Page 18 of So Far Gone

“They should call themselves the Department of Euthanasia.” Lucy made a casual check of her watch. “Well, let the desk know when you file. I’ll have to give it a read from home.” She slinked back to her cubicle to pack up her laptop and her empty Tupperware.

Anytime there was a story about a street person on fentanyl—which was pretty much every day—Lucy got nervous about Kel, who wasn’t in school, didn’t have a job, and whose number of days sober now sat at a personal record sixty-eight. Or, at least, it had been sixty-eight this morning, when Lucy had left for work. Lucy went home nervous most days, worried her nineteen-year-old son was on his way to becoming a full-time Freddy himself.

She texted him:Headed home soon. What sounds good for dinner?

Instant text bubbles. Oh, thank God! When he didn’t answer right away—especially when she was at the office late like this—Lucy got sick with worry, afraid he’d pawned his phone again, and was gone, on the streets, in the wind.WTV, the text came back. Whatever. In Kel-speak:I love you, Mom.

One more check on her way out, at the desk of Jackson, the internshe’d asked to inquire about a reported fistfight at a school board meeting the night before.

Lucy could remember when a fight at a school board meeting would be unimaginable (Fight overwhat? Lunch lady uniforms? Custodian pay?) but now, with everyone on edge, still pissed off by school closures during the pandemic, angry about the teaching of sex ed or evolution or drag queens or gay rights, or about some book no one had checked out from the school library in a decade,Random Yellingwas practically an agenda item. She could also remember when there weretwoed reporters she could’ve put on this story, one for K–12 and one for higher ed, back when the staff was twice the size it was now. Oh, the extravagance!

Now, the education job was in its third month unfilled. At full staff, Lucy had just fifteen bodies to cover a city of 225,000, in a metro of 600,000—but, of course, they were never at full staff anyway. She had just a dozen reporters today, six in the office, none to cover the 150 or so schools and dozen or so colleges in the region. So, she scratched an occasional ed story out of an intern, or she convinced the less overworked of the two government reporters to make a few calls.

“I haven’t heard back from the district,” Jackson said. “And I have to work tonight.”

Right, because you certainly aren’tworkinghere, you fu—

Language, Lucy!But of course, the kid had another job. After the Internet co-opted their content and stole their advertising, the newspaper’s salaries were frozen, then cut, leading to a flood of buyouts, layoffs, and RIFs. Now, starting pay for a young reporter was barely above minimum wage. Most of her staff had to moonlight—freelancing, teaching, waiting tables, driving Uber, in the hopes that scraps and tips might cover the exploding rents and mortgages and the massive holes in their shitty health care plan.

“Well, maybe go to the district office tomorrow?” Lucy suggested.

“I have to work tomorrow, too,” Jackson said.

“Right. Okay. I’ll find someone else.” Lucy swallowed the swears and walked past the night copy desk chief, who had been an intern himself just six months ago. “I’m out. I’ll read Allison’s story from home.”

Kid saluted without looking up from his screen.

Lucy took the elevator down to the first floor. For now, theSpokesman-Review(which, before consolidation, back in the raucous early twentieth century, had been theSpokesman, theReview,and theChroniclenewspapers) still existed in its classic nineteenth-century brick tower, although the newspaper’s footprint had shrunk from a couple hundred people on seven floors and a production facility across the street to a couple dozen people on cubicle islands on two floors. Accountants, real estate companies, wine bars, and a gin distillery had taken over the rest of the family-owned news buildings. (Booze and rapacious land-capitalism nudging aside the fourth estate and the public’s right to know? Hard to argue with that kind of progress.) The rumor was that the rest of the grand, old newspaper building would soon become condos and apartments. So where would the “newsroom” be relocated? Like other newspaper offices—to a mini mall somewhere, where the baby skeleton staff would be left to “cover the world without fear or favor” between a fabric store and a pot dispensary?

The elevator dinged and Lucy stepped onto the first floor at the same time her phone buzzed. She hesitated. Trouble already? Turn around and go back up? But, no, it was just Kel, with a dinner suggestion.Tacos?

The warm feeling sweeping through her, what was it? Hope? At least one more day of her son being at home, healthy Kel getting another day of sobriety under his size 27 belt. Lucy smiled and typed back,Sure thing, K.Then, she looked up from her phone and gasped as—

—rising from a chair in the lobby—

—she saw—

—a fucking ghost—

“Lucy,” the ghost said. “You look amazing.”

“Kinnick? Jesus Christ.”

“No. It’s me. You had it right the first time.”

He’d aged, of course, hair grayer than brown. He seemed work-tanned, too, and while he was clean-shaven, and with a recent haircut, there was something feral about him, like the rough men she saw walking the streets carrying everything they owned in backpacks. Or shopping carts. She searched for the right word (they weren’t supposed to usehomelessin the newspaper anymore, but rather the less personalizedunhoused), but the word she was thinking was much older:derelict. “What happened to your face?” Dried blood in his nose and mouth, cheek swollen, eye bruised. His once pleasingly sharp features were mushed and bloodied.

He touched his swollen, dented cheek. “I got punched.”

“Who’s the lucky girl?”

“There were two of them. Gun nuts. Ram pickup enthusiasts. Knocked me down and stole my grandkids. They want to marry off my thirteen-year-old granddaughter to some pastor’s kid. They broke my—”

Kinnick turned to a young man in a priest’s collar perched forward in a chair next to the one he’d just left.

“Oh, uh, zygomatic arch,” the young man said. He stood.

Lucy looked from the young man back to Kinnick. “Have you seen a doctor?”

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