by J L Bryan
“Where do you think he got the money?”
“Back then I figured he was born rich. He talked so fancy and all, and just had that easy way. Of course, now I’d say it was probably your tax-payin’ dollars at work.”
“Why do you say that?” Ruppert asked.
“Well, I was gettin' to that point, if you’d let me talk for one minute.”
“I apologize,” Ruppert said. He glanced over at Lucia, who slumped in a folding lawn chair next to the holorecorder, staring at Westerly with bulging eyes, utterly indifferent to her alleged camera operation duties. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair, as if she were feeling ill. It might just have been the hoggish stink in the room.
“It was about the summer of 2016 things started to change around Brother Zeb’s place. It started with the visitors. These fellas in good black suits come by any hour of the night and hold these long secret meetings with Brother Zeb. We kept asking him what it was all about, and one of our study nights, instead of looking at Mein Kampf or whatnot, he up and told us.
“Brother Zeb, he said we got more support than we ever knew about. He said there was powerful men from way high up who wanted to help us along, but thing was, they had to be secret about it cause of all the Jews and coloreds and liberal media and so on. He told us about it was gonna take a great big national emergency to really get the whole thing rolling. He called it Ragnarok, the end of history. He said after Ragnarok, it would be a, what did he call it? ‘A new order for the ages.’ He said Ragnarok was our sacred duty.
“Then it all got real strange. The compound went into lockdown, gates sealed up, no one in or out without Zeb’s permission. No more stripping girls from the city, neither, I'll tell you.
“And I don’t know how to tell the next piece except to just say it right out. One morning in June, musta been, these two big Move-It trucks pull up to the gate. A buddy of mine used to call those ‘Move-It-Your-Damn-Self’ trucks. Anyway, Zeb let ‘em in, and they parked inside the barn out behind the main house. That’s when Brother Zeb said Ragnarok was comin'.”
Westerly broke down into a chain of coughs that wracked his whole body. He wiped the blood from his mouth, looked at it, smeared it across the grizzled gray hairs of his chest.
“Hurts to talk anymore,” Westerly said. He looked to Turin. “Gimme one of them pain pills. The good blue ones.”
Turin removed a brown pill bottle from his jacket. He popped the lid, looked inside, shook it around. “I’ll give you a white one for now.”
“Aw, come on, there, homeboy."
“You can have a blue one when you’re done.”
“But I need a blue one now,” Westerly whined. “Come on.”
Turin tipped the bottle, and a white capsule rolled out into his palm.
“Just the white one,” Turin said. “When you’re done, you can have two blue pills, if you want.”
Westerly grunted, accepted the white pill, and chased it down with water from one of the bottles scattered around his cage.
“Are we getting all this?” Ruppert asked Lucia
She checked the recorder. A three-dimensional image appeared to one side of it, a miniature Ruppert listening to a miniature Westerly. “Looks fine.”
“Mr. Westerly, can you continue?” Ruppert asked.
“Shit. Guess I can.” Westerly drank more of the water.
“What was in the moving vans?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Westerly said. “The men driving them turned out to be soldiers.”
“The Army?”
“Hell, no. They was in all black uniforms, and that’s no part of the military I know about. But like that, all the same.”
“Like Terror men?” Ruppert asked, thinking of the Captain.
“Well, yeah, like them, only there weren’t no Department of Terror back then, least as I know of. What I'm saying is they was soldiers or agents or ninjas or some damn thing, you could see that plain. Now, Brother Zeb, he picks out four of us, two teams of two, and he called us the ‘primary’ and the ‘back-up.’ I was on the back-up team.
“These agents, or whatever they was, they took the four of us in the back of one truck and showed us this thing mounted up in there, a big old metal tube inside kind of a cage setup. And they said, this here’s a nuclear bomb, and we’re gonna show you how to set it off. And that’s what they did.”
"You're claiming," Ruppert said. “That some kind of government agents, similar to Terror men, gave you, a white supremacist compound in Idaho, a nuclear weapon?”
“Damn-shit yes they did,” Westerly said. “And it was real easy to blow up, way they had it set. You had to push three buttons on this remote control. Push ‘em real fast in the right order, and that’s all there was. Any dumbass coulda did it.”
“What did they want you to do with it?” Ruppert asked.
“I’m gonna tell ya, if you just gimme two seconds to get a word in. After them soldiers left, Brother Zeb set us down on the floor of his office, up in the main house, with some maps out in front of us, and he showed us how one of us teams was gonna take one of them moving trucks and drive her all the way to Columbus, Ohio-”
“Wait, wait.” Ruppert was up and pacing now. “You’re saying you did Columbus? Columbus? ” The second time he said “Columbus,” Ruppert was no longer talking about the city itself, but everything the name of the city had come to mean in the years since.
Ruppert remembered what Dr. Smith had said: You’re old enough to have noticed how these institutions arose together-the Department of Terror, the Department of Faith, the Dominionists, the Freedom Brigades. Ruppert had noticed. It had all been a response to Columbus, the nuclear destruction of an American city by never-quite-identified foreign terrorists.
He rubbed at his head. He could feel a sledgehammer of a headache coming.
“No, that ain’t what I’m trying to tell ya, stop actin’ stupid,” Westerly said. “What I’m saying is, he made us memorize this one particular drive to Columbus. He even told where we was supposed to stay along the way, a little motel in Nebraska, run by what he called 'friendlies.' He told us we’d take turns driving, three hours at a time.
“Then we spent some more hours looking at a map of downtown Columbus, and he showed us right where to park the van, at the City Center Mall. Said if we go by his schedule, it should be about lunchtime when we got there. We was just supposed to lock it up and leave it. He said some friends of his would pick us up right there, and they’d take care of getting us back home to Idaho.”
The feeling rushed out of Ruppert’s legs, and he had to sit down to stop their shaking and wobbling. It was obvious. PSYCOM had all its plans ready to roll out. The Articles for the Continuation of Democracy, six thousand pages long, was passed the day after Columbus, but it must have taken months to write. They didn’t position all their pieces, then just sit around hoping for an opportunity to come along.
“Why did you agree to do it?” Ruppert asked. “What about all those people-a million people?”
“I weren’t thinking about them, I guess,” Westerly said. “It was holy war. It was everything Brother Zeb had been preaching about. I was just doing my part for the country.”
“You were proud of it.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t get to do it, anyhow. The first team got going on, I can tell you the date exactly, July the third of 2016. We was all sitting at the house just waiting for them to check in, cause Zeb give ‘em a cell phone and tell ‘em to call every three hours.
“On the Fourth, Zeb said he had to run off and meet with some people, and he’d be back in the afternoon. We didn’t think so much of it, cause the bomb weren’t supposed to go off ‘til midnight. We was mainly upset he took the phone with him, but nobody would fuss about it to Brother Zeb.
“I am here and breathin' today because of the dumbest turtle-shit piece of luck. We decided we needed a couple cases of beer for Ragnarok, and we’d start tearing it up soon as the fireworks went off in Ohio. Now, Brot
her Zeb, he gave us strict orders that day, nobody in or out at all, everybody stay in the main house, all locked down. But we couldn’t get hold of Zeb, and we figured maybe he didn’t know we was out of beer, so I took one of the farm trucks into town.
“I still remember the look on the kid’s face at the convenience store. Skinny runt, lot of zits, mouth just dangling open. I brung all that beer up to the counter and he didn’t say nothing. He was looking at a portable television, one of them big heavy kinds they used to have, and right there on the screen it showed that mushroom cloud sitting on top of Ohio.”
“I was in Social Studies class when it happened,” Ruppert said. “Tenth grade. My teacher threw up right on the chalkboard.”
“Well, I was buying beer in Eden, Idaho, and my first thought was ‘Them dumb bastards went and blowed their asses off.’ Cause it was too early, just about lunchtime, and they shoulda just been getting to Columbus. They had to be right near that van when it went up, or maybe still inside it.
“I went back to the truck, but I didn’t even get her started when I saw this big convoy, I mean eight, ten of them big black sport-tilities everybody drove when gas was cheap, and they just tore through town right toward Brother Zeb’s place. The windows was all black so you couldn’t see nothing inside, even the windshields, and I mean tinted windshields weren’t legal even back in those days. And if I hadn’t noticed that, my dumb ass would have gone right back to the farm to tell the boys about the bomb.
“But I could see what was happening. We was set up. They done blowed the van with J.T. and Billy still inside, and then they was sending these others to kill off the rest of us. And that’s why old Brother Zeb hightailed it out that morning, to make sure he didn’t get shot up along with us. He fucked us and throwed us out, just like a used-up rubber.”
“This is crazy,” Ruppert said, pacing again. “What did you do?”
“Same as you or anyone would have done. I put the beer in the truck and I drove off the other way. They been huntin’ me ever since.” Westerly heaved a more loud, violent coughs. “I done run from Terror all these years, and the damn cigarettes caught up with me anyhow.”
“Did you ever see any of the others again?” Ruppert asked. “From the compound?”
“Oh, hell no. I doubt none of ‘em survived that Independence Day. We wasn’t expecting nothing to happen to us, and especially nothing like that big hit squad they sent out in all them sport-tilities. I never seen Brother Zeb again, neither. If I did, I doubt I’d be breathin’ right now.”
Ruppert struggled to think of another question, but he was too shocked to concentrate. He steadied himself by thinking of all the viewers who would eventually see the video, unknown millions around the world. What would they want to know?
“How did you manage to evade Terror so long?” he finally asked.
“Just keep to the poor places, mainly,” Westerly said. “Places they don’t have time to watch too carefully, cause there ain’t nothing worth watching. Keep outta the big cities, that’s the most important thing.”
“What do you think about all this, now that you know what it was really about? And after Zeb’s betrayal?”
“I'm glad we did it," Westerly said. "I think it was a good thing, in all. An important thing." Westerly sat back, sighed, and coughed up a fresh spatter of foamy blood, which dribbled down his chin. "It was real important to everybody, wasn't it?"
TWENTY-TWO
After the interview, Turin carried the holorecorder into another room to burn copies onto discs and cartridges, to begin the distribution process. A mass of copies would be made for the safest the method of distribution, hand-to-hand, and eventually the interview would be uploaded to websites and newsnets throughout the world.
Archer led Ruppert and Lucia upstairs to the main house, where they emerged from behind the false wall of a closet in a dusty first-floor bedroom. They sat at a plastic-coated redwood table while Archer busied himself frying eggs and toasting bread. Ruppert was exhausted.
“I can’t believe any of that,” Ruppert said to Lucia. “Do you think it's true?”
“We know it is,” Lucia said. “We spent the last two years searching for him.”
“How were you able to find him when Terror couldn’t?”
“Terror is best at watching the obedient,” Lucia said. “We’re better at finding people running for their lives, since we usually try to help them out.”
"This non-organization is sounding more and more organized," Ruppert said.
"People make their own order." A wheelchair-bound woman with long, graying hair rolled into the room. The first thing Ruppert noticed was the stunning beauty of her face, and the second thing he noticed was that she looked strangely familiar.
“Order must be made and abandoned as we go," she continued. "Don’t burn my stove down, Archer.”
“I don’t believe you can burn a stove, Mrs. Kendrick,” Archer replied. Ruppert tried to remember: Kendrick, Kendrick…
“If anybody could…” She shook her head, then focused on Ruppert. “This is our reporter?”
“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Daniel, this is Maya Kendrick. This is her vineyard.”
“Not much of a vineyard any more,” Maya said.
“Maya Kendrick!” Ruppert said, then felt himself blush. He’d actually fantasized about this woman when he was a teenager. “You’re the movie star, aren’t you?”
“I was an actor, when the world was different,” she said.
“I thought they took you in the purges,” Ruppert said.
“They did,” she said. “I took a bullet in the back from the Freedom Brigades. And the bastards killed my husband.”
“Jorge Mendez, right?” Ruppert asked. “The director?”
“He saw the hammer coming down,” Maya said. “I used to laugh and say he was paranoid. Then they started posting Terror agents at all the studios, and then the purges…By the time they finished, there was nothing left but cowards and fools.” She raised an eyebrow. “Present company excepted, naturally.”
“No, I’ve been a coward and a fool,” Ruppert said. “I’m trying to change that.”
“Once this interview circulates, they’ll come after you,” Maya said.
“They’ve been after me already,” Ruppert said.
“Not like this. You’re showing the world the rabbit hidden in their hat.”
“What do you think people will do when they find out?” Ruppert asked.
Maya smiled. “Rise up, revolt, destroy the system. Start anew, with better ideas this time. That’s what you’re hoping I’ll say, isn’t it?”
“How else could they respond?”
“Denial,” Maya said.
“What is there to deny?” Lucia asked. “It’s the truth.”
“Never doubt the human capacity for self-delusion,” Maya said. “Terror doesn’t. That’s how they rule.”
“Then what’s the point?” Ruppert asked.
“Not everyone will refuse to believe,” Maya said. “The truth will be available for those who risk looking for it. It will take time. It may not even happen in our lifetime. But now there’s a record of what Columbus really was, and who was behind it. And in the end, I don’t think an armed revolt will be possible. Or necessary.”
“But there’s no other way to stop them,” Lucia said.
“Eggs, overeasy,” Archer set plates in front of Ruppert and Lucia. “Toast, gently blackened.”
Lucia wolfed her food. Ruppert poked his fork at the greasy, pepper-sprinkled whites of the eggs, not convinced he had an appetite.
“Did you ever learn about the Soviet Union? How it collapsed?” Maya asked.
Ruppert nodded. "It was because of a weapons race."
"Not precisely," Maya said. "Some people say it collapsed because it lost a war, or because of poverty, but I think they’re wrong. I think it really fell apart once the Russian people stopped believing what they read in the newspapers.”
“And you think
people will react that way when they see the interview?” Ruppert asked. “They’ll stop believing?”
“In the long run, truth is powerful because it doesn’t change. Lies fade, and political lies are the weakest kind, because they so rarely make any sense in the first place. Westerly’s confession takes Columbus away from them. It removes the keystone from their false reality. It will change minds.”
“But not enough minds,” Ruppert said.
“Possibly not,” Maya agreed.
“Clear out!” Turin burst into the room wearing only a shirt and his briefs. He was fumbling his way into a dark suit. “Cops! Front door!”
The room erupted around Ruppert, chairs overturning as Lucia and Turin scrambled to their feet. Maya rolled backwards into the main hall of her house, looking towards her front door.
“How many?” she asked.
“Three cars,” Turin said. He hurried to buckle his pants. Lucia and Archer grabbed plates, glasses, silverware from the kitchen table, slopping the contents into the sink before hurling the tableware into the dishwasher.
“Hurry!” Archer snapped at Lucia.
“Is it Terror?” Maya asked from the hallway.
“Just Hartwells,” Turin said.
“Thank God for that much,” Maya wheeled back into the room. “You two have to get downstairs-”
Booms echoed from the front door. It sounded like the police were knocking with a wrecking ball.
“-right away,” she finished. Turin rushed by her, on his way to answer the door.
Ruppert felt a compression against his skin, as if all the air in the room had suddenly turned heavy, and then a loud crack echoed through the house. The police forced the front door with a pressure gun, blasting it from its hinges.