J Bryan - Dominion

On Thursday night, they came for Ruppert.

He was nearly asleep when he heard the clomping of boots downstairs. Ruppert had only begun to sit up in his bed when they burst into the room, piercing the darkness with a dozen or more bright beams from tactical lights mounted atop their assault rifles. They wore black body armor, black masks, black boots and gloves.

Some of the beams converged on Ruppert’s chest and face, while others found Madeline sleeping beside him.

“Hands up! Hands up!” one of the Terror men shouted. “Stay where you are!”

Madeline stirred at the loud voice. “Turn off the screen,” she mumbled, then rolled away on her side.

Ruppert raised his hands, and two masked men hauled Ruppert from the bed, in the process cracking his head against the nightstand and knocking over the lamp, which shattered against the baseboard.

“On your feet!” Gloved hands grabbed him up from the wrecked nightstand and shoved him face first into the wall. They clamped his hands behind him, then frisked him, tearing at his shirt and boxer shorts.

He could see the screen next to his bed, the one that should have alerted him to intruders in his home. It was completely blank, a mindless blue like the screens at Sully’s house.

“What’s happening?” Madeline’s voice was distant and dreamy. “Daniel? Oh, Jesus, Daniel, what’s happening?” Her voice rose to a hysterical shriek. “Daniel, where are you?”

“I’m right here, cupcake.” Ruppert tried to twist his head around toward her, but he could only watch from the corner of his eye as the Terror men stripped the sheets from the bed and grabbed her up, then hauled her out of sight.

“Help! Daniel, please, somebody help me!”

“Leave her alone,” Daniel said. “She hasn’t done anything. She doesn’t know anything.”

“Who are you people?” Madeline screamed. “Make them stop!”

“It’s Terror. They’re here for me.”

“What? What have you done?” She began to plead with the men. “Please, I never did anything wrong, my husband’s a jerk. I’m a good, State-fearing woman-” Her voice became a strange gagging sound, and Ruppert could no longer make out her words.

“Please don’t hurt her,” Ruppert said. “She really doesn’t-”

A hand seized a fistful of the hair at the back of Ruppert’s head, snapped his head backward, then slammed his face into the wall.

“Shut the fuck up,” a gravelly male whispered in his ear. “You and your cow both.”

A leather bag dropped over Ruppert’s head, blocking all his vision. He felt it cinch tight around his neck, and a buckle snapped into place at the base of his throat. The musty interior of the bag smelled like old blood and sour vomit.

They slammed him into the wall again, then pinned his hands above his head. A hot, wet slime spurted onto his fingers, then hardened into tough, fibrous strands, binding his hands together.

They dragged him from the room, cracking his shins and knees on the furniture along the way. He called out Madeline’s name and strained to hear if she answered, but the hard leather bag muffled everything. He moved in complete darkness and near silence as his captors hauled him forward.

Blinded, with his hands glued together, Ruppert stumbled and fell as they dragged him down the stairs, banging his shoulder against every support post on the handrail. They marched him across his front yard. He still couldn’t hear Madeline. Whatever they did to him, he’d earned it; he’d broken the rules and gotten caught. Madeline was no danger to society, though; more a slave to it. She’d done everything she was told, killed whatever part of herself people had to kill to adapt to the world, and the last thing she deserved was to be punished on top of that.

Their marriage might have been shallow, even loveless, but she was the closest companion in his life and they’d usually gotten along well when they saw each other. She liked being married to the famous newsreader, and he liked that she kept herself busy. He didn’t want to think about what the Terror men would do to her, what methods of interrogation they might use.

They dragged him over the lawn, Ruppert trying to walk but only managing to scuffle his bare feet sideways through the cool grass; they moved too fast, keeping him off balance.

They wrapped a rubbery cord around his arms and strung him up, and then he was moving, swinging like a pendulum. He was inside some kind of moving vehicle now. He thought of the Freedom Brigades and their black cargo vans.

Fists beat at him now, pounding his kidneys, his ribs, his stomach. He was kicked back and forth among unseen tormentors, each blow swinging him towards another assailant, and each time he could not be sure where the fist or the boot would land. His body became sore and he could feel the bruises forming all over him. He could have kicked out and maybe hit someone, but he knew better than to fight back.

The beating continued for twenty or thirty minutes, and then someone grabbed his foot and stabbed a needle into his lower leg, and then he blacked out.

?

Ruppert awoke shivering on a hard concrete floor, his entire body aching. The air was frigid around him. He opened one eye; the other was stuck closed. His hands were still bound together.

The bare room around him was about as long as a coffin, but a little wider, and the ceiling was only about five feet above him. Light came from a single small panel overhead protected by a steel grill. Freezing air poured from a dark mesh vent next to it.

He pushed himself up into a sitting position. The only way out of the room was a smooth metal panel at one end of the room, which was about three feet high. It had no handle on this side. He pushed at the cold surface, but of course it was locked from the outside.

“Hello?” Ruppert said. “Is anyone listening?”

There was no answer. He thought immediately of Madeline. Had they beaten her, too? Was she waking up in some painfully cold little cell nearby? Maybe they had taken her somewhere else altogether. Everything else in the world was segregated by sex. Why not the gulag system?

He felt like he was deep underground, but he had no way of knowing this. He could have been on the twentieth floor of a glass skyscraper.

He sat back against the wall and drew in his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible to conserve a little body heat. The cold was already painful, and the icy air kept pouring in on him. He wondered what it would be like to freeze to death. His fingers and toes had already gone numb.

He expected that eventually someone would come for him, and he waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. He began listing all the things he did not know. He did not know where Madeline was or what they’d done to her. He did not know how long he’d been unconscious. He did not know if he was still in Los Angeles, or if he was still in America. He did not know if anyone was going to come for him, or if he would freeze to death.

After a few hours he was painfully hungry, but there was no food or water available. He pushed at the door again, then knocked on it a few times, but there was no answer.

Time passed and his arms and legs grew numb, and his nose began to run. He wiped it on the torn sleeve of his t-shirt.

Time passed and he found himself singing, under his breath, the jingle to a laundry detergent commercial: “Keeps your blues bright blue, Keeps your whites clean and bright, Try Splash Ultra Vibrant, In your laundry tonight.” It would not leave his head.

Time passed and he thought of Sully, wondering if Sully had been through this facility, maybe even in this cell.

Time passed and he thought of all the people he might never see again. Madeline. His parents in Bakersfield, his father who’d become obsessed with golf magazines and watching golf tournaments and practicing his short game with the digital putter Ruppert had bought him three Christmases ago, his mother who took very strong pills for nervousness and spent too much too time zoned out in front of the screen, sometimes drooling.