Quickly replaced by,
And Baars’s smiling face, serene and centre-screen. From the willows slowly heaving in the breeze behind him, I knew he was standing in front of the Framer Compound. The sunlight played off his glasses in an eerie way, making them flash utterly white from time to time…
Or was it crimson?
“You said you have a message for the American people?” the off-frame reporter asked.
“Yes,” Baars replied, so much humility compressed into his smile it could only be called smug. “Yes, I do. They need to know that these are the Final Days.”
“You mean that the world is about to end?”
“Yes, but not in the way you might think.”
The unseen reporter was on him in a click. “You think the sun is about to swallow up the world. That the world is billions of years older than it appears.”
This seemed to surprise him-an informed interviewer, imagine-but a quick blink was all he needed to reclaim his Vedic composure. His smile broadened as a chorus of shouts climbed in the sunlit background. Someone close cried out loud enough to be picked up on the interviewer’s microphone.
“It’s her! Jesus! It’s really her! “ I chortled in front of the little screen. This was news?
I saw her even before the cameraman had the presence of mind to redirect his shot. Even before her granular image found its way to the centre of the nation’s perspective, I knew. Slight and beautiful even in a wheelchair. Her hands and feet bound into bloody paws. Buddha smiling and heavy-lidded. Stevie pushed her into the photo-op sweet spot fairly glowing in his white uniform…
Dead Jennifer.
A girl fucked up by a father fucked up by a bottle of bourbon-and the list goes on.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from her bandaged hands and feet. Now that was taking one for the team. Positively hardcore. They had the medical facilities at the Compound-the little episode with the dying stroke patient, Agatha, had demonstrated that. The only thing that confused me was what Nolen had said earlier: that the coroner thought the digits had been severed post mortem. And then I realized: they had been cut twice.
Remove them, leave them overnight, then cut them again closer to the knuckle.
Everything was pixilated madness on the screen. Voices shouted and battled. Only her name was intelligible, repeated over and over and over. A new tag line popped onto the bottom of the screen.