by J L Bryan
Nobody knew what Terror could do, because Terror operated behind an absolute black shield of national security. There were only rumors and the occasional news report: “The Department of Terror has arrested a group of leftist terrorists in San Diego.” Leftist usually meant Latino. Jihadi, of course, always meant Middle Eastern, while imperialist always meant Chinese.
As the Dodgers took the mound, Ruppert’s doorbell rang. It sang out an instrumental of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” played on what sounded like wind chimes. Madeline refused to change the doorbell sound, even though she could choose from thousands at the touch of a button. After four years, Ruppert thought, even Jesus would be sick of that song.
Ruppert stepped into the front hall and saw Sullivan Stone through the window pane by his front door. Sullivan waved, just as enthusiastically as if he’d been an invited guest. Ruppert went to answer the door, puzzled, unable to think of a plausible reason for Sully to show up at his wife’s party.
Ruppert’s house identified Sully and announced in a melodic voice high above Ruppert’s head: “Sullivan Stone, and guest Brandiwynne Hope. Ms. Hope has not visited your home before. She is a nonfamous entertainer. Sullivan Stone is your co-worker at GlobeNet. Both are nonscheduled guests today.”
Ruppert paused long enough to roll his eyes before opening the door. He vaguely recognized the name Brandiwynne Hope, mainly because it was outlandish even for an entertainer. She would be the latest in Sully's endless stream of model/singer/actresses that appeared and disappeared at his arm, each of them a seductive commercial for herself, Sully cool and indifferent as they came and went. The girls were of the type still drawn to Los Angeles for its faded mystique as the entertainment capital of the world, a position it had long ago yielded to Tokyo and Mumbai. Terror men controlled the dying film studios.
Speculation ran back and forth among the men at the office about Sully’s wild success at dating-dating, because no one would dare accuse another of premarital sex crimes without strong evidence. Privately, Ruppert doubted that Sully was ever interested in any of the beautiful ladies who accompanied him.
He opened the door.
“Daniel!” Sully thrust a brown-wrapped bottle into his hands as he swept into the front hall. After him followed the sort of person Ruppert expected-long blonde hair, wide eyes like blueberries, her mouth a bit redder than might be accepted at one of his wife’s church groups. She wore tight denim overalls tucked into thigh-high leather boots, a fashion unfamiliar to Ruppert, if it was a fashion.
Ruppert unwrapped the bottle-Signorello, a Napa wine, bottled in
2010.
“You brought wine?” Ruppert asked.
“Wine and Brandiwynne,” Sully said. “Have you met? She’s cutting a studio setlist with Haisako. A very big, breakout hit. Or it will be, next month.”
“Nice to meet you, uh, Brandy.”
“Brandywynne,” she corrected him. “Brandywynne. Brandywynne Hope.”
“Right. What kind of music do you play?”
“Rust.”
“Is that a…genre?”
“Hey!” she shrieked, pointing at Ruppert. He turned, half-expecting to see a feral rodent swooping down at his head. “You’re that news guy, right? The one that comes on before Sully?”
“That’s how I’m known to the greater Los Angeles area,” Ruppert said. "That guy before Sully."
“Wow! So, yeah, what’s the news today?”
“I’m off today. The kids take our place on the weekends, at least until they’re trained up enough to take our jobs. You’d better come back and meet my wife.”
Ruppert led them through the living room, where a few heads turned towards Brandiwynne and quickly swiveled back to the screen. Ruppert cast a questioning look at Sully, who had only visited his house once before, at Ruppert and Madeline’s housewarming four years ago. Sully held up his index finger and raised his eyebrows. Ruppert had no idea what he meant by it.
The garden club women, who had broken into small, chattering groups, fell silent as Ruppert emerged with Sully and Brandiwynne. They eyed the pretty, unnamed younger girl with cold suspicion.
“Ladies, you all know Sullivan Stone-unless you avoid my newscasts as well as Madeline does.” This brought one or two laughs, which were instantly quashed by hard glares from the other women. “And this is…Brandiwynne Hope, a new rock star-”
“Rust star,” Brandiwynne interrupted.
“-anyway, a musical genius, from what I’ve heard people tell me recently.”
Madeline took Brandiwynne’s hand and smiled, but her eyes were like smoldering green coals when she glanced at Ruppert.
“So nice to meet you. I’m Madeline. We’re just in the middle of a private cheese party.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Ruppert,” Sully said. “We were just passing through Bel-Air when I remembered Ruppert mentioning you were having a party today, and I just really, honestly, needed to see the end.”
“The end?” Madeline asked.
“We’re up by two, but it’s just moving into the bottom of the eighth and the Pirates have that new pitcher, Marshall What’s-his-”
“Fine, fine,” Madeline said. “Men to the den. We can take care of Miss…Hope?”
“Brandiwynne. Brandiwynne. Brandiwynne Hope.”
“And what sort of music do you sing?”
As they walked toward the door, Sully whispered to Ruppert: “Is there a screen in your bedroom?”
“Yeah,” Ruppert whispered back.
“Where can we go?”
Ruppert thought of his house-the den, the guest bedrooms, the small screen set into the kitchen wall. “Follow me.”
Ruppert’s basement was mostly underground, the floors and walls lined with cold, flat stone. Probably faux-stone, but it felt real to the touch. He slid his hand along the smooth surface until he brushed the touchpad, bringing the ceiling bulbs to life. Sully closed the door before following him down the steps.
“What’s going on, Sully?”
“Are you sure we’re safe?”
“From who?” Ruppert asked.
Sully just looked at him.
“There's no screens down here."
"Any kind of media link?"
"Just my old college furniture."
“Listen, Daniel,” Sully whispered. “I need your help, but first I need to know if you'll keep a secret. A serious one."
“Sully, what are you-”
“Just-please, all right?”
Ruppert saw that Sully was sweating hard now, his hands trembling. His eyes slashed back and forth between Ruppert and the basement door above.
“Okay, Sully, just calm down. It can’t be that bad.”
Sully breathed out something between a snort and a laugh. “That bad, that bad…Listen, Daniel, you’re probably right. We’ll say you’re right. Then help me out?”
“I’ll help, Sully, Jesus.”
“I can trust you? Swear to God and the flag?”
“I…yeah, Sully, I swear.” The childish expression unnerved Ruppert. He began glancing furtively at the door, too, though he’d done nothing wrong. Not yet.
“Okay. I thought so. Great.” Sully lifted a thin wafer of plastic from his pocket and held it out to him. A long chain of numbers and letters was stamped across it.
“This is…what?” Ruppert asked. “A data slide?”
“A contact code. Just type it into your web interface. I mean, not your interface. Not here. Do it from a cafe.”
“Why?”
“Don’t do it yet!” Sully glanced at the door again. His hair, matted with sweat, drooped into his eyes. “This is just in case.”
“I don’t understand, Sully.”
“In case it happens to me!” Sully yelled, then winced at his own voice. Whispering again, leaning in close to Ruppert, he said, “If they come for me. If I disappear. Then I want you to call. From a safe line. Voice only.”
“Nothing’s safe, Sully. I have a wife, Sully.�
�
“Don’t involve her.”
Ruppert looked at the digits-forty-three numbers and letters. It was a phone number, but nobody used the actual numbers anymore. You just told your screen who to call and it called.
“Who will this connect me to?”
“He’s a friend of mine. A really good friend, Daniel, and I don’t want anything to happen to him. If they come for me, call him. He can give you what you always wanted.”
“What?”
The basement door swung open, and a graying man in a beige sweater vest looked down on them.
“Oh,” the man said, taking in the sight of them huddled in the basement. “I was looking…for…the men’s room?”
“Second door on your right,” Ruppert said.
“Yes, thank you.” The man remained in place. “Should I close the door again, or…?”
“It’s fine,” Ruppert said. He heard his own heart pounding in his ears. “Thanks.”
The man’s gaze lingered on them as he stepped away.
“Be careful,” Sully whispered. “Don’t mention this again. Remember, only if they come for me.”
Then Sully raced up the stairs and out of sight. Ruppert stood in his basement, puzzling over the slice of plastic. What you always wanted. What did Sully mean by that?
SIX
On Sunday, after a long church service and afternoon groups (Womanly Virtues and Duties for Madeline, Family Leadership for Ruppert), Ruppert suggested they eat their usual early Sunday dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant, the Laughing Dragon. Madeline bristled.
“Wouldn’t that be unpatriotic now?” she asked. “You heard Pastor John-the Chinese are making more threats.”
“The Hans aren’t Chinese agents,” Ruppert said as they turned east on Wilshire. “They’ve been there forever.”
“Maybe they’re a sleeper cell. Pastor John says sleeper cells are everywhere.”
“So they’ve been asleep for, what, five generations? Ten? You think the Chinese Communists planted the Han family in Los Angeles before Karl Marx was born?"
“I’m staying alert, Daniel. We all have to stay alert.”
“We can stay alert over tea and egg rolls. If it makes you feel better, we can watch our waiter for suspicious behavior.”
“Shut up.” She glared out the window.
“Watch for propaganda in your fortune cookie.”
“Fine, you win. But no more Chinese after this. I don’t want to be un-American.”
From two blocks away, Ruppert could see the giant red dragon crouching on the roof of the restaurant, his serpentine body a scarlet sine wave. Happy the Dragon, mascot and minor tourist attraction, had eyes that were squinted almost closed and jaws spread in a smiling howl, as if someone had just whispered the world’s funniest joke into his ear. Today, smoke curled out from the dragon’s nostrils, an effect the Hans created with dry ice on both Chinese and American holidays.
“What’s today?” Ruppert asked.
“Sunday.”
“No, I mean-”
“April eighth. Why?”
“Must be a Chinese holiday.”
Madeline looked at the smoke pouring from the dragon’s maw. Her lip curled. “We can’t eat Chinese on a Communist holiday.”
“It’s not necessarily Communist…” Daniel’s words trailed off. They had reached a red light a block from the Laughing Dragon, and he now saw there was something wrong. Happy the Dragon was not exhaling white plumes of evaporating dry ice, but dark, sooty clouds.
The light changed, and they pulled forward to see the actual restaurant underneath the dragon's belly. The plate-glass picture windows were shattered, the ornate double doors had been ripped from their hinges and thrown aside, and flames engulfed the building.
“Oh, my God,” Madeline whispered. “Keep going, Daniel. Don’t stop here.”
“I’m trying,” Daniel said, but traffic and another red light locked them in place.
He recognized the three unmarked black vans parked in the Laughing Dragon’s lot, and he cringed. The Han family emerged from their burning restaurant, four generations of them, from the ninety-year-old matriarch Wen to her seven-year-old great-grandson, Gabriel. There were eighteen family members in all, their hands clasped behind their heads as their captors marched them out at gunpoint.
The captors wore black cloth masks with American flags stitched on the foreheads. They had to be one of the Freedom Brigades, the loose network of ultrapatriotic vigilantes that emerged nationwide in the wake of Columbus. They’d begun with mosque bombings and violent raids on Muslim community centers. Once the Department of Terror had purged most of the Muslims from America, sweeping them into the Emergency Penitentiaries, the Freedom Brigades had moved on to persecuting illegal Latino immigrants, and assorted others.
The Brigades sometimes released video manifestos, usually consisting of masked men claiming they were true Americans “retaking the country” from corrupting foreign influences. They were not a government agency, and police sometimes condemned their actions, but Ruppert had never heard of Freedom Brigade members getting arrested for their crimes.
The vigilantes forced the Han family to kneel in a row, facing out toward traffic. Many of them wept openly; only old Wen betrayed no emotion, her lined face hard and stoic.
Little Gabriel’s mother, crying, reached for her son, but two of the masked men wrenched her back. One of them drew a pistol from his belt, pressed it to the back of her head, and fired.
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Madeline turned her head away, clapping a hand over her eyes. Ruppert wanted to turn away, too, but instead he watched as the masked men walked down the line, executing one Han after another, their heads erupting in surreal gouts of blood.
“Are we moving? Why aren’t we moving, Daniel?” Madeline screamed.
Daniel looked ahead to see the train of cars that had been ahead of him pull away into the distance. Normally, this would draw irate honks from the cars behind him, but he supposed no one wanted to draw the attention of the Freedom Brigade. He stomped the accelerator.
After several minutes, Madeline whispered, “I must have been right.”
“About what?”
“The Hans. They must have been a sleeper cell after all. Right?” An odd glaze had crept into her eyes. “They were spies for the Chinese. The imperialists.”
“We don’t know that.”
“The Freedom Brigades wouldn’t just kill innocent people like that. Not in public like that.”
“The Freedom Brigades don’t know things like that.”
“How do you know what they know?” Madeline sat up, straightening her shoulders. She lowered the sun visor and checked her hair in the mirror. “The Freedom Brigades really do protect us most of the time. Nobody likes to say it, but they do. They keep regular people safe.”
“Honey-”
“They keep good people safe,” Madeline repeated. “Safe and free. I bet they were Communist spies. That big red dragon. Listening in on all those conversations, all those years, while we ate their greasy rice. Think about it.”
Ruppert gaped at her, almost missed his turn, and swerved off at the last second onto Beverly Glen. This time, the other drivers weren’t shy about honking; some of them really laid into it, unleashing the rage they’d been unable to express at his failure to speed away from the gang of gunmen at the first opportunity.
He sped towards the white-walled hive of suburban enclaves that Bel Air had become. Ruppert understood what Madeline was doing; he saw it every day, could even recognize the expression in the face of strangers. She was editing her reality, making things fit. The Hans, who had sung Happy Birthday to her on her twenty-eighth birthday, had been Chinese spies. That was all. They’d been discovered and put to justice. If he ever mentioned the Han family or the Laughing Dragon again, she would snort something about Communists and change the subject.
Ruppert did not possess this talent, at least not to the incredible degree he saw in eve
ryone around him. Even as a child, he’d held back his belief and his trust, wanting to ponder over information for flaws and contradictions. His natural skepticism led him to journalism school, but as his Berkeley professor Jozef Gorski said, “Journalism is a hard and unforgiving search for facts. Reporting is gossip. Most of you, if you want a paycheck, will work as reporters.”
Gorski had, in a distant youth, been a journalist active in the Polish Solidarity movement, then written a Pulitzer-nominated book on the history of nonviolent resistance. He disappeared halfway through the spring semester of 2021. Another teacher took his place, without explanation, and when Ruppert asked where Dr. Gorski had gone, the new teacher scowled at him and shook his head. Ruppert tried to research the new teacher, but had been unable to find any information on the man’s background. He’d certainly never worked as a journalist.
Ruppert slowed as he approached his neighborhood gate. The road in this part of Bel Air was a paved channel between two thirty-foot walls, each occasionally punctuated by one of the large gates. The brass grill of the gate slid aside for his car.
“Daniel.” Madeline’s voice was unusually soft. She seemed to be making eye contact with herself in the mirror, as if trying to look into her own soul. Daniel knew how she felt.
“What is it?”
She touched her pinkie finger to the corner of her mouth. “Do you think I’m getting a zit here? It looks like there might be a zit.”
Daniel turned off the street into his driveway, then looked at her for a long time. She turned toward him, stretched her mouth into a vertical oval, and poked at the corner of her mouth again.
“See it?” she asked.