And now Anna’s plan looked unbelievably stupid.
Their dead colleague levered herself through the narrow exit with a strength and ferocity literally unknown to her in life, a hatefulness tensioning all her sinews as she burst out and threw herself at Iskov with the camera catching them all somehow completely unprepared. The technician freaked, and dropped the camera as he surged out of the way. Lenore struck the nearby wall like lightning where he’d stood. The impact was like the beating of a drum, and just as fast, the risen news editor whipped about with her hair barely moving in its hairspray hold despite the long hours since her demise.
“Back!” Anna yelled.
Instead, Dwayne expertly threw the elongated coil of the rubber cable across Lenore’s position, lassoing her head and upper body as she twisted about at their intrusion, pierced the TV sound technician with her gaze.
The look in the madwoman’s gaze made it clear anything resembling Lenore Barrett was long gone – and Anna silently abandoned any plan they might’ve had to take her down alive.
Anna crouched under the creature’s swiveling gaze to snatch up the camera, easily hefting the lightweight thing and nimbly dancing backwards in the same move.
The creature chose its moment to strike, snapping back at Dwayne tightening his hold on the cable while Buddy hovered on the other side, machete raised, glancing between Lenore and Anna and clearly set to shit his pants.
Lenore made the decision for him.
She lunged at Dwayne whip-fast, taking him to the floor before the skinny man could even yell. Anna thumbed the zoom – never more familiar with a piece of technical equipment than the LD1s – even though her eyes widened in shock watching Lenore put a hand on Dwayne’s face to push his head aside, exposing the throat she then sank her teeth into.
The contact was minimal. Buddy stepped in and kicked Lenore in the side of the head with such force the woman flipped like a kung fu action star, trussing herself deeper into Dwayne’s unspooled cable, and Anna then threw the metal table leg at her as Lenore started to get up. It bounced off her forehead and disappeared.
“You can see for yourself,” Anna said breathlessly for the audience’s sake.
“This is … this is not the woman you saw earlier today.”
Lenore leapt to her feet from a crouch and hissed at them. The damage to her throat and neck kept her head on an odd bent, adding to the serpentine sense as she checked back towards Anna with the camera as Dwayne scrambled backwards and got up, touching his bleeding neck as he eyed the possible sanctuary of the sofa behind him, and then instead grabbed the coiled cable and threw it high and across and over the bloodied woman swiveling her head around the corridor at them with the clear intent of assessing the best angle for her to play. The creature Lenore’d become didn’t leave much thought to escape, licking her lips hungrily at the taste of blood.
Iskov backed up Dwayne, clutching Buddy’s machete and ready to strike.
“My colleague and … friend … Lenore Barrett is gone,” Anna said and half-whispered an apology to Lenore again for the theatrical lies which at least were heartfelt in the moment they arose in her. Anna’s voice was like a meditation. They seemed frozen in the moment – Lenore Barrett’s indecisive living corpse as well.
“Look at her,” Anna said and fought off her vaguely reverent tone. “She … stands there … studying us … poised to kill … nothing but rage, fury.”
The Classical reading of Anna’s childhood bubbled up in her at the sight.
“She stands there like one of the Furies the Greeks spoke about,” Anna said.
“Feral and furious and deadly, and with rage to no end. Sheer destruction. What was once a human being … but not anymore.”
As if to prove Anna’s point, the trapped Fury twisted about one final time and came hurtling down the hallway towards the camera, caught after only a few paces as Dwayne hauled back on the cable, and Buddy grabbed the thrown coils, bulling forward and shoulder-charging into Lenore with sufficient power to throw her back against the wall leaving a deep dent in the lacquered plywood. Buddy crossed back behind Lenore as the creature turned, three or four ropes of cable around her now, and yet completely undeterred as Iskov fished his katana from the carpet and adopted an action pose with two weapons as if thinking the camera might take to him.
The Fury took his moves for bait, thrusting herself back from the wall. Iskov held his ground this time, chopping with the sword, but only hitting the insulated cables leaving Lenore’s arms still free to clutch at him. When the Fury lunged again, with Buddy and Dwayne groaning to hold the line, Iskov reversed the blade and rammed the point of the curved sword into Lenore’s upper chest.
The furious creature only struggled to deepen the blade running through it as it fought against its restraints, snatching forward one final time to grab Serik by one forearm as one end of the cable escaped Dwayne’s grip amid the brutal tug-of-war, and the sound technician fell over in the carpeted hall.
“That’s … you see that,” Anna said and audibly spluttered. “You see her take a wound no normal person could possibly survive … and keep going. If you see these creatures, you must not approach. You must get to safety.”
Buddy held Lenore back by brute strength alone, giving Iskov the chance to roll clear with the sword still jutting all the way through and out her back. To everyone’s horror, the Fury swept an arm around, grabbing one of the lines connecting it to her captors and yanking with incredible force to pull the bulk of it from Buddy’s shocked hands.
The Fury was up again at once, rushing Buddy who had nowhere to run himself. The cameraman backed right up to the studio door with a shrill scream of terror.
The gunshots were horrifically loud and twice as unexpected.
The first bullet hit Lenore in the chest.
The second hit her torn shoulder – enough to stop her in her tracks, but not her feral glinting eyes which flew unerringly to the source of the interruption.
Alex Ngo stepped from the open entrance to the newsroom. Her compact Walther CCP barked again, and the third bullet hit Lenore in the face.
Anna captured the whole thing as the back of Lenore’s head painted the wall behind her. As simple as that, the whole package of what used to be a human woman dropped lifelessly to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
Alexandra kept the gun trained on the body as Dwayne recovered, snatched up the machete, and crept in closer to confirm the kill.
And Anna had to fight her speechlessness.
“That’s what we have to do,” she said in a chilled voice. “These Furies, they can only be killed. They cannot be saved. Did Lenore look to you willing or even able to have a conversation, to listen to common sense, even to a professional?”
Anna deliberately panned the LD1 across the scene to avoid a gratuitous examination of Lenore’s corpse, the camera taking in Buddy and Dwayne looking freaked and Alexandra training the gun on the corpse with her teeth firmly biting her lower lip.
“You have to shoot them in the head,” Alexandra said.
“Yes,” Anna said, seizing on it. “Whatever makes … whatever makes people this way, it’s clear ordinary injuries, even the worst wounds, don’t seem to affect them or slow them down … at all. It’s almost like they make them stronger, angrier … more furious. But … hitting them in the head –”
“Killing the brain,” Buddy said like it was a sigh.
“Yes,” Anna said. “Maybe there are other ways too, but… .”
“Shoot for the head.”
Alexandra repeated her line off-camera. Anna turned the LD1 back towards Lenore’s corpse with the tragic feeling of further defiling the woman’s memory. Yet there might be skeptics out there still. She forced herself to stay focused on the dead woman, the sword-blade thrust into her chest right near her heart.
“This isn’t a stunt,” Anna said in a renewed austere voice. “Please, please don’t make the mistake of thinking this is for TV thrills. This is the
very real, the very deadly, the very dangerous situation we’re facing here – what millions of our countrymen and women are facing today … as today heads towards night, here … here in Springfield, Illinois.”
Anna switched off the autofocus and the zoomed close image of Lenore lying dead started to dissolve.
“This is Anna Novak and the editorial team at the Springfield Gazette,” she said. “We’ll be live on our website with a panel of experts in twenty minutes so we can further discuss what this all means.”
ANNA FELT TOO worn thin even to care that she’d delivered Mark Twining exactly what he wanted with the horrific footage of Lenore Barrett. Within seconds of the transmission ending, the BBC had key highlights on repeat beneath live banners screaming “The Rise of the Furies”.
In the blood-spattered Gazette office, they were left alone to the equally dramatic yet low key aftermath.
Anna couldn’t tell whether her tears were real or still part of the performance she halfway hated herself for producing, unable to feel almost anything except the trickle of water on her face she now mopped with her shirt cuffs before unbuttoning them and rolling up her sleeves. She tried to distract herself with the desk, but her watery eyes kept tracking back to Lenore’s begrimed, unmoving corpse only a half-dozen yards away.
Buddy crossed to Alexandra like he was about to take the gun from her nerveless fingers, but she gave him a stern look instead and he thought better of it.
Meanwhile, Dwayne slowly reeled in and rolled up the cable, eyes on the dead Fury as Lenore moved slightly with the escaping cord, and the live studio door opened behind them and the two panelists and Demien Christopher stepped out. The black Professor shot Anna a grave scowl, but Anna was numb to care.
“Jesus Christ,” she slowly exhaled.
“Your phone’s going crazy,” Alex said and thumbed into the newsroom behind her.
“It can wait,” Anna said. “Thanks for the quick move there.”
“I’ve got a license to carry,” the saleswoman said.
“I wish I could say the same.”
Dwayne almost hawked up phlegm as he spoke behind them.
“I wish I had a gun – and I don’t give a damn about the license.”
“Dwayne,” Anna said and pointed to his neck. “You’re bleeding.”
“She fucking bit me,” the skinny man replied.
“Think we should amputate?” Professor Irving asked.
It took Dwayne a moment longer than everyone else to realize that meant decapitation, and the sound technician opened his mouth in a soundless cry of dissent, but otherwise said nothing due to the immunologist’s angry scowl.
“Really,” the Professor said. “What on earth were you thinking?”
“He says that a lot,” Buddy said.
“We should’ve done something else, Professor?” Anna asked him.
“Almost anything else, I would say.”
“It’s what she would’ve wanted,” Iskov said.
He briefly met Anna’s eye and winked.
It was the only response that could really undercut the Professor’s rebuke. The academic scoffed in a wordless tumble, shook his head, and retreated back into the studio. It left Demien staring at them, stuck in a time loop or something with his weird look of constant disbelief bordering on mental illness. Anna watched him a moment as if afraid the science reporter might “go Fury” on them as well.
“Demien,” she said. “You OK?”
“Yes.”
“Ready in fifteen?”
He nodded vigorously, then seemed to remember words were needed.
“Uh, yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes.”
“Do we have anyone else for the panel?” Anna asked. “Where’d Professor Rothman go?”
“I think he heard he was too white, so he bugged out.”
Anna was about to say something else, then shot a look at Iskov unable to tell if that was sarcasm or something that’d actually happened while she was away.
“No,” Iskov said. “He left, or … died or something.”
For a moment, Anna thought the performance was for her sake, and then caught on to Iskov’s surreptitious glances to see if Alexandra was listening. And she was.
“OK,” Anna said. “Anyone else for the panel?”
Anna asked the question to the whole crew, introducing some kind of benign normalcy to their plight despite their news editor sprawled with her tits showing dead on the carpet between them all.
“That Olsen guy is outside in the street,” Buddy said.
The cameraman spoke in a hollow voice, but he seemed to slap some sense into himself when Anna looked, nodding to her as if subliminally letting her know he was still on board.
“Olsen?”
“He’s, uh … he’s a population control expert,” Demien said.
Anna raised an eyebrow and Demien coughed.
“Lenore said … and he’s gay, so… .”
“Cool,” Anna said as if she meant it. “God knows, population control comes into this somehow.”
“I’ll go down and get him,” Buddy said.
“How do you know him?”
“He’s local,” Buddy said and shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve been filming here for years.”
“Buddy knows everyone,” Dwayne said.
Anna wondered whether that extended to CIA contacts, and took a fresh look at the brawny, yet pot-bellied cameraman and took a slight reality check. Buddy’s phone started to blast “It’s Raining Men” and he made an embarrassed face and muttered something about the ringtone getting stuck – before his face fell as he looked down at the face of the phone.
“It’s my ex.”
Buddy hurried away with the phone in the direction of the foyer and Demien started telling Anna something longwinded about the experts who were here earlier and ran away when Gus Fitzwilliams appeared.
But Anna had to cut him off.
Douglas O’Dowd entered the Gazette’s foyer with a bearish grin, notebook in one hand as he strode towards them like he’d just returned from the Amazon.
O’DOWD’S EXPRESSION HALTED as he took in Lenore’s corpse laid out in the hall and the general air of somnambulance among the survivors.
“What the fuck’s happened here?” he growled.
“You would know, if you’d been here,” Anna spat back.
She moved off a distance and turned her back to him, not ready to deal with the euphoric waves of anger surging up to ward off all her other, far more confusing emotions. That wasn’t enough for O’Dowd. He walked over to Lenore’s body and knelt, fingers hovering over her wounds like a faith healer intent on bringing the dead back to life one more time.
“It happened here, too?” he asked.
“Fitz is dead,” Iskov said flatly.
“Where have you been, Douglas?” Anna asked.
“On the beat,” he said. “I thought I had some good news for you, but I guess. . . .”
He motioned around, oddly sensitive. Anna glanced at the senior reporter’s notebook and frowned.
“What’s the … what are you working on?”
“I’ve been with the 85th and a National Guard unit,” he said.
With a sarcastic leer, he added, “I took photos and everything. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Photos?”
“And more solid quotes than you can poke a stick at.”
“Quotes about… ?”
“Incidents,” O’Dowd answered and shrugged. “Some of the things these guys have seen, the people they’ve been forced to shoot. Looters, for instance?”
He then motioned at Lenore.
“And people like this, too.”
“Furies,” Demien Christopher said in a subdued voice. “That’s what Anna called them.”
“Great,” O’Dowd snorted. “I’ve got copy to file.”
“Copy?” Anna snapped. “Douglas, you’re chasing old news – and the old-fashioned way. Do you think we’re getting the press up and runni
ng in the next couple of days?”
“I don’t remember answering to you,” O’Dowd said.
“You will now,” she told him. “We need live footage, and we need some fucking answers.”
She cast her eyes around their small assembly.
“I don’t know if everyone’s grasping the enormity of this thing yet,” Anna said. “I know I’m not all there yet myself. We’re witnessing … this is almost supernatural behavior, people rising from the dead … This is end-of-the-world stuff, here. I’m sick of playing catch-up.”
Anna turned back to O’Dowd, and in her own fury, let him have it.
“I need you on board with this Douglas or you can leave,” she said. “Plenty of other media have taken off. I don’t need reporters running around with their fucking cameras and notebooks. We don’t have the time or the energy to craft these stories.
The stories we need to tell … we need to be at those stories as they happen, so we can show people. Understood? This is life or death. So no more of this ‘I don’t do video’ bullshit of yours. Got it?”
O’Dowd eyed her with a seething yet inexpressible rage.
Exhaling heavily, he wheeled away towards the editorial bullpen while the others blinked. Buddy re-entered with Professor Olsen, catching the end of Anna’s spray, and Alexandra Ngo merely holstered her pistol in her handbag once more, checked her mascara, then went off to find a mirror as they all somehow got back to work.
THE DISCUSSION BECAME more and more heated, and Anna sat there stiffly letting it happen, and not just because it made good television – or whatever the hell they called it when more than thirty million people were watching a live stream on the internet. The stink of cordite clung to her memory, if not her clothes as she sat in the middle of the five seats positioned in a curve on the sound stage so the LD1 could capture all of them in one shot, and close enough they could share the studio’s limited body mics.
“OK OK,” Professor Irving said as he leaned into the discussion with his big preacher’s hands thrust out. “Let’s go through what we do know – from science.”
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