South Village (Ash McKenna) (11 page)

I
don’t know how long we’ve been driving when we stop. There’s silence all around, and then the door opens, sunlight blasting into the back, burning my already-stinging eyes.

Men in commando gear haul us out, stand us in a row. Tibo to my left, Magda to my right. Magda is whimpering from the pain, which makes me want to do bad things to these assholes, even though a lot of them are carrying heavy artillery. Lucky for them my hands are tied together.

Though, probably more lucky for me.

Gravel crunches underfoot. A man walks in front of us, comes to a stop, looking us all up and down. Black guy, built like a fighter jet. Six feet four, arms the size of my thigh. Probably the guy who visited Ford, which makes these guys FBI, though I didn’t know this was how the FBI liked to operate.

His eyes are tired and his face is covered with stubble, like he hasn’t seen a bed or a mirror in days. He takes an unmarked plastic bottle out of his pocket and walks down the line, pouring it on our faces each in turn, everyone making little sounds of relief. When he gets to me, I tense up. He grabs my chin, pushes my head up, and pours the liquid in my eyes. It’s cold and the burning subsides.

Once he’s doused everyone he says, “Inside.”

I look around. We’re in a parking lot. It hasn’t been used in a long time. Big heavy cracks, weeds sticking out at odd angles, the paint marking the spaces worn and faded. It’s an industrial complex of some kind. Flat elevation, surrounded by buildings, concrete and metal weeping long, deep rust stains. There are fields beyond them, and then the horizon.

“C’mon, get,” the man in charge says.

The prettyboy agent from inside the van puts a hand up, signaling us to follow him. He leads us across the parking lot to a long, one-story building. We step through the door and inside it smells like mildew and animals. The hallway is littered with papers, the fixtures broken, things ripped out of the walls. There’s a long line of doors, many of them propped open. A female agent with tight blonde hair pulled back into a harsh ponytail gets in front of me and herds me toward a door.

“In there,” she says.

I step inside and there’s a card table with chairs on either side. She pushes me against the wall, pats me down. Pulls out the belongings that I have on me, which is only the flask and—much to my dismay—the piece of paper with the code on it.

“No wallet, no phone?” she asks.

“Didn’t know I’d need it.”

She sits me down in the chair, pulls out a small knife with a thin black blade, and cuts the zip ties. I pull my wrists forward and massage the deep red grooves they left behind.

“Get comfortable,” she says, placing down the flask but taking the paper, slamming the door after her.

The room is quiet, the heavy walls cutting off sound from the outside.

So, this sucks.

No badges, no nametags. No plate on the back of the van where they herded us in. If this really is FBI, then whatever they’ve got planned, they don’t want us to know too many identifying details.

That is not comforting.

I take stock of the room. It’s small, barely bigger than the card table and the chairs. Other than that, completely empty. It doesn’t even seem big enough to have been an office. Maybe a storage room. The walls are intact but most of the acoustic ceiling tiles are missing, only a few still in place, showing big gaps and wires up in the ceiling. The floor has staples and wood in the corners, so there probably used to be carpet.

There’s not much to do right now but wait, so I take a long gulp of whiskey and push my chair back a little until I can rest my head against the wall. Focus on my breathing. It’s not long before my head is dipping forward, waking me up every time it does.

The door opens. The giant black guy comes in and pulls the chair out, sits down. He takes the flask, sniffs it, makes a judgmental face, screws the cap back on. The corner of his mouth curls up into a smile.

“Name?” he asks, placing the paper with the numbers down, facing me.

Now, there are two ways to play this. I could answer quickly and honestly and hope it gets me out of here. Or I could make things worse. My face still hurts. This whole shock-and-awe thing doesn’t sit too well for me. And making things worse is kind of my thing.

“Ask your mom,” I tell him. “She was screaming it all last night.”

I expect his face to twist into anger or frustration. Instead I get bored indifference. “You think you’re funny.”

“I am pretty funny, yeah.”

He gets up, the chair scratching across the floor. He comes up to me and wraps his hand around my neck, slowly presses me against the wall until my chin tilts down over his wrist. I reach up with my free hand, try to peel his hand off, but they’re like a vise. I consider gouging an eye or hitting him in the throat but I have a feeling that would not end well for me.

He squeezes. Drawing this whole thing out, to show me that what he’s doing, it’s not out of anger. It’s because he can. Oxygen stops flowing to my lungs. It takes a second before that turns into an issue. He puts his mouth up next to my ear and I can feel his hot breath exploding on my skin.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” he says. “You’re going to answer me, concisely and honestly. You will not lie to me. You feel me?”

I try to speak but can’t, my lungs screaming.

“No one knows you’re here, and you wouldn’t be found for a very long time. I ask again, do you feel me?”

I nod my head and he lets go. I lean forward, take deep, greedy breaths of air. He returns to his chair and calmly sits, like none of that choking business happened.

“Now… name?”

I tell him the first name that comes to mind. “Dana. Dana Cameron.”

He raises an eyebrow. “A bit on the feminine side.”

Fuck, even my alias is a girl’s name.

“I’m the modern day boy named Sue,” I tell him, glad my favorite comeback still applies. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t laugh, doesn’t seem to get the Johnny Cash reference. So it’s a sure bet he can’t be trusted.

He presses a thick finger to the paper. “Tell me about this.”

“It’s a scrap of paper.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Dude, it’s a scrap of paper,” I tell him, trying my best to sound sincere. “I found it on the ground and I shoved it in my pocket so that I could throw it away. Before I could pass a trash can you and your Stormtroopers came in and yanked us out.”

“You think I don’t know a book cipher when I see one?”

That’s interesting.

“I do not know what a book cipher is,” I tell him, truthfully.

“What’s the key?”

“I told you, I don’t know what that is.”

“Tell me about the Soldiers of Gaia.”

“I also do not know what that is. Are they a band? They sound like a band.”

He stares at me for a second, his eyes gliding over my face. He taps the paper. “You’re telling me you don’t know what the key is.”

“I’m telling you I don’t know why you’re so hot on a piece of trash I found on the ground. As a representative of the federal government, shouldn’t you be glad my first instinct was to ensure it was properly recycled? You are FBI, right?”

He looks up at the ceiling. “You remind me of someone I went to school with.”

He says this like we’re suddenly friends catching up over drinks. I don’t even know how to respond to that, so I wait, to see where the fuck he’s going with it.

“Guy was from New York, too,” he says. “We called him Yorkie. He hated it. But we kept on doing it anyway. Do you know why we did that?”

“Because you’re such a friendly guy?”

“Because he thought he was a hard motherfucker because he grew up in a town with a rep,” the guy says. “But the truth is this motherfucker grew up on the Upper West Side and went to a private school. He would play like a Rottweiler but really he was this yipping little bullshit dog, no bigger than a cat. You get what I mean?”

“I stopped listening.”

“It means I know you think you’re a hard motherfucker. In this room, you are not. I can tell you’ve never heard of the Soldiers of Gaia. That I will give you. I also know you’re not telling the whole truth about this paper, but that you also don’t know it’s a cipher. Do you know how I know that?”

“Are you a wizard?”

He smiles. “I saw it on your face. Faces give away crazy shit. Micro expressions. The way the skin moves around the mouth and the nose and the eyes. Tell you everything you need to know about a person from those little ticks. Figure out how micro expressions work and you’re like a human lie detector.”

I am suddenly very conscious of my face. My skin feels hot. I wonder what it’s saying to him. I try to keep my skin soft and serene but he probably notices the effort. “Why not tell me what all this blabbering is about?”

He points at the wall. “There are people out there, right now, planning some bad shit. If there’s anything you can tell me, anything you can share, anything you can say about activities at your funny little camp, I can make sure of two things. One, nothing touches you. Two, I don’t spend the rest of my life trying to ruin yours. I need you to be honest with me, because I’ll be able to tell if you’re not. You feel me?”

“You want honesty?” I ask. “Here’s some honesty. I don’t give a fuck about any of these goofballs. I’m here for another two weeks, then I’m off to Europe. I have nothing here. No friends, no ties. Most of these people don’t even like me and I’m not losing sleep over it. That place can burn the moment I fucking leave. As long as it’s not a moment before, I couldn’t be bothered. So, tell me, am I being honest about that?”

I feel a little guilty saying it. My feelings about South Village aside, I am loyal to Tibo, and don’t want him or his dream to suffer. But we’re all better off if this guy doesn’t think he can use it as a way to threaten me.

He stares at me long and hard. After a few moments he gets up, pushes the chair in, picks up the paper, and walks out. The door closes behind him. I sit there for a little while, listening, waiting for him to come back.

Soldiers of Gaia.

What the fuck is that?

I don’t know how long passes. Fifteen minutes, maybe? That’s as long as it takes for me to get bold. I poke my head into the hallway and see Tibo looking out of one doorway, Marx out of another. Marx has a big black eye blooming on his face, which leaves me very conflicted, because I don’t know who to root for in that fight.

We all share a quick look of confusion and I run to the door where they led us in, to find the van peeling out of the parking lot.

I turn and Tibo is standing beside me.

“That was unexpected,” he says.

W
e assemble in the parking lot, where we all verify that me and Marx were the only people who were physically assaulted. Which tracks, because we’re the two mostly likely to say something dumb. Everyone got quizzed about the Soldiers of Gaia. Nobody knows why. Or at least, pretends to not know why. No one brings up the book cipher, but Marx keeps glancing at me. There’s something about that.

A few people had the wherewithal to demand a name or a badge number, but none of the agents would give anything up. All we know is what the big motherfucker told Tibo: To call him Tim. No last name.

So, Tim is an asshole. The next time I see him I’m probably going to take a swing at him. He may be a mountain of muscle, but stuff like that has never stopped me before. At very least I’ll make him hurt a little before he pummels me into dust.

Marx and Job are whispering to each other, both of them agitated. Magda is weeping and Cannabelle wraps her arms around the older woman, holds her tight. Katashi looks terribly confused and Aesop pats him on the shoulder, nods, tries to comfort him.

Tibo is the only one with a working cell phone, but it’s not getting any reception, so he walks off to look for some. He doesn’t invite me but I follow after. I have no sense of how far we are from South Village, or how we’re even going to get back.

Once we’re out of earshot I ask him, “Any idea what the fuck is happening?”

He turns, surprised to see me. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Have you heard of the Soldiers of Gaia?”

“I told Tim I didn’t.” He looks at his cell and frowns. “That’s not exactly true. You found that Earth Liberation Front manual in Crusty Pete’s tree house. You do know what they are, correct?”

“Eco-terrorists. They burn down Humvee dealerships and construction sites, stuff like that.”

“I’ve only heard rumors. But supposedly the Soldiers of Gaia is an offshoot. They think burning stuff down isn’t extreme enough. They want to take things to the ‘next level’, whatever the hell that means.”

“Do you think any of that is going on at South Village?”

Tibo pauses. “If anyone was involved I’d think it was Marx. It seems to be up his alley. But even that feels like a little much. I can’t know everything, but I’d like to think I’d notice some kind of radical terrorist organization was taking root.”

We turn onto a long stretch of road, flat and blue sky stretching out and away from us. There’s nothing to go by. We pick a direction and walk, Tibo checking the face of his cell and sighing.

“Weird this is hitting around the same time as Pete dying,” I tell him.

“Yes.”

“What do we do about it? This whole thing doesn’t strike me as exactly legal.”

“It’s not. That’s what you call a black site interrogation.”

“Black site?”

Tibo stops, puts his hands on his hips. “It’s when the authorities want to question people but don’t want to do it through the proper channels. And lest you think I should be fitted for a tin-foil hat, there’s precedent. Just recently, out in Chicago, narco cops were holding people at an old department store. They called it a narcotics headquarters, but the reality is, it was a black site. No lawyers, no phone calls, and advanced interrogation. Which is the nice way of saying light torture. Look it up.” His voice rises and his face twists. “Should be a huge scandal. No one gives a shit because it was brothers and sisters on the receiving end.”

“So where does this leave us?”

Tibo looks up in the sky. “We could find the FBI in the yellow pages. Tell whoever answers that we think a bunch of people who may or may not be FBI pulled us out to an abandoned factory site so they could curb-stomp our civil liberties. When they ask for names and badge numbers we can tell them we have no idea. What do you think of that plan?”