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