Steve Carlsberg was lucky he'd thought of bringing his shades.
Through the honey-coloured lenses of the accessory that was once all the rage in the stores, the neverending clusters of camera flashes appeared as bright yellow sparks in the midst of a golden-hued crowd.
He brushed past the hordes of reporters and rookie journalists having trouble holding on to their microphones, stopping to wave at an individual who had just called out his name. He was aware that the stringy middle-aged man was pronouncing his name in an enraged hiss and was also brandishing a placard reading 'Answers, Carlsberg!' like he was a knight on the battlefield, but he kept his smile going. It wouldn't be the first time anyone did that.
Questions rose and overlapped, creating rounds of garbled speech and incomprehensible chatter.
"What are your viewpoints on the incident? Should we be scared?"
"Carlsberg, did the town actually explode?"
"Are you going to stop sending research teams? Was the safety of the first group actually guaranteed to begin with?"
His mind fought against itself trying to come up with clever replies and to decided which question to answer. He squeezed past a bulky cameraman to take temprorary refuge beside a snack table.
Scanning the large group of people that numbered up to sixty, he lifted a hand up, waggled his fingers over a few considerable candidates, ignored an inquiry with a sharp jerk of his head and pointed at a random woman standing in the front row. "You."
"Is it true that by taking independent action on Night Vale and Desert Bluffs, you've disobeyed all orders from the government when you should actually be co-operating with them on Operation Freedom?"
"Ah." Steve adjusted his shades. He remembered a rumour about them being made from real topaz, which, he remembered also, was wrong.
"I can't say if we're with or against the government with this. But, I am ready to confirm..."
The noise died down by a great amount as if they'd been waiting for the announcement. All microphones automatically bent towards the table.
"...that yes, we sent a representative - only one - to one of the cities, but in a strange turn of events, we forgot which one."
Somewhere in the crowd, a journalist opened his mouth to deny something but was tackled head-on by a few men in suits.
Steve cleared his throat and continued. "Last night, that city combusted, setting approximately 15 kilometeres of dunes ablaze for four hours until it disappeared suddenly, leaving no scorch marks whatsoever, meaning our representative is likely to have perished. Our scientists say this is the first of many stages leading up to a desert wide apocalypse; an omen of more to come. I say this is an act of arson carefully arranged by some crazed community leader whom I doubt - "Flecks of spit sprayed in the air. " - has any clue what the beliefs of the modern man are, at all."
The crowd surged forward; confused rants buzzed forth simultaneously.
"But the town... It's still there, isn't it?" someone asked loudly.
Steve's hands gripped the snack table tightly.
It was.
He just wasn't willing to publicly accept that yet.
Just then, a scream erupted from the back of the room. The masses fell silent immdeiately.
At the oor, a girl staggered in, her back unusually hunched like her spine was about the break the surface of her skin. Veins popped in her eyes; a sour stench emanated from her mouth, the inside of which was a strange shade of purple, her tongue covered in a transparent but viscous liquid.
"Gone!" she wailed, the word coming out like a noise only a creature from the bowels of hell would make. "All gone!"
She collapsed onto the carpet chest first as those present let out shrieks and gasps of terror. Transparent pus trickled out from small tears in her body, dampening the cloth. Starting from her fingertips, her body rotted away, releasing several worm-like entities that writhed and burrowed into a blackened object the size of a human fist lying on the floor - a human heart, which continued to beat, slowed down, twitched wildly for a split second, then stopped.
No clamour from the crowd. Heads turned in the direction of explanations.
But Steve Carlsberg was already out the door.
"I'm not in!"
Steve's hands flipped through everything on his desk. He snatched a camera hanging off a lampstand and stuffed it into an already overflowing suitcase.
The knocking resumed. "It's me!"
Steve stopped packing. He opened the door. A young man in his early thirties wearing a neat labcoat stood holding a stack of files high enough to block out most of his face, leaving his eyes to peek over the obstruction.
Steve checked the corridor before nodding at the scientist. "Lock the door."
He went back to analysing his office supplies while the other man set the files onto the desk.
"They want me to tell you they've printed Janine's obituary. The council decided her cause of death would be 'sudden'."
Steve nodded stiffly, yanking a cable off its socket. "I hope they've cleaned up as well."
The man watched him roll the cable into a tangled heap, only for it to unroll. The head of the socket bounced off Steve's foot, to which he responded to with a furious yelp.
"Who's going to run the show while you're gone, then?"
"I'll be coming back." Steve decided on flinging the cable straight into the suitcase before slamming it shut. "While I'm there, I'll try to e-mail you my findings."
"You sure you'll be okay?"
No, Steve thought, but he didn't answer.
The scientist took a deep breath like he was about to give the speech of honour at a public function. "I want to go with you."
Steve went slack at the statement. He stared at the man with the hazel eyes, his tan face and teeth like a military cemetery, his head of dark curls that most of the other scientists were not just envying but dying to shear off for their own purposes. Perhaps even for a cloning project.
Like him, Carlos had been spearheading the investigation on the two desert communities for the past few months. But unlike him, Carlos had a different approach to the mission. Whenever he needed to understand something, he'd go as far as to immerse himself in his research, in other words getting to know it, to the point of becoming obssessed if not extraordinarily well-versed in the subject. Steve had once found himself agreeing that this method worked just as well as any other; many times, he'd seen Carlos stay up for hours in the middle of the night observing how the cities appeared to change distances through a single telescope when looked at at different times. It was a difficult but clever tactic to master, but in this operation's case, it was also dangerous.
Steve shot Carlos a worried glance. "No. I don't allow it. You stay here and wait for me to contact you. I'm the one providing feed. I should be the one entering the danger zone. It's not safe for you or anyone else."
The determination had yet to fade from Carlos's face. Steve pressed on. "I know I have the risk of dying some horrible death over there, but better me than you. All of you"
Carlos half-consciously reached for his files. "Oh." Steve caught a glimpse of disappointement in his eyes before it disappeared the next second. "Alright, then. What about Desert Bluffs?"
"Halt all operations on Desert Bluffs. We've seen enough from them. No more murder cases."
Steve grabbed the suitcase and unlocked the door. He wondered for a moment why Carlps wasn't following him out as well, all the way down to to the car lot where he tossed his things into his Corolla.
His hands rested on the door handle as he squinted up at the radio tower in the blinding sun.
Carlos, looking through a telescope at what lay beyond.
He sighed.
"Another."
A pale man in a purple police officer uniform handed his colleague the last of the scones. Steve watched from his end of the kitchen in disdain.
The officer chewed, then spat scones all over the Indian cotton rug.
"Me. We." The officer made a peace sign with his bony fingers and pointed them from his yellow eyes to Steve's face. "Watching you."
After they slammed the door behind them, hooting in a foreign language, Steve balled up the rug and flung it out the window for the feral dogs to chomp on.
Half of him regretted the decision. Night Vale was unlike anything he's ever seen. A dog park that even dogs were forbidden to visit. Signboards that appeared out of nowhere advertising stores that had many entrances but no exit. A shrewd radio announcer who took all this in like it was just a slice of life.
Then again, it is better than Desert Bluffs… in a way.
Steve sat himself beside his radio and turned it on. As always, the station had automatically adjusted itself to Night Vale Community Radio's. All attempts to switch back and turn it off were answered with static screeches. He had no choice but to let the announcer's voice play at its fixed volume and hope he'd fall asleep sooner.
"Listeners, a new man came into town today. Carlos. Carlos the scientist."
He buried his face in his hands.
No.