South Village (Ash McKenna) Read Online Free PDF

God and State by Mikhail Bakunin, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. All of them worn and beaten and standard reading for most of the folks around here. Also, an erotic novel called The Kiss of the Rose . Which is weird, but okay.
    Underneath the books is a stack of papers, held together with a paperclip, the pages warped where they’ve been repeatedly soaked and dried and yellowed by age. The front page is a bad clipart image of a book of matches.
    Setting Fires with Electrical Timers: An Earth Liberation Front Guide .
    I flip through and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Lots of diagrams on how to commit some gnarly arson. This sets off all kinds of internal alarms. But as the son of a firefighter, it would. Even as a kid I would lecture people about the dangers of real Christmas trees and the importance of inspecting your fire extinguishers. The idea of arson is pretty fucking repellant to me.
    There are two kinds of people who come through South Village: People looking for something—themselves, adventure, a story, whatever. And then there are the people who are in the tank for the hippie lifestyle. And that can run the spectrum from Woodstock to hard activism. Magda is the Woodstock type. Old-school happy fun times. Marx is the hard activism type. I’ve never been able to peg Crusty Pete down, because we never spoke much, but unless he’s morbidly curious, this seems to be a good indication of where he lands on the scale.
    There are no notes throughout the document, but the back is filled up with careful numbers in little groupings, offset by dashes. This is probably not a good thing to leave lying around. It’s too thick to fold so I roll it up and jam it in my pocket with the flask.
    One more quick look around. Nothing else in the open. I look back to the plate and see the two roaches, which now seem to be regarding me with some level of curiosity. Like maybe I’m edible. I kick a chair and duck in case they attack, but they scramble away and disappear.
    I get down on the floor and check under the chair and the table, to make sure there’s nothing taped under anything. Other than that, there aren’t really any places to hide contraband. Not that it would be easy to find. The shrooms are one thing. If Pete really wanted to hide harder drugs, he probably hid them well enough that they won’t be found without physically tearing this place apart.
    That finished, I step onto the platform that serves as the front porch, which doesn’t give me room to do much more than stand. Look down and there’s Crusty Pete. He’s closer to the tree house than he is the tree that held the ladder. His body is lying perpendicular to the path of the bridge so I can’t tell if he was coming or going. I consider jumping down but it’s too high, so I go back through the window and climb down the branches until I’m on the ground.
    I walk around the tree, careful to avoid looking at Pete’s body, because I don’t want to look at it. I don’t like the way it looks. It reminds me of what happened in Portland. The way Wilson arced through the air off my fist and cracked his neck against the bumper of his car. The way his body felt as I carried it through the woods. Woods that looked a little like these woods, and suddenly the wave hits, roaring in my ears, pulling me down into the dark...
    I try to focus on something else. I go to the bridge and take a knee next to the rope. Thick, brown hemp that probably would have been period-specific for Temple of Doom . It shrinks when it gets wet, which is why they soak it and dry it before using new bundles. That reduces the amount it’ll shrink when it rains. But I can’t remember the last time it rained, and I don’t even know if that would create enough tension to break it.
    The rope is frayed so I twist it back together, to look down the length of it. To see if I can glean anything about how it tore. This is going to mean checking the four other