O’Dowd’s running commentary saved Anna the need for voiceover work, though that was an option too if required.
The live studio beyond the screen window remained dark and empty, and she wondered about Alexandra and Iskov, and then Charlotte, under the care of Professor Irving, and then all the other remaining strangers who’d come to shelter with them.
“Look at that,” Dwayne said suddenly.
The van’s bright headlights picked out a pale figure standing amid the randomly-parked cars in the street ahead: a man of unguessable age, naked as the day he was born, but clearly disemboweled and with horrific wounds to his legs and arms.
Buddy leaned the camera right into the front seats as Dwayne hit the gas to get past the creature, while O’Dowd clutched the dash and the door.
The injuries to the Fury’s legs meant it wasn’t quite as quick as its kindred, and the news van tore past before it could move more than a few feet away. To Anna’s astonishment, O’Dowd let loose with a whoop and opened the van’s heavy passenger door. It clipped the Fury with a meaty bang, and a distressing burst of orange fluid splattered the side of the van’s windscreen.
“You broke my damn side mirror, you fucktard,” Dwayne hissed.
“We’re on air,” O’Dowd said and grinned at him.
“Damn,” he then said to himself. “Did you see that one go down?”
Buddy’s camera eased back in its view as the TV van advanced through the mostly deserted streets, only a few cars abandoned at inconvenient angles. Broken glass from damaged shopfronts littered the sidewalks. Several times, the camera was almost too late to capture civilians running between stores and apartment buildings.
As the business district deepened, light were still switched on in some of the stores, and then as they drove past the bigger ones, the van navigated past numerous vehicles pulled haphazardly to a stop as hordes of Springfield residents seized on the crisis in an orgy of looting and mayhem. Dwayne slowed the van so Buddy could film, while O’Dowd quietly narrated the lack of police, not a member of the 85th in sight.
The burnt-out wrecks of two collided police cars marked the intersection beyond the looting frenzy, and Dwayne gently accelerated as someone around the front of one of the stores hurled something hard at the van which caromed loudly off the road surface beside them instead. Before the view escaped him, Buddy’s camera tracked more than a dozen youths as well as a few dozen older civilians like gatecrashers at a hip-hop gig wanting in on the action.
Dwayne steered the van towards the intersection with Madison near the Bank of Springfield complex and came to a poorly-merged snarl where the flood of vehicles trying to quit the city were stuck. Hundreds upon hundreds of tail and headlights added their surreal color scheme to the disastrous night, but rather than join the gridlock, Dwayne quickly steered them west, past several Army trucks and APCs and at least a dozen weary soldiers holding their guns on the sludge-like traffic with an air of tired watchfulness.
“What do you think?” Buddy asked.
Anna surrendered any thought they might be able to edit or refine their daredevil news effort, two million people watching and with Buddy and Dwayne more than willing to add a comment or two despite their years in the live news game.
The Emergency changed those rules, and all those still watching were either so desperate enough for insight they didn’t care about its source, or far too morbidly entertained presiding over America’s collapse.
The news crew in the van had a quick discussion, then Dwayne circled the deserted street in a wide arc, bizarre with the traffic chaos coming back into view on Buddy’s viewfinder just a few hundred yards away. The TV van rolled towards the soldiers and a Kansas farm boy with Corporal’s stripes moved up as O’Dowd rolled down the window.
“You have the check in to section HQ if you want to film around here!” the soldier yelled without preamble and pointed back the way they’d been going. “We’ve got choke points here, on the Parkways and Sangamon Drive, but you can get through using the side streets.”
The Corporal kept pointing west as if that was helpful, something about his anonymous, clean-shaven, pink-skinned face brooking no actual conversation on the topic. He wheeled back at once towards his unit as Buddy zoomed in to follow him.
The other soldiers were watchful, but impotent in the face of the snaggle of cars and the occasional van or box truck, motorcyclists doing their damnedest to thread through the nocturnal luminescence of the traffic, and more and more cars emerging from behind them to grow the chaos back the way they’d come.
“We’d have to circle around to get back to home base anyway,” Dwayne said.
“Let’s look for the Army checkpoint,” O’Dowd said. “Maybe someone’ll talk to us there.”
The TV van did a three-point turn in the empty street, nothing more immediately suspicious than a few sheets of tumbling newspaper, the previous day’s Gazette pages upholstering the odd randomly-parked car, fire-scorched shopfront or security grill along Ninth Street.
Here, too, there was the occasional straggler out and about. What the camera picked up as the van drove west, along East Washington, failed to clearly distinguish looters from the possible victims of the Emergency which all the evidence seemed to show had risen from the dead to wage war on those still alive.
Anna sighed deeply, taking a breath she’d failed to hold during the last few minutes with her eyes locked on her colleagues’ live drama. She still held her phone in one hand, and without any optimism at all, she tried giving Melina one last call.
No signal.
MORE THAN THIRTY minutes later, the broadcast had a domestic audience of just under a million viewers – a serious drop-off, even considering it was the middle of the night in the US – but now man astonishing ten million viewers followed the TV crew’s advances from overseas. Dwayne’s van drove slowly around the city’s back streets, not just seeking to triangulate the Army HQ site for that area, but sketching the tapestry of destruction in words and images.
Douglas O’Dowd’s narration was stellar.
“These are our streets,” he said in the quiet, shocked, reverent tone of the professional observer. “Streets where we plied our trades, stocked our houses, met with friends and family for drinks, to sit together, to eat, to celebrate our individual occasions. Now … this devastation was unthinkable only a few short days ago.”
Some of the streets were impassable. On a two-block stretch of Third Street, dozens of cars had been emptied in a hurry, numerous doors left open and the pavement dotted with handbags and rucksacks, but with no other explanation for the exodus. A few blocks further north, the van had to weave carefully between fire-scorched wrecks, the camera’s long panning shots taking in what looked like an abandoned crisis center in a multi-story medical complex. Now several fire trucks crowded before its ground-floor parking lot as more than a dozen firefighters struggled to contain a raging fire consuming its top floor. Only three spooked-looking street cops guarded the workers with shotguns and M16s. A pot-bellied desk cop tracked the news van’s slow transit in case any more nightmarish horrors suddenly leapt out.
“We’re near St John’s,” O’Dowd said. “Let’s try there.”
The reporter turned back so he could address Buddy’s camera.
“You see, emergency services are still hard at work,” O’Dowd said. “With what we’ve seen in just this short drive, one can only imagine the day – and night – our city’s finest have had to endure. If you are watching this from the Springfield area, do as the Mayor has said and stay indoors – don’t add to the confusion – no matter what we saw at City Hall earlier on.”
O’Dowd shook his head as if trying to erase the images Melina’s LD1 captured hours earlier, the vapor of the Mayor’s rushed exit when pressured about a doomsday scenario, and then the unthinkable chaos of the press briefing’s end.
“Look at that!”
One, then two more deranged-looking pedestrians came out of cover at the next i
ntersection as if they’d been waiting there. Two men and a woman, dead, yet still on their feet, rushed towards the van from behind a pair of stalled family wagons.
Dwayne mashed the floor pedal and the heavy van surged into life, shooting past them and then swinging a hard right at such a sharp angle the camera veered too, and watching them, Anna feared the TV truck tipping as Dwayne expertly gunned it and they flew down Carpenter Street as it rebadged for the east.
“Gotta love a Chevy,” the driver snarled.
There was a single line of cars headed towards the panicked exit out of the city, but no one remained in the vehicles even though many were still running, parked with their headlights on. The news van moved into the empty oncoming traffic lane and Buddy got plenty of vision of the Marie Celeste-style mystery. They also saw people boarding up in the nearby buildings, a few houses, two-story tenement blocks, motels and a church running down the left-hand side of the road. A number of men wearing camouflage combat vests and other motley gear guarded those buildings, watching over people scurrying from the cars further ahead of the moving van. None of the gunmen looked military. One of them wore an executioner’s black hood, the eye slits as he tracked the TV van, AR-15 cradled against his Walmart-bought combat harness, lending him an eerie horror movie vibe which suited the night. Planted in one of the front lawns behind them, a homemade banner displayed a black eagle in flight clutching a handgun against a pale blue background.
“Who the hell are they?” Buddy asked softly.
“Citizen militia,” O’Dowd said just as quietly.
It was as if they feared the civilian gunmen might hear them, which was a moot point soon as an ambulance with lights and siren blazing headed right towards them in its lane. Dwayne jerked the truck right, O’Dowd’s front corner clipping several parked vehicles with a deafening crash as the ambulance hurtled by. Dwayne cast worried looks around them as the TV truck stopped, and several more ambulances tore out of the next side street and past them looking very much like in the midst of some kind of escape.
“We are trying to establish whether the hospitals are still providing services through the Emergency,” O’Dowd said for the eleven million viewers’ benefit, though he might not’ve been so silky voiced if he knew the size of the audience, being someone who’d refused to use Facebook just a few days before.
“At the moment, folks, it doesn’t look good,” the reporter said, then to his companions, added, “But let’s keep going.”
“Where the hell is the Army?” Buddy muttered.
“Back towards Madison and Clear Lake,” O’Dowd said.
The camera caught people flitting from nearby buildings, plenty of them carrying things in their arms. A fit-looking guy ran out of an unlit office block wearing an ice hockey mask, pump-action shotgun in his hands. He saw the van and took off in the opposite direction as if spooked.
The whole area immediately north was for parking and open landscaping, broken up, at points, by a number of low fences, but the orange glow of the street lights and the distant hospital complex behind it showed hundreds of people moving in haste. Again Dwayne let the van slow, and Buddy cursed under his breath and cranked open the truck’s sliding side door, Anna imagining him holding onto one of the seats for balance as he shot crystal footage of dozens upon dozens of citizens, walking wounded, blood-spattered nurses and hospital staff and the occasional City policeman making their way from the sanctuary behind them.
At least one small fire burned in the hospital’s upper floors.
“Stay away from there!” a man pushing an unconscious woman in a wheelchair yelled at them as they moved past slow enough for his follow-up. “It’s not safe, there’s Furies everywhere!”
The van rolled on before O’Dowd could ask the eyewitness more, but there were scores of people hurrying across the road in front and all around them. Douglas yelled out several questions at anyone who might pay attention. A sweat-slick young black hospital orderly deftly leapt up onto the rim of the van door like performing a skateboard trick, though the addled look in his eye belied any pleasure. The camera pulled back hard as Buddy feared the young man was one of the very creatures they fled, but the orderly spoke to them quickly instead.
“All the people in the morgue, you got no idea how many there were,” he said.
“It’s like they just … got up at once.”
“Weren’t there any procedures in place for that?” O’Dowd barked at him. “We know the dead pose a major threat.”
“Procedure?”
The younger man looked hard at the reporter staring and gave a hollow laugh as he looked ready to leap back onto the passing street. He shook his head.
“‘Procedure’ went out the door hours ago,” he said. “Man, you got no idea what it’s been like in there. We need to get out of the city. Didn’t you see the news?”
The orderly checked the path ahead and then leapt from the crawling van without any farewell. Dwayne veered them around a bigger knot of people stopped in the middle of the lane, trying to help up an older man in a hospital gown experiencing a seizure. The heart stopped beating in Anna’s chest as she knew instinctively what she was seeing and suddenly feared O’Dowd and his team hadn’t realized it yet. She hurriedly started hunting out Douglas’ number on her phone, but Dwayne cursed loud enough for her to see they understood the threat too.
Likewise, so did the people around the dying man. As if by sudden agreement, the half-dozen Good Samaritans turned in different directions to run.
“Go!” O’Dowd yelled.
“Run it down!” Buddy added. “Help those people.”
Dwayne grunted, “Happy to oblige,” and the TV truck lurched forward, gathering fresh pace without much ground to do it.
The headlights caught the white glare of the skinny old man’s naked buttocks in the hospital gown as he whipped about as he stood, mouth open, black eyes leaking blood in that last split-second before the TV van barreled into him and the windscreen cracked sharp down the middle as the Fury was pitched up and over the roof.
“God damn it,” Buddy growled. “He better not take out the satellite dish.”
The van’s coverage continued unabated as they continued accelerating back in the direction of the massive gridlock now stretching as far as the eye could see along the northernmost portion of Ninth Street. The burning hospital now looked like little more than candlelight in their side view. And the low-rise buildings ahead were ominous silhouettes, given the luminescence of hundreds and perhaps thousands of fleeing vehicles trapped with seemingly nowhere to go.
Anna hit the button to call, but now she got a standard recorded warning to say the network was unavailable and call again later. Frustration made her growl. She’d almost forgotten anyone else was in the Gazette with her.
THE COVERAGE CONTINUED as the Gazette crew drove east, people in the streets, people smashing into stores, people frantically trying to hide in homes and businesses along the wide avenue. A family of four watched as the father tried the door of a parked minivan, then took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist, and smashed in the driver’s window. The camera caught O’Dowd’s mouth agape.
“This is utter chaos,” he said.
“Traffic ahead,” Dwayne warned.
The camera turned to the front view through cracked glass, only a few blocks now from the terminal stall of gridlock once again, orange street lamps lighting everything, even more people milling around the cars or streaming away from them.
“Soldiers,” Buddy said quietly.
Three reservists jogged down the middle of the street towards them, the white guy in the lead with his shirt undone as he waved his rifle overhead for them to stop.
One of the other soldiers had his assault rifle raised on the path behind them. There were several parked half-tracks with mounted turret guns on the corner of the street with a view out upon the chaos, but precious few military personnel in sight.
“Slow down,” O’Dowd said.
&n
bsp; “Are you sure?”
Buddy added, “They don’t look like they’re on duty anymore.”
“Slow down so I can talk to them and keep that camera ready,” O’Dowd snapped.
The van crept to a stop and the lead soldier came around as Dwayne rolled down his driver’s window.
“Hey,” the Reservist said. “Can you give us a ride?”
O’Dowd leaned in to talk across the gap. The view in Buddy’s frame was a congregation of heads, not much of the outside.
“What’s happening up ahead?”
“You need to turn this van of yours around and get to safety,” the soldier said.
“And take us with you. Things are turnin’ to shit.”
“Where’s the checkpoint?” O’Dowd asked instead. “Headquarters?”
“Back down there in the worst of it,” the soldier said.
His buddies joined him. The darker of the other two soldiers eyed the crew in the van dispassionately and whispered something in the Corporal’s ear, but the lead soldier shook him off again. He turned and banged on the side of the truck.
“Come on,” he said with a mild smile. “Permission to come aboard?”
“We’re going different ways,” O’Dowd answered and pointed through the windshield, crouched so the Corporal could see their intent to continue.
The soldier stared at them a long moment, not quite retaining his smile, and watching the image in close-up, Anna felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.
“Ask him about the nukes,” she muttered to herself alone in the studio.
The Corporal shook his head slightly, smile wry.
“OK, so be it,” he said.
He shook his head again, a loo0k of disbelief at something unguessed at as he wiped his brow and pointed towards the seemingly abandoned military vehicles ahead.
“Look, and everyone’s buggin’ out, and you should too, but if you’re determined to move forward, there’s a few of our guys still down there,” he said.
“Ask for a guy called Osterland … he’s about as crazy as you.”
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