South Village (Ash McKenna) (12 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.”

O
ne 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?”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look up. Channeling his frustration into the work. Okay then. I step outside and pass Aesop, who’s standing on the porch, hands on his hips, staring off into the distance. His eyes glassy and vacant.

“I’m going to make sure my bunk is in order. Then we’ll start?”

He doesn’t respond. He’s staring at a point beyond the trees, at where the world blurs together.

“Aesop?”

He looks at me. “What?”

“Meet at the kitchen in a bit?”

He nods.

I walk to the tree line, climb onto the wooden boardwalk, head toward the bus, pass over a plank that says:
My blood type is Be Positive
.

Fucking hippies.

T
he inside of the bus doesn’t look like it was touched. It’s easy enough to pass over, maybe even to miss entirely.

I sit down on my cot, put my head in my hands. Take a minute. Breathe deep. Now that I’ve stopped moving the wave has time to catch up. Before it can hit me I open up my flask and drain it. That helps a little.

The downside of that is I am now whiskey-less, and this is a big problem for me. I’ve got some stashed at the kitchen and that’ll help me get through tonight, but that means I need to make a trip off-campus tomorrow. Which means I need to talk someone into giving me a ride.

There are a lot of things I need to do. Like figure out what a book cipher is. I get the gist. It’s a code you crack with a book. It’s the finer details I’m not too sure about.

Normally I’d sit on the computer for a little while, but after dinner the computer is off limits—with the power rationing, the lights get priority. Computer sucks up too much juice. And anyway, that bug or whatever the feds planted could have been a decoy. Something they knew we’d find, lull us into a false sense of security, but really there’s some programming on the computer that’s tracking how it’s used. It makes me nervous about my instant-message conversation with Bombay, too. Whether they were able to find it after the fact.

I take a knee next to my duffel and dig out my phone, very thankful that I took a picture of the cipher. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it. Just felt like a good idea at the time.

The phone won’t turn on. Battery is probably dead. I shove it along with my charger into my pocket, and figure on skimming a little power out of the main dome. Won’t need much.

As I push through the door to leave I ask myself, “What are you doing?”

The way the words spring from my mouth, unexpected but fully formed, leaves me standing there for a minute, confused. Holding the door. Wondering whether I should answer. Ultimately, I decide not to.

A
fter I plug in my phone, we get to work. We give Zorg the night off from cooking. Aesop and I have to move quick to get dinner ready and we don’t want to eat as late as we did last night. Training someone is going to slow us down.

The time margin is slim so we settle on a big garden salad with oil and vinegar—about as simple as you can get—and a macaroni salad with a tofu dressing. Simple, good, and easily assembled from the flotsam floating around in the chest fridge. We’ve got some fresh loaves of bread, too, which we can pair with cashew butter and sea salt. Boom. Dinner. I hope nobody was expecting warm food. Or is counting their carbs.

I load some silken tofu and dill and agave and vinegar and salt into the blender, and turn to check on Aesop. He’s got his hands on the counter, staring out the window. I turn the blender on and the mechanical roar of it fills the kitchen. Aesop leaps, nearly off his feet. He turns, wild-eyed, looking around like he’s trying assess a threat. His eyes settle on me and he closes them.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Fine.” He opens his eyes, goes back to work.

“You’re lying.”

“You’re talkative all of a sudden?”

The way he says it is acidic. Not usually his style. I’m about to say something in return when Tibo sticks his head through the door.

“I’d like to get started,” he says.

I dump the dressing into the big bowl of cooked macaroni, give it a couple of turns, and wrap some plastic over it. Aesop exits and I take that as an opportunity to grab my stash bottle of whiskey and take a little swig. I’d have preferred a big swig but it’s running down. I exit the kitchen in the cooling night air, and everyone is nervously standing around the campfire, which is catching and coming to life.

Aesop walks toward the fire as the group slowly forms into a circle, people reaching out their hands, clasping the hands of their neighbors. I step off to the side, to my usual spot on the picnic table, propping my feet on the bench, and begin my futile attempt to swat away the no-see-ums.

Once everyone is assembled, Tibo nods and bows his head. When he raises it, it seems like he still hasn’t found the words he’s looking for. He opens his mouth and Katie clears her throat.

Tibo rolls his eyes. “Trigger warnings… I don’t know. We’re going to talk about what happened here at camp today. So, I guess, totalitarianism. Overzealous government outreach?” He pauses. “What happened here at camp today. I don’t know what happened. None of us do. There’s a lot to process. And I fear we’re losing our grip on what this place is, and what makes it special. So instead of going off the rails here, I’d like to propose a return to normalcy. So, if everyone could share what they’re thankful for, I think that would be a great start.”

“Are you fucking kidding?” Marx asks.

Here we go.

“The government stormed in here, took us prisoner, questioned us, and then left us in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “No warrant, no nothing. And your response to that is to shrug your shoulders and propose we pretend it didn’t happen.”

“I never said that we should…”

Marx lets go of the people on either side of him and steps forward into the circle. “That’s exactly what you’re proposing. What kind of normalcy can we return to? This is all very much not normal.”

Some people in the circle nod in agreement. I can understand why. He’s not exactly wrong. I expected Tibo’s response would be a little more direct, a little less dismissive.

Tibo steps forward. The two of them are standing on either side of the fire, the flames raging between them, painting them both in red and orange. Tibo looks agitated and he never looks agitated. He usually looks down and away from Marx but now he’s looking him square in the eye. Most of the circle takes a step or two back, hands unclasping and falling to sides. I don’t like the direction this is going so I get off the picnic table, move a little closer.

Marx breaks eye contact with Tibo and walks around the fire.

Not threatening. Orating.

“Those men who came here today had no right,” Marx says, pointing into the distance. “Their search and confinement of us was illegal. I wish I could tell you that we do not live in a fascist state. That this isn’t Nazi Germany. It’s not Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. But the truth is, we do live in a fascist state. This is the new face of America. This isn’t a democratic nation. It’s an oligarchy. And it’s our own fault. Every single one of us here today. We let it happen. When we surrender, we condone it.”

As he speaks, he stops in front of people, scanning their faces. Gauging their reactions? Smiling at some folks, passing by others.