.
“We’re just lucky the people are coming to us,” she said.
Buddy and Dwayne moved off with a sense of purpose, and Alex backed away from the reception counter, grappling with her own shell-shock as Anna introduced herself to Demien Christopher’s panelist from Springfield’s Catholic diocese.
THERE WERE PRECIOUS few answers in Melina’s summary from City Hall, and when the transmission finally cut out, Anna found herself transfixed by the rival news streams playing out on the computer tablet in her lap while Serik Iskov, Dwayne, Buddy, Demien Christopher and his guests bustled in and out of the studio on their own urgent assignments, casting frequent worried looks towards Lenore’s banging.
TV affiliates from Texas to Ohio had a running coverage of the chaos unfolding at a slow crawl across the continental United States. Canada and Mexico closing borders and California’s quarantine zone didn’t seem enough to stem the rapidly-accumulating conclusions sweeping the rest of the planet, and not helped at all by news of major riots and urban panics breaking out in Detroit, Baltimore, Charleston, and LA. States not yet affected, east of Philadelphia, tumbling into riots and looting only worsened the nightmare scenario playing out across the misappropriately-named New England “safe zone”.
Another of Lenore’s god-awful thumps arose from outside, made louder by the studio door propped open to facilitate the incomings and outgoings of its crew. Anna stepped outside to see Father Ryan MacMahon’s two assistants struggling either side of Dwayne moving one of the sofas from the foyer to reinforce Fitzwilliams’ office door.
“Anna, it’s splitting,” Dwayne said.
He pointed at Lenore’s half-obscured door, big sections buckled outward from her repeated blows. Lenore’s faint, unladylike grunts sounded from the other side as Anna stared at the door in horror.
“Doesn’t sound dead to me,” Dwayne grunted.
One of MacMahon’s juniors started saying something about the souls of Hell reinhabiting the cursed, but Anna cut him off with nothing more than an aggressive hand signal.
“Please go on into the live studio,” Anna said to them.
The strategy spinning as a spider’s web inside her mind gathered apace.
“Serik?”
“He’s at the server cabinet with Buddy,” Dwayne said.
They wedged the sofa into place with a few more grunts. Alexandra Ngo appeared from the directions of the washroom, freshly made up and grimacing with anxiety. Anna remembered the field promotion she’d unexpectedly just delivered and motioned the former saleswoman with her. Alex joined Anna in the deserted editorial bullpen.
“Are you OK to do this, what I’ve asked of you?”
“Uh, well … yes,” Alex said.
“It was a request, not an order,” Anna said. “I meant what I said before, but not in a bad way. Technically, you don’t work for me.”
“No … but I want to.”
The earnestness set Alexandra’s features well. Anna nodded.
“The truth is, Alex, we don’t have anyone else and you’re needed … if you’re ready to step up?”
“What about Mr O’Dowd?” the other woman asked. “He’s on his way –”
Anna snickered.
“The chance of me getting Douglas in front of a camera interviewing mere pedestrians are about second to none,” she said.
“OK,” Alex said and looked as if O’Dowd’s rebuke was her compliment. “So, er … how do I look?”
“That’s another reason I got you in here.”
Anna exhaled with an officiousness she hoped the freshly-dubbed new reporter wouldn’t take to heart as she quickly retrieved her dry-cleaning and swapped around the jackets, taking one and thrusting it at Alexandra Ngo.
“Wear this instead,” she said.
Alexandra’s outfit was a study in impeccable taste without screaming for attention – and she’d grown blind to it.
“Don’t take it personally,” Anna said. “You can’t interview – and you can’t be seen to interview – people in crisis while you’re wearing a two-thousand dollar suit jacket.”
Explanation in hand, Alex took Anna’s garment and allowed a bemused frown to cross her elegant features now sharpened even further with a few deft make-up strokes.
“My blazer’s worth three hundred, tops,” Anna told her. “You – your clothes, your opinion, your experience – you’re never the story. When you’re talking to people down there, just ask them open-ended questions. No yes/no. Got it? You focus on them – what they’ve been through, what they’ve seen, what they make of it all – and don’t link any of that back to you. That’ll be a little easier wearing my cheap-ass reporter’s jacket, OK?”
Alexandra blinked with the rapid intake of it all and nodded, flustered, again somehow seemingly flattered.
“Thanks, that’s… .”
“That’s about as much of a crash-course on journalism as you’re going to get.”
Anna held her colleague by the shoulders for a moment, engaging her powerful eye contact even while feeling like a total imposter, made worse by her former boss raging her dead lover’s office.
Then Serik Iskov hustled by, and Anna moved for the bullpen doorway, hailing him like a passing cab and giving one final apologetic shoulder-squeeze to Alexandra before barreling out of the room.
“SERIK,” ANNA SAID not a second after sweeping back out into the corridor. “I need you to do your trick again with our office feed for the BBC.”
Iskov halted at the edge of the now-empty foyer. A half-dozen people stood beyond the frosted glass front wall, halted by the recently-locked office doors. An older black lady wearing smeared lipstick banged an urgent fist on the glass and left bloodstains there like an echo of the grisly marks on the carpet. Anna ignored her.
“They’ve asked us again?”
“No, but they’re going to want to,” Anna said. “I’ll call Mark Twining in a minute. We’re going to broadcast from here.”
She motioned into the bloody foyer.
“What do you … mean?”
“I mean that we’re going mobile.”
“Isn’t that what the studio’s for?”
Anna felt the sick feeling return through her stomach as she acknowledged the tail end of her strategy, now having to speak it aloud, and the cold-bloodedness it took to curate.
“We have to deal with Lenore,” she said.
“Deal. With.”
“Exactly.”
“And you want to … what exactly?”
“Look at this.”
Anna led him back to her work space and woke up the iPad. The video resumed seamlessly and she wondered – if the crisis got as bad as seemed likely – how long things like satellite connections would last.
The video showed poorly-lit amateur footage of a businessman in Nashville attack
ing beyond the dirty windows of a cab. The man’s face was just a blur of anger through the smeared glass.
Anna killed the image and summoned a second video. And then more.
Teenagers running with the phone cam shaking over one shoulder chased by a postman through a suburban street outside Clear Lake. A citizen journalist hiding behind a parked car filming an indistinct scene with police surrounding an arrest as it ended in gunfire. Footage of women running screaming from a bridal party, then the cameraperson running too the moment their attacker appeared.
Any number of other videos she could call up were much the same.
“You want to film us dealing with Ms Barrett,” Iskov said – and to his credit, it wasn’t a question.
“Lenore was a newswoman to the end,” Anna said. “I think it’s what she’d want.”
“You’re serious?”
Anna shrugged.
“She was keen enough to get in front of the BBC earlier today, why not now?”
Anna didn’t buy her own glibness either. She shot Iskov a frustrated look, slapping her sides for emphasis.
“I don’t know, Serik,” she said. “What the hell are we meant to do? We really, really do need to deal with Lenore in there, and I don’t know if you noticed 911 isn’t exactly coming running.”
“Hey, no judgment,” the technician said. “I’ll set it up.”
Word of Anna’s plan set the depleted office into overdrive, and she’d barely got off the phone arranging the whole deal with an elated Mark Twining than a delegation comprised of Buddy, Demien, and the emergency doctor Professor Irving met her at the bullpen’s open doorway.
“Tell me you’re not serious about this, Anna,” the cameraman said.
“No one really understands what we’ve got here.”
“None of us understand,” the Professor growled. “Including us.”
“I appreciate your input, Professor,” Anna said. “I look forward to hearing what you have to say when we’re on the panel together, later. For now, please excuse me, this is editorial business.”
She grabbed Demien and Buddy and moved down into the foyer. The corridor outside reception was crammed with citizen refugees. Many perked up at the glimpse of them, though the woman with the lipstick was gone now, leaving only smudge marks on the glass in her place. Anna ignored the Gazette’s petitioners once again, though Buddy motioned at the crowd regardless.
“I thought we were going down into that?” he said.
“Soon,” Anna said. “First, we’re going to show the world in close-up living color exactly what we’re dealing with – and maybe the Professor’s right, we’ll find out a little more for ourselves as well.”
“Like what?” Demien snorted and looked on the verge of tears.
“Well, maybe whether these people – our friends and colleagues and neighbors – are … alive, still, in any meaningful way … and whether there’s any point in us trying to help them,” she said.
“How’s that for a start? We don’t even know what to call them. The State of Michigan’s put their troubles down to ‘racial tensions’, for God’s sake, and we have police reports across more than a dozen States describing everything from rampant homicide, to civil unrest, looting, ‘crimes of opportunity’, spree killings, mob behavior … yes, ‘racial tensions’ … and Melina’s not even sure City Hall’s fronting the media again today. People are dying because they’re trying to talk to these … these things, these creatures our people have become.”
Iskov’s voice fell unexpectedly into the silence of Anna’s heartfelt diatribe.
“You’re live.”
And she looked across to see him holding the LD1.
“JESUS CHRIST,” ANNA said and immediately regretted it. Whether it was Iskov’s passive aggressive way of giving her exactly what she’d asked for, or maybe just some other quirk of the young Kazakh-American’s brain chemistry, they were now broadcasting to about six-hundred kajillion viewers worldwide thanks to the BBC and its affiliate links.
And for some reason, Anna only hung her head and sighed about it.
“OK,” she said more softly. “Maybe this is the only way to do it, given this … chaos.”
It wasn’t her first time doing straight-to-camera by any stretch. Anna tugged her jacket into place and met the LD1’s unblinking eye.
“Earlier today,” she told the camera, “you saw our colleague, my boss, Lenore Barrett, outline what little we know about what first unfolded here in Springfield, and now… .”
Anna halted, struck by the awful late-creeping stage fright of knowing she didn’t know where she was going with her improvised monologue. Buddy and Dwayne set down their equipment. Buddy held his machete poised, both of them in frame behind her.
“The truth is, we don’t know what’s happening,” Anna said to Iskov’s camera.
“All we know is Lenore Barrett is another victim of the Emergency gripping our city, our country.”
Iskov advanced slowly into the room as Anna motioned to the other two men.
“Everyone else is locked down in the studio?”
“Except for him.”
Buddy pointed to Professor Irving far away at the other end of the corridor, beyond the angled sofa holding Lenore in captivity.
Anna flicked back to the camera as Iskov came right in.
“We don’t know the true cause of this Emergency or what it means for the people affected,” Anna said. “What we do know is that this is a case of extreme danger and people must act with caution … extreme caution. We’re not in a position to speak with any authority apart from what we’ve witnessed ourselves, but it would seem most residents are probably safer locking down at home rather than trying to leave the city … We’re not sure there’s anywhere to go, anyway, with the Emergency – this inexplicable phenomenon – expanding towards the east coast … so people should probably stay inside … unless you find yourself inside with one of them.”
Demien stood aside, aghast and appalled in the one take, as Anna, Buddy and Dwayne eyed the hallway, and Anna called for Professor Irving to get into cover. The immunologist wisely retreated to the life studio where he and the other panelists and their staff could watch the whole show in safety, and Demien Christopher bustled after him.
“A full list of emergency shelter locations are available on the Gazette website and we will update the status of those locations as they are known,” Anna said almost robotically. She could almost choke on the fear in her chest.
Buddy rolled the machete around in his grip with a nervous look, while Dwayne shadowed Anna with another coil of industrial cables and also Iskov’s Japanese sword.
However weird it felt, Anna paused to remove her slip-on shoes, more sure-footed in the face of whatever was to come once she had them and her jacket off. She then stepped barefoot across the foyer to a coffee table and judiciously broke off one of its slim metal legs.
“We need to see, and we need to show you, what we’re up against,” Anna said to the camera. “Then you can make your mind up yourself, based on the clearest evidence we can provide.
“We’re going to remove the barricade we were forced to put up when we first realized Ms Barrett was also affected by this … condition that is at threat of overcoming emergency personnel here in Springfield.
“We lost our general manager Gus Fitzwilliams earlier today, just after our morning broadcast,” Anna continued.
“I can’t apologize enough to Lenore Barrett for this. We … she deserved so much better. A fine reporter and an even better news editor, she did the best she could to keep the Springfield Gazette alive in the face of so many challenges … only to die here … or we think she died, earlier today, during or before a meeting with Mr Fitzwilliams, who we were already forced to … to put down … only a short while ago.”
Iskov made a fine cameraman. He turned the camera on Fitzwilliams’ sheet-covered remains, and Dwayne had worked in television far too long to leave anything to subtlety. He pulled awa
y the ground cover with an unintended magician’s flourish.
And Anna felt a quiver of revulsion at the not-quite-right look of Gus Fitzwilliams’ corpse which was never going to look quite right anyway.
“We believe Gus attacked Lenore,” Anna said in a freshly somber tone, glad to provide a voiceover, at least for a few moments. “We also think somehow the attack caused Lenore to … exhibit the same feral behavior as Gus.”
Iskov filmed as she, Buddy, and Dwayne now advanced down the corridor swapping glances of mutual concern and fear. They reached Lenore’s door far too quickly for Anna’s liking, and Buddy and Dwayne pushed the settee out of the way to reveal the badly-scarred door. Their move was met with Lenore’s renewed attack on confinement. Iskov retreated a step as the door shuddered again and again, flashes of movement obvious through the split plywood.
“Ho-ly Hector,” Buddy said softly.
Dwayne positioned himself on the far side of the door, heedless of the global attention, and Buddy looked to Anna who nodded as a warm rush of affection bordering on admiration swept through her for the two men who’d voluntarily thrown themselves in with the Gazette’s efforts.
“Whatever we are about to reveal,” she said, “please remember Lenore Barrett as she was … and spare a thought or a prayer, if you’re able … because this is Lenore Barrett now.”
And Dwayne turned the handle, and Buddy gave the door a massive kick.
THE DOOR JUDDERED back even with Lenore Barrett mad-faced and scrambling on the other side.
The perfectly-coiffed news editor’s look had taken some battering.
Lenore’s gossamer blouse was unbuttoned to the waist, stilled tucked into her faux leather Versace skirt, but the whole ensemble – and her narrow, gym-hardened torso – was black with thick crusts of dried blood. Terrible bite marks ran from beneath one ear and down to Lenore’s shoulder. The muscle and sinew were torn and exposed. Her make-up had run violently, and the eyes which flicked their pinprick gaze on the camera perfectly conveyed the sheer absence of anything that any reasonable person would call humanity.
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