Black Buck(101)

Jason looked down at Trey and laughed. “Aye, Buck, get your li’l mans out my face before I stuff him in a garbage can.”

Trey, despite Jason standing a full foot above him, didn’t back down. Even though he usually walked around like a kid who’d lost his mommy in the supermarket, when it came to defending me and my ideas, he always had my back. I couldn’t have had a better partner.

“Alright, everyone chill. The good thing is that it doesn’t matter what any of you think,” I said. “It’s decided. And we’re doing it tomorrow night. If you want to be here for it, then be here. If not, be gone.”

I stared at Jason and his followers looking salty as hell in the corner. Despite still being hotheaded, Jason was doing well for himself. Unlike most of the Happy Campers, he landed a job with one of the few Black-owned startups in New York City—some Ancestry.com-like company specializing in Black DNA.

The next night, a group of us gathered in the living room. One of our veteran Happy Campers, Kujoe, typed away on his laptop, his typing displayed on every screen. The plan was to hack WUSS’s website and social media, replace their logo with swastikas, post a bunch of racist articles from far-right, neo-Nazi news outlets, and, we hoped, find some incriminating bigoted emails from Clyde and the rest of WUSS’s leadership.

Kujoe had graduated with a PhD in computer science back in Ghana and had been hacking corrupt politicians from the age of twelve. He was also a skilled SDR and worked with me at Sumwun.

“Okay,” he said, flexing his fingers. “Let us begin.”

People passed around buckets of popcorn, bags of Twizzlers, and boxes of Milk Duds.

Kujoe happily narrated as he typed. “So, last night I used a Trojan on him.”

“Damn, nigga,” Jason said. “I knew you was gay, but you into white dudes? Say it ain’ so.”

Kujoe kept his eyes on his laptop. “Not a Trojan condom, American idiot. A Trojan horse attack. I sent Clyde an email acting like I was someone interested in joining WUSS. The email contained a download link, and the obroni was dumb enough to download it, giving me access to his computer.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard as if they were dancing.

“So he has no idea?” someone asked.

Kujoe smiled. “None. We are going to take these bastards down. So now I am scanning for open ports on his computer, which”—he shimmied in his seat from left to right—“I just found. Gotcha, kwasia. Okay, we are in!”

Everyone clapped their hands, high-fived, and watched the screens open up to Clyde’s computer. His desktop photo was a portrait of Ronald Reagan.

“So,” Kujoe said, winking at Jason. “Where should we start?”

Trey stood, pointing at the screen. “Wh-wh-what’s that folder? Up-p-p-pity Campers take-d-d-down?”

“Oh, fuck these motherfuckers!” Rose shouted. “Kujoe, open that shit up and let’s blast them to pieces.”

“Your wish is my command, Queen.” Kujoe spun around, cracked his neck, and clicked open the folder.

Two seconds later, a grotesque photo filled the screen, accompanied by cartoon-villain-like HA! HA! HA! HAs.

“What the fuck?” Jason said. He grabbed one of the screens and almost yanked it off the wall.

There was a black-and-white photo of six Black men hanging from trees with broken necks as a crowd of white men, women, and children looked on with glee as if they were at the circus. The laughter looped on and on, then the screens began to go black.

“No!” Kujoe shouted. Seconds later, his laptop’s entire screen was dark. He kept punching his keyboard but nothing happened.

“What is it?” I asked, peering over his shoulder.

“A honeypot,” he whispered, shaking his head. “That folder was a trap. They just fried my laptop.”

“What do you mean?” I pressed. “For them to have set a trap, they had to have—”

“Known we were coming,” he said.

Rose walked over, hands on her hips, fire in her eyes. “So he downloaded that thing, the Trojan, on purpose? And we just walked into an ambush?”

Kujoe nodded and closed his laptop.

“But how could he have known?” Brian asked. Lines of confusion mixed with sweat on his forehead.

“Doesn’ matter,” Jason said, standing in the center of the living room with his arms stretched out. “This is what the fuck I was talkin’ ’bout. Niggas ain’ playin’ out here with this cyberwarfare shit. We need to get physical. I’m sayin’ we gotta get our Malcolm X on and stop these honkies by any means necessary.”

“No,” I said. “That’s what they want us to do. Once we get physical, we expose ourselves. Once we’re exposed, they can attack every single thing we’ve achieved. And I’m not about to let that happen.”

“So then what are we going to do?” Rose asked.

I took a second, trying to think of how to hurt Clyde where it would sting most, but drew a blank. “Listen,” I said, turning to Jason. “I know you wanna get violent, but as corny as it sounds, violence isn’ the answer. I’m sure between the two of you”—I looked at him and Rose—“you can uncover some shit about Clyde. So get creative and we’ll base our next move on that.”

“Aight.” Jason nodded at Rose. “We’ll get on it.”