The car blared at her with a honk as she bolted to the other side of the road. She paused when another car almost caught her on the second lane. The sudden shock of it had her stomach caved and front hunched and the box of burgers and fries raised high above her head. The driver pressed down on the steering wheel and she scurried off. It was like this on the very thin road leading to the San Joaquin Valley, up towards the Yellow Gecko Trails¹. The road congested with vans and police cars coming in and out. And her own news station amongst them, on the sides. The truck parked and the people inside staring intently at screens of various selections: the newsreporter live cut, sound waves, image stills of an overhead drone. Kat approached the van and the table to the side, somewhere along what used to be camping parking, which was now being used explicitly by every big and small news outlet. Groups of camera teams scurried amongst each other, teenagers with small phones, vigilante reporters talking up to police officers who shoved them away from the cordoned tape.

The streets and the parking lots were all they had considering the sectioned off area. The whole trail headquarters, the bathrooms, the lots, the souvenir shop, everything behind the barn fence and the giant metal sign that read “Home of the Yellow Gecko’s, happy trails!”. Happy indeed. She sat down on a plastic camping chair at the end of the table with the box of lunch. She set it to the center and she swore she only looked away for a second, only one, and it was gone. Not that she was hungry anyway (but she might have wanted it for later…), she sat and took out her laptop and looked beyond the scope of the van. Asphalt diluted into gravel and dirt, roads quickly dissolving into foot steps and the tracks of fork lifts.

“Why’d they need a fork liftt?” Kat asked.

No one on the table heard her or possibly cared, they were stuck on the computers with eerie concentration. They clicked and typed and sometimes texted and sometimes cursed, always mumbling to themselves, always sweating.

“Kat,” She heard it from within the open van. She bolted fast to it, it was the audio technician.

“Got my coffee?” He asked.

She ran back to the table and grabbed one of the cups on the table, probably stole it. And ran to the man with the steaming liquid rising up to her face. Some of it spilling on her hand, but her too anxious to care. The technician sipped it, nodded his head and set it to the side. He put one headphone up to his triangle head and scratched his face.

“Need anything else?”

“A break,” He said.

“I could take over, if you—“

“They’d shoot me if I handed any of these knobs to anyone,” He said. “This is the most exciting story in months. We can’t fuck it up, you understated, right?”

“Yeah,” She grabbed her arm. “Just feels like I’m doing nothing,”

“We’re all a team, Jaz,”

“Kat,”

“Kat,” He sipped. “We’re all a team. Jessie reports, Kennedy is over there with the live updating, Mag is writing up the article. And we’ve got four out of the field taking notes, interviewing. It’s a big project, this story,”

“I get it,” She breathed heavy. “I get it…I get it…anything I could do?”

He looked at her. This triangle-head shaped man in his blue striped button up and blue jeans and wooden face of a man reaching retirement, he looked at her. Spun his cup. Sipped.

“Creamer, that’d be nice.” He said.

She lowered her head and held a breath before walking out. All of the scene finally coming to view for her. The scope of it at least. The pavement crowded with microphones and portable lights. Armies of umbrellas and camera men underneath those umbrellas. Whole lines of them set up from the Burger Star, down the strip mall and to the corner, coming up and around to the entrance of the trail. The ranch homes around them all filled up to their front yards with people. Police officers, some of them still questioning. In their little pocket in this storm, they had three vans and two portable white-faced tables. She grabbed one of the cups of vanilla creamer, two just in case, and looked up towards the trail. Something in her head pulsed, a deep head-ache, as she watched the journalists running up to the edge of the yellow tape putting a microphone on every police officers face. Not a moment of silence here. Noise and animation warping in her brain, processed as the junk it was.

“I never got an answer,” She said to the group at the table. “Hello?”

“Mmm,” One of them said.

“Why are there forklifts here?” Kat asked.

One of them looked up from their computer screen, black bags underneath their eyes. Look of death.

“They’re trying to get the body out.” He said and bit from a burger. Then he went back down to his phone, or laptop, or notes. Everyone did a bit of everything here. Except her. She was the one who bought the food.

She got the creamer and returned to the truck, stepping into it and setting the creamer on a monitor next to the man. He picked them up, put two.

“Only two?”

“How many more do you need?”

“Doesn’t matter,” He said. “I’m on a diet anyway,”

And proceeded then to add four more packets of sugar to an already milky white coffee. He took sips, Kat sat and checked over her phone, waiting for the bell call of some other co-worker asking for more donuts. Or perhaps a sandwich. Energy drinks. Such and such, the woman checklist, they must have thought. He looked up to her and eyed her. The haggard morphing his face into clay, melting his skin. Age and stress and life having weighed themselves upon him.

“You look anxious,” He said.

“I’m just sitting,” She said.

“You’re sitting anxious,”

She stopped tapping her foot.

“Sorry,”

“Don’t apologize. Is this your first scene?”

“Um, yes, I guess,”

“What were you doing before?”

“Sometimes I’d go to cookware factories. I went to a sewage grate before. That was fun, biggest story I’d gotten yet,” She didn’t say it was because no one else wanted to do it.

“Really? Haven’t heard of it? Was it in the paper?”

“Somewhere, probably,” She said. “On the website, maybe,”

“Mmm,” He sipped. “There’s a lot of noise, isn’t there?”

“Tell me about it,”

“We’ve got a fucking machine, a telescope for soundwaves almost. Picks up a penny drop from a mile away,” He said. “And we still can’t make out anything of what’s going on. We’re all getting a little nervous, cops most of all,”

“I wish we could just ask them, I wish I could just grab one of those fuckers and ask them,”

“Not that it’d help,” He said.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“The probably know as much as they’re telling us,”

“They didn’t tell us anything,”

He smiled. Nodded up and down. Drank his coffee.

“Can I get a refill?” He asked. “It’s going to be a long day.”

It was. Longer than any day before. Her and the team going through every possible person on the street, meeting and talking and interrogating them and accosting them in the Burger Star, and accosting them at the front of the trail and accosting them on their way home. Asking if they knew about the woman in cement. Asking if they’d seen it. If she was a statue. Or if she was a star, like in Downtown Havenbrook. If they say anyone, saw any thing. Any what seemed to be main point of every interview was that A) the little “village” as they called it was one of peace and tranquility and that B) that the horror in the mountain was befell on them from outsiders, A.K.A the misbegotten (or as they really meant to call them, the poor). So that the murderer could not have been any of them and the crime was not their responsibility and that if anything was to be solved it would be by those who had brought it in in the first place.

And what Kat gathered, secret held from the public, was that the body was still in the cabin. Detectives didn’t want to have the site touched just quite yet, all the cranks and the forklifts and the trucks would have done too much damage to the surrounding area of the little bungalow in the mountain. The machinery was left next to it, waiting for tomorrow or perhaps the day after for the body to be taken into and properly dealt with. That was probably the beginning of the formation of her plan. Because by and large the whole murder was a secret, the circumstances withheld. Drones had taken high shots of the house, the rusty abode hidden in the trees. There wasn’t much of any old pictures, no one even knew there was a house up there. Some left over from a cabin community that never truly took shape. So she figured, in between all the runs for food and produce and coffee, that if she wanted to really help and make a name for herself, why not get a picture?

Just a camera shot. Nothing as crazy as the body. But maybe the front of the house? The scene? The place of death?

So at about six when it was due for her to clock out and she said good byes to the second-shift staffing, Kat wandered into her car parked in the Burger Star. She let it idle and watched the streets. A cold approached and she stacked hoodies and sat straight in her car. Empty cans of energy drinks rolling about the foot of the passengers seat, old laundry below them. The mess of her life laid bare and strewn about the car. She sat and waited, drove a little, fed herself stolen pieces of lunches and loitered between the three closest parking lots.

At about twelve she came alive.

Parked by the main road leading to the trail proper, she exited her car with a flash light still in hand. The heat of the engine emenating from the hood of the car. She closed it with her butt and smacked her flash light against the palm of her hand. Shook it a bit, and watched it flicker on and off. There were no cars and although lit, giant gaps of dark intervaled between the few circles of light. Halos amidst the dark. Around her to her left were the suburbs sealed off with giant hedges and pike-toppede metal bars of which ivy’s grew from that in the dark looked more like rope than plant. To her right were the strip malls, neon lights buzzing, the giant logo of a star with shades purple hue’d a top a spinning pole. There were people still ordering food. Some police there too. She hiked her shoulders and turned off her flash light and hid her things and hands inside the pockets of her coat.

She could not park closer, too many newstations, and she did not intend to take the road further along anyway. The small community had it’s own entrance to the hiking trail, it’s own way up the mountain, and it’s own way connecting it. Not that that wouldn’t be protected either. But she couldn’t imagine it flooded with reporters, because none of them had been allowed inside.

She walked fifteen minutes. The light of several police and several news vans coming up on the black horizon. She looked around, shadowed in the night. She climbed the community fence and went inside. She knew it was illegal, but it hadn’t felt that way until she landed and she was met by both sides with houses. Her, in the small alley leading into a pooled back yard, and leading out towards a cul-de-sac. Naturally, she ran.

Climbed the trash can. Jumped over another gate and now stood in the paved drive way. A camera hovering above her, turning slow. Motion sensor lights shining bright by now. She waited for it to make its long turn to the left and ran out the right and hid behind a wall and now walked steady on the side walk. Her heart beat fast. It felt massive and foreign. Her head flushed.

All I did was just run. What’s the big deal?

She steadied herself against a car parked along the street and breathed heavy. Must have put too much weight, because the car blared. She scrambled out and before she knew it had turned several corners. Her heart felt worse. And she wondered how she would even get back, whether that was an option. Doubt came fast moving in slow in dark. The body settling to allow the brain to think. She walked faster. There was no back to go to, she had to tell herself at least.

She jogged down several streets and took out her phone for directions and before long had come up to the second entrance to the Yellow Gecko trails. There were cops there, some sleeping on metal chairs. Only two cars to the dozen out the main. No news station. There was parking. There was a small building with a loud air conditioning unit that she hid behind. The green box vibrating at the touch. Two cop cars. Four she counted. Half-asleep, talking to each other. Lazying about. A wooden rustic fence with three long posts running between. Something she slipped under. Herself in the dark, keeping to the side of a further chain link fence. She followed it around, some ways down, keeping low to the ground. And in the fence line, she noticed stretched metal shaking against the wind. She pulled it, it was worn and pulled easily from the posts. There were beer bottles and condoms and other paraphilia that all looked like caracasses and artifacts in the dirt. She got on her belly. She dragged herself through. Something of a bug crawled on her hand and she almost screamed. She slapped it away and came through the other end. There she turned on her flash light, looked around, then pulled it from her sweater and climbed a steep hill up to the road.

This might have been the first time she had ever felt like a journalist. All academia, all corporate time seeming secondary, almost wasteful, to this singular moment with her shitty phone and her shitty flashlight and the history of her life feeling vindicated. She walked down the road, smiling, waving her flash light about.

Three minutes into the walk something honked behind her. A black car with strobing blue and red.

The light felt hot against her back, but she still went cold.

“Put your hands up then get on the floor,” The magnified voice said.