Frontline

by Warren Hately

  Anna felt stung by the tone in his voice. She stood, trying and failing to cast off her lethargy.

  “Now it’s up to you,” the Professor said as if he thought she might walk out on him instead. “You asked why I waited for you? You’re the leader here, at least among your reporters and … the people you’ve picked up along the way. I’m sorry about your friends. Buddy and Dwayne were good men. But now you have to decide whether you want to put Charlotte out of her misery for good, or maintain some kind of watch over her until she goes.”

  “You’re saying we should just go ahead and kill her?”

  Anna boggled in outrage, though instantly understood Irving’s point.

  “You’re saying … before she becomes one of them?”

  “Precisely,” he said. “The moment she’s dead, Charlotte Francis is a threat to you.”

  Irving retrieved his briefcase and jacket.

  “Wait, you’re going?”

  “You sure are quick, you reporters,” he said with a dry smile.

  Anna grabbed his arm, which he allowed, but just for an instant.

  “Professor,” she said. “How is … how is any of this possible?” She motioned at Charlotte in the bed. “How can people just rise again from the dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Irving said. He shrugged as if he didn’t really care. “The answers are out there, somewhere. That’s not my job, it’s yours, Miss Novak. My job is helping people who might be hurt. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  He offered one final handshake.

  “Good luck, Anna.”

  Then the Professor left her alone in the room with her dying colleague.

  WASHINGTON, MASON AND Leeanne sat with O’Dowd in the Oval Office, and when they’d finished getting everything online, Iskov and Alexandra walked in to join them hand in hand. Anna eyed the happy couple with an amused smirk her tiredness concealed, and then she whistled to get Serik’s attention while Baz and Leeanne popped the lids on even more booze and poured a fifth of Scotch into Anna’s mug.

  The technician raised an eyebrow, reading Anna’s posture for a moment as if she was about to ruin his newfound happiness.

  “Serik,” Anna said. “What would you give me … for a bag of these?”

  She dangled the bag of Skittles over her head and delighted watching Iskov’s face break into the most sensationally expressive grin.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Did you … seriously go out and get me Skittles?”

  “As if, loverboy.”

  Anna chuckled, winking to Alex, who stepped aside with her arms folded in a look of bemusement that also looked challenged. Anna smiled more warmly, moving alongside the other woman and linking her arm through hers.

  “Here,” Anna said.

  She tossed the Skittles to Serik for an easy catch, then turned into Alexandra as they shared a warm hug.

  “You’ve been amazing,” Anna said. “Top job.”

  “Thanks.”

  Alexandra blushed handsomely, despite tousled hair and blurry make-up.

  Anna took the mug of booze offered as Baz shot her a ribald wink and Anna barked a laugh in return.

  “It’s never gonna happen, Baz,” she said.

  “I wasn’t thinkin’ ‘bout you and me,” he said and grinned. “More like you and her.”

  Alex and Anna swapped a look, then burst out laughing. Serik focused exclusively on the very difficult job of getting the Skittles open, and it all would’ve been a more heartwarming moment if not for Charlotte’s shallow-breathing corpse just fifty yards away.

  None of it was enough to make Anna sober. She’d drunk far too much already for that. But she was curious to know how Scotch went with a chocolate bar. She kissed Alex on the cheek, bade her get some rest, and then left the Oval Office with O’Dowd putting the moves on the butch dyke Leeanne unawares, and the others digging into their second breakfast like a pack of starving Hobbits. Anna’s expression crinkled with amusement and relief, which meant she immediately yawned, seesawing through her emotions again as she walked back to the studio where she’d left her phone.

  She paused briefly at the narrow recess between the offices, staring out over the sunlit city coming into greater and greater focus with the day, disbelieving that only a few days earlier, workers were streaming to their jobs like well-behaved citizens, and yet now everything was chaos and ruin. At that moment, she marveled as the blinking figure of a small commercial airliner rose into the cloudless blue sky from out near the airport named for Lincoln. And Anna stood watching, just long enough, mesmerized, for the plane to vanish far beyond her view, the jetliner’s engines fading into a muted soundscape of occasional gunfire and distant alarms.

  And then Anna yawned again.

  Waves of weariness nearly toppled her, but she let herself into the empty studio booth where her phone was tucked out of sight at one end of the long console, fully charged thanks to the hours of Anna’s misadventures.

  It was also flooded with messages.

  Network congestion had eased at some point during the night, and playing catch-up, the system delivered dozens of messages from family and friends across the country and overseas, including her mom and her sisters back home, not to mention countless media requests, contact from distant relatives, old work colleagues, and random male viewers sending dick pics. There were texts from her brother asking her to call as soon as she could. The tired grin dribbled from Anna’s face, and she sat on the edge of the sofa knowing full well her next move was to lie down and pass out.

  Then the phone bleeped again with another fresh text.

  Tom Vanicek.

  Anna stared at it, his innocuous, “Are you OK?” falling into the kaleidoscope of her emotions at perhaps her weakest moment.

  Rather than answer, Anna summoned his contact profile and hit “call”.

  The phone rang for long seconds, and she imagined him, wherever he was, far away in the Smoky Mountains, staring at his flashing phone knowing she’d know he was there, his new message too fresh. He answered on the sixth ring.

  Anna spoke at once.

  “You know I always loved you.”

  She said it in a hollow voice – like an accusation, all the warmth drained out of her by the harrowing past few days.

  “Anna, listen –”

  “Shut up,” she half-groaned, tears leaking down her face. “You’re such a goddamned coward, Tom.”

  “I … know,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, Anna. Everything’s gone to hell.

  These Furies are everywhere. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, here, I’ve got these kids –”

  “I never understood,” Anna cut in, her quietness somehow silencing Tom’s self-pity. “You could walk into a room full of lawyers and politicians and bark orders like some damned drill Sergeant,” she said. “But … those years, when you were with her, and we were working … don’t tell me you didn’t know, Tom. And don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same way.”

  “Of course, I … Of course.”

  The admission only made Anna’s tears worse, drowning her in hopelessness.

  “This is all so fucked.”

  “They’re here too,” Tom agreed. “The Furies.”

  Anna nodded, hair wet in her face as she leaned forward.

  “Anna?” Tom said. “If you can … Listen, your story about the President’s doomsday plan, it’s getting global coverage. I’m texting you my GPS, for here, where we are in the mountains. You could … Your job’s done now, right? You could make your way here.”

  “How?”

  “That’s … That part, I don’t know.”

  Anna surged with anger that he wasn’t pledging to come find her, somehow honoring the love they’d both thrown away. But with the reality of his life, his children, and all the other disasters around them, Anna knew it wasn’t a reasonable hope. Maybe it never was. Part of her died inside, for like the hundredth time.

  Loneliness – her truest companion through most of her li
fe – now reignited like an old, but patient candle flame. First her father, and then in his own way, Stefan, and then Tom – she was tired of losing the men in her life.

  Yet steely determination wilted in the face of her tiredness.

  “It’s about three-hundred miles from Springfield to here,” Tom said in a soft, almost distracted voice. “I know, that’s asking a lot … but what are you going to do?

  You can’t just stay there.”

  Anna didn’t have any sort of answer.

  “I’m just so tired,” she said.

  “I’m sending you my location now.”

  Anna’s phone buzzed. She hung her head again, not knowing how long she’d had her eyes closed. When she didn’t say anything, Tom gently cleared his throat.

  “I think I can make it safe,” he said quietly. “We’re out of the way up here.

  The hunting’s good. Please, Anna … if you’re leaving … if you decide to leave … please let me know. Maybe we can somehow … Maybe we can make up for the past.

  What do you think?”

  Sitting on the edge of the sofa that’d long since become her bed, Anna nodded with tiredness, said “OK,” and dropped the silenced phone onto the carpet.

  The booze and the carbs and the hours with hardly any sleep threw a blanket over her, and she curled up on the settee and faded into a mercifully deep and dreamless rest.

  And when her phone lit up with her brother’s frantic call an hour later, Anna never even heard it buzzing just out of reach.