The Tetradome Run Read online

  He came to believe no one had cleaned out Kyle’s apartment. He believed this not only because the residents hadn’t seen any activity in the unit after the police tape came down, but also because, on the south side of the building, he was able to peer through a window that looked in on somebody’s kitchen.

  He saw a stack of unopened mail and a half-drunk bottle of vodka on the counter. Was this Kyle’s kitchen? He suspected he could get the window open if he tried. Slightly crooked on its tracks, the window didn’t make a perfect seal at the bottom. A gap of air between the bottom of the window and the pane, it started as a millimeter in the middle of the window and grew into a centimeter or more by the right edge.

  Could he lift it open? He’d have to take off the screen. He’d have to…

  …sneak inside. Break an entering. Break the law. Was he ready to do this?

  Thoughts about what he might do and why he might do it became thoughts about missed opportunities from his youth became thoughts about what the hell he was even doing with his life became thoughts about the practicality of this entire scheme. What would he do if he broke into the apartment? If he found the memoir? If he didn’t find it?

  He was still standing in front of the window, thinking about the Journalism Ethics class he took in college, when a voice startled him from his trance.

  “Can I help you find something, Sir?”

  He turned to see an elderly man in a red sweater looking down the pathway between buildings, where Gabe was standing alone, undoubtedly looking suspicious.

  “Oh, no, I was just…”

  A second of silence passed, one that begged to be ended or escalated. The man, looking deadpan at Gabe, was holding a cell phone in his left hand.

  “I was just leaving,” said Gabe.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Dark Thoughts of Sunny’s Letters

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall

  Here’s how a typical letter from Sunny went.

  Open with a paragraph or two of fluff. I remember an early letter from her that began with a rambling bit of chatter about how awful roommates are and how glad she was to live alone.

  After the opening Sunny would transition into some pontificating based on her theories of human behavior. Sunny thought of herself as an evolutionary psychologist. No joke, this was a title she claimed. We might be at a party and she’d want to say something about human nature and would preface her statement with, “I’m an amateur evolutionary psychologist...”

  What does it mean to be an “amateur evolutionary psychologist?” As far as I can tell, it means you have a witty explanation for all aspects of human behavior rooted in your own peculiar understanding of biology and natural selection. Sunny was obsessed with natural selection. Survival of the fittest, the natural order, the cruel logic of nature—these were phrases she used all the time because, for Sunny, in the end it always came down to the cruel logic of nature.

  Why are boys idiots who drive too fast and don’t look before they cross the street? Because nature’s only concerned with keeping them alive long enough to reproduce. Cruel logic of nature.

  Why do good girls like bad boys? Because our reproductive desires developed in the jungle, where the alpha male didn’t allow the offspring of competing betas to survive. Survival of the fittest.

  Why has the social hierarchy from high school carried over into college? Because equality is a social construct that will always lose out to our innate instinct to form groups with leaders and followers. The natural order.

  If you think this sounds like a harsh view of the world, you’re right, but the funny thing is, with Sunny, it was persuasive. Whenever Sunny pontificated I felt like I was learning something of value that was applicable in my life. Things like the importance of portraying confidence, or how to communicate with someone’s “lizard brain,” or how to accept reality in a world that is harsh and unpredictable.

  There is something seductive about a person who has it all figured out. Sunny always came across as someone who had it all figured out.

  I haven’t mentioned yet how her letters were always marked. The purple flower. A four-petaled purple flower called Dame’s Rocket.

  To most people, Dame’s Rocket was a weed, but to Sunny it was a flower so beautiful it deserved cultivation. “It deserves to take over huge tracts of land and squeeze out all the weaker plants in its way,” she told me once.

  Sunny adopted Dame’s Rocket as her symbol, tattooing it on her lower back and drawing a picture of it in purple pen on the face of every letter she gave me.

  Sunny told me her love of Dame’s Rocket began in childhood when she fought with her mother about the fate of flowers that grew on their property in Austin. In Sunny’s story, her mother was a ruthless flower-hater and relentless weed puller. Sunny, the sweet flower-loving daughter, tried to rescue just-pulled Dame’s Rocket plants from the compost heap and replant them in her bedroom.

  I don’t know if any of that was true. What I do know is that Sunny was obsessed with an obscure novel that had a picture of a purple four-petaled flower on its cover. As time has passed, I’ve come to believe that maybe there was no fight over Dame’s Rocket at her mother’s house, that maybe there was no mother’s house at all, that maybe everything Sunny told me about her past was a lie and her entire fascination with the 4-petal flower comes from that book with the flower on its cover.

  The book is titled Spartacus Jones and The Serpent’s Mouth. It’s a dumb, annoying, hateful little book that became a part of the story of Sunny and me. In hindsight, I can see that the first point of contention between Sunny and me was that book. Some time after our letter exchanges started, Sunny gave me a copy of Spartacus Jones, and for weeks after that, she was visibly disappointed every time I told her I hadn’t read it yet.

  I had to force-read the book over winter break, and then pretend I liked it. I wonder what would have happened had I just been honest with Sunny. Had I told her from the beginning that I think that book is one of the suckiest I’ve ever read.

  Maybe being honest would have ended the friendship while that was still possible. Maybe ending the friendship would have saved my life.

  By the final weeks of fall semester, Sunny’s letters to me contained candid comments about masturbation and sex, deeply personal stories from her past (even now I don’t feel comfortable writing about all that she shared with me), and confessions about what she called her “dark thoughts.”

  Sunny’s dark thoughts—confessions about fantasies of murder and rape, or frank descriptions of anger she sometimes felt at the world, or speculative thoughts about how much better the world might be if half the humans died tomorrow—should have sent me running for the hills, or, at a minimum, to the Hillerman counseling office.

  But that’s not how I responded. Sunny’s sharing, (really I should say her over-sharing) drew me closer to her. I’d never had a friend who was so intimate with me about her thoughts. It was intoxicating. When someone trusts you with her darkest secrets, the bond it builds between you…it’s hard to describe. It’s a bond that pushes other friendships into second place.

  It’s a bond that invites you to share your own secrets in return.

  Am I innocent of the crime for which I’ve been convicted? Yes.

  But am I innocent in general? No.

  From early on in our relationship I had plenty of evidence that Sunny was dangerous, maybe even murderous. Again and again I ignored the evidence.

  Ignored until it was too late, and people were dead, and I was in jail, headed for death row.

  CHAPTER 20

  A wide panoramic view from the floor of the Tetradome. Half a million seats surrounding a glimmering tower of glass, the whole of it standing beneath that marvelous ceiling, dizzying in height, the cameras barely able to contain its scope.

  That was the view that began the live pregame before the Semifinal race.

  No sound at first. The producers, always looking for new ways
to translate the grandeur of this arena to the small screen, left a second of reverent silence underneath their expansive view.

  And then, Chad Holiday’s voice, reciting a bastardized version of Euripides.

  A mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape.

  Music, deep tones of contrabass, quiet and intense.

  Two different natures, man and bull, were joined in him.

  The wide view faded out, close-up views of the glass structure taking its place.

  Too hideous for human eyes, the beast hid itself in darkness,

  Where a great rage welled inside him.

  The camera closed in on the maze of steel pathways inside the glass. Tunnels and ramps and stairwells, a gnarled jumble of steel that wound around itself in three dimensions.

  We satiate the beast with sacrifice.

  We pay tribute to its strength. We acknowledge its wrath.

  A view from inside the course, as the contestants would see it when they ran. Swinging axes, harrowing drops that disappeared in darkness, and in the darkness, deep in the darkness, the yellow eyes of a predator.

  Down, down, far below,

  Into the Labyrinth the convicts must go.

  Zooming out, to the base of the tower, where the camera found a man in a black suit, Chad Holiday, standing alone on the arena floor.

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Semifinals course.

  And in two short hours, the starting gun will sound for The Tetradome Run!

  Music. Animation. Credits. Four hundred million televisions across the world tuned in live. Another ninety million watched on phones, tablets, and laptops. The pregame aired in sports bars, in office cubicles, in city squares, in living rooms. People watched from hospital waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, the electronics aisle of the department store…

  Bart Devlin watched the pregame on a monitor that hung from the ceiling of the Control Room.

  Gabe Chancellor watched at a party at Myka’s house.

  Sunny Paderewski watched from her hideout somewhere in the Western United States.

  Jenna Duvall, alas, didn’t watch at all. The thirty-six Semifinalists spent the bulk of the pregame in a holding room, on call to various departments. Wardrobe might want to do touch-ups. Production might want to do one more video “for the archives.” Legal might want to get a few more papers signed before two thirds of the Semifinalists died.

  And so it went that none of contestants saw the footage of Jenna’s return trip to Albuquerque: Jenna at home; Jenna playing clarinet; Jenna at the funeral.

  Jenna at her dead boyfriend’s roadside memorial. That segment was especially engaging. It began with Jenna stepping out of the van onto a barren stretch of highway. It continued with Jenna approaching a flower-covered cross on the side of the road. Jenna touched the cross, tears in her eyes. A close-up on the cross, the name that was hand-engraved on its wooden arms.

  Rudolfo “Rudy” Salazar.

  A long shot of Jenna touching her fingertips to the wood. Fade to black.

  When the show returned from commercial, a new image was superimposed on the bottom left corner of the screen. A clock.

  The Tetradome Run Semifinals Race Begins In 59:28…

  …59:27…

  …59:26…

  In the holding room, Margo was taking the prisoners through a lengthy warm-up. Stretches, calisthenics… “You don’t want to get out there and pull a hammy on your first step,” Margo said. “Gotta stay loose now, people.”

  Jenna was on the floor, touching the toes of her shoes.

  “A little more now,” Margo said. “Really reach for those toes.”

  Nathan Cavanaugh was next to Jenna, doing the same stretch. He had his eyes closed. He breathed deeply. His arms and legs were fully sleeved in tattoos, as was his neck. The only part of him presently visible to Jenna that wasn’t inked was his ears.

  She didn’t know it, but at that moment, she wasn’t the only person looking at Nathan’s tattoos. All around the world, Nathan Cavanaugh’s body art was an object of examination.

  Nathan was the new focus of the pregame. In a pre-recorded video interview, Chad had just asked Nathan about the tattoos.

  “This one was first,” Nathan said, pointing at a green dragon on his forearm. “Got it when I was fourteen.”

  “Fourteen?” said Chad. “Your parents let you get that tattoo at fourteen?”

  “I was a runaway,” said Nathan. “I did whatever I wanted.”

  “What about the others?” said Chad. “What about the tattoos on your face?”

  While Nathan gave a rundown of the major drawings on his skin, the clock in the corner of the screen continued to tick.

  …52:45…

  …52:44…

  It was at 52:29 when Chad shifted the conversation away from tattoos.

  “Nathan, I want to talk about your case. At your hearing, you pled not guilty to the murder of fifty-eight people at the Desert Ridge Hotel.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But when it came time for your trial, you refused to testify on your own behalf.”

  “Fifth Amendment. My right as an American.”

  “A jury of your peers found you guilty and sentenced you to death.”

  “Right again.”

  “Did you do it, Nathan?”

  “Do what?”

  “Did you or did you not place a bomb in the Sagebrush ballroom of the Desert Ridge Hotel?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you aware that bomb would explode during a party with more than two-hundred people present, including families with children?”

  “I knew there would be a crowd of pigs from New Rome PD and their friends from Devlin Security.”

  “Why is it that today, with me, you freely admit you did this, but at your trial-”

  “The trial was for show, Chad. I mean, that’s what we’re all doing here, isn’t it? One big (censor beep)’ing show. Greatest show on earth, right?”

  “There are people out there who think you wanted to be on The Tetradome Run. People think you set out to get onto our show in hopes of dying a martyr for your cause.”

  “And what cause would that be, Chad?”

  …46:12…

  …46:11…

  While America watched Chad and Nathan banter, a team of guards and production assistants came to the holding room and took the prisoners away. They led the prisoners through a tunnel that went underneath the Tetradome, arriving at a steel door where the prisoners had to wait.

  …38:20…

  …38:19…

  The pregame moved to a segment on the families of the victims, including the family of Barbara Lomax, the Senator who was shot dead while she gave a talk on the campus of Hillerman College.

  “…Barbara Lomax was one of America’s greatest champions for justice and redemption…”

  …31:00…

  …30:59…

  They aired humorous commercials for tortilla chips and diet soda.

  …26:38…

  …26:37…

  They aired a video package that named all 36 Semifinalists and their crimes.

  …23:59…

  …23:58…

  They brought out Theo Isner, designer of this year’s Semifinals course.

  “Tell us a little bit about what our contestants will see tonight when they step inside,” Chad said.

  “Well Chad, as you know, tonight’s course is a far cry from what these prisoners faced in the qualifying rounds.”

  Underneath the Tetradome, a guard unlocked the steel door and opened it.

  “Step inside and wait for the starting gun,” the guard said to the prisoners.

  One at a time, they entered a dimly lit, circular room. The walls and the ceiling, which hung low, were made of metal. Jenna felt like she was stepping into a giant sardine can.

  On the pregame, the countdown clock crossed the twenty-minute mark.

  “I’ve seen the layout of the course,” said Chad. “It really is a puz
zler.”

  “Oh yes. A kind of puzzle was our theme this year,” said Theo. “We call this year’s course, Into the Labyrinth.”

  And now a video package about the Semifinal course that gave a brief introduction to the obstacles and the structure. “Prisoners will find themselves in a three-dimensional maze divided into six sections. Each section begins and ends with a brightly colored door that is locked shut and can only be opened by the contestant who has found the corresponding key in the maze.”

  …15:45…

  …15:44…

  “The Labyrinth,” said Chad as the video package ended. “That makes me think of Greek myths, of people being sacrificed to the monster in the maze.”

  “You’re talking about The Minotaur,” said Theo.

  “Will there be a Minotaur in tonight’s course?” said Chad.

  “There might be,” said Theo, a big smile on his face. “You’ll have to watch and see like the rest of us.”

  Another commercial break. When they returned, Chad Holiday asked a gathering of former winners to predict who would make it out.

  The countdown clock was inside five minutes.

  Two people on the panel predicted that Jenna would be one of the twelve allowed to make it out alive. The rest of the panel thought her run ended tonight. Chad thanked them all, then turned to the camera, with one minute left, for some final words.

  “Many years ago, when violent crime was the rule in America rather than the exception, and justice for victims was hard to come by, we couldn’t afford to be forgiving. Before The Redemption Act was the law of the land, families affected by violent crime had to hold onto the anger in their hearts, because in many cases, that was all they had. Today, thankfully, it’s quite different. As we gather with family and friends tonight to celebrate justice, and the peace that justice has brought us, let’s not forget to celebrate redemption as well. Redemption, my friends, is what our show is about. See you in the Tetradome!”

  …00:05…

  …00:04…

  …00:03…

  …00:02…

  …00:01.

  CHAPTER 21