Day One
At the Camp America for Repatriated Adults none of the clocks actually work. All the detained are required to turn in their cellphones, laptops, Smart Watches and the like. The many clocks in the guest quarters, conference rooms, and rec centers all show different times. It keeps people guessing. “We don’t want you to become complacent,” says Helga, the first-day emcee and introducer-in-chief. She looks like an ex-alcoholic schoolmarm/Karen complete with frizzy beige hair and worry lines. “We don’t want you to know things. Or to act like you do. What time is it?” She makes a show of peering at her thin spotted wrist. Comical curious face. “I don’t know! I’m just living. In the moment. Like right now.” She spreads her arms wide as if to embrace us all in a loving one-ness, her gray shaven underarms visible for a moment, her spidery hands uplifted, the turquoise bracelets on her arm sliding back. “Doesn’t this feel good? Transcendent, maybe?”
Camp A seems part small-town jail, part rehab center, part detention camp. It looks like a repurposed Camp Crystal Lake from the horror classic Friday the 13th.
How I came to be here: Months ago I hung out at a bar called The Library. I’d tell my Mom, “I’m going to the library.” Twenty-six years old and I still live at home, in the basement.
Mom would squint at me from above her laptop and frown. “The library, again?”
She wondered why I was reading so much.
The girl I was in love with, Ripley, often met me at The Library. She asked if I’d take a pic of her lifting her dress and showing off her tat. The catch was: In a supermarket. It was for a contest called “Supermarket Surprise.” She could win $1,000 and would throw some my way, maybe.
There aren’t any real jobs to be had anyway.
Times have changed. Fatcats have everything while us proles loiter. Regular people have nothing to do. It’s getting weird. Now they’re inventing things to do, desperate and unsavory. It wasn’t always like this. For a while I had short-lived show on YouTube called “Burning With Bob.” Every week I’d do a new recipe. My shtick was I always, always burned something.
I’m easily distracted. Sometimes it would be a phone call and I’d chat away as the pots on the stove crackled and started to smoke. Sometimes it would be Guest Stars like Ripley in a ponytail running outfit all sweaty and flirty. At the end of each episode the kitchen filled with smoke and I’d search for a fire extinguisher. Sometimes I didn’t find it. Sometimes I did and it was out of foam. The last ep featured my Mom’s kitchen engulfed in CGI flames and me, calling out of the smoky gloom, “See you next week on Burning With Bob!”
I never made any money. It was fun for a few episodes and then it died out. Nobody watched. I spent six grand on equipment and advertising and by the end I was in credit card debt with no place to hide and no job no nothing.
After the death of “Burning With Bob” I drove an Uber but now it’s all self-driving cars. McDonald’s has gotten rid of people in the Drive-Thru. There’s nothing left to do. So me and Ripley went to the produce section of a Safeway and I took video of her bending over near the bananas, flashing a dragonfly tat on her white rump. She thanked me and said it looked nice. I thought it did too—at least for a photo of someone exposing herself in a supermarket.
A manager approached us and pointed at the entrance. “Get that filth out of here or I’ll call the cops.” We were already scurrying that direction, giggling. “You jealous,” I called out as the electronic door swooshed. We got to my ancient Subaru and she was still holding a bunch of bananas. She lofted them. “Now I’m a shoplifter, too.”
A week later I got pinched for porn charges. The law-enforcement apprehension was all online. I got an alert on my phone and then scanned a QR code and then read the Agreements page, which was threatening. I was scared. Next thing I know I’m getting texts to Uber my ass over here for a stay of six months, plus a valuable coupon book when I “graduate.” Weird thing is I’m on Staff. As an NVO (Non-Violent Offender, as opposed to the Vios, Violent Offenders) I’m eligible for perks, like being made an Enforcer. As far as I can tell they worry the Vios will get carried away and hurt somebody. Non-vios rule. We run things. At first. Until the Vios take over and put their jackboots on our necks.
I knew that Ripley had also been pinched. People at the Library wondered until they showed her arrest video on TV under the headline “Cleaning Up the Streets.” In the vid she gets into it with a chubby troll-agent wearing a face mask and this wannabe-SWAT-team military outfit. He yells at her to cease and desist. She starts to say something about free speech and the next thing you know they’re spraying her with mace and pulling her sweater up to cover her face, exposing her bra and skinny ribs. Then she’s being dragged into a van.
And I’m in love with her.
As Helga spreads her arms and her shaven dusky armpits with us, we the crowd of about a dozen newcomers nod and fidget. Arranged in a semi-circle, we stare forward at a wall of pine and fir tree forest behind her—some of the trees brown and deadlooking, victims of beetle kill—above which looms a view of the Rockies, below a bright expanse of blinding blue sky. I have to pee and wonder when this is all going to be over. Maybe I could just wander off and find a bathroom somewhere? A tree? We’re sleeping in cabins with Native American names like Chinook and Nez Perce. It’s a former Boy Scouts of America facility they bought cheap. Now that the government has outlawed gender-bending the Boy Scouts are dead in the water.
Someone behind me mutters that be-here-now is all fine and dandy, but in the real world people know what time it is, don’t they?
Helga asks if there are any sinners in the crowd. Someone snickers. “I’m a sinner,” she announces.
“Aren’t we all?” asks a woman.
“I’m a practicing Mennonite yet I once had sex in a Target dressing room,” adds Helga. “In the middle of the day.”
Another retail-worker-looking woman grins. “Like who hasn’t done that before?”
Someone else mutters, “What does a Mennonite practice? Baking bread? Being homely?”
A blonde to my right notes the middle of the day is the best time to have sex in a Target dressing room, actually, because the robots are programmed to nab shoplifters and aren’t really paying attention to how many feet show below the dressing-room door.
At the end of the Meet & Greet, we’re all required to sign NDAs.
“It’s standard procedure,” Helga calls out. We grumble. She looks around in a who-said-that way, gives me a look like she senses I’m a troublemaker and she does NOT like troublemakers. “Remember, people. You’re starting over. The next week or two we’ll be wiping your slates clean. For now it’s like what happens in Vegas, right? After that, you’ll be shiny and new.”
I admit that’s all fine and dandy, but can we get some real creamer for our coffee tomorrow? Not just the powdered kind? And maybe a digital clock?
“No talking!” she barks.
Day Two
At Camp America there are no calendars, either. It’s before my normal wakeup time on a Tuesday—I know because I got here on a Monday, ergo—morning when Donna Fargo’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” plays on loudspeakers as reveille in the blue light after dawn. We shuffle out like zombies to the Jason Voorhees Dining Hall. By the time I stand in front of the stainless-steel coffee urn, pulling the spigot marked Dark Roast, the sun is up. The dead are listening in and placing bets. The creamer is powdered blech.
After breakfast a plump white woman informs me she’s a Racial-Blindness Counselor and will be my sponsor throughout my stay at Camp A. Her name is Bea, pronounced Bay-uh. She sports curly black hair and looks like Betty Boop gone wrong. A weird chin wrinkle, like a frowny emoji. Dressed like a real-estate hooker with a low-cut maroon silk blouse she makes me fill out a questionnaire full of questions like, “A Latina woman rear-ends your sedan in stalled traffic, and when you get out to exchange information, explains she has no insurance. In response you . . .”
“Ask her for a date?” I write. Report her to ICE is the correct response.
She frowns at my responses. “Do we have an attitude here?” she asks.
“I’m confused,” I admit. “I thought I was here for, like, sex stuff?”
Bea nods. “That too.” She sits there looking at me, twirling a black pen in her fingers. A slight smile on her glossed lips. She says she likes me. She has a cousin I remind her of, Peter. “Peter’s the rebel without a pause. No one has seen him for over two years now. He’s an outcast.” She leans forward, whispers in a husky, Brenda-Vaccaro voice, “Is that what you want to be, the Outcast?”
I can’t tell if she’s flirting with me or what. The smile is unnerving. “Not really?”
“Too late, handsome. The die is cast. Out.” She marches me to the Camp A rec center and takes me to a backroom full of sports gear—a red plastic tub of softball bats and balls, gloves; rack of croquet mallets and colorfully striped balls, fishing poles hanging in the rafters. Smell of dust and old sweaty stuff. She asks that I remove my belt and put my hands behind me, waist level. “Close your eyes,” she commands.
She zipties me. I start to ask if that’s really necessary and she slips a black hood over my face, then fastens a dog collar to my neck. Hooks it to a leash. My breath is warm beneath the hood and all I see is the black fabric.
“You want to be an outcast?” asks Bea. “Voila. Wish come true.”
She leads me through camp, yanking the leash whenever I pause. I insist I did nothing wrong. She smacks the back of my head. I smell pine and hay and her Jungle Gardenia as I stumble through the darkness, hot breath trapped against my face. We pass a group of people talking and all go silent as we get close, except for some sniggers. “This is a violation of my rights!” I call out. Someone laughs.
She jerks my leash. “You have no rights, Worm. All you have is lefts. Like left behind.”
A fifteen-minute walk into the woods. I’m stumbling over roots and rocks and she keeps moving. After a while we stop. I feel her fumbling at my wrists and think that’s it, but then I feel her tugging at my pants button and zipper and she yanks them down, lets go, steps back, and jerks the hood from my face.
I squint in the glaring sun. I’m handcuffed to a pole at the center of an outdoor amphitheater. A clearing in the woods. My pants fallen to my ankles.
She eyes me up and down, whistles. “Commando, huh?” She shakes her head. “The choices we make.”
I tell her she can’t do this to me. I’ll report her.
She takes a photo of me with her iPhone. “You do that.” Looks at her screen and smirks. “Looks like we have some shrinkage today don’t we?”
I’m left there all day, standing. I can’t sit down. The zipties are hooked too high into the pole behind me. Soon my legs and back burn. Flies buzz about my face and crotch. I call out for help and no one comes. At one point a hawk lands atop the high branches of a fir and watches me. At dusk I get cold and shiver and yell until my throat burns and finally Bea arrives carrying a flashlight, shining it in my eyes. “Look who’s here,” she says. “The Outcast in all his glory.”
I tell her what I think of her and this aversion-therapy bullshit and she says, “Really? Well that’s another week on your sentence, Dr. Freud.”
I start begging. She asks if I’m going to behave. I promise I will if she cuts the zips.
The cabins are quiet when we return. Amber glow in windows. Smell of pine needles and campfire smoke. In the camp kitchen hut, people washing dishes. For dinner the only thing left is stale hot dog buns and individually wrapped slices of American cheese. The faint smell of popcorn. A crowd of people sit around a campfire in the plaza between the cabins. I take a seat on the outside and eat my dog, tail between my legs.
Helga sits on a stool in front of the dining tables and points at people. “Anderson? Katy Anderson?” she calls out.
A young dark-haired woman raises her hand half-heartedly. Helga asks, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
The young woman lowers her hand. After a moment she says, “Witherspoon.”
“Good,” says Helga. “Good. You’ve got fine Anglo-Saxon genes.” She smiles and explains that the whole idea of Repatriation is to encourage people to find their homes. “Marry within your tribe, say the Jews. They’re right.” She’s walking in front of the group now, her face darkened by shadows, the campfire light flickering behind her. “We need to cleanse our country. Each to his own. It’s been this way for thousands of years and it works.”
I listen and nod, grin when appropriate. We sign NDAs so we won’t blab about all the shit going down. One of the new ideas of the Repatriation Counsel is “voluntary” repatriation of black people to Africa. They’re offered $100K in cryptocurrency to immigrate to Nigeria, Zambia or Lagos, no questions asked. It’s called The Final Solution, irony not acknowledged. We all just nod. We keep our heads down.
But it’s Ripley who haunts me. I took the photo. She had crooked teeth and squinting eyes like blue coin slots. Cupid bow lips and wild wavy auburn hair. She didn’t smile a lot but when she did it would break your heart. Sad and alluring with a twist of wallflower. She’d been kicked out of high school for starting a fire in the gym. “It wasn’t like Carrie or anything,” she told me. “I just wanted to get out of P.E.” It was supposed to be a trashcan fire. But the flames leapt high enough to catch the Pep Rally banners to Tame the Cougars and next thing you know the whole school was evacuated.
Once when we were leaving The Library I asked if maybe she wanted to have dinner with me. She acted like she didn’t hear and just kept walking to her car. I was about to call out, “My treat!” but then I stopped. I didn’t really have any money. No use getting her hopes up.
Day Three
As a test of my newfound obedience, I’m assigned to watch the video monitors. Bea sets me up in a shed located behind the main camp headquarters. There’s a bank of video monitors, one in each of the cabins, and several in the communal meeting rooms. “This is wrong?” I say. “I mean, aren’t we invading their piracy or something?”
Bea scratches her neck. “It’s privacy, dumbshit.”
“That’s what I meant. It’s still wrong.”
“Wrong, schlong. It’s what we do.” She points at the screen. “Now watch. See monitor fourteen? What is that participant doing?”
He appears to be pleasuring himself, alone in his cabin. He’s really going at it, like a boy scout trying to win a badge. I tell her it’s none of our business, is it?
Helga laughs. “Where’re you from, Lake Inferior?” She asks me to go knock on his door and report back to me. “When he manages to extricate himself and demands to know why you’re there, say, ‘You’re being transferred to a group cabin.’ Then leave.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. You will. Or three additional weeks.” She shoos me along. Her weird chin wrinkle unnerves me. Her cleavage looks like JetPuff marshmallows. “Let’s get this party started!”
When I’m leaving, she adds, “Forgot to tell you. Don’t knock!” She grins. “That would give it all away, wouldn’t it?”
The video monitor station is in the Reinhard Heydrich cabin, and between the Voorhees Dining Hall and Heydrich, I must pass through the Game Courts. There’s a volleyball game in progress. I skitter along the sides and make my way to the Ed Kemper cabin cluster. I’m about to knock, hand poised in air, when I remember Bea’s admonishment: Don’t knock. Don’t knock. Don’t knock. I don’t.
I make a racket, opening the door. Clomp my boots on the wooden porch. Call out, “Hello?” By the time I open the door and don’t even look inside, all I hear is a meek voice saying, “Yeah? What is it?”
“Party on, Wayne!” I call out. Slam the door and promptly step in a mud puddle as I hustle away.
Bea is gone and Helga there when I report back. “If we discover, Mr. Dean, that you reveal anything you see today? Your stay will be increased by two weeks.”
Back in my cabin, I mark tiny black sharpie lines into the wood paneling in the gloom beside my lower bunk bed wall. I record my days, III. No sign of Ripley yet.
Day Four
On one wall of the Voorhees there’s a bulletin board about various events and opportunities at Camp A. In the center of it there’s a photo of me, ziptied to pole, wearing the black hood, with my pants around my ankles. Scrawled at the bottom is the legend, “Look! He’s proud of this little thing!” People gather around, laugh and point. I laugh along with them. I can take a joke.
Afternoon we’re divided into groups and put in vans, driven to the city to participate in a Smash & Grab ceremony.
Helga presents me with a pornographic video of a seriously pregnant woman having sex with two men. I try not to watch. It’s required. There are questions at the end and if you get them wrong, you have to watch again. I’ve already extended my stay by three weeks now.
I want out.
Day Six
I’m already losing track of time. I’m becoming another one of the Know Nothings. At breakfast Helga admonishes me, “It’s not Wednesday! It’s Saturday, silly.”
Later I’m recorded asking a volleyball player if they’ve ever seen a young woman who looks like Ripley. In the video I’m showing her the photo. Three more weeks are added to my sentence.
We’re asked to play games. Rip the Clothes Off the Loser! is a popular one. I play listlessly.
“Are you on something?” asks one of the facilitators.
By early evening we’re encouraged to take a walk around the grounds, to stimulate blood flow. At the end of the Trail of Tears Trail a waterfall splatters and crashes in frothy white foam into a blue pool, beside which the dark-haired woman with a broken arm is sitting, tossing rocks into the pool with her good hand. She’s facing away from me at first but then she turns and squints into the sunshine, my direction.
“Ripley?”
She blinks and doesn’t answer. “Oh, it’s you,” she says. “I thought you might be somewhere.”
I tell her I’ve been looking for her. She doesn’t react. I ask if I can sign her cast.
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all day. I don’t have a pen or anything?”
From my pocket I produce a black Sharpie, brandishing it in the air. “Voila.”
“Aren’t you something?” she says. I sign my name with a big B and swirly-font letters for the rest. She watches in bemusement, whispers. “Looks like the credits on ‘Burning With Bob.’”
For an Important Announcement we meet in the Real-America Chalet, a wide room with black-and-white tile floor done in a checkerboard design, a row of folding tables off to one side, where the wet bar used to be. Giant moose head mounted above the fireplace. People standing around like chess pieces who don’t know their next move. The smell of cinnamon tea, ammonia mop cleanser, and people-stink. Above everything hangs a chandelier made of elk antlers—twisted and tangled, like giant’s crown of thorns. At one table you sign release forms and run your credit card through a white screen, sign your name with your finger. At another table you pick up your packet, a brochure about the facility, with happy smiling rehab people ready to get back on with their lives, ready to face the music. A smiling chubby woman gives me a black Sharpie and a name tag. Hello, My Name Is Bob, it reads, in blocky letters. The B is messy and has a tail, so it looked more like a P.
Ripley lurks in the corner, to the left of the massive fireplace, whose mantel is decorated with cattle brands, like the Circle Z, the Bar O, some that look like geometric shapes, petroglyphs. Sitting on the ground, curly hair held up on her head with a scrunchie, like the Bride of Frankenstein. She looks out of place there, on the floor. The center of the room is full of folding chairs.
She wears cream-colored pants that hike up when she sits, exposing her ankles and shins and lower calf. Thick ankles with pink socks drooping. Gold hoop earrings her only flash of color. A gray sweater decorated with white sheep figures, round puffy white forms, cartoonish, the kind counted by cartoon characters trying to sleep.
I’m the guilty one. It’s my fault she’s here. I walk to the end of the folding table upon which are arranged snacks and beverages. Cheeses on a cutting board, a half-circle of Ritz crackers, a white bowl of throat-cut strawberries. Loiter by the punch bowl, round glass tub of red-colored fruit punch in which floated wedges of oranges and limes. Pretend to be examining the various cattle brands on the mantle. She sits with her back against the wall. Knees folded in front of her. Body disguised by floppy slacks and sloppy gray sweater. Something tragically attractive about her face. She’s reading some kind of Repatriation Manual.
At the end of the table, next to the punch bowl, a stack of short clear-plastic cups. I fill one and stand there, beside the punch bowl, hovering. She glances up.
“I’m loitering,” I say. “Don’t mind me.”
She keeps reading.
I lean down a bit, crouching, looking at the brochure photo of a crowd of white teenagers, like a high school sports team from Utah. “Is it good?”
She sighs. “Listen. Whatever you want from me you’re not getting.” She gets to her feet.
“Jesus,” I say. “I was just being nice.”
She walks away. As she crosses the Great Moose Path, across the chessboard tiles, I watch, and see her reach her hand out behind her, my direction, middle finger raised.
Day Seven
The subject today is bubbles. How we all live in bubbles. Neocons live in neocon bubbles with photos of Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk on the walls, and liberals live in diversity bubbles with photos of healthy, fit twenty-somethings on the cover—a white woman, a black man, and an Asian woman paddling a canoe on a sapphire lake, with mountains in the background.
Here we nickname it Camp UnWoke. Or Camp Oopsy, according to the wags. At Camp Oopsy, like prison, you wondered what your fellow inmates did to get there.
Sex, opioid abuse, anti-maskers, hate-speechers. Accepting gay people.
Bird watching incident, Target incident.
A whole barracks full of Affirmative-Action Abusers.
The rules: No drugs, no alcohol. No fraternization with other Canceleds. “You’re here to learn,” exhorted Helga. “You’re here to be better people. If you keep doing the same things that got you in trouble?” She paused and looked around at all of us, everyone thinking no doubt that Yeah, Lady? That’s what we’re planning, first chance we get. “You’ll be out of here. Gone,” she added. “Gone gone. You understand?’
We nodded. Glumly.
That night the bonfire burst to flame with a kerosene-induced whoosh and a smattering of applause from the Canceleds gathered around like a Christian revivalist congregation. Fir branches stacked in a tent-shape, crackling and smoky. Soon the heat is enough to scorch your face while the cold air keeps your backside frosty. Without booze things are too well-behaved and only a few desperate losers try to dance halfheartedly. I wander off to find Ripley.
At Bronco Henry’s cabin, I get no answer when I knock. Doors aren’t locked there so I peek inside, stand in the doorway and call her name. Moonlight stripes the floor, spilling from the windows beside the bunk beds, leaving the rest of the room in shadows and darkness. I feel exposed, standing there, holding a gift-wrapped box. If any of her bunkmates arrive they’ll turn us in for violating protocol.
A paperback book falls to the floor. What she was reading. “Go away,” she said. “I’m asleep.”
The sound of laughter and clapping beyond the cabin. Volleyball game in progress. A thump and a chorus of cheers. I don’t move. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You answered me.”
After a moment of silence she said, “You’ve heard of sleepwalking?”
“I have.”
“I’m sleeptalking.”
I tell her I guess I’ll have to return it.
“Return what?”
Return whatever is in the gift-wrapped box I’m holding.
She scrunches up her legs. Tells me to sit down. Hers is the bottom bunk. Squeaks when I sit. Those wire grids that pass for box springs. I sit, hunching over a bit, tall enough my head bumps against the ceiling of the top bunk.
“This better be good,” she says, smiling meekly as she tears the gold wrapping paper. “Who are you?” she asks. “One of the Three Wise Men?”
“That would make you Mary I guess.”
“Hardly,” she quips.
She rips open the paper and finds a piece of cheesecake I smuggled out. Takes a bite and chews, goes “Mmm,” then opens her mouth wide to show me the masticated cake. Tells me if I’m going to sneak in here, I better hang this blanket from the top bunk, you think?
In the blue light of dawn I wake, curled against Ripley’s warmth. Outside, the sound of footsteps on the cinder path. I give her a squeeze, whisper that I had better get going. “Before the Gestapo show up,” I add.
She twists around and bestows on me a sweet kiss, whispers, “Now go before you get me in more trouble.”
My face smells of her and I can’t help but smile as I shimmy the window open, sit on the sill and flip my legs out, then drop down and proceed to do the crouch, the crawl of shame. I cut behind the Voorhees Dining Hall and am almost to my cabin when a German Shepherd starts barking and I take off on a run, make it to the door and dash in, waking up my bunkmates as I crawl into the bottom bunk.
“You know we’re not supposed to break curfew,” whispers Jules, the bunkmate above me.
Hush, I tell him. “What is this? Prison?” I whisper.
He waits a while, then whispers, “It’s your funeral.”
Day Ten
The Enforcers drag Ripley away. When I protest, Helga tells me to shut up. “You’re next, Bucko. All privileges are over.”
Chad marches me over to my cabin, forces me to gather all my things, and transfers me to another cabin, more like a dirty shed. He tells me to make myself uncomfortable. “No dinner tonight,” he adds. “No distractions, get it? We’re giving you time to learn the error of your ways.”
In the middle of the night I awake with Helga shaking my foot, pointing a flashlight in my eyes. She tells me to get dressed and put on shoes. That I have to see something. Some Enforcers stand behind her. I turn over and squirm into the corner of the bunk, telling them to go away. One of them yanks the covers off me and tells me to get the fuck up and do as she says or somebody’s going to get hurt.
While lacing my sneakers I say, “I’m going to report this shit.”
They laugh. “Oooh, loser here is going to report us!” The beefy one scratches his crotch. “I got your report hangin’.”
Helga stands there, holding her clipboard. She shakes her head. “Enough.” Once my shoes are tied I stand up and she turns heel. “Follow me.”
The camp is asleep and silent, but for the crunch of our shoes on the cinder paths, the god’s breath of wind in the pines. At one point we pass close to a cabin and hear the sounds of weeping. I try to joke, walking toward the woods, toward an orange glow. “This better be good,” I tell them. “What? You’re giving me a pony?”
Helga whacks me with a hiking stick. We head toward the flickering glow in the forest.
In the woods beyond Cabin Row, hidden by a dense stand of aspen, there’s a clearing, encircled by a ring of totem poles. Upon each pole is fixed a deer or elk skull with antlers, and beside each pole, a tiki torch. Eagle feathers affixed to the skulls flutter in the wind. On the poles themselves, carvings of horrible faces, grimacing, and a path leading into the open center. The torch light casts antler shadows on the audience of nearby aspens. Carved into the totems straddling the path is the legend The Vale of Unforgiveness. Beyond the last totems, a sandy circle with no grass or trees. In the center, a square hole in the ground. In the center of the square hole, a lid with a handle. Helga tells me to raise it.
“You’re kidding, right?” I look at all three, Helga, with her dishpan face, the Enforcers, with their Tweedledum/Tweedledee looks.
“Do it.”
I tell them I don’t know who they think they are and what they’re doing, but I’m nobody’s slave. “Raise it yourself, bitch.”
Something hits the back of my head and I go down. My ear explodes twice more. In a second I’m gasping to breathe, a boot on my neck. My hand flails in the dirt until hands yank me back to my feet and let go. “I told you to raise the lid,” says Helga. “Now raise it.”
The tiki torches throw a circle of flickering amber light and antler shadows over everything but with the lid raised, the square is a black pit. Helga fumbles for her flashlight and we hear whimpering. A gust of urine smell hits us. She gets the light going and points it into the void. “See this? That’s what your meddling caused.” She gives me a smirk. “We call it the Epstein Box.”
Into the pit stretches an aluminum ladder. Beyond it, a bare light bulb illuminates the inside of a doomsday bunker. Gray concrete floor and metal shelving. A few feet away sits Ripley, on a cot handcuffed to an iron ring in the wall, mouth covered with silver duct-tape, eyes wild and terrified, whimpering. She’s wearing an orange T-shirt and dirty gym shorts. Her white legs bruised with blue blotches. Her squeals and whimpering get louder, more intense, and she jerks against the handcuffs, scraping the metal legs of the cot across the concrete floor.
