The Gambit

by Allen Longstreet

  “Brody!” my mom called from the kitchen. “I heated up some chicken soup. Come get it!”

  “I’m coming,” I answered but didn’t move. I wasn’t even really sick, so I didn’t want chicken soup. If she ever left the kitchen I could have just thrown something in the microwave. I kept flipping through the channels.

  “I am innocent!” a voice screamed from the TV. My face scrunched up as the image faded in. My mouth dropped—it was that guy they were all looking for. Owen, I think his name was. He was the one who created the party, and then he bombed the debate and ruined everything. At least, that was what my friends said about him.

  “My name is Owen Lee Marina, and I am innocent!” His face was beet red, and his chest heaved up and down from screaming so loud.

  “Holy crap!” I shouted. “Mom, come look at this! Owen Marina is on the news!”

  “What was that, honey? The faucet is running, I can’t hear you! I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Come on, Mom!”

  If the news cut off, no one would believe me. I pulled out my cell phone and opened the camera app. I switched it to video and hit record.

  “I, Owen Lee Marina was framed for the bombs at Georgetown University. This was all orchestrated by our federal government! The bombs on Black Monday, the Confinement, the bombs at the debate—it was all planned!”

  My face went blank. I could feel my stomach flopping around.

  The Confinement was planned? It almost made me want to cry, thinking about that. Those were the worst three months of my entire life, and I was only thirteen. Why would our government have done that? It just didn’t make sense.

  Owen’s black hair was dripping with sweat, and there was something in his eyes that was frightening. Maybe what he knew was so scary that it made him look that way. Was he telling the truth? Was he really innocent?

  “Viktor Ivankov is innocent! He was chosen, just like I was, to keep their plan alive! There is evidence! Loads of evidence, which proves exactly what I am saying! The evidence we have been given is false! They lied to us! Do not fall for their trap, America! Wake up before it’s too late! Do not let them stay in power! If you vote democratic or republican, your freedom will die! It’ll be gone forever!” His voice was becoming hoarse from all the shouting.

  “Mom, hurry up!” I yelled. “Come look at this!”

  “Coming!” she replied.

  I heard other voices besides Owen’s in the background of the news.

  “…Shut it off!” a woman’s voice said. It sounded like she was behind the scenes or something.

  “…I can’t! Our system is completely frozen. It just keeps rolling. Go for the main power!” a man yelled.

  “…No!” another voice called. “Screw ‘em, our ratings are sky high. Call security instead...”

  Owen was still center screen. These side conversations were distracting.

  “Veronica Hall, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party, is behind this! She is singlehandedly destroying this country. Don’t let her! Don’t let the government turn this great country into a nightmare!”

  Who is Veronica? Hmm…

  “Our ancestors fought for this land in the Revolutionary War, and now we have to fight too! If we don’t, we are going to lose everything! We will wake up one day and we will find ourselves in a Confinement that never ends!”

  “What did he just say?” my mother asked with wide eyes. She stood underneath the archway to the dining room.

  “He said he was framed. Don’t worry, I filmed it all.”

  His words made me nauseous. I honestly would rather die than be in Confinement forever. Now, when I went to the zoo, I looked at the animals in the cages differently. The zoo wasn’t fun to me anymore. I felt like those animals in the cages, during the Confinement. I still had nightmares about it. I prayed that my little sister was too young to remember what happened inside. Maybe I could ask her when she got a little older.

  “Good,” my mother said. “What he is saying sounds very important.”

  She was right. It did sound important. The energy he put into his words was overwhelming. It scared me to wonder if they were really true. I was going to have to put this on my YouTube channel.

  “He said my name…” The words slipped out of my mouth and were met with silence. The entire control room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. I stared at the projected video of the newscast, streaming live on CNN. I was numb. I felt all the eyes in the room on me, but I didn’t want to turn around and face them—not yet.

  “Rewind it back thirty seconds,” I instructed.

  It played again.

  “Veronica Hall, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party is behind this! She is singlehandedly destroying this country. Don’t let her! Don’t let the government turn this great country into a nightmare!”

  The video stopped. I pressed my lips together, and my heart began to pound in my chest. The intensity in Owen’s face was disturbing, and it made me even angrier than I already was. I tried to control my breathing. I didn’t want anyone to see how this affected me. The reality of what had just happened, hit me. Owen just exposed my involvement on national TV. Everything he mentioned was kept so tightly under wraps, that if I didn’t eliminate him and all he had done to threaten the existing establishment, it would be me that paid the ultimate price.

  For the first time in ages, I felt embarrassed.

  My eye began to twitch, and as I breathed I felt my nostrils flare. I harnessed all the fear and embarrassment I felt and turned it into anger. Pure, undiluted anger. I would be damned if I let a sniveling little shit half my age ruin my career and everything I have worked for in my life. I let out a small chuckle, and I admit, it sounded like I was going crazy. It brought me so much pleasure to imagine the moment we won. Owen was the most talked-about political figure of the twenty-first century, but he wouldn’t go down in history as the victor. He would be famous, but not for anything good. His label as a terrorist would stick. We had enough false evidence to brainwash the millions of people who were glued to their TVs. He might have leaked the real truth, but with every spill, there were always people willing to clean it up.

  We had plenty of people to clean it up. Our guys would erase this so quickly people wouldn’t even have the chance to let it sink it. Owen would have just wasted his breath, and in the end, still be remembered as the terrorist who helped kill innocent people. That was what we wanted, and that was what we would get. Nothing would change. This was in actuality less of a ruckus than what happened in Miami. We didn’t have him in handcuffs, but he was in the CNN building. He couldn’t go far this time.

  I turned around and felt the rage bubbling up within me.

  “I want every FBI agent and police officer in a ten-mile radius to converge on that building! If we have to fucking shut down Atlanta, then that’s what we will do! Now!”

  The man who I was looking at stared back at me with a glare in his eyes that was disturbing. I could sense in his expression that he didn’t want to listen. After hearing what Owen said, he wanted to rebel.

  “Did I fucking stutter?!” I shouted. “Now!”

  He glowered at me with such disgust. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I turned back around to the screen.

  “Today is the day that Owen Marina goes down!”

  The maniacal high I felt was addicting. My power extended over everyone in this room, and I would use it to finish what I started. Owen might have thought this was like David and Goliath, but he would soon find out his rebellion was futile. He was but an insect to us, and he would be squashed like one very soon.

  “Ian! Ian, come in here!” Sharon called from outside my office. I shot out of my desk chair and ran towards the door. I tried to imagine what I was going to see, but I had no idea. I should have been home right now, but Rachel told me to keep the news on at work. Sure, I could have stayed home and just sent out a mass email, but that wasn’t my style. If something was going to happen that my journalists needed to
write about, I wanted to be there with them.

  I swung open the door, and the moment I laid eyes on the many flat screens, I saw Owen standing in front of the anchor’s desk, and he was center screen.

  “Someone turn up the volume!” I shouted.

  All of my journalists were crowded around the TVs. I stood at the back of the group and watched bewildered as Owen yelled at the camera on national TV.

  “I hope you heard everything I said loud and clear, America! Because if you didn’t, and if you believe these lies you’ve been given, we might go to a Confinement that never ends!”

  I couldn’t help but smile. He did it. He fucking did it. He was trying to revive his party just before the election. I was no fool, but it worried me because so much damage had already been done. It would take a lot more than that to sway public opinion back to the way it was before the bombs at Georgetown.

  “All right, everyone,” I began. “I want all of you writing. They will take this off the air any moment. There will be nothing to write about once they get ahold of it. We are watching history being made here, and everything else we have written about in the past week and a half, disregard it. As of now, we are going to push a new thought on the American People.”

  “What’s that?” one of the younger, female journalists asked.

  “That Owen Marina might be innocent.”

  “Get him!” a security guard yelled from the far corner of the studio. There was another behind him with what looked to be a Taser outstretched towards me.

  “Oh shit!” I yelled and ran back into the storage closet. I darted through blindly, nearly tripping over some boxes. I still had the maintenance keys I stole, and I tried to slam the door behind me to slow the guards down. Sweat dripped down my forehead as I sprinted through the hallway. I barreled toward the service elevator and began jamming the button over and over again. It was coming up from the ground floor. The guards rounded the corner, and I bolted farther down the hall until I found the stairwell.

  “Put your hands up!” I heard one of them yell.

  I have to hurry. They are right behind me.

  I practically slid down the steps I descended them so quickly, and I began looping around the flights of stairs with incredible speed. Adrenaline surged through my body. The energy I felt from having revealed every lie I knew on TV was unlike anything I had ever felt in my life. For the first time since my framing, I felt like I had control again. I had a choice over what I did next, and it was liberating. I wished I could have felt this forever, but deep down, I knew my freedom would be short-lived.

  I glanced up through the opening in the stairwell, and I saw them two flights above me. I kept my speed as constant as I could. I had an advantage over the guards because they were not in as good shape as me.

  Suddenly, I hit the ground floor and swung open the exit door. The refreshing lobby air hit me in the face as I sprinted across the marble floor.

  “Move, move, move!” I shouted and waved my hands as I ran for the revolving door.

  “Everybody get down!” the guards behind me demanded. As I neared the exit a bullet whizzed past me and barely missed. It shattered the glass, and the noise was earsplitting. I made it through the revolving door, and I gave it an extra shove as I exited. Whatever I could do to slow them down. Running down fifteen flights had me completely out of breath, and the chilly autumn air surrounded me. I didn’t stop. I continued to run down the street, but where did I have to go?

  There were buildings lining the street to my right, and I saw a park to my left. I heard cop sirens echoing from every direction, and before I made my move into the park, they all began to converge on me.

  Tahoes, Chargers, and Crowne Vics surrounded from every angle. Their tires screeched as they stopped, and I could smell the burnt rubber in the air. I turned around in a complete three-sixty and realized I was trapped. My heart pounded against my chest at an unbearable speed, and the midday sun beamed down on me, creating slight shadows between the buildings. I could only see blue sky for miles. The sirens were dizzying, and every which way I turned, I couldn’t avoid the sounds or lights. More and more cops pulled into the area, forming a large circle around me. They made a barrier I couldn’t escape.

  Dozens of the officers stepped out of their cars, all with their guns raised. I very slowly began to raise my hands.

  “Put your hands up!” the officer facing me shouted at the top of his lungs. I continued to raise them higher. Some of them were kneeling beside their patrol cars with automatic weapons against their shoulders. My hands were now above my shoulders, and I struggled to catch my breath. The liberation I felt from barging into the newscast was fading away, and was being replaced by a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had my mom’s message in my dream steered me down the wrong path? Should I have kept running forever, like Viktor?

  I would never know. It was too late now. I had already made my choice, and there was no turning back. I hoped my mother was proud, and wherever my pops was, I hoped he felt the same.

  “Get on the ground, now!” the same cop hollered even louder this time.

  So, this was what it felt like. I was cornered and had nowhere to run. This was how Jamie Lee Curtis felt with Michael Myers only a few feet away. Except, there were a few dozen Michael Myers after me, and they all had weapons pointing in my direction. I had tried so hard to do what was right for this country, and this was what I got in return for all my effort. I could only wish that my stunt in the newscast was enough to bring our support back up. The Convergence Party had to win, or else, we will have lost everything as a nation. There would be no hope, no light left in the darkness to guide us out of the abyss. As nauseous as I felt, I had a sudden clarity of mind. I realized that this situation wasn’t just isolated to me. If anyone were to threaten the existing establishment, the same thing would have happened to them. If you give someone enough power, what will stop them from wanting more?

  “Owen Marina! Get on the fucking ground! Now!”

  I wanted to fight, but I knew this was where my road would end if I did. That nagging feeling I have had since I met Rachel—that my road would be a short one, made sense now. It all made sense now. I loved her so much, and if I wanted to be with her again one day, I would have to submit. I would have to surrender. Rachel would write her story regardless. I hoped she would keep herself safe and not do anything stupid just for me.

  Our story didn’t end here. It was far from over, but today, today was the end of mine.

  The sirens were so loud I was beginning to go mad. We were parked along the road in front of Centennial Olympic Park. Grey was nervously tapping his fingers against the plastic interior of the car, just beneath the window. The taps were keeping pace with my racing heart, and it was unnerving. The air inside was too warm. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Each breath was deeper than the one before it. My hands were moist, and my stomach was in knots. Viktor was staring at the many people who were walking away from the park, trying to see what all the commotion was about in the street.

  None of this felt right. He shouldn’t have to be behind bars. He did nothing wrong. I wanted to be with him so badly, even if that meant behind bars.

  ‘No matter what happens, Rachel, you have to write your story.’

  Owen’s voice echoed in my mind. I knew I had to write the story, and I would. Right now though, I wanted to be there for Owen, even if he didn’t know I was. If he was going to be arrested, maybe his reaction would be an added touch to bring out emotion in those who would read the story. I had to see these kinds of things to document them. I glanced around the car and saw a Nikon camera bag sitting near the stick shift. Without asking, I grabbed it and popped open the door.

  “Hey, that’s mine!” Viktor called from the front seat.

  “Rachel, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Grey raised his voice angrily. “Are you out of your mind?”

  I slammed the door closed before they even had a chance to say anything else. I hurriedly wal
ked with the crowd, and it grew denser with every step. I fumbled with the zipper, and I yanked on it to open the slit just enough to pull the camera out. I took off the lens and hung the strap around my neck.

  I must have been nearing the center because I bumped into people left and right.

  “Excuse me,” I said meekly, keeping my head down. I wore a scarf high around my neck, and my dyed, jet-black locks concealed most of my face.

  “Get down I said!” a man’s voice echoed loudly.

  “I am innocent!” the voice placated the uneasiness in my stomach because I knew he was okay. I pushed past more and more people, readying the camera above the heads to get a good shot of Owen. In reality, I just wanted to see him. I wanted a photo I could hold onto while he was locked up.

  “Watch it, lady!” an old man sneered as I slid past him. I was now less than ten feet away from the cops, and through the many heads, I was almost certain I saw Owen in the center of it all. It had to be. He was still wearing the maintenance uniform he stole.

  “Everyone, everybody back!” Another line of cops stood back to back with the ones facing Owen. I held my camera up and started snapping.

  “Owen, get down on the ground now!” the cop screamed, his voice hoarse. “If you don’t put down your weapon, we will have no choice but to—”

  The camera dropped, jolting my neck from the weight. I couldn’t hear the screams of the people around me, and I didn’t feel them as they ran away, pushing past. Another gunshot split the air, and I felt it pierce my soul. A sickening chill ran up my spine, and it raced past my scalp and face like lightning. My chest heaved up and down, and the ringing in my ears was so loud I could barely process what was going on. Everybody fought to go backward, but I didn’t. I pushed forward. Cops were in front of me, and I tried to jump up and push my body weight against them. I couldn’t hear their shouts, but they were trying to stop me.

  He is fine, Rachel. He is fine. He is fine. Those were just warning shots.