[[This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's
magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is
basically located across the street from the fictional Cesar Chavez
High depicted in Little Brother, and it's not just notorious for its
brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such, but also for its
amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley, who likes to perch like a
buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the front of the store. Borderlands
is about the friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy
places to sit and read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks
who know everything there is to know about science fiction. Even
better, they've always been willing to take orders for my book (by net
or phone) and hold them for me to sign when I drop into the store, then
they ship them within the US for free!]]
[[Borderland Books: http://www.borderlands-books.com/ 866 Valencia Ave,
San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1 888 893 4008]]
We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell Street
BART. They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting
and panicked. Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all,
while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men
about something.
The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became. By
the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a
mob-scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a
narrow staircase. I had my face crushed up against someone's back, and
someone else was pressed into my back.
Darryl was still beside me -- he was big enough that he was hard to
shove, and Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist.
I spied Vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people.
"Screw you!" I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands off
of me!"
I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at
an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was
digging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for.
"Don't mace him!" I shouted over the din. "You'll get us all too."
At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of
melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw
someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She
screamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she
couldn't, the crowd's pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent
to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping on
her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don't think
she was feeling anything.
I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywhere now,
and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as
relentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.
We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly
any better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing
back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all
those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I was prone
to.
People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing
past the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it
was clear to me that this wasn't going to have a happy ending.
"Want to take our chances up top?" I said to Darryl.
"Yes, hell yes," he said. "This is vicious."
I looked to Vanessa -- there was no way she'd hear me. I managed to get
my phone out and I texted her.
> We're getting out of here
I saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then
back at me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in.
"*What's the plan?* Darryl shouted in my ear.
"We're going to have to go back!" I shouted back, pointing at the
remorseless crush of bodies.
"It's impossible!" he said.
"It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!"
He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my
wrist. I took Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and we
pushed out.
It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, then
slowed down even more when we reached the stairway. The people we
passed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way,
either. A couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked like
he'd have punched me if he'd been able to get his arms loose. We passed
three more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way I could have
helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of helping anyone.
All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move
into, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van
behind me.
We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the
grey smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound
of emergency vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was even
louder. There was almost no one on the streets anymore -- just the
people trying hopelessly to get underground. A lot of them were crying.
I spotted a bunch of empty benches -- usually staked out by skanky
winos -- and pointed toward them.
We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch
our shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fell forward.
We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The side of
his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged his
shirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side.
"Someone freaking *stabbed* him in the crowd," Jolu said, his hands
clenching into fists. "Christ, that's vicious."
Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned
and his head went back again.
Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie
she was wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it to
Darryl's side. "Take his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To
Jolu she said, "Get his feet up -- roll up your coat or something."
Jolu moved quickly. Vanessa's mother is a nurse and she'd had first aid
training every summer at camp. She loved to watch people in movies get
their first aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so glad to have her
with us.
We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. He
kept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Van
kept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass.
"What about calling 911?" Jolu said.
I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. The sound
I got wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from
the phone system. You don't get sounds like that unless there's three
million people all dialing the same number at once. Who needs botnets
when you've got terrorists?
"What about Wikipedia?" Jolu said.
"No phone, no data," I said.
"What about them?" Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I looked
where he was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but
there was no one there.
"It's OK buddy, you just rest," I said.
"No, you idiot, what about *them*, the cops in the cars? There!"
He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or a
firetruck zoomed past. They could get us some help. I was such an
idiot.
"Come on, then," I said, "let's get you where they can see you and flag
one down."
Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a
kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if
they saw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and
Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down
toward Market Street.
The first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even
slow down. Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck,
nor the next three cop-cars. Darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was
white-faced and panting. Van's sweater was soaked in blood.
I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeared
down Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my arms
over my head, shouting "*STOP*." The car slewed to a stop and only then
did I notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine.
It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn't
have any military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in
front of me, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the
road. I felt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted
feet moving close by. I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking
guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas
masks with tinted face-plates.
I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at
me. I'd never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything
you've heard about the experience is true. You freeze where you are,
time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth,
then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me.
The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. I
didn't even breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting
and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put a
coarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, so
quick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked on
me. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach and
something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well,
feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own
voice was muffled by the hood.
I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was
going on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling
canvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet
by my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders
screaming.
I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the
Hummer. More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me.
"Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble. I
heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. My head rang
like a gong.
"Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school
students. I wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding.
Someone stabbed him." I had no idea how much of this was making it
through the muffling bag. I kept talking. "Listen -- this is some kind
of misunderstanding. We've got to get my friend to a hospital --"
Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton or
something -- it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head
before. My eyes swam and watered and I literally couldn't breathe
through the pain. A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say
anything. I'd learned my lesson.
Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were
terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I
knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world,
but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of
ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by
a drunk burning his way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more
likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer
people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying
about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about
getting hit by lightning.
Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed
behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on
my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.
The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we were
headed over Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking one
of the steeper routes -- I guessed Powell Street.
Now we were descending just as steeply. If my mental map was right, we
were heading down to Fisherman's Wharf. You could get on a boat there,
get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hell would
terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students?
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then the
doors swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road, then
shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, I tripped
over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind me gave me
another shove. I went up the stairs cautiously, not able to use my
hands. I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it
wasn't there. I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in
front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees
and locked my hands to something behind me.
More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of
me. Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timeless eternity
in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing my own breath in
my ears.
I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulation
cut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted a
year's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30
minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars
off your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always
a bitch.
I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They were neither
rough nor careful -- just...impersonal. Like someone at McDonald's
putting together burgers.
The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, but
slowly I was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way
and look around.
We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see the
wheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of this
truck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail. Steel
desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climbing
above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in a halo
around the operators. Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in front of
it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter
of the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw.
Then there was the jail part -- at the front of the truck, furthest
away from the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of
the vehicle, and attached to these steel rails were the prisoners.
I spotted Van and Jolu right away. Darryl might have been in the
remaining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say --
many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. It stank of sweat
and fear back there.
Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So was
Jolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I
was scared. What's more, I had to piss like a *race-horse.*
I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up until
now, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where your
mind has conjured up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you're
right.
But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If
they were terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist
looked like, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that
they were brown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton
dresses that hung down to their ankles.
Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on
the Super Bowl. They looked *American* in a way I couldn't exactly
define. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite
military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled
freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck,
joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from
Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.
I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked
older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. If you
stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. She
did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration,
dispassionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant.
"Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but I
really need to take a leak, you know?"
She looked right through me as if she hadn't heard.
"I'm serious, if I don't get to a can soon, I'm going to have an ugly
accident. It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?"
She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and
they held a low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from the
computers.
She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'll
each get a piss-call."
"I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a
little more urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice.
"Seriously, lady, it's now or never."
She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of pathetic
loser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one came
forward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the
shoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean
-- even Van can't tell the difference sometimes -- but with that
bearing that said *American* in a way I couldn't put my finger on.
He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped
there: I recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or
pepper-spray before he let it fall again.
"No trouble," he said.
"None," I agreed.
He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my
arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearing Batman's
utility belt -- wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it made sense,
though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all that
deadly hardware at their eye-level -- they might grab your gun with
their teeth and pull the trigger with their tongues or something.
My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strapping,
and now that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that my legs
had turned into lumps of cork while I was stuck in one position. Long
story short, I basically fell onto my face and kicked my legs weakly as
they went pins-and-needles, trying to get them under me so I could rock
up to my feet.
The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back of the
truck, to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl on
the way back, but he could have been any of the five or six slumped
people. Or none of them.
"In you go," the guy said.
I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like
purple sausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs.
The guy didn't move.
"Look," I said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't
easy). "Look. You either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to
aim for me. A toilet visit is not a hands-free experience." Someone in
the truck sniggered. The guy didn't like me, I could tell from the way
his jaw muscles ground around. Man, these people were wired tight.
He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of
multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through
the plastic cuffs and my hands were my own again.
"Thanks," I said.
He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of
clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they
tingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made
me cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I
didn't trust myself to stay on my feet.
As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and
rocking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It
was all I could do to keep from sobbing -- I covered my mouth and held
the sounds in. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.
Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the
door. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper,
stuck it all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink
but only found a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in
small-print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my
hands and stepped out of the john.
"What were you doing in there?" the guy said.
"Using the facilities," I said. He turned me around and grabbed my
hands and I felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wrists
had swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit
cruelly into my tender skin, but I refused to give him the satisfaction
of crying out.
He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down, who, I
saw now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek.
"Are you OK?" I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt abruptly
put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my
head off the truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one.
"No talking," he said as I struggled to refocus my eyes.
I didn't like these people. I decided right then that they would pay a
price for all this.
One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when
they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup
of coffee -- they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of
Starbucks, I saw -- and they had an indistinct conversation that
involved a fair bit of laughter.
Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air,
not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the
slice of outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was
dark out, and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that's
part mist.
The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military
uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back
and that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I
was a prisoner of the United States of America.
They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for
us one at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the
truck. As close as I could work it -- counting seconds off in my head,
one hippopotami, two hippopotami -- the interviews lasted about seven
minutes each. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine
withdrawal.
I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up
close, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the
corners of her mouth.
"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and
then dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic
politeness, but it had been drilled into me.
She didn't twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the
truck and behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat
in it. Two of them -- Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man --
looked at me from their ergonomic super-chairs.
They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and
backpack spread out on it.
"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some questions for
you."
"Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're
not under arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to
you. For starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you,
giving you a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy,
was I ever going to talk to a lawyer.
"What's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen was
showing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its
data without giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message
-- an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture --
because I liked to customize my gear.
"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer any
questions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under
arrest, they have to answer you. It's the rules.
"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the
woman snapped.
"Am I under arrest?"
"You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She
didn't say, "or else," but it was implied.
"I would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like to know
what I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of
identification from both of you."
The two agents exchanged looks.
"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,"
Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right now. We
found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and
your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this
country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't
look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very,
very sorry. Now, what is this for?"
"You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!"
"Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable,
idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very
ugly stuff on the public Internet."
"I would like to speak to an attorney," I said.
Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under the
mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a
crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential
enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you,
I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an
enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy
combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where you
can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you
to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want
you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do
you know about the attack on this city?"
"I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. My
phone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails,
little hacks and mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff."
"What have you got to hide?"
"I've got the right to my privacy," I said. "And I want to speak to an
attorney."
"This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to
hide."
"I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All the
FAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to
see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that
comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. These two
said they weren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it?
In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them.
&&&