by JL Bryan
“Even worse,” Wayne said. “We don’t have time to turn back.”
“You two go and look for him,” the young woman said. “We’ll wait here.”
Wayne grumbled, but he and Ruppert turned back and walked along the way they’d come. Wayne swung his head back and forth as they walked, in case Sully had managed to lose his glowing necklace.
After they’d backtracked for ten or fifteen minutes, Wayne said, “Look, he’s lost. We can’t risk everybody for him.”
“We can’t leave him,” Ruppert said. “He’d never find his way out. He’s—wait!” Ruppert grabbed Wayne’s arm. “Look back…more to the right…”
The beam found Sully, who had indeed managed to misplace his own light source. He stood back in a slight concave nook, where the tunnel had turned to avoid a bank of solid rock.
Sully was staring at his watch.
“Let’s grab him,” Wayne said.
“Wait,” Ruppert said. “Let me do it. You might panic him.”
Wayne snorted, but he stayed in place as Ruppert approached Sully, trying not to make any sudden moves.
“Sully?” he whispered. “Sully, it’s Daniel.”
Sully continued to stare at his watch. A red light pulsed on its face, about once every second. Sully appeared transfixed by it.
“Sully, look at me,” Ruppert said. “We have to keep going. Everyone’s waiting.”
Sully didn’t move. Ruppert reached out and covered the blinking light with his hand. Sully gasped, looked up at him.
“Daniel…Ruppert?” Sully asked.
“That’s right. Sully, we have to stay with the group—”
Something thin and sharp stabbed into Ruppert’s left side, into the soft tissue just underneath his lowest rib. At first he thought it was a wild animal, maybe a mountain lion, though it felt more like a shark. Then Sully raised a polished stone knife and stabbed him again and again, the blade hacking into the ribs along Ruppert’s left side, as if Sully were trying to break through into his heart, but kept missing and gouging Ruppert’s abdomen instead. He thought he could feel hot blood in his own stomach.
Ruppert stumbled back, trying to get away, but Sully’s left hand gripped Ruppert’s right arm and refused to let go. Sully stabbed him again and again, his face blank, drooling a little from the corner of his mouth.
Behavior modification, Ruppert thought, instantly remembering how Terror had programmed him to murder Hollis Westerly. Which, on reflection, he might have accomplished before leaving Maya Kendrick’s defunct vineyard.
Ruppert tried desperately to remember how Dr. Smith had deprogrammed him. There had been a keyword, a master word that George Baldwin had used to gain instant control over Ruppert’s mind.
“Racca!” he shouted into Sully’s face. “Jesus, Sully, Racca, does that work on you?”
The stabbings slowed, then stopped. Sully released him, and Ruppert slipped to the dirt floor, which felt muddy and warm. His own blood.
“Sully, wake up,” Ruppert said.
Sully blinked and looked down at him, then looked to the pointed stone blade in his right hand, drenched in Ruppert’s blood.
“Oh,” Sully said. “Oh, fuck, Daniel.”
Ruppert could see him clearly in the light from Wayne’s helmet. He turned his head and saw Wayne standing where Ruppert had left him, watching, hands at his side, eyes wide in astonishment.
“I’m so sorry, Daniel, oh God,” Sully muttered, and Ruppert turned back to him. “They made me. I forgot. I forgot or I would have said. They made me do it.”
Ruppert coughed, and it hurt. He shuddered.
Sully raised the blade again, staring at it.
“They made me do it, Daniel.”
“I know.”
Sully tilted the blade to look at the bloodied tip. Then, his face blank again, he plunged the knife into his own throat.
“Sully!” Ruppert reached for him as he sank to his knees. Ruppert looked back to Wayne. “Are you going to help at all?”
Ruppert heard a thunderous, rumbling sound, and then Lucia and Nando bolted into view, followed by the other travelers and the young woman who’d been leading the group. All of them ran while looking back over their shoulders, panic on their faces. Ruppert tried to push himself to his feet, but he had no strength in his legs. He’d lost a lot of blood.
Light flooded the tunnel, as if the sun had risen in the underground world, shining down from little buzzing drones overhead. Rows of armed men in faded green uniforms marched after them, wielding machine guns.
“This is the United States Army,” an amplified voice announced. “Border Patrol. Get down flat on your faces. You move, we shoot.”
The travelers dropped to their knees, then lay prostrate on the floor. Lucia gripped Nando’s hand. A team of soldiers approached the alcove where Ruppert and Sully lay, each soaked in their own blood. They lowered their weapons.
“What the hell happened to you?” one of the soldiers asked Ruppert.
“I think I’m dying,” Ruppert said, and then the world turned black.
TWENTY-NINE
When Ruppert finally awoke, he lay on a mattress no thicker than a towel against a hard, flat surface. He had almost no strength, but leather cuffs bound his arms to cool metal rails. Everything in his abdomen ached.
He opened his eyes to see gray cinderblock walls. Clean white bandages bound up his torso. Plastic green curtains hung on either side of his narrow hospital bed. Machines monitored him, included a convex black lens for video surveillance. Fluids fed into his arm from a clear bag suspended overhead.
He lay for a long time, trying to piece together what had happened, wondering if Nando and Lucia were safe. He doubted it, but someone had gone to the trouble of giving Ruppert medical care, and that gave him a little hope. Beyond the curtains, he heard groans and a few snores. There were many others in the room with him.
“Where am I?” Ruppert asked aloud.
“The land of no return,” someone answered off to his left. Someone else forced a laugh.
“Are we in Canada?” Ruppert asked.
There was another, snorting laugh. Ruppert didn’t attempt further conversation, and neither did anybody else.
After more than an hour, a pair of crewcut young men, eighteen or nineteen years old, appeared in threadbare green US Army uniforms. They looked back and forth between Ruppert and a digital clipboard.
“That’s him,” one of the soldiers declared. An obese male orderly appeared with a wheelchair, and the soldiers helped him move Ruppert into it. They strapped Ruppert’s arms to the arms of the chair.
“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.
“Time for your interrogation,” a soldier said. “Do yourself a favor. Cooperate. Don’t give them a bunch of trouble. Tell them whatever they want to hear.”
“Okay,” Ruppert said. “I'm familiar with the program.”
They rolled him down a long, crowded hallway lined with bed-ridden patients along both walls. The patients wore flimsy paper gowns, and most looked heavily sedated. The facility smelled of rot and disease. Streamers of dark mold grew in the upper corners of the hall.
They rode up in a freight elevator, and then the soldiers wheeled Ruppert down a long, white corridor to a black door. It slid aside, and they pushed Ruppert into a white cube of a room, where two black office chairs faced each other across a lozenge-shaped black desk. They moved aside one of the chairs and wheeled Ruppert into place. And they waited.
After about twenty minutes, a section of white wall at the far side of the room slid back, and a man in the black tie, shirt and suit of a Terror agent entered. He was probably in his sixties, but he was very lean and fit, his eyes like blue ice under close-cropped silver hair. He seemed familiar to Ruppert.
“That’s all right, boys,” he said to the soldiers. “You can go on. He’s no danger.”
The soldiers saluted him, then pivoted and marched out of the room, the orderly lumbering after them.
/> The Terror agent sat down across the desk from Ruppert. He touched the slick black surface, and a row of glowing white digital documents appeared beneath his fingertips, many with images of Ruppert alongside their text. He perused them at a leisurely pace, ignoring Ruppert. It was several minutes before he spoke.
“Accessing illegal foreign data,” the man said. “Reneging on an agreement with the Department of Terror. Assault on a high official of the Department of Child and Family Services, for the purpose of accessing classified data. Assault and murder of a military school instructor. Forced entry into said military school, where you kidnapped a ward of the state, detonated explosives, killed two guards and injured several more instructors—all of this while publicly chanting terrorist slogans over an intercom.
“Manufacturing and disseminating terrorist propaganda. Finally, attempting to exit the country illegally.” The man’s eyes burned into Ruppert, who thought the room had grown colder. Maybe it actually had, to intimidate him. “Even if we provided you a trial, you’d have no chance of surviving. You face a long, painful public execution. You are a terrorist, Daniel Ruppert.”
Ruppert said nothing. Now he recognized the man: he was the one who’d been in George Baldwin’s office at the GlobeNet studio, while Ruppert was hypnotized. The one Baldwin had made him forget, until Dr. Smith deprogrammed him.
“Dr. Reginald Crane,” Ruppert said. “That’s right, isn’t it? The 'doctor' for economics, not medicine.”
Crane sat back in his chair. “Correct.”
“They called you Duckers in school.”
Crane’s lips curled into a slight snarl.
"Short for 'Duck-fucker'?" Ruppert added.
The man leaned back in his chair, folded his hands, sighed. "You've picked up a thing or two since we last met." He looked Ruppert over carefully. “There is no need for secrets in this place. On my part or yours.”
“Okay,” Ruppert said.
The man sat very still, and then he asked, “What else do you know about me?”
“You’re Brother Zeb,” Ruppert asked. He made the connection even as he said it aloud. This was why the man had been so interested in him, why he’d come to Baldwin’s office at GlobeNet, why he was here now. "Of the white supremacist national church, or whatever you called it."
The man's smile was tight and cold. He unknotted his tie, then unfastened the top three buttons of his black silk shirt. He exposed his chest to Ruppert, revealing a faded tattoo of six Viking swords arranged in a swastika. “I had most of them removed with lasers, naturally, but this one I kept as a souvenir. Those were heady days."
“You programmed Sully to kill me,” Ruppert said. “And himself.”
“Oh, no, that was a slight bureaucratic error,” Crane told him. “Once your little video emerged, standard protocols went into action.”
“That was standard protocol?”
“For a target as stubbornly on the run as yourself, one takes several precautions. But it wasn’t my group. We are highly compartmentalized, you understand.”
“Terror?”
“Above that.”
“PSYCOM?”
"I’ll admit now, we did lose you entirely on a few occasions. The woman you traveled with, Lucia, she is quite capable. I’m considering recruiting her for our side. What do you think?”
“She would never.”
“All people are vulnerable to persuasion."
“Like Hollis Westerly?”
Crane offered a small smile. “You feel pity for him, don’t you? A beast like that.”
“No. I feel pity for everyone who died in Columbus. The people you murdered.”
“Naturally you do. It would be inhuman to feel otherwise.”
“Why did you kill them? So many?”
“It isn't as though we took pleasure in it," the old man said. "It was collateral damage. A necessary act of war.”
“That’s what Westerly said.”
“It’s what I told him. War surrounds us all. Some of us learn to inhabit it, to move with it, but no man controls it. Do you fault a sailor for the violence of the ocean, or for learning to navigate the storm?”
“You don’t feel anything?" Ruppert asked. "Remorse?”
“Everyone feels remorse at one time or another,” Crane said. “But we have medication for that. You’re focusing on one event and missing the broader picture. Columbus was necessary to protect and preserve the nation.”
“You protect people by murdering them?”
“You aren’t listening, Daniel. I said we were protecting the nation.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
Crane summoned a holographic keyboard, then typed at it. A three-dimensional representation of ancient Rome appeared on the desktop, with stone aqueducts from the mountains feeding into fountains among colorful marble buildings.
“This is from a PSYCOM training manual," Crane said. "Do you know what finally destroyed the city of Rome, Daniel? What caused it to become uninhabitable?”
“Uninhabitable?” Ruppert asked. “I read the population was about 10 million people.”
“You misunderstand. I meant the ancient city.” Crane passed a finger through a miniature aqueduct, and it broke, heaving water out into the mountains far outside the city walls. “Invading barbarians—Goths, if you care to be specific—besieged the city and broke all the aqueducts. They broke the aqueducts, you see, that fed the city, that made the Roman way of life possible. Without water, there could be no city. Never mind who won that particular battle. Without water, the population fell from a million to ten thousand. The greatest city in history became a ruin, home to only sheep and bandits living among abandoned palaces. You saw Las Vegas, didn’t you?”
“Okay,” Ruppert said. “But what does Columbus have to do with aqueducts?”
“Everything. In our case, it is not loss of water we fear. You know what we need, though, do you not?"
"Oil?"
"Loss of petroleum would lay waste our cities. Should we fail to secure the necessary hydrocarbons, and fail to protect the intervening supply lines between there and here, every city in America would resemble Las Vegas in a matter of weeks. No commerce as we know it. And imagine our military—the tanks, the planes, the navy, all useless lumps of metal.
“To protect the nation, we must be willing to fight off all competitors, great and small. We are the mightiest beast in the jungle, Daniel, but the mightiest beast must fight hardest to survive. It is the largest, therefore its needs are the largest, therefore it is, paradoxically, the most vulnerable. You see?”
“You think nations need to make war to survive?”
“Nations do not make war,” Crane said.
“They don't? I'm maybe too medicated right now."
“It is war that raises up nations, war that makes them powerful, war that destroys them. War is the survival competition among human beings, the driver of our evolution. It does not begin or end, though we artificially mark beginnings and endings to particular wars. The nation itself, Ruppert, is simply a long, sustained act of war, in which one group plunders both its own population and foreign lands. It is simply life, the competition for resources, and we cannot help if that is life's inherent condition.”
“Now you're claiming to be moral?” Ruppert asked.
“I am not,” Crane said. “Morality is for structuring and ordering society. Human beings, like animals, are not good or evil, but amoral. We are capable of good or evil acts at any time. It simply depends on circumstances. Look at your background. Not only did you carry out the various criminal acts I described earlier, but for several years, you made a good living spreading propaganda for us. You have murdered a few men, but you have lied to millions.”
“I’ve tried to atone for it,” Ruppert said.
“And you’ve failed. This little interview with Hollis will have no effect, I assure you. No one will believe it, unless they are already predisposed to believing such a thing. For most people, we will c
ontinue to tell them what to believe. We will tell them they are morally superior, that they love peace, but unfortunately this is a time of war, and one must support one's leaders. And they will continue to believe it. Because they need to believe it, Daniel, and at a biological level, they know it is necessary for the survival of the group.”
“If people want war anyway, why do you have to lie to them at all?” Ruppert asked. “Why invent threats? Why not just say, ‘These people have oil, and we need it, and we're stronger, and we’re taking it.’ Why wouldn’t people support that war, if what you say is right?”
“Because we also must live together for the sake of commerce,” Crane said. “Morals are necessary for, as I said, internal organization to support the war machine. The rule of every state rests on two things, Daniel: force and myth. Without force, myth is just words and images. Force without a supportive myth, however, will not last long, because it has no legitimacy among the people. No state can rule by myth alone, or by force alone.
“The role of PSYCOM is to generate the necessary myth—an ongoing myth, extending into the fourth dimension—that is, a mythical narrative. Every war is a war to protect God, country, and family. We exist in an ongoing clash between good and evil, in which good means ‘us’ and evil means ‘them,’ the others who control the resources and supply lines we need.
“What is it that forms our sense of identity, as Americans or as Englishmen or anything else? To which elements of history do we refer? Would you agree that America’s identity was forged in the Revolution, the Civil War, the Second World War, and in the struggle of freedom against terror?”
“That sounds right,” Ruppert said.
“And what do these events have in common?”
“They were all about the struggle for freedom,” Ruppert said.
Crane snorted. “The bigger picture, Daniel, is that they were all wars, weren’t they? Cataclysmic struggles over the question of who would rule whom. Our sense of being a people, that holy sense of patriotism, is generated by war and war alone. What is there that defines a nation beyond its wars?”
