by JL Bryan
“That’s right. It’s Daniel Ruppert.”
“Oh.” Sully’s gaze drifted away for a few seconds, then fixed back on him. “Is it time to…do a show?”
“No, Sully, no more shows. We’re down to reality now.”
“Yeah.” Sully stared at his own dirty shoes, where the tips of the laces looked chewed. He’d lost a significant amount of muscle mass, leaving him shriveled inside clothes that were too large for him. The clothes themselves were odd choices for Sully: corduroy pants that didn’t reach his ankles, a big t-shirt featuring characters from the kids’ cartoon Dog Soldiers.
“Jesus, Sully,” Ruppert whispered. “What happened to you?”
“Re…programmed.” Sully took a breath and made an effort to speak up. “You were my friend.”
“I am your friend, Sully. It’s good to see you again. I'm sorry you’re hurt like this.”
“Reprogrammed,” Sully said again, “I’m deviant. They made us…they injected us, and they made us do…bad things…"
“I’m sorry,” Ruppert said.
“They asked about you,” Sully said. “They asked if you were, you know, disloyal to the state, and I said no, but then they burned me more, and I said yes. They made me say that about a lot of people. They had cameras recording it. I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t worry, they’re after me for worse than that. Your friend Archer came and found me. You remember him, don’t you?”
“Did they get him, too?”
“No, he’s fine. I just saw him a few days ago.”
“I did love him,” Sully said. “The doctors said I shouldn’t anymore.”
“It’s all right, Sully.”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“Yes. I just saw him.”
“Hope he’s okay.”
“The project you planned with him,” Ruppert said. “We did it. It worked. The word’s getting out there.”
“We were supposed to go north together.” Sully looked at his watch. “Now I only have one thing left to do.”
“What’s that?” Ruppert asked.
“Huh?”
“You said you had something to do. What is it?”
“Oh, yeah. Canada. I have to get to Canada. Can you help me to Canada, Daniel?”
“You’re already on the way. How did you get here?”
“They dumped a bunch of us on the street. St. Louis. Or Chicago. Or Minneapolis, I think. They didn’t want to feed us anymore, or something. They said—I don’t remember.”
“What happened then?” Ruppert asked. “Can you remember after that?”
“I went to—I don’t know, Daniel. I can’t keep track. I was in a hotel room with a dog on the wall. A painting of a dog. Some people helped me out with money, and they sent me here. Or some other people sent me here later, from the bar.”
“What kind of people?”
“Just people. This is really hard, Daniel.” The strain of trying to concentrate turned his face red and drew deep furrows in his brow. His right fist opened and closed, opened and closed, as if a muscle inside it were having spasms.
“It’s all right, Sully. We can talk later. Do you need anything? Water?”
Sully shook his head.
"Sully, you were right," Ruppert said. "About what I always wanted. You gave it to me. The big story. The truth that changes the world. My old teacher Dr. Gorski would be proud of us. We're journalists now, not reporters."
Sully blinked a few times, and his lips moved soundlessly. Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall.
Ruppert and Lucia sat on the hay-covered floor next to Sully. They remained quiet for a long time. Ruppert didn’t feel like talking. Seeing his friend all but incoherent, his mind broken up into unrecognizable pieces, chilled any comfort Ruppert might have taken in reaching this next step toward freedom.
Later, Violet returned and motioned for Ruppert and Lucia to follow her. She led them back to the main house, into an upstairs sewing room with a small video screen.
“I thought you should see this. It’s been playing on all the newsnets. Don’t worry, my nephew fixed it, or broke it, so nobody can look out through it.” She turned on the screen, accessed a news site (GlobeNet - Salt Lake City), and clicked the blinking TERROR ALERT icon.
Ruppert appeared onscreen in a way he’d never appeared in a newscast—disheveled, tie undone, a growth of stubble on his chin. He looked dirty. A Chinese dragon with a red star on its forehead filled the background behind him. The video effects group had done excellent work.
“It is time we admit the truth,” the digital Ruppert said. “America is weak and broken. America will fall. We must throw ourselves on the mercy of the great nation of China, a society thousands of years older and wiser than ours. They are closer to God than we are. We should adopt the Chinese way of life as our own, and beg China’s forgiveness for the crimes and provocations waged of our own evil, terrorist government.”
“This isn’t really you,” Lucia said.
“No,” Ruppert said. “But it’s on the news, so it must be true, right? I guess we can assume they’ve seen the Westerly interview. So they set up the narrative that I’m an anti-American, terroristic, apparently pro-Chinese, traitor spreading propaganda. They won’t broadcast the real video, of course, but it prepares people to dismiss the Westerly interview in case they do see it.”
Lucia shook her head. “That is diabolical.”
“In the news business, we call it muddying the stream—flooding them with so much conflicting information they don’t know what to believe. George Baldwin, the Terror agent at my studio, called it releasing the antibodies. You swarm the unwanted bit of information and surround it, steer it your own way, kill whatever leaked. That’s how you keep the official narrative intact.”
“What interview are you talking about?” Violet asked. “Who is Westerly?”
“I’ll show her.” Lucia ran outside, then quickly returned and gave Violet one of the discs. “We have more copies. I can leave some with you. It’s best to distribute these hand to hand instead of online, if you want to avoid Terror.”
Violet led them down the hall to a bedroom with another, older video screen, assuring them it was not connected to anything but its own hard drive. She closed the door and inserted the disc.
As Violet watched the video, her knees shook and she sank down to sit at the foot of her bed. She was in tears as the interview ended, but she didn’t look away. She stared at the blank screen for a few minutes.
“None of it was real,” she finally whispered. She looked to Ruppert. “None of it was ever real.”
“There’s an organization called PSYCOM,” Ruppert said. “Defense, or intelligence. They wage psychological warfare on the world, and that includes us. They have everything, the media, the schools, the big Dominionist churches you have to attend. The Department of Terror is a front for them. They went rogue, or maybe they were following orders, I don’t know, but Columbus was their project.”
“But why?” Violet asked. “To our own people?”
“To make us afraid,” Lucia said. “So they could remake everything.”
“This makes me more afraid,” Violet said, gesturing at the screen. “I’ve never been this frightened.”
Ruppert looked at the black screen. “Even this works for them, doesn’t it? It shows us how ruthless they are. What if it only intimidates people, and they keep quiet?”
“They will have the truth,” Lucia said. “It never goes away. It stays inside you.”
“I think it’s going to stay inside me a long time,” Violet said. “I’m not sure I’m glad I know this. I thought things were bad enough before.” She stood up. “We need to move fast. You need to get out of this country right away. I’ll see if I can move things up a day or two. Until then, you better get back up to the hideaway. Try not to let anybody see your face, Daniel. Even folks around here can’t always tell the difference between truth and not.”
&
nbsp; TWENTY-EIGHT
They spent two nights in the hidden room above the stables, and Ruppert quickly grew accustomed to the sounds of the horses stomping and neighing below, and even the animal smells that reached up into the loft. They made him feel alive and, for the first time since his childhood, like he inhabited a world with some measure of sanity.
Violet, as it turned out, lived in the main house with her sister and her sister’s four children, as well as an assortment of dogs. Violet or one of her nieces delivered meals and jugs of water to them four or five times a day.
Ruppert and Lucia passed the time with the old paperbacks on the room’s only table, most of them missing both front and back covers. In the evenings, they listened to Nando and the other children describe in hushed, awed tones the goats, horses, cows and chickens they’d helped tend around the farm. Nando seemed to be adapting well, except for a tendency to bark orders at younger children.
The travelers also played cards with each other, using decks supplied by Violet. Nobody talked about their past, or how they’d arrived there, and Ruppert began to feel ashamed of how he’d questioned Sully in front of the others.
In fact, they only wanted to discuss one subject: Canada.
“I’m going to learn how to build those igloos,” one of the lone men said. “You can build an igloo, you can live anywhere. Get a couple of dogs, you’re set.”
“You go and sleep with dogs if you want,” said another lone traveler, Tarvis, a hefty black man with a Southern accent. “I’m finding me a French-speaking women, and live up in the mountains.”
“No woman who speaks French would go and live in the mountains with you,” the first man said.
“Fine with me,” Tarvis said. “I’ll move into her place.”
Violet stopped by to tell them she’d advanced the schedule: they’d be leaving a few days earlier than expected. Since she’d kept the original schedule secret anyway, Ruppert didn’t see the point, but he thanked her for it.
“Are you kidding?” Violet said. “You’re the most wanted man in the country. It’s a danger to my family, keeping you here.”
Sully continued to have trouble with his speaking and his memory. Occasionally he would blank out in the middle of a meal, his mouth sagging open, partially chewed meat or bread dribbling from the corner of his lips. Ruppert would hurry to clean him up. Sully twitched his fingers and hands constantly, unable to calm down, checking his watch nine or ten times per minute. It made the others nervous, and they tried to avoid him.
When Ruppert asked Violet how Sully had arrived, she said he’d come through some contacts of hers in the east, but refused to disclose any information more detailed than that. “You know how things are,” she’d said. “It’s best to stay discreet about your friends. It’s part of being a friend, don’t you think? I’ll do the same for you,” she added.
After talking with Ruppert about the Bronto, Violet had one of her workers deliver the truck to a junkyard owner she knew in Billings. He returned with cash, seven thousand dollars of which she gave to Ruppert and Lucia. Ruppert had insisted Violet keep a portion of the money for herself, and she assured him she'd already taken the liberty.
On their third night, Violet and her two oldest nieces arrived just after sunset and ushered everyone out of the stables. They led them into the long, caged trailer of a cattle truck. Violet’s nieces walked to the front of the trailer and pried loose a section of one of the interior cage walls. They lifted it out of the long indentation in the aluminum floor in which the wall was set. Then they reached into the indentation, and Ruppert heard a series of clanging, snapping sounds.
Ruppert and the other adults helped them lift up two panels of the floor, revealing a shallow, hidden cargo bay. The travelers—illegal immigrants, now—would have to lie underneath the floor, side by side, for the entire journey.
“Are you driving us there?” Ruppert asked Violet.
She shook her head. “Best if you don’t see the driver, and he don’t see you.”
The travelers lay down, Ruppert next to Lucia, Nando on the far side of her. Everyone’s luggage and sleeping bags was arrayed at their feet. Violet and her nieces replaced the floor panels, and Ruppert heard the clicking as they replaced the wall. They waited for several long minutes in silence and darkness, and then a low thunder rolled across the floor above them, as if someone were tumbling boulders through the truck. They would be riding underneath a shipment of live cows.
“Are we in Canada yet?” one of the children whispered in the dark.
It was another twenty minutes before the truck finally revved up and began to move. Soon the hidden compartment was hot and sticky with body heat, and it stank of oil and gasoline, and eventually, fresh manure. The road jostled them constantly, jarring Ruppert’s spine.
The long, uncomfortable ride took more than an hour. Ruppert whispered to Sully, making sure he was handling the uncomfortable, frightening situation. Once, the truck idled in place for a painfully long time, and Ruppert wondered if they’d been stopped by the police, but nothing came of it.
Eventually the road got rougher and steeper, and they were sliding into each other, as well as banging elbows and knees against the walls of the compartment. Ruppert took a sharp jab in the ribs from Lucia’s elbow.
Then the truck stopped, reversed direction, pulled forward, reversed direction again, jostling everyone back and forth. Sully groaned. Ruppert was feeling a little ill, too.
Finally, there was heavy thumping above, and then a clanging sound, and then one of the floor panels above them lifted free. An unfamiliar young man in overalls, probably in his late teens, stood above them.
“Come on,” he said in a low voice. “Everybody grab your stuff and get moving.”
They climbed up from the compartment, Ruppert helping Sully to his feet, Nando impatient to get out into the fresh air. Cows occupied half the cages in the truck. A young woman about the same age as the boy in coveralls stood in an opened cage, luring in a cow with a bucket of grain. This must have been the cow that had been positioned on top of them the entire drive.
They exited through the open doors at the back of the trailer, into a cool, rocky corridor that slanted downward into darkness. Its shape was too regular to be a cave, and it was framed with wooden support beams—maybe an old mine shaft, or just a hastily built smuggling tunnel.
Much of the truck was not visible. The last several feet of the trailer extended through a wide square opening not much bigger than the trailer itself. Ruppert got the impression that the area behind the opening was not the outdoors, but some kind of darkened building, maybe a warehouse. He didn’t ask any questions.
“This is everybody?” The girl who’d been leading the cow away jumped down from the trailer. She wore a pair of tall hiking boots. “We go the rest of the way on foot. I’m going to lead, and Wayne here is going to be the last in line. Stay between us and you’ll be safe.”
The young bearded man—Wayne, Ruppert supposed—opened a backpack leaning against a wall of the rocky corridor. He lifted out a thin plastic ring wide enough to be a necklace, twisted and shook it, and the ring flared a glowing green. He dropped it over the head of the nearest child, who still looked pale and sick from the ride.
“Everyone takes one of these,” he said. “It’s going to be your only light for parts of the trip.” They passed the glowing green rings out to everyone, and then two young guides put on spelunking helmets and flipped on the lights set into them.
“We’re going to be walking for about an hour,” the young woman said. “When we come back up, we’ll be in Canada. There is transportation waiting on the other side, but we can’t be late, so let’s get going.” She turned and walked several yards down the tunnel.
They gathered their things and followed, Sully moving a little slow and having trouble with his balance. Ruppert took his luggage, which consisted of a dirty nylon bag that cinched with a drawstring, and carried it for him.
“Are you r
eady to walk, Nando?” Lucia asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve done a lot of cave maneuvers before.”
“That makes one of us,” Ruppert said. “Keep an eye on your mom and make sure she stays safe.”
“I will, sir.”
Sully was already falling a few steps behind. Ruppert could see the young man at the end of the line staring at Sully and shaking his head, recognizing he could be a problem.
As promised, the tunnel was lightless, and increasingly cold, the only light provided by the guides' helmets and the glow rings around each person's neck.
He and Lucia kept Nando between them. They’d attempted to hold his hands throughout the walk, but the boy refused, so they settled for keeping a close eye on him. Like everyone else, he appeared as a disembodied, glowing green head floating through the dark.
Ruppert looked around at the floating green heads. “Where’s Sully?”
“I don’t see him,” Lucia said.
“What’s the problem now?” Wayne asked.
“Sully,” Ruppert said. “The guy who was with us.”
“Oh, the retard?” Wayne looked around. “Shit.”
“Sully?” Ruppert called. The word echoed away in both directions along the tunnel.
“Don’t do that,” Wayne said. He slowly pivoted around, panning the light in a circle. Sully was no longer with the group.
The group had stopped moving and gathered around the young woman guiding them. She walked back to ask what was happening.
“We lost the retarded guy,” Wayne said.
“He’s not retarded,” Ruppert said. “He’s been through a behavior clinic.”
