#MurderTrending

by Gretchen McNeil

  “The parks,” Nyles mused softy, “are lovely.”

  “Can we hide out in them?” Dee asked.

  Nyles cocked his head. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Rule six,” Dee recited. “When chased, run outside. I don’t see any cameras in the park.”

  “Oh, really?” He stopped and pointed to the batting cage around home plate. “Do you see that bird?”

  Daylight was rapidly departing, but against the darkening blue sky, Dee could see the black outline of a crow, perched contentedly atop the metal structure, just like the ones she’d seen outside Slycer’s warehouse.

  “I see it,” Dee said. Bird on the island, whoop-de-doo.

  “Watch it as we pass by.”

  Dee kept her eye on the crow as they crossed by the park. It took her a while to realize that its body seemed to follow them. She gasped. “It’s a camera!”

  “Yep,” Nyles said. “Now tell me how many of them you see.”

  Dee’s eyes swept both sides of the street. Ethan, Griselda, and Blair were halfway down the block already, and everywhere Dee looked, she caught sight of a crow camera turning to follow them: on top of streetlights, fences, power lines. Even mounted on the side of a ruined concrete building. That one was pointed right at her. Dee could actually see the red light in the recess of its eye socket, signifying that they were being filmed.

  There were literally cameras everywhere, covering every inch of Alcatraz 2.0.

  She pictured the motionless crows perched on the roofs outside Slycer’s warehouse. Those cameras had definitely been dark. Did The Postman not want the public to see her leaving after she killed Slycer?

  “Just remember,” Nyles said, gazing out over the soccer field, “nothing bad ever happens on Alcatraz two-point-oh without a camera close by.”

  DEE FROZE IN HER tracks. Nothing bad ever happens on Alcatraz without a camera close by? Was he fucking with her? There wasn’t a single square inch of the island that wasn’t covered by one of those crow-shaped monstrosities.

  “Don’t fall behind,” Blair called out from down the street. “Safety in numbers.”

  Dee seriously doubted that. “Sorry.” She hitched up her dress and jogged to rejoin Nyles, who had quickened his pace. She had more questions that needed answering.

  “I thought you said we have a sixtyish-percent chance of surviving outside?”

  “You do,” he said absently. “Because the cameras are farther away, not because they don’t exist.”

  “Oh.” Whatever hope of survival Dee had been able to muster in the last hour slowly drained away.

  Blair fell into step beside her. “Remember, fans don’t spike outdoor kills as much. It’s harder for the cameras to track you, and the zoom isn’t as good. The Postman’s executioners want high-resolution close-ups for their kill videos.”

  “The Postmantics,” Nyles began, trying out his term for The Postman’s fans, “want to see as much of our fear as possible.”

  Blair nodded appreciatively. “Postmantics. I dig.”

  “I’m so glad you approve.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better to stay inside?” Dee pressed. She was desperate for all the survival details she could get. “Find a spot without cameras and just hide?”

  Instead of answering, Nyles continued his conversation with Blair, speaking even louder than before. “And how about this one—Painiacs. For the executioners.”

  Executioners. Though Dee supposed it was factually accurate, every time Nyles or Blair used that term, it pissed her off. She preferred the ridiculous “Painiacs” to a word that legitimized The Postman’s killers in any way.

  “I like it,” Blair said. “I mean, not as much as Postmantics, but it has a great ring to it.”

  Dee sighed, exasperated. They were ignoring her questions.

  As if sensing her mounting frustration, Blair slipped her arm through Dee’s and gave her a friendly squeeze. “Check out the view.”

  Dee had been so fixated on the cameras that she hadn’t noticed they had reached the end of the street. A row of palm trees lined a rock-wall shoreline, and waves lapped at the rocks, occasionally colliding in a spout of briny spray that shot over the barricade. A wooden sign had been hammered into a crevice: NO SWIMMING. DANGEROUS WATER.

  Nyles, Ethan, and Griselda wandered down the path that hugged the beach, but Dee stood at the edge of the rocky break, gazing out over the bay. A cargo ship powered through the channel, so close that she could count the rectangular containers stacked like Lego bricks on its deck, and beyond, the skyline of San Francisco itself glittering in the fading daylight as a thick blanket of fog spread around it from the west.

  The fog came quickly, tumbling across the city like an avalanche racing downhill. Every second that passed seemed to show less and less of the skyline as it was swallowed by the gray clouds. Wetness permeated the air. It clung to Dee’s skin and clothes, chilling her to the bone. The weather changed so quickly, it almost felt as if she’d slipped through a portal into another dimension.

  Except San Francisco was still there beyond the veil. Dee could see glimpses of light through the ever-shifting billows of fog, and was it her imagination or could she hear the sound of distant car horns blaring from rush-hour traffic, the chattering of laughter and conversation as people walked along the pier? It was as if the mist conducted the sounds of the city, carrying them across the water. Millions of people were powering through their daily lives while she was trapped in this hellhole. How many of them might be watching her on The Postman app at that very moment, tracking #CinderellaSurvivor’s first night on Alcatraz 2.0?

  It seemed so close: the ship, the city. Tantalizing. And there was no fence around the island. What prevented someone from trying to swim for it? A stupid NO SWIMMING sign? Dee wasn’t much of an athlete, but maybe if she worked out at the gym a little, she’d get strong enough to try.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Blair’s voice was low.

  “I guess,” Dee lied.

  “Home, sweet home.”

  “You’re from San Francisco?”

  Blair nodded absently. “Born and raised. My whole life is right across the bay: wife, house, cat. It’s weird. When the president first announced that they were turning the old Treasure Island into a televised prison camp, I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ I figured someone would put a stop to it, you know? Congress…Supreme Court.” She sighed. “But no one did.”

  Though it was just a couple of years ago, Dee only vaguely remembered the early politics of Alcatraz 2.0. Her dad and stepmom had just gotten married, and though it had been four years since her abduction, Dee’s dad was still protecting her from potential triggers. The news was never on in their house, so the only knowledge Dee had of The Postman was what she picked up at school.

  “My wife hated the app,” Blair continued, her voice dreamy while she stared at the city across the bay. “But I checked it out at first. Kinda like watching a train wreck: you can’t look away. And the horror seemed fair. When you considered what heinous things those people had done.”

  Those people. I’m one of those people now. “I guess.”

  “When I first got to Alcatraz two-point-oh, I used to imagine that I’d go back home one day. I’d dream that my conviction would be overturned, a new piece of evidence discovered, proving that I didn’t kill the old lady next door.” She glanced at Dee. “I didn’t. I know we all say that, but it’s true.” Blair paused. Was she waiting for Dee to acknowledge her innocence? It felt that way, the charged air between them. But what was Dee supposed to say?

  “I was framed,” Dee blurted out. She hadn’t planned on sharing this info with anyone, but even though she wasn’t sure she trusted Blair or Nyles or any of these people, she felt the need to explain her own innocence.

  “You too, huh? Some shrink testified that I was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed eighty-five-year-old Mrs. Pacini next door had been stealing from us for years. As if.”

  So De
e wasn’t the only one? “The jury bought that?”

  Blair shrugged. “They did what they were told to—”

  Before Blair could finish talking, a siren tore through the air.

  Like Pavlov’s dogs with a whistle, Nyles, Ethan, and Griselda rushed back up the path to the edge of the rock wall and scanned the water. Dee tentatively followed, and it only took her a few seconds to find what they were looking for: in the midst of the choppy early-evening waves of San Francisco Bay, she saw a solitary figure splashing through the surf.

  “Who is it?” Blair asked.

  Griselda shook her head. “Can’t tell.”

  “Shit,” Ethan said, his eyes wide. “That’s Jeremy.”

  Blair sucked in a sharp breath and broke from Dee’s side. “Oh no.”

  Another glimmer of hope sparked to life inside Dee. “He’s trying to escape,” she said, realizing that her fantasy of swimming for freedom might not be so fantastical after all.

  Nyles cupped his hands around his mouth. “Jeremy, you’ll never make it!”

  Ethan joined him. “Come back! It’s not too late!”

  “Why would he come back?” Dee asked, confused. “It might work!”

  Nyles turned to her, his face ashen. “There’s a reason no one tries to escape through the water.”

  Something about his tone made the hair stand up on Dee’s bare arms.

  The wake of the tanker rippled toward Alcatraz 2.0, and every few seconds a deep trough would momentarily obscure Jeremy from sight. Each time, Dee was sure he’d been pulled under, and each time, Jeremy’s head bobbed up again as he swam for freedom.

  Despite the layer of fog, it seemed like the worst possible time of day to attempt an escape—it was still light out, the water was at peak choppiness, and though San Francisco was tantalizingly close, she knew that the trek would be a challenge for even the most experienced open-water swimmer. “Why not try in the middle of the night?”

  “The current is too dangerous at night, so he’s using the tanker as cover,” Nyles said, his eyes darting back and forth between the departing ship and the guy in the water. “He’s been waiting for a chance like this.”

  “Fucking dumbass,” Ethan said. “I warned him not to try and swim for it.”

  Lights flared to life from a monumental concrete structure at the south end of the island. The building appeared to be hewn directly from the rock like some kind of Bond villain’s lair. Concrete crow’s nests peppered the balustrade on the top floor, offering a panoramic view of the island and its surrounding waters while the searchlights panned the waves, searching for the escapee, and Dee realized that this must be the guard station Nyles had mentioned earlier.

  Figures appeared on the balustrade, black-clad and swarming like ants out of their nest, and within moments, dozens of guards lined the railings, weapons in hand pointed down toward the water.

  Shots rang out. Around Jeremy, the water looked electrified as small spouts erupted, the bullets striking with lethal force. But either these were the worst-trained snipers in the history of US law enforcement, or they were intentionally missing their target. Dozens of bullets peppered the water in a wide circle around the swimmer, none coming closer than five or six feet.

  Jeremy seemed undeterred. He continued to swim west, heading straight for the mainland, pumping his arms with all his strength as he fought the rough waves.

  Then the bullets stopped.

  “They’re letting him go?” Dee asked. She’d never seen this on the live feed from her prison cell. Maybe The Postman didn’t want the public to know that his inescapable island prison wasn’t all it was cracked up to be? Maybe there was a chance she’d be able to escape and find Monica’s real killer?

  “Princess,” Griselda said, quashing Dee’s hope with icy dread in her voice, “they’ll never let us go.”

  The whir of a motor sounded from behind, growing louder each second, and Dee turned in time to see two drones racing across the island. They flew straight for Jeremy, then slowed and hovered above him. Cameras. What had Nyles just said? Nothing bad ever happened if there wasn’t a camera close by. Now that the cameras had arrived, would Jeremy’s doom soon follow?

  Jeremy either didn’t hear the drones or chose to ignore them. He seemed to be standing still, his strokes making almost no headway against the current, and as Dee and her companions watched in tense silence, she could have sworn that something red was spreading out across the water.

  “That’s blood!” she cried, pointing. “The guards hit him.”

  Nyles let out a long, slow breath. “It’s blood. But not Jeremy’s.”

  Huh? “Then whose—”

  The rest of the sentence choked off in Dee’s throat as she saw new movement in the water. The blue-gray dorsal fins—a dozen or more—made Dee’s blood run cold.

  Jeremy was surrounded by sharks.

  He noticed them too. He stopped stroking and treaded water, desperately spinning around as he looked for a means of escape. Then his body jerked, and his head and shoulders disappeared beneath the waves. He popped up a split second later, arms thrashing as he gasped for breath. Then he went under again. The sharks were toying with him.

  This time when Jeremy resurfaced, he let out a blood-chilling scream, and even though Dee was pretty sure the sharks couldn’t actually hear him, his cry seemed to spur them into action.

  There was a frenzy of splashing fins, and a churning of water around Jeremy as the sharks fought one another for a piece of his body. The foaming water was tinged with pink.

  And then Jeremy was gone.

  THE SPOTLIGHTS REMAINED ON the area where Jeremy had been pulled under, and the drones continued to hover overhead until the frenzy of dorsal fins died down and the water calmed. The lights switched off, the drones retreated, and the island fell silent as the fog pushed stealthily forward.

  But though the chaos was gone, Dee’s heart still thundered in her chest. “What the hell just happened?”

  “That’s our security system,” Blair said.

  “Why not just shoot him?”

  “That’s not dramatic enough, now, is it?” Nyles said. His breezy manner had returned, and Dee wondered if that was how he dealt with the harshness of Alcatraz 2.0 without completely losing his mind.

  “Jeremy.” Ethan couldn’t peel his eyes away from the water, even though the fog mostly obscured it from view. “Dude, why? I told you there was no way you could outswim those goddamn sharks.”

  “They populate the bay with shortfin makos,” Blair said, turning Dee away from the shoreline, “then shoot gel capsules full of pig’s blood into the water. It’s only a matter of time before they show up for a free lunch.”

  “Conveniently, just long enough for the drones to arrive and get it all on camera,” Nyles added.

  “See?” Griselda said. “No escape.”

  “That’s horrible.” Ratings, spikes, fandoms. A guy had just been eaten alive by sharks, and within moments millions of people would be cheering it on. Dee swore if she ever met The Postman, she’d kick him in the nuts.

  “Come on,” Blair said, dragging Dee back to the asphalt street. “We need to get home.”

  The Barracks of Alcatraz 2.0 looked exactly the same as what Dee had seen from her prison cell. A neighborhood of duplexes clustered around the north end of the island with bland two-story buildings painted alternating versions of blue, beige, and gray, which was their only distinguishing factor. Each had a roofed carport—empty, of course, since there was no way The Postman would give each inmate a weapon, er, vehicle—and concrete walkway leading to the front door. The two sides of the duplex were mirror images of each other, with the same brown tiled roofs, the same overgrown patch of green-beige lawn, the same streetlamps casting a feeble glow across the sidewalk, and the same crow cameras perched above, staring down at them.

  Ethan and Griselda peeled off about five houses down the street. Dee watched as Ethan attempted to follow Griselda into her apartment. She stron
g-armed him.

  “I just wanted to do a sweep to make sure no one’s hiding in there,” he whined.

  “No one’s hiding in my panties,” Griselda said. “I’ll be fine.” Then she slammed the door in his face.

  Dee had to appreciate the way Griselda took no shit. She may have been a raging bitch in every conceivable way, but at least she was consistent.

  “The Postman likes to create drama,” Nyles said. “Housing Ethan and Griselda next to each other is good for ratings, I imagine.”

  “Do people, you know…” Dee stumbled over the words.

  “Hook up?” Blair asked, finishing her thought.

  Dee felt a blush creeping up her cheeks. “Yeah.”

  “Most of what you see on the app is fake,” Blair explained, guiding her up the walkway of one of the duplexes. “I mean, not the murdery parts, but everything else. The shipping, the petty arguments, the drama. Fans get really into creating their own storylines for us.”

  “The app has a dedicated channel for each of the inmates.” Nyles smiled mischievously and lifted an eyebrow. “Which you already know, of course, since you followed it so closely before you got here.”

  He was teasing her, Dee realized, and in order to avoid an explanation of why she’d never really watched the app, she decided to play along. “Of course.”

  “Fans have to pay extra for the live dedicated channels,” Blair explained, “where they can tune in to see what you’re doing at any point in the day, even when you’re not on the main feed. Having a lot of subscribers can maximize your survival time on the island.”

  Dee pictured Griselda, prepping herself for the cameras before she entered I Scream. She was playing to her fans, the ones who paid extra to have access to her 24/7. Would Dee be able to do the same? She cringed, every molecule in her being crying out in resistance. I’m not sure I could do it.