by Spencer Baum
“Who can get his tracker working?” Jodi said.
“Security’s spreading all over the arena to look for him,” said Mitch.
“This is such bullshit!” said Jodi. “What’s coming up next? Who’s going where?”
“We have a pyro event happening as soon as the last contestant crosses the marker,” said Parna. “Should we cancel it?”
“No! Why would we cancel it?”
“Just asking.”
“We keep the pyro. We keep the show moving. Until security tells me where the hell he is, we proceed as if Nathan Cavanaugh is dead, even though his vitals say he’s alive, somewhere.”
*****
Arnold Detwick was on the arena floor, looking up at the crowd.
Hundreds of thousands of people in this arena, and they were supposed to find one of them who had gone missing.
A pop of static came through the walkie-talkie clipped to Arnold’s lapel. Chris’s voice followed. Sector 22 is clear, he said.
Bill’s voice was next. Roger that. Clear 22.
Everyone in security was rushing to check all the corridors, closets, and hidey-holes that production used to store equipment along the edges of the course. Security was operating under the assumption that, somehow, Nathan Cavanaugh had broken free from the main course and was hiding on the perimeter.
How that was even possible nobody could say, and Arnold figured it wasn’t his job to question. All he knew was what he’d heard, and what he’d heard was that Nathan had disappeared from view and they’d lost tracking on his cuff.
What about Sector 20? said Bill. Who’s on that?
Arnold pressed the button on his radio. “I’m on 20,” he said. “Haven’t seen anything yet.”
Copy that, said Bill. Keep looking. He’s gotta be here somewhere.
Arnold poked through a row of storage closets built into the near wall. A pile of electrical cable. A stack of totes. When the closets were done, Arnold scanned the edge of the forest on the arena floor, hoping he might see a person hiding in a bush or perched high in a tree.
Nothing.
He was headed back to the tunnel when Bill’s voice popped on the walkie-talkie.
His cuff is registering again! Bill said. We’ve got tracking info!
Jodi’s voice was next. Where? Where the hell is he?
Bill responded with: Not on the course, that’s for sure. I’m showing him…no, that can’t be right.
What do you mean that can’t be right? said Jodi. What do you see?
Bill: I’m showing him in the rafters, way up in the ceiling.
Up in the ceiling?
Arnold took a step away from the stands to get a better view of the whole arena, then he looked up.
Jodi: Well that doesn’t make any sense.
Bill: I know. Something is off with that cuff, I think.
It was twenty-three stories from the ground to the bottom of the giant cube of TV screens that hung from the roof of the Tetradome. It was an additional fifteen stories from the bottom of the cube to the ceiling. Arnold had never looked at the ceiling from the stadium floor. It was so high it made him dizzy.
Jodi: What does it even mean that he’s showing in the ceiling? Is there anyplace that people can go up there?
Bill: Not where he’s showing. Not unless he’s in the rafters under the roof.
When Arnold saw it, he saw it as a shadow at first, and didn’t believe his eyes.
Jodi: Is it possible he’s on the roof?
Bill: No. Absolutely not. Totally out of the question.
Jodi: Well can we put someone up there to look?
Arnold clicked the button on his walkie-talkie. “Guys, I think I know where he is,” he said.
Jodi: What? Who’s talking?
“This is Arnold Detwick from security. I’m on the floor in the dome and, well, I think I might see him.”
Jodi: Where?
The crowd was starting to get noisy. They saw him too.
“Way up in the ceiling,” said Arnold, “just like your tracking says. There’s someone up there now. He’s climbing down the cables.”
Jodi: Climbing down what cables?
“The cables that hold up the screens, Ma’am. It’s like…I think he intends to crawl down and stand on top of the Jumbotron.”
CHAPTER 67
Someone left a production door unlocked.
Nathan went through it.
Someone left a security badge under the stairs on the other side of the door.
Nathan took it.
The badge allowed him to open the door to the maintenance shaft of the Tetradome. The badge allowed him to access the elevator. The elevator took him to the lower rafters of the roof, where he stepped onto the catwalks beneath the ceiling.
Eight thick steel cables attached the cube of Jumbotrons to the ceiling of the Tetradome. For most people, the thought of shimmying down one of those cables to stand atop the Jumbotron assembly would be terrifying.
But not for Nathan. Nathan had been training for this moment for years.
*****
Gabe’s Tweet about Bart Devlin’s corpse had dragged him into a collection of viral threads. Some included photos and video from inside the Tetradome. One livestream showed a man sliding down a cable. Gabe went to the next Tweet, and the next. Different angles, all of the same shot. Speculation in the thread. Is that Nathan Cavanaugh? I swear that’s him!
And even as Gabe’s phone showed breathtakingly strange clips from inside the dome, the screen at Polaris remained stuck on a boring shot of Jenna running in a forest.
*****
Jenna’s legs wanted to fly, to ditch Byrd Jenkins and his dithering pace, to cruise past him.
She forced them to behave. Slow and steady. Stay in last place. Look for a yellow flower.
The forest around her had grown dense. A thicket of shrubs and tree trunks made for a natural wall on either side of the gravel path as they ran, and though she couldn’t see the monsters, she knew they were out there. Rustling in the trees, crackling in the foliage, the occasional caw of some bird of prey. The race had been calm for minutes now, but the noises in the forest suggested a storm was coming. Sunny had spoken of a forest fire. The thought of that happening, of all this kindling around her going up in flames, of whatever was out there in the woods getting driven onto the running path, of a collection of Tetradome monsters not only angry, but panicked…
It took all her willpower not to speed up and blaze past Byrd and the rest of them.
A dip in the path, a curve around a bend, a steady jog. Something was happening outside the forest, something that had stirred the crowd. The audience, which at times had felt like it was miles away, had come to life. They weren’t cheering. They weren’t booing either. They sounded…agitated. About what? What was going on out there?
Was it Sunny?
Was her plan, whatever it was, unfolding?
There was no time to think about it. Ahead of her, Jenna could see it. Bursting from a bush on the right side of the path, an explosion of bright yellow color among the greenery. That’s the flower, she thought. That’s my marker. Steady now. Light on your feet. Be ready to pick up your pace the instant you pass that marker.
The orchid came up on the right as she ran. Then it was immediately beside her. Then she passed it.
What now, Sunny? What happens now?
Three steps in the gravel, heavy with anticipation, then the forest around her erupted in flames. An explosion of fire that started somewhere in the treetops and rolled upward in a ball of heat and bright orange light. It was so bright she had to shield her eyes with her arm. Fiery balls of ash began falling on either side of the path. A towering inferno on both sides. The path gave her just a few yards of clear space to her left and right.
The only place in the forest that wasn’t burning, the path, she knew, was about to become crowded.
A mob of angry, burning monsters poured forth from the forest. Harpies—monsters she’d seen on th
e show when she was in high school—dozens of them. More horrifying than she even imagined they would be, bat-winged creatures with stunning, human-like faces, the harpies screamed through snouts of knife-like fangs while their stunted wings burned and their claws flailed. The path had become a deadly obstacle course, a burning corridor of talons and teeth. It was all Jenna could do to keep her eyes open as she ran.
I have to find it, she told herself. A pathway to the right. Sunny said it’s coming up soon. If I miss it, I’m dead.
She was scared that she missed it already. After all, it wasn’t a path she was meant to see. Sunny had described it as some kind of service road, some bit of logistics not meant for runners at all.
There! Down and to the right!
Jenna stepped off the path and bolted down the narrow road, running headlong into burning forest. A blast of superheated air. A harpie’s talons swiping at her back. She was out of control, her own momentum pushing her into a raging inferno.
And then the ground opened beneath her and she fell into darkness.
*****
This was the clearest photo Gabe had seen on Twitter thus far. Nathan Cavanaugh, a body and head of rainbow colored tattoos, standing atop the giant cube of screens that hung from the Tetradome’s ceiling. He had removed his shirt and tossed it over the edge. He stood with arms raised, like a rock star in front of his adoring fans.
Gabe published a new Tweet, a simple statement of fact: Something crazy is happening inside the Tetradome.
*****
Jenna screamed. A harrowing second of freefall, her body completely out of her control, then she landed hard on a concrete floor.
She looked up to see a tangle of broken branches and foliage crisscrossing an opening in the air above her. She had fallen into the classic jungle booby trap. Step on what you think is solid ground only to find yourself falling into a pit from which you can’t escape.
Or can you? This pit—was pit the right word to call it? No, this was more of a manhole. Getting her bearings now, Jenna could see there was a ladder attached to the wall behind her, and if she wanted to, she could use the ladder to climb out of the hole and back on the course. Strangely, her first instinct was to do just that. She had her foot on the lowest rung of the ladder when she realized that didn’t make any sense at all.
Sunny had told her to run down the service road and she did. Was Sunny the one who set this trap in the ground?
Sunny’s name, the thought of it, was the cue Jenna’s mind needed to see what had been in front of her face since she landed. An arc of purple paint on the wall. It glistened in the light that filtered down from above.
Jenna stepped back, widening her view of the narrow space.
She saw a door built into the concrete wall, and on that door, a purple flower of spray paint.
The door had no handle or knob, but when Jenna pushed on it, it opened.
A tunnel was on the other side. Walls of concrete, a row of fluorescent lights on a low ceiling, and on the floor, written in the same purple spray paint as the flower that greeted her, an arrow pointing deeper into the tunnel. Beneath the arrow were the words, “This way, Jenna.”
CHAPTER 68
Bad Decision #3
Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall
First I wrote a letter to Sunny.
Then I let Seth read to me.
Then I said no to the man who wanted to help me.
Seth tried to rape me that night. He got me to the ground, put his legs on either side of me, ripped at my shirt, tried to cover my mouth as I screamed.
Some man from the neighborhood was out walking his German Shepherd. He intervened. It got ugly there for a minute—chaos in the park at night with people yelling and a barking dog. In the end, Seth pulled up his pants and ran away.
Then the man asked me if I was okay. He asked me if he could help, if he could call the cops.
It’s hard to put myself in the frame of mind I was in that night. I was only minutes removed from thinking I was out that night because Seth was sad and needed to talk.
I remember, clearly remember, thinking about how Seth, as a freshman, was falsely accused of being a pedophile.
To the man and his dog, wherever you are, thank you for helping me that night. I wish I had it to do over again. I wish I’d told you, “Yes, please call the police.”
But I didn’t. The feeling I had at that moment…I was exposed. Mortified. I felt an urgent, downright uncontrollable need to get the hell out of there.
So I left. First in a fast walk, then a jog, then a sprint. Away from the park, back to my house, up to my bedroom. I closed and locked the door. I sat on the edge of the bed and caught my breath. I looked at my phone, thinking of all the people I could contact, including the police.
I called Sunny.
“Jenna? Is that you?”
“I know it’s been a long time,” I said, “but something’s just happened and I didn’t know who else to call.”
She seemed so calm when she spoke to me. I can still hear that eerie calm in her voice.
“What is it? What happened, Jenna?”
CHAPTER 69
“What in God’s name is going on out there?” Jodi yelled at her walkie talkie.
A pop of static, a crackle, then some nameless security guard responded. “Control, we’ve got a situation.”
“A situation? What we have is more than-”
She stopped talking because the main feed cut to black.
“Now what?” Jodi said.
“We’ve lost the signal,” said Parna.
“What do you mean? Are we broadcasting a black screen to the world?”
“It appears we are.”
The main feed came back.
“What did you do?” Jodi asked.
“Nothing,” said Parna.
The center monitor showed a view of empty forest, the camera eye from a drone that was covering no one at the moment.
“It’s camera 38,” said Mitch. “I don’t know why-”
“Get it off!” said Jodi. “Go somewhere else.”
“I’m trying,” said Mitch. “I can’t…it’s not working!”
“I can’t control it either,” said Parna.
“Control what?” said Jodi.
“The feed!” they both said at once.
Mitch was pounding on his computer keyboard. “We’re stuck on camera 38,” he said.
Camera 38 was mounted on the bottom of a quadricoptor drone, one that was in the midst of a rapid ascent. The view had gone from an empty footpath to an overhead shot of a smoldering forest.
“What is this?” said Jodi. “We’ve got to switch to a different camera!”
“We can’t change anything!” Parna snapped. “We have no control over the feed!”
“Well this camera is getting too high,” said Jodi. “If it keeps going, pretty soon the world’s going to see that Nathan is…”
She didn’t finish the thought because the truth of it dawned on her before the words came out. The world’s going to see him. That was the point, wasn’t it? Nathan Cavanaugh, an antidomer radical, had escaped from the course and was standing on top of the TV screens in the center of the arena. Someone else, no doubt someone who was helping him, had hacked into their feed.
Jodi was no longer in control of this broadcast. Whoever was in control wanted the world to see the view from camera 38, a drone which was now high in the dome and rapidly rising.
“Not good,” Jodi whispered.
Those were the last words anyone in the Control Room said for a while. On the center monitor, the Main Feed of the live broadcast showed a close-up view of Nathan Cavanaugh, standing tall on his perch. Nathan looked right at the camera, and began to speak.
“Hello everyone,” he said. “We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled broadcast for a special message from your friends in the antidomer community and the Blue Brigade.”
CHAPTER 70
Deep
in the bowels of the Tetradome, Jenna Duvall, running at a full sprint, followed the arrows Sunny had painted on the walls for her.
High above the arena floor, Nathan Cavanaugh spoke to the camera mounted in a drone that hovered in front of him. He recited statistics about violent crime in America, about the overwhelming likelihood that America was executing innocent people ever year.
Gabe, and many millions around the world, watched the TV with rapt attention.
In the Control Room, Jodi was on the phone with the president of NRTV, the two of them debating whether or not the network should cut off the broadcast. Jodi wanted the network to kill the feed and replace it with something else. “I have no control over anything at this point,” she said. “My whole system’s been hacked. Who knows what they’re going to do if we continue giving these people airtime?”
The president of the network refused to pull the plug. “This is a once in a lifetime television event,” he said. “I could give you all the money in the world and you wouldn’t be able to produce a show for me that’s as compelling as what’s coming out of that arena right now.”
Seven miles away from the Tetradome, at the far west end of Redemption Boulevard, a black van with the Devlin logo on its sides drove onto the entry ramp for I-15, headed for Las Vegas.
The driver was a man who had spent the past three years of his life answering to the name Blake Miller, but Blake Miller’s work was done, and now the man was, once again, Gordon Bogel.
At the other end of New Rome, in the storage room of the Wainwright Morgue, Herman Devlin, in the company of an officer from New Rome PD, gave positive ID to a corpse someone had found in a dumpster.
“Yes, that’s him,” Herman said. “That’s my son.”
The arrows led Jenna down three lengths of tunnel, bringing her to a massive ventilation fan that was built into the wall.
Someone had removed the fan’s protective cage, allowing the blades to swoop around in the open air uncovered.
On the other wall, next to the fan, was an electrical box. Words drawn in purple paint on the front panel of the box invited Jenna to ‘Open me and look inside.’
