Little Brother

cross the street from the fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted inLittle Brother, and it's not just notorious for its brilliant events, sign-ings, book cl

hat was when someone put acoarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, soquick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked onme. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach andsomething went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well,feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own voicewas muffled by the hood.I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what wasgoing on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the mufflingcanvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feetby my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shouldersscreaming.I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was insidethe Hummer. More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me."Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for mytrouble. I heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. Myhead rang like a gong."Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school stu-dents. I wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding.Someone stabbed him." I had no idea how much of this was making itthrough the muffling bag. I kept talking. "Listen — this is some kind ofmisunderstanding. We've got to get my friend to a hospital —"Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton orsomething — it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head be-fore. My eyes swam and watered and I literally couldn't breathe throughthe pain. A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything.I'd learned my lesson.41Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe theywere terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before — I mean, Iknew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world,but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions ofways that the world could kill me — starting with getting run down by adrunk burning his way down Valencia — that were infinitely more likelyand immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people thanbathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them al-ways struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit bylightning.Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my handslashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruisesswelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we wereheaded over Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking oneof 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 boatthere, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hellwould terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students?We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then thedoors swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road,then shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, Itripped over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind megave me another shove. I went up the stairs cautiously, not able to usemy hands. I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn'tthere. I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front anddragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees andlocked my hands to something behind me.More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongsideof me. Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timelesseternity in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing myown breath in my ears.I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulationcut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted ayear's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars off42your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always abitch.I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They wereneither rough nor careful — just… impersonal. Like someone atMcDonald's putting together burgers.The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, butslowly I was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way andlook around.We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see thewheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of thistruck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail.Steel desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climb-ing above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in ahalo around the operators. Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in frontof it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeterof the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw.Then there was the jail part — at the front of the truck, furthest awayfrom 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 re-maining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say —many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. It stank ofsweat and fear back there.Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So wasJolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I wasscared. What's more, I had to piss like a race-horse.I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up untilnow, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where yourmind has conjured up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you'reright.But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If theywere terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist lookedlike, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they werebrown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses thathung down to their ankles.Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaderson the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactlydefine. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military.43They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely atone another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking anddrinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afgh-anistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barelylooked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. Ifyou stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dis-passionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant."Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but Ireally 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 acci-dent. It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?"She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and theyheld a low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from thecomputers.She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'lleach get a piss-call.""I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a littlemore 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 patheticloser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one cameforward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across theshoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean— even Van can't tell the difference sometimes — but with that bearingthat said American in a way I couldn't put my finger on.He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strappedthere: 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 wearingBatman's utility belt — wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it madesense, though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all44that deadly hardware at their eye-level — they might grab your gun withtheir teeth an