J Bryan - Dominion

He’d spent far too much of his life in enclosed spaces. Even on vacations or the occasional business trip, he and Madeline just rode inside an airplane to a another city or, at best, a walled resort on a U.S.-controlled island. Spending time in the raw wilderness was considered the height of antisocial behavior. Anyone who didn’t care to be crowded in at all times by other humans was deemed suspect.

He looked over at the strange woman driving his car. Lucia had remained quiet except to tell him to keep watch for highway patrols and National Guard, and she cranked up the stereo to the breaking point-Mozart, maybe. He didn’t know classical very well.

He guessed her age at somewhere in her twenties, probably a couple of years younger than Ruppert, about Madeline's age. It was hard for him to tell; her black eyes and long, straight dark hair marked her as a disfavored minority, probably Latino, possibly Native American. He couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable about that. What if he inadvertently said something that offended her, and she attacked him? She had a stern, serious look about her, an attitude that spoke of surviving long nights in dark and dangerous slums.

“You do this a lot?” he finally asked.

“What?” She turned down the radio.

“Our friend said you ‘run extractions.’ You do a lot of this?”

“Just something I fell into.” She shrugged, glancing in the rearview. They were alone on the highway. “Do it once, suddenly you’re an expert. People start coming to you for help. It’s sort of self-fulfilling.”

“How did you get involved with them?”

“Who?”

“With this…organization. Is that what it is?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s not like we have a name, or meetings, or, you know, a logo or something. You organize, they infiltrate. They disappear the leaders and turn over your membership list to the Freedom Brigades.”

“And the Brigades really do work for Terror? We always report them as a vigilante group.”

“Bullshit. They're paramilitary, state-sponsored. What planet have you been living on?”

“The one we just left.”

“There’s not an organization,” she said. “Just people you meet. Trying to survive. You learn who to see about fake identicards, who’s good at hacking security networks.”

“Like what you did at my house.”

“And your gate. A friend of mine made this remote for me. It's good for most residential security, for cookie-cutter suburban systems like yours. Some liquor stores, too."

“What do you do when you're not kidnapping journalists?”

“We survive." She looked at him a long moment, then said. "You meet people who are real radical idealists, but they don't agree on ideas. Mostly it’s just people on the run from Terror, or who’ve lost someone in their life to Terror. Terror makes its own enemies. And we help each other get by. Occasionally, like what you’re doing, there's an opportunity to act.”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a revolution.”

“Is that what you expected? Nobody wants to get hung at a football game. Anyway, information is the most powerful weapon. You should know that.”

“Because I work in news?”

“You call that news?”

“I read what they tell me to read.”

“And you’re comfortable with that?”

“It’s not what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be-to do, essentially, the exact opposite of what I’m doing.”

“But you do it anyway.”

“It’s the only work left. The kind of journalism that interested me doesn’t exist anymore. I just took what I could get.”

“Did pretty good for yourself, though. Topline car. House in Bel Air.”

“Actually, Bel Air isn’t as nice as it used to be.”

“Most people in the world live in tin shacks.”

“Yeah…” Ruppert looked out at the dark expanse of the desert, the scrub cactus and occasional angular Joshua trees. He liked driving out here. He wished they never had to stop. “Yeah, I know that, I just forget to think about it. It’s strange how your mind closes off after awhile.”

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you.”

“You hate me already?”

“I’ve hated you since I first saw you on the screen. You’re a liar. You just flood the world with their lies, and you smile while you do it.”

“I don’t write the stories myself. It’s just a job.”

“It’s just a job for the people who do write them,” Lucia said. “It’s just a job for the people who make them up. It’s just a job for the people who set the psy-op policy. It’s a gigantic system that’s nobody fault, because everybody’s just doing their little job.”

“I know, but-”

“No, you don’t! Without your propaganda, people would never accept any of this.”

“If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

“You’re right. I do hate you. I hate all of you up there drinking blood for a living, and then shrug and smile and say it’s not your fault, there’s just so much of that fresh blood to drink and all you take is a sip. Besides, it’s just Latin blood, Asian blood, Arab blood, African blood-it’s not like it’s real people being tortured and murdered to make you rich. Is it?”

Ruppert didn't say anything.

“Do you know how many people your machine has killed just this century?”

“It must be thousands.”

She rolled her eyes. “You are an idiot.”

“I told you I was.”

She whipped her head towards him, her eyes glinting. “You’d better not be doing this to screw us over.”

“I’m not.”

“I’ve killed men bigger and uglier than you."

“I believe it.”

“I’ve thought about cutting your throat before,” she said. “Every time I see your newscast.”

“Who did they take from you?” Ruppert asked.

“What?”

“You said most people lost something to Terror. I lost my friend Sully.”

“Nobody said I lost anybody.”

“So you’re just one of those radical idealists?”

“I don’t like talking to you.” She turned up the stereo and fixed her eyes on the road.

They drove for hours, stopping twice at unmanned fuel pumps and paying with Ruppert’s cash. When they were so deep in the desert he couldn’t see even a tinge of city lights either ahead or behind them, Lucia left the paved road to follow a dust-filled, barely visible track. She turned off the headlights, and the world ahead of them turned solid black.

“What are you doing?” Ruppert asked.

“We don’t want any sky patrols to see us.”

“Okay…but how do you know where you’re going?”

“I’m navigating by the stars,” she said.

Ruppert couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not.

After another half-hour, Lucia steered the car along a tall rock formation tall enough to block out the sky on the driver’s side of the car. She slowed, then turned the car and eased it underneath a jutting overhang.

“We’re going to get stuck under here,” he said.

“Stop complaining.” She let the car coast ahead several yards before stopping. They would be out of view of any satellites or helicopters. “We’re here.”

Ruppert opened the passenger door, but the rock wall of the cavern blocked it halfway. He sucked in his breath and managed to squeeze out of the car. Lucia climbed out on her side and closed the door, and the car’s interior light winked out.

Illumination flared from a small flatlight clipped to Lucia’s belt, throwing a harsh white glare that lent a supernatural look to the cavern, turning the craggy stone walls the color of bone while the cracks and recesses in them remained pitch black.

“This way,” Lucia said. They walked to the front of the car and then continued along the sloping cave floor. He followed her down a side passage as cramped as a chimney and nearly as steep, floored with a slippery layer of loose sand.