Ruppert visited the room he’d avoided since the interview, where Hollis Westerly remained locked in his cage. Westerly looked more decayed than ever, coughing up lumps of black and letting them drizzle through his beard stubble onto his scabby chest, staining an image of Thor’s hammer there. The air smelled sick and greasy, like rotten fat.
Ruppert thought about those around the world who would see the interview. Ruppert and Westerly would be linked together for all of history, if history survived Terror. It wasn't exactly the legacy Ruppert would have chosen for himself.
“Looks like we’re going to be famous,” Ruppert said to him. Westerly looked up with hazy eyes under drooping lids. A cigarette with a two-inch ash rested in the crotch of his fingers.
“Ain’t you famous no how?” Westerly asked.
Ruppert remembered that, as far as Westerly knew, Ruppert was still a working newsman. Apparently it had never occurred to Westerly that the news was as scripted as any sitcom, and a real story like this would never break there.
“Did they put me on the TV?” Westerly asked.
“Not yet. We’re putting together a special event.”
“Like the Super Bowl?”
“Yes."
"Always wanted to be big onscreen."
"Tell me something…" Ruppert began, then hesitated. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the man's answer. "Don't you ever have any regret?"
"For what?"
Ruppert wanted to scream and kick at the man's cage. "What you did. Columbus.”
“Well, sometimes you do,” Westerly said. He noticed the long ash in his hand and shook it, breaking it into gray dust. “Yeah, people died. But that’s war."
“Even if you helped start the war?”
"We didn't start it. White man got to struggle to survive, against them others."
"You realize that it was a psychological operation? You were a pawn? It actually had nothing to do with your personal cause or beliefs. You were completely manipulated. You get all of that?"
“Hey, I get it…somebody had to do it, though. Needed to be done. Fetch me them blue pills.” Westerly gestured towards a folding table littered with medication and empty food cans.
Ruppert looked at the shrunken, dying man with the Nazi insignia tattooed into his flesh, frightening and ludicrous all at once. Anyone could see Westerly was sick in the head as well as the body. But was he really that different from anyone who was happy to see millions die for the sake of his own sacred brand of stupid bullshit?
The man Westerly called Brother Zeb, whom Ruppert assumed came from the PSYCOM group Dr. Smith talked about, had gone into prison to recruit disposable men. He waved the proper symbols, and Westerly and the others obeyed him like trained dogs. Entire nations could be manipulated in the same way. Ruppert had done it himself, for a living.
"Pills. Now. Son of a bitch," Westerly growled.
Ruppert found the clear bottle of strong, dark blue pills and snapped off the lid. There were about fifty left, surely enough to kill a man. He pushed the bottle through the bars and turned it upside down, raining them down onto Westerly's piss-stained mats and rugs. A raw, feral glee lit up Westerly’s eyes as he scrambled after the rolling pills and sucked them from the floor.
“Knock yourself out,” Ruppert said, and he left.
In the early morning dark, as Ruppert slept on his now-dirty foam pallet, something grabbed his arm, and a hand closed over his mouth. He could hear the snoring of two or three other sleepers.
“Quiet,” a woman’s voice breathed into his face. Lucia. “Promise me you say nothing.”
Ruppert nodded, and she removed her hand.
“We’re leaving,” she whispered. “Come with me.” She shoved cool leather into his hand-the strap on his suitcase.
Ruppert was groggy and confused, but he’d been through enough danger with Lucia that he wasn’t about to ignore the urgency in her voice. He followed her to the room with all the disused lamps, where they’d first entered the underground rooms from the fermentation building.
“What’s happening?” he finally whispered. “Shouldn’t we get the others?”
“We’re going AWOL.” Lucia showed him a plastic keycard studded with copper bumps. “And we’re stealing Archer’s truck.”
“What do we do about my car?” Ruppert did not want Terror finding it and picking up his trail.
Lucia opened the heavy wooden door to reveal the concrete steps that spiraled up into the old fermentation cylinder in the building above.
“We’re leaving to Archer as payment.” They started up the stairs.
“Does he know Terror will be looking for it?” Ruppert asked.
“Yeah, I figured that was worth leaving a note about. He’ll just scrap it. Lots of expensive parts in there. Help me turn this.”
She placed his hands onto a metal wheel, and together they wrenched it around, opening the cylinder.
Ruppert’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he saw the room had changed since they’d arrived-there were wine crates, more machine parts, and generally a lot of scrap piled into the room, leaving only narrow footpaths. Turin and the others must have started on it just after Lucia and Ruppert arrived. The police hadn’t found the vehicle stashed here, probably because you didn’t intimidate people much by kicking around in their garbage.
“Over here,” Lucia whispered. They began stacking crates and moving aside machine pieces, including what appeared to be the entire flank of a tractor.
The work took thirty very long minutes, and then they stripped away a canvas tarp to reveal a sand-colored Chevrolet Brontosaur, a great hulk of a truck with a reinforced grill and a hardtop covering the payload. Two bumper stickers were plastered to the rear: an American flag captioned “Vote for the President,” and another that read “When the Rapture Comes, Watch Out for My Big Old Truck!”
Lucia started for the driver’s side door with the keycard. Ruppert, remembering a few of the sharp, high turns waiting out in the Sonoma Mountains-and how recklessly she’d taken them-offered to drive instead.
He steered the truck up and over heaps of scrap wood and steel mesh, grateful for the truck’s four-wheel drive. Within minutes, they were back on the road, the sky open and full of moonlight above. Ruppert felt dangerously exposed-he’d grown accustomed to life underground. He wondered if rabbits and voles felt the same way when they ventured out of the warren for a snack.
Still, he rolled down the window and breathed in the fresh night air, high above the pollution line. This, too, must be how burrowing creatures felt. More vulnerable to predators, maybe, but relieved to be out of the dank air and the reek of close, crowded bodies.
It would be a long drive back to Los Angeles, the city that was more dangerous for him than any other place on Earth. He looked over to Lucia. She had opened her window, too, and sat back with her eyes closed against her long black hair, which the wind lashed into her face.
Ruppert knew he’d made a mistake. Even if they did learn where to find Lucia’s son, the boy might be anywhere on the planet by now. Would he even recognize his mother? How long ago had Lucia lost him-five, six years? Meanwhile, Terror would see Ruppert’s interview, and they’d launch a nationwide manhunt to find him.
Still, he drove on, south towards the city.
TWENTY-FOUR
The return to L.A. was jarring. After his time in the desert and the mountains, he could really taste the bitter poison of the smog, and even feel airborne chemicals burning and staining his skin.
In Hollywood, hordes of people choked the sidewalks and the narrower streets, hawking stolen jewelry, drugs, purified water, quick-fried food, Catholic icons, booze, rugs, art, and pieces of computers and automobiles. A rivulet of car traffic crawled through the center of the marketplace.
They stopped at a narrow, clutter maze of a thrift store, the sort of place where they preferred bartering to money, but would still accept cash, if you had a large enough stack of it. Lucia bought clothes-all black, including sunglasses. The illusion wouldn’t hold up on inspection, but at first glance, she would resemble a Terror agent.