Randy Terri's Arc

Chapter 9 of 11

Randy drove back to Farmers Choice with his hands steady on the wheel and his mind running through what the watcher had left him with. He'd agreed to silence, but that didn't mean he'd agreed to stop looking. The prisoner in sublevel three had told him to run — not stay away, just run. He parked behind the dispensary and locked the truck. The observation booth sat at the far edge of the property, tucked against the irrigation line where he could see anyone approaching the farm. Randy opened the booth's steel door and pulled out the camera he'd stored there weeks ago, the one with the billboard coordinates. He scrolled through the photos until he found the image of Door Four's window — the pale hand pressed against the glass, fingers splayed like they were reaching for something just out of range. He'd taken it the first time he descended into sublevel three, before he knew anyone was alive down there. Before he opened that door. Randy pulled his notebook from the booth's bottom drawer and flipped to a blank page. He wrote down what he remembered from inside the cell: the cot pushed against the far wall, the tin cup on the floor, the rusted container near the door filled with torn envelopes and packaging scraps. Then he stopped. On the prisoner's cot, half-hidden under a folded blanket, had been a photograph. Not the one the watcher showed him on the rooftop. A different one. Randy closed his eyes and pulled the image back: creased edges, faded colors, a street scene with power lines overhead and brick buildings on both sides. A younger man standing in the center wearing a red jacket and a medical mask, looking straight at the camera. The pendant around his neck — Randy's hand moved to his own chest where that same pendant sat under his shirt. He'd been wearing it the day that photo was taken, six years ago in a settlement two hundred miles north. Before he bought the farm. Before anyone here knew his name. Randy copied every detail into the notebook, then photographed each page with the camera. The prisoner hadn't just known who he was. They'd been tracking him long enough to have physical proof from a different life entirely. He locked the notebook in the booth's drawer and pocketed the camera. The watcher wanted silence, but they'd made a mistake showing him that iron gate could be opened from the outside. Randy had time now to figure out who put that photograph in the cell, and why someone down there had been waiting specifically for him to show up.