J Bryan - Dominion

“Let’s grab him,” Wayne said.

“Wait,” Ruppert said. “Let me do it. You might panic him.”

Wayne snorted, but he stayed in place as Ruppert approached Sully, trying not to make any sudden moves.

“Sully?” he whispered. “Sully, it’s Daniel.”

Sully continued to stare at his watch. A red light pulsed on its face, about once every second. Sully appeared transfixed by it.

“Sully, look at me,” Ruppert said. “We have to keep going. Everyone’s waiting.”

Sully didn’t move. Ruppert reached out and covered the blinking light with his hand. Sully gasped, looked up at him.

“Daniel…Ruppert?” Sully asked.

“That’s right. Sully, we have to stay with the group-”

Something thin and sharp stabbed into Ruppert’s left side, into the soft tissue just underneath his lowest rib. At first he thought it was a wild animal, maybe a mountain lion, though it felt more like a shark. Then Sully raised a polished stone knife and stabbed him again and again, the blade hacking into the ribs along Ruppert’s left side, as if Sully were trying to break through into his heart, but kept missing and gouging Ruppert’s abdomen instead. He thought he could feel hot blood in his own stomach.

Ruppert stumbled back, trying to get away, but Sully’s left hand gripped Ruppert’s right arm and refused to let go. Sully stabbed him again and again, his face blank, drooling a little from the corner of his mouth.

Behavior modification, Ruppert thought, instantly remembering how Terror had programmed him to murder Hollis Westerly. Which, on reflection, he might have accomplished before leaving Maya Kendrick’s defunct vineyard.

Ruppert tried desperately to remember how Dr. Smith had deprogrammed him. There had been a keyword, a master word that George Baldwin had used to gain instant control over Ruppert’s mind.

“Racca!” he shouted into Sully’s face. “Jesus, Sully, Racca, does that work on you?”

The stabbings slowed, then stopped. Sully released him, and Ruppert slipped to the dirt floor, which felt muddy and warm. His own blood.

“Sully, wake up,” Ruppert said.

Sully blinked and looked down at him, then looked to the pointed stone blade in his right hand, drenched in Ruppert’s blood.

“Oh,” Sully said. “Oh, fuck, Daniel.”

Ruppert could see him clearly in the light from Wayne’s helmet. He turned his head and saw Wayne standing where Ruppert had left him, watching, hands at his side, eyes wide in astonishment.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel, oh God,” Sully muttered, and Ruppert turned back to him. “They made me. I forgot. I forgot or I would have said. They made me do it.”

Ruppert coughed, and it hurt. He shuddered.

Sully raised the blade again, staring at it.

“They made me do it, Daniel.”

“I know.”

Sully tilted the blade to look at the bloodied tip. Then, his face blank again, he plunged the knife into his own throat.

“Sully!” Ruppert reached for him as he sank to his knees. Ruppert looked back to Wayne. “Are you going to help at all?”

Ruppert heard a thunderous, rumbling sound, and then Lucia and Nando bolted into view, followed by the other travelers and the young woman who’d been leading the group. All of them ran while looking back over their shoulders, panic on their faces. Ruppert tried to push himself to his feet, but he had no strength in his legs. He’d lost a lot of blood.

Light flooded the tunnel, as if the sun had risen in the underground world, shining down from little buzzing drones overhead. Rows of armed men in faded green uniforms marched after them, wielding machine guns.

“This is the United States Army,” an amplified voice announced. “Border Patrol. Get down flat on your faces. You move, we shoot.”

The travelers dropped to their knees, then lay prostrate on the floor. Lucia gripped Nando’s hand. A team of soldiers approached the alcove where Ruppert and Sully lay, each soaked in their own blood. They lowered their weapons.

“What the hell happened to you?” one of the soldiers asked Ruppert.

“I think I’m dying,” Ruppert said, and then the world turned black.

When Ruppert finally awoke, he lay on a mattress no thicker than a towel against a hard, flat surface. He had almost no strength, but leather cuffs bound his arms to cool metal rails. Everything in his abdomen ached.

He opened his eyes to see gray cinderblock walls. Clean white bandages bound up his torso. Plastic green curtains hung on either side of his narrow hospital bed. Machines monitored him, included a convex black lens for video surveillance. Fluids fed into his arm from a clear bag suspended overhead.

He lay for a long time, trying to piece together what had happened, wondering if Nando and Lucia were safe. He doubted it, but someone had gone to the trouble of giving Ruppert medical care, and that gave him a little hope. Beyond the curtains, he heard groans and a few snores. There were many others in the room with him.

“Where am I?” Ruppert asked aloud.

“The land of no return,” someone answered off to his left. Someone else forced a laugh.

“Are we in Canada?” Ruppert asked.

There was another, snorting laugh. Ruppert didn’t attempt further conversation, and neither did anybody else.

After more than an hour, a pair of crewcut young men, eighteen or nineteen years old, appeared in threadbare green US Army uniforms. They looked back and forth between Ruppert and a digital clipboard.

“That’s him,” one of the soldiers declared. An obese male orderly appeared with a wheelchair, and the soldiers helped him move Ruppert into it. They strapped Ruppert’s arms to the arms of the chair.

“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.

“Time for your interrogation,” a soldier said. “Do yourself a favor. Cooperate. Don’t give them a bunch of trouble. Tell them whatever they want to hear.”

“Okay,” Ruppert said. “I'm familiar with the program.”

They rolled him down a long, crowded hallway lined with bed-ridden patients along both walls. The patients wore flimsy paper gowns, and most looked heavily sedated. The facility smelled of rot and disease. Streamers of dark mold grew in the upper corners of the hall.

They rode up in a freight elevator, and then the soldiers wheeled Ruppert down a long, white corridor to a black door. It slid aside, and they pushed Ruppert into a white cube of a room, where two black office chairs faced each other across a lozenge-shaped black desk. They moved aside one of the chairs and wheeled Ruppert into place. And they waited.

After about twenty minutes, a section of white wall at the far side of the room slid back, and a man in the black tie, shirt and suit of a Terror agent entered. He was probably in his sixties, but he was very lean and fit, his eyes like blue ice under close-cropped silver hair. He seemed familiar to Ruppert.

“That’s all right, boys,” he said to the soldiers. “You can go on. He’s no danger.”

The soldiers saluted him, then pivoted and marched out of the room, the orderly lumbering after them.

The Terror agent sat down across the desk from Ruppert. He touched the slick black surface, and a row of glowing white digital documents appeared beneath his fingertips, many with images of Ruppert alongside their text. He perused them at a leisurely pace, ignoring Ruppert. It was several minutes before he spoke.

“Accessing illegal foreign data,” the man said. “Reneging on an agreement with the Department of Terror. Assault on a high official of the Department of Child and Family Services, for the purpose of accessing classified data. Assault and murder of a military school instructor. Forced entry into said military school, where you kidnapped a ward of the state, detonated explosives, killed two guards and injured several more instructors-all of this while publicly chanting terrorist slogans over an intercom.