Tyrannia Read Free Page B

and scratched his nose. “You are not a citizen here. You don’t have any rights here, on account of the accords that our country has signed with the underworld. Do you understand?”
    The professor looked up at him and said nothing.
    Evan laughed. “All right, all right. I’m throwing a lot at you. Come on.” He took the professor by the shoulder and helped him up, almost helpfully. The professor complied. Evan had come up with the name of Tyrannia during one of their brainstorming sessions. Patrick felt like he was watching a movie on DVD, with a bored director’s commentary having a distant opinion on whatever they were doing. We chose the farmhouse on account of the caves. It was a great set. A great set. Uh, and we knew the professor would be scared there . . .
    “Patrick can you get the stuff in the front seat?” Tristana said. She had put the professor’s glasses on her forehead.
    “Sure.” What was Patrick’s motivation? Well, that’s a good question. He took a class with the professor—a long time ago—and that’s why he was expelled, because he plagiarized his first paper in the class . . . uh, I think it was on the separation of powers . . .
    “Thanks.” She gave him a warm smile that he knew was manipulation, but he didn’t care. He took the box and shut the door with the back of his heel. As he went up the stairs, Tristana called out from inside the house, “Watch out for that last step. You’ll fall through.” Patrick edged around the step and then the upside-down tractor. He could hear the other three in the basement. The living room had been a hideout for local kids with BB guns, beer, and huffing addictions—targets taped up on the walls with bull’s-eyes blasted through on the outlined heads, breasts, and groins; shattered bottles of MGD littering the floor; glue canisters. In the kitchen there was a twenty-year-old snowmobile and the oven was ripped out. He went down the stone stairs, and the air changed from being rancid to something colder and cleaner.
    In the basement, Tristana and Evan were preparing the site. The professor was sitting Indian style on the dirt floor. He was coughing. Patrick set the materials down. In one of the corners he could see a natural archway and a dark opening, which must have been one of the tunnels that Evan talked about.
    “Aha,” Tristana said, finding the pliers in the box underneath a bag of SunChips. She twirled them on her finger like a six shooter. “There they are.”
    “Okay, remember,” Evan said, rubbing his hands together and standing over the professor. Everyone’s breath was visible. “The point of this exercise is to, you know, gather relevant information about what he knows.” He took a chair from the corner and scraped it to the center of the room. Tristana hoisted the professor onto the chair. The professor was tipping.
    “Don’t fall over,” she said. “Shit, Ev, do you think we should tie him to the chair?”
    “Hmm,” Evan said. “Then we would have to cut his hands free. I don’t know.”
    “What does it say in the manual?” Tristana said.
    “Right.” Evan sifted through the box that Patrick had brought in and found the Interrogation Manual. “Uh, shit,” he said to the professor. “You should know. You wrote this, didn’t you?”
    “I don’t think he wrote it,” Tristana said. “He wrote the legal memos for the Department of Justice that allowed the manual to come into being.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Evan said, looking peeved. “It was, I don’t know, a grandiose metaphor.” He turned to Patrick. “How about you bring down the cooler of beer that I brought here yesterday? It should still be cold.”
    Patrick hesitated. “Sure, where is it?”
    “By the door, I think.” Evan had already turned back to the manual. Tristana ripped off the duct tape covering the professor’s mouth, and he screamed. The noise was muffled by the walls.
    Patrick’s face was hot as he went up the stairs. Evan’s