J Bryan - Dominion

The driver’s side door opened and Lucia leaned in. “Are we ready?”

“Working on it.” Ruppert hauled on the man’s pants, his shirt, fumbled with the tie.

“Don’t worry about that,” Lucia said.

“Make all the difference if some kid sees me.” He managed to complete the knot and tighten it. He dressed in the school officer’s jacket, though one sleeve was spattered with blood, then his shoes and hat. The Goblin Valley security system relied heavily on automated radio tags, which might be located anywhere in the man’s wallet or uniform.

“How long until his buddies notice he’s missing?” Ruppert said. He found the man’s handkerchief and used it to soak up blood from the jacket sleeve.

“They think he hired me for the night,” Lucia said. “They don’t expect to see him back.”

“Hired you?”

“Yeah. These guys are starved. You know they don’t allow any females inside the walls of the school? None. Ever. Nando’s probably never seen a girl since he got here.”

They transferred the school officer from the Goblin Valley truck to the Bronto, Ruppert taking extra care about the man’s wounded head. Lucia just shook her head at his concerns. They laid the man out in the truck bed and covered him with the forest-camouflage tarp, then closed the tailgate and covered the Bronto itself with the desert-camo tarp.

Ruppert checked his reflection in the Bronto’s window. The school official was three or four sizes too big for him, and the uniform drooped, and of course had those dark red blotches soaking the right arm. He adjusted his hat.

“Do I look believable?” he asked Lucia.

“We’ll say you do. Come on.”

They drove back to the school together in the Goblin Valley truck. Ruppert couldn’t stop thinking of the man he might have killed. Did he have family? Children? He imagined how it might be to die violently, at the hands of a stranger, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with you.

Then again, it was possible the man was abusive to the boys in his charge, and the world wouldn’t particularly suffer his loss. If he was married, he hadn’t demonstrated much loyalty to his wife.

“Good luck,” Lucia said, and she crawled behind the seat, into the narrow area where the man had lain. She covered herself with a fire blanket they’d found in the truck’s emergency kit. From a distance, those in the compound might think Ruppert was a guard or an instructor, but they would certainly notice Lucia, a female, did not belong.

Ruppert slowed to a crawl as he approached the western gate in the high walls of the Goblin Valley School. The gate showed no signs of moving aside for him, so he had to stop altogether. There was a guard booth beside him, but thankfully it appeared dark and empty.

“What’s happening?” Lucia whispered behind him.

“Nothing.” Ruppert reached for the touchscreen mounted in the dashboard. “Maybe there’s some kind of-”

Before he finished his thought, the dashboard screen emitted a rapid series of high-pitched beeps. Ahead, the gate clattered as it rolled aside. Ruppert drove into the compound.

The buildings inside were dull cubes of cinderblock, a style of architecture that screamed government bureaucracy. He might have been visiting a public school, or a prison, or the local office of the Department of Faith and Values.

The row of buildings on his left gave way to a paneled aluminum wall. He checked the map of the compound.

“We’re passing the ordinance sheds,” he said.

“Here.” Lucia passed him a bundle of six plastic tubes, each of them about ten inches long and painted black to make them less visible to security cameras. Each had a number between 1 and 6 scratched into it. As he drove, he pitched four of them over the wall on his left, hopefully scattering them among the storage sheds on the other side.

Lucia had built the explosives from household chemicals and fixed each with a detonator. The number buttons on Lucia’s specialized remote control each corresponded to one of the bombs. She’d gutted most of the remote’s parts, along with most of its functionality, to help prepare for the mission.

Ruppert arrived without incident at the row of long, narrow lodges housing boys in Nando’s age group. He parked right in front of Lodge 10. They would need quick access to the vehicle if things turned sour.

“We’re here,” Ruppert whispered. He climbed out of the truck, then helped Lucia crawl out to join him.

The lodge was made of the same dusty concrete as the other buildings. Five concrete steps led up to a shallow concrete porch, where a single closed door gave access to the windowless lodge. Lucia looked at the door and trembled. He took her hand, but she gave no sign of noticing it.

Ruppert gazed along the unlined black road. From the security map, he knew the school bristled with cameras, not all of them visible. They would have a video record of him, which would undoubtedly find its way to Terror, though he hoped bureaucratic inefficiency and territorialism might delay that a day or two. It was a slender hope.

The main concern, of course, was whether anyone was monitoring the cameras right now and might notice that Ruppert wasn’t actually a school employee, or that Lucia wasn’t in any sense a male. They’d had plenty of luck so far. Lucia’s carnovirus must have done its job on Liam O’Shea’s home office, as well as the Child and Family server.

He’d half-expected a pack of Terror agents lying in wait when they arrived. Or maybe they were here, still waiting for the order to ambush. Ruppert glanced at the dark alleys between the cinderblock buildings, but they were pitch black. If men in dark coats or uniforms hid there, he would not be able to see them.

“Are you ready?” he whispered to Lucia, who continued staring at the door.

After a moment, she nodded.

They proceeded up the steps, Lucia’s hand still shivering in Ruppert’s. Ruppert waved the school officer’s identity card at the keypad beside the door, and its single light turned from red to green. They entered the lodge.

Inside, they stood in a sour-smelling, wood-floored anteroom. To their right, a rectangular window looked into a room that served as a station for a guard or supervisor, but fortunately was not occupied at the moment. It contained a flat table with a data console, its cluster of pinpoint lights burning blue in the darkened room. There was an office chair behind the table and three smaller, plain chairs facing it.

Ruppert stepped to the office door and waved the identicard to unlock it. He held it open for Lucia, who tossed aside the fire blanket and walked to the tall microphone next to the data console. She unscrewed the mesh bulb at the top of the microphone, and then she withdrew from her pocket a circuit board, once a part of her remote control, and wired it into the microphone. She depressed the last of a row of buttons at the microphone’s base, labeled with a strip of masking tape: GENERAL/OUTDOOR. Then she pushed the power button to activate the microphone.

They took care to make no sound as they left the room, and closed the door very cautiously. She gave him a thumbs-up sign and an attempt at a smile.

They continued from the anteroom into the hallway running down the center of the lodge. They passed a dreary rec room hung with dusty, unpainted drywall and furnished with a few badly wounded sofas facing a chunky, outdated video screen. A dusty ping-pong table occupied a back corner of the room.

There seemed to be no interior doors in the dorm area, not even for the bathroom, where a row of toilets faced a row of showerheads. The boys were clearly meant to live with zero privacy of any kind. Ruppert wondered if they were instructed to watch each other for misbehavior, like the pastors encouraged at Golden Tabernacle.