Chapter 30: Tell Me a Story (Part I)

“Excuse me?” Emily said. “Who is this?”

“At first I thought it might be as simple as a stalker, but it’s not an emotional attachment to a relationship with you. It’s not even the simple vanity of a deranged mind driving the psychology of this. This is hero worship.”

“Ms. Mercer?” Emily lowered her voice, hoping that her impromptu bodyguards wouldn’t notice her conversation. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“First, you’ll have to answer me a few questions,” Elaine said.

“Okay,” Emily said. She steeled her shoulders, her staff did not notice her, but her mind moved in strange directions as she thought about how she could use the detective to get her off the stage and perhaps away from this. Ideas warred in her head, she could flee—surely a difficult thing—but why? The concert would seal her political future at ASU and probably give her the boost in popularity she needed to put her name on every mouth. Looking over the crowd, she realized she would be standing in front of an extremely large portion of the university’s population in only a matter of minutes. This sort of publicity could not be beat.

Her life could change in that moment.

No matter how strange the circumstances, she needed to keep her head on straight and make an opportunity out of the crisis.

“When my lab got raided because I was suspected of ‘pirating music’ I thought it might just be a bureaucratic SNAFU,” Elaine said, her voice twisting momentarily through several octaves as the signal “An overeager functionary performing her function too zealously, following a vague tip that led them to me. Of course, they won’t find anything. I don’t store music on campus computers and what I do store is always obfuscated with encryption. The delay would be insignificant, although frustrating to my research, but the timing is what really caught my attention.”

Emily felt her breath catch in her throat. “What do you mean, timing?”

The pause on the other end of the phone raised her anxiety slightly as she waited for Elaine to respond. The crowd shifted again, and Emily caught a glimpse of the girl moving through the shifting forest of humanity again. For a brief glimpse, Emily felt her eyes on her; then just as quickly as the crowd revealed her, it collapsed around her again.

“An early hypothesis could have been that your stalker had decided to strike at me, knowing you would seek outside help,” the voice on the phone said. “This is readily falsified by recent evidence that the system we now know is running your viral campaign lacked the interconnections to make such an action. This leaves a different, although more controversial hypothesis: you called in the tip that led to my laboratory being raided.”

Emily nodded as much for the phone as herself. “You’re right. I did.”

“Why?”

“I needed to be sure,” Emily said. “My sources on you made it fairly clear you’re the only person on campus capable of things like what happened to me and you’re the only resource I could run to. It could have been an extortion racket…”

“I see.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Actually, the Dean of Engineering figured it out. He leveled the initial raid and when I went to talk to him he inadvertently let on to me that the same person who tipped him off had spoken on my behalf. Of course, he mentioned you by name because he’d been infected by your campaign indoctrination, but it eventually came to me.”

“So…are you telling me that you’ve figured out what’s going on? Like, who’s behind it?”

“I have,” Elaine said. She paused for a moment, leaving only the crackling echo of “…ave…” to crinkle over the phone. “But, now I need to know if you want this stopped or not. I have two ways to bring this down. One that involves you accepting your involvement in the culmination of this event on part of elements of your past that you’ve been trying to cover up and the other has me revealing it for you.”

“I have a choice?”

“The parameters of the case have changed,” Elaine repeated. “This is going to end; it’s going to end now. When this started it may have been a subtle popularity shift, but it’s gone full blown zombie apocalypse and I can’t have that on my campus. What you get to choose is if you get to accept your own responsibility or if I implicate you instead.”

“I could turn you in for investigating without a license,” Emily shot back. “I’m not helpless with the law. It’s illegal in Arizona to provide services as a private investigator without one.”

“That’ll be harder to prove than you think, and you’re wasting time. You’re paying for the treatment of a coma patient at St. Luke’s Hospital. There’s a newspaper story about a fire in your dormitory where you saved another student from death. Except the trail ends there—”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You wanted to know who was behind this, didn’t you?”

“Ms. Mercer, you should keep your nose out of my past and just do your job.”

Something had agitated the crowd. The audience began to shift uncomfortably, some of them stopped staring at the stage in expectation, and there were people pushing their way through at various places. The ebb and flow of the mob didn’t appear as organized anymore; conversations went out of sync and the buzz became an angry rumble. Through a break in the now boiling sea of faces, Emily saw Elaine clearly for a moment, phone to her ear, goggles shining under the hood of a black hoodie. Next to her a taller boy sprayed someone with perfume, the person staggered and coughed. The faces, originally serene and idiot-blank, now showed a bit of confusion and some anger.

Kimberly and a few other members of her upper staff pointed together in that direction and suddenly Emily found herself alone on the stage. All the various people surrounding her from friends—now strange zombies who spouted only campaign slogans and hollow platitudes about calm—to grips, technicians, and others slid to the front of the stage and jumped down, entering the crowd.

They closed in on the girl with the phone and the hoodie, breaking through the audience with a wake. People tumbled out of their way as they pushed through until Emily could see them

“You’ve been had, Ms. Mercer,” Emily said into the phone. “If you can stop this, perhaps you should do it now and save your own skin.”

Even as she spoke the words she didn’t know that she cared for the moment. A glimmer of concern fluttered over her thoughts as she mused on that fact; she’d started this entire process with great apprehension, but now she simply felt anxious. A reflection of mood from an hour earlier stared, momentarily out of the mirror of self-introspection and she saw herself like one of the idiot-zombies that had become of her staff. Am I being affected by whatever’s affecting them? she wondered at her own lack of fear. The cool confidence, the nerves of steel, the casual charisma—all the things that gave her the edge during her political maneuvering could be symptoms of the same vacancy she there.

“We have just enough time to do what we need,” Elaine said.

In spite of all her steel-and-attitude, Emily still screamed when a hand gripped her shoulder from behind and spun her around.