Part IV- Competition
CNN
March 14th, 2031. 0830h. The Transamerica Inn in Deertrack, Georgia, doesn’t see a great deal of business throughout most of the year. It does a modest enough trade in folks taking lengthy road trips on their way from northern states down to Florida, likely on their way to the Magical Kingdom of Disney, but otherwise, its primary means of staying afloat, according to some locals I’ve spoken to and the overnight front desk clerk, are a trio of divorced single dads who rent three of the four deluxe suites down at the north end of the single-building structure on a monthly basis. At only $600 per month, which includes access to a key to the laundry room for each of them, this is practically a steal for them.
Yesterday evening, one of these three men, Mark Stirn, swung over to introduce himself to me. He said he’d noticed that someone else seemed to be taking up long-term residence, and he felt it was his neighborly duty to welcome me to the area. When I informed him that I’d grown up here in Deertrack, he chuckled, and replied that his ex-wife had grown up here as well, that they’d met in the Army.
I informed him then, over the course of five or six minutes, what it was I was doing back in Deertrack, at which he merely nodded quietly, arms folded over his chest. I suffered no surprise or dismay over his seemingly abrupt withdrawal; some people just don’t like talking to members of the press and media, especially military folks. Yet, when I was finished telling him why I was in town, Mark offered me a helpful little tidbit.
“Pretty sure you’ve got some competition nosing in, Matty,” he said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder towards the parking lot.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone pulled up about an hour ago, few doors down from you, in a big ol’ white panel van. I saw them unloading a whole mess of gear into their room, looked like camera and audio stuff.” I waved my hand in a scooping motion, following the larger fellow out onto the cement walkway fronting the rental rooms and suites and looking down the way toward the white panel van.
I recognized its type immediately; it was indeed an in-field production van, the sort utilized by the big networks and semi-professional freelancers all over the country. They had come into vogue among alternative media types when Tim Pool, ostensibly a trailblazer in independent investigative journalism from 2019 to 2022, used one to travel from coast to coast, producing some phenomenal independent pieces for YouTube and various other indie online outlets.
Of course, few people like to bring him up these days, since the Molotov firebombing of his van and follow-up beating death at the hands of a mob-like social justice movement cell. For legal reasons, I still can’t name the organization responsible, even here, should these notes end up in the final draft of this project.
I didn’t inspect the van any further, but intend to this morning, and possibly have a few words with whatever colleagues may have decided to cover the memorial coming up.
**
1100h. Well, that was certainly informative. I’ve just spent close to an hour conversing with Melanie Jones and Phil Potter of CNN. Jones, many of you will know, is a contributor to the CNN program ‘State of the Nation’, an hour-long weekly show that highlights stories that haven’t gotten as much attention as perhaps they should. She first made a splash in the field of journalism when she worked for The New York Times, hammering at Congressman David Wendell when rumours began swirling around campaign finance abuses. Many are the political commentators who, to this day, call her ‘The Rep Slayer’, citing her investigation into Wendell’s numerous financial improprieties with his eventual recall and removal from office in a special election.
However, for my own purposes, she is the far less interesting member of the duo that CNN sent down here to Deertrack. Phil Potter is a production assistant at the network, and as you will know if you’re familiar with the Delta Heights Massacre, is one of the Delta 26. I cannot imagine that it’s an accident or coincidence that the massively influential cable news network sent not only a native to cover the memorial, but one of the survivors of the incident.
The conversation between myself and CNN’s people was largely civil and professional, exchanging shop talk that would, I do not doubt, bore most of my readers. As such, I’ll refrain from reproducing any of it here. The two things I will note above everything else is that Jones and Potter are only intending to stick around for a few days, and that Potter has agreed, begrudgingly, I might add, to speak with me one-on-one for my project.
He’ll be swinging over here to my room to talk in about twenty minutes. I never thought I’d be adding him to my list of interviews, so I have nothing prepared for him specifically. Regardless, I can improvise something.
**
[Interview format to follow]
MH: Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, Mister Potter. Would you mind a formal introduction?
Phil Potter [PP]: Not at all. [clears throat] My name is Phillip Derrick Potter, and I’m a production assistant at CNN. I was born in Storkhaven, Georgia, and at the age of five, my family moved here, to Deertrack. It was cheaper for my folks to commute nearly an hour south for work to Storkhaven than to continue living there.
MH: You’re one of the Delta 26, yes?
PP: That is correct. I’m also one of the only ones who didn’t suffer some kind of major injury in the incident.
MH: How did you avoid getting hurt?
PP: You have to understand, I wasn’t much different than those guys, Sitanski and Norris. I didn’t have a lot of friends, didn’t really belong much of anywhere in the cliques and groups at Delta Heights. I was the only openly gay student in a school of just over 200 kids, and I’d come out in my freshman year. In a public school. In Georgia.
MH: I can partly understand what that’s like. I didn’t come out myself until I was in college.
PP: Then you know what I’m talking about, kind of. It was 2017, I figured I’d be safe. [snickers wryly, shaking his head] But it doesn’t matter what year it is, or how much people talk about ‘acceptance’ and ‘progress’. Some places just don’t move ahead. I got the shit kicked out of me probably five, six times in just the first month after I came out. My folks were on the verge of just hauling up stakes and moving us all in with my aunt and uncle down in Miami, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to let a bunch of narrow-minded idiots push me out of my home.
MH: That takes a lot of courage. I can’t begin to imagine what that was like for you.
PP: [shrugs] It got better, especially after a few guys got suspended from school, and a couple of them got arrested. My parents wanted to press charges, but I convinced them not to. I let everybody know that I wasn’t going anywhere, and I wasn’t going to pull some victim card to shut them up or force them to change their minds. I didn’t care if they accepted me or not. In the long run, I think that made them decide to leave me alone. All you have to do with a bully, most of the time, is stand up to them, just once.
MH: True. But, and forgive me for saying so, that doesn’t really answer my question. How did you avoid getting injured in the incident?
PP: Well, when the fire alarms started going off, I was like pretty much everybody else in my class at the time, sighing and grumbling. We’d had so many drills earlier in the year, I was pretty much over them, you know? But I grabbed my phone out of my backpack and stuffed it into my pocket, and started following everybody out into the hall.
My class at the time, English 12, mixed in with the kids from the rooms to either side, forming this kind of uber-clump, and I ended up sort of hanging back from the core group. When we all got outside, the entire north wing was gathered and moving toward the woods on that side of the school. I didn’t want to end up being in the middle of the pack or paid any kind of special attention to for being the last one there, so I sort of jogged to catch up, then scooted out around them all, made my way right to the tree line.
I pulled out my phone, and started checking my Facebook. I was scrolling through my feed when the blast went off.
MH: So, you were far enough away to not be hurt.
PP: Yes and no. The shockwave threw me off my feet, clear past those first few trees, smack into another one. Everything hurt, but I was able to kind of half-sit up, had this terrible ringing in my ears. I remember hearing people screaming, and then I saw someone half-running toward the smoke and flames, heard the rapid burping of a gun, saw a couple of people go down. So I let myself flop over onto my side, kept one bleary eye open until Sitanski or Norris, whichever one it was, moved on toward the next group. But, [PP’s face scrunches up, like he’s confused by his own recollection]
MH: But what?
PP: Thing is, I think I remember hearing sirens at that point. Like, way quicker than they should have been coming, you know? I mean, the attack had just happened, so how were there already sirens?
MH: Chief Carlyle informed me the other day that someone had called 911 when the fire alarm was activated, that a student had seen the boys carrying rifles into the woods near the school that morning. They suspected something was going to happen, so they called when the alarms were triggered.
PP: Huh. [Lengthy pause as the CNN production assistant looks away, chewing on his lower lip] You know what that means, right?
MH: I have a suspicion, yes.
PP: And that is?
MH: Sitanski and Norris convinced an unknown third party to pull the alarm for them, since they didn’t report to classes on the day of the incident.
[Potter abruptly excused himself at this point, seeing his way out of my hotel room in a hurry. I recognized the look in his eyes, and though it is normally every journalist’s nightmare to have someone bigger and better-connected come horning in on their story, I wasn’t much worried. Potter may have caught a sliver of a scoop off of me, but he would have to get Jones to move on it if it was going to go anywhere.
Talent like her rarely listen to lowly Pas. It’s an ego thing, and it will, I believe, work to my benefit.]
I don't know if you've ever read John Hersey's book "The Algiers Motel Incident", but, having read that, I see some similarities with that with what you're doing here. Hersey wrote about a particular abuse of police power that ended tragically during the rioting in Detroit in 1967, but he took great pains to tell the story from all of the sides involved, and make the reader understand what was important about what happened. Significantly, he relied greatly on the same kind of long form interview format your narrator uses here.
Since school shootings have become to 21st century news what race riots once were to its mid-1960s counterpart, I thought I should note this connection.
It was reissued recently by an academic press (the first edition came out shortly after the events occurred), so it should be readily available in public libraries (I found it in mine) and online.