Deadly News: A Thriller (2 page)

“Kids,” the scruffy man says, shaking his head.

“Oh, honey, are you okay?” the doctor’s wife asks, after, you note, taking a swig of wine.

The girl wipes her mouth. “Ow.” She looks at her hand. “I’m fine. Gimmie that,” she says to the women holding the rescued bottle, and takes it before the woman can do anything. She brings it to her lips and throws her head back, apparently chugging it. After several seconds, the wife stands and gently pushes the bottle down. “Slow down, that’s… not good.”

“Let me have some of that,” the man with the suit jacket says.

The bottle is passed from girl to doctor to you to man. He puts it to his lips, then spits. “Agh! Blood. Gross.”

“Duh,” the girl says.

The man spits again, wipes his mouth. “You’re what, fifteen?”

“Why?”

“I mean, you’re not… sick, are you?”

“I don’t have any disease—or STDs”—she makes some kind of gesture with her hands—“if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh,” the man says, nodding. He looks at the bottle. “And—”

“Look, I’m a virgin and healthy. Now stop being paranoid and either drink or pass.” The man considers, then, using the cuff from the jacket in his lap, wipes the rim of the bottle before taking a drink. This done, he holds it out for the scruffy man to take.

“Are you kidding? Do I look like an idiot to you? We’re stuck in a fucking collapsing subway, and you jackoffs are getting wasted. No thanks. That’s just going to dehydrate you.”

“You should let it air out,” the doctor adds absently, “evaporate.”

“I’ll take some then,” Abby says. “I need the courage.”

“For what?” the doctor’s wife asks. When she puts the wine bottle to her mouth, you see in the firelight that a quarter is already gone.

“I know something you all deserve to hear. Why this happened.”

“You some kind of engineer?”

“A journalist.”

“A journalist?”

“Give that bottle here. Come on. Thanks.” She sighs. “This will sound ridiculous, I know. But just hear me out. I think I know what’s going on. Hm? Oh, yeah. Here.

“Anyway, this was intentional. The train was attacked. No, not terrorists. Well, not like you mean. I think they were after me.”

There’s a silence then. As you look around the fire, something about the reaction of everyone else seems off, they aren’t looking at Abby, but at each other. You focus back on Abby.

“A few days back, I got this story. At the time, I had no idea. But now, I wouldn’t have even gone into work. Hell, I could’ve quit.

“But that’s not what happened. I didn’t mean to get involved, but I did. Sometimes chance is simply unlucky, the coincidence unfortunate.”

Abby Melcer sat at her desk, staring at her computer screen, trying to figure out a way to integrate the incoherent quotes she’d gotten earlier that day into a coherent story. This was not how she imagined her life working out when she’d discounted her guidance counselor’s advice and majored in journalism. Thank God she’d minored in psych, or she’d probably never even have gotten this job. It had come down to her and someone who’d minored in English. Hell of a thing to decide a job on; one of the candidates having a less common, and possibly slightly more applicable, minor.

That win wasn’t feeling much like one right now.

“Abbs,” Ecks said, walking up to her desk.

“Oh good,” she said. It took a second for her eyes to adjust focus from the computer screen to him. “You’re always someone I want to see.”

“I know,” he said, smiling. Then his smile dropped.

Abby couldn’t recall ever seeing him so serious. Not like she studied his every move, though.

“This, uh, this came for you. A guy—I think it was a guy—dropped it off. Darla said he told her he was repaying a favor.” He held out a folder, tape sealing its three edges.

She swiveled in her chair to fully face Ecks. “What is it?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t open it.” He shook it at her. “Here.”

She took it from him. “Thanks.” She stared at him.

“Well are you gonna open it?”

“Yes.” She spun back to her computer screen. “Once I finish this damn story.”

“Tomorrow’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Well, hey, let me know if it’s something interesting.”

Still looking at her screen, “If it’s something
interesting
, you’ll be the first person I tell.”

“Okay, cool. See you.”

She stared at the quotes and sighed.
The Thin Man had red eyes, and he cast a hex at my red, the sign, you know, following left and which one is? But that’s besides. So anyway, we got to the back of the store, and the body was just standing there.

Everything else aside, either this man saw a mannequin, or a dead body was standing on its feet. Abby wanted to go with the former, but that’s not what the man said, and her editor didn’t like her reporters to ‘improvise’, as she called it.

Disgusted, right eye throbbing with the promise of a migraine, Abby got up to use the restroom. Standing, she moved the mouse to bring up the task bar to look at the clock. She’d now been up for—mental arithmetic was hard—twenty hours? Twenty-two? Eighteen?

She had to use the ugly bathroom to avoid passing by Ecks’s desk. It had only one stall, and the door’s lock was broken. It always seemed dirty, too. It was used less than the other one though, so it probably just seemed dirty because of its state of frequent disuse.

After washing her hands, she stared at her reflection in the hazy mirror. Over her right shoulder was a small window that looked out into the night. There was a light on in one of the windows in the building directly across from this one. As she watched, she saw movement, then the light went out and that window got lost with the rest of the darkened ones surrounding it.

That she wasn’t the only one working late gave her some small comfort. She began washing her hands again, only realizing she already had when the waving of her hand under the automatic soap dispenser triggered the memory of having done the same thing seconds previous. She groaned, and tried to rinse the soap off without getting her left hand wet. It didn’t work.

She just had to finish this report, then she could go home and sleep for the next week. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she exited.

Out in the newsroom, the night shift was busy preparing for tomorrow’s news. This was a huge story, and that she had any part in it at all was lucky. A byline on a front-page story. Not bad. All it cost her was twenty dollars’ worth of Starbucks and a few years off her life from stress and caffeine. Ah, cortisol, my old friend, she thought. She’d likely end up like Becky: middle-aged, fat, and alone—if you didn’t count the cats.

At least she was allergic, she thought as she sat down at her desk. She was so tired that out of habit she’d taken the long way back past the entrance, forgetting about avoiding Ecks, but he hadn’t been at his desk. Another lucky stroke in a day filled with them.

The taped-up folder sat in front of her keyboard, and she frowned at it. She picked it up, shook it. The word ‘anthrax’ flashed in her mind, along with ‘incendiary’. She rummaged through her purse for the knife her ex had gotten her for Valentine’s Day.

That was a short relationship.

She flicked the blade open and cut through the tape carefully. It was just plain scotch tape, so she’d have seen any wires, she hoped.

She set the folder back down on the desk, and flipped it open with the knife. Inside was a brown sheet of paper:

Under this were more sheets of paper, each with a picture in the top left corner, a few lines of stats in the right, then typewritten lines with hand written scribbles. She leaned in closer to see if the writing was photocopied, but she couldn’t tell.

“Melcer.”

Abby jumped and shut the folder out of instinct.

“Jumpy,” Becky said. She raised an eyebrow. “How long you been up? You look like fuck.”

“Thanks.”

“Ah, don’t take it so hard.” She gestured around the room. “You’re the most capable half-wit under my command.”

“Thanks again.”

“Abby, Abby.” She sighed. “So, how are my quotes coming? Able to work out anything that doesn’t sound…” she crossed her arms and tapped her bottom lip as she ostensibly searched for the right words, “so batshit crazy?”

“God, I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

She patted Abby on the shoulder. “I know it’s difficult. But you’re a journalist, not an actor. The facts and just the facts. This isn’t the Daily Mail.

“Yeah? Listen to this.” Abby slid the mystery folder away and looked around for her notes. She found them and began reading:

“‘I was about six or seven in’

—Shots,” Abby clarified. “Six or seven shots in, okay?” She continued reading:

“‘When a man with the biggest boobs I’ve even, even seen gets out of his car’”—Abby looked up at Becky—“Fun fact, they were in a bar, there were not cars in the bar, obviously.” She looked back down. “‘I think it was red. Coulda been black though.’”

“Melcer,” Becky interrupted, “I get it. This is why you shouldn’t rely on your recorder. You should have been taking notes, not relying on a transcription.”

“I—”

Becky put a hand up. “I’m not your psychologist—I don’t get paid damn near enough for that. This story is going out in five hours and”—she looked at her watch—“oh, five hours on the dot. So you have three, four at most, to finish up and get it edited.” She began sauntering off. “If you want first billing, that is.”

“What?” Abby shouted, unable to help herself. “Serious?”

“Do I joke, Ms Melcer?”

“I think I love you, Becky.”

“Time’s wasting.”

Abby turned back to her project with new vigor. Her lethargy vanished, and she began molding crap into something less crappy, and hopefully coherent.

Four hours and some odd minutes later, with the first hints of the sun’s presence lightening the sky out Becky’s office window, Abby sat in the chair opposite, and leaned back. They’d finished editing the story with time to spare, and Becky seemed pleased with the way it turned out. This may have had something to do with the fact that she’d basically rewritten the entire thing, but Abby wasn’t complaining. It was Abby’s name that’d be on it, right under the headline.

Back at her desk, a few underhanded compliments from Becky heavier, Abby gathered her purse and coat, made sure everything was saved in the office’s Dropbox and not on her desktop, then shut off the computer. As she was doing this last, she spotted the folder, and the still open knife. At the idea of doing anything else work related, even reading the contents of an intriguing mystery folder, a wave of exhaustion flooded into her, and she stuffed the folder into her purse, folded the knife before shoving it into her pocket, and headed to the elevator.

She pressed the call button, which lit up electric blue: the work of an intern majoring in some kind of engineering. Abby kind of missed her. At the time, she’d been working on the server farm story, and it had been nice to have someone she could get explanation from about the more technical failures, and even simulate or figure out equations to model what might have happened had things been different.

A minute passed, and the elevator still hadn’t come up. She looked up at the floor indicator. The number 1 was still lit up. She pressed the button again. A few seconds later, 1 still lit, the elevator chimed and the doors opened, letting out Ecks.

“Hey,” he said, far too happily.

“I’ve been up for over a day, haven’t eaten in nearly that, and I’m getting all too familiar cramps. I can’t deal with your vapid cheeriness right now.”

His smile fell slightly. “Yeah, sorry. I’ll let you get some rest.”

“How nice.” She got in the elevator, and pressed the ground floor button.

“Hey, what was that thing about earlier?”

The doors finally began to close. She prayed he didn’t try to stop them.

“Don’t know, didn’t read it.”

“Let me know tomorrow, yeah?”

“Off.”

The molasses progress of the doors was almost complete.

“Monday then,” he said, and then was cut off from view as the doors sealed.

He’d find out on his own she was off then too. She leaned against the back of the elevator. She wondered what Ecks had been doing, it was kind of late. Maybe he had a story. God she was tired. She closed her eyes, letting her head rest against the wall.

A voice startled her. Her eyes flew open, heart thudding loud enough for her to hear.

“Didn’t mean to frighten you. This your floor?”

She looked around. A man was standing outside the open elevator doors. Past him, she saw the lobby, the two trees on either side of the elevator, one sagging in its death throes, the other healthy and an offensively bright green. Beyond that, the glass exit doors and through them the empty street beyond, with streetlights which would soon be shutting off as daylight took over.

She pushed off the handrail. “Yeah, thanks. Tired.”

He laughed. “I can tell. I’d say good morning, but I’m guessing all that’s on your mind is sleeping until the next sunrise.”

“Damn right,” she said walking past him.

She saw in the reflection of the exit doors the elevator slowly shutting, the man standing patiently inside. She wondered where he was going, but then she was outside and freezing. She clenched her jaw and sucked in air. After fumbling for a moment—her hands were still shaky from the coffee she’d had hours earlier—she got her coat on and headed home.

By the time she reached the door to her apartment, she was so tired that she couldn’t even get it open. After several attempts, it swung inward and she fell into the darkness of her two room dwelling. She walked through the darkness, not sure if her eyes were even open. She dropped whatever she was holding—her purse?—next to her on the couch, and fell onto it. She groaned as the purse forced her back to arch uncomfortably, and after scooting and shoving for at least an hour, managed to free the purse from under her back. It thudded to the floor, and she was asleep even as she was sinking into the still compressing cushions.