Нора Робертс - Year One

Arlys froze when he pulled out a gun and waved it toward Jim as Jim started sprinting to the desk. “You want to stay back there, Jim boy. You all want to stay back. And, Carol, sweetheart, if you cut the feed, I’ll know it. Cut it, and I put a bullet in this pretty girl’s head.”

Arlys tried to swallow on a throat that had gone dead dry. “It’s your desk, Bob,” she repeated.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When she’d been a fledgling reporter with dreams of conducting hard-hitting, insightful interviews with heads of state, Arlys had imagined herself in life-and-death situations, and how her courageous and intrepid on-the-spot reporting would impact the nation.

Now, as she faced a drunk, potentially crazy colleague with a gun, her mind went blank. Panic sweat rolled greasily down her spine.

“Didn’t take long for you to sit your fine, young ass down in my chair, did it? Backstabbing bitch.”

She heard her own voice: tinny, indistinct, as if on a bad connection. “Everyone here knows, everyone in the viewing audience knows I’ve only filled in until you could get back.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, little girl.”

The “ little girl” woke her up, pissed her off enough to snap her back. Later, when she analyzed it, she’d admit the foolishness, the sheer knee-jerk aspect of her reaction, but it got her up and running again.

“You’re better than that, Bob. You’re too good, too experienced to fall back on sexist insults and baseless accusations.”

She added the visual equivalent of a tsk-tsk with the angle of her head, the subtle frown.

“You criticized Ben’s story, and my reporting, and said you had your own story. I’m certain everyone watching would like to hear it as much as I would.”

“You wanna hear my story?”

“Very much.” Keep him talking, keep him talking. Maybe he’d pass out.

Or she’d just drown in a pool of her own panic sweat before he shot her.

“Twenty-six years I’ve been in this business. Twelve years I sat at this desk. Do you know why The Evening Spotlight ’s the top-rated news hour?”

“Yes, I do. Because people know they can trust you. Because you’re a steady hand, a calm voice.”

“I didn’t just read the news, I found it, I fought it out, I reported it. I earned this desk.” He smacked the desk with his fist, hard enough to make the papers on it jump. “I earned it every single day. Night after night, I let the world know the truth. I’m going to give the world—what’s left of it—the truth tonight.”

Gun hand waving, he swung back to face the camera.

“It’s over! Are you fucking listening out there? Over! The human race is finished, and in its place come the weird and the strange, demons from hell. If you don’t die choking on your own bile, they’ll hunt you down. I’ve seen them, oozing out of shadows, slithering through the dark. Maybe you’re one.”

When he swung the gun toward Arlys again, numbness set in. He wasn’t going to pass out. She couldn’t run.

“You’re speaking of what’s been termed the Uncanny .”

“Fuck that! They’re evil. What do you think caused this plague? Them! Not some goddamn bird, not some mutating virus. They set it on us, and they’re watching us die like sick dogs. They’ve taken over the government, destroyed governments around the world, and they feed pitiful, third-rate reporters like you bullshit about a cure that’s never coming. They’ll enslave the immune.”

On a jerk, he pivoted back to the camera. “Run! Run if you can. Hide. Fight to spend your last days on Earth in freedom. Kill as many as you can.”

“Bob.” Arlys reached out a hand, but at the flash in his eyes, let it drop to the desk. “You’re a veteran journalist. You know you have to provide evidence, to give facts to substantiate—”

“Corpses rotting in the streets! That’s your evidence. Demons scratching at the windows,” he whispered. “Grinning as they float. Red eyes staring. I turned off the lights, but I could still see the eyes. They’ll poison the water. They’ll starve us out. And you sit here and spout their lies. You sit here and pretend a miraculous cure’s coming, that there’s some sort of pathetic hope because a man took in one stray kid and plays games with him? People need to listen to me ! Destroy them while you can. Run while you can.

“You could all be demons. Every one of you. Maybe we need a demonstration. You! Redhead. What the hell’s your name again?”

“I’m Fred. I’m not a demon.”

He chortled. Arlys could think of no other word for the wet, sick sound of his laugh.

“Says she’s not a demon. Of course she says that. I don’t think they bleed. Not red like humans. We can test that right now.”

“Don’t hurt her, Bob.” Now Arlys did put a hand on his arm. “That’s not who you are.”

“The public has a right to know! It’s our job to tell them, show them the truth.”

“Yes. Yes, it is, but not by hurting an innocent intern who comes in every day, even through all this, to help us do just that. She could’ve gotten out of the city weeks ago, but she stayed and came into work. Jim, he’s the head of our division. He lost his wife in this, Bob, but he’s here, working in the control booth. Every day. Steve is working the camera, every day. Carol is in the booth, every day. All of us trying to keep the station up and running so we can inform and communicate.”

Now Bob’s eyes filled with tears. “There’s no point anymore. No point. False hope’s just a lie in soft focus. You lie in soft focus. I have two dead ex-wives now, and my son … my son’s dead. It’s all over, and they’re coming for the rest of us, so there’s no point. I’d be doing you a favor.”

He turned the gun back to Arlys, cocking his head. “Think about what the demons might do to a young, pretty woman like you. Do you want to risk that?”

“I don’t believe in demons.”

“You will.” He turned to the camera. “You all will, when it’s too late. It’s already too late. This is Bob Barrett, signing off.”

He put the gun under his chin, pulled the trigger.

Blood splattered, a shock of warm and wet, on Arlys’s face even as Bob fell back in the coanchor chair.

She heard—that same bad connection—Fred’s scream, the shouts. For three banging seconds, her vision grayed.

She lifted a trembling hand. “Don’t cut the feed.”

She felt Jim’s hands grip her. “Come with me, Arlys. Come on with me.”

“No, no, please.” She tipped her face to his, saw tears sliding down his cheeks. “I need to … On me, Steve,” she told the cameraman. “Please. Bob Barrett built an illustrious, admirable career as a journalist with his ethics, his integrity, his no-bullshit style, his dedication to serving the ethos of the Fourth Estate, to serving the truth. His son, Marshall, was … seventeen.”

“Eighteen,” Jim corrected.

“Eighteen. I didn’t know Marshall had died, and can only speculate how Bob suffered with his great, personal loss in the last several days. Today, he succumbed to his grief, and we who try to serve the truth, who try to mirror his ethics and integrity, suffer a great, personal loss. He shouldn’t be remembered for his last moments of despair. And even in them, even in them, he showed me I still have a long way to go to reach his level. In tribute to him, I’m going to serve up the truth.”

She knuckled a tear away, saw the red smear of blood, let out a breathy moan.

“I have to.” She looked directly at the camera, hoped—prayed—Chuck was watching. “I have information from a source I consider absolutely reliable. I’ve had this information since early this morning, and I withheld it. I withheld it from my boss, from my coworkers, and from all of you. I apologize, and offer no excuse. Contrary to the information and numbers given to the media by the World Health Organization in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, the death count as of this morning from H5N1-X is more than two billion. This is one-third of the world population, and does not include deaths from murder, suicide, or accidents connected to the virus.”