by Spencer Baum
Jenna looked at the crowd around her. She allowed a slight feeling of relief into her psyche. They’d found the bomb. They’d disarmed the bomb. He was going to let her check it.
Maybe it was all over.
Blake put a strong arm around her back, allowed her to put nearly all her weight on him. He asked people to make way and they did. As he led her past the stairs and into the tunnel, the audience cheered.
And Jenna relaxed. It was over. She was the winner.
Down the tunnel and onto a metal catwalk. Concrete walls, televisions, flower pots—they were in the Underdeck now. They were on one of its upper levels. Jenna recognized the pattern of the wiring on the wall. They weren’t far from the generator room.
He led her off the catwalk and through a doorway that led to a concrete room lined with steel pipes. He pulled away from her, making her stand on her own.
“Do me a favor and stay here for one second,” Blake said.
“What is this place?” Jenna said. “What are we doing?”
Blake ran to the door and pulled it shut.
“What’s going on?” Jenna said.
He turned and approached her, slowly, keeping his body between her and the door.
“You’re acting strange,” said Jenna. “Where are we?”
“This will be quick, Jenna. I just need to ask you some questions.”
Locked in a room, Blake and his big bald head approaching slowly, his body backlit by the single window in the door behind him.
“I thought we were going to the generator room,” said Jenna.
Blake was still approaching. Jenna tried to back away but quickly ran into an intersection of thick steel pipes.
“What I don’t understand, Jenna, is how you knew,” Blake said.
She ducked under the pipes, stepped behind them, instinctively putting a barrier between herself and Blake.
“How I knew what?” she said.
“About the bomb. About Nathan’s TAC. About everything.”
She moved sideways, keeping the pipe in front of her, trying to bring herself closer to the door. “I…you’re making me uncomfortable. Will you please let me out of-”
“Did she tell you?” he asked, a sinister emphasis on the word she.
“What’s going on, Blake? Do you know about Foster? Do you know who she is?”
He smiled, bringing his face close to hers. “You’d be shocked at what I know.”
She moved without hesitation, applying a lesson she learned once in Albuquerque Metro Prison. A swift punch to his throat, catching his windpipe before he had time to react.
He wheeled back, coughing, wheezing.
Jenna ducked under the pipe, slid past him, and went to the door. It was locked. “Dammit,” she whispered. There was a keycard reader on the wall—Sunny had left her a keycard in that trash bag but Jenna had failed to grab it. All she had from Sunny’s bag of presents was the square-headed key that had popped open her cuff. That key was still in the beltline of her spandex. Knowing her fight with Blake wasn’t over, she pulled out the key and formed a fist around it, letting the head jut out from between her fingers.
“There’s no getting out of here, Jenna,” Blake said between coughs. He was still doubled over, still struggling to breathe. “You don’t have a keycard.” Wheeze. “Nobody knows you’re in here.” Cough. “I’m ready to die before I let you go.”
“Give me your card, Blake. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“A few weeks of training and you’re the tough girl now, are you?”
Knowing it was best to act while he was still having trouble breathing, Jenna rushed at him. He tried to move aside but she anticipated it, going with him, swinging her fist, landing a punch, albeit a glancing one, at the top of his stomach. Blake rolled back, crashed into a pipe. Jenna waited for him to bend over at the waist (they always bent at the waist after a gut punch), then she kneed him in the face. Blake stumbled back then fell to the floor. Jenna followed him, crouched down, and threw an elbow at his temple. His head flipped to one side and he groaned in pain.
He was dazed, but not fully out.
She decided dazed was good enough. Moving slower than she wanted to (it hurt to bend over) Jenna climbed on top of him, straddling his body, a knee on either side of his torso. She started digging through his pockets.
“Where’s the key card, Blake?” she said.
He was still coughing.
She checked both front pockets, it wasn’t easy—he was squirming, rocking back and forth as he coughed.
The key card wasn’t there.
She turned herself around and started going through the pockets on his shirt. She came up empty.
“Aww…” he moaned. “Aw shit.”
He was starting to come to. She might need to hit him again.
“I think you broke my nose!” he said.
“Tell me where the keycard is,” she said. “Is it in your back pocket?”
Had to be, right? She was going to have to turn him over. She crawled up on her haunches and rolled Blake’s body around, putting him on his stomach. She was about to reach into his back pocket when he jumped to his knees, surprising her. She made to kick him in the head, but there was movement at the door. It distracted her. She missed.
Someone opened the door. Someone came in.
“Arnold?” she said.
“Get her!” Blake yelled. “She’s out of control!”
Arnold’s eyes went wide with fear.
Jenna tried to calm him. “No, Arnold it’s not like that-”
But it was already too late. Blake was scrambling to his feet. Arnold was rushing at Jenna, fiddling with a snap on his belt as he ran. He was trying to get his Taser loose.
Three seconds of chaos followed. Blake stumbling around the room; Jenna taking a swing at him, catching his shoulder, barely knocking him off-track; three people yelling and screaming “Tase her, Arnold!” “No, you don’t understand what’s happening!” “Tase her! Do it, Arnold!”; Arnold raising his Taser gun; Jenna slapping it out of his hands; Jenna and Arnold lunging to get the Taser as it skidded across the floor; Blake approaching, his arm extended, something in his hand.
Blake blasted Jenna in the face with a shot of pepper spray. She shrieked and turned her face away, but not before the potent liquid got in her eyes. A white hot burn. She tried to power through it and keep her eyes open but she simply couldn’t. Her eyelids demanded to be shut.
“Jesus,” said Arnold. “What’s happening in here?”
Jenna couldn’t see what came next, but her ears told her plenty. Another squirt of spray, then Arnold yelled, Aww! What the fuck, Blake? Arnold staggered about the space before tripping over his own feet.
And now the sound of the Taser, finally getting to fire its load of paralyzing purple sparks. The sparks made contact with Jenna, whose muscles twitched into stillness. Unable to move, she wanted to clutch at her ribs, but all she could do was let out a pathetic moan from a mouth that was partially frozen shut.
Blake grabbed her wrist, yanked her arm.
What are you doing? she wanted to say, but couldn’t.
He held her wrist high, used his hands to twist at the cuff she’d been wearing since snapping it off of Nathan’s dying arm.
No! Stop! What are you doing?
None of the words would come. Her tongue, like the rest of her, still didn’t want to move. Blake unlocked the cuff and popped it off.
You’ll kill us all! This time it came out as a moan. Movement was coming back. She tried again, and got actual words out. “You’ll kill us all!”
Her eyes coming into focus, she saw a fuzzy image of Blake Miller, head of security at Devlin Enterprises, snapping the cuff of a TAC device around his own wrist.
Then he ran out of the room, closing the door behind him.
CHAPTER 85
She was making for the front doors of the casino. She was going to leave. Gabe tried to cut her off from the other side, but a flow of people coming
the other way caught him, carried him like a river, and for a few steps, he was going the wrong direction. By the time he broke free and made it to the opposite door, Sunny was already out. He could see her through the windows. She was walking quickly across the entry lot, head down, moving towards Las Vegas Boulevard.
Should he tell someone?
Tell them what? That he saw a cocktail waitress dropping plastic bottles in trash cans?
That he was worried the clear liquid in those bottles wasn’t water?
He ran after the girl. Through the door, the jarring switch from refrigerated air to Las Vegas heat. The crowded sidewalks of the Strip at night. Once Sunny hit that crowd it would be impossible to catch her.
“Sunny!” he yelled. “Hey, Sunny!”
She slowed her gait, just a little. It was her.
“Sunny, stop!”
Now she moved faster, like she knew she was being followed. Gabe broke into a run. He cut through a line of people waiting for taxis. He ducked between bumpers of shuttle buses parked in the driveway. To the sidewalk, towards the street—Sunny was at the corner now. She was jogging through the crosswalk. She was ten paces behind the crowd getting to the other side. A flashing red hand on the traffic light…it was going to change before Gabe got there.
“Sunny, wait!”
He ran faster, as fast as his jiggly-bellied stiff-kneed middle aged body would take him, but he didn’t make the intersection in time. The light changed. Six lanes of traffic broke their standstill to separate him from Sunny.
He watched her from across the street. She turned right, started walking down the sidewalk, ducked into a throng of people. Disappeared.
“No,” he whispered. No, no, no.
And also, now what?
A cardboard box in a fireplace. Stink bombs in a performance hall. A memoir hidden on a computer.
A memoir that told a story of deception, murder, assassination, and terrorism.
Did he believe what he read in that memoir?
Do you believe in the story you’ve written or not, Gabe Chancellor?
Do you trust what your gut is telling you?
He turned back towards the front doors of Polaris. When he moved, he did it cautiously at first. One tiny step. Then another. A little faster. His feet didn’t want to move but he forced them to. He told himself that the strange paperback novel he found in Kyle’s fireplace didn’t end with one explosion.
It ended with two. One on the boat and one in the church.
The doors of Polaris, simple structures of glass and steel—they looked foreboding as Gabe approached them. He pulled them open. Thought about what he might be stepping into.
Stepped inside anyway.
He looked around. He saw a fire alarm box on the wall next to the front desk. He ran to it. He lifted the plastic cover. The front desk clerk yelled at him.
“Sir? What are you doing?”
“You have to evacuate the building,” he said. Then he grabbed the alarm lever and pulled it down.
*****
Gordon Bogel ran through the Underdeck, a Tetradome contestant’s cuff on his wrist, blood pouring out from his broken nose.
The Underdeck was quiet. Everyone was out in the stands, waiting for Jenna to show up in the Winner’s Circle. No doubt the entire world was getting antsy, wondering what was taking so long.
Just a little bit longer and all of you will find out.
*****
Arnold felt like he might throw up.
“Come on, I need you to get up.”
It was Jenna. She was pulling on his hand. A prisoner was telling him to get up after his boss pepper-sprayed his face and Tasered his chest.
What the hell was going on around here?
“I’ll call for help,” he said. “My walkie-talkie.”
“There’s no time,” said Jenna. “Blake took the cuff. He’s going to set off the bomb.”
Blake? The cuff? Arnold didn’t know what to make of what she was saying, so he didn’t try. He just did what she wanted him to do. He took her hand, let her help him up.
The world after pepper spray was made of interlocking swirls of blurry light. Arnold felt like he would get lost in it if he let go of Jenna’s hand, so he didn’t. He let her lead him into the Underdeck.
“Where are we going?” he said.
“To the generator room,” said Jenna. “I need you to open it for me.”
*****
It was a testament to the respect a Devlin Enterprises van commanded around here that none of the many cop cars parked near the arena chose to give chase when Gordon took his van over the grass median and the wrong way down the street. When he reached Donnie Devlin Avenue he let out a whoop and a holler, like a bandit speeding away from a robbery.
The first traffic light ahead of him turned red well before he made the intersection. He ran it. His foot on the gas, his elbows on the steering wheel, he pulled a square-headed key from his pocket, and used it to snap open the cuff on his wrist.
He threw the open cuff, now detached from any human vital signs, onto the passenger seat. Revving the engine, bringing the van up to fifty miles an hour, then sixty, he began to count.
“One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi…”
How far away from the dome would he be when he got to sixty? Would he be on the highway?
Yes, if he floored it, he could be on the highway, the marvelously empty highway, when his count reached sixty and the Tetradome exploded.
*****
Through the Underdeck, Jenna leading the way. How did she know her way around down here?
Why did Arnold feel like Jenna was the only person in the building who knew what was going on?
Onto the stairs, down the stairs, to the generator cage, Jenna lifted the padlock and commanded him to, “Open this.”
He supposed there was no questioning her now. Arnold was all-in on Jenna’s plan, whatever it was. He might not understand the finer points of what was happening, but he understood enough.
He understood that the TAC status grid in this basement had been rewired.
He understood that something strange had been happening with Jenna’s cuff all night long.
He understood that his boss had gone mad, his boss’s boss was rumored to be dead, and tonight’s race was the weirdest in the history of the show.
He pulled a keyring from his pocket. He popped open the padlock on the cage. Jenna threw open the door and sprinted for the status grid.
“Nathan’s light has already gone yellow,” she said. “He’s taken off the cuff.”
She already had her fingertips behind the loose panel in the back. She groaned as she pulled at it, as if the motion pained her. “Help me!” she yelled. “This panel needs to come off!”
He ran to her side and pulled at the panel. When it broke loose, it did so with a flash of sparks and a painful shock to Arnold’s fingers. “Ow! God dammit!” he yelled, backing away.
Jenna rushed to the space he vacated, running her fingers along the wiring inside, whispering something to herself. Was she counting wires? Counting loops? Why did it look like the wires inside this box were shaped like a flower?
“Detonator, trigger…” Jenna said, naming parts of the circuit as she touched them, “…toggle, and switch!”
Grabbing a bundle of wires in her fist, she yanked them loose from the circuit board. A flash of yellow sparks fell through the air as copper wire broke free from its soldering joints.
The status grid went dark.
Jenna let the wires go, let them fall limp from the broken status grid, like guts from a dead animal. She bent forward, hands on her knees, exhaling in big, noisy breaths.
“It’s over,” she said.
“It’s over?”
“Their bomb. It won’t detonate now. Not from this device, at least.”
“What bomb? You said something earlier about Foster Smith?”
“And Blake too,” said Jenna. “And Nathan.”
; “Nathan?”
“And whoever else was working with them. They wanted to blow up the Tetradome tonight. They meant for it to happen when Nathan died.”
“Jenna, how did you…?”
She walked past him, so aloof, so in her own thoughts that he didn’t bother to finish his question. She went to the door of the cage. She pulled the keys from the padlock. She headed towards the back.
“What are you doing?” Arnold asked.
She ignored him, walked past him, walked past the status grid, past the generators.
Arnold followed her.
“Jenna?”
There was a second padlock on the back door of the cage. How she knew about this door, this lock, this anything, would just get folded into the mystery that was Jenna Duvall. But it didn’t seem out of the question to ask her what she was doing, did it?
He was the guard and she was the prisoner, right?
“Jenna, what’s back there? What are you doing?”
She used his keys to open the padlock. She stepped into a small concrete space on the other side. He made to follow her but she pulled the gate shut before he was through.
“Jenna I need you to tell me what you’re doing.”
“Stay right there,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
She snapped the padlock onto the gate from the other side, putting a locked door between her body and Arnold’s. Then she tossed the keys to the floor.
“I’ll give those back to you in a minute,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but I think we should get back, don’t you? The whole world is waiting for you to make a lap around the Winner’s Circle. Don’t you want to stand on the podium? You won, Jenna.”
She wasn’t listening. She had gone to the back corner of the space. She was rooting through a small pile of junk she’d found on the floor. A trash bag, a piece of paper, a jacket, a hat—was that a key card?
There was spray paint on the wall in front of her. A purple flower with four petals.
“Jenna, whatever you’re thinking of doing…”
She put on the jacket. She put on the hat. She put on the glasses.
“Jenna, you won the race! Your death sentence is revoked! Don’t do this!”
