Dominion (27 page)

The bearded man stared at Lucia, then gave her a wry smile. He gestured toward one of his men: “Rico, let’s have a look at the lady’s data.”

The man named Rico was short and dark, his skin weathered by long exposure to the desert, though he looked no more than twenty. He wore data goggles over his eyes and assorted plastic and metal components strapped to his arms and belt. He took the disc in question, ejected it from its transparent case, and popped it into a console on his arm. Rico then pointed his arm at an empty, sandy patch of road beside the truck. Ruppert and Hollis Westerly appeared in a life-size hologram.

As the interview played, the bandits ceased talking among themselves. Ruppert and Westerly’s voice echoed through the quiet streets, bouncing off the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx. More bandits emerged one or two at a time for a better look at the video, leaving their hidden guard posts, including two who’d been hiding behind the Eiffel Tower.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ruppert whispered to Lucia.

“Did you have a better one?” she whispered back.

When the entire video had played, the men stood in silence. Finally, Rico flipped off his projector and spoke up.

“Terror would pay a good bounty for these two, I bet,” he said. “Whatever we wanted.”

A couple of the men grumbled what might have been agreement, but they looked at their shoes as they spoke. To Ruppert’s surprise, most of them remained quiet, their eyes distant. Gradually they turned their attention to the bearded man, who continued to stare at the patch of road where Westerly’s image had been.

“What are you planning to do with this?” he finally asked.

“We’re going to distribute as wide as we can,” Lucia said. “There are others doing the same. Lots of others.” Ruppert found this to be an exaggeration, but said nothing.

The bearded man released the disc from Rico’s arm, returned it to its case. “You have fifty copies. I’m keeping one.”

“Of course,” Lucia said. “Make as many copies as you can, too.”

The bearded man looked south along the strip, possibly checking whether any other cars were approaching. None were.

“Let them go,” the bearded man said.

“But there could be a bounty—” Rico protested.

“Shut up.” One of the older bandits cut him off.

“We at least oughta siphon some gas,” another bandit said.

“Quiet,” the bearded man said. “I served four years in the Marines, in the old world. We talked about something called honor. You brats don’t even know what the word means.”

“Sure,” Rico spoke up. “My uncle told me, greed and honor. Greed is killing someone else for your own profit. Honor is when you kill for someone else’s greed, and they keep the profit.”

“Nobody wants to hear your bullshit, Rico.” The bearded man turned back to Ruppert and Lucia. “This is treason, and people need to know it.” He shook his head. A waxing moon was rising behind him. “We used to be a country.”

He turned his back to them and walked towards Paris, his head low, saying nothing. The other men began to peel away. Ruppert and Lucia gathered their belongings and loaded them back into the truck, then climbed up into the cab. Ruppert started the engine, but the sentries at the gate ahead of them didn’t move.

Ruppert leaned out the window. “He said we could go.”

“One minute,” a sentry said, and nodded towards the Eiffel Tower. Rico was returning, holding some kind of large, red container in one hand. He wore a broad, clearly false smile as he approached Lucia’s passenger window.

“I don’t like him,” Lucia whispered. “Tell them to open the gate.”

“Just wait.”

“He’s coming towards me.”

“Have your blade ready.”

“I do.”

Ruppert studied the length of black obsidian resting in her fingers. Not for the first time, he considered how helpful a gun could be to their situation. Legally, only police, government agents, and specially approved citizens could own firearms, but supposedly there were a million or more still circulating the countryside. He imagined firearms stashed away, in small caches of firearms dispersed all over the country, like dry tinder waiting for the match..

Rico approached with his unnaturally wide smile.

“A parting gift for you,” he said. “From the mayor.”

He held it up, and now Ruppert could make out the word stamped on the rectangular five-gallon jug: GASOLINE.

Lucia reached for the jug with one hand, while her other hand positioned the blade just below the edge of the window, ready to strike. She accepted the jug and quickly retreated into the truck, setting it on the floorboard.

Rico backed away, still grinning. “Drive safe,” he said.

“Thanks,” Ruppert said. Lucia did not look at him.

At last, the sentries used a chain-and-pulley system to open the gate. Ruppert drove through it and on along the potholed Vegas strip, passing groups of shriveled people in rags huddled around trash fires in the cluttered streets, while moonlight illuminated the dark, soaring Roman and Chinese palaces behind them. The deprived condition of the people reminded him of south Los Angeles. He was beginning to wonder if most people in the country were living this way, and if his walled and protected suburb was the exception and not, as he’d somehow been led to believe, the norm.

He stomped the accelerator—there would be other armed gangs lurking in the windblown city ahead, and he didn’t want to tempt any of them.

“We have to dump this.” Lucia lifted the five-gallon gas can.

“What? Why?”

“He could have put a tracker in it.” She thumped the large black cap with her fingernail. “Maybe even a listener.”

“They’re just desert people,” he said. “It was a gift. They support us.”

“Desert people with computers on their arms,” Lucia said. “The one wanted to contact Terror for a bounty. He must have done it before.”

Ruppert’s good mood, which had just begun to develop, now evaporated. “But the bearded guy said to let us go.”

“Bigger share for Rico and his friends.”

Ruppert frowned. Maybe she was paranoid, but he’d learned to be paranoid, too. “All right. We’ll pour the gas in the truck and dump the can.”

“Not happening.”

“We need it. We can’t afford to keep gassing up your pal’s monster truck.”

“If he’s calling Terror, he could also taint our fuel to make us an easier catch. Probably pay him a bonus. And a tracker could be floating in there, too.”

“You want to throw away six hundred dollars’ worth of gas?”

“It could cause thirty thousand dollars in damage to the truck. And I prefer to be alive and free, if it all possible. Why are you slowing down?”

“Look.” They’d reached another barricade, this one erected of I-beams, more wrecked cars, and glittering curtains hung on chainlink. Already, men with machine guns were appearing at their windows.

Lucia rolled down the window and addressed the largest man in rapid-fire Spanish. She held up the jug, spoke a bit more, and he nodded and accepted it. He waved them through, and the sentries pulled their tangled metal gate aside.

“Two problems solved.” She smiled at Ruppert, something he hadn’t seen before. He’d seen her as dangerous, tough, resourceful, but now it occurred to him that beneath the angry glare etched into her face, she might be beautiful, too.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“Just you.”

She dipped her head away and looked out the window. “Drive. I don’t want to stop until we’re in Utah.”

TWENTY-SIX

It was six more hours of rough driving through canyons, washouts, and choppy dirt roads before Lucia, who’d drifted in and out of sleep since Las Vegas, announced they should stop to rest. Ruppert kept checking his rearview, expecting an armada of armored cars and black helicopters to erupt over the horizon at any moment, but there was nothing but desert and night sky. They’d been traveling for more than twenty-four hours, and though he hadn’t seen a Terror agent in many days now, Ruppert felt pursued. Maybe they were toying with him, watching him through satellites. There could even be a drone cruising above the Bronto, keeping a special tab on them, and Ruppert would never know.

“This is far enough,” Lucia said, blinking away sleep. “We need a place to hide.”

“We still have another hour to Goblin Valley.”

“And we don’t want to get any closer. I’m the extractions expert, remember?” She zoomed to a closer view of their location on the digital dashboard map. They were near a region marked Capitol Reef National Park. “Utah. We should find a slot canyon.”

For the first time, Ruppert enjoyed the fact that the Party had gutted the parks and conservation budget long ago. There would be hardly any rangers to find them. Not much risk of tourists, either. The wilderness teemed with the insane, the murderous, and the criminal, or so Ruppert had frequently reported. The Dominionists preached against visiting the wild, insisted it was home to demons, emphasized that time in the wilderness had made even Jesus vulnerable to the devil’s temptations. The only real sanctuary was the church and the company of fellow believers.

“Turn off here,” Lucia said. They turned down a narrow rut of a path littered with boulders and rocks. Ruppert eased the truck around, and sometimes over, the rocks. The truck seemed like it could handle the terrain, but he worried about the tires.

She directed him through a series of sharp, steep turns. His headlights shone on irregular rock surfaces pitted with long, deep shadows, like Rorschach blots, and his tired brain could hardly interpret any meaning from what his eyes told him.

“Okay, slow down,” she said. She leaned until her nose almost touched the screen, scrutinizing the old satellite image of the park. “You want to slow down…and turn to the left…right…here.”

Ruppert gingerly turned the wheel to the left, unable to understand the strange rock patterns around him, and drove them over a cliff. His fingernails bit into the steering wheel as the front tires reached out into empty space, and then the whole front end of the truck dropped like the heavy end of seesaw. They slammed into a hard, steep slope, rattling everything inside the cab and shoving Ruppert and Lucia upward against their seatbelts, which dug deep into their thighs and abdomens. He thought he felt his brain splosh against the dome of his skull.

The truck charged forward at an extreme downhill angle, out of his control, fishtailing down a washed-out gully.

“Gas!” Lucia screamed. “Give it gas!”

“What?” he asked, but his foot, which had been searching for the brakes, took her advice instead and stomped the accelerator. They roared down the slope. In the headlights, a high, solid ridge appeared in the distance and rapidly swelled to consume his field of vision.

“Turn!” Lucia yelled, but his hands were already moving. Ruppert’s instinct was to wrench the wheel as hard as possible, but his numbed shock at the situation saved him, and he only turned it a little. The truck spun to the right, and they skittered down the remainder of the slope and then skipped across an uneven surface of eroded rock.

The canyon narrowed quickly around them—ahead, Ruppert could see where the smooth boulders of the opposing canyon walls nearly touched each other. A man on foot would have to climb his way through.

He eased down the brake, then stomped it. Again the seatbelt lashed diagonally across him, and now he heard the tires screaming as they grabbed onto the rocky ground. The truck squealed to a stop as the canyon walls closed in around it.

Ruppert turned off the truck and removed his shaking hands from the steering wheel. Lucia caught her breath, then reached out and scrolled the map a few degrees. “Oh, maybe we should have come down the other side,” she said. “It’s not as steep.”

Ruppert removed his seatbelt, which would soon be tattooed into his skin in the form of a chain of purple bruises, and opened the truck door. He half-climbed, half-fell from the cab, stumbled across the smooth rock floor, and sat down.

“This is good, though.” Lucia sat beside him and looked up. The canyon walls reached more than a hundred feet above them, but were so close to each other they almost touched in places. “Hard for them to look down in here.”

They shrouded the truck under the desert-camouflage tarp, and then sat upon a heap of boulders to study the laminated maps printed from Liam O’Shea’s computer. They shared a paper sleeve of salt crackers and a large bottle of water.

“The database said Nando lives in Lodge 10, with twenty boys his age,” Lucia said. “The nearest gate is the staff entrance, here in the west wall. We should use that.”

“We can’t just ram it down with the truck,” Ruppert said. “They’ll have a security system. Armed guards, I bet.”

“Guards, and machine gun nests, and lots of boys with military training.”

“They’re just kids.”

“Best time to train them,” Lucia said. “Goblin Valley keeps boys up to the age of sixteen, then enlists them. So there will be older boys too—boys trained as soldiers and snipers, trained to torture and interrogate. I’m sure they run school-defense drills. That would be good training for protecting foreign bases. So we could be facing a few thousand defenders.”

“Then we have to keep quiet. I don’t suppose we can use your magic remote?”

She shook her head. “It’s just a toy against their systems. They have an evolving propriety code.”

“Then what do we do, extraction expert?”

“We’ll need human intelligence. A person on the inside.”

“Which we don’t have,” Ruppert pointed out.

“And we’ll have to get one. I’m not sure how. Let’s assume we’re inside and go from there.”

“Okay. So we’re inside the school, surrounded by a bunch of armed Children of the Corn—and your son,” Ruppert hurried to add, in response to Lucia’s scowl. “We have to get inside his dormitory without drawing the attention of guards or other kids. We have to wake him without disturbing any of the others. I assume they’re not in private apartments or anything?”

Lucia glanced at the map, shook her head. “Looks like they all sleep in one room.”