Tyrannia Read Free Page A

the van.
    “Yeah,” Patrick said. Evan was wearing his black bandana over his nose and mouth, so Patrick wasn’t sure how he could smell anything.
    “It’s nice. Really nice.”
    They were on the outskirts of town, past the last outposts of the higher-end outlet malls. Patrick was driving the van well within the legal speed limit. Evan and Tristana were in the back seat, and the professor was lying down in the back-back. The duct tape, the interrogation manual, and their box of clothes and sundries were riding shotgun. Evan’s uncle’s old farmhouse was about fifteen minutes away.
    The professor started flailing around and mumbling.
    “Hey, hey,” Evan said. “Sit.” He leaned over the seat and beat the professor on the shoulder blade with his billy club a few times. The professor screamed, though the duct tape muffled most of the sound. Tristana laughed, and ran her hand through Evan’s stringy braids. Patrick turned his attention back to the road. He would have thought that the minivan might have attracted more attention on campus, but on Monday morning there were few students and workers around. The execution of the first part of the plan was flawless.
    “I have your dossier in the front seat here,” Evan said. “You’re, like, a fucking monster.”
    The professor bucked his head around. His glasses flew off his face, underneath the seat.
    “Whoa, you’ll break your glasses, professor,” Tristana said. She leaned down and fished under the seat for the glasses. Patrick watched her from his rearview mirror and saw her T-shirt ride up. He saw the tattoo on her lower back—a series of Sumerian cuneiforms that she told him was the ancient word for freedom—for the first time since they broke up. Tristana found the glasses, folded them, and put them in her purse.
    There was a long honk outside and the flash of a white roofing van. The van was inches away from the window.
    “Jesus, Patrick, you ran that stop sign!” Evan said.
    The other van stopped, and then sputtered forward in the intersection again.
    Patrick wasn’t sure whether to slow down more or speed up.
    “Sorry, sorry,” Patrick said, his face flush. He sped up. “That sign . . . it wasn’t there a couple weeks ago.”
    He knew the excuse was itself incompetent.
    “What the fuck would have happened . . .” Evan began, but Tristana put a hand on his shoulder.
    “It’s okay, Evan. No harm, no foul.”
    Evan sighed and then leaned over the seat. “What do you think professor? What is your expert opinion? No harm, no foul?”
    The professor didn’t say anything, and couldn’t say anything. The one-way banter continued until they reached the farmhouse, but Patrick didn’t pay attention to any of it, focusing on the road with the efficiency of a vice.
    The farm was desolate, set in a sloping valley with an abandoned apple orchard. Evan said that there were limestone caves underneath the main house. His great-great uncle had mined a tunnel that connected the storm basement to those caves. “No one knows where they end,” Evan had said in one of their planning sessions in Tristana’s flat. No one had lived at the farm for ten years, and in that time, the house and the other buildings had fallen into severe disrepair. The front porch of the house sagged and bowed. The front door was ripped off and an upside-down lawn tractor blocked the gap. The grain silo, shorn of its shingles, looked like a stone obelisk from an interplanetary civilization. The barn’s paint was fading, and many of the fence posts on the property had been knocked over or driven over.
    “We’re home,” Evan said. “Park outside the barn.”
    Patrick parked there and the three of them got out. Evan opened the back hatch and yanked at the professor’s collar, pulling him out and to the ground.
    “Black site,” Evan said. “Black site. You are now leaving the United States of America. You are in the Kingdom of Tyrannia now.” He pulled down his bandana for a second