Ruppert held his breath as he crossed the empty parking spots, raising the tire iron like a baseball bat. The man must have sensed his approach, because just before Ruppert reached him, he turned and looked Ruppert in the eyes. The man’s own eyes were droopy with alcohol, but they flared at the sight of Ruppert, and his mouth opened wide and he took in a deep breath, ready to call for help.
Ruppert swung hard. The hexagonal end of the tire iron bashed into the side of the man’s skull. The impact sent shudders up Ruppert’s arm.
Lucia pulled away from the man as he lurched a step toward Ruppert, one hand grasping at the air before him, his mouth working soundlessly. Ruppert struck at him again, but this time his aim was off and he only clipped the man’s lower jaw. He stepped forward and hit him again, and the man flopped back against his truck and slumped to the ground.
Ruppert continued to strike at the man’s head, over and over. The world was narrow and dark around him, containing only the school officer’s face and Ruppert’s own sudden rage, which boiled up from inside him. Later he would try to tell himself that he was just trying to be safe, he couldn’t allow this trainer of soldiers one moment to collect himself, because Ruppert would surely lose a fair fight with the man. But in his mind he was seeing the man’s hand fondle Lucia, and he was seeing the Captain watching with disinterested blue eyes as two guards held Ruppert against the floor and beat him, and he was seeing George Baldwin, the Terror agent at the studio, and he was seeing Pastor John’s beatific, collagen-molded face.
“Enough!” Lucia spoke in a loud whisper. “Daniel, enough! What’s wrong with you?”
Ruppert stopped swinging the iron, blinked a few times, and looked down at the school officer. The man bled from his mouth, his nose, and both ears. He was not moving. Ruppert felt his stomach lurch.
“You don’t think I killed him, do you?” Ruppert whispered.
“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Maybe three or four times.”
Ruppert knelt down, checked the man’s wrist for a pulse. He could detect nothing.
“We have to get moving.” Lucia squatted down and took the man’s arms. “Help me.”
They loaded him into the storage area behind the driver's seat in the Goblin Valley truck, and Ruppert laid the bloodied tire iron beside him. Lucia filched the man’s wallet pack and handed it to Ruppert, who dug through it, searching for the truck key.
“Hurry.” Lucia glanced toward the bar. “I think someone’s coming out.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ruppert said. “Go ahead.”
Lucia nodded and dashed to the Brontosaur, circled around it to slam the passenger door closed, then jumped into the cab. Ruppert found the key and hurried to crank up the Goblin Valley truck. He followed Lucia out of the parking lot just as the door to Bertha’s opened and two younger men in khaki uniforms stumbled out, laughing, their arms flung around each other.
Once they were on the road, Ruppert passed Lucia in order to drive in front of her. They’d decided that a truck from Goblin Valley would likely be ignored by local police, so the safest thing to do was let that truck lead the way, with the Bronto close behind, hopefully conveying the impression that the Bronto driver was some out-of-town guest of a school official.
They drove to a narrow canyon they’d selected along the western side of the San Rafael Swell plateau. Ruppert parked, then immediately removed his clothes and stripped the bloody school official down to his underwear. He moved the man delicately, not wanting to cause him any pain if he were alive. He still could not detect a pulse.
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.