Story code: ST-000540
Part 2: The Reverse Spotlight
The hand on her shoulder spun her halfway around. The phone slipped in her damp grip, the camera swinging wildly to capture a blur of asphalt and a pair of scuffed work boots.
“Get that out of his face, what the hell is wrong with you?” a harsh voice demanded.
Chloe stumbled back as a broad-shouldered man in a faded denim jacket shoved past her. He dropped heavily to his knees beside Julian, ignoring the dark puddle seeping across the concrete.
“I’m documenting a public figure,” Chloe said. Her voice sounded thin and reedy, stripped of the booming authority it had carried just a minute ago. She raised the phone again, centering the lens on the chaotic scene. The red recording dot blinked steadily. *Fifty-eight thousand viewers.*
The man in the denim jacket leaned over Julian, pressing two thick fingers against the side of the author’s pale, clammy neck. “Hey! Buddy, can you hear me?” The man slapped Julian’s cheek. Julian’s head just rolled limply against the brick, his half-open eyes glassy and fixed on nothing.
“He’s acting,” Chloe told her audience, her thumb hovering over the screen. She needed to say it out loud to make it true. “Julian Vane is refusing to answer the allegations. This is a deliberate distraction tactic.”
“He’s not breathing!” the man yelled, panic suddenly cracking his gruff exterior. He looked up, his eyes locking onto Chloe’s camera lens with raw, unfiltered fury. “Call 911! Put the damn phone down and call 911!”
Chloe couldn’t move. Her thumb remained suspended a fraction of an inch above the glowing red ‘End Live’ button. If she pressed it, the broadcast would terminate. The spell would break. Hitting that button would mean acknowledging that this wasn’t a performance-that she wasn’t an investigative hero exposing a fraud, but a woman standing over a dying man.
“Someone already called,” a voice from the growing circle of onlookers shouted.
Chloe kept the phone up, her arms locked at the elbows like a shield. The chat was moving at a dizzying, unreadable speed. The fire emojis were entirely gone. In their place was a relentless, vertical stream of text that made Chloe’s stomach hollow out.
*WTF is she doing?*
*is he dead??*
*HANG UP AND HELP HIM U PSYCHO*
*omg shes killing him live*
*CancelChloe*
“I didn’t touch him,” Chloe said aloud, her breath hitching. She stared at her own face in the small preview box in the corner of her screen. She looked pale, her eyes wide and panicked, completely mirroring the expression Julian had worn just moments before he collapsed. “You all saw it. I never touched him. He just… he sat down.”
The man in the denim jacket interlaced his hands and positioned them over the center of Julian’s chest. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, locking his elbows and throwing his weight downward.
A wet, sickening *crunch* echoed off the subway walls as a rib gave way under the force of the compression.
Chloe flinched, the phone trembling violently in her hands. The sound was horribly organic. It cut through the digital unreality of the livestream, anchoring her to the physical horror of the damp street, the smell of urine, and the gray, lifeless hue of Julian’s skin. She remembered the small orange plastic bottle rolling into the street grate. The dropped prop. It hadn’t been a prop.
“He dropped his medication,” Chloe whispered, the words slipping out before she could stop them.
The man doing CPR didn’t hear her over the sound of his own desperate counting, but the microphone on her phone picked it up perfectly. The chat exploded with fresh vitriol.
*SHE SAW HIS MEDS AND DID NOTHING*
*murderer*
*MURDERER*
*someone arrest her*
The crowd pressing in around them had thickened. Chloe realized, with a suffocating spike of claustrophobia, that she was no longer the only one recording. Half a dozen smartphones were raised in the air, their lenses pointed directly at her. Flashlights glared in her eyes, blinding her, reversing the dynamic entirely. She was no longer the spotlight; she was the subject pinned against the wall.
“Move back, give him air!” a woman screamed at Chloe, stepping forward and physically shoving Chloe’s shoulder.
Chloe staggered, her heel catching on the uneven pavement. She nearly dropped the phone but caught it with a desperate, white-knuckled grip. Her livestream was the only thing standing between her and the angry mob. If she lowered it, she would just be a person. She would have to face what she had done.
“I’m a journalist,” Chloe stammered to the ring of glowing rectangles surrounding her. “I was just doing an accountability interview. It’s public record. He stole from marginalized voices.”
“He’s having a heart attack, you sick bitch!” a teenager in the crowd spat back.
Julian’s chest jerked upward with another brutal compression. His mouth hung open, a thin trail of saliva pooling in the corner of his lips. The man in the denim jacket was sweating profusely now, his face red as he pumped Julian’s chest.
A distant, piercing wail of a siren finally sliced through the cold night air, rising above the murmurs and shouts of the crowd.
*Sixty-five thousand viewers.*
The phone was burning hot in her palms, the battery straining to process the data, the video, the thousands of incoming comments demanding her head. Chloe couldn’t look away from the screen. Through the digital filter, Julian was just a collection of pixels, a character in a story she had written. If she looked over the top of the phone, she would have to see the human being.
“We’re losing him!” the man doing CPR screamed, pausing his compressions to check for a pulse again. His bloodshot eyes locked onto Chloe’s camera. “Where the hell is the ambulance?!”
The siren grew louder, but Chloe’s thumb remained paralyzed, hovering over the red dot that dictated her entire reality, terrified of what would happen the second she let the broadcast go dark.