by Spencer Baum
The Yack Shack was a desk in the corner of each bedroom with a computer and a webcam. Prisoners who so desired could sit down and compose messages for the world at the Yack Shack.
Yack Shack messages could be written or spoken. They could be lengthy video rants befitting of Youtube or pithy thoughts the length of a Tweet. In the orientation video, Chad Holiday had encouraged inmates to go with their strengths on the Yack Shack.
“You can take selfies, you can give tearful goodbyes, whatever you want! The more heartfelt and genuine your messages at the Yack Shack, the more likely we are to share them with the world, and every Yack Shack message we put out there is money for your beneficiaries.”
Early in her stay, Jenna tried making a video, but it felt fake so she never uploaded it. For weeks after that, she didn’t sit at the Yack Shack at all.
But the cellblock grew lonely after all her roommates died. One morning, a few days after the Semifinal race was done, the quiet got to her, and Jenna sat at the Yack Shack, desperate for some kind of connection with the world.
She decided to write a note for Mariscela.
To My Pen Pal,
I hope it’s okay if I say goodbye again. I hope it will be okay if I say goodbye to you a hundred times before I die.
She told herself it would be okay so long as she didn’t use her pen pal’s name. But was it? Her mouse hovered over the Send button as she pondered if there were any clues in this little note that might lead the media to Mariscela.
The door chime rang. A guard was entering the cellblock. Telling herself she’d try again later, Jenna deleted the note to Mariscela and closed up the Yack Shack. She went to the front room of the cellblock expecting to find one of the goofy guys from the guard station waiting for her.
She found Blake Miller, head of security for the whole complex, instead.
“Good morning, Jenna,” he said.
It was strange seeing Blake in her cellblock. In the prison complex, Blake was the big dog, a man more likely to hover on the edges of a room and intimidate the underlings than deal directly with a prisoner himself.
“Hi,” Jenna said, and then, pulling out a phrase she hadn’t used since her days as a summer clerk at Moreland’s, “can I help you?”
“We’re going to medical,” Blake said. “I’m told there are problems with your implant.”
“Oh. Okay, good. Yes, my implant keeps paralyzing my arms and legs,” Jenna said.
Blake shrugged, his neck briefly disappearing inside his bulky shoulders. “Whatever it is,” he said, “we’re going to fix it. Come with me.”
She followed Blake to the medical ward. He turned her over to a nurse. The nurse led her to a dressing room, told her to put on a gown and get in the bed.
Anesthesia. A pleasant but temporary escape from her miserable life. When she woke up, she wasn’t in a hospital room, but in her bedroom in Cellblock G.
The clock informed her she’d slept all day.
She went to the kitchen and pulled a salad out of the fridge. Romaine, kale, chicken breast, and Parmesan cheese—the salad was one of three meals the staff had left for her. The other two were a salmon fillet and a pasta dish.
The meals, or rather, the knowledge that the meals were hers and hers alone, was a reminder that the women who used to share the cellblock with her were dead. Crazy as Robin and Victoria were, she missed them. She hated being alone.
A piece of chicken fell off her fork. She stabbed at it, and right as the tongs of her fork made contact with the Tupperware, an alarm sounded in the cellblock, startling her. A buzzer began honking through the speakers. The fire alarm lights began flashing.
“What the hell?” she said.
She went to the front of the cellblock. They had never done a fire drill in this prison, but she figured it was smart to wait near the door.
The alarm stopped.
She turned to the nearest camera and spoke directly to the guards she imagined were watching. “Is everything alright?”
Seconds passed. She didn’t know what kind of answer she expected to get, and it occurred to her that speaking to the cameras in the cellblock was a little bit like praying to God and hoping for a response.
Nothing happened. The cellblock was shrouded in silence, the noise of the alarm having passed through the walls, leaving her, once again, alone.
*****
Bart didn’t hear about the fire alarm in the cell blocks until the next morning. When he did hear about it, and when he learned it was a false alarm, some faulty circuit or something (“Facilities is working on it,”) he wasn’t surprised.
He’d spent the previous day getting neck-deep in security and maintenance at the company, and the experience had left him disgusted.
Bookkeeping was terrible, accountability was lax, and security procedures were full of holes. Management of the clickers, the central security devices of the entire operation, was disorganized and loose. Bart knew which clicker had activated Jenna’s GMS switch (“Device 34”) but he had no way of finding out which person used it. There was no central list assigning specific clickers to specific employees. Directors and Senior Staff were allowed to keep their devices in their offices overnight, but everyone else checked out clickers from the stockroom daily, and the only paper trail left behind was on a clipboard some Facilities woman named Foster Smith kept in the stockroom.
Or so Bart had been told. Thus far he hadn’t been able to track down Foster Smith. She, like everyone in Facilities it seemed, was accountable to no one. There was no cell phone number where Bart could reach her. No pager or walkie-talkie on her belt. In Bart’s division none of this would stand. In Production, if you collected a paycheck you were available when your boss needed to talk to you. There was no reason Operations couldn’t be the same.
No reason except laziness at the top. After the Finale, Bart would have a talk with his brother. Maybe with the whole family. With all the security holes Bart had found in just one day of looking, it was a wonder this issue with Jenna’s GMS switch was their first security incident.
Thankfully, things with Jenna seemed to be contained. Dr. Hoyer had removed her implant and she’d been locked in Cellblock G ever since. Bart arranged with Dr. Hoyer to keep Jenna’s implant turned on even though it now sat in a petri dish rather than in her spinal column. Bart would check the implant log daily, see if any new activity appeared, see if he could smoke out whoever was trying to mess with his prize contestant.
And he would keep looking for the mysterious Foster Smith, missing lady of the stockroom.
Following a morning of production meetings, Bart went to the stock room in the basement and waited for Foster to appear. It was a dark, depressing place. A chainlink cage behind a high wooden counter, and inside the cage, a wide expanse of inventory shelving. A case of Post-It notes on one shelf, a plastic tub of handcuffs underneath it, a box of bar soap underneath that.
In front of the stacks, on the near wall across the counter, 50 hooks were arranged in five rows of ten. Each hook was numbered. Twenty-two of the fifty hooks had clickers dangling underneath.
11:30 in the morning, a time when operations should be in full swing, and there were twenty-two god-damned clickers that weren’t in use, but rather, were hanging on the wall. Why so many spares? Were they not inviting abuse with all these spare clickers? Were they not asking for trouble if, say, a guard, or a trainer, or anyone with access to the stock room, placed a bet at a nearby sportsbook that Jenna Duvall wouldn’t make it out of the Semifinals, and then put a spare clicker in his pocket to ensure as much?
So many things Bart had to say to Donnie. So many things that needed to change.
A door at the back of the cage opened and someone entered. The entrant had soft footsteps, feminine footsteps.
She appeared in the center row between the shelves. Slim, muscular, taut, she had a boyish haircut, her dark hair short on the top and buzzed on the sides, with long, purple bangs dangling to her eyebrows. It was the kind of spunk
y look Bart didn’t see very much in the production department. Her playful hair was a perfect match for her eyebrow and nose piercings, not to mention the sleeves of flowery tattoos on her arms and the spikey dog collar bracelet on her wrist.
She saw him. “Hello,” she said.
She wore a badge that identified her as Foster Smith. Bart suppressed a laugh. Yesterday afternoon he’d allowed himself to get angry at a version of this woman he’d created in his mind. That version was the kind of grouchy, yellow-toothed troll he associated with basement stockrooms.
The real Foster Smith was something else entirely. Something young, and refreshing to look at.
“Hello Foster. My name’s Bart.”
Foster pulled a key ring from her pocket and used it to unlock the front door of the cage. She stepped through and approached the desk
“I know who you are,” she said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”
“Finally?”
“I’ve worked here a long time. I’ve always wanted to meet you but I never had the chance. What brings you to my dungeon?”
“I was looking for you, actually,” said Bart.
“For me? Why am I so lucky?”
She gave him a flirtatious giggle.
“I’m doing some research,” he said. “A kind of internal investigation.”
“Ooo. How corporate and official.”
“Yeah,” Bart said, smiling. “It’s about the clickers. I’m looking to find out which employee had which clicker on a specific day, and I’m told you can help with that.”
“You were told the truth,” Foster said, smiling back. “Tell me which day you’re looking for and I’ll pull the sheet.”
“Sunday,” said Bart. “Race day. During the race, actually. I need to know who had Device 34 on Sunday night while the Semifinal aired.”
Foster squatted down to open the bottom drawer of a file cabinet beneath the counter. As she fingered through the paperwork inside, Bart leaned over the counter to get a better look at her. Her baggy facilities uniform hid the contours of her body, but there was enough visible that Bart could imagine the rest.
“Here we go,” Foster said, retrieving a single sheet from the file cabinet.
She slid the paper across the counter. She and Bart leaned in together to look at it. Their faces were inches apart. She smelled like coconut.
“Each clicker is numbered,” she said, pointing at the paper, which showed fifty-five numbered lines. “Employees put their name, the time they check a clicker out, and the time they check it back in.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Bart. There were names and times handwritten on roughly half the lines.
But not on Line 34. Line 34 was blank.
“So if it’s blank,” Bart said, “does that mean no one checked out that clicker on that day?”
“That’s right,” Foster said.
“Well this doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I have a contestant’s implant log that clearly says device thirty-four was used on Sunday night.”
“Oh shoot,” said Foster. “Did you say device thirty-four?”
“Yes. Is there a problem?”
Foster stood up straight, and the flirty vibe she’d been giving off since he got here vanished.
“Device thirty-four is missing,” she said.
“Missing? How could it be missing?”
“We have three hooks that always hang empty,” she said. “It’s been that way since I started in the stockroom.”
“Three hooks that hang empty?”
“I’m sorry. I thought everybody knew. And I swear to you I’ve never lost a clicker since I’ve been here. I’m the one who instituted this checkout log.”
“You’re telling me that we have three clickers that are unaccounted for?”
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Foster said. “Nineteen, thirty-four, and forty-nine. Those clickers are long gone and have never been replaced.”
“But how can…?”
Sensing his own voice beginning to rise, he stopped himself. This wasn’t Foster’s fault, and if he took it out on her, he might never get to see what was underneath the jumpsuit.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to go now, but I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Perhaps we can do it again later.”
“I’d like that,” Foster said. “And I’m sorry about the clicker.”
CHAPTER 34
Eleven Tetradome contestants were allowed to train for the Finale.
On this day, they trained on Obstacle Course 8.
Course 8 was the big course, the one that simulated the Finale, meaning it started inside the building, went outdoors, covered a quarter mile of terrain in the open air of the Southwest Nevada desert, then worked its way back again. Contestants training on Course 8 typically took an hour or longer to finish it.
Then Margo made them run it again.
“The live course is even longer than this!” Margo yelled. “If you think you’re tired now, wait until you’re a couple miles into the Finale race with some monster from holy hell chasing you down!”
Nathan Cavanaugh was the leader among the contestants running the course. He was the leader during yesterday’s training as well. Of the twelve Finalists, Jenna was the only one who could match Nathan’s speed and endurance, and Jenna wasn’t at training today.
The other contestants knew better than to ask, but you could sense their curiosity piqued at Jenna’s absence. The most notorious contestant among them, the last one to make it out of the Semifinals…where was she?
Nathan finished first. Garson Laramie came in a distant second. Solomon Moss, Byrd Jenkins, and Michael Petty rounded out the Top 5. The rest got clicked for running too slow.
Margo let them take a water break then brought them all back to the beginning of the course.
“We run it again,” she said. “I’m gonna get you clowns in shape for the Finale if it kills me.”
Although Margo was comfortable handling a small group of Finale contestants by herself, she wasn’t the only authority figure present during this training session. Six guards, stationed throughout the course, each with clicker in-hand, were helping her maintain order. Those six guards and Margo were the only members of Devlin staff assigned to be in the training center on this day.
Any other staff members who were present, who were watching, were there of their own volition and not because their work required it.
Like the man in the observation deck, looking on from high above. No one on the ground knew the man was there. Officially, he wasn’t. Officially, he was making rounds in the cellblocks right now, rather than gazing down on the training course through one-way glass.
At Devlin, this observation deck was a space that was unknown to most employees. It was rarely used anymore. Sometimes Herman Devlin wandered in and looked down at the contestants. Chanelle too might make an appearance once or twice in a season.
But mostly it sat empty.
The deck was known to senior staff by its colloquial name, its old name, the Bird’s Nest.
The staff member who was in the Bird’s Nest at the moment was there alone.
He was a big man, well over six feet. He was in his late twenties, but his bald head and expensive suit made him look older.
He stood at the window. He had a clicker in his hand. Clicker number thirty-four.
Although this man had only worked at Devlin for four years, he was already high on the company ladder. His rapid rise from entry level staff to senior management was a result of hard work, determined focus, and circumstance.
Tragic circumstance.
But also fortuitous circumstance.
Tragic but fortuitous, fifty-eight-people-dead circumstance.
The man started as “Security Technician” (a fancy title for prison guard). Eight months later, he accepted promotion to “Security Team Leader.” Three months after that, Desert Ridge happened.
Desert Ridge, of course, was the hotel where Nathan Cavanaugh set a b
omb to explode in the middle of a retirement party for a Devlin security guard. Desert Ridge was where eleven people ahead of this man on the company org chart got blasted to bits.
The world viewed the bombing of the Desert Ridge Hotel as an act of domestic terrorism, which it was. But it was more than that. The bomb Nathan Cavanaugh planted that day was meant to put Devlin Enterprises into an instant personnel crisis, the kind where they might make a rushed hiring decision or two, the kind where an ambitious employee like this man could quickly climb the ladder.
The man’s real name was Gordon Bogel, but that was a name he hadn’t used for years. When he applied to work at Devlin, he applied as someone else. Someone with a different name, a different haircut, a different bodyweight, and a different history.
In the personnel crisis that followed the bombing, the man became a hero at Devlin Enterprises. He took on tasks formerly done by senior staff. He acted as a leader in a department that was grieving and torn. He made himself personally available to the Devlins, the training staff, and the other guards, and when the dust settled, he applied to take on a senior position at the company, and he got the job.
Now he made hiring decisions. Now he made scheduling decisions. Now his badge gave him unlimited access to every room in the complex, including the Bird’s Nest.
He had access, and access was crucial. This man was one member of a larger team, a team that was years into a plan to do something big, something special, and the man’s access throughout Devlin headquarters and the Tetradome was central to the plan’s success.
The man’s access also gave him senior-level control over every function of the company’s central security devices: the clickers.
A door opened at the back of the Bird’s Nest. The man turned, startled, maybe a little nervous, but realized it was only her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
The woman closed the door quietly behind her. “I should ask you the same question,” she said. “Jenna’s not coming to training today, and even if she was, she doesn’t have an implant anymore. There’s nothing you can do.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s more habit now than anything, coming here.”
