“And you,” Turin said to Ruppert. “You need to look like you’re on the job. I’ll find you a suit upstairs, but maybe…” He pantomimed a few swipes at his own face.
Ruppert touched the heavy stubble on his chin, then nodded.
“Bathroom’s down the hall, fourth door on your left,” Turin said.
A few minutes later, having shaved his face and splashed some water in his hair, dressed in a dark brown wool suit that might have been fashionable in the 1920s, Ruppert met back with the others. Lucia had gathered her hair back into a ponytail and changed into a long-sleeved blouse and ankle-length skirt, the way a modern Dominionist woman dressed in the workplace, but they looked ridiculous on her.
“Okay, Daniel.” Lucia powered up the holographic recorder. “Let’s go and make your life worthwhile.”
Turin led them through a dark warren of rooms lit by a few spare bulbs, down another set of stairs, then unlocked a sheet-metal door. “Don’t let him rattle you,” he said to Ruppert. “And try not to mind the stink. He won’t sponge himself off, so we just have to hose him down every couple of days.”
The door swung open, and Ruppert stepped into a cinderblock room dominated by a large iron cage, like a monkey house at an old city zoo. A man reclined on a heap of filthy cushions, his leg attached to one of the cage bars by a long chain. His hair was longer, grayer, and more scraggly, and he smelled like a rhinoceros, but Ruppert recognized the swastika tattoos on his flabby arms and bare torso. The man leaned forward and smiled at him through teeth clotted with dried, black blood.
This was Hollis Westerly.
TWENTY-ONE
The underground room was floored with a concrete slab, but a few worn rugs and swatches of carpet softened the interior of Westerly’s cage. Scattered inside the cage were a small chemical toilet, a few bottles of water, a cot, and a few highly illegal magazines of the kind that featured people performing sex acts. Westerly rose from the pile of cushions at the middle of the cage and approached Ruppert, his chain skittering along the floor behind him.
His smile was crooked, missing teeth.
“I know you,” he said. “I seen your show before.”
“Always nice to meet a fan,” Ruppert said.
“Didn’t say I was a fan or not.” Westerly looked at Turin. “Now give me one.”
“That’ll be three today, Hollis,” Turin said.
“You said I could have one when he got here.”
Turin shrugged, then produced a crumpled pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. He passed one of them to Westerly through the bars and lit it for him.
Westerly took a deep pull, then hacked loudly. It sounded like gravel being ground to dust inside his chest. He looked back at Westerly with watering eyes.
“They got a colored boy deciding when I smoke, when I eat, when my shitter gets emptied,” Westerly said. “How do you like that?”
“It must be difficult for you,” Ruppert said. The muscles in his arms and fingers twitched as if they had a mind of their own. He wondered if some part of him was still programmed to murder Westerly, despite Smith’s efforts.
“Difficult, hell,” Westerly said, then coughed again. Blood spattered out from his lips. His eyes drifted to Lucia, who was setting up the cylindrical silver holorecorder on a tripod a few feet outside the cage wall. He took a long, slow look up and down her body. “Whose ‘at?”
“Oh,” Ruppert said. “This is, uh, Karen. Karen Andrews…son…Anderson. My camera tech.”
Westerly continued to leer at her. “She don’t look like no Karen Andrewston to me. She looks more like a Maria Gonzales. That your name, Maria Gonzales?”
Lucia ignored him and spoke to Archer, staying in character: “Can we get any more light in here?”
“Tell that Maria to come over here,” Westerly said. “Tell her come right up here and onto her knees.”
“She’s busy right now,” Ruppert said. “Mr. Westerly-is that correct? Mr. Hollis Westerly?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Daniel Ruppert with GlobeNet-Los Angeles Nightly News. We understand you have a very important story to share with us tonight…this morning.”
“Ragnarok.” Westerly smiled his bloody grin again.
“Excuse me?”
“Ragnarok. The end of time. When the wolves eat up the sun and the moon,” Westerly said. “We recording yet?”
“Are we ready?” Ruppert asked Lucia.
“Best we can do in this light,” Lucia said, giving Ruppert half a smile.
Ruppert sat in a folding lawn chair Archer had brought in for him. Westerly hunkered right at the cage wall, sucking down the last bit of the cigarette before grinding it to pieces on the concrete floor.
“What all did they tell you?” Westerly asked.
“Very little,” Ruppert answered, honestly. To be even more honest, he said, “Everybody thought it would be better if I walked into this without much information.”
“That’s all right,” Westerly said. “To tell you the real story of Ragnarok, I got to tell you about Brother Zeb.'
'Who is Brother-'
'You just shut up and listen, cause I want my goddamned blue pill. I got picked up in Detroit back, oh, twenty years ago now, winter of 2014, 2015. Me and a buddy of mine knocked over this Korean liquor store. It was supposed to be quick, you know, grab up the cash and a few bottles and get out. Then the little yeller creep starts gabbing at us, all that crazy kinda talk they have, so I hit him once or twice with the butt of my shotgun just to quiet him down some. They said I broke his jaw in five places, but I didn’t believe ‘em, cause his jaw was so small it didn’t look like he’d have five places to break.
“Anyhow, just cause of this little Korean squirt, they gave me forty years up at Ionia. Don’t know what happened to my buddy. But anyway, so I got up to Ionia about the middle of 2015, almost summertime, and I got up with some of my brothers there.”
“Brothers?” Ruppert asked.
“You know, the white freedom movement. I was in the Social Nationalists down around Mississippi, but this group up in Michigan called themselves the Aryan Whitehammers. Anyhow, they followed after this big bastard named Trace McCully. So I settled in up there.
“Well, I’d been there two, three months when Brother Zeb first checked in. Nobody knowed at first what they got him for, but it turns out, the story went, he gunned down about six gang-bangers right out in open daylight. They say he only had five bullets in his gun when he did it, which is just the kind of thing you could believe about Brother Zeb.
“What I mean is, Brother Zeb weren’t one of your regular felons. He was real quiet, almost so you couldn't hear him when he walked, if he didn't want you to. He had like a puddle of quiet all around him. I remember just a couple days after he first come to the prison, one of these big homeboys decides Brother Zeb needs to be taken down a little, not that Zeb was a big mouther, not one bit, but you got this feeling he could turn water into ice if he pissed in it.
“So this big colored man, I mean four hundred or more pounds sort of big, he moves on Zeb on the way from the cafeteria. And Brother Zeb, who’s about half his size, don’t even look over to see who’s after him. He just reaches out one hand and takes that boy’s arm and rolls it up like a newspaper. I swear, right up to the shoulder. I never seen nothing like it. And Brother Zeb, he just kept on walking, didn’t even look back to see what he’d done.
“Brother Zeb, we knew he was one of us, had the marks, like this Viking swastika right over his heart. And most of us never met anyone like him. I thought I knew some things myself, back then, but Brother Zeb, he’d quote chapter and verse from big people like Darwin and what’s his name, German fella, Nietcheese, and like that, and
