the last two years.”
“Lucia’s not a fan of my news program,” Ruppert explained to Smith.
“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” Smith said. “Mr. Ruppert, thank you for telling me this. It’s going to save time. What else did they want you to do?”
“That’s it,” Ruppert said. “Just the Westerly guy. I didn’t want to help them, but they said they’d send us to labor camps, send Madeline to work at that meltdown site in Texas-”
“And if you helped out, you get to keep on living the good life, because you’re one of their guys. Right?” Lucia asked.
“If they thought I was one of them, they wouldn’t have tortured and threatened me,” Ruppert said. “You’ve seen the scars on my hands.”
“Could be fake,” she said.
“Check them out.”
“Could be real but you agreed to it, and they doped you on painkillers first.”
“If I was that dedicated, why would I be telling you now?”
“He was going to put you under,” Lucia said.
“Without drugs,” Smith pointed out. “It would require his cooperation.”
“Then maybe you should use the drugs,” Lucia said. Her eyes had narrowed as she examined Ruppert. “Just to be safe.”
“Fine with me,” Ruppert snapped back at her. “I’ll take the drugs.”
“Both of you need to calm down,” Smith said. “So far as I understand, I am the only certified medical doctor in this room, and I will make the medical decisions. Now. I don’t think it will be necessary to drug you, Daniel. I believe you wish to cooperate in removing any directives Terror may have planted within your mind. Am I correct?”
“Yes,” Ruppert said. He and Lucia continued glaring at each other.
“Lucia, avoid agitating him. It creates more work for me.”
Lucia stalked away towards a shelf crammed with magazines.
“Make yourself comfortable, Daniel,” Smith said. “Ease back in your chair.” He activated the easel screen. A constellation of electronic dots appeared, then slowly faded into another arrangement of dots, and then another.
“Now, keep your eyes on the screen, and allow yourself to relax,” Smith said. “I am going to count down from ten to one, and you will grow increasingly calm, clear, and relaxed. Ten, relaxing now…nine…”
The dots on the screen continued to fade in and out of existence, and the constellations fell into repeating patterns. Ruppert felt his eyelids dropping, and his body seemed to grow heavy. It was actually a very soothing experience, as if he were on the edge of sleep and momentarily forgetting his worry and fear…
“Now,” Smith’s voice said. Ruppert could not see him anymore. He supposed his eyes had closed, though he could still see dim afterimages of the slowly shifting dots. “We will look at a few of your memories. You will experience these like video files playing on a large screen. You will have full power to reverse, advance, pause, or stop any memory. The choice is yours. Do you understand?”
“Sure, doc.” Ruppert’s voice drawled out thick and slow.
“We are going back to the time when you were in the custody of the Department of Terror.”
A barrage of jagged, disconnected images assaulted Ruppert. Armed men in black masks raiding his home. The burning of his hands, the Captain electrocuting him, the guards beating him. A scream rose in his throat.
“Remember,” Smith said, in a voice that was calm and reassuring and seemed to glow with kindness. “These are just old videos. You have complete power over them. You are perfectly safe.”
“Okay,” Ruppert said.
“Good. Now, Daniel, we are looking for the secret conversations, the ones they told you never to remember.”
Ruppert slumped in his chair in the interrogation room, his wrists and ankles strapped into place, facing the cold blue eyes of the Captain across the table. There was something wrong with Ruppert’s arm. A needle. They’d inserted an IV into the inner crook of his elbow, and cold fluid dripped in through it, his arm aching as the coldness spread through it.
“You will remember none of this,” the Captain said. “You would rather hurt yourself than remember-”
A rush of bad memories filled Ruppert’s mind, apparently selected on the basis of their ability to stir emotional trauma. Eight years old, kneeling in the street in front of his parents’ house in Bakersfield, his black lab Guppy sprawled on the asphalt in front of his neighbor’s SUV. Ten years old, peering down at his grandfather’s body in a casket while his mother wept beside him. Ruppert heard a man screaming across a long distance.
'Now, steady yourself,” Smith’s voice said. “Nothing can hurt you now. You are free of these things. You are at peace now.”
The avalanche of painful memories began to ebb. Ruppert actually did feel better now, as if Smith’s voice had the power to make things real just by saying them. He was free of these things.
“Let’s try again,” Smith said. “We’re back in the interrogation room-”
And Ruppert was. A scorching pain flared in his muscles and in the cores of his bones. He twisted in the interrogation, but there was no escape.
“You will remember nothing,” the Captain said again, through grinding teeth. The Captain looked less human somehow, as if a dark supernatural force inhabited his body. The shadows across his face were longer and deeper, and his blue eyes looked as unfeeling as painted rocks. “Nothing…you will not remember…”
Ruppert’s eyes fixed on the skull-and-bones pin on the Captain’s uniform, the insignia of Terror. The silver skull grew to fill his entire vision. The crossbones broke at right angles to form a swastika, and it began to rotate counterclockwise, giving the impression of a spiral.
The swastika began to multiply, filling him with horror. He saw them everywhere, made of bones or painted in blood, thousands of them now and they brought dread and terror with them because he knew what they meant he knew deep deep down that the devil could make itself real in the world and it could hide behind any symbol, any flag, any words, and you might not even know it was there until it had done its evil and moved on-
“You,” the Captain snarled, and with each word he spoke, a fiery stab of electricity seared Ruppert inside and out. “Will. Remember. Nothing.” That wasn’t how it had really gone, but that was how it was going now, with Dr. Smith and the Captain wrestling for Ruppert’s mind, the Doctor outside him, the Captain within.
The thousands of swastikas crunched back together and assembled like puzzle pieces into the shape of Hollis Westerly, a big hulking man with a balding mullet-style haircut and strange tattoos along his hairy arms, Ruppert read the words on one and the words said “Odin Rising” but they didn’t mean anything to him.
Ruppert was in a dark place facing Westerly, who was not a pic or a hologram now but an incarnate person. The Captain stood in the deep shadows behind Ruppert and whispered in his ear.
“He’s a wicked man,” the Captain said. “Just look at him.”
“Wicked,” Ruppert agreed.
“He shouldn’t be allowed to live.”
“No, he shouldn’t.”
“Look around and see what you can use,” the Captain said.
Ruppert looked, but there was only darkness.
“A gun, a knife, anything,” the Captain said. At his words, both a revolver and a dagger appeared, floating in the void nearby. Ruppert plucked the knife out of the air.
“Make sure his throat is cut,” the Captain said. “Remove his tongue if you can. Don’t leave him alive. There is nothing more important this.”
“Yes.” Ruppert stepped towards Westerly, lifted the blade, and skewered the neo-Nazi’s throat.
“Good boy,” the Captain said.
Ruppert blinked, unsure where he was. His empty hand was extended out in front of him, as if reaching for something.
“What?” he asked, as if someone had spoken to him.
“And you’re awake,” Dr. Smith replied. The room suddenly made sense. He was in a cave in the desert. The old doctor occupied a recliner just behind and to the left of Ruppert.
“You snapped out of it,” Smith told him. “You woke yourself. What do you remember?”
