Frontline

by Warren Hately

  “Yes,” Anna agreed vehemently.

  “Everyone’s callin’ ‘em Furies, Anna,” Melina said. “Because of you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Anna gave a shaky laugh.

  “Not the sort of legacy I expected,” she said, then added impulsively, “I thought I might have a kid or two one day, you know?”

  And then she burst into tears.

  Alex went from alarm to practicality in one swift move, respectfully and carefully removing the cell from Anna’s grasp as the hardnose reporter curled up on one end of the long sofa, completely overcome by so many layers of competing terror and grief, the fear, anxiety, and sense of everything unraveling so fast and with such vastness that her shock-addled brain simply couldn’t grasp it all at once. She couldn’t hold the entirety of it within the palm of her mind, and for long moments, her body lay transfixed, curled, exhausted, until the first major release came and went and she returned to herself hearing Alexandra’s short, clipped mutterings of agreement as she kept on the line with their colleague at City Hall.

  Anna sat up wishing for something other than the jacket she now removed to mop at her face, her bare toes dug into the plush studio carpet, and listening as Alexandra navigated her way through transferring emailed files into the upload manager. Anna’s face was a mess, and her thin shirt was increasingly grimy as a result of the afternoon’s calamities, but Alex was at risk of deleting something if left to complete the transfer by herself.

  “What’s this?” Anna asked.

  “City Hall’s called an emergency press conference,” Alexandra said. “But they’ve sent out an Excel file with up-to-date information on the city’s crisis centers – the ones that have still got people at them.”

  “An Excel file?” Anna said with a wheezy laugh.

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said with an expression that was anything but triumphant.

  “Excel is one area where I do excel, sad to say it.”

  The former advertising rep met Anna’s eyes.

  “Not exactly a valuable skill-set in the zombie apocalypse.”

  “I don’t know,” Anna replied and shook off a deep unease at the old black-and-white movie reference. “Coming in pretty useful right now.”

  Anna watched her comrade unpack the data. The computing power at their disposal meant not even the inevitable software lag held them at bay for long.

  Alex put Anna’s phone on the desk between them and switched it to speaker.

  “Melina said the City’s PR guy called the crisis centers ‘fallback positions’,”

  Alex said loudly for Melina’s benefit.

  “Jenkins?”

  “It was like it was … deliberate.”

  Melina’s voice was tinny and thin.

  “I think he was deliberately trying to tell me something,” she said. “Like, ‘that’s how bad this thing is getting’.”

  “That’s because that’s how bad this thing is getting,” Anna said.

  “Yeah,” Melina replied.

  They sat in silence a moment as each reflected on the gravity of the concept.

  Anna refused to retreat back into her paroxysms of a minute before, and she literally shook her head to clear it, accompanied by a sigh more like a very feminine growl.

  Alexandra straightened up beside her, intimidated, Anna realized, as she tried to soften her warrior’s face, lips trembling the moment she relaxed instead.

  “Melina,” Anna said. “How long until the conference goes live?”

  “What, you’re not watching me on camera?”

  Anna scowled even more, realizing how daft she’d been. She drew Alexandra’s attention, then showed her the relatively simple move of switching camera feeds. The monitor blinked awake with a view of Melina Martelle wearing a far more rumpled version of her earlier attire, several dozen people in similar states of disarray prepping the Mayor’s podium once again, and the Mayor and the Governor already standing at the back talking in among numerous other officials.

  Things looked heated.

  “It’s almost show time,” Melina said.

  “And after that?”

  For a moment, it almost felt like she and Melina made eye contact, such was the earnest look on the other reporter’s face addressing the camera. They both knew it might be suicide to try crossing Springfield with the city under siege from within, and only a whisker’s breadth away from crashing into whatever lay on the other side of Martial Law.

  “Almost everyone’s bunkering down at City Hall,” Melina said and shrugged.

  “We need someone here anyway, so that’s gonna be me. Miss y’all.”

  She winked to show it was a remark ladled with irony, but Anna’d long since realized all jokes grew from an acorn of truth.

  “Stay safe, Melina,” Anna said. “Do they still have all that area secure?”

  “Nothing to make me hate politicians more than seein’ how many troops are deployed here to keep ‘em safe.”

  “OK,” Anna said. “Listen, do you have a plan for the conference?”

  Melina shrugged.

  “Jenkins already said ‘no questions’.”

  Anna replayed her earlier conversation with her brother and nodded to herself, confirmed in what she believed.

  “OK,” she said to her colleagues. “They might not want questions, but hear me out for a minute.”

  And she told them about the President’s Crisis Line.

  THE PACK ATTACK on Buddy and his team had distracted Anna from the nagging worry about the cryptic parting words in the President’s last address. As if the cocktail of Anna’s anxiety needed anything more, a deep, gut-churning fear returned as she considered her instructions to Melina and watched Nick Hocking take the microphones once again as the conference immediately got underway.

  The Mayor was stressed out, his eyes so red he could’ve just smoked a truckload of weed. He raised a hand to silence the self-soothing reporters and realized something about the gesture resembled a surrender, so he dropped his arm like it didn’t belong to him and fixed the depleted media pack with a fierce stare.

  “To the people of Springfield, we have to urge you,” he said without preamble. “Please, stay in your homes. Stay off the streets. Stay out of traffic. This Emergency is bad enough without innocent people getting caught up in the disaster still gripping our city. We can contain this!”

  The Mayor shook his fists, livid with frustration.

  “Please,” he said again. “But you’ve got to give us a chance. The National Guard is yet to arrive – we’re not even sure if they’re coming – and thank God for the First Army Reserve. Our police and frontline forces have been on continuous shift for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “What about the hospitals?” someone yelled.

  “I said no goddamned questions!”

  Red-faced, Hocking looked about to hammer curl the podium. He stood there drinking in chest-racking breaths, then returned Terminator-like to his message.

  “We can do this, people,” he said. “Every one of you in Springfield today, you can help. Support your neighbors. Protect your homes. And for God’s sake, keep off the streets. If you’re able to provide expertise and skills, people with reasonable physical health are urged to please come forward to help. Our hard-working police and firefighters and nurses – and yes, our nurses and doctors too – need a break.

  Seriously. Otherwise, please just keep off the streets. I really can’t say it enough, that’s why I might seem like I’m rambling, but we’ve got this, OK? Seriously. But … really really really please just stay off the fucking streets, OK?”

  Something about the mood in the air made the otherwise unthinkable profanity seem completely normal – like how real people speak, most of the time – and Melina saw the chink in the Mayor’s armor and went for it with an impeccably-pitched question.

  “Can you explain to us what the Crisis Line is please, Mr Mayor?”

  The question hit Nick Hocking completely out of left
field and the expression captured on his face would’ve carried front pages and morning news discussions for weeks, if only the circumstances of it weren’t so bad.

  “How do you … know about … that?” he asked.

  The other journos broken into open revolt, repeating variations of Melina’s question because they had no other idea themselves, and the burgundy-tressed Belinda del Ray turned on her ever-trusty cell with a violence suggesting some sort of betrayal that she didn’t have the scoop – whatever the scoop was.

  But Anna, Alex and Melina had discussed this contingency as well.

  “Mr Mayor!”

  Melina had to say it several times until her brethren shut the hell up.

  “Mr Mayor!” she called. “What has the City been told about a possible scorched earth response?”

  Of all the delicate political moments that Nick Hocking had managed so deftly in his career, this wasn’t one of them. Face frozen in a horrified mask, the Mayor turned, colliding with the advisors hurrying forward to join him, and he pushed them and himself away to the door behind the stage as the reporters surged forward yelling more incoherent questions.

  The half-dozen armed cops on security detail stepped out to brace against the oncoming tide, but when the angry journalists and their cameras kept coming, it only took one of the helmeted cops to lose his cool.

  A young cop fired his M14 into the ceiling, perhaps hoping to shock the media into obedience, but it only caused one of the other officer to misunderstand the urgency, turning his gun on the closest reporters coming at them. In the chaos, the gunfire triggered an utter stampede, and the fixed view from Melina’s LD1 pitched violently sideways and then the transmission turned to static.

  O’Dowd burst into the control room to find Anna and Alex on their feet with hands to their shocked faces, staring at the white noise as if still watching the distressing scenes.

  Anna turned her mortified gaze on O’Dowd, thoughts filled with fear for whether Melina had even survived the travesty they’d just witnessed – and they’d broadcast to the world.

  “Where’ve you been?” Anna snapped.

  O’Dowd’s blaze cooled in a microsecond. He kept his soulful, belligerent brown eyes locked on Anna’s cold blue stare.

  “With Charlotte.”

  “Oh.”

  Anna crimsoned at once.

  “I’m sorry, Doug, it’s –”

  “It’s Douglas.”

  “Yes,” Anna replied. “Y-yes, of course.”

  O’Dowd still held the door ajar. The noise of citizens yelling and crying in the office outside filtered through to them. As awkward as their exchange, Anna still tried to change tack.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The civilians are in the Oval Office, watching on the monitors in there,”

  O’Dowd said.

  “Oh.”

  Already standing, Anna walked out into the corridor and eyed survivors storming out from the conference room and back into the lobby, talking and arguing amongst themselves with clear animation, if not outright distress. An older man in leisure wear steered his Thai wife and a copper-skinned boy across the foyer and past anyone in their way. The population control expert Eugene Olsen followed, shooting scattered looks around the room at nobody else streaming for the exit with them.

  “What are you just standing there for?” he yelled. “Doesn’t anybody understand that means they’re not sending help to Springfield? We’re trapped here.”

  He whirled around and rushed to catch the swinging glass door and was gone, taking his adumbrations of doom with him just like that.

  Anna looked around wondering who was meant to answer the fled Professor’s question, instead finding most of the survivors’ eyes on her again, as well as O’Dowd emerging from the studio hub responsible for the terrifying broadcast they’d all just witnessed.

  Anna turned to her phone still clutched in one hand rather than deal with those eyes pleading for answers. She tapped up Melina’s number again and called. The phone was still ringing out when O’Dowd stepped alongside her.

  “What do we want to do?” he asked.

  Anna checked back at half the people still watching them like hawks, gave an irritated growl, thumbed her phone dead, and motioned O’Dowd back into the comparative privacy of the corridor.

  “What do we want to do about what, Douglas?” she asked. “Go online and tell them Illinois and the Midwest are locked on for nukes?”

  “You think that’s what it means?”

  “We can’t know what the hell it all means,” Anna said, referring to the images they’d just watched. “Melina could be lying on the floor of City Hall dead for all we know. It sure as hell didn’t look like we were getting any more statements out of Mayor Hocking. The President’s ordered a Crisis Line established across the North East … even though there’s already Fury attacks in New York.”

  O’Dowd stared at her afresh. Despite her fervent tone, they’d kept their voices low, and the majority of the survivors turned back to their own discussions rather than keep eyeballing them.

  “How the fuck do you know all this?” O’Dowd asked.

  Anna blinked, and declined to feel self-conscious.

  “I have a … my brother, he’s a European field officer for the CIA,” Anna said. “Obviously, I just told you that on condition of confidentiality strictly between you and me, right?”

  “Jesus,” O’Dowd exhaled. “What are they … what are Crisis Lines? I mean, I can imagine, but why are you talking about nukes?”

  Anna nodded. They were reporters now, the nauseous feel of knowing they might be living on the doomsday clock pushed into abeyance.

  “The CIA use the term when they have to contain a major catastrophe of some kind,” Anna said. “It’s a contingency, never carried out on American soil. But some of those scenarios involve a scorched earth response.”

  “Nukes?”

  “That’s why I said what I said,” Anna explained. “What are we meant to go online and say, after that performance? I don’t even know … I mean, fucking hell …

  Can you even believe we’re talking about this? It feels surreal.”

  Anna walked a few steps closer to the studio door, tempted to slap her own face. O’Dowd shadowed her.

  “So we need some kind of confirmation?” he asked.

  “We can’t just report speculation.”

  “People are going to flee the city regardless,” O’Dowd said. “You saw the people back there.”

  And he gestured to the foyer, acquiring Anna’s slow nod.

  “I don’t even know myself if I think that means nukes, Douglas.”

  “We need confirmation,” he said again.

  “On the record,” she agreed.

  The studio door flew open and Alexandra Ngo leaned out breathlessly.

  “Quickly,” she said. “It’s Melina. She’s alive. And online.”

  THE THREE OF them poured back into the soundproof booth, hypnotized at once by the found footage unfurling across the studio monitor. Melina’s ragged breathing carried clearly as she moved at a rapid pace, outside, but still in the grounds of the City Hall complex.

  Anna realized at some point it had become night. The cover of darkness only riled her fears further, and now she retrieved her crusty jacket and slipped it on as if to ward off fever chills.

  O’Dowd sat heavily as the roaming LD1’s view caught more and more light, then the flashing red-and-blue glimmer of police cars seen through a wrought-iron fence, over which the camera slowly rose as Melina somehow managed herself up and over the fence and its flanged, ten-inch anti-intruder spikes.

  “I really hope you’re getting this,” Melina muttered out of sight. “I just cut my hand pretty bad. Damn.”

  There was a line of queued police cars nearby with their lights active, repelling the evening darkness covering one of the long snaking driveways through the grassed hillocks surrounding the historic City site. The camera pitched sideways fast,
Melina rushing out of sight at seeing every police cruiser had a driver in it, while at least one crew of armed tactical police came from the direction of the distant gatehouse checking in between all the vehicles doing a security sweep.

  “If you are receiving this,” Melina said in a hushed, but professional voice, “this is Melina Martelle for the Springfield Gazette, here in the City Hall precinct tonight outside the scene where only, I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes ago, a number of my defenseless colleagues from the Fourth Estate were callously gunned down by Springfield police.”

  The trio in the sound booth stood captivated by the footage, Melina’s narration – and her courage. The longer the gloomy, sometimes unclear images ran, the more obvious it became that City Hall was a frenzy of activity, with more security teams patrolling the grounds, helicopters blinking with lights overhead, and even a canine unit rushing along a distant perimeter fence guided by spotlights.

  Melina turned the camera back to the left, along the side of one of the big civic buildings where yet more police and unidentified personnel hurried harried-looking City Hall staff out a service exit to the waiting convoy.

  Gunshots rang out somewhere on the grounds, but Melina’s camera stayed steady, panning across the action to capture the sense of the evacuation somehow ensconced behind nothing more than a single shady tree rendered into a hiding place by the evolving night.

  “We are seeing what seems to be a mass exodus,” Melina said. “These are City officials and key support staff you can see hurrying to what looks like a fleet of police vehicles.

  “We know the President ordered all air travel suspended, but these vehicles are whisking away every City official in a hurry, that’s for sure.

  “Minutes ago, the Mayor, Mayor Hocking, refused to answer questions we asked about the establishment of a Crisis Line bisecting the country, some kind of response of last resort, and whether that meant a quarantine zone or whether some kind of biochemical or even nuclear response might be coming our way … and whether that means we’ve been left behind, surrendered … and what other cities across our country might also be sharing our fate.”