by JL Bryan
“This is the wrong choice!” O’Shea squealed. “You’re making the wrong choice! You assaulted me!”
Ruppert walked to the door, not looking back.
“Walk away!” O’Shea screamed after him. “Walk away! You can walk away from me, but you can’t escape from Our King! Nobody escapes the King, Daniel!"
TEN
On Wednesday night at the Men’s Meeting rally, and then on Ruppert’s news report for Thursday, the lead story centered on China. The Chinese government had issued a demand that all Atlantic-alliance naval craft depart the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea, decreeing a zone of control extending twenty miles from China’s coastline.
President Winthrop was, as usual, unavailable for comment, but Vice President Hartwell issued a thundering video statement punctuated with sweeping hand gestures. He declared that “China will not intimidate or attempt to bully the United States and its allies. We will not submit to imperial terror.”
On Thursday night, they came for Ruppert.
He was nearly asleep when he heard the clomping of boots downstairs. Ruppert had only begun to sit up in his bed when they burst into the room, piercing the darkness with a dozen or more bright beams from tactical lights mounted atop their assault rifles. They wore black body armor, black masks, black boots and gloves.
Some of the beams converged on Ruppert’s chest and face, while others found Madeline sleeping beside him.
“Hands up! Hands up!” one of the Terror men shouted. “Stay where you are!”
Madeline stirred at the loud voice. “Turn off the screen,” she mumbled, then rolled away on her side.
Ruppert raised his hands, and two masked men hauled Ruppert from the bed, in the process cracking his head against the nightstand and knocking over the lamp, which shattered against the baseboard.
“On your feet!” Gloved hands grabbed him up from the wrecked nightstand and shoved him face first into the wall. They clamped his hands behind him, then frisked him, tearing at his shirt and boxer shorts.
He could see the screen next to his bed, the one that should have alerted him to intruders in his home. It was completely blank, a mindless blue like the screens at Sully’s house.
“What’s happening?” Madeline’s voice was distant and dreamy. “Daniel? Oh, Jesus, Daniel, what’s happening?” Her voice rose to a hysterical shriek. “Daniel, where are you?”
“I’m right here, cupcake.” Ruppert tried to twist his head around toward her, but he could only watch from the corner of his eye as the Terror men stripped the sheets from the bed and grabbed her up, then hauled her out of sight.
“Help! Daniel, please, somebody help me!”
“Leave her alone,” Daniel said. “She hasn’t done anything. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Who are you people?” Madeline screamed. “Make them stop!”
“It’s Terror. They’re here for me.”
“What? What have you done?” She began to plead with the men. “Please, I never did anything wrong, my husband’s a jerk. I’m a good, State-fearing woman—” Her voice became a strange gagging sound, and Ruppert could no longer make out her words.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Ruppert said. “She really doesn’t—”
A hand seized a fistful of the hair at the back of Ruppert’s head, snapped his head backward, then slammed his face into the wall.
“Shut the fuck up,” a gravelly male whispered in his ear. “You and your cow both.”
A leather bag dropped over Ruppert’s head, blocking all his vision. He felt it cinch tight around his neck, and a buckle snapped into place at the base of his throat. The musty interior of the bag smelled like old blood and sour vomit.
They slammed him into the wall again, then pinned his hands above his head. A hot, wet slime spurted onto his fingers, then hardened into tough, fibrous strands, binding his hands together.
They dragged him from the room, cracking his shins and knees on the furniture along the way. He called out Madeline’s name and strained to hear if she answered, but the hard leather bag muffled everything. He moved in complete darkness and near silence as his captors hauled him forward.
Blinded, with his hands glued together, Ruppert stumbled and fell as they dragged him down the stairs, banging his shoulder against every support post on the handrail. They marched him across his front yard. He still couldn’t hear Madeline. Whatever they did to him, he’d earned it; he’d broken the rules and gotten caught. Madeline was no danger to society, though; more a slave to it. She’d done everything she was told, killed whatever part of herself people had to kill to adapt to the world, and the last thing she deserved was to be punished on top of that.
Their marriage might have been shallow, even loveless, but she was the closest companion in his life and they’d usually gotten along well when they saw each other. She liked being married to the famous newsreader, and he liked that she kept herself busy. He didn’t want to think about what the Terror men would do to her, what methods of interrogation they might use.
They dragged him over the lawn, Ruppert trying to walk but only managing to scuffle his bare feet sideways through the cool grass; they moved too fast, keeping him off balance.
They wrapped a rubbery cord around his arms and strung him up, and then he was moving, swinging like a pendulum. He was inside some kind of moving vehicle now. He thought of the Freedom Brigades and their black cargo vans.
Fists beat at him now, pounding his kidneys, his ribs, his stomach. He was kicked back and forth among unseen tormentors, each blow swinging him towards another assailant, and each time he could not be sure where the fist or the boot would land. His body became sore and he could feel the bruises forming all over him. He could have kicked out and maybe hit someone, but he knew better than to fight back.
The beating continued for twenty or thirty minutes, and then someone grabbed his foot and stabbed a needle into his lower leg, and then he blacked out.
Ruppert awoke shivering on a hard concrete floor, his entire body aching. The air was frigid around him. He opened one eye; the other was stuck closed. His hands were still bound together.
The bare room around him was about as long as a coffin, but a little wider, and the ceiling was only about five feet above him. Light came from a single small panel overhead protected by a steel grill. Freezing air poured from a dark mesh vent next to it.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position. The only way out of the room was a smooth metal panel at one end of the room, which was about three feet high. It had no handle on this side. He pushed at the cold surface, but of course it was locked from the outside.
“Hello?” Ruppert said. “Is anyone listening?”
There was no answer. He thought immediately of Madeline. Had they beaten her, too? Was she waking up in some painfully cold little cell nearby? Maybe they had taken her somewhere else altogether. Everything else in the world was segregated by sex. Why not the gulag system?
He felt like he was deep underground, but he had no way of knowing this. He could have been on the twentieth floor of a glass skyscraper.
He sat back against the wall and drew in his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible to conserve a little body heat. The cold was already painful, and the icy air kept pouring in on him. He wondered what it would be like to freeze to death. His fingers and toes had already gone numb.
He expected that eventually someone would come for him, and he waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. He began listing all the things he did not know. He did not know where Madeline was or what they’d done to her. He did not know how long he’d been unconscious. He did not know if he was still in Los Angeles, or if he was still in America. He did not know if anyone was going to come for him, or if he would freeze to death.
After a few hours he was painfully hungry, but there was no food or water available. He pushed at the door again, then knocked on it a few times, but there was no answer.
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Time passed and his arms and legs grew numb, and his nose began to run. He wiped it on the torn sleeve of his t-shirt.
Time passed and he found himself singing, under his breath, the jingle to a laundry detergent commercial: “Keeps your blues bright blue, Keeps your whites clean and bright, Try Splash Ultra Vibrant, In your laundry tonight.” It would not leave his head.
Time passed and he thought of Sully, wondering if Sully had been through this facility, maybe even in this cell.
Time passed and he thought of all the people he might never see again. Madeline. His parents in Bakersfield, his father who’d become obsessed with golf magazines and watching golf tournaments and practicing his short game with the digital putter Ruppert had bought him three Christmases ago, his mother who took very strong pills for nervousness and spent too much too time zoned out in front of the screen, sometimes drooling.
Time passed and he grew absurdly happy they’d never had a child. Or bought a dog. Madeline bristled at the idea of “dog hair” and “dog smells” in their home. The dog would be stuck inside by himself, with no one to take care of him. He wondered what happened to the pets of those disappeared by Terror. He decided it was better to have a small dog, because they would probably kill a large dog when they raided your home. A small, fearful dog who ran and hid at the first sign of danger.
Had Sully had a dog? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t seen one at Sully’s house.
A cat might be a better choice. Cats were better survivors on their own.
He knew what happened to the children of the disappeared. Older teenagers would be interrogated, probably, but the younger ones would be given over to Child and Family Services, their fate to be decided by Liam O’Shea and his kind. He wondered what they did at the Child Salvation Centers.
He was grateful he had no children.
Time passed and he slid into a dark, comatose sleep. He dreamed he was hiking across an endless white glacier riddled with cracks as deep as canyons. In the distance, almost at the horizon, he saw Sully stooped over, trudging forward into the cold wind. Ruppert tried to call his name, but he’d lost his voice.
He awoke to a loud wailing sound that burned his cold, stiff ears. The door panel opened and two large men in black coveralls reached in and hauled him out of the cell. The cell was sunken below floor level, so Ruppert was up and over a ledge onto another concrete floor. The air here was only room temperature, but it felt like a soothing sauna to Ruppert. He sucked in a deep lungful of the warm air, then accidentally sighed as he breathed it out.
“Don't get too comfortable,” one of the men said. They lifted him to his feet.
“Sooner or later you’ll wish you were back in there,” the other said. He had a flat nose that looked as if it had been broken long ago. “Get walking. We’re not carrying you.”
The men stayed close on either side as they walked up the dusty gray corridor. More metal doors were sunk low in the wall on either side of him.
“Is Madeline here?” he asked.
The first man, who had a scar twisting from his ear to his throat, stopped him with one hand and punched Ruppert in the jaw with his other.
“First rule,” he said. “No questions. You don’t ask anyone anything. Understand that? We own all the questions here.”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?” Scarface asked.
“I don’t know what he said.”
“Yes,” Ruppert said. “I said yes.”
Scarface hit him again, this time in the gut. Ruppert doubled over, slumped to his knees, and struggled to draw air.
“What was that for?” Ruppert asked.
Scarface grabbed him by his shirt. “Did you just ask me a question?”
“Yes. No.”
“Now he’s lying,” Broken Nose said. He grabbed Ruppert’s hair and turned Ruppert’s head to look at him. “You’re asking questions and telling lies.”
They threw him to the floor and kicking at his ribs, his shoulders, his head, their boots slamming into bruises still raw from his beating in the van. When his nose was bloodied and one eye was swollen, they jerked him back to his feet and made him walk.
The first stop was a large industrial sink, where Broken Nose dropped a metal grate over the basin, then drew on a pair of latex gloves. He grabbed Ruppert’s forearms and pressed them down on the grate, so that Ruppert’s bound hands were underneath the wide-mouthed faucet.
Scarface retrieved from under the sink a large plastic jug half-filled with a brackish, dark green fluid. He unscrewed the cap and bared his teeth at Ruppert.
“Don’t move your hands,” he said. He began to pour the fluid over the sticky bindings that glued Ruppert’s hands together, which now looked like a mass of old, dirty caulk.
The clumps of binding began to bubble and steam, dripping off his hands as fluid and acrid white smoke. He watched the drops of white liquid spatter the grimy basin, burning into the dark crust around the drain. He wriggled his fingers around, making sure Scarface poured it over the large clots sticking to his palms and between his fingers.
His hands began to itch, and then to burn. The green liquid, or its reaction with the dissolving paste, was eating into the skin of his hands. He hissed and tried to draw back, but Broken Nose just tightened his grip on Ruppert’s forearms.
“Burns a little, yeah,” Scarface said. He replaced the jug under the sink, then lit a cigarette. “It’s got to get in there good if you want that crap off your hands.”
The painful burning intensified. It felt like he’d grabbed a double handful of poisonous jellyfish tendrils and squeezed them tight. The burning spread underneath his fingernails, and deep into his knuckles. His teeth ground together, every muscle in his arms seized up tight, and he tried not to shout his pain, understanding that his captors would beat him if he complained.
The bindings on his hands continued to dissolve, with a sound like frying eggs, bubbling and dripping—it looked and felt like his hands were melting away, right down to the bone.
“You know what helps with that?” Scarface said. “Water. Just plain, cold water.” He positioned the wide mouth of the faucet directly over Ruppert’s hands.
“Water does help,” the broken-nosed guard said.
Scarface touched the handle over the sink. “You want me to turn this knob here?”
“Yes,” Ruppert said.
“Yes what?”
“Please. Yes, please, sir, please turn on the water, Jesus God it hurts.”
“I think he called you Jesus,” Broken Nose said.
“Is that right?” Scarface leaned in close to Ruppert. “Did you call me Jesus? Do I look like God to you?”
“Please.” Ruppert’s voice was a pained hiss. His fingers were bent into sharp hooks. He thought he could feel his fingernails peeling away.
“That looks like enough to you?” Scarface asked the other captor.
“Looks okay.”
“I think it’s enough.” Scarface turned the knob and a broad column of cold water fell onto Ruppert’s hands, washing away the reacting chemicals and soothing his pain a little. He twisted and turned his hands to make sure everything got washed off, just as he’d been stupid enough to do when Scarface was pouring the acidic liquid.
“Make sure you get it all,” Broken Nose said. “You don’t want any bone damage.”
When his hands were thoroughly rinsed, Ruppert looked them over. A tangle of red, bleeding stripes was burned into them, from his wrists to his fingertips, and the muscles in his fingers felt very weak. His fingernails were actually intact, though a couple of them felt loose, like scales ready to be shed.
They marched him up a dusty concrete stairwell and down a gray cinderblock hall into another windowless room, which was empty except for a heavy wooden chair with leather cuffs for the wrists and ankles. They strapped him into the chair, then left the room.
Ruppert sat alone for a very long time, but with no way to judge time he co
uld not really tell if it was twenty minutes or an hour, or more. His hands throbbed; the nerves in his fingers felt as if they’d been exposed to the open air. He glanced several times at the room’s only other feature, a mildewed green curtain that partitioned off one side of the room. He could not tell how much space was behind the curtain, or if it was just a wall.
His back was to the door, so when it finally opened again, he couldn’t see his captors until they walked in front of him. Scarface placed a folding card table in front of Ruppert, while Broken Nose positioned a chair on the far side of the table, facing Ruppert. They left again without a word.
It was another long time before the captors returned, and this time they were accompanied by a man in a black-on-black officer’s uniform and cap. The left side of his chest displayed a silver skull next to two colorful rows of ribbon bars, of the kind Ruppert was accustomed to seeing on military dress. It was rare to see them on Terror uniforms.
This man was smaller than the other two, even slender, with fine blond hair and very pale blue eyes. He brought with him a large black bag, something a small-town doctor might have carried on house calls. He placed this on the table and sat down. He had not yet made eye contact with Ruppert or acknowledged his presence.
“The Captain’s going to ask you a couple questions,” Scarface said. “If you don’t play nice with him, we get to play with you.” The two large captors—Ruppert was beginning to think of them as prison guards—turned and walked away, and he heard the door close behind him.
The wiry Captain lifted out a very thin handheld screen and studied it, holding it at such an angle that Ruppert had no idea what he was reading. Several minutes passed before the Captain looked up.
“Daniel Ruppert?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re a newsreader for GlobeNet-Los Angeles.”
“Yes.”
The Captain shook his head. “We’ve always had trouble with you media people. Even now we can’t trust you. You get your face plastered all over town, suddenly you think that your personal opinion is in some way important.”
