Dominion

TWENTY-ONE

The underground room was floored with a concrete slab, but a few worn rugs and swatches of carpet softened the interior of Westerly’s cage. Scattered inside the cage were a small chemical toilet, a few bottles of water, a cot, and a few highly illegal magazines of the kind that featured people performing sex acts. Westerly rose from the pile of cushions at the middle of the cage and approached Ruppert, his chain skittering along the floor behind him.

His smile was crooked, missing teeth.

“I know you,” he said. “I seen your show before.”

“Always nice to meet a fan,” Ruppert said.

“Didn’t say I was a fan or not.” Westerly looked at Turin. “Now give me one.”

“That’ll be three today, Hollis,” Turin said.

“You said I could have one when he got here.”

Turin shrugged, then produced a crumpled pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. He passed one of them to Westerly through the bars and lit it for him.

Westerly took a deep pull, then hacked loudly. It sounded like gravel being ground to dust inside his chest. He looked back at Westerly with watering eyes.

“They got a colored boy deciding when I smoke, when I eat, when my shitter gets emptied,” Westerly said. “How do you like that?”

“It must be difficult for you,” Ruppert said. The muscles in his arms and fingers twitched as if they had a mind of their own. He wondered if some part of him was still programmed to murder Westerly, despite Smith’s efforts.

“Difficult, hell,” Westerly said, then coughed again. Blood spattered out from his lips. His eyes drifted to Lucia, who was setting up the cylindrical silver holorecorder on a tripod a few feet outside the cage wall. He took a long, slow look up and down her body. “Whose ‘at?”

“Oh,” Ruppert said. “This is, uh, Karen. Karen Andrews…son…Anderson. My camera tech.”

Westerly continued to leer at her. “She don’t look like no Karen Andrewston to me. She looks more like a Maria Gonzales. That your name, Maria Gonzales?”

Lucia ignored him and spoke to Archer, staying in character: “Can we get any more light in here?”

“Tell that Maria to come over here,” Westerly said. “Tell her come right up here and onto her knees.”

“She’s busy right now,” Ruppert said. “Mr. Westerly-is that correct? Mr. Hollis Westerly?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Daniel Ruppert with GlobeNet-Los Angeles Nightly News. We understand you have a very important story to share with us tonight…this morning.”

“Ragnarok.” Westerly smiled his bloody grin again.

“Excuse me?”

“Ragnarok. The end of time. When the wolves eat up the sun and the moon,” Westerly said. “We recording yet?”

“Are we ready?” Ruppert asked Lucia.

“Best we can do in this light,” Lucia said, giving Ruppert half a smile.

Ruppert sat in a folding lawn chair Archer had brought in for him. Westerly hunkered right at the cage wall, sucking down the last bit of the cigarette before grinding it to pieces on the concrete floor.

“What all did they tell you?” Westerly asked.

“Very little,” Ruppert answered, honestly. To be even more honest, he said, “Everybody thought it would be better if I walked into this without much information.”

“That’s all right,” Westerly said. “To tell you the real story of Ragnarok, I got to tell you about Brother Zeb."

"Who is Brother-"

"You just shut up and listen, cause I want my goddamned blue pill. I got picked up in Detroit back, oh, twenty years ago now, winter of 2014, 2015. Me and a buddy of mine knocked over this Korean liquor store. It was supposed to be quick, you know, grab up the cash and a few bottles and get out. Then the little yeller creep starts gabbing at us, all that crazy kinda talk they have, so I hit him once or twice with the butt of my shotgun just to quiet him down some. They said I broke his jaw in five places, but I didn’t believe ‘em, cause his jaw was so small it didn’t look like he’d have five places to break.

“Anyhow, just cause of this little Korean squirt, they gave me forty years up at Ionia. Don’t know what happened to my buddy. But anyway, so I got up to Ionia about the middle of 2015, almost summertime, and I got up with some of my brothers there.”

“Brothers?” Ruppert asked.

“You know, the white freedom movement. I was in the Social Nationalists down around Mississippi, but this group up in Michigan called themselves the Aryan Whitehammers. Anyhow, they followed after this big bastard named Trace McCully. So I settled in up there.

“Well, I’d been there two, three months when Brother Zeb first checked in. Nobody knowed at first what they got him for, but it turns out, the story went, he gunned down about six gang-bangers right out in open daylight. They say he only had five bullets in his gun when he did it, which is just the kind of thing you could believe about Brother Zeb.

“What I mean is, Brother Zeb weren’t one of your regular felons. He was real quiet, almost so you couldn't hear him when he walked, if he didn't want you to. He had like a puddle of quiet all around him. I remember just a couple days after he first come to the prison, one of these big homeboys decides Brother Zeb needs to be taken down a little, not that Zeb was a big mouther, not one bit, but you got this feeling he could turn water into ice if he pissed in it.

“So this big colored man, I mean four hundred or more pounds sort of big, he moves on Zeb on the way from the cafeteria. And Brother Zeb, who’s about half his size, don’t even look over to see who’s after him. He just reaches out one hand and takes that boy’s arm and rolls it up like a newspaper. I swear, right up to the shoulder. I never seen nothing like it. And Brother Zeb, he just kept on walking, didn’t even look back to see what he’d done.

“Brother Zeb, we knew he was one of us, had the marks, like this Viking swastika right over his heart. And most of us never met anyone like him. I thought I knew some things myself, back then, but Brother Zeb, he’d quote chapter and verse from big people like Darwin and what’s his name, German fella, Nietcheese, and like that, and he’d go on explaining how history all fits together and how the white race is supposed to rule the world. I mean, he was deep, he musta read a hundred books or more.

“Well, some of us got to hanging around Brother Zeb, listening to all his ideas, and that made old Trace McCully more than a little jealous, because here’s all these people start listening to this other guy, who everybody knows is smarter than Trace. Question is, is he tougher than Trace? Trace was all gut and muscle.

“Finally Trace tells us we can’t talk to Brother Zeb no more, cause he’s trying to mess with our heads and all, but everybody knew Trace was jealous about maybe he wasn't alpha wolf no more. And the day after that, the guards find Trace tied upside down on the door of his own cell, all cut open and bled out, kind of like Jesus only with his feet in the air. And nobody could prove Zeb did it, not even them guards, and it told us a couple things about Brother Zeb. First off, he was tougher than Trace, by a long sight. Second off, he was sneakier than oiled shit to pull a trick like that without getting caught. And third, the way he done Trace, it was almost respectable, not like shiving a man in the back at lunch or what have you. It was an honor killing, if you understand.”

“Sure,” Ruppert said. At the moment, he felt particularly grateful to have metal bars between himself and Westerly.

“After that, we spent lots of time with Brother Zeb, listening to him preach about the white man's natural rights over all them mongrel races. He talked about how the liberals and Jews control the media, and they used it to confuse us about our real place in history, and to hide all the animal ways of the lower races. He was a good talker, Brother Zeb. That’s why we got to calling him Brother, anyhow, cause he was like a real holy man. A white prophet.

“The whole time, it was like being in prison didn’t matter none to Brother Zeb. He could get what you needed. He talked against drugs, said we ought to keep ourselves pure for the upcoming race war, but still, if you needed a little something, he could always get it for you. High-grade stuff every time.

“Brother Zeb was always going and having long talks with his lawyers. He was only there about five, six months before he got out. I guaran-damn-tee ya these weren’t no public defenders, cause those fuckers never want to talk to you about nothing but signing some deal with the prosecutor.

“Then we started to see how there was more to Brother Zeb than he let on. In the three months after he left, those of who was closest with him, about twelve of us, we each got out of prison one way or another. Some folks got paroles they wasn’t expecting, and things like that.”

“How did you get out?” Ruppert asked.

“That was the strangest thing. Here I am, first year in a forty-year stay, and Brother Zeb calls me on the phone-I wasn’t even allowed to take phone calls at the time, cause the guards was mad at me over some damn thing or other-but somehow they decide to let me take this phone call from Zeb. And he says he’s bought this big farm out there in Idaho, and he’s looking to build up something called the Church of the White Creator, about protecting the heritage of the white race, and would I be interested in helping him out there?

“Well, Zeb, I said, I sure would, but I ain’t getting out until I’m an old man. And then he said, it was like scary how calm and quiet he said, ‘Anything can be arranged.’ But, he says, I got to promise to stick with him no matter what, which by then I woulda done anyhow, I reckon.

“And I don’t know, two, three days later these funny lawyer fellas show up wanting to talk to me. Three of ‘em. They said they was from the Liberty and Sanctuary Foundation, and what they did was go around the country looking at arrests and trials and seeing how to get folks out of prison cause of the government’s mistakes. They got together and went over it with a judge, and I never understood a damned thing they was talking about, and to tell the truth I weren’t even there for most of the time they talked to the judge. But the upshot was I got out of prison on what they said was a ‘semi-permnant trial basis,’ which wasn’t like parole cause I only had to check in with these lawyers instead of a regular P.O. It meant I could always go back to prison, any time, but I might never. I never heard of nothing like it before or since. Tell you the truth, I never heard of the Liberty and Sanctuary Foundation before or since, neither.

“So them lawyers give me an envelope with three hundred dollars cash and a bus ticket out to Eden, Idaho. By then I was so hell-bent to put the back of my ass to the state of Michigan that it didn’t occur to me just how it was them lawyers knew where I was going.

“Turned out Brother Zeb’s place was a house and some big barns on a lot of land, away from everybody. All walled in, too, big wooden walls all around the place, like a damned Civil War fort.

"Most of the others from prison was already there by the time I showed up. They throwed me a big welcome party, lots of beer, roasted a pig, even had a few stripping girls Zeb brung in from the city. I never had a time like that in my whole life.”

“What were they doing up in Idaho?” Ruppert asked.

“Training, mostly. Brother Zeb said we had to get ready for the race war, which was gonna be the final conflict for white dominion. We learned to use some different machine guns, sleek things out of Asia, and we learned about explosives. There wasn’t nothing Brother Zeb didn’t know about. He taught us things like how to avoid the police out on the road, and get through all kinds of security, surveillance-type set-ups. How to move around in big cities without getting caught, cause he said the race war would be urban war.

“We trained like soldiers for Brother Zeb. And he made each of us into what he called a Knight of the White Creator, a race warrior. He made a big deal out of that. You’d go out into this little barn back behind the main house. You have to cut open a hog’s throat, and he’d paint these bloody swastikas all over you, you’re naked with all them other guys watching you. And you had to say all these big things about loyalty and death, and things like that, but real fancy. But we was all believing in him then, and I guess it meant something to all of us, being part of a thing like that.”

“Did you ever check in with your lawyers?” Ruppert asked.

“Naw, Brother Zeb said he’d take care of all that. Said them lawyers was friends of his. You was grateful to him for getting you out, but sooner or later you also figured out it meant he could send you back to prison if you got him sore at you. Didn’t none of us worry about that once he made us into Knights, though.”

“Where did the money come from in all of this?” Ruppert asked. “How was he paying for it?”

“Some of us did talk about that, a little,” Westerly said. “A few said he musta got it from drugs, but I never thought that. He never flashed anything around. I never saw a dollar in his hand the whole time. Things just showed up. There was always plenty to eat, plenty to drink, plenty of ammo.” Westerly gave another blood-clotted grin. “Plenty of women, too. He’d bring in a whole group of ‘em every once in a while. Sometimes it was just a few and we had to share, but that was all right.”

“Where do you think he got the money?”

“Back then I figured he was born rich. He talked so fancy and all, and just had that easy way. Of course, now I’d say it was probably your tax-payin’ dollars at work.”

“Why do you say that?” Ruppert asked.

“Well, I was gettin' to that point, if you’d let me talk for one minute.”

“I apologize,” Ruppert said. He glanced over at Lucia, who slumped in a folding lawn chair next to the holorecorder, staring at Westerly with bulging eyes, utterly indifferent to her alleged camera operation duties. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair, as if she were feeling ill. It might just have been the hoggish stink in the room.

“It was about the summer of 2016 things started to change around Brother Zeb’s place. It started with the visitors. These fellas in good black suits come by any hour of the night and hold these long secret meetings with Brother Zeb. We kept asking him what it was all about, and one of our study nights, instead of looking at Mein Kampf or whatnot, he up and told us.

“Brother Zeb, he said we got more support than we ever knew about. He said there was powerful men from way high up who wanted to help us along, but thing was, they had to be secret about it cause of all the Jews and coloreds and liberal media and so on. He told us about it was gonna take a great big national emergency to really get the whole thing rolling. He called it Ragnarok, the end of history. He said after Ragnarok, it would be a, what did he call it? ‘A new order for the ages.’ He said Ragnarok was our sacred duty.

“Then it all got real strange. The compound went into lockdown, gates sealed up, no one in or out without Zeb’s permission. No more stripping girls from the city, neither, I'll tell you.

“And I don’t know how to tell the next piece except to just say it right out. One morning in June, musta been, these two big Move-It trucks pull up to the gate. A buddy of mine used to call those ‘Move-It-Your-Damn-Self’ trucks. Anyway, Zeb let ‘em in, and they parked inside the barn out behind the main house. That’s when Brother Zeb said Ragnarok was comin'.”

Westerly broke down into a chain of coughs that wracked his whole body. He wiped the blood from his mouth, looked at it, smeared it across the grizzled gray hairs of his chest.

“Hurts to talk anymore,” Westerly said. He looked to Turin. “Gimme one of them pain pills. The good blue ones.”

Turin removed a brown pill bottle from his jacket. He popped the lid, looked inside, shook it around. “I’ll give you a white one for now.”

“Aw, come on, there, homeboy."

“You can have a blue one when you’re done.”

“But I need a blue one now,” Westerly whined. “Come on.”

Turin tipped the bottle, and a white capsule rolled out into his palm.

“Just the white one,” Turin said. “When you’re done, you can have two blue pills, if you want.”

Westerly grunted, accepted the white pill, and chased it down with water from one of the bottles scattered around his cage.

“Are we getting all this?” Ruppert asked Lucia

She checked the recorder. A three-dimensional image appeared to one side of it, a miniature Ruppert listening to a miniature Westerly. “Looks fine.”

“Mr. Westerly, can you continue?” Ruppert asked.

“Shit. Guess I can.” Westerly drank more of the water.

“What was in the moving vans?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Westerly said. “The men driving them turned out to be soldiers.”

“The Army?”

“Hell, no. They was in all black uniforms, and that’s no part of the military I know about. But like that, all the same.”

“Like Terror men?” Ruppert asked, thinking of the Captain.

“Well, yeah, like them, only there weren’t no Department of Terror back then, least as I know of. What I'm saying is they was soldiers or agents or ninjas or some damn thing, you could see that plain. Now, Brother Zeb, he picks out four of us, two teams of two, and he called us the ‘primary’ and the ‘back-up.’ I was on the back-up team.

“These agents, or whatever they was, they took the four of us in the back of one truck and showed us this thing mounted up in there, a big old metal tube inside kind of a cage setup. And they said, this here’s a nuclear bomb, and we’re gonna show you how to set it off. And that’s what they did.”

"You're claiming," Ruppert said. “That some kind of government agents, similar to Terror men, gave you, a white supremacist compound in Idaho, a nuclear weapon?”

“Damn-shit yes they did,” Westerly said. “And it was real easy to blow up, way they had it set. You had to push three buttons on this remote control. Push ‘em real fast in the right order, and that’s all there was. Any dumbass coulda did it.”

“What did they want you to do with it?” Ruppert asked.

“I’m gonna tell ya, if you just gimme two seconds to get a word in. After them soldiers left, Brother Zeb set us down on the floor of his office, up in the main house, with some maps out in front of us, and he showed us how one of us teams was gonna take one of them moving trucks and drive her all the way to Columbus, Ohio-”

“Wait, wait.” Ruppert was up and pacing now. “You’re saying you did Columbus? Columbus? ” The second time he said “Columbus,” Ruppert was no longer talking about the city itself, but everything the name of the city had come to mean in the years since.

Ruppert remembered what Dr. Smith had said: You’re old enough to have noticed how these institutions arose together-the Department of Terror, the Department of Faith, the Dominionists, the Freedom Brigades. Ruppert had noticed. It had all been a response to Columbus, the nuclear destruction of an American city by never-quite-identified foreign terrorists.

He rubbed at his head. He could feel a sledgehammer of a headache coming.

“No, that ain’t what I’m trying to tell ya, stop actin’ stupid,” Westerly said. “What I’m saying is, he made us memorize this one particular drive to Columbus. He even told where we was supposed to stay along the way, a little motel in Nebraska, run by what he called 'friendlies.' He told us we’d take turns driving, three hours at a time.

“Then we spent some more hours looking at a map of downtown Columbus, and he showed us right where to park the van, at the City Center Mall. Said if we go by his schedule, it should be about lunchtime when we got there. We was just supposed to lock it up and leave it. He said some friends of his would pick us up right there, and they’d take care of getting us back home to Idaho.”

The feeling rushed out of Ruppert’s legs, and he had to sit down to stop their shaking and wobbling. It was obvious. PSYCOM had all its plans ready to roll out. The Articles for the Continuation of Democracy, six thousand pages long, was passed the day after Columbus, but it must have taken months to write. They didn’t position all their pieces, then just sit around hoping for an opportunity to come along.

“Why did you agree to do it?” Ruppert asked. “What about all those people-a million people?”

“I weren’t thinking about them, I guess,” Westerly said. “It was holy war. It was everything Brother Zeb had been preaching about. I was just doing my part for the country.”

“You were proud of it.”

“Yeah. But I didn’t get to do it, anyhow. The first team got going on, I can tell you the date exactly, July the third of 2016. We was all sitting at the house just waiting for them to check in, cause Zeb give ‘em a cell phone and tell ‘em to call every three hours.

“On the Fourth, Zeb said he had to run off and meet with some people, and he’d be back in the afternoon. We didn’t think so much of it, cause the bomb weren’t supposed to go off ‘til midnight. We was mainly upset he took the phone with him, but nobody would fuss about it to Brother Zeb.

“I am here and breathin' today because of the dumbest turtle-shit piece of luck. We decided we needed a couple cases of beer for Ragnarok, and we’d start tearing it up soon as the fireworks went off in Ohio. Now, Brother Zeb, he gave us strict orders that day, nobody in or out at all, everybody stay in the main house, all locked down. But we couldn’t get hold of Zeb, and we figured maybe he didn’t know we was out of beer, so I took one of the farm trucks into town.

“I still remember the look on the kid’s face at the convenience store. Skinny runt, lot of zits, mouth just dangling open. I brung all that beer up to the counter and he didn’t say nothing. He was looking at a portable television, one of them big heavy kinds they used to have, and right there on the screen it showed that mushroom cloud sitting on top of Ohio.”

“I was in Social Studies class when it happened,” Ruppert said. “Tenth grade. My teacher threw up right on the chalkboard.”

“Well, I was buying beer in Eden, Idaho, and my first thought was ‘Them dumb bastards went and blowed their asses off.’ Cause it was too early, just about lunchtime, and they shoulda just been getting to Columbus. They had to be right near that van when it went up, or maybe still inside it.

“I went back to the truck, but I didn’t even get her started when I saw this big convoy, I mean eight, ten of them big black sport-tilities everybody drove when gas was cheap, and they just tore through town right toward Brother Zeb’s place. The windows was all black so you couldn’t see nothing inside, even the windshields, and I mean tinted windshields weren’t legal even back in those days. And if I hadn’t noticed that, my dumb ass would have gone right back to the farm to tell the boys about the bomb.

“But I could see what was happening. We was set up. They done blowed the van with J.T. and Billy still inside, and then they was sending these others to kill off the rest of us. And that’s why old Brother Zeb hightailed it out that morning, to make sure he didn’t get shot up along with us. He fucked us and throwed us out, just like a used-up rubber.”

“This is crazy,” Ruppert said, pacing again. “What did you do?”

“Same as you or anyone would have done. I put the beer in the truck and I drove off the other way. They been huntin’ me ever since.” Westerly heaved a more loud, violent coughs. “I done run from Terror all these years, and the damn cigarettes caught up with me anyhow.”

“Did you ever see any of the others again?” Ruppert asked. “From the compound?”

“Oh, hell no. I doubt none of ‘em survived that Independence Day. We wasn’t expecting nothing to happen to us, and especially nothing like that big hit squad they sent out in all them sport-tilities. I never seen Brother Zeb again, neither. If I did, I doubt I’d be breathin’ right now.”

Ruppert struggled to think of another question, but he was too shocked to concentrate. He steadied himself by thinking of all the viewers who would eventually see the video, unknown millions around the world. What would they want to know?

“How did you manage to evade Terror so long?” he finally asked.

“Just keep to the poor places, mainly,” Westerly said. “Places they don’t have time to watch too carefully, cause there ain’t nothing worth watching. Keep outta the big cities, that’s the most important thing.”

“What do you think about all this, now that you know what it was really about? And after Zeb’s betrayal?”

“I'm glad we did it," Westerly said. "I think it was a good thing, in all. An important thing." Westerly sat back, sighed, and coughed up a fresh spatter of foamy blood, which dribbled down his chin. "It was real important to everybody, wasn't it?"