Fire Drill- Tabitha Crowell (The Notes Before)
PART I- Tabitha Crowell
The Notes Before
November 19th, 2030. 0736h. After turning off the alarm on my cell phone and hearing the reassuring burble of the time-programmed coffeemaker in my kitchen going through its paces, I am conscious enough to recognize that the unpleasant taste in my mouth is my own morning breath, and that the ritual of brushing my teeth and showering is not to be ignored. Before all of that, however, comes an equally important part of the whole setup, and that is my first cigarette of the day. I recognize that this is a nasty habit, but it is one that I indulge in with the precision of a machine that has been engineered to perform at the highest possible rate of anal-retentiveness.
0812h. Showered, shaved, brushed, and dressed in a simple yellow button shirt, black slacks and clip-on tie, I sit with my OneNote electronic notepad and stylus to the right of my coffee mug, and my trusty Moleskine journal before me. I spent a feverish hour last night jotting down some initial, baseline questions for Miss Crowell, and a couple of more in-depth ones, primers to get the conversation moving.
Tracking Tabitha Crowell down turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, and this is, I suspect, exactly how she wanted it to be. Unlike most people of our generation, she has left virtually no digital footprint online, you see. She has no social media presence whatsoever; no Facebook, no Twitter, no Minds, no blog, and nothing on Worldspeak. She is practically a ghost by today’s standards.
However, there is one social network that I was able to utilize to reach out to her on, and that’s LinkedIn. Barely used anymore by the general public, this once-useful professional networking service is still available for use, and Miss Crowell frequently posts medical news articles there on her newsfeed. This makes perfect sense, seeing as she is an LPN working out of Hennepin County Medical Center, locally referred to simply as HCMC.
I sent a private message to her there, which I will quickly summarize here: I informed her that I’m a journalist, and that I wanted to write up a retrospective on the incident at Delta Heights in Deertrack, since the ten-year anniversary was approaching. I didn’t attempt any obfuscation, because one of my firmly held ethical standards is that if you work in the field of journalism in an effort to get to the truth of a situation or circumstance, you aren’t helping yourself by being anything other than honest on your own part.
**
1050h. While waiting for a reply from her, I must have paced the entirety of my apartment seven or eight times before opting to throw on a movie on Netflix. This doesn’t take very long; my apartment is only 1,100 square feet. With only a few minutes left in my film of choice (David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’), my cell phone dinged to inform me that I had a notification.
When you work in media, it is imperative that you spend a decent chunk of time modifying your phone’s notification settings. If you let everything cause a sound or vibration from your device, your battery will die in a matter of a couple of hours, even if you’ve just finished charging it. For my purposes, I had set the phone to only respond to notifications from LinkedIn and emails sent to my personal address, muting alerts from my professional address for the time being. As such, I paused the film immediately, leaned forward and plucked the device from my coffee table with the absurd natural speed that has taken root in people of my generation.
Miss Crowell had responded. Her missive to me was short and to the point, and once again, I will summarize; ‘I actually have a day off from the hospital tomorrow. We can speak around noon, if you’re willing to pay for lunch at X’. (Name of restaurant omitted at request of the establishment’s ownership).
**
1530h. I’ve spent the last couple of hours diving into the web to try to follow up on some of the other members of the ‘Delta 26’, and have come across some rather unfortunate information. Of the original 26, only 18 are still alive. I haven’t been able to learn a great deal about those who have passed away since, but some preliminary findings are as follows:
1) Peggy Hamm- This one, I will confess, I had known once upon a time, and had forgotten since it occurred not long after the initial incident. Six months after surviving the massacre, young Peggy Hamm took her own life. She had shown up on dozens of video replays of footage taken by local media crews who arrived on scene in the aftermath, being taken on a stretcher into one of almost a dozen emergency rescue vehicles on the day, an oxygen mask pressed over her face by an EMT who looked barely older than her. In the footage, her eyes are mostly shut, and the brief glimpse audiences get of the medical technician’s eyes is haunting. He looks like he has just glimpsed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, sitting astride their spectral mounts just atop the crest of a hill less than a stone’s throw away.
2)Ryan Ackermann- Shot and killed in a drive-by shooting in Atlanta nine months after the incident, an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a street gang confrontation.
3 and 4) Deshaun Spikes and Kendra Macklin- Killed in a car accident driving home from a graduation party two years after the incident. Deshaun’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit, and he was only nineteen years old at the time.
5) Aaron Kwan- On the night of the third anniversary of the incident, Deertrack Police officers were alerted by a resident to suspicious activity in front of the school, which had remained shuttered since the incident. When officers arrived on location, they discovered 20-year-old Aaron Kwan seated on a bench fronting the steps leading up into the school’s entrance. He had slit his wrists.
6) Cynthia Smith- While mountain climbing with friends in 2025, Miss Smith’s harness equipment failed, and she fell to her death in the Andes.
7) Carlos Emmet- One month later, Emmet, who had been romantically involved with Miss Smith at the time of the incident, was found deceased in his apartment just outside of Boulder, Colorado. He had overdosed on heroin.
8) Candace Nirn- Murdered in 2027 in Jacksonville, Florida, apparently the victim of a hate crime (she was a pre-op transgendered woman).
**
1715h. I am uncertain how many of the Delta 26 will be willing to speak to me regarding the incident and their lives since it took place, but I’ve managed to track down, with the assistance of some colleagues and the expenditure of about sixty dollars, nine of the remaining 18 members of the group. Catching up with any of them has proven frustrating; unlike the survivors of similar incidents in the past, none of them went on talking tours or wrote autobiographical accounts of the time leading up to and following the massacre. It is, I understand, quite macabre to pose this question, but given the nature of human beings on the whole, and specifically, members of the last couple of generations, how did none of them decide to try to monetize their trauma? Am I heartless for thinking that it would have made things a lot easier for this project if somebody had just capitulated to the impulse to ‘go viral’ or ‘make bank’ on one of the most horrendous events in modern American history?
I recognize that even posing this question will make me seem callous or low-brow, but dear reader, I can’t imagine that now that I’ve put the question out there that you haven’t wondered about this curious phenomenon yourself.
**
November 20th, 2030. 0745h. The process of selecting what ensemble to adorn myself in for my lunchtime conversation with Miss Crowell is not as simple as I had initially thought it might be. I am going to be asking this young woman to recall and recount some of the most awful moments of her life, which is not something one does casually. Proper attire is essential, especially if I want to come across as professional and detached.
Conversely, if I appear too professional, she may withdraw out of instinctive defensiveness. After all, nobody’s going to want to talk about such things if they feel like the person they’re talking to is the equivalent of a mercenary. Somber earth tones seem ideal, but without a tie. Sneakers, not wingtips, but solid black. My male readers might wonder what possible difference this could possibly make, and the ladies in their lives may well roll their eyes at those fellows’ lack of understanding. One of the first things that female subjects of my interviews over the years have looked at, almost before looking me in the eyes, is my feet. Specifically, they’re assessing my footwear.
What could a journalist’s footwear possibly say about them? Well, if they’re wearing worn-down tennis shoes with frayed laces, it may indicate a lack of concern for appearances, which could be parleyed into a suspicion/expectation that what they’re interested in are just the facts. Then again, it could also denote a lack of financial success in their field, and perhaps lead the interviewee to question their decision to talk to the journalist.
Conversely, if the journalist is wearing expensive and highly polished or brand-new black leather wingtips, he might be taken as a serious and no-nonsense kind of newshound, one who wants to project the seriousness and nobility of his chosen profession. That, or he could be taken, as I mentioned, as a complete and utter mercenary, only invested in doing a solid job to sustain his reputation and financial gains in the industry.
The point is, a person’s shoes can serve as a useful starting point to get a feel for them. Nearly every woman I’ve known in my life can attest to this, and some few of them will let you in on these secrets. My thanks to Pamela Jablonski for this insight. She was a psyche major back at Georgia University, and we dated on and off for a couple of years. I wish her all the best success, and hope she and her husband are enjoying their time in London.
Anyway, the wardrobe. Now that I’ve made my selections, I will away to my morning rituals.
**
0822h. I am trying not to seem too eager about this interview. After all, if it doesn’t go as well as I’m hoping, it could result in my losing the taste for it. I’ve hit that particular brick wall before, especially back in 2028, when I was taken briefly off of the politics beat at the Star Tribune and assigned to cover the post-mortem on the historic late-season resurgence and ultimate Super Bowl victory of the Minnesota Vikings over the historically dominant Pittsburgh Steelers.
Growing up, after all, I had been a big fan of the Jacksonville Jaguars, them being the nearest NFL team to my hometown that I felt I actually enjoyed watching on Sundays. As such, though I had a deep appreciation for the game of football itself, I had reservations about doing this specific story. I was not a Minnesota Vikings fan, even though I live in the state they represent. I was not a Steelers fan, so I had nothing mean-spirited or spiteful to say. And though I enjoy watching the game, and will watch any team if I happen upon a match in my down time, I am not anything approaching an expert on the sport.
So I tried to put together a piece about the game itself at first, but that quickly devolved into a two-paragraph synopsis of the highlight reels. It was too short in word count, had no pulse, and overall, made me question why I thought I could make a continued living as a writer of any stripe.
Since that wouldn’t do, I turned to a different question in my head: how were long-time fans of the Vikings celebrating? Thank god I asked myself that question, because that prompted me to find the nearest sports bar I could locate, which resulted in three days’ worth of conversations with ‘Bleed Purple People’ (which was, as you may have guessed, the title of the piece I ultimately wrote for the Trib).
I mention all of this in order to convey my current state of mind, and nothing more. I am effectively trying to let my readers know that as things stand, right now, at this time, I am literally at the precipice of this entire enterprise either resulting in nothing more than a handful of tedious pages of journaling, passages that will never be read by anyone beyond myself and, perhaps some day, my biographers or loved ones, or becoming the front-end material for something significantly larger in scale and scope.
Eventually, I’ll find out which turned out to be the case.
**
1125h. I am making this note as a kind of setup for what’s going to follow, in terms of style. While plenty of ‘straight journalist’ sorts would undoubtedly compare what I am going to be presenting readers with in the next section to the ‘creative journalism’ techniques of timeless and brilliant storytellers like Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote, I would quickly interject that I have never, and likely will never in my life, be so arrogant as to assume that I am anywhere near their levels of competence or mastery of the narrative arts.
Yet, I would be lying if I didn’t say that their brand of storytelling is exactly what I’m hoping to aim for.