South Village Read online

  “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.

  We 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?”

  “That’s a shit plan.”

  “Exactly. Meanwhile, Tim made it pretty clear that if he gets even a whiff that there’s something going down at South Village, he’ll have it destroyed. He told me by the time he was done there’d be nothing but empty forest.”

  We keep walking. A pickup truck crests the horizon and barrels down the road in our direction. Me and Tibo put our hands into the air, try to get the truck to stop. It doesn’t, flying past us so quick we can’t even make out who’s driving.

  As I’m holding both my middle fingers up into the air, hoping with all my heart the driver sees them in his rear-view mirror, Tibo calls out from behind me: “Got a signal.”

  He pokes at the screen and says, “Okay, we’re about fifteen miles from camp.” He dials a number, holds the phone to his ear.

  “Who… Gideon? Okay listen… no, listen… no, listen… Gideon, stop talking. I’m going to send you a location. There’s eight of us out here. You either need to bring the van or… Gideon, shut up. Either bring the van or two cars. Get here as soon as possible. Is everyone else there okay? … Gideon, answer the question. Okay, thank you.”

  Tibo taps the screen and jams the phone in his pocket.

  “Anything from the home front?” I ask.

  “Agents tore the place up. Swore they had a warrant but wouldn’t show it to anyone. Same deal. No badges, no names.”

  “Great. Fucking great.”

  We turn back for the warehouse. I stop and stand there for a second, watch him. Wanting to ask him about Crusty Pete and the deed for the land, because all of this is coming together in an awkward way. He stops and turns and asks, “Coming?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  The ride back is nearly as silent as the ride over. Gideon, driving the camp’s battered white van, is asking a lot of questions, but I tune him out, so it doesn’t count.

  Everyone is shaken. Scared. Or in the case of Marx, seething.

  I don’t know what I am.

  Mostly I want to go back to the bus and gather my stuff and get out of here. I have no idea where I’ll go. I could rent a motel room, wait out the time it’s going to take to get my passport, then head out like planned. But my funds are dwindling. I’ve got the money I scored in Portland, but I’m going to need to rent an apartment or something when I get to Prague. South Village doesn’t exactly pay much. Mostly it’s room and board, with fifty bucks a week on top of that. Easy enough to live when your housing and food are covered. Not so great for building up a bank account. I’d rather avoid spending the money.

  But I’d also rather avoid getting involved in whatever stupid thing is happening here. At least they don’t have my real name. Mister “I’m a human lie detector” isn’t really as good as he thinks.

  The cool air is blasting but sweat breaks out on my brow. My skin feels itchy. I’m worried it’s a signifier of something serious, when I realize it’s probably that I haven’t had a drink in a little while. I unscrew my flask and take a long pull. Cannabelle, sitting next to me all the way in the back, gives me a sideways glance. I hold the flask toward her. She shakes her head.

  Aesop twists around in his seat. His eyes are red, the skin around them a little puffy. “We should get dinner started right away. You good?”

  “I’m good.”

  He nods. Turns back around.

  I drink a little more whiskey, get a little more good.

  As we pull off the road and into camp, Marx speaks. It’s surprising to me it took him so long to speak. I would have expected him to rant the entire ride over. What he says fills the van with a foreboding sense of dread, both for the brevity and because the words are like burning coals.

 
“I hope you all understand, this was an act of war.”

  One of the two wooden posts marking the entrance to South Village is toppled to the ground, the Tibetan prayer flags strung across them trampled into the dirt.

  According to Gideon there were two teams. The first team took us away for questioning. The second stayed behind to search. They focused on the main buildings but also spread out into camp and checked into whatever tree houses they came across. They didn’t search the entire property—at 40 acres of woods and swamp, that would take weeks and a few dozen more men. But they covered as much ground as they could and disappeared without saying a word. They didn’t hurt anyone here, at least.

  As soon as the van stops, Tibo flings the door open and sprints to the Hub. I follow. The office space is trashed. The filing cabinets emptied out, papers strewn on the floor. The chair is thrown to the side. It’s hard to tell if anything was taken. I reach into the back of the filing cabinet closest to the desk and find the copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang I stashed there. That much feels like a victory. I slide it into my back pocket.

  The computer is still here, sitting on the desk, wheezing away. That’s a little surprising. Seems a sure bet they would have taken that. There are tracks in the dust around it, like it’s been moved. I turn it around and there’s a black plastic nub stuck into a USB port. It’s nearly flush and I have to use my fingernail to pry it out. I show it to Tibo.

  “I imagine this isn’t supposed to be here,” I tell him.

  Gideon is suddenly standing behind us. “What is that?”

  “Keylogger or something,” Tibo says, taking the nub from me.

  “We should hold on to that,” Gideon says.

  Tibo places the nub on the desk, picks up a stapler, and whacks it. It cracks and shoots off the desk, clattering into some hidden corner on the floor.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Gideon asks.

  “It’s of no use to us,” he says. “And on the off chance it’s transmitting off site, I want them to know we found it.”

  Tibo stands there for a second, surveying the damage, and picks papers off the floor, placing them in a neat stack on the desk next to the computer. Gideon shakes his head and leaves. I ask Tibo, “Need a hand cleaning?”