Twilight Prophecy. Maggie Shayne
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when it was her turn to go onstage.
Sighing, she glanced down at the book the old man had pressed into her hands.
THE TRUTH.
Unimaginative title, but memorable in its simplicity. There was a string emerging from the top of the book, and a tiny jade Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy and compassion, pendant dangling from the bottom. A necklace. Pretty. What an odd thing for a man to be using as a bookmark. She wondered if Mr. Folsom was a practicing Buddhist or just fond of Asian art. She removed the necklace from the book and hung it around her own neck, tucking the pendant underneath her blouse, so she would remember to return it to the man when they passed again. She was sure she would see him on her way to the stage.
She stuffed the book into her satchel so she wouldn’t forget it and offend the old guy when he came back to the greenroom for his coat and saw his gift, abandoned there. Then she dropped her bag into an empty chair and went to the television to turn it up the old-fashioned way, since she didn’t see a remote, curious to see how the fearless vampire hunter would come off to the viewers.
She’d always had a lot of respect for Will Waters. She hoped that wasn’t about to be shaken, but she suspected it was. There were only two ways this interview could go down, the way she saw it. Either Waters was going to expose the old man as confused and possibly senile, or he was going to play along with this sensationalistic vampire nonsense for the sake of his ratings. Either way seemed a breach of what used to be known as journalistic integrity. She hoped she was wrong.
Lucy sat down, waiting for the commercial break to end. She had been pleased at the invitation to appear on a serious news program. Not because she had any desire to grab her fifteen minutes of fame. God knew she preferred solitude. Her favorite place in the world, aside from a dig site in the middle of nowhere, was the dusty basement of the archaeology department at BU. And she certainly wasn’t going to jump onto the 2012 doomsday bandwagon, as the show’s producers seemed to be expecting her to do. No, she was going to stick to the facts. This translation was an extraordinary new bit of information about the ancient Sumerians, how they lived and how they thought. Period.
Sensationalism was something she didn’t need. And she wouldn’t take fame if they gave it to her. Recognition for her work, that would be okay, because it might just result in good PR for the university, which might persuade the powers that be to further fund her work.
She was picking over the fruit tray on the table, looking for grapes that hadn’t yet made it more than halfway to raisinhood, when the show’s theme music announced that the break was over. As it faded away, Will Waters introduced his dotty next guest.
Lucy looked up at the screen, absently popping a grape into her mouth, and watched as Mr. Folsom made his way toward the set. His gait was slow and shuffling, his posture stooped. He took his time crossing the stage, then finally extended a hand to shake the host’s.
And then there was a series of popping sounds that Lucy recognized all too well. She froze in place, not believing what she was seeing on the TV screen, as both men fell to the floor, red blooms spreading on their white shirts.
Shock gripped her as her brain tried to translate what her eyes had just seen. The cameras began jostling amid a cacophony of shouting, rushing people. Some seemed to be racing toward the stage, but most were running away from it, stampeding for the exits.
The screen switched abruptly to a “technical difficulty” message, and it took Lucy a few seconds to realize that the sounds of panic she could still hear were coming, not from the television set, but from the hallway beyond the greenroom door.
And for just an instant she was back there again, sleeping in her parents’ tent on the site of an archaeological dig in a Middle Eastern desert.
There were motors roaring nearer, and then a series of keening battle cries and gunshots in the night. She felt her mother’s hands shaking her awake in the dead of night and heard her panicked, fear-choked voice. “Run, Lucy! Run into the dunes and hide. Hurry!”
At eleven years old, Lucy came awake fast and heard the sounds, but what scared her more was the fear in her mother’s voice, and in her eyes. It was as if she knew, somehow, what was about to happen.
“I won’t go without you!” Lucy glimpsed her father as he shoved his worn-out old fedora onto his head. He was never without that hat on a dig. Said it brought him luck. But it wasn’t bringing any luck tonight. And then he was taking a gun from a box underneath his cot. A gun! She’d never seen him with a gun before. Her parents were a pair of middle-aged, bookish archaeologists. They didn’t carry guns.
“You have to, Lucy. Go! Now, before it’s too late!”
“Obey your mother!” her father told her.
Her mother pushed her through a flap in the rear of the tent, even as men in mismatched fatigues surged from a half-dozen jeeps, shouting in their foreign tongues, shooting their weapons. Lucy’s feet sank into the sand, slowing her, but she ran.
There were screams and more gunfire. Every crack of every rifle made her body jerk in reaction as she strained to run faster through the sucking sand, until finally she dove behind a dune, burying her face.
But worse than the noise, worse than the shouting and the gunshots, was the silence that came afterward. The vehicles all roared away. And then there was nothing. Nothing. Just an eleven-year-old girl, lying in a sand dune, shaking and too terrified to even lift her head.
Something banged against the greenroom door, snapping Lucy out of the memory. Blinking away the paralysis it had brought with it, she realized that she had to get the hell out of this place, and she had to do it now. The door through which she had entered was not an option. There was what sounded like a riot going on beyond it. Turning, she spotted the room’s only other door, one marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.
This qualified, she decided, and she grabbed her satchel and jacket, shoved the emergency door open and ran through it into a vast concrete area with an open, overhead door, like a garage door, at the far end, and the city night beyond. She raced toward that opening, onto the raised platform outside it—a loading dock, she guessed—and jumped from that to the pavement four feet below.
Running full bore now, she followed the blacktop that ran between two buildings until she emerged onto a New York City sidewalk. Blending with the masses of humanity, she walked as fast as she could away from the violence she’d just witnessed.
Sirens screamed as police arrived. She smelled fast-food grease from somewhere nearby. Across the street, four men emerged from a black van. They wore suits and long dark coats, and they strode very quickly toward the building she’d just exited. One glanced her way, but she quickly averted her eyes and kept on walking. The wind swept a playbill over her feet and on down the sidewalk, and air brakes whooshed in the distance. She kept going.
Guilt rose up to nip at her heels. She was a coward for running away. Surely she ought to seek out a police officer, and tell him what she had seen and heard.
But everything in her told her to do just the opposite. So that was what she did. Running away, saving herself while others died—that was she did best, after all.
And yet it didn’t work out quite that way for her this time. From behind her, Lucy heard a voice say, “Hold it right there, lady.” And somehow she knew he was addressing her.
Her feet obeyed. But her heart raced even faster. The fight-or-flight impulse was coming down with all its weight on the “flight” side of the coin. And every cell in her body was already in motion, pushing her, making it almost impossible to stand still.
“Are you Professor Lanfair?” the man asked. He was one of those men in black she’d spotted earlier. She could see his warped reflection in the back of a chrome mirror, affixed to the side of a hot little sports car she wished she could jump into and drive away.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me, ma’am.”
No, I don’t think I am.
Her brain argued, told her