Killing people in front of his underlings was, of course, done by design. It was an object lesson, or lessons, in more ways than one. First, it cultivated the atmosphere of fear that Szabo, like Machiavelli, believed was the best way to motivate people. Second, that people should die so quickly and for such puny reasons was a direct reflection on the absence of God in the world. And the third and final reason was that the premier liked to be in the overall atmosphere. He liked the stink of fear, the smell of death. If he had been alive at the time of World War II he would have been one of the guards at the gas ovens in Auschwitz or someplace similar with his ear against the door-trying to hear women, children, and old people screaming as they died in breath-stopping agony.
Premier Szabo had two trusted lieutenants, Jack Dill and R.W. Duyvill. Both were ex-military men, mercenaries who had honed their combat teeth in a variety of wars. But they were not ordinary grunts. Dill had been a two-star general and Duyvill a bird colonel in the American army. Both were excellent military strategists, and the premier depended on their expertise for invading and capturing some fifty towns in the Northwest and giving advice to operatives in the cities. And both men—in fact all of the top people, in the Rejects army—shared one quality that all great soldiers, even professional prizefighters, share: the killer instinct.
In fact, it was people like U.S. Grant and Sherman that Szabo admired the most. In the Civil War Sherman had, of course, conducted the infamous “Sherman’s March to the Sea” where, after burning Atlanta to the ground, he had marched with his army all the way to the ocean, burning and killing and destroying everything in sight. On reflection and examination, there was no justifiable reason for doing this, except one big one: to hammer the spirit of the resisters into total, depressed submission.
But Grant was the same way. Indeed, people forgot that it was Sherman who took his orders from Grant, and he would not have done what he did unless Grant ordered it. Grant himself showed this ruthlessness in the assault on the Confederate troops at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and other places and was known as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Szabo and others shared another quality of great soldiers: none of them were afraid to die. In fact, some of them seemed to seek out death. In numerous battles with the Believers, Szabo and other commanders often put themselves in harm’s way, oblivious of bullets and sometimes shrapnel whizzing past them, any piece of which could take their lives. They lived within the moment, focusing on what they were doing. They all had that fabulous essential quality of all great soldiers, the ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination that otherwise would conjure up ways to show you how you were going to get killed.
Now Szabo, Duyvill, and Dill were in the “War Room” at the cave headquarters in Compound W, all poring over a large, detailed map showing a variety of things, these indicated by colored push pins and markers. The only viable threat to the Rejects was the Believers, and their number and concentration in various areas were indicated by markers. Towns that the Rejects had taken over were ID’d with green push pins, and areas that the Believers occupied were marked with red ones. The Reject command could tell in a moment where they stood militarily. Overall, of course, they knew that the plague had hobbled the U.S. government and its armies Indeed a number of U.S. servicemen had come over to the Rejects, or the Believers, and the only group—though it was formidable—between the Rejects and total domination of the United States was the Believers. Szabo and the others vowed that someday they would need a forest of lumber and a ton of spikes to create crosses to which they would then spike to the cross all the Believers who were still alive.
The premier was about to speak when the door virtually burst open and his aide de camp, Jerry Upton, came in accompanied by an attractive, dark-haired young woman. Upton had done a dangerous thing. The premier might get a little pissed, and the next thing you knew you could be on your way to the prison compound—or a dirt nap.
Upton and the woman stood a few yards away from the commanders until their presence was acknowledged, this some two minutes after they had arrived.
“Yes?” the premier said.
“Sir, I wanted you to see what Selby here found in the pants of Morton Adams,” Jerry said.
“What?”
Selby handed him the card.
The premier looked for a moment and then handed it to Dill and Duyvill, who, taking Szabo’s lead, didn’t show much visible reaction.
“Tell the troops to fall out,” the premier said, “and get me Raymond O’Brien.”
It was a simple statement. But a certain hush fell over the room. Everyone knew the real meaning of what the premier had said.
Ten minutes later, the troops, all in uniform, were lined up on either side of the open compound. The premier came out of headquarters flanked by Dill and Duyvill, and stopped when they were roughly in the middle area that the troops flanked.
Thirty seconds later, a tall, wiry man, looking as if he had just been awakened from sleep, his bushy red hair askew, his eyes puffy, approached.
He stopped and saluted. The premier made a halfhearted gesture to salute back.
It wasn’t long, however, that O’Brien was fully awake. Everyone was very quiet, a seeming impossibility with so many people in the area, when O’Brien broke the silence with a short but explosive fart. Everyone laughed raucously, including the premier. O’Brien did not laugh.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said when the laughter had died down. “What’s this all about?”
The premier said: “Do you know Morton Adams?”
“Yes, I do, sir.”
“What did you do for him?”
“I brought him into our ranks.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because,” O’Brien said, suppressing more gas, “I thought he would be a good addition.”
“And why did you think that?”
“Because I knew he didn’t believe in God. He told me his background as a criminal and his membership in the G Group, the atheistic group in New York City.”
“And you believed him?” the premier said.
Everyone seemed to get even more quiet, if that were possible. Everyone knew that something bad was going to happen to O’Brien, including the premier. But he enjoyed this, just as he enjoyed watching someone die slowly on the cross, just as he enjoyed the bodies falling off the cross and being devoured by wild animals, just as he enjoyed watching and listening to people scream in agony as their weight drove the sharpened stake they were sitting on deeper into their entrails. The premier was now treating O’Brien like a marshmallow on a stick, turning him this way and that over a low fire, close enough to singe, but not close enough to go up in flames.
“And why did you believe him?”
“Just the way he was in general, but he also showed me a tattoo.”
“A tattoo of what?”
“It showed a picture of Jesus Christ and had a cross-out symbol over it. I asked him what it was, and he told me it was Jesus Christ and represented the way he felt. That God was dead—and should be dead.”
“And how did you know the tattoo was real?”
“It looked very real. It was faded like he had it a long time.”
The premier nodded and smiled. The smile was terrifying. Everyone knew that the premier only smiled as he did when he was contemplating causing someone else pain.
The premier took the card out of his pocket and handed it to O’Brien. “And did you also know that he was a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine? Did he have a tattoo for that as well?”
“Where did this come from? It must be a plant,” O’Brien said.
The premier disregarded what O’Brien said.
“Why did you vouch for him?”
O’Brien farted again, but only a few people laughed.
“I believed . . . I believe he is okay. I’ve seen him in action against the Believers. He’s shot at them.”
“So why does that mean that he isn’t a mole?”
> “Doesn’t it? Would a mole kill?”
“I don’t know,” the premier said, smiling even more broadly, “but it’s a possibility, isn’t it? It’s the perfect cover. Or maybe he faked it.”
“No, his bullets hit people.”
“You are aware, are you not, that vouching for an enemy is an extremely serious crime?”
“It’s not been proved that he is,” O’Brien said, his voice croaky. “It’s not been proved!” he yelled.
The premier swiveled his bald dome from side to side.
“I think it has been. Does anyone here disagree with me?”
There was silence. O’Brien farted loudly again. Then abruptly, in total panic, he turned and started to run, but the premier was as quick as a cat and in a few strides he had grabbed him, squealing like a pig, by the shirt and had him down on his back, straddling him, and just as quickly had his massive hands around O’Brien’s neck and was squeezing. O’Brien grabbed the premier’s forearms in a vain attempt to pry his hands off his neck, but it was useless, like trying to pry away bands of steel. O’Brien kicked and kicked and kicked and gradually his kicks slowed down, then stopped.
The premier stood up, still straddling him. His pants were tight, and careful observers would see that his crotch was slightly engorged, expanded. The killing had been a sexual experience, as all his killings were to one degree or another.
The premier took a few steps away from the body.
“Has anyone seen . . . Rosen?”
A trooper in one of the front rows raised his hand.
“I saw him last night at chow.”
“Anyone seen him today?” the premier asked.
There was silence.
“Are all the vehicles accounted for?”
The director of the motor pool, a portly, balding man in his mid-forties, stepped forward.
“Yes, sir.”
“Which means, of course, he’s on foot. He no doubt got the idea, somehow, that his true identity was in danger of being compromised.”
Heads nodded.
“And I can tell you,” the premier said, “that if he writes about what he experienced here it will not be good for us. It could galvanize people against us. He also knows much classified intel. He was here about eight weeks. He knows how we operate, he knows the locations of our compounds, he knows the personnel, he knows everything. And, in the worst-case scenario, he will give the Believers a royal road to attacking and possibly destroying us. We have no greater priority than to find and terminate him and anyone else he has told. Let’s go. I want bloodhounds on the scene within fifteen minutes.”
The premier glanced down at O’Brien’s body. His crotch area was wet and the premier could smell the feces he had expelled when his sphincter muscles shut down.
“Get this farting machine out of my sight,” he said.
TWELVE
The Rejects were careful where they buried their victims. By executive order, the premier had declared that grave sites be a minimum of two hundred yards from the compound, and that the graves, individual or mass, were to be a minimum of six feet deep so that the animals could not get to them.
Many people used lime on dead bodies to destroy tissue more quickly, but the premier didn’t feel that necessary. “The body,” he had astutely pointed out, “rots from the inside out, so no lime is required. I used to get a kick,” he told one assemblage of troops, “when people would buy these five- or ten-thousand dollar mahogany coffins to keep their dead from rotting. Meanwhile, they were going to rot even if they had them inside kryptonite. Isn’t that hilarious?”
The assemblage had laughed appreciatively, though some of them did not think the premier’s observations funny at all.
Ten minutes after he was strangled to death by the premier, O’Brien’s corpse was dumped into a grave opened up with a backhoe the required distance from the compound, and a few minutes later was filled in. There would be nothing to mark the grave, nothing to remember O’Brien by. The only people who would remember him would be those who watched him die, and some of these people would never forget.
Above all, there was no service to mark his passing, no prayer, no nothing. (A good way to join O’Brien would have been to get caught saying a prayer over his grave.)
Within twenty minutes, a select group of twenty-five Rejects, the “escape unit,” gathered in the center of the compound. Also present were two bloodhounds and their handlers, a permanent part of the escape unit.
Otto Krill, the escape unit leader, stood in the front of the men, and reiterated what the premier had told them.
“It is very important that we track down and neutralize Morton Rosen. He has information that is of the utmost sensitivity. I expect everyone to keep pace with the group. If anyone here feels that they cannot do this, drop out now. Anyone?”
No one raised their hands. In fact, all the Rejects were expected to stay in good physical shape, but the elite group that gathered here were special. Each man ran a minimum of five miles before breakfast, did multiple sit-ups and pull-ups with palms facing forward, and innumerable push-ups. There wasn’t a person in the group who couldn’t do more than a hundred pushups per session, and many of them could do thirty or forty one-arm pushups.
The escape unit was also well schooled in reading the countryside they traveled. Two of them were, in fact, full-blooded Apache Indians who had lived in the Wyoming area their entire lives and were almost otherworldly in their ability to read the slightest disturbances in the natural world, such as the breaking of a twig, the crushing of a leaf. These things spoke volumes to them and they were almost always able to know if the disruption was made by a man or an animal.
But at the heart of the escape unit’s success was the special, physically altered bloodhounds: their voice boxes had been surgically removed. While this did not interfere with their olfactory prowess—it was said that the average bloodhound could detect smell hundreds of times better than a human being, even follow a scent underwater—it did allow them to lead the escape unit to an escapee without uttering the usual baying sound that would warn him or her (or them) of the proximity of the unit.
So far, in Compound W, there had been eight attempts at escape, none successful. One of the escapees had had a losing encounter with a grizzly bear, while another had fallen to his death, and another had drowned. The others—except for one—had been captured alive, and the premier personally beat all to death with a three-foot section of lodgepole pine. Just before they took the other man, a forty-five-year-old scientist, into custody, he sprinkled cyanide powder on a pear and ate it, killing himself instantly.
Suicide was preferable for some of these escapees because, as Rosen had told Jim and Bev, the punishment was only limited by the imagination of the premier and his henchmen. One particularly malevolent treatment of women, for example, was what happened to one slightly overweight forty-year-old ex-nurse who escaped and was caught. She attempted her escape in the early fall, and premier Szabo told her, in front of most of the people in the compound, that he was going to give her another chance to escape. But there were going to be a few changes. One was that she would only be allowed to wear a pair of sneakers. All other clothing would be removed from her. She would then be given a half-hour head start, released into the woods, and then three of the escape specialists, armed only with knives, themselves nude, and carrying along a video camera, would pursue her through the woods. If she was found, she would be returned, but first she would be gang-raped by the three pursuers who would tape the entire experience for the pleasure and edification of others in the camp.
As it happened, the woman was caught within two hours, and then raped and sodomized repeatedly over a three-hour period and then, bleeding profusely from her rectum—because someone had also used a part of a tree branch on her—had been returned to the camp. Sometimes during the night, while being sodomized by one long line of soldiers, she died from loss of blood and shock.
The escape unit knew that going aft
er Rosen was not without hazards, the main hazard being the Believers. They would instantly kill every Reject they came across or sometimes emasculate captives, then release them. The Rejects viewed them as every bit as savage as they were. And, at least with them, they were. It was a holy war and anything went.
Exactly forty minutes after O’Brien was killed, the handlers of the bloodhounds pressed a piece of Morton Rosen’s soiled clothing in the nose of each of the silent bloodhounds, and within seconds they were pulling on their leashes, his scent found, and fresh, as clear to them as highway signs leading to a particular road, and the escape unit was trotting to keep up with the bloodhounds as they emerged from the compound entrance and started to thread their way through the woods where, less than twenty-four hours earlier, Morty Rosen had slipped out of the compound and started to run for what he knew might be his life. If he had been there, indeed he would have reflected that now his analogy was accurate. He was the hare.
THIRTEEN
For a moment, Bev didn’t know where she was, and when she reached over, expecting to feel Jim, he wasn’t there. She opened her eyes and sat up. It was windy, the shadows of adjacent tree branches moving on her tent almost ominously.
Where, she wondered, could he be? She felt a quick surge of loss and was surprised very much by her feeling. She cared about him very much. When he had asked her about the loves of her life, she never explained—why, she didn’t know—that there had been one boy in high school, Jeff Grimes, whom she loved very much. And one day Jeff and his family had moved away, almost without warning, and she had felt as if her stomach had been hollowed out and she would never get over it. That relationship was on the same level of feeling as this one.
But Jim was all right, she thought, she was making a big deal of this. He probably went to relieve himself.
She looked over at where he slept. Certainly, she thought, it wasn’t something he heard that he was investigating. His AK-47 was lying right next to where he had lain. He would have taken that with him.
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