The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

  Her TAC. She knew. She had to know.

  But how could she possibly know? How did she move so quickly into an attempted escape after they took out her implant?

  “We’ve mobilized all security in the building, but it’s possible she’s already gone. We can’t be sure when this happened.”

  Bart finished tying one shoe and moved on to the other. “So you have no idea how far she’s gotten.”

  “The monitors were playing yesterday’s security footage, Sir.”

  “What? How could that…I don’t even…who’s in charge down there?”

  “Foster Smith, Sir. We’ve tried calling her but she hasn’t answered her phone.”

  A jingle sounded on Bart’s phone. “What now?” he said.

  He pulled it away from his ear to see an emergency notice from the company’s security software. Fire Alarm pulled in Sector 2.

  Fire alarm? No, the honking campus-wide alarm that was sounding now was a Code Red, not a fire…

  In that moment, a slush of thoughts congealed into a single realization in Bart’s mind.

  “Sir?”

  “I know where she is,” said Bart. “The doors locked automatically when you went to Code Red. “

  “Yes, I was hoping we’re not too late to--”

  “She’s pulled a fire alarm to unlock them.”

  “Oh,” said Arnold, and then, “Oh shit!”

  “Fire alarm’s in Sector 2,” said Bart. “That’s where she is.”

  “Okay, we’ll-”

  Bart ended the call before Arnold could finish his sentence. He called Pavel.

  “Hello, Bart? What’s going on? There’s an alarm sounding in the lab.”

  “There are alarms sounding everywhere,” said Bart. “Do you still have a crew there watching Mortimer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We need you, Pavel. The fire alarm she pulled was in the parking garage next to the lab.”

  “Fire alarm? Who pulled a fire alarm?”

  “Jenna Duvall has escaped and we can’t click her implant.”

  “What?”

  “I need you and your crew to head up to the garage with tranquilizer guns.”

  “This is highly unusual.”

  “This is no different than the animal incidents you guys rehearse, only this time the animal is our most valuable prisoner. I need her caught but not killed. She has to run in the Finale next week. Hurry!”

  *****

  Multiple alarms blared as Jenna ran over the walkway and into the parking garage.

  Space 43, she told herself. Black Devlin Enterprises van.

  She was on an empty deck. Rows of empty parking places. Their numbers were in the two hundreds. She needed to go down.

  “Sunny?”

  “Where…out…look…”

  “Sunny, I can’t hear you!” she yelled.

  The noise in the garage was deafening.

  “Can you text me whatever you’re trying to say?”

  She ran farther into the parking deck. The garage spiraled downward as she ran, a wide and shallow coil.

  “Sunny?” she yelled. “Sunny are you here?”

  The deck ended at space number 70.

  Where was space 43?

  A text came in on the phone.

  It’s a divided parking garage. You’ve got to take the stairs and come out on B-level.

  Divided parking garage?

  She ran to the stairwell and threw open the door. The alarms were so loud in the stairwell she wanted to cover her ears.

  B-Level. Find your way to B-Level, she told herself.

  “Is someone up there?” came a voice from below. “Who’s up there?”

  The next landing was marked 3-B. She pushed open the door and bolted into the garage.

  A crowd of people was waiting on the other side.

  “There she is!” one of them shouted.

  There were six of them. They carried long, silver rifles. “Stop right there!” one of them shouted.

  She ran back to the stairs. As she yanked the door open, she heard what might have been a gunshot sound behind her, and what might have been a bullet smack into the concrete wall next to her head.

  “Jenna!” someone yelled from below, the sound of her name getting swallowed inside the cacophony of alarms.

  She sprinted up the near flight of stairs. As she ran, she heard more shots behind her. They didn’t sound like normal guns, more like air rifles.

  “Jenna!” someone shouted. “Jenna stop!”

  At some point the landings would stop coming. At some point, she’d reach the top. She had to get off the stairs. She had to find Space 43. Guards were probably securing all the exits right now. If she didn’t find the van soon, as in right freaking now, this escape was done.

  As she neared the next landing she saw a security guard coming down at her from above.

  “Stop right there, Inmate!” he yelled. He had his clicker out, and was furiously pressing on it with his thumbs.

  A look of panic came over his face when he realized the clicker wasn’t working.

  So much of her life spent in fear, so little of it lived as the aggressor, but when the moment came, the decision was easy. It came naturally to her.

  Screaming like a crazy person, Jenna charged the guard, who stood frozen on the edge of the landing for a second before turning tail and running the other way. When Jenna reached the landing, she reached it alone. The guard was long gone.

  B-2 was the marking on the door she threw open. B-2 was the level of the parking garage she entered. There were cars in every space, but no guards to be seen.

  She ran out onto the deck.

  Space 69…68…67…she was going the right way. Was there a black van? Her eyes scanned to the numbers at the end of the deck. 61…60…

  She broke into a full sprint, rounded the bend, and saw it on the turn. It was maybe twenty feet away from her.

  A black van. A whole row of them, ten or more. One of them in Space 43. She tried to run faster.

  She failed.

  She heard the pop before she felt it. Such a faint sound amidst all the noise, and then a stab on her shoulder, as if she’d been stung by a wasp.

  Weakness. Someone let all the air out of her legs. The room was turning around on her, or she was turning around on the room. Hard to say. Her sight was that of a child on a Merry-Go-Round, looking out at the stationary world beyond. She saw a man in a lab coat. Another man with some kind of gun. A ridiculously long stainless silver tube for a barrel.

  She leaned against the nearest vehicle, a van, and slid down the side panel as her legs collapsed beneath her. Her vision was blurry now. She would be asleep soon.

  Reaching, or maybe flailing, with her right arm, she put her hand around a protrusion coming from her left shoulder. She yanked it out. It was a dart with a plastic canister on the end. The canister was half full of liquid.

  She felt the other half coursing through her veins.

  They were crowding in around her, guards with guns, with clickers, with night sticks. Someone was holding up a stunner with purple sparks dancing on its tip.

  Too late, Jenna thought, I’m already stunned.

  She fell to her hands and knees.

  “No, no, don’t zap her,” came a familiar voice. With all the will she could muster, Jenna lifted her head, and saw Bart pushing his way through the guards. “She’ll be asleep soon.”

  It’s over Jenna. Don’t try and fight it. It’s done. Were those her words or Bart’s? She didn’t know and she didn’t care. She was on the ground, her eyes closed, the cool concrete pressing against her cheek.

  Then she was out.

  CHAPTER 43

  My Breakup With Sunny

  An unfinished excerpt from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall

  Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is presented as it appears in the scanned copies of Jenna’s handwritten pages. This excerpt was not included in Kyle Duvall’s master docum
ent, and, as the reader will see, Jenna did not mean for this page to appear in the final version of the memoir.

  My breakup with Sunny was like most breakups, I suppose. It started with small disagreements, escalated into arguments, then bigger arguments…

  Things came to a head the first weekend in May when Sunny wrote a one-act play. I don’t know what I want to say in these pages about Sunny’s little stage drama. I guess I’ll just say this: Imagine it’s Saturday morning, you and your boyfriend are snuggling in bed, and you get a text message from your friend that says, “I’ve written a play and we’re all going to perform it today. I’ll be by in an hour to pick you up.”

  What do you do?

  …

  You know what, Kyle? I’m going to set this page aside. If you want to write about what happened that day when Sunny took us to the mesa to act out her play, you can, but I’m not in the mood to write about it today, and I don’t know if I ever will be. For whatever reason, that memory is one that really stings.

  CHAPTER 44

  “Uh oh,” said Jenna. “You’ll never guess who the message is from.”

  “Sunny?” said Rudy.

  Jenna read the message again. It made her laugh. What was she supposed to make of this?

  “What?” said Rudy. “What does it say?”

  “Apparently Sunny has written a play and wants us to perform it. She’s coming to get us now.”

  “You’re telling me I have to be in a play today?” said Rudy.

  “Apparently so,” said Jenna, laughing.

  She hoped Rudy would laugh with her. He didn’t.

  “Oh come on,” said Jenna. “Let’s humor her. It might be fun.”

  “Or it might be another Saturday that gets eaten up doing what she wants to do,” said Rudy.

  Jenna was already out of bed and getting dressed. “If I tell her no we’re going to lose our Saturday fighting with her anyway. Come on. If nothing else, it’s a unique way to spend a morning, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” said Rudy.

  Sunny had a manic air about her when she arrived on Jenna’s doorstep. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, she said. She just got back from the mesa, she said, where she’d been “setting up for our performance since four in the morning.”

  She smelled like gunpowder.

  They loaded into Sunny’s Accord. Sunny, Seth, Kyle, Rudy, and Jenna, the same crew that, only a few weeks before, took a memorable trip to Texas, a trip that ended in divisive opinions and awkward silences.

  Sunny passed out scripts for them to read.

  “You don’t need to memorize anything,” she said. “We’ll do this workshop style. Everyone can read their lines.”

  ‘The play’ was a dramatization of the climactic scene from Spartacus Jones and The Serpent’s Mouth. Sunny told them she wrote it “in a flash of inspiration” the evening before.

  The final three pages of the play were an abbreviated version of Spartacus’s book-ending speech, and the final sentence was a stage direction that said, “Spartacus throws down his torch and the whole set explodes in a fiery inferno.”

  “We’re blowing something up, aren’t we?” said Kyle.

  “Damn right we are,” said Sunny.

  Jenna gave Rudy a playful punch in the shoulder. “See? Told you it might be fun,” she whispered.

  Sunny drove them deep into the mesa south of town. Tumbleweeds and sagebrush, prairie dogs, rabbits, hawks, and then they were at the “set” Sunny had built. The carcass of an old abandoned truck, a rusty metal frame that had become an object for target practice out there in shooting country. Sunny had put a sign on the bullet-riddled truck, labeling it “Church of Saint Stephen,” which was a location from the novel. Some fifty feet away from the truck was a sunburst of cords and firework cannons Sunny had laid out on the ground, and in the center of it all, a detonator, its wires making a four-petal flower.

  “And when Spartacus says his final words,” Sunny explained to them, “The detonator lights the fuses and we all gather in the center and watch as the ship explodes around us.”

  They oohed and ahhed at Sunny’s creation, as they all knew she wanted them to do. Then they began the play.

  In the final chapter of Spartacus Jones and The Serpent’s Mouth, Spartacus tricks the colonists into loading him on a slave frigate that is about to set sail. He waits until the ship is far out to sea, then he frees himself of his chains with a key he has snuck on board. He kills the officers with their own knives and swords. He opens the hatch to the powder room and holds a torch aloft, then he gives a speech that ends with the line, “I give my life to the battle for justice!”

  Those words uttered, Spartacus drops the torch and blows up the boat.

  “We’ll stand in the center. I want it to be like we’re on the boat when it explodes,” Sunny said. “All eight cannons will go off at once. It will be a spectacular fireball.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Rudy asked.

  “Of course it’s safe,” Sunny said.

  “Just checking,” said Rudy.

  “Well there’s no need to check. If you think I’d gather you guys, my best friends in the world, and…oh never mind. Let’s get started. Places everyone.”

  They performed her play. They read every line, four members of the group working together to humor the fifth, all of them waiting to see what kind of explosion Sunny had in store for them when it was over.

  But seconds before Seth uttered the final line of the play, Rudy ran to the detonator box and pulled out the key.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Sunny yelled at him.

  “I just want to clarify something,” Rudy said. “This guy, Spartacus…he blows up the boat with everyone on board? Even the slaves?”

  The venom on Sunny’s face at this point, the fury that Rudy had interrupted her play at the climactic scene...

  “Yes,” she said, exasperated. “Now please, give me the key.”

  “But that’s horrible,” said Rudy.

  “Yes, the story is a tragedy,” said Sunny, holding out her hand. “I can explain it to you when we’re done.”

  “I don’t need it explained,” said Rudy. “I think I get it.”

  “I think you don’t,” said Sunny. “Give me the fucking key. You’re ruining everything.”

  “Maybe we could watch your fireworks without pretending we’re in this story,” Rudy said. “I’d like that better. This story, Spartacus Jones…I don’t like this story.”

  “You just don’t understand the themes,” said Sunny.

  “Don’t act like I’m not smart enough to understand your stupid story,” said Rudy.

  Silence descended on the group like a cloud of poison gas. With her eyes closed, as if she was struggling to contain the fire within, Sunny said, quietly, “Please don’t call it a stupid story.”

  “It’s just not cool that he kills the slaves,” said Rudy. “They’re innocent.”

  “Sometimes, in war, innocent people have to die,” said Sunny.

  “But these people? I mean, what did Spartacus even accomplish? We don’t know because the story ends with him blowing up the-”

  And then Sunny screamed. Piercing, shrill, maniacal, crazed—she let out a wail that soared across the mesa, and she followed it with a full-on temper tantrum. Feet stomping, arms flailing, as she shouted, “Shut up! Just SHUT THE FUCK UP and give me the key!”

  Her voice carried across the desert. No one said anything in response. No one moved.

  “The key! The key! Give me the key God Dammit!”

  Rudy gave her the key.

  “Oh, but now the moment is ruined!” she yelled. “We’ll do it again. Yes, that’s the only way. From the top, people!”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m good,” Rudy said.

  Then he held out the script, Sunny’s precious script that she’d typed in a flurry of inspiration the night before, and when Sunny refused to take it, he dropped it on the groun
d and walked away.

  At this point, all eyes fell on Jenna. And though she hesitated at first, though she made a show of effort to act torn between these two warring parties, there was no question in her mind whose side she was going to take.

  But before she walked off with Rudy, she uttered a sentence of extraordinary betrayal to Sunny, one she knew would tear a rift open between them that would never heal. The phrase was frightening to utter, her mind begged her to hold back, but she forced it out.

  She was ready to be done with Sunny.

  “It really is a strange story,” she said.

  The words spoken, the insult leveled at the book that Sunny treated as a Bible, Jenna jogged after Rudy. The two of them were halfway to the outer edge of the fireworks rig when Sunny yelled, “Stop!”

  They stopped. They turned back to see Sunny inserting the key into the detonator. Then they saw eight little fireballs begin racing down the sunburst of fuses in Sunny’s rig.

  “Jesus,” Jenna said.

  Sunny had given them a choice. Run back to the center of the rig, as was her plan for the play, or risk getting caught in a massive ball of fire that might well kill them.

  Hand in hand, they ran back to everyone else, arriving in time to hear the burst, see the flames, and feel the heat from the fire that, for a few seconds, engulfed the world around them.

  CHAPTER 45

  While looking through old yearbooks in the library at Mary Nolan College, Gabe found an interesting photograph.

  It was on the bottom left corner of page 187.

  He had enough info to write a story now. But, much as he wanted to rush to publication, he waited. He was still hoping to find some pot of gold on the laptop he stole from Kyle’s apartment.

  Cameron had gotten past the login screen. Gabe had already made a first pass on the machine. He had dug through every folder, scoured every document, and found…nothing.

  There was one folder he couldn’t access. There was a folder named Utility Bills that was password protected.

  Why would someone password protect their utility bills?

  Deciding he couldn’t call the laptop done until he’d seen all of it, and now with Cameron just as eager to get at the machine’s secrets as Gabe, he waited.