Exodus

We switch gears for the second half of this short story, away from meta fiction and the FEM to more 'normal' fiction, at least up until the final sentence!

Charles Walmsley-Vetch had been a BBC News presenter for eight years. Bad news, he had decided early in his career, was a self-replicating drug that people couldn’t get enough of. This was lucky because today the poppy yield had been bountiful. He was the favored presenter for seriously bad news. His ‘gravitas’ ensured that such dire tidings came hitting home to soft viewers sat on their comfy sofas; as if they had been plunged directly into the distress of those less rich than themselves. He made the news more real, like someone telling a story that made you feel like you’d been there, but were glad you weren’t (by the grace of God). It wasn’t his face. He’d had surgery to correct the worst of a nose broken as the result of a badly timed rugby tackle in his teens. But the evidence of deviant alignment was still there; it gave his countenance an exhibition of enhanced reality. However it was his voice that turned those tough faces red, sent those timid constitutions for the tissue box. How glorious and gritty it was. Like treacle poured over a path of broken glass, it made the pain look more beautiful.

Shuffling his notes, Charles stared into the vacant camera and cleared his throat. The Floor Director gave him the three-minute signal. He nodded back with the disdain of a lord deigning to acknowledge a surf. They were nothing to him; he was all that mattered, all that was important in this circus - this arena of production. He was ring-master, lion tamer and even clown when required. Everything was focused on him, and that was as it should be.

Charles pressed some keys on his laptop, pretending to work but really imagining himself receiving the Royal Television Society’s National Presenter of the Year award. He had only been a researcher when 9/11 raised its baton to the overture of the War on Terror. He had watched as the presenters of the day excreted disbelief over the answerless questions. But today was his chance to bring news of timeless endurance to the world. It was his voice which would be remembered, recorded and replayed - like Churchill’s “we shall never surrender” speech. The world would listen to him. He knew the audience was out there - watching, listening and waiting. Everything in the last few hours had led to this point, this moment when he would knit together disparate global events into a coherent sequence.

“Two minutes,” came the call from the shadows.

 He did some facial stretches and took a sip of water; just enough to wet his throat, not enough to put any pressure on his bladder. He checked the running order, nodding in agreement at the sequence. He looked up and into the murky lens. He tried to image the faces he would speak to: expectant faces (regulars), nervous faces (sometimers) and worried faces (first-timers). He imagined children being hushed, barking dogs being evicted and final touches being made to cups of tea by grinding old ladies.

“One minute,” the dark voice intoned.

Charles smoothed his tie (today it was a sombre, dark blue); the feel silk enticed the faintest arousal in him - a sensory memory of fingering his mother’s stockings as they lay, enveloped by a lavender haze, in her underwear drawer. He made a conscious effort to relax every muscle in his face.

“Ten seconds.” 

The lights in the studio came up to full. 

Charles felt the prickly, burning sensation on the back of his neck. He had never gotten used to the feeling of so many lumens suddenly penetrating his skin. The sensation that his flesh was suddenly being cooked by a hundred suns was disconcerting but he had learnt to ignore it. He saw the opening sentences come up on the auto-cue, and watched the Floor Director’s fingers, illuminated like a mime artist, count the last three digits. At the point of takeoff the Director’s index finger swept towards him and the steady, crimson light on top of the camera came into existence. Death and life were now a reality to viewers around the world.

“This is the news from the BBC,” he began, with a touch more solemnity than normal. This would signal to regulars that today was an especially good day to be watching. “Here are the headlines.” He clasped his hands together as if receiving confession by proxy server, and began the litany of woes.

“The unprecedented disruption to worldwide communications which occurred yesterday, and resulted in the complete loss of all global satellite transmissions, has been attributed to electrical interference from Hurricane Santa Cruz.” 

The auto cue moved at exactly the right speed, at his speed. 

“In a related story, Hurricane Santa Cruz swept unexpectedly inland across eastern Mexico last night. This put an effective end to years of bloodshed between two drug cartels, but has left thousands dead. Santa Cruz’s unexplained change of course has been described by meteorologists as ‘unprecedented’.” 

Charles wondered if, somewhere in the National Hurricane Center, a weatherman was getting ‘chewed out’ as the Americans so nicely put it.

“In Africa, the sudden disappearance of water from Lake Tanganyika has caused wide-spread drought in the region.” He had to be consistent and reticent. “Geologists believe that a sink-hole has opened beneath the lake. Aid agencies say that the lack of water could kill hundreds of thousands of people who depend on the lake for drinking water and irrigation.” 

Steady; keep your delivery pattern, he thought.

“In America, the catastrophic failure of crops in the Mid-west has many environmentalists blaming genetically modified seeds for a lack of resistance to an as yet unknown bacteria.” He paused between each sentence, so that the news could really sink in. “Analysts are predicting that the US will need to buy grain from abroad to cover national demand, and the price of wheat on global markets has rocketed. Analysts further predict that third-world countries will now struggle to feed their populations, and that this could trigger a famine even worse than that in Ethiopia during the 1980’s, which killed more than four hundred thousand people.” 

Charles made a mental note to check with his stock broker, in case he needed to diversify into grain futures.

“Finally, outbreaks of the Ebola virus in Southern Africa continue to have scientists baffled. Experts from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA have gone on record as saying that the outbreaks are ‘worrying’.”

Whilst Charles was delivering his sermon of catastrophe, something unexpected was happening in the studio. A bolt, manufactured in China as many bolts are, was fracturing. The reasons for this would never be discovered. However if forensic scientists had ever traced the cause of what was about to pass, they would have found that the iron composing most of the bolt’s steel had suffered a bizarre realignment of its magnetic field. This caused the bolt’s structural integrity to reduce to a level where the carbon inside it was insufficient to keep it from sheering. Why this magnetic disturbance had been localized to this particular bolt would have been the cause of much scientific and philosophical deliberation.

This bolt was one of fifty bolts securing the lighting gantry above the presenter’s desk to the ceiling. Between them they spread the gantry’s load across their ranks. This particular bolt would not have appeared special to any visual inspection. But, like all contingents, the ranks were not composed of uniform recruits. Some bolts took more strain than others. This bolt was, in fact, the most important one in the entire frame, like the strongest man at the bottom of a human pyramid. This was because it had been tightened more than the bolts around it, so the strain on it was greater.

The result of the bolt sheering was not immediate, but the weight of the gantry was suddenly being taken by bolts which, up until now, had really had it far too it easy. They were not up to their new duties, and without the wonder-bolt to hold them together they too failed one by one. 

Charles looked up as a noise like a murder of screaming crows being thrown into a vat of boiling oil echoed off the studio’s amazing acoustics. The lights above him flickered and pulsed. It appeared that they were swaying, as if the sunlit bells of trumpets in a swing orchestra. 

The lighting gantry collapsed in a tangle of metal, and Charles Walmsley-Vetch was crushed to death.

After all, no-one likes a tattletale.