“I know that.”
“Why are you so paranoid today?' Ruppert looked at the only other customers remaining, a table of three Mexican men in stained, threadbare coveralls. 'I don't think they're with Terror, either.'
'How can you know that?' Sully whispered.
“Jesus Christ, Sully.” Ruppert shook his head and jabbed a fork at the fried black lump of soy patty. He wasn't hungry. 'Things used to be different, didn't they?'
'I can hardly remember,' Sully said. 'It's like the bomb stopped time. Now every day is just the day after the bomb.'
THREE
Ruppert parked in the guest lot at District 118-4 Public Secondary School 171E, a twelve-story cinderblock building in Brentwood Glen. Cameras mounted on razor-wire fences swiveled after him as he approached the bulletproof window of the guard station by the school’s front door. The security guard, a heavyset white guy with a shaved head and drooping eyelids, was engrossed in a glossy sports magazine.
“Hi,” Ruppert said. “My name is Daniel Ruppert, I’m here to see my wife, Madeline-”
The guard looked up, and his eyes flared open.
“Oh, shit!” The guard spoke with a tinny echo over the loudspeaker. Then a loud, grinding screech resounded over the same speaker, and the guard clapped his hands over his ears. It was the school’s voice-monitoring system, punishing the guard for inappropriate speech.
“I mean, shucks, or whatever,” the guard said. “You’re the news guy!”
“Yep.” Ruppert gave what he thought of as his photo-op grin. “Thanks for watching. I’m here to pick up my wife.”
“Your wife works here?”
“Madeline Ruppert.”
“Madeline…” The guard leaned forward and tapped at the screen on his console. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen her. Sorry, first week on the job. We're not supposed to admit unscheduled visitors during school hours. It's still ninth period.”
“You really want me to stand here for the next twenty minutes?”
“Not up to me.” Ruppert waited while the guard spoke to a supervisor over his earphones. Finally, the guard nodded, tapped his screen again, and a sliding drawer emerged from beneath his window. Ruppert lifted out a laminated badge with his name, the date and time, and a photograph of himself that had apparently just been taken.
“Mrs. Ruppert is on the eighth floor-Room 82B,” the guard said. “Adults stay to the center lane in all corridors. The badge is radio-tagged, so don’t go off-course or you’ll trigger an alert.”
“Thanks.”
The front doors opened, and Ruppert entered a hallway divided into three lanes by thick black stripes on the floor. More cameras watched him from the ceiling. Posters lined the walls, many of them depicting President Winthrop at a flag-draped podium, the image of the Earth floating in blackness behind him. The pictures showed Winthrop in his prime, rather than the somewhat decrepit and shriveled old man now serving his twenty-third year as President of the United States. The poster were emblazoned with some of the Party’s favorite slogans: “Strength Abroad, Strength At Home;” “America for Americans;” “America: The Revolution Continues.” And of course the inevitable cross painted like the flag, planted in a hilltop and apparently leaking blood into the grass, with the inevitable slogan: 'America Everlasting.'
As Ruppert continued towards the elevator bank, he glanced at other posters, these depicting the homeland’s enemies. One showed a fierce-looking Latino guerrilla, certainly a leftist, his face painted with black stripes, his machine gun pointed at the viewer. He stood in a jungle under a full moon. The caption for this one: “If You Use Drugs, You Support the Terrorists.” Another poster depicted Arabic jihadis huddled in a cave, staring at a map of the United States: “Where Will They Strike Next? Stay Alert!”
The elevator automatically took him to the eighth floor, since Ruppert was not authorized to visit any of the others. As he walked down a similar hallway towards Madeline’s room, a boy of twelve or thirteen shuffled past in the lane to his left. The boy kept his eyes on his own shoes and flashed a hall pass at Ruppert without looking up.
The door to Madeline’s classroom was next to a poster of an adolescent girl in an orange prison jumpsuit, her lips a corrupt mass of blisters and sores. The poster read, “Remember: Premarital SEX is a SIN and a CRIME.”
The door opened, and Madeline leaned out, smiling, tucking a long strand of red hair behind her ear. Security must have beeped her.
“We’re still in ninth period,” she whispered. “You’re breaking school protocol.”
“I wanted to surprise you. Surprised?”
“Sh. We’re watching a lesson.”
He followed her into a darkened classroom where sixty eighth-grade students watched a standard montage of life in Columbus, Ohio, before the bomb: kids playing baseball, families attending church, a farmer driving a pick- up truck loaded with bales of hay. Whenever Ruppert saw this one, he always wondered how many farmers had actually driven around downtown Columbus with a full load of hay, and for what purpose, but naturally he kept questions to himself.
“The Fourth of July, 2016. Columbus, Ohio, was a quiet Christian city in the middle of the American heartland,” the narrator said. It was the deep, twangy voice of semi-forgotten country music star Olroy P. Toombs. “People lived the traditional American way in Columbus. The good people of Ohio never expected the horrible fate the terrorists planned that Fourth of July.” A few video clips illustrated the Fourth of July factor, families in red, white and blue oohing and aahing at fireworks as they ate hot dogs and waved sparklers.
The movie’s background music shifted from pleasant piano notes to grim, dark oboe and bass tones. Ruppert reclined against the back wall, next to Madeline, and looked over the herd of kids. They all dressed according to the school’s strict moral code: long skirts and long sleeves for the girls, slacks and collared shirts for the boys. The moral code also required boys’ hair to remain less than an inch long, preferably crew cut, while all girls had to grow theirs out to at least shoulder-length. A few of the kids looked bored, but most watched as if the video would soon show Christ rising from his tomb.
Stark video clips cut into each other. The mushroom cloud rising from Columbus, captured from one angle after another. The neighborhoods blown flat. The twisted black hulk of a school bus.
Then the soundtrack shifted again, to a thundering brass orchestra, as hundreds of military, police and FEMA vehicles swarmed into the city. The video cut to President Winthrop, the edges of his face still hard and sharp at age fifty, his steel-gray hair tousled by the wind as he stood under the White House portico.
“Today, on the birthday of our nation, we have suffered a horrendous and unjustified attack at the very heart of our homeland. The entire country mourns with the good people of Ohio.
“Today, our country has changed forever. For too long, America has allowed her enemies to gather in the shadowy realms of the world. We have been generous. We have been just. We have loved peace; today, we see we have loved peace too much, been too forgiving of our enemies, too kind to those who threaten our interests.
“The American people are a good-hearted people, but after this grievous act of war, perpetrated by foreign terrorists against innocent lives, we must show the world a new face, another side, a different view of what our power can be.
“Americans love peace-but we love justice more.”
A roar of cries and an avalanche of applause poured over the speakers, the recorded enthusiasm of the press corps.
“America has suffered today, but America is strong, and America will grow stronger still. Today, I pronounce a Second American Revolution, one that will purge the corrupting influences from our nation and make us pure and upright once again. As we have grown complacent abroad, we have grown complacent at home-and as we all see now, the enemy is present here among us. Perhaps in our neighborhoods. Perhaps in our schools. Perhaps even at our churches.
