The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

  If you do exactly as I tell you to, in about ten minutes you will be out of the complex and on your way to a safe house I’ve arranged. I’ve got a whole route planned with everything we’d need to pull this off. You can be free again, Jenna. Do you want to be free again?

  I know you’re mad at me. I’d be mad at me too. We can talk about that later. Right now it’s time to get you out. Everything’s ready. If you do exactly as I tell you, by the time the sun comes up you’ll be a free woman.

  Are you ready?

  The first thing I need you to do is look at the camera on the wall and change the way you think about it. You’ve become accustomed to spying eyes watching your every move.

  Look at that camera and tell yourself nobody’s watching. Because they aren’t. I’ve made it that way. You’re about to walk out of here, and when you do, the guards won’t see it happen.

  Don’t believe me? Test it if you need to. Flip them the bird and watch as nothing happens. Stand up and tell the guards to go fuck themselves. You won’t get zapped. No one will come. No one will care because no one will know.

  Do it quickly. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

  Jenna looked up from the letter, found the camera on the wall above the bathroom door.

  She looked back at the letter. She could barely make sense of this.

  Sunny had left a letter for her in the top drawer of the Yack Shack? And now she was mapping out an escape?

  How was this even possible?

  Her eyes back on the camera, the words of Sunny’s letter in her mind, the idea of testing reality…

  She felt ridiculous when she did it, but she did. Slowly, Jenna raised the middle finger of her right hand.

  She felt like a child whispering a Bloody Mary chant in the bathroom mirror. Was something terrible going to happen?

  Nothing happened.

  She looked back at the letter. She had one paragraph yet to read.

  Once you’re satisfied that you are alone, get your shoes on and go to the utility door at the back of the kitchen, the one that’s always locked. Tonight, when you try the handle, you’ll find the door will open for you. There’s another note for you waiting on the other side. Speak with you soon, Jenna.

  CHAPTER 38

  Down the hall from Jenna’s cellblock, two guards sat at the station, a bank of television monitors all around them. Their names were Arnold Detwick and Chris Cavacho.

  “You notice she’s wearing the same shirt she wore yesterday?” Chris said.

  Arnold was working on a crossword puzzle and was slow to answer.

  “Arnold?”

  “Huh?”

  “Jenna’s shirt,” said Chris, pointing at the monitor. “She wore that Minotaur T-shirt yesterday.”

  Arnold looked up. Jenna was indeed pacing around the common area of her cellblock with a picture of the Minotaur from Tetradome Labs on her T-shirt.

  “So what?” he said.

  “They’ve been giving her a new T-shirt every day,” said Chris. “Weird that today they didn’t.”

  Arnold shook his head. “You’ve got a thing for that girl.”

  Chris laughed. “Well yeah,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”

  On Monitor Group A, Tammy Flanigan was speaking to David Lomax, husband of the late Senator.

  Jenna’s appearance on the Run has already netted your family one-hundred-sixty thousand dollars in beneficiary payments, Tammy said to him.

  And we’ve arranged to give all of it to the Victim’s Fund, said David. Unlike many families of victims, we’re doing okay on money.

  A year ago, Arnold had figured out how to tune the blank monitors at the security desk to network television stations, meaning he got paid to watch TV for eight hours when he was on night shift.

  And do his crossword puzzle.

  “She must have pissed off somebody good,” said Chris. “Joseph told me they haven’t let her out of the cellblock all week. And now…what’s she doing now?”

  Arnold focused on his puzzle.

  “Is everything alright?” Chris said quietly.

  “What’s that?” said Arnold.

  “It’s Jenna,” said Chris. “She said those words to the camera last night after that fire alarm. She just said them again.”

  A few seconds of silence passed as they both watched Jenna on the screen. She stared at the camera, then she turned and walked away.

  “The girl’s getting a little stir crazy,” said Arnold. “I see this every year. These prisoners don’t like being alone.”

  On the screen, Jenna had resumed her pacing through the cellblock.

  “Yeah, that must be it,” said Chris.

  *****

  The hallway behind the kitchen. A door the service staff used. A door that was always locked. Jenna grabbed the doorknob and twisted.

  Gently, miraculously, the knob turned in her hand and the door swung open.

  There was a utility room on the other side. Four washing machines, four dryers, a high shelf that held cleaning chemicals and plastic buckets, an ironing board mounted on the wall like art, a folding ladder in the corner, and, on the counter, a paper folded into a rectangle, a purple flower drawn on its face.

  Jenna unfolded the paper and began reading the letter.

  Hooray! If you’re reading this note, that means you’ve made the decision to go for it, and if you’re going for it, that means I’ll see you soon!

  Here’s how we begin. I need you to look around and take note of these two objects:

  1) The aluminum ladder that’s leaning against the wall to your right.

  Jenna had already seen the ladder. She took a second to look at it again, then put her eyes back on the letter.

  2) The metal storage cabinet behind you.

  The cabinet behind her was dull gray with locking double doors, floor-to-ceiling in height.

  Your first step is to set up the ladder directly underneath the ceiling tile I’ve marked. Do that now, then come back and read what’s next.

  The ceiling was a grid of white tile squares, and, sure enough, one of them had a four-petaled flower drawn on it in purple marker. Jenna opened the ladder under the tile marked with a flower.

  You’ll be taking your cuff off tonight. You’re already without implant. Once we get that cuff off your wrist, you’ll have no piece of their tracking and control systems anywhere on your person.

  Jenna ran her hand over the back of her neck. Was it really true that they took out her implant? Even if it was true, how would Sunny know?

  How would Sunny know any of this? How would she get into the cellblock, disable the cameras, and map out an escape? It didn’t seem within the realm of possibility, but here she was, reading letters in Sunny’s handwriting, looking up at a ceiling tile marked with Sunny’s symbol.

  Did it matter if it was true or not? If she tried to follow these instructions and they turned out to be bogus, or misguided, or otherwise led her into the hands of her jailers, what was the worst that could happen? They would punish her? They would torture her with repeated clicks and whatever? A small price to pay compared to the possibility, however slight, that there was freedom on the other side of that ceiling tile.

  Climb the ladder and then push on the ceiling tile I’ve marked.

  Jenna did as instructed, and found the ceiling tile easy to remove.

  Tilt the tile diagonally and pull it through.

  There was now a gaping hole in the ceiling.

  Open the metal cabinet on the wall behind you. You’ll find two prizes from me inside.

  Jenna opened the cabinet and found an LED headlamp and a square-headed key, the kind they used in the medical ward to unlock a prisoner’s cuff.

  Put the lamp on your head and turn it on.

  Jenna turned it on.

  Use the key to take off your cuff.

  The key made a satisfying click as it turned in the cuff’s locking mechanism. The cuff split open and Jenna removed it.

  She felt twenty
pounds lighter without that steel on her wrist.

  Walk the cuff to your bedroom and place it in your bed. Whenever the guards look at your location on their board, we want them to see you in the cellblock, and if your cuff is on the bed, that’s exactly what they’ll see.

  Jenna went to the bedroom and placed the cuff under her pillow.

  Now you have to move, My Dear. Your cuff is no longer sensing a pulse, and a little red light has popped on at the guard station. We’re banking on the guards being slow to spot that light, and even slower to react to it. Here we go girl!

  Back to the utility room…

  Jenna ran.

  …close the door behind you and lock it…

  Jenna turned the latch. Her heart was racing. Was she actually getting out?

  Use the ladder to climb into the ceiling. There’s only one way you can go. You’ll find another message from me at the end.

  Good luck.

  CHAPTER 39

  Arnold looked at Eight Across.

  Seven letters. Fourth letter was T. Drills and fills was the clue.

  Arnold began writing in the squares. D-E-N-T-I-

  “Woh, we got a problem!” Chris said. “Look!”

  He pointed at the TAC Status Grid on the left end of the station desk. A panel with 144 numbered LED bulbs, the Grid was a tool they used so rarely it was practically invisible to Arnold.

  Each bulb on the Grid was connected to the wrist cuff of a single prisoner. 132 of the bulbs were turned off, matching the 132 prisoners who had died since the season started. The remaining 11 were glowing green, which was a problem, because there were 12 prisoners.

  The twelfth LED, Jenna’s LED, which should have been glowing green, was glowing bright red instead.

  “What the hell?” said Arnold.

  He knew what a red light on the status grid meant—there was a pneumonic they all learned in training that ended with red means dead—but he’d never seen an inmate’s status flip to red before.

  “What do we do now?” said Chris.

  “I don’t know,” said Arnold.

  “Maybe we should call the floor supervisor.”

  Arnold stared at the light for a few seconds. In his experience, calling the floor supervisor was a good way to get pegged as needy, and Arnold had his eye on a section chief job he heard would be opening soon.

  But they couldn’t just ignore a TAC status grid light that was glowing red.

  “Okay, yeah, I’ll call,” he said.

  He opened the spreadsheet to see who was on duty this night. It was Foster. He dialed her number.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Maybe she’s on break,” Arnold said.

  “Maybe she doesn’t have her phone,” said Chris.

  “She’s supposed to have her phone,” said Arnold, allowing a hint of displeasure into his voice.

  “We could send an email,” said Chris.

  “To who?”

  “To the Security list.”

  “That will go to everyone in the department!”

  “We need to do something. I’m telling you, man, there’s something weird going on tonight.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” said Arnold. “Just a TAC system malfunction.”

  “Jenna’s wearing the same T-shirt she wore last night.”

  “So what?”

  “She never wears the same T-shirt two days in a row. And earlier, the way she looked at the camera, I swear I was having déjà vu.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “What if there’s something wrong with the security cams? What if we’re watching yesterday’s footage?”

  “How would that happen?”

  “I don’t know, but…Jesus, we should do something about that red light!”

  “Okay,” Arnold said. “I’ll send an email.”

  He opened a new message and addressed it to Security. In the Subject Line he wrote, “Abnormality with Jenna’s TAC.”

  *****

  The headlamp lighting her way, Jenna walked atop a steel beam somewhere in the guts of the complex. As she walked on one beam, she held onto another just above her head, shimmying her way into the darkness, her lamp catching occasional pipes and wires in its glare, like nerves and tendons weaving in and around a steel skeleton.

  She thought about Sunny as she moved. What was she going to say to Sunny when she saw her?

  Thanks for getting me out?

  Where the hell have you been?

  How you could you let me languish in prison all these years for a crime you committed?

  Jenna had spent years of her life thinking about what she would do to Sunny if she had the chance. Locked away in a solitary prison cell, Jenna had allowed murderous fantasies of rage to play out in her head, fantasies where she showed her old friend just how hardened prison had made her.

  What was she going to do now? What did it mean now that the person who put her in jail was the person breaking her out?

  You’re getting ahead of yourself, she thought. What you do about Sunny is a problem to solve after you’re out of here.

  There was a wall and a platform some fifty feet ahead. Gripping tightly onto the beam above, Jenna shuffled along, going wherever it was that Sunny was taking her.

  CHAPTER 40

  How Sunny Set the Trap

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall

  It was Sunny’s idea for the Blue Brigade to partner with the Rule of Law Society in a joint campus lecture series.

  It was Sunny’s idea for me to represent the Brigade at the first meeting between clubs.

  “You are nice and pretty and nonthreatening,” was her sales pitch to me, not that I needed to be sold. I loved the idea of activists from opposite sides of the political spectrum working together to further the conversation. While the rest of the Brigade was getting more into street activism, provocation, and even agitation, I would be the member of the club who sought to make peace with the activists from the other side. I was thrilled to play that role.

  With Sunny’s conversation notes in my mind, I went to the first meeting (at Umberto’s, where else?) and told the Rule of Law guys something like, “If we only bring in speakers from our own sides, we’ll only be speaking to our own sides. We want an event where all feel welcome, where we have open dialogue and each side gets a chance to make its arguments. May the most compelling argument win.”

  By the end of the first meeting we had a plan in place. The Blue Brigade would bring an antidomer intellectual named JoAnna Lowenworth to speak on campus, and at the same time, the Rule of Law Society would bring Barbara Lomax. We would jointly sponsor a two-day lecture series. Student speakers and debates during the day, big-name guest speakers at night. With support from Hillerman admin, we formed a committee that met once a month to plan for an event we would advertise as the first annual Hillerman Festival of Ideas.

  Planning for the Festival became my entire role in the Brigade. While other members of the club were organizing highway blockades and vandalizing storefronts associated with Tetradome advertisers (that really was a crazy spring), I was working on this joint committee and bringing my notes back to the club.

  Where Sunny had a million questions.

  What hall will Barbara Lomax be speaking in? What will security be like? Who’s driving her from the airport? Where is she staying? Where is she eating? When is she leaving?

  How was I supposed to know that, in answering those questions, I was helping Sunny plan a murder?

  For many in the antidomer movement, Barbara Lomax, Senator from Oregon, daughter of the original author of the Redemption Act, beautiful and well-spoken firebrand, and future candidate for president, was Enemy #1. When I think of what Sunny wanted to do, of the America she wanted to live in, it’s hard for me to think of a more perfect target for her than Barbara Lomax.

  At the time we invited her to Hillerman, Senator Lomax’s campus tour was already generating national news everywhere she went
. Protests and counterprotests, bricks and baseball bats, posters and flags and effigies aflame—the domers loved to bring Lomax to college campuses precisely because the antidomers hated her so much. With each violent protest at one of her speeches, Senator Lomax grew stronger. Her message grew louder. Her adherents grew in number. The talk she gave at American colleges that year was about the crime wave that led to the Redemption Act, the effects of deterrence, and the “glorious history” of execution as public spectacle.

  “From the Roman Coliseum to hangings in the public square, execution as spectacle has been an integral part of civilized society for thousands of years…” yada yada. You know the arguments as well as I do. America’s abandonment of this foundational principle…a blip on the historical radar…disastrous consequences…we’re still living in the shadow of Barbara Lomax’s fiery rhetoric. She knew exactly what Tetradome fans wanted to hear. She understood that the protestors outside her talks were her greatest asset. She was an idol in the domer community. She was everybody’s first answer to the question, “Who will the domers back for president?”

  If some agitator wanted the tension between domers and antidomers to spread into the populace at large, there was no better way to do it than to assassinate Barbara Lomax.

  I’m convinced that an assassination was Sunny’s plan all along. She had it planned before she pitched the idea of working with Rule of Law in a joint lecture series. She had it planned even before she sat next to me at freshman orientation. People don’t believe me when I tell them this but the more I think about it the more I know it’s true. Sunny came to Hillerman to do this. She is a professional agitator with a murky past, a past that we later learned was all lies. She chose a college with an active chapter of the Blue Brigade. She inserted herself in the club, brought new members into the club, radicalized the club. She found her perfect acolyte in Seth, and when the time was right, she used our club and our school to bring in her victim.