The Last Handful of Clover - Book 3: The Stone in the Stream

3.35 Carol from Public Relations

June 16, 2:09 pm

I feel like we're a pack of squirrels that have been chased up a tree...

Morgan couldn't stop thinking about how accurately Rhonda Ferguson had described their plight that morning. Or about her own response.

I just hope whatever is hunting us hasn't learned how to climb.

Things hadn't gotten better for the newsroom since dawn.

The night before, Morgan had convinced the reporters that they needed to go back out and try to document what had happened to the city. But when the light of day had revealed the situation more clearly, her colleagues had seen quite enough through the windows of their high-rise offices and studios. It was mid-afternoon now, and the two teams that hadn't returned from the night before were still missing in action.

As morning had bled into afternoon, the conversation had turned away from their duty to their survival. Everyone was tired and on edge, and Morgan watched with concern as the emotions in the conference room threatened to spin out of control.

"We need to barricade the stairwell doors!" Rhonda said, her voice high pitched and cracking. "Seal them shut, like they've done on the lower floors!"

"Rhonda, we're twenty-one floors up," Levi Cannon said. "Nobody is coming up that dark stairwell."

Unless they're squirrel hunting, Morgan thought.

"You don't know that," Rhonda countered, sharply. "If somebody's crazy enough, and if the doors lower down are blocked, they might get this far."

"In case you didn't notice," Martha Gillespie said, "it wasn't a stranger bursting into the studio that killed the intern. It was one of our own. Nobody from the outside made Stan go crazy."

Morgan heard a note of panic in everyone's voices. They all kept glancing nervously toward the station manager's office, where Stan's dead body, as well as Phil King's living one, were still locked up.

"Do we still think it's a virus, then?" Larry Wiggins asked. He'd taken his customary place at the head of the conference table, but his contribution to the discussion had been pretty useless so far.

"I don't know," Morgan said, after no one else ventured an opinion. "But whatever it is, something tells me that locked doors aren't going to keep it out. And neither are dark stairwells." They all stared at her. "Stan thought it was a... consciousness... of some kind."

"A 'consciousness'?" Buck Jones mumbled through his swollen jaw. The weatherman sat with his arms crossed across his ample chest, the two ends of his tie hanging in front of his sweat-stained shirt. "That's nuts, Morgan! What kind of 'consciousness'? A demon? Maybe an alien invasion? Pod people, for Christ's sake?"

"All of that sounds just as likely as a virus," Morgan shot back. "If it's a virus, why don't we all have it? Why did Stan have it, and then he suddenly didn't, as soon as he got shot? I've never heard of a bullet scaring away a virus."

That silenced the table, and they all sat staring at each other and out of the windows for several minutes. Wisps of black smoke curled around the outside of the building, perhaps from one of the more than a dozen fires visible in the distance. Or (even more terrifying) from a lower floor in their own building.

Over the next ninety minutes, there was little conversation. Mostly, everyone just stared out the windows, drifting to and from the bathrooms down the hall, and constantly checking their phones for a signal that was clearly not going to come back.

At 3:55 pm, a sudden commotion in the hallway made everyone in the room jump nearly out of their skins, and seconds later, the door to the conference room flew open. Morgan couldn't help herself. She felt herself jump into a fighting stance and she looked around the room for anything she could use as a weapon.