Frontline

by Warren Hately

  Sitting to the far right, Father MacMahon didn’t much like the unsubtle rebuke. He was already glowering at the immunologist, so it was hard to describe exactly how his dark look worsened, except that it did. On the other side, between Anna and Professor Irving, the neatly-dressed, harassed-looking population control expert Eugene Olsen sat as mutely as he had so far. The other panelist – pulled from the street by Buddy, after Professor Olsen identified the man – was a pudgy older black guy with a thick moustache and an uncanny resemblance to the beat cop from Die Hard. And retired Lieutenant Barrance “Baz” Ezekiel Washington was a former policeman too. He’d struck up a conversation with Olsen while the two were bunkered down earlier with the crowd outside the Gazette building, and the helpful suggestion was a good one. Despite his track suit pants and stained t-shirt, Baz was a veteran street cop and had been taking calls from still-serving comrades throughout the day and the previous night.

  Irving had center stage, though not quite literally. He snapped Anna’s attention back into focus with the theatrical counting-off on his fingers as he berated them.

  “I’ve already said we don’t see any sign contact with these Furies is infectious, but let’s put some kind of transmissible disease as number one,” he said. “Maybe there’s another immunologist out there cleverer than me who can point to a factor that maybe I’ve missed,” he said.

  “Number two, the City already flagged possible contamination of a water source,” Professor Irving continued. “That could be an act of terrorism, a homeland security matter, a domestic political group, or what have you. Or, it could be human error – human error’s the most likely explanation in any scenario, in my view, whatever the mechanism – and human error could manifest in dozens of ways we can’t even hypothesize.”

  “Such as, Professor?” Anna asked.

  The question – the act of speaking – kept her in the room and in her body.

  Anna adjusted her position in the host’s chair like a driver trying to stay awake.

  “Well, it could be near-anything,” the college expert said. “Water supply, contamination from an airborne source, something linked to the City power supply.”

  Irving was good on camera and sometimes remembered to talk to the viewers, which he did now, angling with his eyes on the blinking LD1.

  “We live in a city where the power supply and the water supply are almost completely integrated,” he said. “Unknown biological agents, pathogens, almost anything could result.”

  “What else you got, boss?”

  It was Baz Washington’s question, slumped back in his chair like he had been since the debate’s ten-minute mark. He didn’t seem fazed at the slightest to be on air.

  As he told Anna, he was just “looking for somewhere to sit down a while”. And now he’d found it.

  “OK,” the Professor said to him. “Three, and one no one even considers, is something like a naturally-occurring airborne agent.”

  “What would that be, Professor?” Anna asked.

  “Spores,” he said and shrugged.

  Clearly Irving thought the remark was self-evident. Father MacMahon disagreed.

  “Surely, fourth,” he said, “you can’t deny this as an act of God?”

  Irving started to chuckle to show that, in fact, he could, but again it was the retired cop Washington who intervened.

  “I don’t see a lot of evidence for this God o’ yours, Father.”

  The Catholic priest shook in his wheelchair as if trying to turn it around.

  “In my years on the street,” Baz said, “I seen enough things to slap any nonsense out o’ me about the ‘Almighty God’ an’ all his works.”

  The last thing they needed was for the discussion to turn liturgical. Anna cleared her throat and shifted so everyone noticed her directing energy to Baz.

  “Mr Washington, we haven’t heard much from you yet,” she said. “You told me earlier, as a thirty-year veteran of Springfield PD, you’d heard from colleagues during the –”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what are you hearing?”

  “Aw Jeez,” the older man said with a brief laugh, slapping the arm of his chair and motioning politely to the priest beside him.

  “Stories that wouldn’t deter any God-fearin’ man from his religion, I’ll tell you that,” Baz said. “You people already proved earlier on that these are the Dead, man … risin’ from the dead, that’s the story on every cop’s lips. I had people reachin’ out to me, needin’ comfort, you know? They seen some … let me use the polite words and say ‘some messed-up stuff’ overnight, you feel me?”

  “Police have reported to you that people are rising from the dead?”

  Never in her career had Anna imagined say such words in an interview – and certainly never to a potentially global audience.

  Baz chuckled to acknowledge the mutual absurdity of the question.

  “I know, I know,” he said and motioned again. “But you showed it yourself, man. That lady out there – God rest her soul, or whatever – there weren’t nothin’ o’ the lady left in her, you dig?”

  Anna did indeed “dig”. She nodded tersely, and felt her phone buzz once against her hip. Somehow, in all the steep learning curve, it’d become acceptable for her to pull out her muted phone despite live-streaming internationally, the incoming texts as much a crucial part of their coverage as the experts in their seats.

  “What else have police reported?”

  Anna asked the question with her eyes on the phone. A text from an unknown number with a stock standard media announcement – from the President of the United States.

  Baz Washington answered the question, but Anna was already working towards cutting him short and getting O’Dowd or Demien to take over the chair as the retired cop told about numerous 911 calls for ordinary disturbances turning far more serious once the police had boots on the scene. A drug-affected teenager coming home late became a family homicide. Vandalism led to assailants shot dead by police.

  Suspected rapes and bag snatches turned out to be nothing of the sort. One of Baz’s old partners lost her rookie to the Furies. “Bit out his throat,” the ex-cop said. “My friend said it was like it was drinkin’ from a hydrant.”

  And when that officer went down in the line of duty, within moments, he got back up again and started attacking comrades with hands and teeth, even with a Glock still on his belt.

  Anna nodded, growing more and more grim as Washington’s stark outline wore on, and by the time she had the chance to politely cut him off, her face was a downcast iron mask and it was hard to keep the whole thing from crumbling as she dried her eyes.

  She turned her attention back to the camera.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re staying on air through all of this, but we have to take a short break,” she said. “We have just had a message from the White House.

  We’ll be right back. Please click the links on these sponsored messages to show your support, and we’ll be live again in five minutes.”

  Anna turned her solemn acknowledgement to her guests.

  “Thank you everyone,” she said. “Let’s get a glass of water.”

  The LD1 light went solid red and Anna slumped, tugging her body mic free, keen to get out of the studio as fast as she could.

  AFTER TWO MINUTES of advertising, Anna had Iskov switch the feed to Alexandra Ngo’s interviews in the street, which were already streaming as a second option on the Gazette website and gathering plenty of interest. The panelists needed the break, and Anna needed more than sixty seconds in the women’s restroom before she had her nerves in check. O’Dowd stood outside for her when she emerged and it took everything she had not to buckle instantly, not ready to face any more of his glowering belligerence.

  Instead, Douglas gestured to her with his cell in hand.

  “Anna, listen to me, please,” he said.

  O’Dowd swallowed with difficulty, clearly shaken. Anna slowed her own breathing to match, disliking
enormously the brittle feeling of her nerves.

  “I wanted to apologize,” O’Dowd said. “You probably … well, you definitely deserve it from me, and … Lenore made the hierarchy clear, before she was … killed … and I know I’ve … I’m difficult to work with, and I wanted to apologize for that.

  I also know you were right about what I was chasing down.”

  He hadn’t met her eyes till now and Anna took them in only for a moment.

  O’Dowd covered his face with his hand and Anna thought he might start bawling too, but nothing changed in his voice to betray such fears and she had the briefest question of whether it was all part of some more elaborate charade.

  “I didn’t really understand how widespread this thing is,” the senior reporter said and exhaled shakily. “I just got a text from the Oval Office –the real Oval Office, I mean.”

  “Yes, me too.”

  Anna’d already snagged a message from Melina to confirm the same, and eventually it’d be clear reporters on autodial across the country received the same text message within seconds of each other. The sense of an historic moment – for all the wrong reasons – chilled the air with a stomach-churning sense of unease.

  “Oh,” O’Dowd said. “OK.”

  He looked down into his twinned lifeless hands.

  “If you want me to go… .”

  “No, Douglas,” Anna said. “I appreciate your apology. Thanks. I’m really only interested in what’s best for the news, but I don’t want to drive over people to get there.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I want you to take my chair in there,” Anna said and motioned towards the studio. “Is that something you can do?”

  “I can do that,” O’Dowd said. “Better than putting the girl from advertising in there.”

  Anna gave him a slow look, disappointed at how poorly she masked her own surprise at the acid tone to O’Dowd’s words given his apology of just a minute before.

  “OK,” Anna said and snapped her jaw shut lest anything unhelpful came out.

  “I thought you might want to know, too,” O’Dowd said, again gesturing with his phone. “I’ve been told citizen militia have started turning out to support reservists and the police.”

  “Militia?” Anna said. “I didn’t think Illinois had any –”

  “Oh, yes we do,” O’Dowd said. “But apparently they have an active web forum … as well as links to white supremacists.”

  “Great.”

  “I’d love to … um, go out there – with a camera, I mean – so we could –”

  “Maybe later,” Anna said and deliberately cut him off. “We have the President in fifteen minutes. Melina’s stuck at City Hall waiting for further news and making inquiries about … something else. We need the other LD1 for the studio and I need you in there, for now.”

  “What about the TV guys?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  For a moment it looked like Douglas would argue, and all Anna’s talk about getting out on the street looked like a straw man ready for a little gasoline, but in the end the older reporter showed the same stoic professionalism he’d displayed doing a fine job during the first press call at City Hall the day before.

  “Yeah, OK,” O’Dowd said. “I need to take a shit first.”

  He moved past her to the men’s room. As much as a good dump was essential therapy for her, now Anna’s stomach groaned for more obvious reasons.

  A few of the other panelists shared her concern. It was getting on towards 4pm and she hadn’t eaten anything since her dawn breakfast of Iskov’s clandestine cereal.

  And if Professor Irving was right and the City’s water source could still be the cause of the contaminant, Anna figured she was screwed since they had nothing like an alternate water supply.

  She headed back towards the bullpen following the sound of Alexandra’s interviews coming from Demien Christopher’s screen, tugging her phone out of her waistband as had become a bad habit in recent hours as she tapped up Melina’s details to make a call – except the network signal only bleeped in her ear.

  “Shit.”

  Anna walked into the newsroom crewed by Demien alone.

  “How’s Charlotte?” he asked at once.

  “Um… .”

  Anna threw a guilty look back to the doorway, and by implication, the safe room at the back of the corridor in which Charlotte was laid out on Iskov’s rancid bed.

  “Are we still streaming Buddy’s team live?” she asked instead.

  “Yes?”

  “And the studio signal?”

  “You switched priority to the street interviews –”

  “OK,” Anna said.

  She hit redial with a nervous frown, but now the call went through as if it’d never faltered. And Melina answered with a forced cheeriness she clearly didn’t feel.

  “HEY,” Anna said with a similar inauthentic casualness. “How are you getting on?”

  “I don’t see myself getting out of here any time soon,” Melina replied.

  “What, ready to knock off?”

  “I think you know what I mean,” Melina sighed. “I keep askin’ Jenkins if we’re gonna convene again, but that guy’s a shyster.”

  “What have you managed to find out about that other thing?”

  Melina gave a snort of bemusement.

  “That ‘other thing’?” she asked. “Girl, I don’t think you need to worry about anybody from the CIA listenin’ in. Seems like they’ve got bigger things to keep ‘em busy.”

  “OK,” Anna said. “So, any word?”

  “The Mayor and Governor Glenn are locked in constant meetings,” Melina said. “We keep seeing ‘em comin’ and goin’, so I started sketching in all the other movers and shakers, drawin’ up a list to see who’s who.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Me and what’s left of the media pack here,” Melina said. “You’d be surprised how many people’ve gone AWOL.”

  “Yeah.”

  Anna had already scanned the local networks on her workspace browser, confirming there was a Seinfeld marathon for anyone hoping to get a break from the end of the world. Two of the other news channels were still putting in some kind of effort, while the last one was offline, not even running adverts from sponsors.

  The national and international networks screamed for Anna’s attention from the back of a queue of open web pages, but there simply wasn’t the time.

  “How did you go with your sketching?” Anna asked instead.

  “So we went through everyone we knew and there’s still a couple of people I couldn’t place.”

  “You don’t know them?”

  “Hey, City Hall’s O’Dowd’s beat, not mine,” Melina said. “Did I ever tell you they started me here as the entertainment reporter?”

  Anna chuckled at the idea. Melina continued on.

  “I hate to say it, but those of us left are all swappin’ notes,” she said. “Belinda del Ray’s been here since Jesus was a baby boy, and IDed everyone else as either FBI, CDC, City managers, or the liaison from the 85th. I’m still workin’ angles to find out who the other two are, but they’re in on every meeting.”

  “Either of them fit the profile?”

  “There’s a guy called Jones,” Melina said. “Fits the tee for a spook pretty well.

  Fills it out pretty well, actually. I think you’d probably like him, since you’re into that sort of thing.”

  Anna smirked to herself, and even forgave Melina her misuse of the old adage “fits to a t” for the sake of their battlefield friendship.

  “I was tryin’ to call you before,” Melina said again. “I couldn’t get through.”

  “I just had that too,” Anna said.

  “You think the phones could go down?”

  “The network? I don’t see why,” Anna said. “We’re mostly on satellites. Most phone towers have an emergency power source, however limited.”

  Anna traced their dialogue back to the previous bum n
ote.

  “You were trying to call?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Yeah, there was something else,” Melina said. “I don’t know if you noticed or not, or heard already from someone else, but the National Guard still hasn’t deployed. It’s still just police, firefighters, and the Army – and the Army deployed itself.”

  “And the white supremacists,” Anna said.

  “What?”

  “Douglas said there’s some militia group with an online forum,” Anna said.

  “They activated – or whatever the word for it is, because I don’t want to say ‘deployed’ – earlier today to help with relief efforts.”

  “I don’t think they’re the sort of volunteers the Mayor was askin’ for.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Watch yourself, OK?”

  “What, because I’m black?”

  “No,” Anna said. “But yes. And also because you’re a woman.”

  “Huh,” Melina replied, though it sounded affectionate. “So much for intersectional feminism when the shit hits the fan, huh?”

  “I just don’t want any of my reporters killed.”

  However Melina interpreted that remark, it effectively ended their call. The other reporter signed off from City Hall and Anna checked her cell, the charge running distressingly low.

  Demien cleared his throat from the far side of the room.

  “If it’s not a virus, why did Canada and Mexico seal their borders?”

  Anna considered the question a moment, knowing even as she did that Demien was now as motivated to justify Charlotte’s amputation as his own germaphobia.

  “I don’t know, Demien,” she said tiredly. “On another topic, though … um, what are you doing for food?”

  “I tried to call a few delivery places,” he said. “No answer.”

  He pulled out his desk drawer.

  “I have a box of breakfast bars in here for emergencies … and some chocolate.”

  “Jesus,” Anna said. “Anything would be fine … like, almost anything.”

  Demien brought her a couple of the wrapped bars and stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his hands as Anna devoured the first bar almost whole.