Zeb said Ragnarok was comin'.”
Westerly broke down into a chain of coughs that wracked his whole body. He wiped the blood from his mouth, looked at it, smeared it across the grizzled gray hairs of his chest.
“Hurts to talk anymore,” Westerly said. He looked to Turin. “Gimme one of them pain pills. The good blue ones.”
Turin removed a brown pill bottle from his jacket. He popped the lid, looked inside, shook it around. “I’ll give you a white one for now.”
“Aw, come on, there, homeboy.'
“You can have a blue one when you’re done.”
“But I need a blue one now,” Westerly whined. “Come on.”
Turin tipped the bottle, and a white capsule rolled out into his palm.
“Just the white one,” Turin said. “When you’re done, you can have two blue pills, if you want.”
Westerly grunted, accepted the white pill, and chased it down with water from one of the bottles scattered around his cage.
“Are we getting all this?” Ruppert asked Lucia
She checked the recorder. A three-dimensional image appeared to one side of it, a miniature Ruppert listening to a miniature Westerly. “Looks fine.”
“Mr. Westerly, can you continue?” Ruppert asked.
“Shit. Guess I can.” Westerly drank more of the water.
“What was in the moving vans?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Westerly said. “The men driving them turned out to be soldiers.”
“The Army?”
“Hell, no. They was in all black uniforms, and that’s no part of the military I know about. But like that, all the same.”
“Like Terror men?” Ruppert asked, thinking of the Captain.
“Well, yeah, like them, only there weren’t no Department of Terror back then, least as I know of. What I'm saying is they was soldiers or agents or ninjas or some damn thing, you could see that plain. Now, Brother Zeb, he picks out four of us, two teams of two, and he called us the ‘primary’ and the ‘back-up.’ I was on the back-up team.
“These agents, or whatever they was, they took the four of us in the back of one truck and showed us this thing mounted up in there, a big old metal tube inside kind of a cage setup. And they said, this here’s a nuclear bomb, and we’re gonna show you how to set it off. And that’s what they did.”
'You're claiming,' Ruppert said. “That some kind of government agents, similar to Terror men, gave you, a white supremacist compound in Idaho, a nuclear weapon?”
“Damn-shit yes they did,” Westerly said. “And it was real easy to blow up, way they had it set. You had to push three buttons on this remote control. Push ‘em real fast in the right order, and that’s all there was. Any dumbass coulda did it.”
“What did they want you to do with it?” Ruppert asked.
“I’m gonna tell ya, if you just gimme two seconds to get a word in. After them soldiers left, Brother Zeb set us down on the floor of his office, up in the main house, with some maps out in front of us, and he showed us how one of us teams was gonna take one of them moving trucks and drive her all the way to Columbus, Ohio-”
“Wait, wait.” Ruppert was up and pacing now. “You’re saying you did Columbus? Columbus? ” The second time he said “Columbus,” Ruppert was no longer talking about the city itself, but everything the name of the city had come to mean in the years since.
Ruppert remembered what Dr. Smith had said: You’re old enough to have noticed how these institutions arose together-the Department of Terror, the Department of Faith, the Dominionists, the Freedom Brigades. Ruppert had noticed. It had all been a response to Columbus, the nuclear destruction of an American city by never- quite-identified foreign terrorists.
He rubbed at his head. He could feel a sledgehammer of a headache coming.
“No, that ain’t what I’m trying to tell ya, stop actin’ stupid,” Westerly said. “What I’m saying is, he made us memorize this one particular drive to Columbus. He even told where we was supposed to stay along the way, a little motel in Nebraska, run by what he called 'friendlies.' He told us we’d take turns driving, three hours at a time.
“Then we spent some more hours looking at a map of downtown Columbus, and he showed us right where to park the van, at the City Center Mall. Said if we go by his schedule, it should be about lunchtime when we got there. We was just supposed to lock it up and leave it. He said some friends of his would pick us up right there, and they’d take care of getting us back home to Idaho.”
The feeling rushed out of Ruppert’s legs, and he had to sit down to stop their shaking and wobbling. It was obvious. PSYCOM had all its plans ready to roll out. The Articles for the Continuation of Democracy, six thousand pages long, was passed the day after Columbus, but it must have taken months to write. They didn’t position all their pieces, then just sit around hoping for an opportunity to come along.
“Why did you agree to do it?” Ruppert asked. “What about all those people-a million people?”
“I weren’t thinking about them, I guess,” Westerly said. “It was holy war. It was everything Brother Zeb had been preaching about. I was just doing my part for the country.”
“You were proud of it.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t get to do it, anyhow. The first team got going on, I can tell you the date exactly, July the third of 2016. We was all sitting at the house just waiting for them to check in, cause Zeb give ‘em a cell phone and tell ‘em to call every three hours.
“On the Fourth, Zeb said he had to run off and meet with some people, and he’d be back in the afternoon. We didn’t think so much of it, cause the bomb weren’t supposed to go off ‘til midnight. We was mainly upset he took the phone with him, but nobody would fuss about it to Brother Zeb.
“I am here and breathin' today because of the dumbest turtle-shit piece of luck. We decided we needed a couple cases of beer for Ragnarok, and we’d start tearing it up soon as the fireworks went off in Ohio. Now, Brother Zeb, he gave us strict orders that day, nobody in or out at all, everybody stay in the main house, all locked down. But we couldn’t get hold of Zeb, and we figured maybe he didn’t know we was out of beer, so I took one of the farm trucks into town.
“I still remember the look on the kid’s face at the convenience store. Skinny runt, lot of zits, mouth just dangling open. I brung all that beer up to the counter and he didn’t say nothing. He was looking at a portable television, one of them big heavy kinds they used to have, and right there on the screen it showed that mushroom cloud sitting on top of Ohio.”
“I was in Social Studies class when it happened,” Ruppert said. “Tenth grade. My teacher threw up right on the chalkboard.”
“Well, I was buying beer in Eden, Idaho, and my first thought was ‘Them dumb bastards went and blowed their asses off.’ Cause it was too early, just about lunchtime, and they shoulda just been getting to Columbus. They had to be right near that van when it went up, or maybe still inside it.
“I went back to the truck, but I didn’t even get her started when I saw this big convoy, I mean eight, ten of them big black sport-tilities everybody drove when gas was cheap, and they just tore through town right toward Brother Zeb’s place. The windows was all black so you couldn’t see nothing inside, even the windshields, and I mean tinted windshields weren’t legal even back in those days. And if I hadn’t noticed that, my dumb ass would have gone right back to the farm to tell the boys about the bomb.
“But I could see what was happening. We was set up. They done blowed the van with J.T. and Billy still inside, and then they was sending these others to kill off the rest of us. And that’s why old Brother Zeb hightailed it out that morning, to make sure he didn’t get shot up along with us. He fucked us and throwed us out, just like a used-up rubber.”
“This is crazy,” Ruppert said, pacing again. “What did you do?”
“Same as you or anyone would have done. I put the beer in the truck and I drove off the other way. They been huntin’ me ever since.” Westerly heaved a more loud, violent coughs. “I done run from Terror all these years, and the damn cigarettes caught up with me anyhow.”
“Did you ever see any of the others again?” Ruppert asked. “From the compound?”
