“Turn it on,” she says.
Alex picks up the remote and flicks it.
“What channel?”
Lizzie looks at him. “Fox.”
“Of course.”
The screen pops into life with a commercial for some anti-aging cream. Alex flicks forward through basketball, a sitcom, and a couple of soaps before getting to the cable news channels. He stops at Fox.
It’s America Unbound with Victoria Hannahoe.
“What is this shit?” Julian says.
Lizzie watches as he drags himself over to the couch, crawls onto it, and sits beside his brother.
There’s an item about Iran on at the moment, a filmed report. It seems to be coming to an end.
“Why are we watching this?” Alex says.
“I don’t know. Just… wait.”
They wait.
Then it cuts back to the studio. It takes Lizzie a moment to focus and to realize that the background graphic, which has the word siege emblazoned across it in jagged red letters, is a treated, filtered image of Orchard Street.
In the foreground sits glamorous Victoria Hannahoe, with her extravagant red hair and striking blue eyes.
“We return now to our top story,” she says, “the ongoing siege of a downtown New York City apartment in which three radical students believed to be in possession of bomb-making equipment and a quantity of explosives are caught up in a now nearly twenty-four-hour standoff with the New York City Police Department, the FBI, and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
Lizzie can barely process this. It seems unreal.
“The three radicals-students of Atherton College in upstate New York-have issued a wide-ranging series of demands, which, if carried out, would amount to an effective restructuring of our entire financial system.”
“Yesss.”
“Two of the three-brothers Julian and Alex Coady-are also believed to be responsible for the recent murders of two Wall Street bankers, Jeff Gale and Bob Holland, and for the attempted murder of another, Scott Lebrecht. However, it is now emerging that the leader of the group, and the ideological driving force behind it, may well be the third student holed up in the Orchard Street apartment, one Elizabeth Bishop.”
“What the fuck-”
Julian struggles to turn around on the couch.
Alex remains completely still.
Lizzie stares at the TV screen in disbelief.
“Elizabeth-or Lizzie-Bishop is the one who issued the demands and is also, according to police sources, understood to be the most in-control and proactive member of the group.”
Julian throws his arms up. “This is… this is BULLSHIT!”
“In an attempt to further our understanding of these events-events that are unfolding before the eyes of the world-we are now going to speak exclusively to the mother and stepfather of Lizzie Bishop, Deborah Bishop-Hackler and Lloyd Hackler-”
“Oh Jesus, oh no.”
Lizzie staggers back toward the wall as the camera pans right to reveal… her mother? And Lloyd fucking Hackler? Sitting together like teenagers, looking all attentive and concerned? This is horrendous, and where’s… where’s Frank?
Lloyd isn’t her fucking father…
“… and let me ask you as well…”
Wh-what was that? Lizzie didn’t hear the first part of the question. She’s finding it impossible to concentrate.
“… as a child, growing up…”
“Fuck this,” Julian says, and starts getting up off the couch. Alex turns and looks at Lizzie, the weirdest expression on his face-this pale, sickly, confused stare-and then he lurches to the side and throws up, a liquid hurl of vomit landing in a splat on the floorboards next to the couch.
“You bitch,” Julian says, one eye on Alex as he comes around the end of the couch, and then directly toward her, “I should have fucking-”
“… what you might call emotional intelligence…”
But he stops… just as-or just after-Lizzie hears a dry phwutt sound. Julian’s eyes roll upward, he stumbles to the left, and the red mark on the side of his head bubbles and spurts into a sudden and rapid trickle down his cheek.
Lizzie tries to scream, but nothing happens. Her throat is dry, and her chest seizes up in pain. When Julian falls to the floor, she notices a tiny cracked hole in the window behind him. In the next moment she hears a second phwutt sound, and an identical hole appears beside the first one. By the time she turns and looks down at Alex, whose head is now resting on the edge of the couch, the trickle of blood on his cheek has already started mingling with the vomity mucus around his mouth.
Directly ahead of Lizzie, her mother is on the screen, leaning toward the camera, words coming from her mouth, only some of them getting through, only some of them comprehensible.
“… a mother’s perspective… here now to implore my little…”
Lizzie leans against the wall behind her, stretching her arms out, pushing back hard, tears in her eyes. She looks to the right, at the window, at the two holes, waiting…
But it doesn’t come.
Then she slides quickly to the floor, out of the sightline of the window, facing the table and the back of the couch.
She feels like throwing up herself now, but manages to hold it in.
She’s no longer able to see the TV, but her mother’s voice continues to fill the room.
“… and for that reason, and that reason only, I know that Lloyd and I-”
Then it stops abruptly and is replaced by a low hum.
The connection cut.
The sudden stillness is terrifying. A few feet to her right is Julian’s crumpled body. To her left, on the floor next to the couch, she can see the glistening, lumpy peninsula stain of vomit-Alex himself unseen, but so close, slumped on the couch in front of her.
Dead.
Poor, sweet Alex.
In her worst imaginings this ended with handcuffs and a televised perp walk and orange jumpsuits and a vague, inexact, drawn-out process, including lots of photographers and clips gone viral and trendings and…
She’s ashamed now to think how little she thought it all through, and angry at how stupid she’s been-or was. Because she could have done something. She could have gone along with the guy on the phone, for instance. She could have found some way to neutralize the situation, to wind it down peacefully.
She wipes her eyes and nose with her sleeve.
So now what?
Is the phone going to ring? Will there be a gentle rap on the door?
Seconds pass, each one unbearable, each one hijacked by images and thoughts and emotions she has no way of resisting or fighting off. She thinks of her mom on the TV, a tracker scout calling back at her from the hostile, oxygen-thin media landscape. She thinks of her dad; she’d earlier imagined seeing him through the more intimate medium of the apartment-door peephole. When she got back from her long walk yesterday afternoon and plugged in her phone to charge it, she saw that he’d left voice messages and texts, so many of them-which had made her smile. She should have called him then.
If she had, all of this might be different.
She thinks of her brother, John. She should have-
Jesus.
What?
Is that all she’s got left? A fucking catalog of should haves…
Shoulda this, shoulda that, shoulda the other.
The phone rings.
She lets it go for a bit, but then leans forward. As she’s reaching up to get the phone, she notices Alex’s backpack under the table. She pulls it out, realizing that she has no idea what’s in it. It doesn’t feel heavy. It could be just a few books.