The Gambit (2 page)

I walked out of the office building to see the weather hadn’t changed a bit from this morning. The sky was overcast, painting the world shades of gray. I felt a light drizzle falling. The air was cold and humid. As I breathed in the moisture coated my nose. A soft breeze crept into my button-up and torso, so I zipped up my motorcycle jacket.

“See you later, boss,” I heard from behind me.

When I turned around I saw Alexis ducking into her Volkswagen Beetle with a flirtatious smirk.

“See you,” I responded with an awkward smile before putting on my helmet. I didn’t feed her flirting by returning the action. She was attractive, but I wasn’t going to get involved in interoffice relations. I had already been down that road, and although it was an exhilarating ride, I wasn’t fond of making the same mistake twice. I was quite certain Alexis had a fetish for the boss-and-intern scenario. I could see the lust in her eyes when she looked at me and the fantasies played out in her mind like a porno. The promiscuous intern in skimpy clothing, the boss telling her he needed to see her in his office. The scene played out in my mind was enough to give me a chubby, and get Alexis more worked up than she ought to be. In a month from now, after the election, I’d most likely never see her again. For those reasons, I chose not to pursue her.

There was one
other
reason, though. I was straddling it. I turned the key and hit the ignition switch, holding in the clutch and revving the engine. The shrill, metallic growl of the 998 cubic centimeters beneath me were just brimming with raw power, ready to devour the asphalt in front of it.

My YZF-R1 was my baby—my everything. I had an R6 for years, and then I bought this model in 2012, dumping the majority of my money into it in the years before the Confinement. Some people used drugs for a high, but my drug was the speed, the adrenaline that pumped through my veins when I was tucked into the body of a bike, accelerating faster than anything else on the road.

I let the clutch slip slowly and made my way onto New Jersey Avenue. I took it easy because the street was congested, and I wasn’t on my main route yet. I then turned onto Massachusetts Avenue where I hit the daily rush-hour. Traffic in D.C. was a nightmare. The roads were too narrow for a city of this size. We were on some list for worst traffic in the US. Luckily for me, I wasn’t stuck behind this line of cars. If I was it would have made the fifteen-minute trip into half an hour or longer.

I weaved in and out of the traffic. It was like an intricate dance, a pattern. There was something seductive about being exposed, zipping down the street on two wheels, passing all the people stuck…
confined
in their cars.

When I blinked I saw a flashback—a mother and daughter holding hands. The mother whispered with her voice trembling, “
Thank you
.”

I whipped around a curve, speeding with anger, and purposely over-blinking to phase back into the present. The word
confined
drew me back to that memory. It was a memory from a time I wished I could forget.

Shifting into a higher gear, I slalomed between the traffic with finesse. This was innate for me. My motion was fluid. The high-pitched sounds coming from the engine were soothing, they canceled out all other noise that lingered from work, thoughts, and all the bullshit I fought so hard to keep out. Riding was my solace—the peace in my being.

I cut right hard, my knee just barely scraping the ground as I whipped around the corner onto Wisconsin Avenue. I passed a cop in the opposite lane, and as I glanced in my mirror he didn’t turn around. Smart move on his part, for if he did
attempt
to pull me over I’d be going over 150 miles per hour before he could even U-turn back into my lane. Let’s say I did give the officer the satisfaction of stopping me, I could have almost guaranteed that I would get out of it. I was somewhat of a local celebrity, as was Cole and the majority of the party. Although they still worked under direct legislation from the laws that were already in place, the cops, teachers, and firefighters were all ready for our party to take the White House. Sometimes out in public I recognized a face, someone I recalled having a conversation with. It hurled me back in time to the Confinement. A simple face could be the trigger that catapulted the memories forward. The planning, the ideas…it was where it
all
began.

I crossed the state line into Maryland. I had called Bethesda home since the beginning of 2012, about eight months after I graduated from university. I pulled in behind the Bethesda Theater and opened my garage to park the bike. I took off my helmet and made my way to the entrance of the Whitney. Living in the D.C. metro area, life could be extremely hectic, but when I came back home, I felt like it was
home
.

The automatic doors opened, and I was surrounded by the amber glow from chandeliers that filled the lobby. The soft browns and beiges were always welcoming.

“Owen! How was work?” the concierge Ricardo asked.

“Just another day in paradise, my friend.”

“I’m sure, it should be smooth sailing after the polls came back.”

“I won’t celebrate until the eighth, just to be sure,” I answered, smirking.

“You know you guys have my vote,” he said as I neared the elevator.

“Ah, Ricardo, you’re a good man. Have a good night.”

He grinned from my compliment. “Goodnight.”

The smooth hum from the elevator always was accompanied with a deep exhalation. It was a precursor to privacy—a rare occurrence in the time after the Confinement. Everyone knew my face, which made me feel so connected to the cause, but yet so
exposed
.

I walked down the hallway and opened my apartment door. Mine was the last one on the left, a corner unit. It was only one bedroom, but I chose this one because it had more room than the other models. The crisp whites gave everything a clean look. I left the walls the way they were when I moved in, I didn’t have the time to decorate. I sat down on the couch and turned on the flat-screen.

“…Tonight’s special report, the Union of Concerned Scientists is filing a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with an offer of dropping the charges in exchange for the commission to be willing to re-investigate the nuclear material collected from the scene outside of Wall Street on Black Monday. The commission has made no comment regarding the lawsuit, but their lawyer has given us a quote saying that the commission followed strict protocol in the testing of the nuclear materials recovered…”

Yeah, sure
. I thought.

“…The Union’s report tells a different series of events that followed Black Monday. When the EPA finished their clean-up, the NRC’s final report claimed that the Strontium-90 came from a Russian source with the help of the infamous Viktor Ivankov—American-born Russian who worked at the Port of New York for almost a decade. In his later years, he was one of the lead operators for the X-Ray Radiography machine used to intercept potential anomalies shipped into the US through cargo containers. This report by the NRC poses many questions in the minds of the rest of the country and the world for that matter. Russia has made no comment on their involvement with being the source for the Strontium-90. Nevertheless, the tension between the US and Russia has been at an all-time high. Experts say if anything further were to occur we’d be at war overnight. What the Union is demanding is that the NRC and the federal government answer the hard-hitting questions that remain unanswered to the American public. Why, when questioned, does the Port of New York’s staff all reply with the same answer? That Viktor Ivankov was the mastermind behind this and the case is closed, and when the Chief of Staff for the Port is requested the images of the container which encased the Strontium-90, he says those images are classified. Why is it that the only labs the nuclear material have been tested in are those of the EPA and the federal government? But, the biggest question that has been on the minds of Americans since Black Monday is the whereabouts of Viktor Ivankov. Where was he during the Confinement? Who is helping him elude the feds? To this day he hasn’t been arrested or killed, failing to be found on any of the registries from the Camps. The closest the FBI came to apprehending him was six months ago, when they received a tip stating he had been seen at a convenient store in remote Cashiers, North Carolina—deep in the Nantahala National Forest. Upon the FBI’s arrival and inquisition of employees and patrons of the store, they were informed he had been hiding out in a small cabin nearby. When the agents stormed the residence it was vacant. There wasn’t a trace that anyone had been living there. What they did find, though, would turn out to be the most baffling piece of the case since Ivankov disappeared. It was a note left on a wooden desk, only five words long. It has been shared by millions on social media, revered by conspiracy theorists, and has only spawned more questions in our minds. Here is that note once again…

A chill raced across my skin. I turned off the TV as the sensation swept over me. I’d seen that same image hundreds of times on the news, and I still had the same reaction. The erratic, scribbled handwriting in all caps. Then, the deliberate, heavy-handed strikes through the word
free
. I shuddered once more. To some, his message might have suggested that we would no longer be free if he or the Russians committed more terrorist acts. I, on the other hand, interpreted the message to find a different meaning. That for whatever reason, and for whichever motives—Viktor Ivankov sent his five-word message blaring to the American public.
We
were no longer the land of the
free
…

The sounds of horns resonated through the air, signaling our second meal of the day. A light flurry fell from the sky, and a bitter breeze accompanied it. The lines to get our lunch stretched out for a football field in distance or more—there were three—all of them converged into the main line where we were served the meal.

This was the ‘Nourishment Zone’ I had been assigned to, and I absolutely loathed it. The direction of our lines faced the White House, and it made me nauseated to think our president was less than a quarter of a mile away, enclosed in warmth and luxury. I pondered that if he were out here with all of us, in the frigid mid-Atlantic winter, waiting for a sad excuse of a meal, perhaps he would have hesitated before signing the executive order which initiated the Confinement.

The smell of shit was intermingled with ground beef. If it was anything like the meat we have been served for the past three weeks, then it wasn’t meat at all. This was of a lesser quality than the meat at Taco Bell, or the canned chili that had been sitting out for hours at a family cookout. Maybe it
was
scraped from a can, but it tasted as if it had sat out in the sun for a day or two. There it was again, that awful shit stench—always intermittent. It was from the hundreds of port-a-johns which lined the sidewalks.

Our line was probably one of two dozen or more in our District. The D.C. Confinement Camp was comprised of five districts. I was assigned District 1 during sorting which was surprising to me because Bethesda was closer to District 2 and 3, which were Northwest and Northeast Washington. Districts 4 and 5 were Arlington and Alexandria, and within those five districts housed the nearly six million people of the Washington Metro Area. I wondered if the other cities were in Confinement too, we haven’t been told anything at all. I glanced down at the only information I had. I was wearing it—my identification wristband.

Screw this
…I turned the wristband back around. As my line grew closer to the converging point, I sighed with frustration. I fucking worked for the government and I was still behind these fences. Were these the ‘comprehensive benefits’ the EPA offered? What I would do just to ride my bike, or to sit at a bar and have a drink. Fuck.

From behind me, a bald, burly man walked past. The skin on his arms had turned red from the cold. He was wearing a cut up t-shirt. He looked like the kind of guy who might ride a Harley, and judging by his size he enjoyed a diet of steak and potatoes. The scent of cigarette smoke filled my nose. He must have smuggled some in when he was sorted, or the guards had sold him some. A couple feet in front of me, where the line began to converge, he cut in front of a woman and her young daughter. My eyebrows furrowed at the sight.

I looked to my left, and then my right. The armed guards lined the rows of port-a-johns, waiting for the smallest disruption in behavior. If I brought attention to myself who knows what could happen.

I saw the woman gently reach for the man’s shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir. You just cut in front of me and my daughter.”

He didn’t even react, like he hadn’t heard her. The soft-spoken woman then moved to his side, and that was when I saw she was also pregnant.

What kind of asshole passes a pregnant mother?

“Sir,” her voice now a little firmer. “You jumped in front of me.”

“No shit, lady. Now let it go and keep to yourself.”

Her expression turned harsh instantly. That was when I left my place in line and began approaching them.

“Keep to myself? We all have to wait for our food, so you have to too—just like everybody else. Go to the back of the line!”

He turned around with a smirk, like this was all some joke.

“Well, you don’t look like you’re in any condition to
make me
,” he said, glancing down at her stomach. He drew in his cigarette and exaggerated the exhale as he blew the smoke at the mother’s face. She started coughing. Anger surged through me.

“But I am, asshole.”

He laughed when he saw me and puffed up his chest to flaunt his size. In the corner of my eye, I saw the daughter pulling at her mother’s wrist. “Mommy,” she whimpered.

“What the hell are you gonna do about it?”

I punched him square in the face with all my strength and he staggered and fell onto one leg. The line around us opened up as people turned to watch. I lunged at him on the ground and began wailing punches, trying my best not to allow him to retaliate. His nose and lip were bleeding, then with his fist he deflected one of my punches and nailed me in the chin. I fell backward and he punched me once more—knocking my head back onto the grass. He slammed my left arm against the grass and suddenly with his right hand I saw him grab his cigarette, and he smashed it against the inside of my forearm.

“Ahhh!” I groaned from the singeing pain.

With the adrenaline, I used my free hand to clip him in his temple, knocking him sideways. In a quick turn, I kneed him in his groin, and then I was free. I kicked him once in the teeth and a couple more times in the stomach.

I breathed heavily as I ceased fighting, and suddenly I heard a noise. I clutched my side in agony as the rubber bullet hit my ribs, then another on my hip.

“Disturbance!” the guards shouted as they closed in on me. The alarms began to sound. If my fight led to a riot or upheaval, the bullets would no longer be rubber.

The guards tackled me to the ground, and then violently pulled me up. Half of which were surrounding the man on the ground doing the same to him. They held my arms firmly and dragged me away. I craned my neck backward to find the mother and daughter. They stood facing me, holding hands as the snow swirled delicately around them. There were tears in the mother’s eyes, and the daughter waved goodbye.

“Thank you…” Her voice trembled. “
Thank you
…”