We’re gonna make it. I try to force a confident, positive thought into my mind, but as my legs scramble through the tube, the blackness and cold air seeming to constrict my lungs, there is not an ounce of me that believes it.
Another round of explosions, this time closer to the slide, cause the metal to vibrate. My heart drops, the chaos happening outside drowning out even my own brain screaming at itself as I fall, not knowing whether the slide is collapsing or whether it is another dip in the slide’s track.
A second later, my feet make impact with the metal and I fall forward, my face colliding with the ground at a momentum that won’t leave me scarred but will surely result in a few bruises the next morning. I push myself up, ignoring the thumping sensation of blood rushing to the entire front side of my body, and sprint forward towards the light a few dozen feet away.
The slide is still standing—for now. But there’s no telling how much longer it will withstand this kind of force. I need to be out of it before it finally succumbs to the will of the fire.
“I see the bottom!” Jake shouts, which is encouraging given that he is only a few dozen feet away from me, yet due to the high barriers of the slide and all the twists, it is impossible for me to tell how much longer we have left.
The same bottom, the ugly, moss-covered floor of the empty cement pool, comes into my view seconds later. I let the adrenaline and massive amounts of anxiety continue to propel my body forward, using the momentum from the sloped slide to send my legs flying forward faster than the tubes probably proceeded down the slide in the water.
I reach the bottom, jumping down from the hard, cold metal slide to land four feet below on the bottom of the former landing pool that is now filled with cracks, anthills, and stains. We made it. We freaking survived, but one look at the fire that has spread to every building around us, causing tons of smoke to billow in the air, creating a thunderstorm-sized cloud of blackness and ash above the park, reminds me that our mission is far from over.
“This is beyond insa—”
“All right, follow me.” I cut Jake off before he can let his thoughts about how messed up and scary this is waste any of the precious time we need to get out of here.
I run through all the scenarios in my mind, trying to think of one where we can somehow escape this hell unscathed, but I can’t think of one. If by some chance there is a group of people here actively trying to kill us, then they inevitably have us circled by now, and with no weapons or backup, our hopes at somehow beating them are nearly none. Then there is the fact that the police are no doubt on their way, the probability of residents in the area not hearing the explosions or seeing the fire that covered hundreds of acres and reporting it to the police beyond slim.
We have to try and get out through the back of the park and hide in the woods surrounding the park. I climb out of the pool, using one smooth motion to jump over the ledge and onto the cement pool deck. I scan the area, my eyes at first amazed at the breadth of destruction that the series of explosions managed to cause. Practically every building is smothered in deep, orange flames, thick black smoke enveloping nearly every square inch of air and only taking up more mass with each passing second.
My idea of running to the forest is looking worse with each passing second. Unless dozens of fire trucks roll up, there is no way it is not spreading to there—spreading to us. But it is our only option. The front of the park is too far away, and if we want any chance at survival, we need out now.
“We’re going to the forest!” I cough as I finish talking, the amount of particulates being inhaled into my lungs causing me to wheeze. The smoke has not completely infested the air at lower altitudes yet, but as the fire continues to grow, there is only a matter of time till we are either burned or suffocated to death.
“Are you crazy?” Jake struggles to keep up with me. The second the open walkways sprawled in front of us, I let my long, lanky legs carry me forward well ahead of him. I know if I’m not careful, I could end up leaving him totally behind him, but in situations as desperate as this, nothing else matters but survival.
“This is crazy!’ I scream back to him, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one has appeared out of the shadows to try and kill us. If the criminals who set this place ablaze are smart, they have already left, but I can’t ignore the sick feeling in my gut that we are being watched and even laughed at as we run.
The fire only seems to increase in ferocity, the deafening sounds of poles snapping and entire buildings falling apart shaking my body with their force. It feels like the entire world is falling apart right in front of our eyes, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
This is too much pain. My lungs ache from the lack of oxygen, and my legs are sore from days of training, on top of a competition, on top of whatever you want to call attempting to live when everything in the world seems to want you dead.
The forest at the rear end of the park is over a hundred yards away, the last center of shops and rides for little kids burning on either end of us, as another series of explosions go off behind us. Each time one of the buildings got closer to falling to the ground, the cracking of its structure haunts my mind, sounding eerily similar to the cracking of human bones.
The brick wall surrounding the park, separating us from the forest, is a few dozen feet away. I look behind at Jake, who is running only about one hundred feet behind me, and my eyes connect with one last haunting image from the scene of mayhem and destruction.
It is a statue of Jean Lemon, whose entire body has caught fire, its eyeballs melting onto its face from the intensity of the heat. He is a few hundred feet behind us at the center of a small green area with benches, and now it will forever be vaporized from Earth.
I shake the image from my mind, not wanting any emotion to spring forth that will distract me from the task at hand. I approach within feet of the wall that divides us from the outside world. I run my hand against it, looking for the best spot for my feet to get a grip to scale the roughly twelve-foot-high, red–colored wall.
Jake runs up next to me, wheezing, with ash streaked across his face and sprinkled throughout his curly hair. He opens his mouth to say something, but the echo of sirens—an entire brigade of them—causes both of us to stand still. They have broken into the park, and the sounds of fire engines, police cars, and dozens of other emergency responders roar over the fire.
They are coming.
They are coming for us.
It takes all the strength in me to not let out a scream, and every ounce of insanity in my body to keep going with the only thing I know how to do—keep running. I jump up as high as I can, having my right foot catch a corner of the wall that protrudes out no more than three inches. I use this leverage to jump up once again, allowing my hands to grasp the top of the wall. I feel my raw skin, which had already been exposed to the flames in a minor degree, tear against the rough brick as I pull my body up on top of the wall. Before jumping down, I quickly extend an arm to Jake, hoping that I can pull him up in one swift motion and then sprint through the woods away from the bedlam.
Midway through this process, two police vehicles emerge from the smoke, two men hopping out of the vehicle with their guns aimed at both of us.
“Don’t move or we will shoot!”
The row of emergency vehicles and police officers seems to grow from two to a dozen within a second. I hear the barking of multiple attack dogs behind us, and can even hear the buzz of a helicopter overhead.
We are surrounded. There’s no escaping this time.
Both Jake and I put our hands up in the air, surrendering immediately.
Two cops drag me down from the top of the wall, handcuffing me as soon as they turn my body over. Before I can even protest or try and explain myself, I find myself shoved away from Jake.
Everything turns into one massive blur as the cacophony of the sirens, screaming, and continued crackling of the fire all coalesce into a singular, mind-numbing blare in my mind. The next instan
t, my body is practically tossed by two men into the back of a police car.
Then the door slams, causing every nerve in my body to vibrate.
I don’t need anyone to tell me where I am headed next. Maybe the fire would have been better.
Chapter 17
Sometimes it’s easier not to think.
Now, I’m not saying it’s good to never think. No, that would certainly be a bad thing. I’m just saying that every once in a while, it’s nice to turn my brain off. It’s easier to not feel rather than feel all the shit I always get myself caught up in.
Okay, well, I won’t lie, maybe I turn my brain off often, very often; possibly I even live as a zombie for most of my life. I suppose I wouldn’t know—I try not to think about it.
It’s in moments like these where I wish I could automatically turn off all emotions and capacity to think in my brain at the blink of an eye. Except the only things that could do such a task so masterfully are some hardcore synthetic drugs, which often have you end up in the same spot you tried to forget. And even if I wanted to take that risk, getting some drugs, some light, some happiness, or some of anything is nearly impossible when locked up inside a cold jail cell all alone.
The only good news I have to report is that I am no longer naked, which might seem obvious most days, but after having my clothes stripped from me, which were covered in ash, as part of the investigation, the officers left me to sit on the cold bench, my bare butt cheeks tensed against the rigid metal beneath them. There’s something about being naked, even when no one is watching, that makes one feel self-conscious. Somehow, even amidst a mounting list of criminal charges, including first-degree arson, and a possible life sentence in jail, I find my mind worrying about if I would have an erection or not when the prison guard appeared.
And of course, due to my fantastic luck, after a few hours of silence interrupted by intermittent manic screams echoing through the hallway, a guard finally shows up and, in that moment, I happened to be relieving myself. The guard looks unfazed by the sight of a grown-ass man sitting naked on a toilet, likely it being one of the less mentally scarring things he has to witness in a day. He tosses me my clothes, which consist of white boxer briefs, gray joggers, and a blue T-shirt—all much more fashionable than the orange jumpsuit I pictured I’d have to wear—into the cell.
Maybe I can live like this. After taking care of my business, I sit back down on the same bench as before. I glance around the cell, which smells of stale urine, has no windows, and is surrounded in cheap gray paneling, trying to look for some positives after a miserable last few hours. After having been brutally interrogated immediately upon arriving at the police station, and then being ushered to court, where my bail was posted at ten million dollars, it’s safe to say that going to Spiders World turned out worse than I could have pictured in my wildest imagination.
It is very likely that I will be kicked off the Deadwave World Tour, shunned by my father, and stuck in jail for the minimum of the next decade if I can’t somehow prove that the fire wasn’t set by us.
Now this is a new low. I sigh, shifting in my seat so that the nervous sweat that has pooled at my armpits can get some fresh air. My whole life is ruined. For the first few minutes in the police car, the shock and trauma from the incident were so intense that I felt nothing. But as time has worn on, I have been hit by waves of sadness and anger as I realize that all the evidence left behind by the people who actually committed the crime has been incinerated. We are all that’s left of the crime scene.
They will now make sure to set ablaze our entire lives.
I look around again at the cell, this time scanning for any easy escape routes through either an air conditioning vent or loose floorboard. It only takes me a few seconds to realize that escaping prison in real life will be much tougher than in the movies. There’s no way I could ever make it out of here alive without adding another decade to my prison sentence.
I cough, a round of dark, thick phlegm forcing its way out of me as my body still struggles to process all the smoke I was forced to inhale. Although it wasn’t a particularly lethal amount of smoke, I feel like I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes without stopping to take a breath of fresh air, which has left my lungs feeling like two shriveled-up raisins barely holding on for life (okay, this may be a bit of an over exaggeration, but bottom line is I feel like utter shit).
All right, I need to get out of here. I take a deep breath, a deep wheeze exuding from somewhere inside my chest. I stand up, hoping to attract the attention of one of the prison guards so I can ask to go and call my dad. He will know what to do. He will believe me.
I walk around the cell, letting my feet, which are clad in a pair of ugly black sneakers and thick, itchy white socks that the prison guard gave me, finally stretch out after remaining still for hours. I feel extremely sore from the impact that both my legs and feet had to take from the series of falls in that slide. My lower body is even dotted with bruises, blood still swelling to the areas, causing my skin to look discolored and my muscles to tighten.
I can’t even compete in Deadwave like this. Usually I would tell myself a lie and live under the false expectation that somehow I would miraculously be back in shape to compete in the last tournament of the regular season in Chicago next weekend. But even if I do manage to shake the horrid images of the fire and dead body from my mind, and alleviate the pain from my knees and lungs, there is still no escaping the fact that I am trapped.
I am trapped and I have to get out.
“Hey!” I scream, my voice raspy and inaudible at first, but eventually my voice surges into a formidable bellow. There is part of me that, when pressed up against the archaic metal bars lining the cell and listening to the echoes of the inmates fighting and screaming, wants to burst out crying. It isn’t even that I’m upset. Turning off the stream of sadness inside of me is something I have grown to be a master at over the years. It’s that I’m scared—scared shitless. And more than ever I feel helpless—I know who did the fire. The same people who want to kill me three weeks from today. The same people who are hell-bent on destroying my life.
And I can’t let them. But I don’t know if I can stop them.
“What do you need?” One of the prison guards appears within seconds of my scream, which pleasantly surprises me. I figured I’d have to make a scene for at least a few minutes for anyone to bother to take notice, but I can tell there is a soft look in the man’s eyes, filled with pity. He probably has heard why I am here and feels bad that someone as young as me has already thrown my life away. But if there’s anything I have learned, it’s that one is never too old or too young to fuck everything up. And what he doesn’t know about me is that, unlike everyone else, I will fix it.
“I want to call my dad.” I speak calmly, which is probably in stark contrast to most of the prisoners here. There is a weathered quality to the man’s dark skin that tells, without a single word, all the anguish he has had to endure throughout the years. “He’s probably wondering about me, and I need to let him know I’m okay.”
“Yeah.” The man looks around hesitantly for a second, his dark eyes darting in either direction. “Our standard procedure allows you only fifteen minutes to talk on the phone per day during an allotted time period, unless there’s an emergency going on, but you should be fine this once.”
The guard pulls a set of keys out of his pocket, and after fumbling for a few seconds for the right one, unlocks the door. Just seeing physical keys used to unlock doors feels weird. The last time I ever saw anyone use an actual key for something was when I was a little kid, back when my house in La Jolla wasn’t falling off a cliff, back when my mom was still living. But times have changed, and this prison has remained neglected throughout all of it.
He immediately handcuffs me upon opening the entrance to my cell, and I comply without any struggle. I can tell this man is trying to do his job as best as he can, which isn’t easy given the constant chatter audible on his radio that is st
rapped to his belt, and I have never been one to make it any harder on people. After all, if by some chance I’m stuck in this place for a while, it will be good to have a friend on the inside—someone that I can trust. Someone that I can use.
He directs my body to turn left as I exit the cell. By the looks of the area, this seems to be one of the more dangerous areas of the prison, likely where the murderers and rapists hang around, which is yet another thing to add to the list of things to haunt my nightmares.
I tune out the yelling of the various prisoners, refusing to even look at them as I pass their cells. I don’t need another reminder of how many people the system and this world has miserably failed—it will only make me feel more guilty for being one of its biggest beneficiaries. Instead, I keep my eyes focused forward on the cracked concrete and rusted metal casing that surrounds the sparse light bulbs in the hallway. The heaviness to the air, constant animal-like screams, and rotting stench that permeates my nostrils make this place seem more like hell than a place on Earth.
After only a few seconds I have had enough of it. My brain doesn’t need to take any more of it in to garner any more motivation to get out. But before I let myself mentally check out and dissolve into the world of thoughts and dreams in my own mind, I hear an odd muffling on the radio that seems to perk the attention of the guard behind me.
“Your call with your dad will have to wait.” He speaks sternly, doing an effective job at keeping up a tough-guy persona, although I can already see right through it to the gentle man he is on the inside. “They need you at the central office to see a visitor up front. It’s one of your father’s friends, apparently.”
I run through the possibilities of who it can be, and then my stomach sinks. My dad doesn’t have any friends, at least none that I have ever met. This must be them.
Deadwave Page 12
