Dominion (6 page)

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 everyone 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.

“No. I think it’s fine.”

“Good.” The car door opened for her, and she gathered her purse and climbed out. “I’d hate to start the week that way.”

SEVEN

Ruppert and Sully spoke very little to each other after Sully’s panicked visit, and they never had lunch together again. Ruppert busied himself trying to patch up his image with his fellow churchgoers. Not only did he attend Revelation Review on Tuesday night, but he arranged to meet a few of the men for lunch the following day, including Liam O’Shea, who accepted the invitation with his usual rubbery, toothy smile. Ruppert spent most of the lunch poking at dry, flavorless slices of grilled chicken on top of a limp salad and feigning interest in O’Shea’s drooling pedantry.

“We have to stay vigilant, you know,” O’Shea said. Ranch dressing dribbled from his lower lip. “You’d be surprised how many families are still raising their children with incorrect beliefs and antisocial values.”

“And your job is to fix that?” Ruppert asked. O’Shea, it turned out, was an analyst for Child and Family Services, a federal program contracted out to Pastor John and Golden Tabernacle. A bureaucrat, as Ruppert had thought.

“We have a hundred-point system to evaluate the morals of parents,” O’Shea said. “It’s very scientific. A score of sixty or below indicates a social crisis, and we get those kids to a Child Salvation Center immediately. It’s important to grab them as young as you can, before their parents corrupt them beyond repair.”

“And what happens to the parents?” Ruppert asked. The question drew sharp glares from the other two men at the table.

“We report them to Terror.” O’Shea shrugged, dipped his thick hamburger into the cup of ranch dressing he’d ordered for just that purpose, and bit off a mouthful. The process of chewing didn’t stop him from speaking; O’Shea was an efficient one. “We’re focused on protecting children, not prosecuting terrorists. You know, we save thousands of young souls in California every year, but it’s never enough. You can’t help but worry about all the children that go unsaved these days, with Judgment Day so close at hand. I wish I could just get my hands on all of them.”

Ruppert nodded solemnly and signaled their waiter for the check.

Sully did not show up to work on Thursday morning, and the producers scrambled to bring in the weekend sports reporter to cover his slot. No one mentioned why Sully was absent, and nobody asked, so Ruppert assumed the man hadn’t simply called in sick.

He tried twice to call Sully from the screen in his office, but the screen spat back that the system had no record of any such person. This was a warning universally understood—look no further, the person you’re trying to reach has been deleted from the official universe.

Ruppert’s top news story concerned the new radical Egyptian cleric, Muhammad al Taba, and his alleged hordes of North African followers. The cleric was finally being introduced to the nation at large, a shiny new enemy to hate, and Ruppert was doing his part. War news often arrived in this fashion, first released by select religious authorities, then confirmed by news reports days or weeks later. It reinforced the faithful’s confidence in the wisdom and infallibility of the Dominionist preachers. What Ruppert didn’t understand was how the preachers got such important, still-classified intelligence ahead of everyone else.

After work, Ruppert wanted to visit his storage unit in south L.A. and get online—he’d earned it, after two consecutive days with O’Shea and his ilk—but instead he made an even less cautious decision and drove east into Silverlake.

Sully lived in a neighborhood of large, decaying old houses with yards of sand and weeds, some of them only burned-out hulls. Silverlake was not a walled community, and literally anyone could walk right up to Sully’s door or window. After four years in Bel Air with Madeline, this seemed to Ruppert like a dangerously exposed way to live.

Sully’s house stood at the top of a hill, an old Victorian with tall, narrow windows and sharply peaked roofs, ancient by California standards. The lawn was patchy here, too, as if Sully wanted to respect the neighborhood’s low standards, but in place of the coarse weeds choking up the other yards, Sully had only desert wildflowers and thick palm trees within the iron fence encircling his property.

Ruppert parked on the street in front of the house and approached the iron gate. He couldn’t see any sign of a callbox, so he lifted the hand latch, opened the gate, and walked up the front steps.

The only sound in the neighborhood was the rush of highway traffic in the distance. He saw one person, a black man with a long gray beard, sitting on broken porch steps across the street from Sully’s house. He smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and read a crumbling paperback, and paid no attention to Ruppert. One corner of his house’s roof was cratered in, and bits of what might have been a second-floor balcony still dangled from the wrecked area.

Ruppert turned to look at the black lens over Sully’s door. “Sully, are you here? Sully?”

No response. He rapped the antique door knocker, and the door crept inward. He nudged it open further. A wide vertical crack split the doorjamb, and there was only a gaping, splintered hole where the notch for the deadbolt should have been.

Ruppert pushed the door open all the way. The front hall of Sully’s house was demolished, as if an earthquake and hurricane had hit at the same time. Side tables were overturned and broken apart, pictures had been ripped from the walls, and the walls themselves were punctured in more than a dozen places.

“Sully?” Ruppert moved down the hall, looking into a parlor, the kitchen, the dining room, the small library at the back of the first floor. Everything was broken open, upholstery ripped out of furniture, appliances smashed apart, bookshelves overturned. Only Sully’s screens had not been touched, even the floor-to-ceiling in his living room. All of them glowed the vapid blue color indicating your net connection was broken.

Ruppert climbed the narrow spiral staircase at the back of the house and into the upstairs hall. He looked into Sully’s office, the guest bedroom, the bathroom. All had been ravaged, and even the claw-footed bathtub was overturned and broken into large pieces. The bathroom sink was full of shattered glass and bright pills from the medicine cabinet.

Every nerve ending in Ruppert’s body told him to get out, run to his car and drive away, never to think of Sullivan Stone again, but he didn’t. There was one more room to check.

One of the double doors to the master bedroom stood slightly ajar, revealing nothing about the lightless room beyond. Ruppert pushed them both open with trembling hands.

Wooden shudders blocked off the windows, but streaks of late-afternoon sunlight fell into the room between the slats. The only other source of light was the square of idiot blue from a small screen across from the curtained bed.

The bedroom had been destroyed, as he expected by now, the furniture gutted, the drawers yanked from the dresser and flung across the room. He avoided the curtained bed, looking first into the master bathroom to see a thousand fragments of shower stall door littering the tile, then into the closet, which was nearly as large as the bedroom itself. Dozens of shoes were spilled on the floor, and the hundred or so stylish coats and jackets had been slashed open.

He returned to the bed, took a breath, and pulled back a handful of sliced curtain.

The mattress, too, had been gutted, and the pillows ripped apart. The memory of the Han family flared behind his eyes, as it often did, and he squeezed them shut for a long moment before he could look again. Sully’s body, which he’d half-expected to see, was not there. He did notice a dark stain on the inner face of one of the bed’s four posters. Looking closer, he could see it was a wide stamp of dried blood with a few blond hairs clinging to it. That was the only sign of Sully.

He let the curtain drop, momentarily relieved he hadn’t confronted Sully’s dead body, but he knew it meant worse things for Sully. If he was still alive, it meant long hours of interrogation, beatings in dark rooms, nights of torture…it meant Terror. The awareness of Terror was the submerged iceberg in the American consciousness. The Department of Terror was the full and final backstop against dissent, against unpatriotic attitudes, against moral deviance.

No one wanted to think about Terror, but fortunately you didn’t have to. You just had to wave the flag harder than everyone else, pray louder than everyone else, recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with greater solemnity than your co-workers. You just had to adapt to the safe alternative to reality that they offered you. You just had to express your full faith and belief in whatever the latest version of the truth might happen to be, and commit yourself fully to it, and forget all about it when the story changed. In Madeline’s school, they called this “well-adjusted.” More than anything else, her job was to adjust children.

For the maladjusted, there was Terror.

Ruppert stepped away from the bed and turned toward the screen. The house’s security system should have recorded what happened. It should have contacted the police, too; the fact that it hadn’t meant it was not criminals who did this, but authorities.