Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

Kyle, with his curly brown hair, pimpled jaw and track pants, looks like a normal kid. Invisible by choice.

‘How old are you, Kyle?’ I ask.

‘Nineteen,’ he says, and then glances at me to see if I believe him. I pretend I do. I’m guessing he’s more like seventeen, or even sixteen.

‘How’d you get involved in this?’ I ask him.

‘The Guards?’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. My friends at school were sharing the videos around. Killers getting beaten up, paedophiles getting buried alive or whatever. I heard they were hiring, and I needed the money.’

‘What for?’

‘I grew up in Ackerly. You know it?’

I shake my head.

‘Of course not. Why would you? It’s a town of two hundred people. A meteorite landed in a field once—that’s literally the only interesting thing that ever happened in Ackerly. There’s a plaque and everything. It wasn’t even a good meteorite. Smaller than average and made of chondrite—that’s the most common material for space rocks.’ Kyle scratches the hair under his baseball cap. ‘Anyway, I wanted out of Ackerly. But I needed a car, and gas, and a place to stay. Those things aren’t cheap, and no one in town had any cash. My mom spent all her money having me—’ the matter-of-fact way Kyle says this makes me think it was something his mother said often ‘—so I had to get a job.’

‘And you just … sent in a resume?’ To a dark web torture site?

‘I got lucky. Someone else in Ackerly posted something online about the Guards. She said their site was a hoax. So they gave me a way to prove myself. They told me to put a brick through her window with a message on it. After I did that, I was in. They wired me the money for the fare to Houston, then Fred picked me up from the bus station.’

Kyle wanted money for a car to get out of the middle of nowhere. Now he lives in a house even further from civilisation, and he still doesn’t have a car. The irony seems to be lost on him.

I take a risk. ‘Who’s Druznetski?’

‘Oh. He’s a private investigator.’ Kyle doesn’t look suspicious that I don’t know this. ‘We use him for background checks on potential inmates. Figure out what they did, how they got away with it, if anyone will notice they’re missing and so on.’

He discusses abduction with the casual fatalism of a cop nearing retirement age. That ability to simply not give a fuck, I’ve noticed, is only present is the very old and the very young.

‘What’s he like?’ I ask. ‘Druznetski?’

‘Dunno. Never met him. He’s not one of the Guards.’

‘Why are we called the Guards? No one ever told me.’

He looks over. ‘You don’t remember from your vow?’

What vow? I quickly backtrack. ‘I had a little chemical help to memorise the words at the time, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Oh.’ He glances at my teeth. The missing ones are too far back to see, but he still seems to buy my story that I was a meth head.

‘Well, it’s named after a group in Finland, I think, or Sweden—one of those countries. They were a small volunteer army who fought off the invading Russians. The actual name was the White Guard, but Fred thought that sounded a bit, you know, Nazi-ish. Whoa, whoa! Stop!’

I hit the brakes just in time to stop the car from going over the edge. There’s a gorge here, narrow but deep, and well hidden by the trees on either side of it.

‘That was close,’ Kyle says. ‘Come on. Leave the parking-brake off.’

We get out of the car into the feeble daylight. Kyle’s right—it was close. The sedan’s hood pokes out over the hundred-foot drop. Down the bottom, a shallow creek flows between boulders, rubble and the skeletons of clumsy cows. I can see the shattered remains of other cars are rusting in the shadows. The Guards have done this before, maybe dozens of times. Some of those steel carcasses probably belong to former prisoners.

‘Okay,’ Kyle says. ‘Make like a pregnant lady and push.’

I hesitate.

‘I know,’ Kyle says. ‘Hurts to do this to such a sexy car, right?’ He pats the sedan on the trunk and even gives it a squeeze, as though it’s a woman’s butt.

I don’t care about cars, but I get why some men do. Everyone wants to be beautiful, but men aren’t allowed to be. If they use make-up, nail polish or hairspray they get belittled and attacked. So they surround themselves with beautiful things instead. And because their entire concept of beauty comes from advertising, those things tend to be expensive. Luxury sports cars. Guns with high-capacity magazines. Sprawling mansions with swimming pools. And women, which starts the cycle again. Only women are presented as objects of desire, which is why men consider themselves ugly in the first place.

If I’m immune to any of this, it’s because I’ve always been too poor to advertise at. A low-interest demographic. That world of fast cars and big houses has always been so far out of reach that it’s not even worth thinking about.

Kyle thinks I care about the car, and I do. If the Guards work out who I am, I’ll need a quick escape. Without the car, I’ll be stranded at the house in the woods as surely as Kyle was stranded in Ackerly.

‘Trust me,’ he says, ‘the prettier the car, the prettier the crash.’

I put my hands against the trunk. Shoulder to shoulder, Kyle and I push it towards the edge.

The car lurches, and there’s a crunch. Kyle and I step back, but it doesn’t fall. The front wheels have gone over the edge of the cliff, but now the undercarriage is on the dirt, taking the full weight of the front of the car.

‘Damn it,’