Dominion

FOURTEEN

“I know where you’re going,” Madeline said. She looked straight ahead at the car in front of them, avoiding his eyes. He was driving them home from Sunday church services.

“I’m telling you the truth, Madeline. You can call George Baldwin, the Terror man at GlobeNet. He said I have to help him with something tonight. He didn’t give any details, but-”

“Yes, Daniel. I’m sure your friend at work will cover for you.”

“He’s not my friend. He works for Terror.”

Madeline said. “I just hoped our vacation would put an end to it. I thought it would bring us closer together, like we used to be, but I guess nothing ever will.”

“What vacation?”

“St. Lucia.” Her face crinkled in anger. “I thought you’d forget about her.”

“Madeline, I was never seeing anyone else. And we sure as hell never went to St. Lucia. You know that.”

Madeline rolled her eyes and looked out the passenger window.

“We’re not in public, Madeline. You don’t have to do this.”

“Do what? Talk about your mistress?” She snorted. “Mistress. Almost sounds classy when you say it like that.”

“You never even thought I was having an affair until those Terror agents told you I was.”

“What does the Department of Terror have to do with anything?” Madeline snapped. “Just plan to stay home next weekend. I’m ovulating.”

Ruppert drove on in silence. The rift between them had widened into a gulf too wide to bridge. The most honest moments of their marriage had come just after Terror deposited them back at home. Now she’d cut him off, casting him in her mind as just another person to whom she had to prove her unquestioning faith and patriotism.

He could see their future from here, a continual retreat away from each other into their isolated, individual selves. Terror had severed whatever connection the two of them had shared. He wondered if it was a strategy, breaking people apart so that they stood alone and powerless, or if they’d done this to provide Ruppert an ongoing reminder that nothing in his life was safe from Terror. A smoldering hatred rose within him as he understood that both he and Madeline had been violated so deeply that they might never recover.

They didn’t speak again all afternoon.

The city of Los Angeles had never restored Malibu after the big mudslide of 2019, and neglected to repair any of the collapsed infrastructure of south L.A. after the earthquake of 2024, but somehow it had no trouble raising funds for Nixon Stadium, completed in 2027 with seventy thousand seats. At each of the four cardinal directions, a towering statue loomed at the upper lip of the stadium. The statues were identical: angels-or archangels, Ruppert supposed-their wings spread open like a canopy, their beatific faces bowed towards the playing field, their hands clasped in prayer.

Ruppert bought a ticket for section 469, then sat down in the middle row of 472. He had no competition for seating. The lowest levels were packed, but only scattered clusters of fans populated the top level. He had empty rows above and below him. Apparently there weren’t many Packers fans willing to travel all the way from Wisconsin to watch an insignificant June early preseason game.

He waited impatiently through the first two quarters of the game, eating popcorn that tasted like salted Styrofoam. He kept his cap, stamped with the Archangels logo from three seasons ago, pulled low over his eyes, though he doubted he would encounter anyone he knew up all the way up here when much better seats were available below.

As the clock ran out on the second quarter, the Archangels were ahead 12-7, and it had not been a particularly eventful game. When the halftime buzzer sounded, a voice spoke directly into Ruppert’s ear, making him jump:

“What did I miss?”

He turned to see a lean young man, maybe half a foot shorter than himself, with a mop of sandy hair. He wore a Green Bay Packers jersey. He had sat down just behind Ruppert and leaned in close to talk.

“Not much,” Ruppert said. “We fumbled in the first quarter, a little bit of a scramble, but your guys didn’t take it. Other than that…” He shrugged.

“These early preseason games,” the Packers fan said, shaking his head. “I don’t even think the players care.”

“I don’t even think the coaches care,” Ruppert said, and the man laughed, then stepped over and dropped into the plastic seat next to Ruppert.

“You look taller on the screen,” he said.

“I’m always sitting down,” Ruppert replied.

“Maybe that’s why. I’m glad you finally decided to meet me. It took you one hell of a lot of courage.”

Ruppert cast a few nervous glances around him, but no one seemed to be paying them any attention. All eyes were riveted to the half-time show set-up as stages wheeled onto the field, along with the Tree of Justice, a five-story scaffolding with beams extending out in every direction. Most of the beams ended in a square platform, and on every platform stood a blindfolded man with his hands shackled behind him, more than a hundred men in all. Each man had a limp noose around his neck, anchored to a beam over his head.

“You’re Sully’s friend?” Ruppert asked.

“Yeah, we were…yeah.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“No. They have special places for people like me and Sully, you know. Personality modification. Behavior programming. Try to cut the sin out of us. If he’s lucky, they just killed him.”

“Jesus.”

“And I’d rather not talk about that anymore right now, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice boomed from every speaker in the stadium. “Please rise as the Ladies’ Choir of the Holy Kingdom Shopping Plaza Community Dominionist Church performs ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

Ruppert and the young man both stood and applauded along with the rest of the crowd. Scores of women in white choir robes had arrayed themselves on the tiers of a stage at center field, their backs to the Tree of Justice.

“We have work to do,” the man in the Packers jersey said to Ruppert. “Look, this is a risk for me, too. As far as I know you’re working for Terror. But Sully believed in you, and I believe in Sully.”

“What is it you want from me?”

The choir began to sing, dozens of beautifully trained female voices:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

When they reached the first “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” a square platform near the top of the Tree of Justice dropped, swinging inward on hinges, and the prisoner standing on it fell until the noose snatched up taut. His legs splayed out, kicking, as he was hanged.

The crowd surged forward, roaring. They’d sat indifferently through the first half of the game, but now they were electrified. Ruppert imagined how they might look from above, a mass of thousands of people contracting inward to view the action at the center. On the giant digital billboards throughout the stadium, the crimes of the condemned rolled past: murder, arson, drugs, sedition, prostitution, immorality, sodomy, terrorism-related activities (details classified for national security), production of propaganda…

“It’s dangerous,” the young man said. “Your career will be over. Your life will be ruined. You’ll be on the run, in hiding, until you die. That’s if we succeed.”

“And if we don’t?”

The young man nodded towards the Tree. More of the platforms dropped away, leaving blindfolded prisoners dangling and choking and kicking and swinging. The pace of hangings accelerated as the song continued.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;

“As ye deal with My condemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,

Since God is marching on.

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah…

Ruppert watched.

“Sully thought you had his disease,” the young man said.

“What do you mean?”

“The same a lot of us have. You don’t adjust. You remember all kinds of inconvenient things that don’t fit with today’s version of the truth. You almost want to scream it out at times. In front of a huge crowd, maybe.”

“Sully’s right. I do have that disease.”

“He had a good sense about people.” The young man wiped at his eyes. “He was ready to give up everything. Then it was just going to be me and him, going up to Canada…” He shook his head, looked Ruppert in the eyes. “Sully picked you to take his place. What if you had your chance to speak the truth, an important piece of the truth, out to the world?”

“I don’t control content. The shows are prerecorded, they’re edited-we even have a Terror agent on site.”

“Forget the newscast. We have our own distribution. What we need is your face.”

“I don’t understand.”

The young man took Ruppert’s jaw in one hand. “Your face, man. The trusted face of the news from San Diego up to Fresno, right? Millions of people. They’ll believe it when you tell them.”

“What am I telling them?”

“Not yet. But I promise you, if you care about the truth, if you hate what’s happening out here, it will be worth sacrificing everything to let the people know what we’ve discovered.”

The man let go of him, but his eyes were locked onto Ruppert’s.

“What do you want me to do?” Ruppert asked.

“Go home.”

Ruppert shook his head. “I want to know more.”

“You’ll know more, man, but not today. Do you trust Sully?”

Ruppert thought the question over. As the choir sang the final verse, the last row of prisoners dropped two at a time.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,

Our God is marching on.

“I trust Sully as much as I could trust anyone.”

“Are you in or not? This is your only chance to say no. You can go home and forget you met me. If we go any further, then change your mind-I hate it, but we have to be as ruthless as Terror sometimes. Too much at risk.”

“I understand.”

“Think it over. Your own life against the truth. Sully thought it was worth dying for.”

Ruppert remembered his old journalism teacher, Professor Gorski, one of Terror’s early victims. What had he said? Power fears truth above all things-more than bullets, more than bombs, more than death itself, because truth can destroy powerful men even as they lie in their graves.

A battery of cannons fired at the final note of the hymn, and the crowd screamed and howled and cheered, their bulging, hungering eyes transfixed by the grisly ornaments jerking and twitching on the Tree of Justice. All over the stadium they waved pointing foam fingers, giant New America flags, and small golden flags stamped with the Archangel team logo.

“I’m with you,” Ruppert said. “Somebody has show the world what it’s become.”