Dominion

by JL Bryan

  Something crashed in the master bathroom down the hall, perhaps Liam's gilded toilet-paper stand. Ruppert checked the time on the screen. O'Shea's wife could be home any minute.

  "We need to get out of here," he said.

  “One minute." Lucia inserted the "jaguar" virus-injection plug into a jack in Liam's desk.

  The image on the wall screen wavered, broke into chunks, and vanished. The screen flickered and flashed random colors. A screeching sound tore through the room’s speakers.

  "Irregular function, irregular function," the soft Italian tenor sighed.

  “Do we have time for this?” Ruppert asked.

  “I need the carnovirus to destroy the remote server at Child and Family, too," she said. “If they know what we searched for, they’ll know where we’re going.”

  When the screen turned lifeless and black, Lucia finally pulled the jaguar plug. They hurried towards the stairs, but she paused on the top step.

  “Did you loot him?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Did you check the weird fat man for cash?”

  “It didn’t cross my mind.”

  “Wait here.” Lucia returned down the hall, into the master bedroom. Ruppert stood on the steps for what felt like hours, watching out the plate-glass window for Mrs. O'Shea to come home from whatever club or social activity she was attending at Golden Tabernacle.

  Lucia finally returned, holding up a roll of greenbacks. “Twelve hundred seventy,” she said. “That’s worth waiting for.”

  “Do you mug everyone?” he asked as they rushed down the steps.

  “A bushel of my enemy’s grain is worth twenty bushels of my own,” Lucia said. “Sun-Tzu.”

  “Who?”

  “You ever read anything that isn't teleprompted?”

  They jogged out into the backyard, where the children were fighting over control of the still-running garden hose. They hurried to the arched gate, but Lucia turned back. This time she approached Liam’s children, unsheathing her black knife.

  “Don’t!” Ruppert called after her. "What are you doing?"

  She ignored him. The children saw her approaching, and they dropped the hose and backed away from her, staring open-mouthed at the blade.

  Lucia knelt down next to the wading pool and sliced it open from lip to base. The pool deformed into an oblong as gallons of water poured out the deep cut in its side.

  Liam’s daughter watched the water escape with mounting horror. She looked up at Lucia, whose eyes were still concealed behind the dark glasses, and she screamed. She turned and ran into the house, calling for her father.

  Lucia ran towards Ruppert. “Hurry up, let’s go!” she shouted.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked as they passed through the gate to the driveway.

  “No adults,” she said. “Kids can drown in those little pools."

  “Great,” Ruppert said. “We have about fifteen minutes before Hartwell-brand cops come flying in from everywhere."

  “Less than that.” Lucia snatched the keycard from his hand. “Better let me drive.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ruppert had been exhausted after the eight-hour drive from Sonoma to Los Angeles, but now the threat of Terror kept his adrenaline high. Lucia drove, leaving him nothing to do but tap his fingers, search the radio, and check the rearview for police. In the past weeks, they’d kept to back roads and out of the way towns, but today they rode interstate 10 to put the city behind them as fast as possible. The sprawl scrolled on and on: West Covina, Pomona, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga…and he still felt caught in the city’s tentacles. He hoped they didn’t hit a checkpoint.

  He activated the display screen in Archer’s dashboard and found that Archer had decent mapping software. No GPS, of course, which would have required an uplink and left the truck vulnerable to tracking, but plenty of road and terrain maps assembled from last year’s satellite images. Once they were well away from the city, they could make a good part of their trip off-road. Lucia had been smart to steal Archer’s truck.

  At last the concrete gave way to sand and rocks. They again would cut through the Mojave Desert, but Lucia did not want to detour and check on Dr. Smith.

  “He might tell me this is a bad idea,” Lucia explained. “He might even change my mind. I can’t risk that.”

  They stopped in the town of Yermo for fuel and basic supplies. Water, crackers and dried fruit would have to sustain them for the rest of their drive—every stop was a risk. Lucia entered the gas station to pay with some of Liam’s cash, while Ruppert slumped in the passenger seat, a baseball cap low over his eyes, hoping he didn’t get picked up on a stray security camera. Terror could look out through any digital eyes, and they could automate an ongoing image search for his face. Or so he'd heard.

  They left the highway and kept to worn back roads as they traveled northeast through the desert. Again he enjoyed seeing the rich vistas of sand painted in warm tones by the late afternoon sun, which glowed fat and orange in the rearview. It was like another planet, a beautiful place where nobody was watching you.

  Lucia found a Spanish-language station playing traditional songs, and in time the cheerful music and the fantastically empty desert soothed Ruppert’s overstrained nerves, and gradually lulled him into a light sleep. When he woke again, he asked Lucia where they were, then checked the map.

  “That can’t be right,” Ruppert said.

  “What?”

  “It looks like you’re taking us right through Las Vegas.”

  “That is the fastest way,” Lucia said.

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Daniel, you have to switch your brain around,” she told him. “What is safe and what is dangerous have changed places.”

  “I don’t think Vegas is safe no matter whose side you’re on. Do we have any weapons?”

  “I have my blade.”

  “Great. We couldn’t be more prepared, then. One stone knife.”

  "Good for evading metal detectors," Lucia pointed out.

  "But that's not what I'm worried about."

  They stopped for a restroom break by the side of the road—once they got close to Vegas, they wouldn’t want to stop. Then Lucia claimed the driver's seat again, and they continued driving. Within minutes, the towers of Vegas became visible, illuminated by red sunset reflecting off the acres of glass windows.

  The city looked attractive until you drew close enough to see the burned-out cars heaped along the sides of the road, turning the Vegas strip into a shooting alley. They drove between high ramparts of rusting vehicles. Ruppert watched the car-piles for snipers.

  They passed a giant black pyramid, a medieval fairy-castle, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State building. All looked frayed at the edges, their facades chewed by years of bombs and machine gun fire. Scattered open-pit fires provided the only lights in the deepening gloom.

  Las Vegas was a corpse of a city. Its demise had been brought about in part by a zealous Secretary of Faith and Values in Washington, who outlawed prostitution and gambling nationwide; in part by the Western Resource and Energy Committee's stringent water restrictions on Nevada; and ultimately by water riots in the streets. Now trash filled those streets, sometimes narrowing the strip to a single lane, and gangs of armed men and women inhabited the great husks of theme parks and casinos.

  In front of a replica of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomph, the street narrowed again, and iron gates spanned between the piles of rubble, blocking the road. Men flanked the gate, armed with machine guns, dressed in berets and lacy, puffy, beaded coats that looked like they'd been designed during the late Bourbon dynasty, just before its bloody, frilly end.

  Lucia slowed as several of the longhaired, unshaven men stepped forward, signaling with velvet-gloved hands for Ruppert and Lucia to stop.

  “This is not good,” Ruppert said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lucia said. “I doubt they’re Terror informants.”

  “That hadn’t occur
red to me yet, but thanks.”

  A bearded man approached Lucia’s window, and she reached for the handle to roll it down. Ruppert wanted to tell her to stop, but what could they do? Two rough-looking male faces appeared outside his own window, their hostile glares a steep contrast to their puffy silk apparel.

  “Toll gate,” the bearded man said through Lucia’s open window. “Ride the king’s road, pay the king’s taxes."

  “What's the toll?" Lucia asked him.

  “Depends what you carry,” the bearded man said. “Got drugs? Ammo?”

  “Sorry,” Lucia said. “We have a little cash, that’s it.”

  “Cash?” The bearded man looked to his comrades, who laughed. “Cash doesn’t buy around here. We wipe with cash. Get out of the truck. Your man, too.”

  The armed men directed Ruppert and Lucia out into the dusty air and stood them against the grill of the truck. Two of the bandits patted them down and searched their pockets. More searched inside the truck. They unrolled two tarps stored in the back of Archer's truck, one printed with forest camouflage and another with desert camouflage, but were disappointed that nothing was hidden inside them. The bandits dug out the paper bag holding their food and water, Lucia’s worn, patched duffle, Ruppert’s embossed leather suitcase.

  “This one looks expensive,” one of them muttered, stroking his fingers across over the suitcase.

  “You’re welcome to the suitcase,” Ruppert said. “But the clothes inside are all I have.” He didn’t realize how true those words were until he said them aloud. He was even traveling in a stolen truck.

  “We got a million suitcases,” said the bearded man, who seemed to be the group’s leader. “People left quick, back during the riots.”

  The men had no interest in Ruppert’s thrift-store clothes, but the contents of Lucia’s duffle drew their attention.

  “What’s this here?” A bandit held up her modified remote control, the colored wires tumbling in every direction.

  “It’s for housebreaking,” Lucia said, surprising Ruppert with her bluntness. “Really only works on residential systems. Some liquor stores.”

  The man snorted and laid it on the truck’s hood. He lifted out a blue data disc the size of a silver dollar, one of fifty in her bag.

  “What are all these?” he asked.

  “It’s fifty copies of the same video,” Lucia told him.

  “Starring you?” he asked, drawing snickers and leers from the others.

  “I doubt it would interest you,” she said. “Just a historical document, really.”

  “If it’s so not-interesting,” the bearded man asked, “Why you smuggling fifty copies?”

  “Why do you assume we’re smuggling?” Ruppert asked.

  “You’re driving through Vegas, ain’t you?” the bearded man said. He looked back to Lucia. “What is it?”

  “It’s restricted information,” Lucia said. Ruppert wished she would stop there, but she continued. “Letting people know about some covert operations, state secrets, that kind of thing.”

  The bearded man stared at Lucia, then gave her a wry smile. He gestured toward one of his men: “Rico, let’s have a look at the lady's data.”

  The man named Rico was short and dark, his skin weathered by long exposure to the desert, though he looked no more than twenty. He wore data goggles over his eyes and assorted plastic and metal components strapped to his arms and belt. He took the disc in question, ejected it from its transparent case, and popped it into a console on his arm. Rico then pointed his arm at an empty, sandy patch of road beside the truck. Ruppert and Hollis Westerly appeared in a life-size hologram.

  As the interview played, the bandits ceased talking among themselves. Ruppert and Westerly’s voice echoed through the quiet streets, bouncing off the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx. More bandits emerged one or two at a time for a better look at the video, leaving their hidden guard posts, including two who’d been hiding behind the Eiffel Tower.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ruppert whispered to Lucia.

  “Did you have a better one?” she whispered back.

  When the entire video had played, the men stood in silence. Finally, Rico flipped off his projector and spoke up.

  “Terror would pay a good bounty for these two, I bet,” he said. “Whatever we wanted.”

  A couple of the men grumbled what might have been agreement, but they looked at their shoes as they spoke. To Ruppert’s surprise, most of them remained quiet, their eyes distant. Gradually they turned their attention to the bearded man, who continued to stare at the patch of road where Westerly’s image had been.

  “What are you planning to do with this?” he finally asked.

  “We’re going to distribute as wide as we can,” Lucia said. “There are others doing the same. Lots of others.” Ruppert found this to be an exaggeration, but said nothing.

  The bearded man released the disc from Rico’s arm, returned it to its case. “You have fifty copies. I’m keeping one.”

  “Of course,” Lucia said. “Make as many copies as you can, too.”

  The bearded man looked south along the strip, possibly checking whether any other cars were approaching. None were.

  “Let them go,” the bearded man said.

  “But there could be a bounty—” Rico protested.

  “Shut up.” One of the older bandits cut him off.

  “We at least oughta siphon some gas,” another bandit said.

  “Quiet,” the bearded man said. “I served four years in the Marines, in the old world. We talked about something called honor. You brats don’t even know what the word means.”

  “Sure,” Rico spoke up. “My uncle told me, greed and honor. Greed is killing someone else for your own profit. Honor is when you kill for someone else’s greed, and they keep the profit.”

  “Nobody wants to hear your bullshit, Rico.” The bearded man turned back to Ruppert and Lucia. “This is treason, and people need to know it.” He shook his head. A waxing moon was rising behind him. “We used to be a country.”

  He turned his back to them and walked towards Paris, his head low, saying nothing. The other men began to peel away. Ruppert and Lucia gathered their belongings and loaded them back into the truck, then climbed up into the cab. Ruppert started the engine, but the sentries at the gate ahead of them didn’t move.

  Ruppert leaned out the window. “He said we could go.”

  “One minute,” a sentry said, and nodded towards the Eiffel Tower. Rico was returning, holding some kind of large, red container in one hand. He wore a broad, clearly false smile as he approached Lucia’s passenger window.

  “I don’t like him,” Lucia whispered. “Tell them to open the gate.”

  “Just wait.”

  “He’s coming towards me.”

  “Have your blade ready.”

  “I do.”

  Ruppert studied the length of black obsidian resting in her fingers. Not for the first time, he considered how helpful a gun could be to their situation. Legally, only police, government agents, and specially approved citizens could own firearms, but supposedly there were a million or more still circulating the countryside. He imagined firearms stashed away, in small caches of firearms dispersed all over the country, like dry tinder waiting for the match..

  Rico approached with his unnaturally wide smile.

  “A parting gift for you,” he said. “From the mayor.”

  He held it up, and now Ruppert could make out the word stamped on the rectangular five-gallon jug: GASOLINE.

  Lucia reached for the jug with one hand, while her other hand positioned the blade just below the edge of the window, ready to strike. She accepted the jug and quickly retreated into the truck, setting it on the floorboard.

  Rico backed away, still grinning. “Drive safe,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Ruppert said. Lucia did not look at him.

  At last, the sentries used a chain-and-pulley system to open
the gate. Ruppert drove through it and on along the potholed Vegas strip, passing groups of shriveled people in rags huddled around trash fires in the cluttered streets, while moonlight illuminated the dark, soaring Roman and Chinese palaces behind them. The deprived condition of the people reminded him of south Los Angeles. He was beginning to wonder if most people in the country were living this way, and if his walled and protected suburb was the exception and not, as he'd somehow been led to believe, the norm.

  He stomped the accelerator—there would be other armed gangs lurking in the windblown city ahead, and he didn’t want to tempt any of them.

  “We have to dump this.” Lucia lifted the five-gallon gas can.

  “What? Why?”

  “He could have put a tracker in it.” She thumped the large black cap with her fingernail. “Maybe even a listener.”

  “They’re just desert people,” he said. “It was a gift. They support us.”

  “Desert people with computers on their arms,” Lucia said. “The one wanted to contact Terror for a bounty. He must have done it before.”

  Ruppert’s good mood, which had just begun to develop, now evaporated. “But the bearded guy said to let us go.”

  “Bigger share for Rico and his friends.”

  Ruppert frowned. Maybe she was paranoid, but he’d learned to be paranoid, too. “All right. We’ll pour the gas in the truck and dump the can.”

  “Not happening.”

  “We need it. We can’t afford to keep gassing up your pal’s monster truck.”

  “If he’s calling Terror, he could also taint our fuel to make us an easier catch. Probably pay him a bonus. And a tracker could be floating in there, too.”

  “You want to throw away six hundred dollars’ worth of gas?”

  “It could cause thirty thousand dollars in damage to the truck. And I prefer to be alive and free, if it all possible. Why are you slowing down?”

  “Look.” They’d reached another barricade, this one erected of I-beams, more wrecked cars, and glittering curtains hung on chainlink. Already, men with machine guns were appearing at their windows.

  Lucia rolled down the window and addressed the largest man in rapid-fire Spanish. She held up the jug, spoke a bit more, and he nodded and accepted it. He waved them through, and the sentries pulled their tangled metal gate aside.