CHAPTER 14
At the southernmost entrance to the Old City, Brenna leaned against the arched portal, watching Grace’s awkward progress as she caught up.
She was limping, rotating her left shoulder, moving through pain.
She had taken a hard thwack against the driver’s seat while she was serving as her human seat belt, and then she’d bounced across the cobblestones when the van ignited.
Uncomfortable as she looked now—later, when she stopped moving and her body cooled down, she was going to be in a world of hurt.
When that time came, she wasn’t going to have any homey comforts.
Her luggage had been incinerated. Everything she now owned was on her back, and Kav?ak wasn’t exactly Rodeo Drive.
Grace drew near, caught her eye, and quickly looked away, still embarrassed.
She was so reserved, so proper. She didn’t understand how powerful an aphrodisiac war could be.
The prospect of death brought out primitive impulses, and war correspondents were infamous for fucking like bunnies.
She smiled inwardly. Stress revealed what manners concealed.
Beneath the cool facade, Grace Alcott ran hot.
Even on auto-pilot, she had moves. Brenna flushed, the heat of sexual recollection warming her despite the cold day.
Grace caught up.
Brenna gave her a moment to catch her breath, then led on.
Without a word of complaint, she followed, limping.
Civilians in the Old City—none of whom traversed the deserted streets unless it was absolutely necessary—had resourcefully stacked hulked-out cars, scrap metal, concrete slabs, and other debris into berms,
creating protective barriers that shielded them from gunfire and mortar attacks the rare times they did venture out.
The berms ran like solid walls for blocks at a time, even barricading street intersections.
Brenna scurried like a mouse along the bases of the blasted buildings, moving in the lee of the huge piles as rapidly as she could without opening too great a distance between herself and Grace.
Overhead, she heard a freight train bearing down on her.
She stopped. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she searched the sky apprehensively.
The noise grew louder—large mortar roaring in their direction.
Hundred-twenty millimeter, she guessed. Heavier than the rockets blazing across the rest of the city.
She cursed, running for a recessed doorway. Grace, following her lead, squeezed in beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder.
One Mississippi—it crossed above them skimming the rooftops—two Mississippi...
The payload shuddered to the ground with a heavy whoomf and shook the ground as it exploded. Three Mississippi. Half a mile, no more. A dense black cloud billowed into the sky just north of them.
“Shit.” The market. It had to be.
The economic center of the city since the 14th century, the market had become a distribution point for the trickle of international relief that eluded Nationalist blockades. Today, the first dry day after ten days of rain and snow, it would be thronged.
She hitched the straps of her bags up her shoulders and ran.
Her strong thighs took her, full out, toward the column of smoke, up and over paths in tall berms, across rubble-strewn streets, and down side roads. And all the time she ran, dread spread through her like a poison. Her brain rebelled: Don’t go. Turn back. You can’t see any more of this.
Grace followed, hard at her heels, grunting with pain, her breath ragged.
She turned the last corner and skidded to a halt.
The passageway that led from the street into the market lay ahead.
Brenna shuddered. She hated entering the market.
It was a trap. Built like a fortress, the large open area in the center courtyard was surrounded by high walls on all sides.
Only four narrow, tunnel-like passageways, from the major points of the compass, allowed access to the middle.
Easy enough to get into, a few people at a time, but hard to get out of, should everyone decide to leave at once.
She heard panicked screams echoing off the stones in the dark passageway.
Her stomach corkscrewed downwards.
Grace caught up and stumbled into her. She took one look at her face and followed her line of sight.
“The market,” Brenna said. “Direct hit.” She led off, lifting the camera to her shoulder before her resolve failed her.
The stone walls inside the tunnel radiated cold.
Blinded by the contrast of the interior darkness and the brilliant light in the square, she advanced quickly but cautiously.
A middle-aged woman wearing a floral-print skirt appeared mirage-like, and ran past her, babbling incoherently.
Brenna faltered, fighting the urge to turn around and go with her.
She didn’t want to be part of the horror any more than that fleeing woman.
But if she, and other journalists like her, didn’t broadcast the truth to the world, how would people know what was really going on?
Camera ready, bags criss-crossed guerrilla-style across her chest, she stepped out of the dank passageway into the square. Acrid smoke gusted into her face. A flash of heat stung her eyes then suddenly cleared, lifting the veil on the surreal scene.
She took a deep breath and steadied her trembling hands. Pressing the record button, she panned the scene with a wide-angle lens to obtain her establishing-shot.
With one eye glued to the viewfinder and the other orienting her peripherally, she stepped forward into the center of the pandemonium, letting the camera keep recording while she turned from one grisly image to another.
The transitions were chaotic, but in the studio, a good editor would recognize the discrete cutting points.
Trying to gain a higher vantage point, she stepped onto a hill of debris, blindly seeking a solid foothold. Moving up the pile, her foot skidded across something warm and spongy. The object rolled and thumped the inside of her ankle.
She took her eye off the viewfinder and looked down.
A woman’s hand lay there, still curled around a loaf of bread. She jumped. A cry of horror escaped her throat. She scanned the heaped bodies, looking for a middle-aged woman that matched the hand. Memories bubbled inside her, threatening to rise to the surface. She took a shuddering breath.
Behind her, a hideous wail—half-human, half animal—rose above the cacophony and isolated itself in her consciousness. Keening.
Brenna remembered that blood-curdling sound.
She’d made it once herself.
The camera tumbled from her shoulder and dangled uselessly at the end of her arm. She searched the square. There. An old woman, tendrils of thin gray hair floating out from her scarf, kneeling over a dead man. The lower part of his torso was gone.
Memory engulfed her and everything faded around her—all sight, all sound, all sensation. She was back in Tel Aviv, making love to Ari in a recessed doorway after two long weeks of separation. He was pressing her against the door well, back to the deserted street, intimately linked to her.
A car bomb exploded at the curb. He crumpled and fell backwards onto the pavement.
Ari. Her dear Ari.
She lost her mind.
She’d immersed her forearms in him, tried to push everything back in—as if reassembling him could make him come to life again. She pushed and grunted and gathered him into a futile embrace, screaming for help, holding him until she became exhausted and eventually understood her defeat.
Then she did the only thing that made sense.
She took pictures. Three rolls, thirty-six frames each, a hundred and eight pictures in all.
She kept shooting until the rescue workers arrived and pulled her away, clutching her precious camera.
In the middle of the night, she threw those three black plastic film canisters onto her editor’s desk.
“Print them,” she raged, staggering wildly before him in her blood-drenched dress.
“Print every fucking one and make people understand!”
She wandered Tel Aviv alone that night, wailing, disconsolate, in a trance of despair, Ari’s blood drying on her arms and flaking off. At dawn she woke in the sea, nudged by tiny waves, her dented camera resting on her chest, her skirt billowing around her in pink water.
He was gone.
Grace hesitated after Brenna left, not really wanting to follow. She’d never been a rubbernecker, never wanted to subject the sick or injured to the added mortification of becoming a public spectacle.
That had always grieved her about Aya’s death.
How many passing drivers had seen her on the Beltway when she was finally extricated from her chewed up Saab? How many strangers had gawked at that private, dignified woman while she lay on the road, belly huge with their unborn son, dress ripped open from neck to hem while the EMTs did CPR?
Those last months before she died—having become an independent producer—Aya had been lighter in spirit than Grace had seen her in years. Already she had begun researching the first story she would independently produce: the siege of Kav?ak, which she’d had the insight to see developing.
She was here, she reminded herself, because Aya never got her chance.
So she would do whatever was necessary. Sheltering her throbbing shoulder from the stream of dazed survivors rushing past her, she limped through the passageway.
At the opening, she stopped and stared into the heart of immorality, shocked and disbelieving that humans could intentionally hurt each other this way.
A shrieking wail rose above the din. She scanned the square until she found the source of the gut-wrenching sound.
Fresh horror greeted her. Brenna Rease was on her knees, her lens stuck in the face of a ululating old woman. A vulture capitalizing on tragedy—was this what Grace had commissioned?
She strode across the square to her. “Turn it off,” she ordered.
The tally light kept flickering. Ignoring her, Brenna manually adjusted the lens.
If Brenna wouldn’t shut it down, Grace sure as hell would. She leaned forward to block the lens.
With that superbly-developed peripheral vision of the combat photographer, Brenna saw her coming and pushed her hand aside. “Out of my way.”
“Stop, I said.”
“Be quiet!” She pivoted to frame up the shot.
For the first time, Grace saw the corpse fully. Fighting the urge to vomit, she looked away. “Allow this woman some dignity,” she said. “Show some compassion.”
Brenna continued recording.
“My God,” Grace rasped. “You’re as heartless as they say.”
Brenna’s thumb twitched in the hand-grip. The tally light went off. She stood up and spun on her, eyes dark and inscrutable. “She scarcely knows we’re here.”
“I told you what I wanted. Traumatizing this woman sure as hell isn’t it.”
Brenna stuck her face in Grace’s. “Get one thing, Alcott—and get it well. You can’t stay clean here.”
“Sure,” she spat back. “Justify it. What’s one old woman when you can win a Pulitzer?”
Brenna’s back stiffened. Her eyes blazed with cold fury. “How dare you moralize me from your nice safe life? How. Dare. You.”
A burning stall began to crumple along the west wall.
She hoisted her camera onto her shoulder again. “Stay the hell out of my way,” she commanded. “I’m not turning in crap so you can sleep at night.”
Grace stood there, rooted in the evil scene, watching Brenna disappear into the chaos.
“Agresori! Agresori!”
Grace was body-slammed from the side. Blinding pain shot through her hip. She lurched and momentarily lost her balance.
A young woman with flame-red hair frizzed around the ears of a knit cap pulled desperately at her forearms, babbling in Kav?ak. “Agresori! Agresori!”
She looked at her, not comprehending.
The redhead rushed to the keening woman and grabbed her arm. “Agresori!” The widow’s primitive howl strangled in her throat.
Grace circled, looking around herself. Everyone had taken up the cry. A wave of panic was surging across the market.
At her side, the redhead pulled the old woman to her feet. She threw a final warning to Grace over her shoulder and rushed away.
Something frightening was happening, but she had no clue what.