Dominion

SEVENTEEN

Friday evening, Ruppert was in his office upstairs reading a bad murder-mystery novel when he heard a shattering crash from downstairs, followed by the sound of Madeline screaming. He’d been on edge, not believing he’d actually extorted money from Pastor John, though the man certainly had the resources. The money had magically appeared in the joint spending account he shared with Madeline-two million dollars. He had no doubt that it could disappear again just as easily, but he’d done the best he could for her.

Gathering his bathrobe around him as a pathetic form of armor, Ruppert hurried downstairs towards his wife’s shrieking voice. He did not own a gun, although he probably could have qualified for one, at least before his recent troubles with Terror.

He rushed down into the foyer, where Madeline hurled porcelain decorations from a side table at two unannounced guests. A broken lamp and two demolished vases lay on the floor near them.

“Out! Get out of my house, you whore!” Madeline screamed.

Ruppert recognized one of the two visitors-it was the sandy-haired Packers fan, though today he looked much more rough, with the tattered and stained shirt of a street person and a few days’ growth of beard. His Packers gear was gone. Ruppert did not recognize the young woman with him, apparently the target of Madeline’s wrath. Her skin had a dark caramel tone, which was enough to trigger anger or fear in Ruppert’s neighborhood. Suspicious blood, possibly tied to Neocommunist or Mercosur forces. She deftly blocked the flying porcelain objects with her forearm, which was fortunately clad in a leather sleeve.

“Benny,” she said, “What’s with the hostile wife?”

“I don’t know!” The Packers fan-whose name was Benny, apparently-noticed Ruppert and scowled. “You said she had church groups every Friday night.”

“She had them almost every night, but she hasn’t been going,” Ruppert said.

Madeline saw him on the stairs and her lips curled into a snarl behind the tangle of dark red hair smeared across her face. “You told her to come over, didn’t you?” Her hand scrabbled across the rosewood side table, but she was out of ammunition. She growled her frustration, then overturned the entire table.

Ruppert approached his wife. “Madeline, just calm down. I have to go somewhere with these people.”

“I know where you’re going and what you’re going to do!” Madeline struck out at him, trying to claw at his face with her fingernails. “They showed me. They had video!”

“We don’t have time for this.” The dark young woman raised what looked like a standard handheld remote control for the screen, but heavily modified, with strange buttons and loose, dangling wires along the sides. Ruppert was aware of beeping from the small screen next to his front door, but he was busy trying to fight off Madeline’s attack.

“Will you just listen, Madeline?” Ruppert said. “I have to go now. You’re going to be fine. There’s plenty of money in the bank-”

“I don’t want money,” she hissed. “I want my baby. I’m on a schedule, I’m on a schedule, and now you’re going to go spray it all over this…this Jezebel-whore!”

“Excuse me?” the woman asked. There was a rush of crackling static from the screen.

“Madeline, I don’t know her…Madeline, listen. I might not be able to come back. I want you to know I love-”

“Don’t come back!” Madeline jerked away from him, walked backwards towards the kitchen. “I don’t you want back, ever.”

“Madeline, that’s what I’m saying-”

She stomped into the kitchen, letting out another frustrated scream.

“We have to get moving,” the Packers fan said.

“I’m just trying to explain-” Ruppert noticed his screen. Numbers and symbols raced across it, too fast for his eye to read. The woman with the remote control inserted a circular plastic plug into the data jack beside the screen, the place where Ruppert would plug in his camera to upload video. A sticker showing a jaguar was plastered onto the plug. The screen began to sputter and flash, then turned black. “What the hell are you doing?”

“A carnovirus," she said. "It's washing your house. I don’t want any records of my face. If Terror tries to dig around, they’ll just get an ugly infection.” She removed and pocketed the carnovirus plug. "Let’s go.”

“I just have to tell Madeline-”

“There isn’t time,” the Packers fan said. “Where’s your suitcase?”

Ruppert looked between them, then heard the crash of appliances breaking in the kitchen. “One second.”

After he returned with the case, the two ushered him out of the house.

“Drop your wallet,” the woman told him. “Leave everything here but cash.”

“Who is she?” Ruppert asked the young man.

“Lucia,” the Packers fan said. “She runs extractions. You should do what she says. They can track you through your wallet.”

Ruppert emptied out the cash compartment of his wallet, reached out to lay the wallet unit on his front steps, then hesitated. Without his wallet, he couldn’t prove his identity, couldn’t access his accounts, couldn’t reach anyone on his contact list. He would be completely at the mercy of the two strangers who were taking him from his home. Beyond that, he was supposed to use the "weather" icon on his wallet screen to contact Terror. Leaving it meant breaking his bargain.

“Look,” the Packers fan said. “There’s no point in keeping it. It’s no use to you anymore.”

“Would you hurry him up?” Lucia snapped. “The police will already know his house has gone funky.”

“Sorry.” Ruppert held his wallet a moment longer, then tossed it up to the top step. His knees felt a little weak.

A patched, rusty station wagon idled in his front driveway. Ruppert couldn’t help wondering how much the neighborhood association would fine him for keeping a car like that in front of his house. The neighbors must have noticed by now. Likely one or another of them would call the police on suspicion.

The Packers fan opened a rear door of the station wagon and lifted out a puffy, hooded coat that reminded Ruppert of a life preserver.

“Put it on,” the Packers fan said.

“Why?”

“You might have a tracker implant, too,” Lucia said. “This blocks the signal until we can check.”

“I don’t think I have a…" Ruppert stopped and considered how much time he’d lost while captured by Terror, the blacked out time he couldn't remember. They might have done anything to him. He slid the coat over his shoulders, buckled it, drew the hood in around his face.

“Good luck,” the Packers fan said. “Thanks, Lucia.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the old station wagon.

“We’re not going with him?” Ruppert asked.

“We take your car. It’s got hard resale value, even if we have to chop-shop it. I’m driving. Don’t argue.”

Inside the car, she drew a small toolkit from her pocket and used a small flathead screwdriver to pry open his uplink console.

“I disabled that,” he said. He felt odd-he couldn’t remember ever sitting in the passenger seat before. “I disconnected the fuse.”

“Not good enough.” Lucia dug the screwdriver in underneath a circuit panel, then cracked it loose. She lifted it free and threw it out the window onto Ruppert’s lawn. “They install backup batteries now. You have to get rid of the whole thing.”

Lucia stepped on the accelerator, and the Bluehawk launched backwards, crashing through the low cactus hedge banking his driveway. They flew out into the street, and Lucia spun the steering wheel and stomped the brake. The car screeched to a stop just before hitting his neighbor’s mailbox. The stink of roasted rubber poured in through the air conditioner vents.

“This is a nice car,” she said. "Good pick-up."

“Okay…where are we going?”

“The desert.”

As they hurtled towards the neighborhood exit, Ruppert looked back at his retreating house, wondering if he would see it again.

As they drove east into the Mojave desert, the layers of smog gradually peeled away overhead, and Ruppert was stunned at the sight of the great vault of the sky overhead glittering with billions of stars. He had spent so much of his life surrounded by concrete, walls, and security fences that the sky had become a meaningless detail, just a dark brown smudge you might happen to notice high overhead if you happened to look up when you happened to be outside. Here the sky arced from horizon to horizon-and he realized the horizon itself was the truly unfamiliar sight, land reaching out into the night further than he eyes could follow.

He’d spent far too much of his life in enclosed spaces. Even on vacations or the occasional business trip, he and Madeline just rode inside an airplane to a another city or, at best, a walled resort on a U.S.-controlled island. Spending time in the raw wilderness was considered the height of antisocial behavior. Anyone who didn’t care to be crowded in at all times by other humans was deemed suspect.

He looked over at the strange woman driving his car. Lucia had remained quiet except to tell him to keep watch for highway patrols and National Guard, and she cranked up the stereo to the breaking point-Mozart, maybe. He didn’t know classical very well.

He guessed her age at somewhere in her twenties, probably a couple of years younger than Ruppert, about Madeline's age. It was hard for him to tell; her black eyes and long, straight dark hair marked her as a disfavored minority, probably Latino, possibly Native American. He couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable about that. What if he inadvertently said something that offended her, and she attacked him? She had a stern, serious look about her, an attitude that spoke of surviving long nights in dark and dangerous slums.

“You do this a lot?” he finally asked.

“What?” She turned down the radio.

“Our friend said you ‘run extractions.’ You do a lot of this?”

“Just something I fell into.” She shrugged, glancing in the rearview. They were alone on the highway. “Do it once, suddenly you’re an expert. People start coming to you for help. It’s sort of self-fulfilling.”

“How did you get involved with them?”

“Who?”

“With this…organization. Is that what it is?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s not like we have a name, or meetings, or, you know, a logo or something. You organize, they infiltrate. They disappear the leaders and turn over your membership list to the Freedom Brigades.”

“And the Brigades really do work for Terror? We always report them as a vigilante group.”

“Bullshit. They're paramilitary, state-sponsored. What planet have you been living on?”

“The one we just left.”

“There’s not an organization,” she said. “Just people you meet. Trying to survive. You learn who to see about fake identicards, who’s good at hacking security networks.”

“Like what you did at my house.”

“And your gate. A friend of mine made this remote for me. It's good for most residential security, for cookie-cutter suburban systems like yours. Some liquor stores, too."

“What do you do when you're not kidnapping journalists?”

“We survive." She looked at him a long moment, then said. "You meet people who are real radical idealists, but they don't agree on ideas. Mostly it’s just people on the run from Terror, or who’ve lost someone in their life to Terror. Terror makes its own enemies. And we help each other get by. Occasionally, like what you’re doing, there's an opportunity to act.”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a revolution.”

“Is that what you expected? Nobody wants to get hung at a football game. Anyway, information is the most powerful weapon. You should know that.”

“Because I work in news?”

“You call that news?”

“I read what they tell me to read.”

“And you’re comfortable with that?”

“It’s not what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be-to do, essentially, the exact opposite of what I’m doing.”

“But you do it anyway.”

“It’s the only work left. The kind of journalism that interested me doesn’t exist anymore. I just took what I could get.”

“Did pretty good for yourself, though. Topline car. House in Bel Air.”

“Actually, Bel Air isn’t as nice as it used to be.”

“Most people in the world live in tin shacks.”

“Yeah…” Ruppert looked out at the dark expanse of the desert, the scrub cactus and occasional angular Joshua trees. He liked driving out here. He wished they never had to stop. “Yeah, I know that, I just forget to think about it. It’s strange how your mind closes off after awhile.”

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you.”

“You hate me already?”

“I’ve hated you since I first saw you on the screen. You’re a liar. You just flood the world with their lies, and you smile while you do it.”

“I don’t write the stories myself. It’s just a job.”

“It’s just a job for the people who do write them,” Lucia said. “It’s just a job for the people who make them up. It’s just a job for the people who set the psy-op policy. It’s a gigantic system that’s nobody fault, because everybody’s just doing their little job.”

“I know, but-”

“No, you don’t! Without your propaganda, people would never accept any of this.”

“If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

“You’re right. I do hate you. I hate all of you up there drinking blood for a living, and then shrug and smile and say it’s not your fault, there’s just so much of that fresh blood to drink and all you take is a sip. Besides, it’s just Latin blood, Asian blood, Arab blood, African blood-it’s not like it’s real people being tortured and murdered to make you rich. Is it?”

Ruppert didn't say anything.

“Do you know how many people your machine has killed just this century?”

“It must be thousands.”

She rolled her eyes. “You are an idiot.”

“I told you I was.”

She whipped her head towards him, her eyes glinting. “You’d better not be doing this to screw us over.”

“I’m not.”

“I’ve killed men bigger and uglier than you."

“I believe it.”

“I’ve thought about cutting your throat before,” she said. “Every time I see your newscast.”

“Who did they take from you?” Ruppert asked.

“What?”

“You said most people lost something to Terror. I lost my friend Sully.”

“Nobody said I lost anybody.”

“So you’re just one of those radical idealists?”

“I don’t like talking to you.” She turned up the stereo and fixed her eyes on the road.