by JL Bryan
“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?"
TWENTY-TWO
After the interview, Turin carried the holorecorder into another room to burn copies onto discs and cartr
idges, to begin the distribution process. A mass of copies would be made for the safest the method of distribution, hand-to-hand, and eventually the interview would be uploaded to websites and newsnets throughout the world.
Archer led Ruppert and Lucia upstairs to the main house, where they emerged from behind the false wall of a closet in a dusty first-floor bedroom. They sat at a plastic-coated redwood table while Archer busied himself frying eggs and toasting bread. Ruppert was exhausted.
“I can’t believe any of that,” Ruppert said to Lucia. “Do you think it's true?”
“We know it is,” Lucia said. “We spent the last two years searching for him.”
“How were you able to find him when Terror couldn’t?”
“Terror is best at watching the obedient,” Lucia said. “We’re better at finding people running for their lives, since we usually try to help them out.”
"This non-organization is sounding more and more organized," Ruppert said.
"People make their own order." A wheelchair-bound woman with long, graying hair rolled into the room. The first thing Ruppert noticed was the stunning beauty of her face, and the second thing he noticed was that she looked strangely familiar.
“Order must be made and abandoned as we go," she continued. "Don’t burn my stove down, Archer.”
“I don’t believe you can burn a stove, Mrs. Kendrick,” Archer replied. Ruppert tried to remember: Kendrick, Kendrick…
“If anybody could…” She shook her head, then focused on Ruppert. “This is our reporter?”
“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Daniel, this is Maya Kendrick. This is her vineyard.”
“Not much of a vineyard any more,” Maya said.
“Maya Kendrick!” Ruppert said, then felt himself blush. He’d actually fantasized about this woman when he was a teenager. “You’re the movie star, aren’t you?”
“I was an actor, when the world was different,” she said.
“I thought they took you in the purges,” Ruppert said.
