and there is always another fight tomorrow.
“So, war is holy because it the means by which the group binds together to protect and provide for its members. The word religion itself means ‘to bind back together.’ Are you following me, Daniel?”
“So you exploit people’s beliefs for fun and profit.”
“No!” Crane’s fist slammed into the black desktop, causing the holographic city of Rome to scramble and shudder. “War is the thing that makes us, war raised us from the primordial sea into creatures that build cities and nations, war evolved all forms of life on the planet, war makes us strong and makes us strive, war brings us together, tells us who we are, makes us more, the essence of the nation and of the human being and of all life.” Crane leaned in close, his mouth a flat line, his cold blue eyes unnaturally bright.
“War is God,” he whispered. “And God is war.”
Ruppert sat in his wheelchair, looking back into Crane’s eyes. It was a long, tense moment, and then something beeped in Crane’s pocket. He removed a flat screen the size of business card.
“I have an appointment,” Crane said. “You see? Even I am just a servant in the vineyards of the Lord. I’ve enjoyed our talk, Daniel, but tomorrow we’re down to business.” He opened a drawer in his side of the desk, then handed Ruppert a pen and a pad of paper. “I’m going to need you to write down everything, naturally.'
“I’m sorry?” Ruppert asked. He felt dazed by their conversation, detached from reality.
“A history of what you’ve done,” Crane said. “An account of your crimes against the state and so on. And do grant me the courtesy of naming names. Note anyone who assisted you in your crimes. As I said, we have no need of secrets in this place.” He touched the desktop, and the two Army guards returned with the obese orderly.
Crane stood and straightened his jacket, leaving his tie undone. “Remember what we talked about, Daniel. Consider your place in what remains of this world.” The wall panel slid away for him, and he turned and exited the room.
“I’m sure I will,” Ruppert said. The orderly turned him around, then wheeled him out of the room, a soldier close on either side.
THIRTY
They did not return Ruppert to the room where he’d awoken, but to a narrow, private room that looked as if it might have been converted from a janitor’s storeroom. It was no cleaner than the rest of the hospital, and smelled just as sour, and Ruppert decided it was less a gesture of generosity than an attempt to prevent him from talking to other patients and spreading any of the classified information he knew. He’d been placed in information quarantine.
Dr. Crane did not send for Ruppert the next day, or the next. He had no reading material and no screen to watch, so he resorted to the pad of paper Crane had given him. Instead of a confession, he tried to draw a cartoon picture of Vice President Hartwell, and eventually he wrote letters to both Lucia and to Madeline, wishing them both the best. He knew they would never be delivered, but it felt good. After four days, he also wrote a note to Dr. Crane:
Dr. Crane:
You make a strong argument, but I don’t believe you.
Ruppert paused, not sure what else to add. Then he wrote:
You may be right. Historically, you are right. But there must be another way to live. And shouldn’t we be trying to figure out what that might be?
He stared at what he’d written, and he sighed and put away the notepad. Reading and writing made him dizzy. He wondered what drugs he was on.
On the seventh night in the private room, he dreamed of earthquakes and woke to silence. He lay in complete darkness-even the annoying little lights on the monitoring machines had vanished.
Voices shouted from the floors below him. Then there was a long quiet, maybe a few hours, he thought he drifted in and out of sleep during this, but he couldn’t be sure. He was startled by a sudden eruption of gunfire below, which quieted, then resumed, then trickled down to a random shot fired here and there around the detention facility.
It was just before dawn when the door to his room opened, but it wasn’t the large orderly or any of the nurses who occasionally dropped by to silently refill his meds. It was the two young soldiers who’d escorted him to meet Dr. Crane, one of them with blond stubble on his scalp, one with red. The hallway behind them lay dark, but both of them held flashlights.
“Told you they put him in here,” the red-haired soldier said to the other.
“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.
“Fucking game over, man,” the blond soldier said. “Can you walk?”
Ruppert heaved himself up to a sitting position. He tried to put weight on his feet, then shook his head.
The soldiers left, then returned with a folded wheelchair. They muttered and grumbled to each other as they figured out how to open it and lock it into position. Then they hefted Ruppert into the chair. He was able to turn the wheels with his own hands.
“We have to take the stairs,” the red-haired soldier told him. “No power, no elevators. Nothing works.”
Ruppert followed them into the stairwell. The soldiers turned him around and rolled him backwards down the stairs, one step at a time, down five landings.
They followed a wide corridor into the detention center’s staff cafeteria, where hundreds of people had gathered, prisoners and Army guards alike. The young and the wounded were wrapped in blankets gathered from the hospital rooms and guard barracks. The crowd was silent, listening intently to a scratchy radio set into a wooden case the size of a coffee table.
“Everything fritzed out,” the blond soldier whispered. “We found the old radio in the basement. Couple generators.”
“We killed those psychos that were running this place,” the red-haired soldier told him. 'That's what you want to know, isn't it?'
“I don’t understand,” Ruppert said.
“When the cities started going up, they told us to kill all the elderly prisoners,” the blond soldier said.
'And adult males,' his friend added. “To, you know, conserve resources, and all that.'
'But we talked it about it,' the first soldiers. 'We decided not to do it. But you can't just disobey a psycho. But D.C.'s gone, no chain of command, so what the hell, right? We figure we had to kill the psychos instead. We put ‘em out there.” He nodded toward a window wall that looked out into a concrete courtyard outside the staff cafeteria.
There were five bodies in black cloth. Ruppert saw one man in an official, military-style Terror uniform, black with silver ornamentation, and four others in black-on-black suits. Crane was among them, his blank eyes open toward the stars, snowflakes accumulating on his frozen eyeballs. The ice and snow around his head had become a wide circle of red slush.
'That's an extreme decision,' Ruppert said.
'Extreme days,' the red-haired soldier said. 'And we saw your video. That was you, right? With the Nazi guy?'
'What?' Ruppert asked. 'When?'
'It's going around.' The soldier shrugged. 'Helped us make up our minds about the psychos. Figured they brought things down in the first place, right?'
Then the two soldiers left to collect another patient. Ruppert wheeled into the crowd, looking carefully among the shadowy faces. His heart stuttered when a dark-haired woman seated on the floor turned towards him, and he recognized Lucia. She looked smaller, as if she hadn’t eaten well, but now she was spooning peanut butter out of a gallon-sized aluminum can. She shared it with Nando, who sat beside her on a folded bed sheet.
Ruppert rolled towards her, but Nando saw him first and sprang towards him. Lucia gasped.
“We didn’t know if you were alive,” she whispered. “Are you hungry?”
“No, thanks. What’s happened?”
Several people shushed them, and they lowered their voices even more. On the radio, a man’s voice crackled:
