South Village (Ash McKenna) by Rob Hart Page B

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.”
     
    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