They dragged him over the lawn, Ruppert trying to walk but only managing to scuffle his bare feet sideways through the cool grass; they moved too fast, keeping him off balance.
They wrapped a rubbery cord around his arms and strung him up, and then he was moving, swinging like a pendulum. He was inside some kind of moving vehicle now. He thought of the Freedom Brigades and their black cargo vans.
Fists beat at him now, pounding his kidneys, his ribs, his stomach. He was kicked back and forth among unseen tormentors, each blow swinging him towards another assailant, and each time he could not be sure where the fist or the boot would land. His body became sore and he could feel the bruises forming all over him. He could have kicked out and maybe hit someone, but he knew better than to fight back.
The beating continued for twenty or thirty minutes, and then someone grabbed his foot and stabbed a needle into his lower leg, and then he blacked out.
?
Ruppert awoke shivering on a hard concrete floor, his entire body aching. The air was frigid around him. He opened one eye; the other was stuck closed. His hands were still bound together.
The bare room around him was about as long as a coffin, but a little wider, and the ceiling was only about five feet above him. Light came from a single small panel overhead protected by a steel grill. Freezing air poured from a dark mesh vent next to it.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position. The only way out of the room was a smooth metal panel at one end of the room, which was about three feet high. It had no handle on this side. He pushed at the cold surface, but of course it was locked from the outside.
“Hello?” Ruppert said. “Is anyone listening?”
There was no answer. He thought immediately of Madeline. Had they beaten her, too? Was she waking up in some painfully cold little cell nearby? Maybe they had taken her somewhere else altogether. Everything else in the world was segregated by sex. Why not the gulag system?
He felt like he was deep underground, but he had no way of knowing this. He could have been on the twentieth floor of a glass skyscraper.
He sat back against the wall and drew in his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible to conserve a little body heat. The cold was already painful, and the icy air kept pouring in on him. He wondered what it would be like to freeze to death. His fingers and toes had already gone numb.
He expected that eventually someone would come for him, and he waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. He began listing all the things he did not know. He did not know where Madeline was or what they’d done to her. He did not know how long he’d been unconscious. He did not know if he was still in Los Angeles, or if he was still in America. He did not know if anyone was going to come for him, or if he would freeze to death.
After a few hours he was painfully hungry, but there was no food or water available. He pushed at the door again, then knocked on it a few times, but there was no answer.
Time passed and his arms and legs grew numb, and his nose began to run. He wiped it on the torn sleeve of his t-shirt.
Time passed and he found himself singing, under his breath, the jingle to a laundry detergent commercial: “Keeps your blues bright blue, Keeps your whites clean and bright, Try Splash Ultra Vibrant, In your laundry tonight.” It would not leave his head.
Time passed and he thought of Sully, wondering if Sully had been through this facility, maybe even in this cell.
Time passed and he thought of all the people he might never see again. Madeline. His parents in Bakersfield, his father who’d become obsessed with golf magazines and watching golf tournaments and practicing his short game with the digital putter Ruppert had bought him three Christmases ago, his mother who took very strong pills for nervousness and spent too much too time zoned out in front of the screen, sometimes drooling.
Time passed and he grew absurdly happy they’d never had a child. Or bought a dog. Madeline bristled at the idea of “dog hair” and “dog smells” in their home. The dog would be stuck inside by himself, with no one to take care of him. He wondered what happened to the pets of those disappeared by Terror. He decided it was better to have a small dog, because they would probably kill a large dog when they raided your home. A small, fearful dog who ran and hid at the first sign of danger.
Had Sully had a dog? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t seen one at Sully’s house.
A cat might be a better choice. Cats were better survivors on their own.
He knew what happened to the children of the disappeared. Older teenagers would be interrogated, probably, but the younger ones would be given over to Child and Family Services, their fate to be decided by Liam O’Shea and his kind. He wondered what they did at the Child Salvation Centers.
He was grateful he had no children.
Time passed and he slid into a dark, comatose sleep. He dreamed he was hiking across an endless white glacier riddled with cracks as deep as canyons. In the distance, almost at the horizon, he saw Sully stooped over, trudging forward into the cold wind. Ruppert tried to call his name, but he’d lost his voice.
?
He awoke to a loud wailing sound that burned his cold, stiff ears. The door panel opened and two large men in black coveralls reached in and hauled him out of the cell. The cell was sunken below floor level, so Ruppert was up and over a ledge onto another concrete floor. The air here was only room temperature, but it felt like a soothing sauna to Ruppert. He sucked in a deep lungful of the warm air, then accidentally sighed as he breathed it out.
“Don't get too comfortable,” one of the men said. They lifted him to his feet.
“Sooner or later you’ll wish you were back in there,” the other said. He had a flat nose that looked as if it had been broken long ago. “Get walking. We’re not carrying you.”
The men stayed close on either side as they walked up the dusty gray corridor. More metal doors were sunk low in the wall on either side of him.
“Is Madeline here?” he asked.
The first man, who had a scar twisting from his ear to his throat, stopped him with one hand and punched Ruppert in the jaw with his other.
“First rule,” he said. “No questions. You don’t ask anyone anything. Understand that? We own all the questions here.”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?” Scarface asked.
“I don’t know what he said.”
“Yes,” Ruppert said. “I said yes.”
Scarface hit him again, this time in the gut. Ruppert doubled over, slumped to his knees, and struggled to draw air.
“What was that for?” Ruppert asked.
Scarface grabbed him by his shirt. “Did you just ask me a question?”
“Yes. No.”
“Now he’s lying,” Broken Nose said. He grabbed Ruppert’s hair and turned Ruppert’s head to look at him. “You’re asking questions and telling lies.”
They threw him to the floor and kicking at his ribs, his shoulders, his head, their boots slamming into bruises still raw from his beating in the van. When his nose was bloodied and one eye was swollen, they jerked him back to his feet and made him walk.
The first stop was a large industrial sink, where Broken Nose dropped a metal grate over the basin, then drew on a pair of latex gloves. He grabbed Ruppert’s forearms and pressed them down on the grate, so that Ruppert’s bound hands were underneath the wide-mouthed faucet.
Scarface retrieved from under the sink a large plastic jug half-filled with a brackish, dark green fluid. He unscrewed the cap and bared his teeth at Ruppert.
“Don’t move your hands,” he said. He began to pour the fluid over the sticky bindings that glued Ruppert’s hands together, which now looked like a mass of old, dirty caulk.
The clumps of binding began to bubble and steam, dripping off his hands as fluid and acrid white smoke. He
