“They’re in the lobby,” he said and gulped.
Any need for further explanation was abruptly punctuated by the clear, yet faint sound of one and then a half-dozen gunshots.
“Alex,” Anna said to no one.
Blaspheming under her breath, Anna ran down to the lifts. The overhead display showed the previous carriage nearly descended to the ground floor. She whipped her gaze back to the fiftysomething as he closed the fire door at the end of the corridor once another woman and a ten-year-old boy got clear.
“My crew’s in the lobby?”
The man hunched over and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “The monsters are.”
The woman behind him bawled “What’s the matter with those people” – as if she hadn’t watched anything the Gazette broadcast throughout the day. The daylight was fading beyond the office windows as the lowering sun went away beyond the tall buildings, and things inside seemed to darken as a result.
The gunshots came again, in rapid succession – a reload, Anna somehow new.
Then the lift counter chimed as the carriage started back up again.
“You might want to get back from there,” the older man called out.
Anna lifted, tilted her head at him.
“You know,” the man said. “What if some of them are Dead?”
THE LIFT DOOR chimed open and Anna took even more steps retreating to the Gazette’s glass façade. There was an awful groan from the elevator, then Buddy stepped out with the TV camera still raised high, followed by Alexandra helping Dwayne walking with a limp and clutching a bloodied knee. A distraught, caramel-skinned older woman and a black guy in a bomber jacket followed them out of the car.
“Are any of you… ?”
Anna realized she had no idea what she was asking. Buddy lowered the camera to carry it like a heavy suitcase, glancing with concern at his offsider and then to Anna, pointing with his free hand to the fire door and the unshaven man still loitering there.
“Secure that door,” Buddy said. “We have to get inside.”
“I heard shooting,” Anna said.
“That was me,” Alex said and gave a tired nod of acknowledgment. “All out of ammo, too.”
The Eurasian woman made a pained face, looking ready to crack under the stress. She hurried past and into the Gazette office, leaving Anna to help Dwayne close the distance. The sound tech reeked of stale sweat as he clutched his blood-soaked pants, a gauze bandage around his throat from the earlier tussle with Lenore.
“What happened?” Anna asked.
“What, you weren’t watching?”
“No, I was … on my way down.”
Dwayne eyed Anna’s bare feet with clear disbelief as they made it inside. The man with the fire door, who quickly introduced himself as Gert, started searching around for how to shut the stairwell for good, and almost twenty outsiders stood in various states of distress in the Gazette’s reception area, several of them already trying to figure out the company phones to call loved ones. A worried-looking man still wearing an apron hovered around Anna as she and Dwayne entered.
“Is there a doctor or anyone who can help?” he asked. “There’s a woman here with a broken arm.”
Anna just shook her head, wordlessly overwhelmed and trying to contain her own freak-out too. She ushered Dwayne to a chair, and an older woman already sitting there quickly made way.
“Bashed my knee when they chased us into the building,” Dwayne said with some kind of reluctance. But he looked up with sincerity when he added, “If Alex didn’t have that gun, we’d be toast right now.”
“Where are they?” Anna asked him. “The Furies. Are they in the building?”
Dwayne looked away with the tired shock of any newcomer to a battleground.
“I dunno, Anna,” he said. “I dunno.”
She left him a moment, moving to where Buddy stood trying to get away from other survivors petitioning him for help, tears leaking down his face despite a mood like he was ready to start smashing things. For some reason, seeing Anna gave him a kind of relief, and he wheeled into her trajectory, shutting out the quartet of people who thought a TV cameraman had some sort of obligation to help.
“Did you get it all?”
“The footage?” Anna asked him in turn. “Yes.”
Buddy let out a mighty sigh of relief. Amid it all, Anna flushed with appreciation that despite the chaos, the veteran cameraman still gave a damn.
“Hey,” she said to him. “Are you OK?”
Buddy nodded slowly. They had a moment to themselves.
“You know my ex-wife called me earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“First time in three years – and last time, it was only ‘cos of some bills for our kid.” He added, “My older boy’s a club player in Europe now. Soccer.”
“His father’s not bad on his feet either,” Anna said.
Buddy managed a shaky grin, remembering his heroics soccer-kicking Lenore Barrett’s head to save Dwayne, so much earlier in the day.
“The hours I spent with that boy in the park, growing up, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Hopefully he’s safe in Europe now,” Anna said, thinking instead about her brother, and realizing just as Buddyd did that there was no guarantee it was true.
“And how is your … ex-wife?”
“Hmph,” Buddy said. “Now she wants me to come over.”
Anna sighed. Buddy drew himself up to his full height.
“Told her I had work to do.”
Anna nodded her appreciation. She didn’t want him to think her flirtatious, so she gave him a daughterly pat on the arm, and Buddy glanced at her hand and faltered a little, awkward with it anyway. Anna winced, not as subtle maybe as she’d hoped, and the remaining panelists and Father MacMahon’s minor entourage emerged from the studio to provide a convenient distraction. O’Dowd led them out, ghost-riddled eyes tracking to Anna before he moved in among the newly-arrived crowd.
“We still have work to do,” Anna said.
“Yeah,” Buddy said.
Anna withdrew her phone and fired off a quick message to her brother, letting him know she was safe. It felt like a lie, but she distracted herself with work as usual.
“Where’s Demien?”
Alexandra re-entered, wiping her face with wet paper towelettes.
“I saw him outside, just a moment before they … attacked,” she said.
Anna absorbed that as the other woman added, “Looks like he’d peed himself.”
“I think Demien may have … tendered his resignation,” Anna said.
“Funny way to do it,” Buddy said.
“I don’t think … pissing your pants is mandatory.”
She tried to make it sound light, knowing it came off weird and inappropriate.
The others were kind enough to leave her wondering.
The panelists wanted to know if they were still needed. The harrowing footage of the Fury attack needed to be reviewed, edited, and made available online, though unbeknownst to her, digital natives overseas had stripped the Gazette’s live feed and posted it to a dozen other sites already.
“We would … like to be able to continue the discussion,” Anna told Baz, Professor Irving and the others.
It sounded weak, even to her. None of them were ready to go back into the studio, and with their numbers in editorial down even further with Demien gone, there weren’t enough of them to get even the most crucial tasks done in quick order.
That was assuming the reporters still served a purpose.
A brief flickering of the office lights was enough to remind Anna how the façade of everyday life had been torn from the city in less than seventy-two hours, and the forecast for the fast-approaching night didn’t look good. Sirens continued to blink and flash across the city, but gunfire came with increasing frequency, muted as it was through the Gazette building’s tall windows.
“I think we will be going,” Father MacMahon declared.
From his wheelchair, the Catholic priest offered Anna a terse salute, then looked meaningfully to his two assistants nearby. The woman, Julie, allegedly a nun, had blood stains on her shirt sleeves from caring for Charlotte Francis. Anna felt the pit of her stomach drop yet again.
“You’re going?”
Anna’s phone lit up in her hand, but she took a slight pleasure declining Mark Twining’s call to stay focused on the taciturn old priest.
“It’s not safe out there,” Anna said to MacMahon.
“We are all in the hands of the Lord,” he said. “Come on.”
Julie looked less than convinced, but her male counterpart took the handles of the reverend’s wheelchair enthusiastically, smiling at Anna as if he wasn’t strolling out into the Book of Revelations. Maybe that explained his excitement. O’Dowd got the door for them, scratching ruefully at his stubbled chin.
Professor Irving joined them, face etched with its usual alarm. He honed in on Anna, threading his way through the people cluttering the lobby, pausing briefly to boggle at a woman seven months pregnant. What she’d been doing headed to sanctuary at a newspaper office was anyone’s guess, but City Hall had said not to attend local hospitals.
“What a nightmare, Professor,” she said.
“Yes,” the older man agreed. “Your colleague, Miss Francis, she’s not doing well.”
Anna said nothing, returning her attention to the pregnant woman.
“We need to find out what’s what with the hospitals,” she said.
The lights flickered again. Anna looked around until she spotted Serik Iskov standing with a hand on Alexandra Ngo’s shoulder – Anna’s suit jacket shoulder, for what it was worth.
“Serik,” Anna called over to him. “What do you make of that?”
She motioned up at the lights, trusting he knew what she meant. Iskov and Alexandra drifted closer. Anna screwed up her nose and looked to the Professor.
“Is Springfield on nuclear?”
“No,” Irving said. “There’s several coal-fired plants.”
“Well, are they still putting coal in them … or whatever it is they do?”
The two men exchanged glances, but it was Iskov who spoke.
“Tried calling the building’s super, earlier on,” he said. “No dice. I’ll go have a look myself.”
“You could try asking a few of these people,” Anna said. “See if someone has any expertise?”
Iskov lifted his brows with impeccably polite derision. Alexandra went with him. Anna again turned back to the Professor.
“You could get a few of these people here,” she said to him. “Maybe come up with some kind of plan? Someone needs to touch base with the hospitals, at least, if Charlotte and this other woman need help. Someone else had a broken arm?”
Anna looked around, no idea where the person in question had gone.
“You haven’t watched … all the footage yet, have you, Miss Novak?”
“It’s Anna, please,” she said. “And no. I was … well, I’m not sure exactly what I was going to do. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.”
“There’s a lot more people out there that need help,” Professor Irving said gravely. “And there are those who died, too. That means, they will be out there, in the street, as well.”
“You think we’re trapped?”
“Not necessarily,” he replied. “But if these creatures, these Furies of yours, act the way they appear, they will move on to fresh game. And each person they hunt and kill adds more to their ranks.”
“Maybe that explains … how things have spiraled so fast… .”
The Professor lit on her with one of his trademark scowls and Anna felt appropriately stupid for the half thought-out remark. She nodded instead, as contrite as O’Dowd had seemed earlier.
“I need to review the footage,” she said. “Will you help?”
“Yes,” the Professor said emphatically, and then just sounded very tired. “I guess I have nowhere else to go, and we’re all in this together … for now.”
Irving stopped her just as Anna turned to leave.
“But something needs to be done about your colleague.”
Anna nodded, but cautiously – wondering what agreement consigned her too in the murky landscape of the near future not yet quite arrived.
PROFESSOR IRVING ROUNDED up a few of the survivors camped out in the Gazette foyer, though several of them left the building in haste when they realized their free, albeit brief ride was over. The Professor said no one was safe until the ground floor was secure, and the occasional muffled sounds of breaking shop windows down below, and the odd fender bender in the surrounding blocks, convinced them the well-dressed immunologist was correct. Four of the newcomers armed themselves with improvised weapons, though one of them, a black guy in a bomber jacket called Mason, had a nickel-plated Desert Eagle. They headed out in the wake of the other fleeing survivors, each wearing strange looks at finding themselves thrust into dangerous new roles that could turn truly nightmarish if any Furies lingered still in the lobby down below.
Anna learnt of the Professor’s preparations while bunkered away with Alexandra Ngo in the control booth. With her iPad neglected on the desk beside her, Anna worked the console to further familiarize herself with the video suite and its integration with online, the LD1 inert in the live studio beyond the see-thru screen, while also giving Alex a few extra units in her crash course on live journalism.
Anna’s final call to Demien Christopher went unanswered. She hadn’t expected much when earlier attempts didn’t get through, and now her attention was focused on toggling the video capture from Buddy’s TV camera and trying not to get sucked in by the horror of what they’d filmed.
After the roaming Furies took down the businessman in the street, the crowd behind the camera team went berserk in their panic, fleeing in all directions. Through Buddy’s lens, it seemed the seven undead Furies understood that butchering the stragglers threw everyone else into a crazed flight response, after which they hurtled forward like a terrifying flight of vultures clothed in human flesh.
Buddy’s team ran amid the panic too, with cameraman’s labored breathing the only soundtrack for vital seconds as they headed for the Gazette’s entrance along with twenty or thirty or forty others. The bulk of the crowd chose to hightail away down the street, running as a fast-evaporating group as they split and split again past parked cars, into other shopfronts, parking garages, or heading for the next block over, and Buddy caught the end of it from the lobby’s steps as at least three of the onlookers were taken down by the feral hunters and killed.
The footage showed Alexandra in Buddy’s face, pulling at him, yelling at him to run as the one-armed Korean woman and the rocker chick with her throat torn out spotted the escapees and veered towards them.
Buddy broke and ran, but like a true veteran, he carefully reversed the camera on his shoulder, moving as best he could to minimize the inevitable shaky-cam cliché of Alex lifting her handgun from the lobby door and firing double-handed, purse-holster hanging from her side as she then retreated into the lobby with them, firing five times in total before the weapon clicked empty and she chased after the camera team.
Buddy’s camera swiveled again once they reached the lifts. Now the footage was a blur, Alexandra reloading her Walther, Dwayne clutching his knee and swearing, a dozen other people headed for the stairs across from them.
The Korean woman pushed the lobby’s glass doors open and the rocker chick bounded in on hands and knees like a feral animal with a scent for blood.
ANNA CAME OUT of the studio waving her concerned look like a banner above her head. Professor Irving stood in the middle of the remaining survivors milling in the foyer. Some had already made camp among the scattered furniture. Irving caught her expression at once and tensed.
“What is it?”
“One of the Furies might’ve got into the stairs,” Anna said. “We don’t know how clever these things are. It mig
ht still be in there, trapped –”
“Alright, Anna,” the academic said. “I’m onto it.”
Anna hadn’t expected the terse and generally bad-tempered immunologist to be such a rock, but she was grateful to him. Many of the terrified-looking survivors kept their eyes on her, Anna’s own theatrics and the flush she could feel on her normally pale face probably not helping much. She felt strangely conscious of her bare feet, toes scrunching at the non-existing fabric of the foyer’s drab carpet.
Then her phone started ringing.
Anna turned back to the studio to take the call from Melina, noting the lights out in the editorial bullpen. Anna let her ring for the second or so it took to peer into the hub, Serik Iskov curled up on an improvised bed of his own laundry, clearly not keen to sleep in his own quarters given the ailing Charlotte occupying his filthy bed.
The thought of the gravely-ill redhead and what might happen if Charlotte died, alone in there, vanished from Anna’s head at her phone’s insistence, and she answered more brusquely than she wished. Melina’s annoyed tone dispelled those thoughts as well.
“God damn it,” the other reporter said. “I’ve been trying to call for half an hour now.”
“I’ve been here,” Anna said.
“It’s not you, it’s the network,” Melina replied. “Tech guy here says the systems overwhelmed by call volume.”
Anna drank that in a moment as Melina went on.
“All those people trying to reach their loved ones,” she said.
“Heavy.”
“Listen,” Melina said. “Everyone’s talkin’ about the attack you guys just filmed, but if we’re still chasing ratings, we’re gonna have to do better than that.”
“I don’t think we’re chasing ratings anymore.”
Anna re-entered the control booth to see Alex in her seat, carefully testing out some of what she’d been shown.
“Almost every TV station in the flyover States are out on the streets now as this thing spreads,” Melina said. “Good job and all, you know. I trust those two dudes and that pin-up from corporate are OK, but Fury attacks aren’t the story anymore.”
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