Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

THREE TIMES BY JENNIFER CAMPBELL-HICKS

Emily Grant’s assignment that day: cover the historic unveiling of the Freedom Bell. She walked from the newsroom, only a few blocks away. Hundreds of people had gathered outside the Liberty Bell Center in the muggy summer heat, waiting for the July Fourth festivities to begin. Emily wove her way through the crowd to the building’s entrance.

A uniformed guard eyed her. “What’s the name, sweetheart?”

Sweetheart? She cringed.

“Emily Grant. Philadelphia Inquirer.”

“Credentials?”

She flashed her work ID, which he checked against a list.

“Over there with the others.”

The others were reporters, photographers, television camera operators, and TV talking heads — local and national — crushed along one wall, roped off like dangerous animals.

“Good idea,” Emily said. “Wouldn’t want us mingling with the First Lady and the Washington bigwigs. You never know, we might bite.”

“Next,” the guard said.

Scowling, Emily walked through the metal detectors and inside.

She spotted the Inquirer’s photographer Craig and joined him against the rope line. The toll from decades of chasing down news was etched into his weathered face. He nodded to her while he fiddled with his camera’s buttons and dials.

Emily looked around the open, airy hall. She’d meant to bring her daughter, Mia, here but hadn’t found the time. They’d moved to Philly only a few months ago, after Mia’s father left them. Not that Emily blamed him. Doug wanted stable, and she’d been anything but. As always when she thought about Doug, her fingers sought out the small silver medallion hooked to her purse zipper. Three months sober, it said.

Across the hall stood the Liberty Bell, encased in glass, Independence Hall visible through floor-to-ceiling windows behind it. The bell radiated history, more than its copper and tin, the very soul of its era. Everyone felt it. Visitors, journalists, dignitaries, guards, they all kept glancing its way.

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.

Her editor, Chuck, stood over her desk, bald head gleaming under harsh fluorescent lights.

“Come with me,” he said.

Damn it.

Chuck did most of his work in the newsroom with the reporters, but he also had a closet-sized office with bare walls, a desk, and two chairs, which was where he led Emily. He squeezed his considerable bulk behind the desk, sat, and gestured for Emily to do the same. She couldn’t meet his gaze. She focused on his tie, blue with pinpoint yellow dots.

He rubbed his thick brown beard. “How much have you had?”

She shook her head.

“Are you drunk?”

Not drunk enough. Guilt tore at her, for the sobriety medallion gone from her purse zipper, for what she was doing to Mia. Such a sweet, trusting girl, she deserved better.

But only drinking made Emily forget the weight of Craig’s dead body, blood from the hole in his head dripping onto her cheek.

Play dead. Don’t move.

That woman had saved Emily’s life.

Emily didn’t even know her name.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy,” Chuck said. “You can do what you want at home, but there are no drugs or alcohol when you’re on the clock.”

“I know.”

He waited. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me? All right. You don’t leave me a choice. I have to suspend you for a week.”

That surprised her. “You can’t. It was just a little kick in my coffee.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“But my investigation. I’m so close. I’ll have the story by Thursday. You can publish Sunday. No one else has this. It’ll be the scoop of the year!”

This time Chuck rubbed his bushy eyebrows, as if he had a headache. As if she were giving him one. “We’ve talked about this. You said you’d drop it. I know what you think happened on July Fourth, that a biological agent turned people into some kind of zombies—”

“Craig is not just people.”

“It’s not true. FBI, DEA, NSA, they all say the same thing. It was a hallucinogen.”

“It was real.”

“You imagined it, Emily.”

“They’re lying.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. You heard the audio I recorded.”

“It proved nothing. It was mostly screams and static. If we had Craig’s photos…”

“I don’t.”

“Then there’s no story.”

Not for the first time, Emily wished she had grabbed the camera when she’d been ushered from the center, but the bodies had terrified her. Her only thought had been to get to Mia and hug her daughter, and then get drunk. Just the one time.

“I don’t need the photos,” Emily said. “I have twenty interviews, at least, maybe more.”

“Let it go.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have to find her!”

Emily jumped to her feet and yelled at her editor. Chuck also stood, not anger in his expression, but pity.

“Who?” he asked.

Emily’s voice was small. “The woman who saved my life. I’ve gone through all the agency files — the public ones, anyway — and checked with every government contact I have. I’ve talked to every survivor I can find. No one knows who she is, but I’m close to finding her. I know it.”

More beard rubbing. “Go home,” Chuck said.

Emily sank into her chair. The false story of the hallucinogen did a disservice to all who had died and survived that day. But part of her wondered: What if the story wasn’t false? What if she was wrong?

No, she couldn’t accept that. Because if Chuck was right, then she was losing her mind. “I’ll show you,” she said.

“Not this week. As of right now, you’re suspended. Use the time to get some help, all right? For your daughter’s sake, if nothing else. We’ll talk when you get back.”

Emily left to pick up Mia at day care. She pulled her old Ford Escort onto Market Street, headed out of Center City, and slammed down her hands on the steering wheel in anger.

“Damn it!” she yelled.

A week’s suspension. Really, it was a final warning. Zero-tolerance policy? Sure. Zero tolerance for the post-traumatic stress from living through a terrorist attack. Zero tolerance for survivor’s guilt. Why had she walked out while so many had not?

As she had stumbled from the Liberty Center that day, she had fixated on the shattered glass case around the Liberty Bell, what was left of it splattered with red.

Happy July Fourth, America. Here’s your freedom, drenched in blood.

A black SUV pulled in front of her just before a red light. She didn’t think anything of it until an identical one pulled in behind her. The light turned green, and the SUV in front didn’t move.

She laid into her horn.

The SUV still didn’t move. The one behind her had stopped so close, she couldn’t pull out and go around.

What was this?

Other drivers honked, drove around, flipped the bird.

A door opened on the back SUV. A hulking man in a T-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses walked to her Escort, a gun in a shoulder holster. He didn’t even try to hide that he was packing.

“Oh, God,” Emily said.

She fumbled in her purse for the mace she had taken to carrying since the attack, then thought better of it. She could spray him and run, but she couldn’t spray every person in two SUVs. She stuffed the canister into her pocket.

The man pressed a badge to her window. National Security Agency.

“Get out of the car, ma’am.”

The badge might be real, or not. She shut off her engine and cracked the window.

“Is something wrong?”

“Out of the car, please.”

His gun hung at her eye level, an implicit threat. She opened the door and got out.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Just come with me, ma’am.”

She went, and tried to not hyperventilate.

The SUV’s back seat was dark behind tinted windows. Emily slid onto the brown leather. A person sat beside her. Emily could make out only a silhouette.

“Hello, Ms. Grant.”

Emily gasped. She knew that voice.

Stay there. Play dead. Don’t move.

It was the Major.

“Buckle up,” the Major said.

Emily’s breath came quicker. Her heart jackhammered. She clicked her seat belt. The Major rapped the glass between the front and back seats, and the SUV moved.

“My car—”

“Will be fine until you get back.”

“I’m going back?”

“That depends on you.”

“You’re not NSA.”

A faint smile. “What makes you say that?”

“Your accent is British.”

“Let’s say I’m on loan.”

The SUV made a right turn. A blur of coffee shops, restaurants, stores, streetlights, trees, and pedestrians passed outside the tinted windows. A clink of metal drew Emily’s gaze to the Major’s lap, where she gripped a gun in a familiar way. As if she had been born holding it.

Emily shivered. “Why am I here?”

Suddenly, the Major was in Emily’s face. One second she had been across the seat; the next she forced Emily back until the door handle jabbed into her spine. The gun pressed into Emily’s side, colder than she had thought possible. Her muscles tensed so hard they hurt. She felt for the mace in her pocket, but who was she kidding? “We eat cornflakes for breakfast,” Craig had said. “She eats bullets.” Then she killed zombies for lunch. In a fight, Emily didn’t stand a chance.

“You’re asking questions,” the Major said.

“How do you know about that?”

“That doesn’t matter. Here’s what does: You need to stop your investigation.”

Or what? Emily almost asked, but she feared the answer had to do with the gun, so she said nothing.

Her investigation had drawn these agents to her. They hadn’t started this. She had. And her decision alone would determine how it ended. That gave her leverage.

Or it might get her killed.

“This is about national security,” the Major said. “I’m not asking you to drop it. I’m ordering you. Do you understand?”

“I hate guns,” Emily said, voice trembling. “The attack. Please.”

The gun pressed harder into her side.

“Understand?”

“On one condition.”

A scowl. “What condition?”

“Tell me what happened on July Fourth. Not for print. Say it’s off the record, if you like. It’s for me alone. I need the truth.”

The Major searched her eyes. Emily met her gaze unflinching, one of the hardest things she had ever done. Finally, the Major nodded.

“I see you do.”

“I’ll drop my investigation, I swear. I won’t print it.”

“I believe you,” she said, as though she knew something about Emily’s ethical code. How much did she know? She must have one hell of an information source. “You have until the SUV stops.”

The Major set the gun on her lap.

Emily dove in.

“Was there a hallucinogen?”

“No.”

Despite herself, Emily smiled, relieved. She wasn’t crazy. “Was there a pathogen in the darts, a bioweapon that turned people into—” She stopped.

“Zombies? Yes, there was.”

Holy crap.

“Was it contagious?”

The Major took a shuddering breath. “Very. Those who were infected were driven to infect others by any means.”

“Like a bite,” she said, thinking of Craig.

“Especially a bite.”

“That’s why you killed them.”

“They were already dead.” Her voice was steady but sad. “It was over the moment the pathogen entered their bodies. Our only option was to eliminate all the carriers right then. Otherwise, the pathogen would have spread, uncontrolled, across the Earth.”

That sank in. The human species would have been wiped out. But it hadn’t been, thanks to this woman and her fellow agents, while Emily had only cowered under Craig’s body and then drowned herself in a bottle of bourbon.

She had been weak.

Her face heated with shame.

“Who are you?” Emily asked. “What’s your name?”

The Major stared. Her expression softened.

The SUV stopped.

The door opened, letting in fresh air. An agent stood there. Emily blinked at the sudden invasion of sunlight.

“She’s free to go,” the Major said to the agent, then added to Emily, “Remember your promise. I’ll be watching.”

Emily didn’t doubt it.

The SUV had parked behind her Escort. They had gone around the block. As soon as Emily got out, blinking in the bright sun, both SUVs pulled out and drove off down the street. Gone. As though she had dreamed it. Except Emily knew the truth now and couldn’t tell a soul. She slid into her driver’s seat and imagined what devastation the pathogen would have caused had it spread. On this street alone: wrecked cars, broken windows, looting, gunfire, screams, and moans.

Then she imagined herself as one of the agents who had prevented that apocalypse, wrapped in Kevlar, a gun in each hand, picking off the infected with perfect shots like targets in a carnival game.

That just wasn’t her.

A pickup honked.

“Come on, lady, go!”

She wanted to yell back, Shut up, you’re lucky to be alive! Instead she flipped him off, turned on the ignition, and drove. Two blocks later, she made the vow. No more wallowing. No more drink. No more suspensions. She should have died on July Fourth, but she hadn’t. This was another chance to not screw up her life, and she wouldn’t waste it.

Only when she parked outside Mia’s day care did she remember that Major hadn’t said her name.

A month later, Emily listened to the police scanner in the newsroom while hunting through social media feeds for news. A murder or car wreck. She’d settle for a cat up a tree.

On one of the newsroom’s many televisions, set to CNN on mute, the words BREAKING NEWS and TERRORIST ATTACK FOILED blared across the screen in capital letters, bright red. The pretty blond anchor looked solemn as she talked into the camera.

“Hey, John,” Emily yelled. “Turn that up.”

John, who sat next to the TV, thumbed the volume.

“… not giving details on the attack,” the anchor said. “Again, here’s what we know at this time. The intended attack was global in nature, but halted at the last minute by an American strike team…”

Emily listened intently.

She didn’t jump at every car backfire anymore, not since she had learned the truth about the Liberty Center attack. She had feared she would never sleep soundly again, but that night, her insomnia had melted away and she had slept better than in weeks. She’d called her AA sponsor and attended meetings. She spent more time with Mia. She had even started yoga classes three mornings a week. Life got better.

But she still paid attention to any terrorist action anywhere in the world. “It’s an obsession,” Chuck said, and he was right.

No one could blame her, considering.

The CNN anchor put a hand to her earpiece. “We’re getting new information. I’m told the Defense Department is confirming a death. A British agent. This is the first we’ve heard about any nationality besides American involved in the action. The DOD has released a photo and a name.”

The photo flashed on the screen.

She wore a uniform, her hair pulled back.

Smiling. Happy.

Emily had never seen her happy.

She doubled over her trash can and vomited up the coffee and bagel she’d had for breakfast.

“Are you all right?” John asked.

“Fine,” she said.

“Not pregnant, are you?”

“Are you?” she snapped back.

That shut him up. She wiped off her mouth and walked to Chuck’s desk. Today’s tie sported stripes of deep green and silver — Philadelphia Eagles colors. He was typing an email.

“In a minute,” he said.

“It’s important.”

“So is this. We’re trying to find out if there’s any local connection to that.” He pointed at another TV, also tuned to coverage of the attack.

“There is,” Emily said.

He stopped typing. “Go on.”

“The British agent who died was at the Liberty Center. She was in charge of the agents who brought down the attackers.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not having a relapse, are you? Because if this is another one of your delusions—”

Emily bristled. “Every survivor I interviewed talked about her. No one knew her name, but they all described a female British agent that the other agents called Major. That’s her. She was there.”

Chuck swiveled his chair to face her. “She’s the one who saved your life.”

“Yes.”

“Do you need to go home? Take the day off?”

That sounded attractive.

She couldn’t.

“I need to write this story, Chuck.”

“You’re too close to it.”

“That’s why it has to be me. I can’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it. I already have the contacts and interviews from before.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded.

“Then it’s yours. This isn’t the hard news. The wires will have that covered. You write the reaction from local survivors. That woman is a hero, twice over. That’s the story. I want you to do your best to answer one question.”

“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.