Dominion (35 page)

“Because we also must live together for the sake of commerce,” Crane said. “Morals are necessary for, as I said, internal organization to support the war machine. The rule of every state rests on two things, Daniel: force and myth. Without force, myth is just words and images. Force without a supportive myth, however, will not last long, because it has no legitimacy among the people. No state can rule by myth alone, or by force alone.

“The role of PSYCOM is to generate the necessary myth—an ongoing myth, extending into the fourth dimension—that is, a mythical narrative. Every war is a war to protect God, country, and family. We exist in an ongoing clash between good and evil, in which good means ‘us’ and evil means ‘them,’ the others who control the resources and supply lines we need.

“What is it that forms our sense of identity, as Americans or as Englishmen or anything else? To which elements of history do we refer? Would you agree that America’s identity was forged in the Revolution, the Civil War, the Second World War, and in the struggle of freedom against terror?”

“That sounds right,” Ruppert said.

“And what do these events have in common?”
“They were all about the struggle for freedom,” Ruppert said.

Crane snorted. “The bigger picture, Daniel, is that they were all wars, weren’t they? Cataclysmic struggles over the question of who would rule whom. Our sense of being a people, that holy sense of patriotism, is generated by war and war alone. What is there that defines a nation beyond its wars?”

Ruppert thought it over. “There’s a lot. Culture, learning, science—”

“Irrelevant,” Crane interrupted. “Now, consider the conditions of our existence as living organisms. Organisms can multiply rapidly, at a geometric rate, so their numbers are limited only by the need for each individual to consume resources and sustain itself. There are limited resources available at any given place and time. So they must compete. The slightest advantage—faster, stronger, smarter—determines who lives and who dies. Over time, advantages accumulate.

“The role you served, Daniel, in your former occupation, was the role of coordinating information—the bee dancing before the hive, the ant laying down a scent trail to a food source. It was more complicated, of course. The point is that myth is used to program the group behavior of human beings, to direct their fear, their violence and their productivity as needed. We all have a natural fear for the security of ourselves and our families—so much of the world, and the future, is simply unknown. Myth allows us to nurture that fear, and to pool it into a collective monster. This is the process that permits us to compete for resources as one human group against other human groups, and of course against lone, dissenting individuals like yourself.

“Evolution, as I was saying, results from competition over scarce resources. Colonies of bacteria, colonies of ants wage wars on one another. Trees poison the soil against one another. We have ongoing wars in our bodies, antibodies fighting off invasive disease.

“From the smallest bacterium to the greatest civilizations, the same rules apply. Those who are able to band together and fight, dominate or destroy, are the victors in the evolutionary contest. But victory is always temporary, and there is always another fight tomorrow.

“So, war is holy because it the means by which the group binds together to protect and provide for its members. The word religion itself means ‘to bind back together.’ Are you following me, Daniel?”

“So you exploit people’s beliefs for fun and profit.”

“No!” Crane’s fist slammed into the black desktop, causing the holographic city of Rome to scramble and shudder. “War is the thing that makes us, war raised us from the primordial sea into creatures that build cities and nations, war evolved all forms of life on the planet, war makes us strong and makes us strive, war brings us together, tells us who we are, makes us more, the essence of the nation and of the human being and of all life.” Crane leaned in close, his mouth a flat line, his cold blue eyes unnaturally bright.

“War is God,” he whispered. “And God is war.”

Ruppert sat in his wheelchair, looking back into Crane’s eyes. It was a long, tense moment, and then something beeped in Crane’s pocket. He removed a flat screen the size of business card.

“I have an appointment,” Crane said. “You see? Even I am just a servant in the vineyards of the Lord. I’ve enjoyed our talk, Daniel, but tomorrow we’re down to business.” He opened a drawer in his side of the desk, then handed Ruppert a pen and a pad of paper. “I’m going to need you to write down everything, naturally.”

“I’m sorry?” Ruppert asked. He felt dazed by their conversation, detached from reality.

“A history of what you’ve done,” Crane said. “An account of your crimes against the state and so on. And do grant me the courtesy of naming names. Note anyone who assisted you in your crimes. As I said, we have no need of secrets in this place.” He touched the desktop, and the two Army guards returned with the obese orderly.

Crane stood and straightened his jacket, leaving his tie undone. “Remember what we talked about, Daniel. Consider your place in what remains of this world.” The wall panel slid away for him, and he turned and exited the room.

“I’m sure I will,” Ruppert said. The orderly turned him around, then wheeled him out of the room, a soldier close on either side.

THIRTY

They did not return Ruppert to the room where he’d awoken, but to a narrow, private room that looked as if it might have been converted from a janitor’s storeroom. It was no cleaner than the rest of the hospital, and smelled just as sour, and Ruppert decided it was less a gesture of generosity than an attempt to prevent him from talking to other patients and spreading any of the classified information he knew. He’d been placed in information quarantine.

Dr. Crane did not send for Ruppert the next day, or the next. He had no reading material and no screen to watch, so he resorted to the pad of paper Crane had given him. Instead of a confession, he tried to draw a cartoon picture of Vice President Hartwell, and eventually he wrote letters to both Lucia and to Madeline, wishing them both the best. He knew they would never be delivered, but it felt good. After four days, he also wrote a note to Dr. Crane:

Dr. Crane:

Ruppert paused, not sure what else to add. Then he wrote:

He stared at what he’d written, and he sighed and put away the notepad. Reading and writing made him dizzy. He wondered what drugs he was on.

On the seventh night in the private room, he dreamed of earthquakes and woke to silence. He lay in complete darkness—even the annoying little lights on the monitoring machines had vanished.

Voices shouted from the floors below him. Then there was a long quiet, maybe a few hours, he thought he drifted in and out of sleep during this, but he couldn’t be sure. He was startled by a sudden eruption of gunfire below, which quieted, then resumed, then trickled down to a random shot fired here and there around the detention facility.

It was just before dawn when the door to his room opened, but it wasn’t the large orderly or any of the nurses who occasionally dropped by to silently refill his meds. It was the two young soldiers who’d escorted him to meet Dr. Crane, one of them with blond stubble on his scalp, one with red. The hallway behind them lay dark, but both of them held flashlights.

“Told you they put him in here,” the red-haired soldier said to the other.

“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.

“Fucking game over, man,” the blond soldier said. “Can you walk?”

Ruppert heaved himself up to a sitting position. He tried to put weight on his feet, then shook his head.

The soldiers left, then returned with a folded wheelchair. They muttered and grumbled to each other as they figured out how to open it and lock it into position. Then they hefted Ruppert into the chair. He was able to turn the wheels with his own hands.

“We have to take the stairs,” the red-haired soldier told him. “No power, no elevators. Nothing works.”

Ruppert followed them into the stairwell. The soldiers turned him around and rolled him backwards down the stairs, one step at a time, down five landings.

They followed a wide corridor into the detention center’s staff cafeteria, where hundreds of people had gathered, prisoners and Army guards alike. The young and the wounded were wrapped in blankets gathered from the hospital rooms and guard barracks. The crowd was silent, listening intently to a scratchy radio set into a wooden case the size of a coffee table.

“Everything fritzed out,” the blond soldier whispered. “We found the old radio in the basement. Couple generators.”

“We killed those psychos that were running this place,” the red-haired soldier told him. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand,” Ruppert said.

“When the cities started going up, they told us to kill all the elderly prisoners,” the blond soldier said.

“And adult males,” his friend added. “To, you know, conserve resources, and all that.”

“But we talked it about it,” the first soldiers. “We decided not to do it. But you can’t just disobey a psycho. But D.C.’s gone, no chain of command, so what the hell, right? We figure we had to kill the psychos instead. We put ‘em out there.” He nodded toward a window wall that looked out into a concrete courtyard outside the staff cafeteria.

There were five bodies in black cloth. Ruppert saw one man in an official, military-style Terror uniform, black with silver ornamentation, and four others in black-on-black suits. Crane was among them, his blank eyes open toward the stars, snowflakes accumulating on his frozen eyeballs. The ice and snow around his head had become a wide circle of red slush.

“That’s an extreme decision,” Ruppert said.

“Extreme days,” the red-haired soldier said. “And we saw your video. That was you, right? With the Nazi guy?”

“What?” Ruppert asked. “When?”

“It’s going around.” The soldier shrugged. “Helped us make up our minds about the psychos. Figured they brought things down in the first place, right?”

Then the two soldiers left to collect another patient. Ruppert wheeled into the crowd, looking carefully among the shadowy faces. His heart stuttered when a dark-haired woman seated on the floor turned towards him, and he recognized Lucia. She looked smaller, as if she hadn’t eaten well, but now she was spooning peanut butter out of a gallon-sized aluminum can. She shared it with Nando, who sat beside her on a folded bed sheet.

Ruppert rolled towards her, but Nando saw him first and sprang towards him. Lucia gasped.

“We didn’t know if you were alive,” she whispered. “Are you hungry?”

“No, thanks. What’s happened?”

Several people shushed them, and they lowered their voices even more. On the radio, a man’s voice crackled: “Has anybody heard any announcements? Is there anyone left out there?”

“It was war,” Lucia whispered. “Real, nuclear war.”

“With who?”

“China. Our cities, their cities. Nobody’s sure who started it.”

“What about the anti-missile satellites?” Ruppert asked. “The Skyfire system? The President said it would protect us.”

“Who knows?” Lucia whispered. “Maybe the Chinese took it out. Maybe nobody turned it on. Maybe it never worked.”

“Maybe it never existed,” muttered a man in a meshback cap.

Ruppert shook his head. “Nando, are you all right?”

Nando nodded without looking up. He’d returned his attention to a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.

“Again, this is Jerry Rothman, licensed chiropractor, broadcasting by ham radio from Garrison, North Dakota,” the radio voice said. The sound was full of hiss and static. “I’ve heard from survivors as far away as Eau Claire. They say they’ve heard people from upstate New York. Reception is not good. There has been no word from the government. We have known survivors in the following areas…”

Ruppert looked out through the tall windows into the predawn dark. Looking south, he thought he could see bright embers of the holocaustic light, unnaturally white, glowing over the southern horizon, consuming the cities of North America. He thought of his parents in Bakersfield, his wife in Los Angeles.

Lucia took his hand.

“What do we do now?” she whispered.

Ruppert watched the sun begin to rise over the smoldering ruins of the civilization. He didn’t know the answer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina. Visit his website at
www.JLBryanbooks.com
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