by Jack Heath
Zara puts one foot on my chest, pinning me to the floor, holding up the razor like a hunter posing with a kill. All the air is crushed out of my lungs. Maybe this house had other guests before me. Fred invites someone, they come, the other housemates relax them, then Zara kills them after a few days. I just lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.
And without me, Thistle dies.
Zara shifts her foot, and pushes her toes into my mouth.
Water floods up my nose and between my lips, choking me. I almost bite down. Only confusion stops me.
Zara wiggles her toes against my tongue, and then shifts her gaze to my hips. Looking for something, and not seeing it.
‘Interesting,’ she says. Then she steps back, wraps a towel around herself and slips away.
I roll sideways and cough up a lungful of warm, soapy water. The air rushes back into my lungs.
Getting up will hurt, so I lie there for a minute, thinking. Zara has been looking for a way to manipulate me since I got here. I should have given her a fake vulnerability, something she thought she could exploit. Now I’m considered a threat.
I guess she noticed my lack of a reaction when she shoved her foot in my mouth. Maybe I can pretend to have a foot fetish and erectile disfunction. Embarrassing, but better than revealing the truth. If she realises I’m a cannibal, that I was trying to eat Samson’s foot, she will also realise I’m not Lux.
Then it won’t be her coming to join me in the shower with a razor. It’ll be Donnie with a baseball bat.
Fred is in the kitchen, making coffee.
‘Morning, Lux,’ he says.
I yawn. ‘Morning.’ The adrenaline crash after getting slashed in the shower, coupled with a sleepless night, is killing me.
‘Coffee?’ Fred asks. He has a cup already.
‘Sure.’
‘Help yourself.’ He steps aside.
I put a cup under the nozzle and try to work out what the next step is. I only drink instant coffee at home.
‘You called the FBI agent a baby killer,’ I say, as I look for some kind of make coffee button.
Fred points. ‘You have to tip the old grounds out and put more in.’
‘Oh. Thanks. I knew that.’ I cough. ‘Paradox. I’m only mentally capable of making coffee after I’ve already had coffee.’
‘Heh.’
I tamp down the grounds, like I’ve seen baristas do. ‘So did she really kill a baby?’
‘Well, a foetus. A few years back.’
Something doesn’t fit here. Fred and his team are environmentalists, vegetarians, campaigners against rape and racism. Hailey, the KKK Queen, is here because she advocated the killing of abortion doctors. Imprisoning a Black woman for terminating a pregnancy seems … off-brand.
Then again, I noticed that the inmates are mostly women or people of colour. While all the Guards are male except for Zara, and white except for Cedric, who they seem to ignore most of the time. Their commitment to equality is just an excuse for violence, although I doubt they realise it.
‘How did you find out?’ I ask. It takes me a second to remember the private investigator’s name. ‘Druznetski?’
Fred chuckles. ‘Right. Druznetski.’ He sips his coffee, then adds some more cream. ‘Medical records. There was a big data breach last year. I bought all the files on the dark web. Hundreds of thousands of patients. Your girl was among them. The company fixed the vulnerability but never notified the patients.’ He shakes his head. ‘Despicable.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Goddamn big business.’
‘Anyway, breaches like that are super useful. A couple of years ago we got fourteen million Texas voter records. Just recently we got the phone numbers and locations of four hundred and nineteen million Facebook users. There was a law enforcement one just before that, with tens of thousands of cases going back a decade. That was very useful.’
‘For finding more victims?’ I say. ‘I mean, inmates?’
Fred smiles. ‘I call them “talent”. But no, the data is mostly for the riot.’
He starts washing his cup in the sink.
TV shows are full of moments like this, when one person says something deliberately vague and someone else asks for clarification. ‘How could you?’ one character will demand angrily, just so the other character can say, ‘How could I do what?’
In real life, people speak to be understood. Fred isn’t waiting for me to ask, ‘What riot?’ He thinks I already know.
‘Oh, right. How is that going?’ I ask instead, trying not to sound alarmed.
‘Yeah, it’s ready to rock,’ Fred says. ‘But I can always use more material—to make it bigger, more effective.’
At the FBI, I hunted kidnappers and crime bosses and serial killers, but never revolutionaries. I don’t know anything about how riots are started or, I now realise, how they are stopped.
‘So what did you and Zara talk about?’ Fred turns to face me. ‘In the shower.’
He’s caught me off guard, and he knows it. His gaze is suddenly less friendly.
He must have seen Zara leaving the bathroom, and then me. Or maybe she told him, when I spurned her ‘advances’. There are several different ways I could play this, none of them good. Too many angles. Not enough information.
‘We talked about boundaries,’ I hear myself say. ‘I don’t know what the rules are here. But I’m not used to people coming into the bathroom while I’m in there.’
Fred takes a step in. Enough that I can sense his physical presence, but not so much that it’s definitely a threat. Zara may not be good at boundaries, but he is.
‘I don’t get angry,’ he says, as Zara promised he would. ‘Not since group. But that doesn’t mean I’m a pushover. Yesterday it was Ivy, today it’s Zara. I like you, Lux—but I don’t like the idea of you getting naked with my girlfriend.’
‘Is your girlfriend clear on that?’
He purses his lips, like a chimpanzee about to throw a punch. ‘Are we going to have a problem?’
‘You and me?’ I say. ‘Never. Bros before hos.’
Fred barks out a laugh, shattering the tension. ‘Cool. Listen, I need a favour.’
Fred has a complicated dance. Friendliness, oblique threats, favours. But I’m starting to learn the steps.
I blow some cool air on my coffee and take a sip. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘When you go with Kyle to the post office today,’ Fred says, ‘can you watch him?’
I realise that I never told Thistle that Kyle might be my son. Maybe I forgot. Or maybe I just didn’t want her to know he existed. I’ll let her arrest me, but I’m not sure I want her to arrest him.
‘To make sure he does it right?’ I ask.
‘No. Well, yes, but I’ve been thinking.’ Fred lowers his voice. ‘You know the hiker?’
I see where this is going. ‘You think he came here to meet somebody.’
‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’
It does, especially after finding the file about Donnie in the fireplace. Maybe the hiker brought the file here and gave it to someone, who read it and burned it. Not Fred, who would have used his paper shredder instead. Not Donnie, who was the subject.
I put the coffee cup down. ‘You think it might be Kyle.’
‘He has been acting weird lately.’ Fred leans over the bench, resting on his knuckles like a general examining a map. ‘Will you let me know if he makes contact with anybody at the post office?’
I need to identify the killer before tonight’s escape attempt. Kyle and the hiker are two of my suspects. If they’re connected …
‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ I say.
CHAPTER 31
What happens at ten o’clock and at again at two o’clock, but simultaneously?
‘How does the driveway sensor work?’ I ask.
Kyle turns the wheel and the van rumbles out onto the dirt road. ‘I don’t know. Infrared?’
‘Is there just the one?’
‘Sensor?’
‘Right.’
‘Just the one, yeah. Tied to a tree a few feet in. Why?’
I think of the second box I saw, camouflaged, a little deeper in the woods. Is it not a motion sensor—or does it not belong to the Guards?
‘Just doesn’t seem very secure,’ I say. ‘What if someone snuck up behind it and turned it off?’
‘Can’t do that,’ Kyle says. ‘It would ping all our phones, same as driving past it.’
‘Oh. But you can turn it off in the editing room, right?’
He frowns. ‘Why do you want to know that?’
‘Good point.’ I force a chuckle. ‘If an intruder broke into the house and turned it off there, we’d have way bigger problems than an unprotected driveway.’
Kyle laughs uncertainly. ‘Sure.’
This time the van turns left when it reaches the highway, away from Houston. I guess we’re going somewhere smaller. Maybe a town where the post office is so desperate for business that the owner will choose not to be suspicious.
I watch the entrance to the dirt road shrinking in the rear-view mirror. Thistle is back there, with Donnie, Zara, Cedric and Fred. They could do anything to her while I’m gone. I’ve bitten all my nails down to the quick, so now I start picking at the scabs on my arms.
Kyle drives both proudly and self-consciously. For the first half of the journey he rests one cocky hand on the wheel, leaving the other drumming his leg in time to the music. Then, when he’s sick of trying to impress me, he reverts to ten o’clock and two o’clock, his driving lessons only just beneath the surface.
I’ve been trying to work out how to get Kyle talking about his background. Was he capable of killing Samson? Could it have been a hate crime? And is it really possible that he’s my son?
It turns out no subterfuge is necessary. Being a teenager, Kyle rambles about himself throughout the journey with minimal prompting.
‘It wasn’t a big deal, dropping out of high school,’ he says. ‘Not like I was learning anything there anyway. I was surrounded by fucking morons. Not just the students, either. I had this one teacher, Mrs Spaniucci? She didn’t even know when the Vietnam War ended.’ This seventeen-year-old shakes his head in despair at what the world is coming to.
‘Was she your history teacher?’ I ask.
‘No. Math.’ Then he catches the implication. ‘But she still should have known.’
When people say the world is full of morons, what they really mean is, I’m smarter than everyone else. I had that attitude once—and I spent years getting outsmarted by people I had underestimated.
Now I’m not sure idiots exist. Or geniuses, either. A brilliant programmer might make a crappy CEO. A great songwriter might be a hopeless husband.
A skilled FBI consultant might be a terrible father.
‘What school did you go to?’ I ask.
‘Ackerly High. Why?’
I want to know if he was born in Houston, where I donated sperm, or if he and his mom spent their whole lives in Ackerly. ‘Just wondering. I had a Mrs Spaniucci at my school, too. But I went to South Houston High.’ None of this is true.
‘Really? Was she a moron?’
‘Not that I could tell. Did you ever live anywhere else? Or your mom?’
He shoots me a suspicious look. ‘Why are you asking about my mom?’
‘Just making conversation.’ I turn back to the window and watch the wasteland flit by. I want to know about the woman with whom I might have fathered a child. But I can tell Kyle will shut down if I ask more questions about her.
‘Anyway, she died,’ Kyle says eventually. He can’t take the silence. Can’t retreat into his phone, since he’s driving. ‘Mrs Spaniucci, I mean. She got shot.’
‘At your school?’
‘No. Ordering food at a drive-through. The American Civil Liberties Union tried to have it classified as a hate crime, but they couldn’t prove the guy who did it had heard her accent. Anyway, it sounded like she was being a total bitch. Holding up the line, you know. Nothing to do with where she came from.’
‘Where did she come from?’
Kyle shrugs. ‘What am I, a geography teacher?’
Two hours later we reach the town. I expected a sign with a name and population size, maybe a corny motto, but there isn’t one. This place is too small even for that. It’s really just five buildings around a crossing. On one corner, a middle-of-nowhere bar with crumbling wooden walls and dark windows. The sort of place that would go out of business if drink-driving laws were even half-assedly enforced. On the opposite corner, a feed store with a tractor parked out front, and a gas station with rust creeping up the sides of the pumps. Lacy curtains in the window indicate that the gas station is also a cafe. The feed store is closed, even though it’s a weekday, heavy shutters over the doors. Next is a general store, with racks of newspapers, potato chip packets and candy bars out the front. I didn’t realise they still made 3 Musketeers, I think, then I realise they probably don’t. These candy bars might have been here since the nineties.
Then there’s the post office. A little concrete box, unlike the wood and aluminium structures around it, as though it was built to withstand hurricanes. Some kind of nationwide standardisation, maybe. A faded sign above has both the UPS and FedEx logos.
Kyle parks fifty yards away. ‘Not so far that it’s suspicious, not so close that the truck will show up on cameras,’ he says.
‘Smart,’ I say, pleased that Kyle has some sense, some critical thinking. There are no morons.
‘Yeah, Fred told me to do it that way,’ Kyle says.
Oh.
We get out into the frosty air. Even the weak winter sunshine feels painfully bright after all that time in the woods. It wasn’t exactly dark in the eco-home, but the downlights only shone on certain parts. The dining table, the kitchen bench and the art on the walls all glowed, leaving the people in the shadows. I remember hearing about a study that showed people behaved less honestly in darkened environments. The Guards want everything exposed except themselves.
Kyle opens the back of the van. He unfolds a trolley, extends the handle on telescopic poles, and starts stacking boxes onto the steel flap at the bottom. He moves quickly and diligently, without asking for help. I’m proud of him for working hard, and then I remember that the work is mailing videos of torture to lunatics.
I pick up a box. Envelopes stuffed with USB sticks jostle inside. ‘Let me give you a hand.’
‘Sure, whatever.’ He steps aside so I can add the box to his stack. He squints into the empty van. ‘Not a huge delivery today. Weird that Fred sent you to help me.’
‘Maybe he’s hoping I’ll learn from you,’ I suggest.
Kyle brightens. ‘Maybe.’
He wheels the trolley along the dirt towards the post office. The dirt becomes sidewalk about ten feet from the door. No graffiti or gum stuck to the concrete. No kids in this ‘town’.
We get to the front door of the post office. There’s a tub of B-grade romance and C-grade crime novels under the window with a sign that says, $2.
‘You want to stay behind?’ Kyle asks. ‘Be the van guard?’
‘Ha. That’s clever.’
He looks blank.
‘Because vanguard means the opposite of “stay behind”,’ I prompt.
He doesn’t seem to understand. ‘Are you coming in, or what?’
‘I’ll come in.’
A bell jingles as Kyle pushes open the door.
There’s a security camera right above our heads, another one behind the counter and a third in the corner of the store. With half of rural America now addicted to opioids, this place probably gets robbed from time to time.
I look at the closest camera and give it a meaningful nod. If any of my former colleagues from the FBI ends up watching, I want them to think I’m here undercover and I’m still on their side. Which I am. Sort of.
The store seems to be forty per cent newsagent, fifty per cent gift shop, ten per cent post office. T
he post office part is right up the back. To get to it, Kyle has to manoeuvre the trolley between two shelves of magazines and past a display of Valentine’s Day chocolates that are either two months early or ten months late.
A dapper little Native American woman is behind the counter. Silver chains dangle from her ears and there’s an opal pin in her inky hair. Her faded name badge says Sue. She looks relieved to see us—we might be her first customers all day. All week, maybe.
‘Hello, James,’ she says to Kyle. ‘How are you today?’
Kyle gives me a smug look. I’m so clever. I have a false identity. ‘I’m spectacular,’ he tells her. ‘How are you?’
‘You know: busy, busy.’ Sue sweeps an ironic glance across the empty store. ‘Those chocolates probably need dusting.’
When salespeople joke with customers, it always seems desperate, pleading, no matter how clever the joke or careful the delivery. The customer has money and the salesperson wants it. Knowing that agenda turns the humour sour.
Then again, I’m rarely the customer. When I am, I’m not considered important enough to joke with. Maybe the jokes seem sad to me because I’m not the audience.
Kyle opens the first box and starts passing padded envelopes over the counter. The woman scans them and dumps them straight in a mailbag. The process is quick. Hopefully too quick for Kyle to notice that one package has a handwritten label.
‘How’s the mouse-trap business?’ Sue asks.
‘We’ve expanded,’ Kyle says. ‘We’re getting rid of pantry moths now.’
‘Ugh, I have those.’
‘Well, now you know who to call.’ Kyle holds up one of the packages. ‘Stick one of these in your pantry, and they’ll be gone within a week.’
‘I might just do that. Who’s your friend?’
‘Timothy Blake, ma’am,’ I say. ‘Nice to meet you.’
Kyle looks impressed that I came up with the name so quickly.
Sue keeps scanning packages. ‘Are you James’s new hire?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Just helping out for the day. I’m his uncle.’
‘Oh!’ Sue looks us both up and down. ‘Yes, I see the resemblance.’