Running Red

by Jack Bates

  It isn’t until we get to the wide-open field inside the main gate that I realize my impulse to take the Humvee was the stupidest maneuver I could have made. Besides the guardhouse at the entrance, there are half a dozen heavy armor vehicles parked across the road. At least twenty soldiers stand in defensive formations. While they don’t have their guns pointed at us, they nonetheless look ready to use them. Standing in front of them is my friend, Mr. Yanoloukis.

  Ram them, I think, but then realize that would be the second stupidest maneuver I’d make. Besides, I don’t want to harm Aubrey. I dragged him into this, after all. Part of me still feels guilty for what happened to Matt back at Freedom House. And don’t get me started on how I basically dognapped Yuki and then abandoned her.

  I slow the Humvee to a crawl, then stop. Yanoloukis approaches the vehicle. He takes one look at me and snarls. “Get out of the vehicle,” he says. “Now. I won’t ask a second time.”

  When neither of us moves, Yano waves a hand and a soldier runs up to the Humvee. He pulls Aubrey out of the passenger seat. It is Yano who removes me from my side. We are put in the back of a new Humvee. Yano rides in the passenger seat and a new soldier drives us back through the camp. Aubrey holds my hand.

  Once again, we pass the pink barracks Aubrey lives in. I see Shannon pushing a stroller. Adam looks like a wrapped log of bologna. Shannon smiles lovingly up at Gordon. Both are dressed in camp issued fatigues. I wonder if, under his blanket, baby Adam wears similar attire.

  Yano points at the intersection that leads off to the field hospital. The driver slows and makes the turn. Up ahead I see a white, four-story building. Two smaller buildings have been erected separately, but connect to the taller one with second-floor walkways. I am assuming this is the field hospital as we shoot passed it. The road extends away.

  Up ahead of us I see a very tall fence, at least twelve feet high. From the slight rise in the road and the angle of the Humvee as it descends it, I can see that the fence makes a pentagon around a structure that looks like a pushed over Y. There is a guard tower in every corner of the enclosure. Coils of razor wire curl endlessly above the top horizon of the fencing.

  The driver slows at a guardhouse outside of the main gate. There is one of those familiar barrier arms painted in black and yellow stripes. No one comes out of the guardhouse. The arm rises. A motor kicks on and the main gates slide open. We drive through. When I look over my shoulder, the gates are closing once more.

  The butt end of the toppled Y appears to be the entrance to the building. Above two metal doors is a hand painted sign that reads “Detention Center.” The doors beneath it are gray. Each has a narrow, vertical window with wired-glass panes in them. No one stands guard outside these doors. For the most part, the place looks abandoned.

  Yano gets out of the Humvee. He motions for Aubrey and me to do the same. As I am crawling out from behind the passenger seat, I notice the driver. He un-grips and then re-grips the steering wheel. Although it is not all that hot outside, I see a little bead of perspiration trickle down his temple. The new driver is nervous about being here.

  “That’s all, Private,” Yano says. The Humvee drives away.

  “Don’t either of you get any other ideas,” Yano says to us. He removes his pistol from his hip holster. Yano goes up to the third step and faces what looks like a video camera. Beneath it is a number panel. He pushes several numbers and leans close to the camera. A blue line slides over his eyes. There is another one of those ominous clicks, and the door on the left opens. Yano turns to us.

  “All right,” he says. “Inside.” Yano stands off to the side. Aubrey goes through the door first. Yano stops me as I go through it. He yanks my arm and twists it behind my back. “Not so tough with me when I’ve got a gun, are you, you little bitch?”

  Aubrey has stopped. He turns around and starts for Yano when Yano raises his handgun. He points it first at Aubrey and then at my head.

  “What you going to do, tough guy?” Yano asks. “I can kill you both.”

  “You’ll kill no one,” LC Allison says. She has come out of a room at the far end of the corridor we are in. Yano reluctantly puts his gun back into its holster. LC Allison takes measured steps, keeps an even pace. Her boots clomp-clomp-clomp along the tiles. She stops when she reaches us.

  “Just what did you think you were going to do?” she asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “All of a sudden I just wanted out.”

  “Out? Where are you going to go? The world outside the gates is a dangerous place.”

  “How safe is it in here, Aunt Alice?” Aubrey asks.

  Her smile takes on a bit of the devil. “It’s Lieutenant Commander Allison, Nick,” she says.

  Nick? This surprises me. I had never thought of it before, but I guess Aubrey’s first name could be Nick.

  LC Allison continues. “Safer than you know. But that safety comes at a price, and part of that price is being able to follow the rules we have within these grounds. Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”

  We walk in formation down the long corridor. LC Allison leads. Aubrey and I walk side by side behind her. Following us is Corporal Yanoloukis. The hall is dimly lit. It stretches about half a football field before we reach a brightly lit, circular room. It has a cathedral ceiling. Two metal staircases lead to and from a balcony circling above our heads. A single catwalk extends across the circular walk above our heads.

  There is a mosaic design in the tile floor. It’s a large star inside a ring. Elite Forces emblem.

  We are at the spot where the two arms of the Y branch off. There are two doors: one for the left branch, one for the right branch. The left branch has a simple hurricane push bar, a large window, also lined with crisscrossing, diagonal strands of wire. The right branch is a solid metal door. A white, triangular sign with red warning stripes along the border is screwed into the plating. In the center of the triangle it reads, “Authorized Personnel Only.”

  Thankfully, I think, for now we are only going through the door to the left.

  We are standing in a vestibule. There are two more heavy metal doors. LC Allison turns. She is wearing her Cheshire grin and she softens her voice to calm us. In many ways, she reminds me of an elementary teacher I had.

  “I think you both know where we are right now,” she says. “This is the stockade, a jail. This is where we deal with the rule breakers.”

  LC Allison turns and looks into another security camera. She also taps her finger over a number pad. When she touches the last key, the numbers she has touched light up blue. The blue light from the camera slides over her eyes. Again, there is a click and the door pops open.

  It feels stuffier in this new corridor, even though this place also has a cathedral ceiling. The hall is wide. Every ten feet or so there is a new metal door with a tiny wired-glass window in it. Occasionally there is a face behind the glass. Above us, a balcony walkway makes a complete rectangle. Three bridges stretch between the two sides, spaced about twenty feet apart. Upstairs there are more cells.

  LC Allison doesn’t stop at any of the doors. I want to, though. I want to look inside and see if my sister is in one, if Matt is inside one, if anyone I may have encountered when I was on my own is in one. There were some people I met who I did trust, but back then I wasn’t ready to group with anyone. Back then I was still angry. After the last two weeks, I remember why I preferred being out amongst the runners. At least with a runner I knew what to expect.

  When we reach the end, she takes us up a set of metal stairs that curves up along the wall. At the top, we are greeted by a wall-length window that looks out on the grounds. The view of the rolling, tree covered hills and the blue sky and loping fields is amazing. It isn’t until she leads us up to the window and we look down that I discover the horror the view holds.

  Below us is a scaffold built ten feet above the ground. Spaced evenly along a crossbar are the hanging, lifeless bodies off three people. Their feet dangle throug
h opened trapdoors. LC Allison nods to the lone soldier on the scaffolding. This soldier moves slowly, from dead man to dead man, removing black pillowcases from their heads.

  Denny.

  Scarecrow Jimmy.

  Mr. Gumm.

  “I told you before, Robin,” LC Allison says. “This is how it is now. Don’t get any ideas.”

  Nineteen

  My one-room apartment is gone.

  Aubrey and I are put into separate cells on the second floor. We’re across from one another. We can stare into each other’s window across the open canyon between us. I feel bad that I got him sequestered.

  I can’t even begin to explain the onset of claustrophobia. If I felt suffocated in the apartment, it is nothing compared to being in a cell. I have two windows in my room. There’s the one in the door that looks out at another door: Even though it’s Nick’s, which I’ve started thinking of him as in my head, it’s still a door. The other window is about a foot over my head and isn’t much wider than the front of a cereal box. My room is just narrow enough that I can’t stretch completely from wall to wall without bending my knees. It’s ten paces long.

  There is a metal toilet in the corner beneath the wall window. A short cinder block wall hides me when I’m using it, but the upper half of my body can be seen. A small, metal sink is in the corner across from it. I stand on the toilet and try to crawl up the wall to look out the wall window, but there’s nothing to hook my fingers into for support. I can’t see anything but sky; I never knew how lonely sky could be.

  A fold down table, the size and shape of the kind on a plane, is on the wall across from my bunk. It’s just far enough from the edge of the bed to make it impractical for me to reach. A circular seat pulls out of the wall for me to use when I want to sit and eat my meals. Most of the time I just move the food to my bed and eat off the tray.

  I don’t know how long we’re going to be in here, but it already feels like it’s a life sentence. At least a dozen nights have gone by since we were incarcerated. You can forget due process and civil rights under a militant regime. If my dad had pulled a stunt like grounding me for this long, there would have been hell to pay. Here, in the Camp G Detention Center, I would only make it difficult on me.

  I’ve heard what being difficult does to someone who gets on LC Allison’s bad side. A few nights after I was locked up, I was awakened by some gut-wrenching screams. They came from a man. He begged over and over again to go back into his cell. I listened to him scream and cry as they took him down the hall. The last thing I heard was a despondent, “No!”

  Lately, the nights are at least a little better. There’s been a new moon so it’s been pretty dark. It makes it easier to sleep. It also makes it easier for me to work on and hide some little tools I’ve been making from the razor blades I pocketed and some of the supplies they bring me with each meal.

  We are given one hour a day out in the yard. There is never anybody else out when I am. I have to walk past the scaffolding. The bodies are gone, but the smell of death lingers. Maybe it’s all in my head.

  I have found a footpath that leads out to the fence immediately around the detention center. Beyond it is another fence. I’m sure there is another beyond that. I’m afraid to touch the fence when I get out to it because there is a rubber coated wire snaking through the wire diamonds along the bottom. For all I know it could be a ruse, but I don’t feel like testing it for electricity.

  It’s the morning of my thirteenth day of incarceration when Unknown Guard 13 opens my door. I have had a new guard every day since being locked up. Guard 13 presses the button of the intercom that feeds into my room and instructs me that it is time for my hour in the yard. Even though there are no clocks anywhere that I’ve seen since arriving at Camp G, the detention center guards all carry stopwatches.

  Guard 13 is a square-jawed young man with curly, brown hair. The color of his hair matches the color of his eyes. Unlike some of my other guards, he wears a sidearm on his hip.

  He hands me a fresh set of clothing. It’s the same basic fatigues, but they’re fresh. They smell like they’ve been washed. Camp G is a self-sustaining environment full of propane powered generators. The constant hum of the units on the roof and around the camp blends in like soothing white noise.

  Guard 13 leaves the door open, but steps in front of the opening, turning his back to me. I’m still a little uncomfortable changing with the door open. In the middle of pulling on my pants, my stomach rumbles. I haven’t had breakfast yet. I’m about to tell him this when I see Nick’s door is open and there is no one in his cell.

  “Where’s Nick?” I ask. Guard 13 says nothing. Unlike my previous twelve guards, the white rectangle over his left pocket bears no name.

  Outside, the morning air is cool, a little damp. There is no one around. I shake my arms and throw them around my chest a few times to get the blood flowing. I keep them wrapped around me as I stroll out to the fence. The sun is barely over the tops of the trees. I shield my eyes from the morning rays and that is when I see her.

  Yuki sits on the other side of the far fence. Her brown eyes do that dancing thing. She stands up, wags her tail. Please don’t bark, I think. My eyes sting with tears.

  Something makes her turn her head. Her tail stops wagging, then starts again. A second later, Matt steps out from the thickness of the trees. He ruffles her head, rubs her behind the ears. When he looks up at me, his smile is as bright as the morning sun. He holds up a hand and waves at me. I wave back, and then it hits me. He’s not just waving; he’s showing me his hand, both sides. It’s as if he’s grown a new thumb and forefinger on each.

  I want so much to ask him how it’s happened, but he’s too far away to shout to. Besides, I don’t want anyone to know either of them is there. I’m so relieved to see the two that I lean forward against the fence, wrap my fingers through the diamonds of wire, and press the side of my face against it. The stress of the last few days has worn on me. Matt’s alive. Yuki is here. I feel the tears slip down my cheeks pressing against the fence.

  The fence.

  Nothing happens. There’s no electrical shock. I jump back from the fence all the same, as if 10,000 volts have just raced through my nerves, looking to explode my heart. Matt gives me a startled look. I smile and shake my head, covering my face with my hand for a moment to hide my reddening cheeks. I laugh behind it, shaking my head. When I look up again, Matt is giving me his big, dopey grin. It doesn’t last long. He points at his wrist like he’s telling me it’s time for him to go, even though he wears no watch. I wave goodbye and watch until he and Yuki disappear behind the trees.

  So the mutt made it here after all. I don’t know how. The only thing I can think of is the soldiers patrolling around the Velodrome must have found her in the trees. They would have known I traveled with her from the photos the woman I rescued took of me. I slip my hand into my back pocket and pull out the picture of my sister and niece. The photo is getting creased and I try to smooth it out.

  Before I start my walk back to the detention center, I do what I’ve done every day since I started my walks. I bend down and look for sticks. Not just twigs, but thick, short rods. I put them in my pocket, along with a couple of stones.

  As I pass the scaffolding, Aubrey—Nick—is coming outside. He shields his eyes from the sunlight. He looks pale and little thinner.

  “Nick,” I say.

  He stares at me.

  “It’s me. Robbie.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Sun was in my eyes.” He doesn’t seem like Nick. He seems out of it.

  “You okay?”

  He looks over his shoulder at the guard in the doorway. When he looks back at me, he tries to smile. “Yeah.”

  “Come along, miss,” Guard 13 says.

  Nick and I stare at each other for a moment. “You’d better go,” he says at last.

  I stop at the door and look behind me. Nick leans against one of the legs of the scaffolding. He wraps his arms around himself and dro
ps his head like it’s full of lead.

  “What have they done to him?” I ask the guard.

  “I don’t know what you mean, miss.” Guard 13 does not look at me. He leads me up the metal stairs and puts me in my room. A tray of steaming powdered eggs, dry toast, and a bowl of plums is sitting on the small fold down table across from my bed. The stool has been pulled out of the wall, the round, metal seat that looks like a pie plate has been flipped into place. I’m hungry from my morning exploits and I sit down on the cool metal. I scoop up some of the egg onto the toast, making a sandwich.

  Just before Mystery Guard 13 closes the door, I him see drop a bundle of something into my wastebasket.

  “Hey,” I say. The door closes with that echoing bang of metal.

  I go over to the wastebasket and reach inside. He’s left me four metal rods about as long as an ink pen. One rod has a Y-shaped attachment over the non-grooved end. There is a notch cut into one end on each of the rods. They are held together with what I think is one thick rubber band, but find out are actually several thick bands overlapping one another.

  My appetite is gone. I go to my toilet and reach behind the pipes. I pull out the bundle of crude darts I’ve made with the razor blades and the sticks. Each night, before I go to sleep, I sit over the toilet and I shape the ends of the day’s sticks into sharp points. I’ve done two a day since I got locked up.

  I sit down on my bed with my back to the door. I know I should wait until night to do any work, and it takes every ounce of will power not to lay out my arsenal and begin to build it. I don’t know who Mystery Guard 13 is or why he has offered me these tools. All I can think is that something is going to happen, and I can’t risk it by being impatient.

  I stow my supplies under my pillow. I don’t even know if they check my room when I’m not there. When I am finished eating, I arrange the sticks and stones into a clock on the table. It means nothing, but I point the sticks at the eight o’clock position. I lie down on my bunk and begin counting in my head: 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. When I reach 3,600, I move the hand to the nine o’clock position. I do this until my lunch arrives, and I find that I am only off by about fifteen minutes.