My objective today was to be invisible, so I could avoid confrontations with Mama. I figured maybe if she couldn’t see me, she’d forget about me and go hug somebody else, but that wasn’t the case. When I came into work this morning, she had all of us line up in a single file to kiss her at her desk. OK, what could be grosser than Mama? Mama after she kissed half the men in laundry services. I coughed, sneezed, and even threw up a little bit of my breakfast to try to get out of it.
“I’m sorry Mama, I’m sick, and I don’t want you to catch this bad flu I have,” I said.
“That’s OK, you can kiss me on the cheek,” Mama replied.
It was difficult enough for me to even do that! My body froze for two minutes before I found the energy to inch my lips to her cheek and give her a peck.
She giggled like a little school girl and blushed with her hand covering her mouth. “Oh, Johnny, that was beautiful. Do you want to go out on a date with me tonight after work?”
Was I allowed to say no? “I think I’m just going to cuddle up in my sleeping bag and fall asleep after work. I’m really not feeling well. I think it’s the stomach flu, and I may throw up a few times. Tonight isn’t really the best night for a date.”
“Eating together in the cafeteria would make you feel better,” she responded.
I highly doubted it. She was the last person I would want to watch eat in the cafeteria. She’d probably force me to play footsies with her under the table or hold her hand. I bet she was one of those people who would reach their fork across the table and take my food without asking. I could imagine sitting across from her, watching her scarf down three plates of food in large bites. In my mind, she didn’t close her mouth while she chewed, but even worse, she talked with her mouth full and spit all over me. Going on a dinner date with her would mentally scar me for life…if that hadn’t already happened yet.
“I’ll think about it,” I said before she moved on to the next guy.
During the time I wasn’t collecting or dropping off laundry, I hid behind the dirty uniforms that hung on the rack, quietly rubbing out the stains with stain stick. I went on mostly unnoticed, except for once, when Mama came over to tell me how excited she was for our date. That was the last straw. There was no way I was going out on a date with Mama, in public, where all my friends could see. Sorry, lady, you’re getting stood up!
Normally, I’d feel bad about standing a lady up on a date, but I’m going to make an exception with this one. I had a girlfriend once when I was fourteen. We met up every day for three weeks during lunch and had a conversation through the fence. It wasn’t really a conversation, more like me listening to her bitch about her roommates while I nodded occasionally and agreed with her accusations. I didn’t even know what she was talking about more than half the time. When I did comprehend what she was saying, she was always comparing how she looked to the other girls and complaining how she wasn’t pretty enough. Sure, her face was rounder than the other girls, her hair frizzed easier, and she had a little more junk in the trunk, but I didn’t really care about that. At the end of lunch, she’d kiss me on the lips for free because she liked that I listened to her talk. I never really got to say much, so I didn’t know if she actually liked me. When she was feeling bad about how she looked, I picked the yellow and purple weeds from the ground and gave them to her to show her that she was beautiful just the way she was. That always cheered her up.
By the third week, she had gotten so used to me listening to her talk by the gate that she expected me to do it every day. The one day I didn’t do it, she thought I was standing her up, but I wasn’t because I was literally a short distance away, talking to my friends. I tried to explain this to her, but she broke up with me the next day. Now that I’ve learned how mad girls get when men stand them up, this might signal Mama to back off.
I visited Veronica while I was dropping off the clean rags to the kitchen at the end of the day. She agreed to help us escape, so we planned a group meeting in my room after dinner. I told her to bring me some dinner since I wasn’t going to show up for Mama’s date in the cafeteria.
Later that night Veronica, Laura, Vincent, and I met up in my room. Veronica brought me a plate of chicken parmesan, mixed vegetables, and spaghetti.
“Thanks for the food, Veronica,” I said with my mouth full. “Has anyone seen Collins?”
Everyone seemed clueless about the whereabouts of Collins.
“The fact that none of us know where he is can’t be good,” Vincent said. “I hope he’s not in trouble again.”
“He’s going to ruin it for all of us,” Laura complained.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said. “We’ll discuss the escape, and I’ll tell him the plan later.”
“OK, so I’ll start,” Veronica said as she handed everyone a pen. She folded and then neatly tore a sheet of paper up into six pieces and distributed them. “This extra paper is for Collins,” she said before setting it down on the glass floor.
“Do we need to take notes?” Laura asked.
“I wouldn’t take too many notes and don’t write in complete sentences. If you lose this piece of paper, you don’t want anyone to read it and know what it means. Only write what you can’t remember,” Veronica said.
“Are you sure this is a safe place to talk about this?” Vincent asked. “I see security cameras.”
“This is the safest place,” Veronica responded. “The cameras can’t hear what we’re saying; they only see what we’re doing. Workers meet up to chat all the time, so security won’t find it suspicious. Just keep your voices down because guards might pass by in the hallway. Now, first, before we think about how we’re going to…you know…we need to prepare for how we will survive in the desert. Johnny is reading the book I gave him, which will help us with that.”
“I’m going to read from the book a list of items that we will need at bare minimum, so let me know if you think you have access to these items at work,” I said before I opened the book and began to read.
Veronica volunteered to steal a knife (to cut open cactus in case we ran out of water), matches, food such as instant soup and trail mix, and water jugs from the kitchen. Laura volunteered to steal tweezers (to remove cactus needles), mosquito repellent, sanitation wipes, and a first aid kit from the medical wing. She also said she’d collect wood (to burn for warmth in case we got stranded at night) while she picked mangos. I would collect plastic bags (to carry essentials and collect water from plants and trees). Unclaimed items: water purification tablets, flashlight, spare batteries, compass, map, and a large piece of white sheeting (to protect us from the sun while resting during the day). These items weren’t claimed because we didn’t know where to find them, so Veronica said she’d look into how we could get them.
“Everyone needs to hide the items they collect in their sleeping bags,” I said, “unless they are too big; then we will have to collect them right before we…you know. Also, everyone will need to bring their sleeping bags.”
“OK, so what are we planning to do? Are we just going to walk out the gate with all this stuff?” Laura asked. “I don’t think that will work.”
“We don’t really have a plan yet,” I said. “No matter what our plan ends up being, we will need this stuff because we’re traveling through the desert. If we don’t have it, it won’t matter if we get out of here because we won’t survive out there.”
“I have a plan,” Vincent said. “When we were abducted, they put us in a produce truck. I work in packaging services, where the produce trucks are loaded with boxes of fruit before they ride off into the sunset. I think those trucks are our way out, but I don’t know how we would get in them without being seen. There are security cameras watching the loading area.”
“Can’t we just break them?” Laura asked.
“No, because that would probably sound an alert and cause the guards to secure the packaging area more than usual,” Vincent responded.
“He’s rig
ht,” Veronica said. “We would have to get into the trucks at a time when everyone is distracted or possibly even make a distraction of our own.”
I was peering outside on the sandy village below, when the glass pane suddenly burst into colors. Startled, I fell back onto Veronica’s lap with wide eyes, unsure of what I would see next. Kenneth’s image appeared on the glass, which operated like a television.
“Good evening, Walnut Cherryville citizens. A new episode of Chair Trials will air in five minutes,” Kenneth said through the screen. “Please stop what you’re doing, and return to the glass building to view the show. The guards will begin their perimeter sweep now.”
The motion picture faded and returned to clear glass.
“What was that?” I asked, still frightened by the glass.
“Don’t worry, Johnny; could you get off my leg,” Veronica said. “You gave it pins and needles.”
“Sorry,” I said as I sat up and touched the glass.
“Jonathan Cockit-Gilbertson, how may I help you?” the glass pane asked me in a robotic woman’s voice.
“Whoa,” I said in awe.
“I’m sorry, I do not understand ‘whoa,’” she said.
“This…is…amazing,” Vincent said as he stood up and touched the glass.
“Vincent Henderson-Smith, how may I help you?”
“Do you know what this is, guys?” Vincent said excitedly while Laura and I looked confused. “It’s an interactive, photovoltaic, LCD, frameless design, damage-resistant, weather-resistant, thermally durable, tough, electro-optic, large-pane, display glass!”
“You are correct,” the glass said.
“Why does Walnut Cherryville have this?” Laura asked. “It doesn’t exist yet.”
“If it didn’t exist yet, Laura, then you wouldn’t be looking at it,” Vincent replied.
“This is Walnut Cherryville’s communication system,” Veronica explained. “It’s mostly used to air Chair Trials and send messages to people in the village. If you do use it, be careful what you say because messages are monitored by the government. It also can give you information like the time, daily weather, what’s being served in the cafeteria, you know, stuff like that.”
“Best…device…ever,” Vincent said, still in awe.
“Don’t get too attached, Vincent, you’re going to have to leave her,” Laura said.
The guards stormed the hallways of the glass building, and citizens piled into their rooms for the show. About a minute later, the glass lit up with colors again, and I heard people cheering and applauding on the show and in other neighboring rooms. The screen turned red with yellow writing that said, “Chair Trials will begin in five, four, three, two, one…” Kenneth appeared on the screen again, standing in front of a theatrical red curtain.
“Welcome back to another thrilling episode of Chair Trials. I’m your host, Kenneth Quinton. Behind me are five criminals that have broken the laws of Walnut Cherryville, and tonight you’re going to hear their stories about what they did and why they did it. At the end of the show, you, the viewers in the glass building, get to decide who gets the chair. You will have thirty minutes to place your vote with ComCon at the end of the show. When the thirty minutes are up, we will share the results. Now, let’s begin!” The red curtain opened, and the camera took a wide shot of the contestants tied to chairs before it zoomed in on Hank. “Our first contestant is Hank from maintenance services. He was charged with vandalism of Walnut Cherryville property. Hank, tell us your story.”
“Did I just see…Collins?” I asked.
“I saw him, too,” Vincent said. “He’s on the far right. What is he doing on this show?”
“Looks like he got his second strike,” Veronica said. “This is bad.”
“How bad?” I asked.
“If he gets the most votes…he’ll die in the electric chair.”
Chair Trials lasted for thirty minutes and was by far the most horrifying show I ever saw. Kenneth was a crazy pervert who seemed to get off on watching people suffer. The worst part about it was hearing that the only time citizens of Walnut Cherryville got a choice about something was when they were voting for who died on Chair Trials. So I couldn’t choose where I wanted to work or what I wanted to wear, but I could choose who died on some stupid show where the host over-exaggerated the severity of citizen’s crimes? That was just messed up! Some of those people didn’t even commit real crimes that would be punishable in America. Were we even still in America? I had no idea how a place like this could exist within driving distance of Phoenix. Maybe when they knocked us out with their poison, they put us in a truck, flew us somewhere, and then put us in another truck. What if we were in another country? We needed to find a map pronto.
“I know this may sound bad,” Veronica said. “But we have to vote for someone to divert the votes away from Collins as much as possible.”
“No, it’s not our right to decide who lives and who dies,” Laura argued. “That’s morally wrong and unfair. Every one of those contestants is a person just living their life. How would—”
“Laura, Collins is my best friend,” I interrupted. “Besides Counselor Hank, whom I feel very sorry for, I don’t know anyone else up there. Are you telling me that you purposely won’t divert the vote away from Collins because you feel bad about voting?”
“And you don’t?”
“I feel that it’s wrong, too, but I’d do it to save my best friend. Who would you do it for?” Laura went silent and stopped arguing with me. I think I got my point across. “No one vote for Collins or Hank. We should all vote for the same person.”
“We should vote for Dave,” Veronica said. “He’s the only one up there that actually committed a real crime, and yes, he really rapes people.”
“It’s settled, then,” I said. “We’re all voting for Dave. Veronica, what is ComCon?”
“It’s the Communications Connect system that you guys were playing with earlier,” Veronica replied. Veronica touched the glass.
“Veronica Rodriguez, how may I help you?”
“I would like to vote for tonight’s Chair Trials.”
“Retrieving content now…Content is now available.”
Veronica pressed on Dave’s picture on the touch screen and then selected submit. The rest of us did the same.
“We’re horrible people,” Laura commented.
The thirty minutes I had to wait for the Chair Trials results felt like the longest thirty minutes of my life. Fortunately, diverting the vote worked, and Collins was saved. I was angry he got himself in trouble again but was relieved that he was alive. Dave earned 65 percent of the vote, which made Veronica happy that the rapist wouldn’t be around to rape any more.
The guards unraveled Dave from his plastic chair and strapped him into the electric chair. Laura threw my sleeping bag over her head so she couldn’t see it. They wet a sponge and placed it on Dave’s head before the electric current started pulsing though his body. It was a terrible sight to watch. When it was over, the glass turned clear, and we sat in silence for ten minutes.
“I know what the distraction is now,” Veronica said, breaking the silence. “Chair Trials. Since everyone is forced to watch it, the people watching what’s recorded by the security cameras should be paying less attention. We also need a disguise.”
“I can get you guys guard uniforms from laundry services,” I said.
“Good thinking,” Veronica said. “Dressing up as guards and doing a perimeter sweep of the packaging area would clear the area of any witnesses. Once we lead the workers back to the glass house, we can pick up our stuff, put it in the truck behind the boxes, and hide out there until the truck drives away.”
“Everyone in the truck needs to get rid of their medical button,” Laura said. “It’s got a GPS in it. How do we get rid of the driver’s medical button?”
“The driver should be one of us,” I said. “I can get a driver’s uniform as well.”
“That’s goi
ng to be more difficult,” Vincent said. “Drivers have to get a key from my supervisor before they drive the trucks. If we’re stealing a truck driver’s identity, we have to choose someone who looks similar to one of us. I’ll scope out the truck drivers tomorrow and see if there are any possible matches. If I get a match, then I will tell Johnny to steal that person’s uniform a day or so before we leave.”
“What about the truck driver?” Laura asked. “He’s still going to show up for work. How do we get one of us in the driver’s seat instead of him?”
“Well, that’s easy for you, Laura; you’re a pretty lady, and all the truck drivers are men,” Vincent said.
“Excuse me,” Laura said. “Are you trying to suggest that I seduce him?”
“However you want to do it is up to you,” he responded. “All we need is his scan key and for him to be out of the picture for like a day. Knock him out, tie him to a tree, bury the body, whatever. Just keep him out of the way.”
“I don’t do that anymore,” Laura replied, “Things have changed.”
“You don’t have to seduce anybody,” Veronica said. “Just lead him on, get him to follow you into the forest, then knock him out, and tie him to a tree. Nothing sexual involved. Once he’s knocked out, steal his key and bring it back.”
“OK, I guess I can do that,” Laura hesitantly agreed.
“When Chair Trials ends, our truck driver impersonator will drive us away when the rest of the trucks are ready to leave,” Veronica said.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
Chapter 10: Vincent