Dominion (32 page)

The man’s eyes narrowed. He instructed the other two to keep watch on the unexpected visitors, then dismounted and walked up into the rambling, uneven main house, which looked as if it had grown one misfit room at a time over the years—some stone, some brick, some wooden. A collection of miniature windmills spun in the front yard.

“I know what they are!” Nando sounded defensive, which amused Ruppert a little. “Alexander the Great’s horse was Bucephalus, and he conquered Afghanistan, like George Bush the Second. Soldiers used to ride them a long time ago.”

“Not all that long ago,” the man on the Appaloosa said, and his companion smiled.

The rider who had first greeted them returned, accompanied by a tall woman in a straw-colored cowboy hat—Ruppert guess this was the woman called Violet, the owner of the ranch. Her gray hair was gathered into loose, thick braids punctuated with bits of turquoise. She looked over the three strangers in the Bronto, then leaned in at Lucia’s window.

“Kipp tells me you’re travelers in trouble.” She studied Lucia’s face for a second, then looked towards Nando in the back seat. “What’s your name?”

Lucia leaned out and whispered into the woman’s ear. Violet nodded, looking to Ruppert and Nando. Ruppert didn’t know if she was explaining their story, or passing information, or using some sort of code to indicate she was a trustworthy resister. Whatever she said, it worked, because the woman hugged her and invited the three of them inside for a “late breakfast.” It was a few minutes past six in the morning.

The kitchen was clearly the biggest room in the house, arranged around an unevenly built stone fireplace at the center of the room. Violet directed them to a big picnic table that could seat twenty people at once, though none of them would be sitting in matching chairs—there were chairs of wood, wicker, bamboo, and a couple of folding aluminum seats. Two adolescent girls, one white and one Guatemalan, hurried to dish them out breakfast from an array of skillets on the brick counters flanking the stove.

Before eating, Nando said a prayer aloud: “Our Almighty King, Commander of the Legions of Heaven, Let us eat grain from the fields of our enemies, that we may grow strong on their hunger, and let our swords find their bellies empty. Amen.” Then he tore into his food, loudly proclaiming it the best he’d ever eaten.

Lucia cast a gloomy look at Ruppert.

They learned what it meant to eat like a ranch hand—the girls brought fried steak, fried eggs, fresh tomatoes, and biscuits yellow with butter. They drank hot coffee and cold milk thick with cream. After days of crackers and nuts and watery juice mix, it was a feast.

Afterward, Violet and the teenage Guatemalan girl, whose name was Ana, led Ruppert, Lucia and Nando behind the house to the long, ramshackle horse stable. They carried their luggage—Ruppert’s suitcase, Lucia’s duffle bag, and Nando empty-handed—up a narrow staircase of wooden slats into the dark loft, which was illuminated by a wide, narrow slit of a window. Violet crossed the length of the building to the rear wall, reached through the clutter of saddles, harnesses and horse blankets that hung upon it, and opened a concealed door that folded back into a dark, hidden room.

The interior of the room stank of old sweat and musty, hot air, though a little light and fresh air trickled in through a constellation of nail-holes in one wall. Fresh straw lined the floor, and on top of that people huddled together on blankets and sleeping bags in the shadows. They stirred as the door opened, but said nothing.

As Ruppert’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see the room’s occupants consisted of two families with small children, plus a few lone individuals scattered along the rear wall.

“We have a few extra guests,” Violet announced to the people in the room, who didn’t exactly applaud the news. She turned to Lucia. “We were just about to wake the children anyhow. We let them work around the farm during the day—it ends up better for everyone.”

“Of course,” Violet said. “Ana will keep an eye on them. We have workers’ kids running all over the farm, and everyone will assume they belong to someone else.”

“That’s not what concerns me.”

“If the police come, they usually want to question me, or my sister, or one of the workers. They don’t care about the kids. And anyway the kids aren’t always good at keeping quiet when you need them to, so everyone’s safer this way. Speaking of that…” Violet pointed to a small light bulb wired to a roof beam. “If that lights up, everyone must lay low and be quiet. It’s for emergencies. Follow me?”

“When do we cross the border?” Ruppert whispered his question, which drew scowls from both Lucia and Violet.

“You’ll cross when it’s time, with everyone else,” Violet said. “And I will thank you not to ask more of those kinds of questions. There’s a washroom downstairs if you need it, but otherwise please stay up here unless somebody comes for you. Are you going to be all right? I have a lot of work this morning.”

“We’re fine,” Lucia said. “Thank you so much.”

“My pleasure.” Violet closed the concealed door after her.

Ruppert looked among the others in the crowded room, smiling awkwardly, thinking of how nobody liked to talk in an elevator. He saw a lot of dull eyes and blank faces, the signs of people who’d experienced unspeakable things. A man in the back corner looked familiar to him, but it took Ruppert a minute to place him. Then he ran over to the man.

“Sully?” he asked.

Sullivan Stone barely resembled the man he’d been a few months earlier. His head was shaved, and scars twisted across his exposed scalp. Splotches of bruised purple and sickly yellow marred his face and arms. A hashwork of scars tattooed the left side of his face, and the eyelid there drooped over a staring, bloodshot eye.

“Sully. He was the one who was going to…do what I did. It should have been him that you extracted, his house’s memory you deleted instead of mine.”

“That’s Sullivan Stone?” Lucia knelt on the other side of Sully. “Oh. Wow. I see it. How are you?” She took his hand, but Sully pulled it back and folded his arms around himself.

“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.

“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.”

“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.”