A second, similar platform stood draped in a tent decorated in stars and stripes. That could only be the new Freedom Bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell but without the crack.
People packed the hall, first the city’s movers and shakers, then a few dozen lucky members of the public, all under the watch of grim-faced government agents — tough-looking men and women, some in suits, some in civilian clothes. They looked ready for trouble, as though they expected it.
One agent in particular caught Emily’s attention. Short brown hair and a fit body. She moved with confidence and poise, a woman whom men respected instead of objectified, who didn’t take shit from anyone. If someone called her “sweetheart,” she would kick their ass.
“Who is she?” Emily asked, mostly to herself, but Craig answered.
“Homeland Security or FBI. She looks tough. I heard someone call her ‘Major.’”
“Is that a rank? Call sign?”
He shrugged. “All I know is I wouldn’t want to cross her.”
“I don’t want to cross her. I want to be her,” Emily said — instead of a recovering alcoholic single mother who hadn’t been to the gym in ages.
“We’ll never be like her,” Craig said. “We eat cornflakes for breakfast. She eats bullets.”
Emily laughed. “Bullets? Are you serious?”
“Hey, it sounded good.”
“It sounds like bad 1950s noir. And I hate cornflakes.”
“Me too,” Craig said.
When the hall was packed tighter than a bar during an Eagles game, and the stink of too many bodies bordered on intolerable, the First Lady stepped onto a podium and tapped her microphone.
“Cue the boring speech,” Craig said.
“You think?”
“Bet you a dollar.”
Emily didn’t take the bet and was glad she didn’t. The First Lady launched into a recitation of the Liberty Bell’s history. Emily took notes on her reporter’s pad and recorded audio on her phone to play back later in the newsroom. Not that she planned to include a history lesson in her article.
The crowd shifted, restless. No one wanted to see the First Lady. Not really. They wanted the grand finale, still draped in patriotic red, white, and blue. The First Lady gestured to another woman on the podium wearing a yellow pantsuit — Andrea Lester, maker of the Freedom Bell, as grim-faced as the federal agents who prowled the hall.
That was strange. Andrea Lester was the reason for this pomp. Every newspaper in the country would centerpiece her work on 1A, an artist’s dream come true. Shouldn’t she be glowing?
“Something isn’t right,” Emily said.
“What’s that?” Craig asked.
Before she could explain, the First Lady finished her speech with a triumphant wave. The red, white, and blue covering fell away to reveal the Freedom Bell. The audience gasped and applauded. The crowd outside the windows roared. Craig and the other photographers snapped photos.
A scream. A shout.
Emily looked for the source.
A yell from the podium. It was the artist, Andrea Lester. In her hand she held a knife.
Emily froze. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away as Andrea Lester lunged toward the First Lady.
This isn’t happening.
Gunshots. Red blossomed across Andrea Lester’s yellow pantsuit, and she fell away from the First Lady. Panic crashed down like a tsunami, immediate, total, inescapable. It swept up Emily, too. An attack on the First Lady!
At the rope line, Craig snapped photos.
More gunshots. Suddenly every agent in the room held a weapon. Bullets flew. Emily ducked down. Why were they shooting at each other? Weren’t they all on the same side? What the hell was going on? The pop-pop of shots mixed with the screaming.
“Seal the room!” a man yelled.
On the podium, the First Lady had vanished under a pile of Secret Service agents.
I have to get out, Emily thought with the dead certainty that she could never manage it. Too many people stood between her and the exit. And if agents had sealed the exits, no one was going anywhere.
Agents bellowed orders.
One yelled, “No!”
The yell was desperate. Terrified.
Something triggered in Emily. An instinct. Without knowing why, she dropped to the floor.
The Freedom Bell exploded.
It broke apart with a loud bang. Bits blew outward in all directions. Shards hit Congress members, dignitaries, ambassadors, children.
By sheer chance, Craig stood between Emily and the bell. He dropped his camera as he reached to where a shard had punctured his neck. Emily snatched the camera and set it aside.
Craig swayed. She helped him to sit on the floor. The room descended further in chaos. Now Emily silently thanked whoever had put the media pen where they had, because she and Craig weren’t in the middle of it. She pulled the shard from his neck. Glass, hollow with a pointed tip.
“It’s a dart,” she said.
“What the hell?” Craig said, and pulled another dart from his leg. “Why? What’s it for?”
“Don’t know. Keep still.”
“Are you hit?”
She checked herself. “No.”
“My camera—”
“I caught it.”
“Give it to me.”
“Are you crazy? We have to keep down. We’re in the middle of a terrorist attack.”
Even as she said the words, she couldn’t believe them. Of course the United States had been hit before, but these things happened to other people, in other places.
“My camera,” Craig repeated firmly. His face had a pallid, sickly sheen.
He was right. They were journalists. People looked to them to make sense of the nonsensical. They had to do their jobs.
Emily set the camera in his hands. He struggled to his feet. The shutter clicked. Legs shaking, Emily stood beside him and started taking notes again.
Later, she would look at her notebook and not remember a single thing she had written there. She would recall only bits and pieces, like fitting together fragments of a broken mirror.
Like when Craig dropped to his knees, eyes feverish and skin clammy. Others were also falling sick. Agents separated them out, though Craig still lay beside Emily, moaning.
The agent in charge was the woman Emily had spotted before everything had gone to hell, the one Craig said was called Major. Blood splattered her clothing and skin. While others whimpered and shook, she kept her back straight and her voice steady.
“Listen to me!” she said, and talked about a highly contagious disease. Emily caught only some of it. She couldn’t stop thinking about her daughter. What would happen to Mia if she died here? And what about Craig? Would he live? She clutched his camera to her chest.
Craig stood with a strange, glassy expression. He moaned. The sound was inhuman. Emily gasped and tried to back away. Craig lunged at her, mouth wide-open, canines bared, so fast she could only scream.
Then he was on her, his weight bearing her down. But no teeth broke her skin. Craig didn’t move. He lay on top of her, limp, a dead weight. His head lolled. Blood from a hole near his left ear dripped onto Emily’s dress.
Above them stood Major, gun aimed at Craig, mouth pressed in a thin line, her eyes two bright, precise points.
“Did he bite you?”
“No.”
“Stay there. Play dead. Don’t move.”
She pivoted, aimed, fired.
Emily flinched at each shot, squeezed her eyes shut, kept quiet, and followed the agent’s orders exactly.
Emily returned to work. She didn’t want to, but rent was due, and the bills didn’t care if you’d been in a terrorist attack. One morning in the newsroom, her head pounded from the bottle she’d emptied the night before, and her mouth tasted evil. There was only one way to fix that. She was pouring bourbon into her coffee when she looked up.