Every nerve ending in Ruppert’s body told him to get out, run to his car and drive away, never to think of Sullivan Stone again, but he didn’t. There was one more room to check.
One of the double doors to the master bedroom stood slightly ajar, revealing nothing about the lightless room beyond. Ruppert pushed them both open with trembling hands.
Wooden shudders blocked off the windows, but streaks of late-afternoon sunlight fell into the room between the slats. The only other source of light was the square of idiot blue from a small screen across from the curtained bed.
The bedroom had been destroyed, as he expected by now, the furniture gutted, the drawers yanked from the dresser and flung across the room. He avoided the curtained bed, looking first into the master bathroom to see a thousand fragments of shower stall door littering the tile, then into the closet, which was nearly as large as the bedroom itself. Dozens of shoes were spilled on the floor, and the hundred or so stylish coats and jackets had been slashed open.
He returned to the bed, took a breath, and pulled back a handful of sliced curtain.
The mattress, too, had been gutted, and the pillows ripped apart. The memory of the Han family flared behind his eyes, as it often did, and he squeezed them shut for a long moment before he could look again. Sully’s body, which he’d half-expected to see, was not there. He did notice a dark stain on the inner face of one of the bed’s four posters. Looking closer, he could see it was a wide stamp of dried blood with a few blond hairs clinging to it. That was the only sign of Sully.
He let the curtain drop, momentarily relieved he hadn’t confronted Sully’s dead body, but he knew it meant worse things for Sully. If he was still alive, it meant long hours of interrogation, beatings in dark rooms, nights of torture…it meant Terror. The awareness of Terror was the submerged iceberg in the American consciousness. The Department of Terror was the full and final backstop against dissent, against unpatriotic attitudes, against moral deviance.
No one wanted to think about Terror, but fortunately you didn’t have to. You just had to wave the flag harder than everyone else, pray louder than everyone else, recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with greater solemnity than your co-workers. You just had to adapt to the safe alternative to reality that they offered you. You just had to express your full faith and belief in whatever the latest version of the truth might happen to be, and commit yourself fully to it, and forget all about it when the story changed. In Madeline’s school, they called this “well-adjusted.” More than anything else, her job was to adjust children.
For the maladjusted, there was Terror.
Ruppert stepped away from the bed and turned toward the screen. The house’s security system should have recorded what happened. It should have contacted the police, too; the fact that it hadn’t meant it was not criminals who did this, but authorities.
“Restart home network,” Ruppert said.
The screen did not change. It didn’t even flicker.
“Hello? House, answer me.”
Nothing.
It suddenly occurred to Ruppert just how he might look to Terror, should they choose to look in on Sully’s house, or to review the records later. It was possible that the cameras weren’t functioning, either, but he doubted it. More likely, they’d wiped the network’s memory but would want to keep an eye on anybody who came to visit their latest target. Sully had been involved in something, or why would they have searched his house so thoroughly? It was not the kind of disappearance you associated with simple social deviants.
Whatever crimes they suspected of Sully, Ruppert was now unavoidably a person of interest. It was possible they would dismiss him because he was a co-worker and might have been concerned about Sully, and if not, Ruppert would certainly make that defense when they came for him. Ruppert was a God-fearing Dominionist, a Party member and regular donor, a public man. He’d erected every possible bulwark against Terror, doing his best to protect himself and his wife from their power. He hoped it counted now. Still, he should have known better than to check up on a disappeared friend.
Ruppert left the bedroom and hurried down the front stairs.
“Stop there!” a man’s voice yelled from behind him. Ruppert felt a chill pass down the length of his spine. He raised both his hands, fingers wide.
“Turn this way.”
Ruppert obeyed. He tried to not exhale a sigh of relief when he saw that he was facing two cops in black uniforms. The Hartwell Police logo was stamped on their shoulders, an “H” with a hollow heart at the center of the crossbar, a smaller “W” tucked into the lower bracket of the “H.” Like most large cities on the West Coast, Los Angeles had contracted its police services out to Hartwell Civil Defense, Inc. These amounted to local cops. They were still dangerous, of course-he didn’t want to offend them by looking relieved, but he’d expected Terror men in black coats.
“This your house?” one of the cops asked. He was short and pudgy, with a bristly mustache. He glanced at a thin screen in his hand. “Says it’s not your house.”
“No. This is where my…a co-worker of mine lives. Used to live.”
“Looks like he moved out,” the other cop said.
“Yeah,” Ruppert said. “I thought he was at home sick. I guess I got some bad information.”
“I guess you did,” the pudgy cop said.
“Looks to me like he moved out,” Ruppert said, his words moving a bit too fast. “He might have moved to another city and just didn’t tell anyone. He’s a…well, you know these TV types, and anyway maybe we’re better off he’s gone, he could have been a deviant or a criminal for all we know, you never know, I mean you have to stay vigilant about these things.”
“You do have to stay vigilant,” the second cop agreed.
“After Columbus, you really can’t trust anybody except God and the president.”
The two cops nodded solemnly. Then the pudgy one broke into a smile. Ruppert knew what that meant, and it relaxed him further.
“Hey! You’re that reporter guy, right? My wife watches you every day, right after that talk show with the three angry fat ladies.”
“Thanks,” Ruppert said. “Tell your wife I said thanks for watching.”
“Wow, the reporter guy,” the pudgy cop continued. “So, hey, what’s the news today?”
“The war’s on in Egypt again. Can I help you with anything else?”
“We got a report of a suspicious character. You seen anybody like that?”
“It is a bad neighborhood,” Ruppert said. “I thought somebody I used to know lived in this house, but I guess he’s moved. Can’t blame him with a neighborhood like this.”
“Can’t blame him at all,” the second cop said.
“All right,” Ruppert said. “Thank you both so much for your admirable public service in these difficult times.”
“We’d better escort you to your vehicle, sir,” the second cop said. “It is a dangerous neighborhood.”
“I’d appreciate that very much.”
They both walked close behind Ruppert all the way to the curb. He guessed that if he’d stopped walking, they would have pushed him to his car.
The cops hovered over him as he sat down in the driver’s seat and the car door closed. He thanked them both again and then drove west, shivering hard and barely able to concentrate on the road. He checked his rearview mirror the whole way home, but nobody seemed to be following him.
EIGHT
After Sully disappeared, Ruppert took great pains to keep his life unremarkable. He joined another group at church, the Dune Buggers for Christ, which involved building machines from kits and driving them around a church- owned park in the desert (but only as a large and supervised group, of course). He liked it because it meant hours of time at the church workshop, working with his hands-it was more enjoyable and more honest than the Revelation
