Gogo dried the rinsed-out mug with a tea towel. “What changed?”
“Eamon Fields,” said Vern, exhaling an angry breath. “I think he just wanted a place where he could act out all his sick desires with the excuse of religion to justify it all. All the rules, he came up with those. Uniforms. Getting rid of the phones. Did you know once upon a time there weren’t even leaders? It was all just people cooperating. Getting along. Then he made himself the reverend and never looked back.” Vern, disgusted, shook her head. Eamon Fields took a rebellion and turned it into a gated community.
Gogo set her mug down. “You know, given the time frame, it sounds like he could’ve been a plant,” she said, voice plain, like this fact was obvious and any minute now Vern would nod in agreement. “This shit’s typical. It was the sixties, right? The American Indian Movement, Black Panthers, and Brown Berets all had government infiltrators. Why would Claws and Cainland be any different?”
Vern slung her arms around her chest and squeezed. She bit her lip raw as she stood to tread a circle around the small kitchen. “You mean like some COINTELPRO shit?” she asked.
Gogo shifted her weight. “I didn’t think—”
“We learn about it in school,” said Vern. COINTELPRO was a frequent topic in Cainland’s history classes. Students did oral presentations on the FBI’s dismantling of radical political groups under the program. When they weren’t outright murdering and framing dissidents, they were orchestrating their deaths and downfalls using undercover agents.
It was one of the main reasons Eamon started forbidding folks from leaving the compound. It was to protect against spies, informants, and provocateurs. He’d enforced a no-or limited-contact rule with outsiders because feds lurked everywhere. Vern thought of the compound’s single phone, the one in his office, so other Cainites wouldn’t have their phones bugged.
Vern quaked as the truth of it hit her. His edicts weren’t defenses against cops but ways to concentrate power in his hands. Under the guise of keeping government plants out, every one of Eamon’s rules had instead kept him, the real plant, in. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew it as sure as she could know anything. Eamon was a plant, or he’d been turned into an informant. That was what Reverend Sherman had meant about his father’s treacheries.
Vern hated herself for not realizing sooner, when it was so obvious in retrospect. Cainland’s prosperity had always been a mystery to her. If the white man was so bent against the Black man—and he certainly was—how had Eamon secured such a large parcel of land in a state deep with KKK roots and racism? How had the police never once brought charges against them for their many illegal activities?
Gogo had said last night that Cainland stank of corruption bigger than one man on an ego trip, and here was Vern’s answer. The Blessed Acres of Cain was a psyop.
“But why?” asked Vern, crossing and uncrossing her arms over her chest. “Why go to the trouble of taking over a commune—never mind that, creating a whole goddamn religion?”
But Vern knew the answer. Had known it for some time, in her own way. This was about the fungus. One of its primary effects—the hauntings—was written into Cainland’s mythology from the very beginning. The so-called detox. “We’re an experiment or something. Test subjects,” said Vern, shaking. The vitamin shots and blood draws. All of it had been part of it.
She thought of every horror tale of the night doctors. She was no different than Brother Jon and his disappearing family. Ku Klux scientists messing all up in his brain.
Gogo set her coffee down and clutched Vern’s shoulders hard. “Fuck the U.S. government and the horse it rode in on.” She tugged Vern into a vise-grip embrace, and Vern let herself be held, let her limbs go slack in Gogo’s arms.
“I can’t breathe,” Vern said, shaking her head.
“I’ll breathe for both of us.”
Vern wriggled out of Gogo’s hold and paced the kitchen, stilling herself when she remembered a long-ago night. “What?” asked Gogo.
Vern tiptoed into the living room and grabbed her bag. She searched inside and then pulled out Ollie’s beat-up computer. “This belongs to somebody who’s involved in what’s going on. Can you get into it?” asked Vern. She wasn’t sure the device still worked. More than once it had been accidentally submerged in water.
“Hacking’s not really my thing, but I’ll try to get somebody on it,” said Gogo. Vern nodded gratefully. For the second time since arriving here, she found herself wishing she’d left the woods sooner. It wasn’t a thought she’d ever voice aloud, but it turned out other people had their uses.