Frontline

by Warren Hately

  The Corporal called his companions away from their open stares at the TV crew, and there was no denying the subtext of how easily they could’ve just taken the vehicle – and the other soldiers looked willing to do it, too.

  But instead they moved on.

  “The Army’s … deserting,” O’Dowd said.

  Dwayne shifted the van back into gear as Buddy spoke.

  “These guys are Reservists,” he said. “They have homes and people here who probably need them too.”

  “Sure,” Dwayne said. “But if we don’t have the Army, who else we got now?”

  He looked around the cabin and the camera perfectly captured the driver’s growing horror at seeing the world unraveled.

  “What the fuck are we doing out here, man?”

  “Looking for evidence,” O’Dowd chided him. “And doing our job.”

  “You still got a job, O’Dowd?” Dwayne snapped back. “You lookin’ forward to ya next paycheck?”

  “Shut up, you two,” Buddy said. “Camera’s rolling.”

  “And so are we,” O’Dowd said, and motioned to the driver like Dwayne was just another employee. “Take us to the end of the street.”

  THE VAN DROVE in close enough that the Biblical exodus out of central Springfield became the full background of every shot. The car lights and the streetlamps lit the whole avenue in reds, pinks and orange, bright enough to shoot images clearly, despite the city blocks away from the flood falling back into darkness. The transmission truck couldn’t advance any further, with vehicles of every shape and size blocking Ninth Avenue and its sidewalks as well. An Army tank added to the obstruction, placed in the middle of the thoroughfare much earlier in the day and now landlocked by the fleet of vehicles around it, likewise stranded headed for the fastest route out of the city and now at a standstill.

  The nearby APCs were uncrewed, but the camera caught sight of several soldiers up on the tank turret about a hundred yards away, deep into the sea of vehicles. All around them, at street level, motorists stood by their cars, some of them unpacking suitcases and anything else they’d tried taking with them out of Springfield as soon as rumors of the Crisis Line were aired. The soldiers wore helmets and full Afghanistan gear, the Reservists not up with the latest color scheme, but they angled the heavy machine gun with obvious expertise back into traffic, and the lean-faced officer directing them scanned the gridlock with binoculars raised.

  “They must be the guys,” O’Dowd. “What name did he say? Osterfeldt?”

  “Something like that,” Dwayne answered.

  “So we’re going mobile?” Buddy asked.

  “We’ve got plenty of range,” his partner said.

  O’Dowd told them to hurry up, alighting from the vehicle and disappearing from view as he checked the security of their surrounds. The camera barely picked up his swearing as Buddy clambered out his side door and came around the rear, surprised to meet up not just with the Gazette reporter, but Dwayne hobbling along after him holding his boom mic and still fixing on his belt.

  “What about your knee, fool?”

  “Who are you? My mother?”

  Buddy knew he was a visual storyteller, so he brought the camera up to show Dwayne’s lean, sweat-damp face. Dwayne’s eyes fidgeted sideways under the scrutiny, and Buddy turned about to film Douglas O’Dowd stalking out across to the first gridlocked cars.

  Almost at once, the bullish reporter flinched and dropped into cover behind an SUV.

  “What is it?” Dwayne asked off-camera.

  A loud whining noise built in pitch, and then an underage rider on an unlicensed dirt bike came through the stalled traffic. Just as quickly, the hirsute patriarch of a big Italian family stepped out from his people to pull the kid off the bike. The motorcycle screeched as it lost its rider and clattered between the vehicles, but Buddy filmed everything as the Italian man dumped the rider, grabbed his teenage son and younger daughter, and hurried them to where the bike had crashed.

  With the commotion at an uncertain finish, O’Dowd turned back to motion the camera team closer.

  “C’mon!”

  The camera advanced until it was in among the stalled traffic, plenty of drivers and passengers still in their cars as if paranoid the route ahead was going to open up the moment they gave up. Families and vehicles full of random people thrust together by the Emergency peered out hauntingly as the camera team passed, and Buddy’s lens also took in the numerous other drivers already out of their cars, the whole end-of-the-world vibe of the disaster only confirmed by yet more terrified, shell-shocked, appalled expressions as people encouraged family members and co-workers from vehicles to help with carrying their ramshackle bundles of survival gear.

  It didn’t seem like many people had a Plan B.

  O’Dowd led them through the exodus to the monolith of the stranded tank, the soldiers on board already well wise to their approach. The two-man gun crew ignored the reporter, the TV crew moving around for an easy angle to film up at their leader as the officer clambered over the turret structure to standing imposingly above them.

  “What are you after, people?” he asked. “I’m Captain Eric James Osterland, still at my fucking post.”

  “Captain, I’m Douglas O’Dowd from the Springfield Gazette!” Douglas yelled up to him. “We’re live on the Internet now, sir. What can you tell us, please? We haven’t heard anything from Washington or the President in hours and people are panicking because they’re worried about a possible doomsday response.”

  The veteran soldier stared down at them craggy-faced, Buddy’s camera light not able to do much to dispel the shadows transforming the Captain’s face into a Rorschach mask at that distance.

  “We’re up against it, that’s for sure,” the Captain said.

  “Can you tell us a little more than that please, sir?”

  Captain Osterland looked like he was past the point of giving a crap about his authority to speak on behalf of the US military. He gazed off in the direction the traffic was once headed, inhaling the night air as if anticipating the dawn. Instead, his eyes narrowed and he pointed sharply, barking to his men. The Captain lifted a Mossberg shotgun, but his gunner retrieved an AR-15 rather than angle the turret gun big on a single figure flitting between cars another sixty yards away. Several of the motorists in that directed yelled and screamed as the night filled with car horns.

  The tank-mounted Private fired and then fired again.

  Buddy wasn’t quick enough to catch the action, focused more on the soldiers than the lone Fury they’d sighted, but the aftermath made it clear they confirmed the kill, and the view briefly dipped to catch Dwayne’s haggard look back that way as he stood hunchbacked, the boom handle weighing him down.

  “Captain?” O’Dowd called again.

  The soldier looked down at O’Dowd and shrugged.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  “Son?” O’Dowd yelled back. “Can you give us an update, please –”

  The Captain held up his hand and it was almost astonishing Douglas O’Dowd fell immediately silent. The raised hand turned into Osterland pointing at the camera.

  “That thing’s on?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “On the Internet, you say?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  The officer nodded, jaw set grim and determined.

  “Well Mr O’Dowd, if history proves me wrong today, at least I’ll know I did the right thing,” he said. “It’s my unhappy duty to inform my fellow citizens that our President yesterday authorized a nuclear strike against Springfield and more than a dozen other cities across the continental United States in a vain hope to contain these Furies, such as the one my men just killed there.”

  The chilling admission hit Anna in the control booth as hard as anyone else, and the camera caught a glimpse of O’Dowd stammering like a cub reporter straight out of college, eyes boggling at the awful revelation casting the city’s troubles in a fresh new horrific light.

  But the
screams in the background had never completely stopped, and before O’Dowd could fire his return question or Captain Osterland could reveal the fatal deadline for the President’s threat, those screams redoubled, demanding the soldiers’ attention back across the roofs of stalled traffic and the dozens of car windscreens facing them.

  “Did you hear what he said?” a freak-sounding Dwayne asked off-screen.

  “I dunno, what, what… .”

  “Over there!” O’Dowd’s voice yelled more loudly.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” the reporter said.

  “Can you hear –?”

  “Buddy, turn the damned camera.”

  The view abruptly shifted from the side of the tank to the outlook across the gridlock, then zoomed slightly, better to capture the far side of the street. Hours ago, eager motorists had broken through narrow fencing to queue along the old rail line as well as the asphalt, but they’d only added to the stemmed flow of vehicles quitting Springfield. The picture sharpened under Buddy’s control, slowly resolving the images moving quickly through the gloom beyond the far edge of the vehicles.

  Anna was less distracted from the doomsday warning than the soldiers or the valiant TV crew, but despite her thrashing heartrate, Anna squinted, locking her eyes on the monitor to register another running figure in the shadows on the far side of the traffic, and then realizing just as quickly how all of the shadows over there were moving – all of the shadows were running figures – as more than a dozen Furies burst across the traffic with many more of them charging along behind.

  Half of the stalled vehicles had people in them still. All of the civilians already out of their cars immediately started hurrying away, in the direction of the tank and the camera crew, weaving in and out of the staggered cars ahead of them and sending the other civilians already in the street before them into a complete panic. The screams built into a frightened crescendo that didn’t cease, dozens of men, women and children now surging through and past the diorama in front of the tank with at least a dozen bloodied Furies after them.

  And the camera caught it all.

  “They’re coming this way!” someone yelled, possibly O’Dowd.

  Buddy moved back into the cover of the tank and knelt, but the angle was wrong, and for a moment all Anna and anyone else watching could see was the closest vehicles with a few legs and feet rushing between them. Then Buddy groaned, loud enough for the whole Internet to hear, as he hoisted the camera up and hissed for Dwayne to help him climb the tank – but that seemed neither possible nor likely.

  Dwayne’s cheek briefly filled the lens as he bawled for Buddy to get the camera out of his face. People yelling all around them almost drowned the pair’s banter – and then the M240H machine gun over their heads roared into life.

  O’Dowd’s shouts somehow carried above the chattering rounds, spent shells tinkling around them. This was serious warzone business now, and Buddy scrambled away from the tank and the cartridges clattering onto the tarmac, headed for where O’Dowd had made cover at the front of a nearby cab. The jiggling camera played witness as the tank-mounted gunners poured methodical fire in a tight arc back and forth in front of them, mowing down at least the first dozen Furies while indiscriminately demolishing the stranded cars behind them and any civilians still stuck inside. Heavy 7.62mm round punched through roofs and engine blocks and more than a few windscreens exploded in redness amid all the flying glass.

  Yet more living corpses chased the survivors through the jammed traffic directly in the camera’s foreground, and it was right then O’Dowd and his team saw the situation was hopeless and started fleeing as well. Citizens with bitten-out throats and torn-open cavities threw themselves onto the fleeing crowds. The screams and utter savagery were shocking.

  And then the camera crashed to the ground.

  “Doug!” Buddy cried off-camera.

  More people ran past the fallen view, then the camera shunted about, pitched again, and finally lay on its side capturing the last of several people running from the area as the enraged machine gun cut out. A teenage girl in one-piece bathers and a swimming cap had Dwayne pinned to the ground with one talon on his face and her knee in the middle of his back. The girl’s lungs hung out of her torn ribs, inflating and deflating rapidly as she bit down into the side of Dwayne’s cheek and tore most of his face away between her teeth.

  Anna cried out aloud. Shaking and sobbing, she could only watch as the unshifting view caught Dwayne’s frantic adrenal struggle, tossing the girl off him, only to be tackled by a throatless doctor in a white coat who pushed the sound technician’s head back so hard he was knocked out on the road surface.

  And then the camera caught every detail as the Furies fed.

  ANNA REMAINED WATCHING the inert camera with her hands covering most of her face, curled up on the sofa alone in the unlit sound studio as the two Furies glutted themselves on Dwayne’s stomach cavity, the doctor clawing up into the dead man’s ribcage to pull out his heart and gnaw on it like a delicious, syrup-filled dessert. The doctor pawed the slack-faced swimmer away as she growled and moved towards his treasure, but the male Fury scuttled off, slapping at her, and the dead teenager swiveled her eyes back to Dwayne and descended upon his throat again.

  Anna had nothing in her stomach to throw up, and a kind of dry, existential horror filled her as the camera picked up the obscene chewing noises, the creature slurping, so much like a wild animal it was uncanny. Dwayne bled out onto the road, and after several minutes, his feet twisted around and the girl on him moved off, as if surprised herself as Dwayne’s eyes opened like a newborn summoned into life.

  “Oh my God,” Anna said.

  Coming in the steaming heels of Captain Osterland’s confession, Dwayne’s rise from the dead was too much. Anna wept openly, clutching her filthy jacket like a safety blanket as the dead Channel Four sound technician got to his feet and disappeared from view.

  Waves of terror, hopelessness, and grief poured down.

  Anna stayed locked on the screen in a catatonic stupor, each minute, and then each hour that elapsed just another occasion to review whether it could be possible Buddy and O’Dowd survived – and whether any of that even mattered when the President had turned the country’s arsenal on her own people, betraying the country’s sacred principles in a time when a reporter just doing his or her job now risked such an awful, brutal death.

  But not just death.

  The image of herself subject to the same hellish condition as the Furies filled Anna with such a sudden panic that at one point she finally leapt from the sofa, staggering around the room gasping and clutching for panicked handholds like a blind woman, if not a mad one, literally nowhere to run to escape the sort of doom which – unimaginably, and for no known reason – now hung over all of them.

  And she thought of Melina, perhaps sharing the others’ fate as well. Had she seen the report? Did she know? Was there any chance left to quit the city before the sword blow fell?

  And then Anna hated herself for her stomach rumbling with hunger.

  She threw herself back down onto the settee and covered her head with her hands, staying that way as the unchanging view on the monitor slowly lightened with the dawn.

  SHE HADN’T SLEPT, but Anna jerked upright in shock at the hand on her ankle, and she scuttled away from the dark shape backwards on the sofa. Resolving out of the shadows, Baz Washington only smiled at her, the retired cop faintly apologetic as he waited for her understandable fears to resile.

  “Hey, sorry to wake you,” he said. “Sun’s almost up.”

  Anna wiped drool from the corner of her mouth, blurry eyes checking at once on Buddy’s camera view and the first dawn light dappling the bloodied street.

  Anna felt strangely ashamed at herself, helpless as some terrified child while the city went to hell, Airforce planes maybe even now set to deliver their deadly payload.

  “Were you … out there watching this?”

  Sh
e motioned to the screen.

  “I was sleeping,” the ex-cop said. “They told me, though, about what happened, and what the Army guy said. I’m really sorry for your people, baby.”

  Anna ignored the unwanted epithet, unsure whether it was age or ethnicity or his idea of sympathy that made Baz comfortable calling her that. She flicked her eyes over him, taking in his sincere, maudlin expression – and also something else.

  “What is it?”

  “A few of us were talkin’,” Baz said. “We’re starvin’, man. We’re gonna head out to find something to eat. You hungry?”

  “But what about… ?”

  “What?” he asked. “Nuclear Armageddon?”

  “Well, yes?”

  “Uh-huh,” Baz replied. “You hungry though, right?”

  “Ravenous,” Anna said.

  She heard her own word choice and blanched in an instant. Baz ignored it, if he’d noticed at all. He wasn’t a small man, and it was hours since any of them last had food.

  “Yeah,” Baz said. “So come on.”

  “Come where?”

  “Mason suggested we hit that little eatery downstairs,” the retired officer said.

  “Really?”

  “Honey, we’re sittin’ here wonderin’ if we’s about to get nuked, and I don’t think them people from the café are comin’ back, you dig?”

  “Baz,” Anna said to him. “Do you really think it’s possible, the … the President ordered that?”

  Baz Washington stood properly and gave her a bittersweet scowl.

  “You think that Captain was makin’ stuff up?”

  “Well, no.”

  “So you askin’ me if I think the President of the United States would order nuclear weapons on her own people?”

  He scoffed.

  “I wouldn’t trust those fuckers with anything, if you’ll excuse the language.”

  “Disaster zone etiquette, and all that,” Anna said.

  Baz didn’t actually understand her, but he smiled agreement so he could keep talking, in the process reminding Anna much of her father. She stood then as well, smoothing down her ridiculous tight skirt and scrunching her toes in the carpet along with her scowl.