“Did they get him, too?”
“No, he’s fine. I just saw him a few days ago.”
“I did love him,” Sully said. “The doctors said I shouldn’t anymore.”
“It’s all right, Sully.”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“Yes. I just saw him.”
“Hope he’s okay.”
“The project you planned with him,” Ruppert said. “We did it. It worked. The word’s getting out there.”
“We were supposed to go north together.” Sully looked at his watch. “Now I only have one thing left to do.”
“What’s that?” Ruppert asked.
“Huh?”
“You said you had something to do. What is it?”
“Oh, yeah. Canada. I have to get to Canada. Can you help me to Canada, Daniel?”
“You’re already on the way. How did you get here?”
“They dumped a bunch of us on the street. St. Louis. Or Chicago. Or Minneapolis, I think. They didn’t want to feed us anymore, or something. They said-I don’t remember.”
“What happened then?” Ruppert asked. “Can you remember after that?”
“I went to-I don’t know, Daniel. I can’t keep track. I was in a hotel room with a dog on the wall. A painting of a dog. Some people helped me out with money, and they sent me here. Or some other people sent me here later, from the bar.”
“What kind of people?”
“Just people. This is really hard, Daniel.” The strain of trying to concentrate turned his face red and drew deep furrows in his brow. His right fist opened and closed, opened and closed, as if a muscle inside it were having spasms.
“It’s all right, Sully. We can talk later. Do you need anything? Water?”
Sully shook his head.
"Sully, you were right," Ruppert said. "About what I always wanted. You gave it to me. The big story. The truth that changes the world. My old teacher Dr. Gorski would be proud of us. We're journalists now, not reporters."
Sully blinked a few times, and his lips moved soundlessly. Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall.
Ruppert and Lucia sat on the hay-covered floor next to Sully. They remained quiet for a long time. Ruppert didn’t feel like talking. Seeing his friend all but incoherent, his mind broken up into unrecognizable pieces, chilled any comfort Ruppert might have taken in reaching this next step toward freedom.
Later, Violet returned and motioned for Ruppert and Lucia to follow her. She led them back to the main house, into an upstairs sewing room with a small video screen.
“I thought you should see this. It’s been playing on all the newsnets. Don’t worry, my nephew fixed it, or broke it, so nobody can look out through it.” She turned on the screen, accessed a news site (GlobeNet – Salt Lake City), and clicked the blinking TERROR ALERT icon.
Ruppert appeared onscreen in a way he’d never appeared in a newscast-disheveled, tie undone, a growth of stubble on his chin. He looked dirty. A Chinese dragon with a red star on its forehead filled the background behind him. The video effects group had done excellent work.
“It is time we admit the truth,” the digital Ruppert said. “America is weak and broken. America will fall. We must throw ourselves on the mercy of the great nation of China, a society thousands of years older and wiser than ours. They are closer to God than we are. We should adopt the Chinese way of life as our own, and beg China’s forgiveness for the crimes and provocations waged of our own evil, terrorist government.”
“This isn’t really you,” Lucia said.
“No,” Ruppert said. “But it’s on the news, so it must be true, right? I guess we can assume they’ve seen the Westerly interview. So they set up the narrative that I’m an anti-American, terroristic, apparently pro-Chinese, traitor spreading propaganda. They won’t broadcast the real video, of course, but it prepares people to dismiss the Westerly interview in case they do see it.”
Lucia shook her head. “That is diabolical.”
“In the news business, we call it muddying the stream-flooding them with so much conflicting information they don’t know what to believe. George Baldwin, the Terror agent at my studio, called it releasing the antibodies. You swarm the unwanted bit of information and surround it, steer it your own way, kill whatever leaked. That’s how you keep the official narrative intact.”
“What interview are you talking about?” Violet asked. “Who is Westerly?”
“I’ll show her.” Lucia ran outside, then quickly returned and gave Violet one of the discs. “We have more copies. I can leave some with you. It’s best to distribute these hand to hand instead of online, if you want to avoid Terror.”
Violet led them down the hall to a bedroom with another, older video screen, assuring them it was not connected to anything but its own hard drive. She closed the door and inserted the disc.
As Violet watched the video, her knees shook and she sank down to sit at the foot of her bed. She was in tears as the interview ended, but she didn’t look away. She stared at the blank screen for a few minutes.
“None of it was real,” she finally whispered. She looked to Ruppert. “None of it was ever real.”
“There’s an organization called PSYCOM,” Ruppert said. “Defense, or intelligence. They wage psychological warfare on the world, and that includes us. They have everything, the media, the schools, the big Dominionist churches you have to attend. The Department of Terror is a front for them. They went rogue, or maybe they were following orders, I don’t know, but Columbus was their project.”
“But why?” Violet asked. “To our own people?”
“To make us afraid,” Lucia said. “So they could remake everything.”
“This makes me more afraid,” Violet said, gesturing at the screen. “I’ve never been this frightened.”
Ruppert looked at the black screen. “Even this works for them, doesn’t it? It shows us how ruthless they are. What if it only intimidates people, and they keep quiet?”
“They will have the truth,” Lucia said. “It never goes away. It stays inside you.”
“I think it’s going to stay inside me a long time,” Violet said. “I’m not sure I’m glad I know this. I thought things were bad enough before.” She stood up. “We need to move fast. You need to get out of this country right away. I’ll see if I can move things up a day or two. Until then, you better get back up to the hideaway. Try not to let anybody see your face, Daniel. Even folks around here can’t always tell the difference between truth and not.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
They spent two nights in the hidden room above the stables, and Ruppert quickly grew accustomed to the sounds of the horses stomping and neighing below, and even the animal smells that reached up into the loft. They made him feel alive and, for the first time since his childhood, like he inhabited a world with some measure of sanity.
Violet, as it turned out, lived in the main house with her sister and her sister’s four children, as well as an assortment of dogs. Violet or one of her nieces delivered meals and jugs of water to them four or five times a day.
Ruppert and Lucia passed the time with the old paperbacks on the room’s only table, most of them missing both front and back covers. In the evenings, they listened to Nando and the other children describe in hushed, awed tones the goats, horses, cows and chickens they’d helped tend around the farm. Nando seemed to be adapting well, except for a tendency to bark orders at younger children.
The travelers also played cards with each other, using decks supplied by Violet. Nobody talked about their past, or how they’d arrived there, and Ruppert began to feel ashamed of how he’d questioned Sully in front of the others.
In fact, they only wanted to discuss one subject: Canada.
“I’m going to learn how to build those igloos,” one of the lone men said. “You can build an igloo, you can live anywhere. Get a couple of dogs, you’re set.”
“You go and sleep with dogs if you want,” said another lone traveler, Tarvis, a hefty black man with a Southern accent. “I’m finding me a French-speaking women, and live up in the mountains.”