Dominion (26 page)

Ruppert took Liam down the hall to the master bedroom.

“God won’t forgive you for this,” Liam said. “God sees everything, and He won’t forgive you. Why are we going into my bathroom? What will you do to me in my bathroom?”

Ruppert pushed Liam into the long walk-through closet connecting the master bed and master bath. He shoved a washcloth into Liam’s mouth, then bound his hands and feet behind him with bed sheets. He left the man lying on the tiled floor of his bathroom, bleeding from his stomach and the side of his head, whimpering. Ruppert turned out the bathroom light and closed the door.

Back in the office, Lucia knelt on the floor, weeping, no longer the murderous creature she’d been only minutes earlier.

“What’s wrong?” Ruppert dropped to a knee beside her and lay a hand on her back. She turned, flinging her arms around his neck, crushing herself against him.

Ruppert looked up at the wall screen. A large window occupied most of it. The window displayed a picture of a handsome boy of nine or ten, with the same black eyes and light caramel skin as Lucia. He had a shaven head and wore a tan military-style uniform. The picture was captioned GEORGE LIBERTY.

“Nando,” Lucia whispered. “They even gave him a new name. A stupid new name.”

“It will be all right,” Ruppert said. He read the text underneath the picture. George Liberty, or Nando, had been raised at the Goblin Valley School for Males in Goblin Valley, Utah. At Ruppert’s request, a further description of the school appeared: “Proactive specialized pre-training in desert and mountain combat. Counterinsurgency. Central Asian linguistics and geography.”

Further down the list, he saw George Liberty’s “discarded name.” Fernando Luis Santos.

He asked for an expanded health report, and the screen presented him with details and pictures from Fernando’s last medical inspection.

“He’s in really good health,” Ruppert said. “What’s wrong?”

“He does not know his name,” Lucia whispered. “He will not remember me. They have remade him into one of them.”

“Not everyone takes to the program. We can go to this school place. We can get him. You’re his mother, you have rights.” Ruppert ordered the computer to print laminated maps of the Goblin Valley compound, annotated with the details of their security system.

“Rights? Are you serious? Are we calling a lawyer first? Is that how you would handle this?”

“We can get him out,” Ruppert said. “That’s what you do, right? Disappearing people from Terror’s screens? Extractions?”

“That is a full-fire military school, Daniel,” Lucia said. “In the middle of the desert. Thousands of armed boys trained to kill. We would need a large team of very good people. And a helicopter. And also, half the team would need to be at least a little suicidal.”

“Terror’s going to kill me anyway, right?” Ruppert gathered the maps from Liam’s printer. “So, really, I don’t have to worry about death anymore. Today, this week, next month—whenever. I’m already dead. It’s really like being invincible, if you think about it. Like you’re already acting from the beyond the grave.”

“Quiet,” Lucia said.

“I could be in Vancouver right now,” Ruppert said. “Smoking hash with Eskimos. But we came back for Nando. If you’re thinking about going to get him, I just happen to have nothing to lose.”

Lucia pushed herself to her feet. “Oh, no. We’re going to get him. Helicopter or not.”

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 occurred 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.”