Dominion

TWENTY-THREE

Though the bomb had only demolished a rotten, long-disused water tower, and there were no victims, Terror never missed an opportunity to flex its muscles. Over the following days, the swarm of local Hartwell cops gave way to the black coats of state and federal Terror agents, knocking on doors, inviting themselves into homes and businesses if nobody answered. Helicopter formations patrolled the sky.

Ruppert and Lucia remained underground with the others. They lived off the only available food, which happened to be a pantry of canned vegetables and rack after rack of aged wine. Occasionally Turin brought down a loaf of bread or carton of milk. They slept on nests of blankets and clothes-Ruppert had a bare foam pallet. Nobody spoke more than necessary, and never above a whisper.

On their third night underground, Ruppert and Lucia slipped off to a remote room that might have been a well or cistern in the forgotten past. They shared Lucia’s last cigarette.

“What do we do now?” Ruppert whispered. “Do we have a plan?”

“When Terror finishes beating their chests, and gets tired of kicking in doors up and down the valley, we’ll leave here with copies of your interview. We’ll pass them along to others by hand, and we’ll upload them to some people we know internationally. We have to send it everywhere.”

“People like me, or whoever has my job now, will just ignore it," Ruppert said. "If it ever got too well-known to ignore, they just call it enemy propaganda. They’ll bring in experts from Terror and an Ivy League university or two, who will explain just how fraudulent it is."

“You don’t think I know that?” Lucia snapped. “We just have to put it out there. Let people make their own decisions.”

“‘He who has hears, let him hear,’” Ruppert said. It was an expression of Pastor John’s-and, if Ruppert remembered correctly, Jesus.

“Terror will want you to die,” Lucia said.

“I was a little concerned about that, too.”

“You’ll go north, into Canada.” She didn’t need to say why they wouldn’t go south-they would never make it through the walls, land mines and guard towers along the Barrier. Originally built to keep out immigrants and refugees from the Mexican civil war, the Barrier was equally good at keeping people in. “Archer will take you, probably.”

“You aren’t going?”

Lucia shook her head. “I don’t know anything about the escape routes. Compartmentalization. And I always have more work to do.”

“I could stay and help you.”

“With Terror out for your blood? You wouldn’t really be an asset. Sorry,” she added.

Ruppert felt a gnawing discomfort in his gut. He’d lost his entire life, and even as unhappy as he’d been, he felt rootless and without any purpose. Going north might be his best hope of survival, but then what? He’d be alone in some remote, frozen place-he would never be able to return to a city, with all the security systems picking up his image. Terror could find him as easily in Vancouver as they could in Los Angeles.

He thought of Liam O’Shea, the pudgy man with the rubbery smile who worked at Child and Family Services. Ruppert had been thinking about him off and on since they’d stayed with Dr. Smith in the desert.

“I can help you,” Ruppert said. His voice was very low.

“You’ve helped us enough,” she told him. “You should go north.”

“I mean about your son.”

She shook her head and turned away from him. “Don’t talk about that. I should not have told you.”

“I know someone,” he said. “A senior case analyst manager, or some arrangement of those words, in Family Services. He’d have access to their databases, probably even from home.”

Lucia looked back at him. Her mouth was trembling, from anger or from fear. “He would help me?”

“No. I think I could make him help.”

Lucia stared into the dark, then shook her head. “It won’t work. Terror will be looking hard for you, and he’ll know that by now.”

“That’s not the point. I have an idea of how we could-”

“Don’t speak about this to me again.” Lucia glared at him. Her eyes were wet. “Never mention my son.” She threw the cigarette stub on the floor and left the room.

Lucia stopped speaking to Ruppert. After several days, Terror lost interest and the agents in black faded away. According to Turin, the news media had settled on blaming unspecified Chinese agents, allegedly trying to spread fear and disorder along the West Coast. There would likely be more attacks, or so the Department of Terror warned the nation.

“Fear,” Turin muttered as he recounted the official narrative. “Keeps the swine in line.”

The underground rooms had initially seemed to Ruppert like a good and fortunate place to hide, but he was beginning to feel more like a prisoner. There was a restroom but no bathing facilities, and everyone looked dirty and unshaven. They slept in the same clothes every night, and the rooms took on an odor of sweat and stale air. Lucia still refused to talk to him, and that made the dark rooms even more suffocating.

At last, Maya judged that the federal dragnet had ended, and people could soon begin to leave. Each one would leave in a different direction, smuggling thousands of tiny discs on which Turin had copied the interview. Ruppert heard there was more evidence on the disc, linking Westerly to a high-level official in the Department of Terror. He didn't ask to look at it. He'd done enough journalism.

Ruppert visited the room he’d avoided since the interview, where Hollis Westerly remained locked in his cage. Westerly looked more decayed than ever, coughing up lumps of black and letting them drizzle through his beard stubble onto his scabby chest, staining an image of Thor’s hammer there. The air smelled sick and greasy, like rotten fat.

Ruppert thought about those around the world who would see the interview. Ruppert and Westerly would be linked together for all of history, if history survived Terror. It wasn't exactly the legacy Ruppert would have chosen for himself.

“Looks like we’re going to be famous,” Ruppert said to him. Westerly looked up with hazy eyes under drooping lids. A cigarette with a two-inch ash rested in the crotch of his fingers.

“Ain’t you famous no how?” Westerly asked.

Ruppert remembered that, as far as Westerly knew, Ruppert was still a working newsman. Apparently it had never occurred to Westerly that the news was as scripted as any sitcom, and a real story like this would never break there.

“Did they put me on the TV?” Westerly asked.

“Not yet. We’re putting together a special event.”

“Like the Super Bowl?”

“Yes."

"Always wanted to be big onscreen."

"Tell me something…" Ruppert began, then hesitated. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the man's answer. "Don't you ever have any regret?"

"For what?"

Ruppert wanted to scream and kick at the man's cage. "What you did. Columbus.”

“Well, sometimes you do,” Westerly said. He noticed the long ash in his hand and shook it, breaking it into gray dust. “Yeah, people died. But that’s war."

“Even if you helped start the war?”

"We didn't start it. White man got to struggle to survive, against them others."

"You realize that it was a psychological operation? You were a pawn? It actually had nothing to do with your personal cause or beliefs. You were completely manipulated. You get all of that?"

“Hey, I get it…somebody had to do it, though. Needed to be done. Fetch me them blue pills.” Westerly gestured towards a folding table littered with medication and empty food cans.

Ruppert looked at the shrunken, dying man with the Nazi insignia tattooed into his flesh, frightening and ludicrous all at once. Anyone could see Westerly was sick in the head as well as the body. But was he really that different from anyone who was happy to see millions die for the sake of his own sacred brand of stupid bullshit?

The man Westerly called Brother Zeb, whom Ruppert assumed came from the PSYCOM group Dr. Smith talked about, had gone into prison to recruit disposable men. He waved the proper symbols, and Westerly and the others obeyed him like trained dogs. Entire nations could be manipulated in the same way. Ruppert had done it himself, for a living.

"Pills. Now. Son of a bitch," Westerly growled.

Ruppert found the clear bottle of strong, dark blue pills and snapped off the lid. There were about fifty left, surely enough to kill a man. He pushed the bottle through the bars and turned it upside down, raining them down onto Westerly's piss-stained mats and rugs. A raw, feral glee lit up Westerly’s eyes as he scrambled after the rolling pills and sucked them from the floor.

“Knock yourself out,” Ruppert said, and he left.

In the early morning dark, as Ruppert slept on his now-dirty foam pallet, something grabbed his arm, and a hand closed over his mouth. He could hear the snoring of two or three other sleepers.

“Quiet,” a woman’s voice breathed into his face. Lucia. “Promise me you say nothing.”

Ruppert nodded, and she removed her hand.

“We’re leaving,” she whispered. “Come with me.” She shoved cool leather into his hand-the strap on his suitcase.

Ruppert was groggy and confused, but he’d been through enough danger with Lucia that he wasn’t about to ignore the urgency in her voice. He followed her to the room with all the disused lamps, where they’d first entered the underground rooms from the fermentation building.

“What’s happening?” he finally whispered. “Shouldn’t we get the others?”

“We’re going AWOL.” Lucia showed him a plastic keycard studded with copper bumps. “And we’re stealing Archer’s truck.”

“What do we do about my car?” Ruppert did not want Terror finding it and picking up his trail.

Lucia opened the heavy wooden door to reveal the concrete steps that spiraled up into the old fermentation cylinder in the building above.

“We’re leaving to Archer as payment.” They started up the stairs.

“Does he know Terror will be looking for it?” Ruppert asked.

“Yeah, I figured that was worth leaving a note about. He’ll just scrap it. Lots of expensive parts in there. Help me turn this.”

She placed his hands onto a metal wheel, and together they wrenched it around, opening the cylinder.

Ruppert’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he saw the room had changed since they’d arrived-there were wine crates, more machine parts, and generally a lot of scrap piled into the room, leaving only narrow footpaths. Turin and the others must have started on it just after Lucia and Ruppert arrived. The police hadn’t found the vehicle stashed here, probably because you didn’t intimidate people much by kicking around in their garbage.

“Over here,” Lucia whispered. They began stacking crates and moving aside machine pieces, including what appeared to be the entire flank of a tractor.

The work took thirty very long minutes, and then they stripped away a canvas tarp to reveal a sand-colored Chevrolet Brontosaur, a great hulk of a truck with a reinforced grill and a hardtop covering the payload. Two bumper stickers were plastered to the rear: an American flag captioned “Vote for the President,” and another that read “When the Rapture Comes, Watch Out for My Big Old Truck!”

Lucia started for the driver’s side door with the keycard. Ruppert, remembering a few of the sharp, high turns waiting out in the Sonoma Mountains-and how recklessly she’d taken them-offered to drive instead.

He steered the truck up and over heaps of scrap wood and steel mesh, grateful for the truck’s four-wheel drive. Within minutes, they were back on the road, the sky open and full of moonlight above. Ruppert felt dangerously exposed-he’d grown accustomed to life underground. He wondered if rabbits and voles felt the same way when they ventured out of the warren for a snack.

Still, he rolled down the window and breathed in the fresh night air, high above the pollution line. This, too, must be how burrowing creatures felt. More vulnerable to predators, maybe, but relieved to be out of the dank air and the reek of close, crowded bodies.

It would be a long drive back to Los Angeles, the city that was more dangerous for him than any other place on Earth. He looked over to Lucia. She had opened her window, too, and sat back with her eyes closed against her long black hair, which the wind lashed into her face.

Ruppert knew he’d made a mistake. Even if they did learn where to find Lucia’s son, the boy might be anywhere on the planet by now. Would he even recognize his mother? How long ago had Lucia lost him-five, six years? Meanwhile, Terror would see Ruppert’s interview, and they’d launch a nationwide manhunt to find him.

Still, he drove on, south towards the city.