The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter Three (Free)

by Sandra Gail Lambert

Sandra Gail Lambert

Here’s the last paragraph of the previous chapter as a refresher: Through all of it, the parents stared, not at Vic, but past her. The mother's dessert fork hung mid-air, the father's after dinner coffee went untouched. Vic ended her monologue by asking Dr. Cromwell if he had a dog. He didn't answer. Mrs. Cromwell asked if Shayna would be able to help open the summerhouse this year. After dinner, in the taxi, insisted upon and paid for by the parents, Shay was angry at not her parents, but at Vic and had expressed it with the carefully modulated tones that always grated on Vic nerves. Instead of her usual yelling, Vic went sullen. Shay hated that. Later, they made a sort of peace.

The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter Three

The wail of an air raid siren shook through Vic's bones. She turtled her neck into her shoulders and scanned the newsroom for the source of the noise. The screens on the back wall were muted, like always, and the black lines of captioning scrolled endlessly. Across the room a reporter held a phone to his face and kicked back his chair to yell at the ceiling. At the international desk, a researcher hunched at his keyboard. He ignored the segment producer and reporter bent over him with their faces to either side of his neck. One jiggled a foot, the other tapped a fingernail against her teeth. The newscast's deadline was closing in. Vic was just an intern and hadn't been there long, but, except for the siren, it seemed like an ordinary afternoon.

No one else showed any sign they'd heard it. And now the sound was gone, almost. Maybe she'd hallucinated her childhood's every-Wednesday-at-noon test of the evacuation alert system. The government never missed a week. Generations of Vic's extended family had crabbed about it, but the hurricanes and the nearby power plant made the feds, state officials, and even the easily corruptible county commissioners unwilling to relent.

Vic resumed looking over the shoulder of the line producer seated in front of her. He was bent close to his terminal, so she risked a look at the latest text message from Shay. "Tonight?" Vic had been responding "Busy. Work." but she had to do better than that soon. Even in an uninflected text, Shay could sense when Vic was lying. The producer tapped on the screen. He was showing her how he edited the teleprompter. She was supposed to be learning things, so she clamped shut her jaw to keep from yawning and leaned closer. Maybe she'd fallen asleep from her desperate boredom and dreamt the sound of the siren.

Instead of paying attention to the screen, Vic stared at the thin strip of greying ponytail that hung between the producer's shoulder blades. Her Uncle Slick sported the same hairdo. He lived closer to the power plant than any of them and had a palsy he blamed on the sirens. The rest of the family thought his shakes were due to the cocaine his fishing boats had smuggled in the eighties. "Wild times, wild times," Uncle Slick would say. Not that he was ever an addict. As much as her relatives drank and used whatever product they were handling, none of them ever got hooked. It made them excellent drug runners. The siren lingered as a tremor in Vic's pelvis, and she remembered being a kid away from home for months having surgeries and rehab and crutch fittings. She'd had the same shaking each Wednesday at noon no matter where she was. Maybe Uncle Slick was right. But it wasn't Wednesday today. Or noon. Or hurricane season.

"Are you getting this?"

He growled it at her. Vic slouched her shoulders over her crutches to lean closer to his screen. Aside from each day's scut work, her internship, so far, consisted of watching this guy edit. He was a terrible speller. A story about the surge in conservative political power scrolled on the screen. Except it said "conservation." And the part about who was funding them said, "cooperate" instead of "corporate." Vic had corrected him once, the first day. She knew better now.  

"Sure. Got it. No problem." Vic entertained herself with images of flustered anchors as they read the script. It was a bad sign that she wanted things to go wrong at her workplace. Her phone vibrated. It was Shay's text reminding her that it existed. 

Shay was full of news about her own internship at a news blog—the copy she was writing, the stories she pitched. Her latest milestone was shadowing one of the city reporters. Just thinking of Shay out on the streets of New York made Vic grind her teeth with envy. But every day on the way in Vic passed by the map of the world that Walter Cronkite had used for a backdrop. Sometimes she'd touch the glass protecting it. And the news producer she worked under was one of her journalistic heroes. It had to be worth something to be in his newsroom even if he had no idea who she was. And she had health insurance. The leather on her calf pads could use replacing.  

Maybe she and Shay should have found internships together and stayed the rock star team they'd been at school. Vic felt the staccato vibration against her groin that meant Shay was calling again. She shifted her hips so the phone didn't press as hard into her skin and ignored it again. Last week, after sex, Vic's hand resting on the high mound of Shay's hip, she and Shay had reminisced about the way Shay's neon green satin bra strap had slipped during their undercover operation. That had been the best time of their lives so far, and they still broke up whenever they heard the word "flop." Vic snorted.

"Is something amusing? Sometimes arrogant jerks of reporter wannabes think this job isn't important. That wouldn't be you, right?"

He whipped his head around so fast the ponytail now wormed across one shoulder. Vic faked clearing her throat, fake sniffled, and croaked out a "sorry." Her made-up cold and the impending deadline was enough to divert him. He turned his back to her again.

And now Shay was having an even better time of her life, and Vic felt like Uncle Slick with his old tales of pulling things over on the feds. She was twenty-two. She shouldn't be using the word "reminisce." But maybe her glory days had already passed. The phone buzzed again—Shay again. This was getting messy and too much. Shay had been pushing for them to get an apartment together. Vic had to end it between them. It made sense that she and Shay should go separate ways now. Their lives were in flux. It could be seen as a mature step in a new direction. Mellie would be irate. Vic already felt guilty. But it wasn't fair. People got to break up if they wanted to.

Especially since then Vic wouldn't have to confess her hook up with the executive producer. Vic prided herself that the one thing she didn't do was lie to women about other women, and yesterday, when she'd been allowed up onto the balcony of glassed-in offices to deliver lunches, after the blinds were shut, she'd ended up the extra side to the executive producer's egg salad. One of Vic's exes had called her an emotional cripple, which was mean considering, but she understood enough about herself to know that it was Shay's success contrasted with her own frustration that had been part of why. Well, that and the Natasha of Natasha and Boris aura of sinister high femme power the woman exuded.

Vic had thought she could be different or maybe that she could let Shay change her, but she hadn't changed. And it wasn't fair to Shay. She'd take care of it tonight. Vic imagined cupping Shay's face in her palm and saying something soothing and final. She'd always been good with a break-up speech. The producer twisted in his chair to stare at her when a sob ballooned out of her mouth. Vic was as startled as he was. She followed up with some snorts and a fake sneeze.                                                                                                                                                                                                        Another text vibrated the phone, but this one was coded in the double beat of a heart. It was from Mellie, not Shay. She hadn't been in touch since her emergency room residency had started. And Mellie actually texting was alarming. Maybe something was wrong back home.

Vic pulled the phone far enough out of her pocket to see the screen. She waited until the line producer was typing before she risked a look down. Mellie just said to call, although there were exclamation points. Their triple Great Uncle Bob had been frail for a while. But even if it was him, Mellie knew better than to ask her to show up at the funeral. It couldn't be Aunt Rose. Mellie surely would have called.       

"See this here, how I use ellipses. People do it wrong all the time."

It was hard to speak over the lingering siren tremor and the worrying, but Vic mangled out a sound that he took as interest. Today was just being a strange day. Another text came in. It was Shay again. The line producer was now talking on his own phone, so Vic took the chance and texted "10pm" back. She was caught practicing a touching head tilt when her instructor looked over his shoulder. He glared. 

"Are you catching how to do this? Tomorrow it's your turn."

That interested Vic. She pivoted on one crutch to get a closer view. She paid attention and kept herself from smarting off. The guy was still mid-rant about the overuse of compound sentences when a headache burst up the back of her skull along with the rising pitch of that same siren. She gripped the shoulder in front of her to stay upright. Maybe she was having an aneurysm. The sound backed off, and Vic decided she wasn't going to die right then. The line producer was smacking at her hand. Vic had a strong grip. She released his shoulder, put her arms into her crutches, and twisted her body between them to look over the newsroom and up into the booth. Nothing had changed around her. Once again, no one else had noticed. While the guy rubbed his shoulder and threatened to report her if he bruised, Vic rested her elbows on top of the crutches and scanned the wall of screens.

Her eyes slid by and then back to a blond, big-toothed reporter leaning over the side of a boat. The camera panned down to a manatee and her baby huffing to the surface. Their breath smelled like fresh greens. She knew this. She knew how the sun felt on the guy's skin, how the Florida gulf marsh grasses flashed in that sun, how the salt air tasted. She knew exactly where he was—in the hot water discharge canal where just off-camera the two stacks of a nuclear power plant rose like a mirage. The siren's pitch wound itself back up. Jerome, the other intern, her rival, was near the control panel. She hissed at him. 

"Turn up sixteen."

The line producer gaped at her. Jerome sneered back.

"Don't order me like you're my boss."

"Someone, sixteen, now." She was louder this time. People stared at her.

"It's just some fluff piece." Jerome looked around and shrugged. He was playing to their growing audience. 

"Turn it up, you piece of chum." Most all her family worked on boats. They could yell. Vic had thought she'd changed that along with her accent, but from the way the room went quiet, it seemed she hadn't.     

Jerome smirked. Vic knew he was thinking the crappy assistant job they were competing for was now his. Vic smiled at Jerome with her toothy smile, the one she'd used on the professor who'd insulted her body. Jerome quailed, and his fight or flight reaction kicked in. He took a step back. Over his head, Vic saw the reporter steady himself in the boat. Vic used her too-wide shoulders to slam her too-muscled arms back into her crutches. With three long swings she landed next to Jerome and reached for the volume controls. Jerome spread his arms and made a show of blocking her.

"Hey, really Vic, we're not supposed to touch these."

Vic ground a crutch tip into his foot until he yelped and backed off. She fisted a line of keys and heard the rise and fall of gunfire from a mountain in Afghanistan, what she thought was a criminally superficial fashion show of the new trends in cute rubber boots what with sea level rise and all, and the "We're being culled" chants of a bunch of wheelchair users getting arrested at a congressional health care hearing. That might have been a meaty enough story for Vic to risk being typecast, but she hadn't been offered the chance. Next was the reporter who shaved his head and got tats in order to get in with neo-Nazis. That's who Vic wanted to be. Vic kept slapping at buttons until she found the blond reporter. She twisted the knob, and his perfect tenor spread over the newsroom.

"Guys, it's not me. I'm not touching anything, it's her." Jerome held his hands in the air.

Eel slime. Everyone hated him. He didn't know this. She might not get the job, but he might not either.

"The interruptions we're experiencing are a test of the evacuation system, but it doesn't seem to bother these manatees around the boat. They benefit from the warm outflow of the repaired and newly online nuclear power plant."

Vic heard the rustle of people around her, but didn't look away from the screen.

"And now, they'll be safe for years to come due to the installation of 'World's Ease,' a transmutation technology that decreases the half-life of nuclear waste. Join us tonight for a special one hour . . ."

The camera shot dropped to the reporter's knee height and snapped back to his face. The quick pan of the boat had shown stickers on the fish cooler—a skull of some sort? Like that heavy metal stuff her second cousins liked. Was it one of their boats? The reporter rushed through his script.  

 " . . . report on how a unique combination of corporate and federal resources led to the invention of a safe, low-cost, and adaptable system that has the potential to solve the world's energy shortages. And we'll find out more about this administration's humanitarian decision to offer this invention to the world without cost or restriction."

Vic kicked the volume way up. The siren raised the hair on her arms. The reporter's smile looked more pasted than usual. He was annoyed as if the sound of a train was ruining his take.

"You, whoever you are, what do you think you're doing?"

It was the news producer. The dead silence in the room must have alerted him. But the silence was shifting away from "let's not mess with that out-of control handicapped girl" to noticing what was happening on the screen. The producer looked at the screen along with the rest of them.  

The cameraman understood before the reporter did. The camera angle shifted until the twin stacks of the power plant came into view. Vic had seen a whole childhood of sunsets behind them. The reporter shifted in and out of focus and you could hear voices from off-camera, but now he gathered himself. He placed his body dead camera center, he stopped fidgeting, and he put his arms in that elbow akimbo stance that implied authority. This guy might be worth more than his thousands of dollars in dental work.

"I've just been told that this is not a test. These are actual warning sirens from the nuclear power plant that you can see behind me."

He didn't see what happened next, but the cameraman did. His "oh, crap," broadcasted over the air as a dome-shaped flash burst into the sky.

"Override local programming. Go live on all stations. Get the anchor in here." The news producer's voice was crisis calm. A hum spread through the room. It escalated to shouts.

The camera held steady as black smoke billowed along the ground. It rose and folded and wrapped in on itself as if a troupe of acrobats were hidden inside. The cameraman had just earned a Peabody or would have if he weren't going to be dead soon. The reporter had his back to the camera and watched the smoke surge toward him. All around Vic, fingers rushed over computer keys until it was the whole world that saw the reporter's shoulders spread, his arms lift, his butt and thigh muscles tighten in the need to run. Even Vic, in New York, pushed off the desk and eyed the door. As they watched, the reporter's shoulders dropped, and his body stopped its sideways pitch and settled back over his feet. They saw the long breath travel down his spine. From off camera came the faint sound of someone else on the boat pleading to Jesus his savior in heaven. Vic strained to recognize the voice even though she knew her relatives would more likely be cussing than praying.

The reporter turned to look straight at the camera. His face was different. None of the shiny teeth showed. His eyes were quiet, his smile peaceful. He flipped a strand of hair off his face, and it streamed into the air behind him.   

"There has been an explosion at the power plant just behind me. The smoke approaching is a mixture of volatized uranium or plutonium powder. Right now we can feel the suck of air rushing past us toward the plant. Any second, this will reverse. Anyone who can, should leave the area immediately."

His hair dropped into a tangle over his head. He left it there. Behind him one last shaft of sunlight revealed whirlwinds of red dust within the smoke.

"Darling Catherine, my boys, I love you."

It was as if something grabbed and pulled him back into the darkness. The camera swung down as the boat lurched and the last thing anyone saw was a pair of feet in beat-up sneakers. Vic's uncles, cousins, aunts—they all had shoes like that, stained from the salt water, the colors bleached away. The screen crackled into shards of grey. Vic wasn't the only person who ducked.

The newsroom, for a moment, went silent. The line producer slumped back in his chair. One of the studio crew froze, unblinking, with one hand pressed against her chest and the other over her mouth. Secret workplace lovers clung to each other. The producer moved around the room touching people and giving them simple orders. "We need the specs on that plant. And you, find out the evacuation protocol for the area." The reporters were the first to recover. They surrounded the producer, each making their case of why they should be sent. The rest of the staff regained their momentum, and the newsroom became its own maelstrom.

END OF CHAPTER THREE

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