“What’s that?”
“Who is she?”
“The DOD isn’t going to release that information—”
He waved her off. “I don’t care about the DOD. I want to know who she is to the survivors. Think you can do that?”
Oh, yes, she could.
“Absolutely, boss.”
“Then get to it.”
Emily returned to her desk, pulled up her file of survivors’ phone numbers, picked one, and dialed.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Tim Weiss?”
“Yes.”
“This is Emily Grant at the Inquirer. Have you seen the news?”
A pause. “I thought I might hear from you.”
Emily worked the story hard, well into the afternoon. This was her zone, what she did best. She left out what the Major had told her. That promise she would never break. Instead, she wove in her memories with the other survivors’ stories. Their hero was dead. No one could bring her back. But Emily could bring her to life on the page, help people to know her as more than a name and photograph, and make certain she finally received the recognition she deserved.
Details on the attack leaked over the next few days. The Extinction Wave. Cyrus Jakoby. And the woman who stopped them.
The influence of Emily’s article in setting the public conversation was huge and immediate. Media across the United States and as far away as Russia and Australia picked up the story. Emily did interviews with CNN, BBC. Some of her co-workers joked about her sudden fame, but in every interview, Emily deflected attention from herself. She wasn’t the hero, and she made sure everyone knew it.
The world needed real heroes.
Now more than ever.
The funeral was six days later in Baltimore. The procession past the coffin took hours. Thousands of people came, but only a few hundred attended the private service. Those seats went to the president and First Lady, members of Congress, heads of state, ambassadors.
Because of her article, Emily received the honor of an invitation — not as a reporter but as a mourner. That was the deal. She couldn’t write about the funeral because no press was allowed.
She sat in the back and cried.
In this chapel were the people who kept the world safe. They asked for no recognition, but they had Emily’s total respect. She had never fired a gun. She couldn’t stop a terrorist attack. But she could bring sense to the nonsensical. Her tools were phones and computers, and her bullets were words. Her work wasn’t flashy, but it was just as important, in its own way.
It was enough.
Emily walked past the coffin, which was closed. She appreciated that. She didn’t want her last memories to be of a body. She brushed her fingertips over the American and British flags draped over the top and moved away.
Three blocks from the chapel, in a green, leafy park, an impromptu memorial had sprung up, the kind where people left flowers and Hallmark cards. Someone had donated a pink teddy bear. The fur was matted and one eye was missing, perhaps a child’s cherished friend and the biggest way that child could say thank you.
Traffic roared in the distance. A squirrel chattered and scurried up a tree while a young woman in military blues walked up, set down a single red rose, snapped a salute, and walked away.
Emily knelt by the memorial, took a folded paper from her pants pocket, and laid it beside the teddy bear. She didn’t have to unfold the paper to know what she had written.
“The first time, you saved my life. The second time, you saved my sanity. The third time, you saved the world. Thank you, Major Grace Courtland.”
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks’s work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Nature: Futures, Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera for a New Age, and many other anthologies and magazines. She is a journalist who was on the Pulitzer Prize — winning staff of the Denver Post and lives in Colorado with her husband, her two children, and her dog. Visit her blog at www.jennifercampbellhicks.blogspot.com.
PSYCH EVAL
BY LARRY CORREIA
“Why am I being interrogated?” she snapped as soon as Rudy walked through the door.
“Relax. It’s just an interview.”
“Then why does the sign say INTERROGATION ROOM?”
Rudy pulled out a chair and sat down across the metal table from one of the survivors of Bowie Team. She was obviously suspicious and frightened, but his goal was to help, not make this adversarial. Lieutenant Carver had been through enough already. Rudy’s plan was to be his normal, good-humored self, and help this brave soldier through the aftermath of her ordeal.
Unless Mr. Church’s suspicion was right, and she was a murderous traitor, because then her fate was out of his hands.
“This room is what the army had available on short notice. Believe me, I’d much rather be having this conversation in a nice office.” As usual, he wanted to make his patient feel safe and comfortable. Only it was summer in Texas, the building’s air conditioner was dying, and it was muggy enough in these stuffy, windowless rooms that sweat rings were already forming on his shirt. So comfort was out, but Rudy could still try to make her feel safe.
“We’ve not spoken before, Lieutenant Carver. I’m Dr. Sanchez. You can call me Rudy.”
“The Department of Military Sciences’ number one shrink. I know who you are, so I know why you’re here. But I’m not crazy.”
“Nobody said you were.”
“I’m not a liar. I know what I saw. I gave my report.”
She was clearly agitated. Rudy had read her file on the way over. The DMS mission was so sensitive that every team member’s background had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Her record wasn’t just clean, it was spotless. Her service record was exemplary. Carver’s previous psych evaluation had made her sound as a rock, solid under pressure, but the poor young woman in front of him today had been reduced to an emotional wreck.
He’d watched her through the one-way glass before coming in. She’d spent the whole time staring off into space and occasionally muttering something incomprehensible to herself. Now that there was another person for her to focus on, she was demonstrating bad tremors in her hands. Her eyes kept flicking nervously from side to side. By all accounts Carver had been fine before leaving on this mission, but she’d developed several severe nervous tics in the last forty-eight hours.
“I’ve read your report, Lieutenant. Do you mind if I call you Olivia?” She didn’t respond, so he went with it. “Believe me, Olivia, I’m on your side. After some of the things I’ve heard from other teams over the years, I never assume anybody in this outfit is lying, regardless of what they say they ran into.”
“Do you believe in the Devil, Rudy?”
Considering what she’d just been through, with most of her team murdered and the only other survivors in critical condition, it wasn’t such an odd question. “I believe in good and evil. My small part in that struggle is helping good people deal with traumatic events and the horrors they’ve faced. I’m just here to help you.”
Carver stared at him for a long time. It was the first time her tremors had stopped. She responded as though she hadn’t even heard his words. “I believe in him now.”
“You hungry? Want some coffee or something?”
The survivor lifted her arm to show that her wrist was handcuffed to the metal table.
“Yeah, well. Sorry. That’s not my call,” Rudy explained.
“No. It’s his.” She looked over at the mirrored wall and raised her voice. “Hello, Mr. Church.”
Rudy just shook his head, but he didn’t deny who was on the other side of the glass. He’d asked about the necessity of the restraints already — it was hard to make somebody feel safe enough to open up while they were chained like a prisoner — but he had been shot down. Apparently it wasn’t clear yet who had done all of the killing. Lieutenant Carver could be the survivor of some kind of new chemical hallucinatory attack, or the victim of an unknown terrorist bioweapon, or she could have just had a psychotic break, or even be a traitor who had simply murdered her teammates in cold blood and lied to cover it up. The fact was they didn’t even yet know what they didn’t know.