Dominion

TWENTY-SIX

It was six more hours of rough driving through canyons, washouts, and choppy dirt roads before Lucia, who’d drifted in and out of sleep since Las Vegas, announced they should stop to rest. Ruppert kept checking his rearview, expecting an armada of armored cars and black helicopters to erupt over the horizon at any moment, but there was nothing but desert and night sky. They’d been traveling for more than twenty-four hours, and though he hadn’t seen a Terror agent in many days now, Ruppert felt pursued. Maybe they were toying with him, watching him through satellites. There could even be a drone cruising above the Bronto, keeping a special tab on them, and Ruppert would never know.

“This is far enough,” Lucia said, blinking away sleep. “We need a place to hide.”

“We still have another hour to Goblin Valley.”

“And we don’t want to get any closer. I’m the extractions expert, remember?” She zoomed to a closer view of their location on the digital dashboard map. They were near a region marked Capitol Reef National Park. “Utah. We should find a slot canyon.”

For the first time, Ruppert enjoyed the fact that the Party had gutted the parks and conservation budget long ago. There would be hardly any rangers to find them. Not much risk of tourists, either. The wilderness teemed with the insane, the murderous, and the criminal, or so Ruppert had frequently reported. The Dominionists preached against visiting the wild, insisted it was home to demons, emphasized that time in the wilderness had made even Jesus vulnerable to the devil’s temptations. The only real sanctuary was the church and the company of fellow believers.

“Turn off here,” Lucia said. They turned down a narrow rut of a path littered with boulders and rocks. Ruppert eased the truck around, and sometimes over, the rocks. The truck seemed like it could handle the terrain, but he worried about the tires.

She directed him through a series of sharp, steep turns. His headlights shone on irregular rock surfaces pitted with long, deep shadows, like Rorschach blots, and his tired brain could hardly interpret any meaning from what his eyes told him.

“Okay, slow down,” she said. She leaned until her nose almost touched the screen, scrutinizing the old satellite image of the park. “You want to slow down…and turn to the left…right…here.”

Ruppert gingerly turned the wheel to the left, unable to understand the strange rock patterns around him, and drove them over a cliff. His fingernails bit into the steering wheel as the front tires reached out into empty space, and then the whole front end of the truck dropped like the heavy end of seesaw. They slammed into a hard, steep slope, rattling everything inside the cab and shoving Ruppert and Lucia upward against their seatbelts, which dug deep into their thighs and abdomens. He thought he felt his brain splosh against the dome of his skull.

The truck charged forward at an extreme downhill angle, out of his control, fishtailing down a washed-out gully.

“Gas!” Lucia screamed. “Give it gas!”

“What?” he asked, but his foot, which had been searching for the brakes, took her advice instead and stomped the accelerator. They roared down the slope. In the headlights, a high, solid ridge appeared in the distance and rapidly swelled to consume his field of vision.

“Turn!” Lucia yelled, but his hands were already moving. Ruppert’s instinct was to wrench the wheel as hard as possible, but his numbed shock at the situation saved him, and he only turned it a little. The truck spun to the right, and they skittered down the remainder of the slope and then skipped across an uneven surface of eroded rock.

The canyon narrowed quickly around them-ahead, Ruppert could see where the smooth boulders of the opposing canyon walls nearly touched each other. A man on foot would have to climb his way through.

He eased down the brake, then stomped it. Again the seatbelt lashed diagonally across him, and now he heard the tires screaming as they grabbed onto the rocky ground. The truck squealed to a stop as the canyon walls closed in around it.

Ruppert turned off the truck and removed his shaking hands from the steering wheel. Lucia caught her breath, then reached out and scrolled the map a few degrees. “Oh, maybe we should have come down the other side,” she said. “It’s not as steep.”

Ruppert removed his seatbelt, which would soon be tattooed into his skin in the form of a chain of purple bruises, and opened the truck door. He half-climbed, half-fell from the cab, stumbled across the smooth rock floor, and sat down.

“This is good, though.” Lucia sat beside him and looked up. The canyon walls reached more than a hundred feet above them, but were so close to each other they almost touched in places. “Hard for them to look down in here.”

They shrouded the truck under the desert-camouflage tarp, and then sat upon a heap of boulders to study the laminated maps printed from Liam O’Shea’s computer. They shared a paper sleeve of salt crackers and a large bottle of water.

“The database said Nando lives in Lodge 10, with twenty boys his age,” Lucia said. “The nearest gate is the staff entrance, here in the west wall. We should use that.”

“We can’t just ram it down with the truck,” Ruppert said. “They’ll have a security system. Armed guards, I bet.”

“Guards, and machine gun nests, and lots of boys with military training.”

“They’re just kids.”

“Best time to train them,” Lucia said. “Goblin Valley keeps boys up to the age of sixteen, then enlists them. So there will be older boys too-boys trained as soldiers and snipers, trained to torture and interrogate. I'm sure they run school-defense drills. That would be good training for protecting foreign bases. So we could be facing a few thousand defenders.”

“Then we have to keep quiet. I don’t suppose we can use your magic remote?”

She shook her head. “It's just a toy against their systems. They have an evolving propriety code.”

“Then what do we do, extraction expert?”

“We’ll need human intelligence. A person on the inside.”

“Which we don’t have,” Ruppert pointed out.

“And we’ll have to get one. I’m not sure how. Let’s assume we’re inside and go from there.”

“Okay. So we’re inside the school, surrounded by a bunch of armed Children of the Corn-and your son,” Ruppert hurried to add, in response to Lucia’s scowl. “We have to get inside his dormitory without drawing the attention of guards or other kids. We have to wake him without disturbing any of the others. I assume they’re not in private apartments or anything?”

Lucia glanced at the map, shook her head. “Looks like they all sleep in one room.”

“Won’t he automatically try to alert the others?”

“He won’t, if he recognizes me.”

“Do you think he will?” Ruppert regretted the question even before he asked it, but it had to be said. He worried Lucia was being a little unrealistic in her expectations-the boy was ten years old and hadn’t seen his mother since the age of five. Ruppert himself couldn’t remember anything before the age of six or so, though that was thirty years ago now.

Lucia’s mouth trembled, and she looked away from him without answering.

“I’m just saying,” Ruppert continued, “That he could make a lot of noise and trouble before he realizes who you are.”

“Then what can we do?” she whispered.

“All I can think is to use a tranquilizer. Maybe they have ether.” He pointed to the square building near the center of the school compound. It was marked “Clinic/Dispensary.”

“Then we’d have to break into a second building, right in the middle of the place,” Lucia said. “Probably extra secure because of the drugs. Too complicated.”

“Fernando kicking and screaming would complicate things, too.”

“We would trigger security alerts at the clinic,” Lucia said. “We’d never get to Nando.”

“All right. So, by some miracle, we get into the school, we grab Fernando without getting ambushed by a mob of killer ten-year-olds. We still have to get out again. And we have to plan for them to be pursuing us at that point. Worst-case scenario.”

“At last, you are thinking clearly.” Lucia traced her fingertip along the route from the west gate to Fernando’s barracks. They would have to make several turns. She tapped a series of low sheds, shielded from the road by a wall. They were marked ORDINANCE.

“We cover our escape with fireworks,” she said. “If we time it right, there will be burning debris falling into the road behind us. Maybe even rubble. Block off the way out as we leave.”

“There are other gates they can use.”

“It will buy us a little time. And a lot of confusion. Once you assume they are following us, time will be short no matter what we do.”

“Okay, you’re right, it’s the best we can do. And then we all go north, right?”

“Yes. There is a safehouse. We can get across the border from there.”

“I thought you didn’t know about those things,” Ruppert said.

“I only know about this one. I’m not supposed to know about it, either.”

“Then it’s a lifetime of ice fishing and beaver trapping.”

“God willing.”

“God willing,” he agreed.

Goblin Valley was a low, rocky place between the Fishlake Mountains to the west and a dry tundra of badlands stretching away to the east, where the wind had carved the stone into elaborate fortresses, as if a forgotten race of giants had once lived and fought there. The valley itself teemed with thousands of enormous stone mushrooms, or “goblins,” the size of suburban homes. The school compound was barricaded inside concrete walls at the western cliffs of the valley, where the oddly shaped rocks created a landscape resembling vast human faces and skulls. The valley was without water and clearly never meant for human habitation.

Ruppert and Lucia drove through the open desert, far east of the valley, and also explored the mesas and canyons in the San Rafael Swell to the west. In the evening, they passed through the nearest town, Hanksville, whose main attraction seemed to be the Hollow Mountain gas station, carved into the side of a rock.

Hanksville provided much support to the Goblin Valley facility, judging by the numerous vans and trucks with “Goblin Valley School for Males” stamped on their doors. Ruppert noted six such trucks parked outside “Berna’s Lounge,” a cinderblock building with a sheet-metal roof, the town’s only apparent drinking establishment, located just outside the official town limits. He noticed a few more of them at a five-story brick apartment building at the center of town, and others parked in the driveways of small houses.

Their plan took shape as they studied the situation. At night, they hid in the shadows among southern Utah’s endless slot canyons and narrow, rocky valleys. They slept in the back of the truck on the forest-camouflage tarp, all their clothes piled around them for warmth, each one sleeping half the night and keeping guard the other half, watching for bandits, police, or Terror.

On their fourth night in Utah, a Friday, Lucia parked the Brontosaur in the parking lot at Berna’s Lounge, positioning it so that the driver’s-side door faced the bar, while the passenger side looked out to the empty desert. Ruppert was slouched down deep in his seat, out of sight. It was a few minutes before eleven.

“Wish me luck,” Lucia said. She’d dressed in a long cotton skirt and a skimpy top that left most of her belly and chest exposed. Dressing that way could get you arrested for public immorality in Ruppert’s old neighborhood, but such attire on a young woman was always welcome wherever men gathered to drink.

“Luck,” Ruppert said. He took her hand, which was decorated with chunky, glittery fake jewelry she’d purchased in a flea market three towns away. “This is your last chance to turn back. Are you sure?”

Lucia shook her head. “No second thoughts.”

“No second thoughts,” he agreed.

“Are you ready?”

“As much as possible.”

“Good. Keep your eyes open.” Lucia reached for the door handle, then surprised him by leaning over and kissing him on the mouth. His hands reached to embrace her, and he had a quick impression of ribs, taut muscle, and hot skin before she pulled away.

Ruppert gave her a smile. “Remember-”

“I know,” she interrupted. “Identify the highest-status male in the room.”

“I was going to say, be careful.”

“That, too.” Lucia half-smiled at him, then eased the truck door open. They’d long since dismantled the cab’s interior light. She dropped to the blacktop and closed the door behind her. Ruppert slid across the seat and peered over the edge of the window, keeping his head low. He watched her pass the row of Goblin Valley School pick-up trucks, her skirt fluttering around her in the cool desert wind. Then she opened the front door and disappeared.

Ruppert slid back to the passenger side and opened the door about half an inch. He reached under the seat, and his fingers closed on the cold, heavy mass of the tire iron. Then he returned to the driver’s side, and he looked out the window, and he waited.

When he’d suggested to Lucia that they should arm themselves with guns, she’d refused the idea immediately.

“To carry a gun is to become a beast,” she’d said. “Like them. Guns are for those who live in fear.”

“But you carry that knife,” Ruppert had pointed out.

“A knife has many uses,” Lucia said. “A girl has to be sensible.”

Ruppert clutched the tire iron in both hands and tried to think of it that way. It was the sensible thing to do. In this situation, it was entirely reasonable. He thought of the picture of Lucia’s boy, Fernando Luis Santos, barely ten years old, his entire education focused on mountain warfare and counterinsurgency, and probably a fair amount of Dominionist dogma. He hoped the kid was worth it.

His thoughts drifted to Madeline, as they sometimes did. She was probably happier, he’d decided, as long as Terror left her alone. Certainly a Terror alert for her own husband would be more than an embarrassment at church-she might even have been banished from the congregation. He hoped Pastor John hadn’t done that. Madeline lived to belong and be accepted.

The door to Bertha’s opened, and Ruppert’s hands tightened on the tire iron. A bearded man in long shorts emerged, meandered across the parking lot to a beaten old Mustang, and drove away, drifting slightly into the wrong side of the road.

It was another hour before Lucia finally emerged, stumbling as if she’d had a little too much to drink, and Ruppert wondered if she really had. She beamed at the man who escorted her out. He looked to be in his late fifties, his hair cut into a flattop the color of steel. He possessed the wide neck and arms of a former athlete, with a paunchy gut to match. He wore a khaki uniform jacket with golden epaulets, unbuttoned now, displaying a loosened tie and a partially untucked shirt. Lucia swayed and leaned on his arm as he guided her toward the row of Goblin Valley trucks.

Ruppert slid back to the passenger side door, which he’d left ajar, and nudged it open. He eased down to the pavement with the tire iron in his hand. He looked up and down the empty road, grateful they were in the middle of nowhere.

He crept around the front of the truck, keeping himself lower than the hood. Ahead, the uniformed man opened the passenger door on a Goblin Valley truck and gestured for Lucia to get inside. Ruppert would have to pass two more trucks and then cross two open parking spots to reach him. The distance might have been thirty or forty feet, but it looked as wide as the Great Plains to Ruppert.

Lucia rested a hand on the side of the man’s truck, bent down, and began working at one of her shoes, apparently intending to remove it but having difficulty. Buying time.

Ruppert changed course and passed behind the tailgate of the first Goblin Valley truck. He dropped even lower, into a kind of walking crouch, as he passed behind the second truck. He stopped at the rear bumper and peered around. There was nothing but open blacktop left between himself and the school officer.

Lucia had removed one shoe and was working at the other. Her stooped-over position held the man’s attention. He stroked his hand down her smooth, brown back, then cupped her buttocks through the thin material of her skirt. Lucia looked back over her shoulder, gave the man a wink. The man tugged the waist of her skirt down and poked his fingers at the black fringe of her panties.

Ruppert held his breath as he crossed the empty parking spots, raising the tire iron like a baseball bat. The man must have sensed his approach, because just before Ruppert reached him, he turned and looked Ruppert in the eyes. The man’s own eyes were droopy with alcohol, but they flared at the sight of Ruppert, and his mouth opened wide and he took in a deep breath, ready to call for help.

Ruppert swung hard. The hexagonal end of the tire iron bashed into the side of the man’s skull. The impact sent shudders up Ruppert’s arm.

Lucia pulled away from the man as he lurched a step toward Ruppert, one hand grasping at the air before him, his mouth working soundlessly. Ruppert struck at him again, but this time his aim was off and he only clipped the man’s lower jaw. He stepped forward and hit him again, and the man flopped back against his truck and slumped to the ground.

Ruppert continued to strike at the man’s head, over and over. The world was narrow and dark around him, containing only the school officer’s face and Ruppert’s own sudden rage, which boiled up from inside him. Later he would try to tell himself that he was just trying to be safe, he couldn’t allow this trainer of soldiers one moment to collect himself, because Ruppert would surely lose a fair fight with the man. But in his mind he was seeing the man’s hand fondle Lucia, and he was seeing the Captain watching with disinterested blue eyes as two guards held Ruppert against the floor and beat him, and he was seeing George Baldwin, the Terror agent at the studio, and he was seeing Pastor John’s beatific, collagen-molded face.

“Enough!” Lucia spoke in a loud whisper. “Daniel, enough! What’s wrong with you?”

Ruppert stopped swinging the iron, blinked a few times, and looked down at the school officer. The man bled from his mouth, his nose, and both ears. He was not moving. Ruppert felt his stomach lurch.

“You don’t think I killed him, do you?” Ruppert whispered.

“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Maybe three or four times.”

Ruppert knelt down, checked the man’s wrist for a pulse. He could detect nothing.

“We have to get moving.” Lucia squatted down and took the man’s arms. “Help me.”

They loaded him into the storage area behind the driver's seat in the Goblin Valley truck, and Ruppert laid the bloodied tire iron beside him. Lucia filched the man’s wallet pack and handed it to Ruppert, who dug through it, searching for the truck key.

“Hurry.” Lucia glanced toward the bar. “I think someone’s coming out.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ruppert said. “Go ahead.”

Lucia nodded and dashed to the Brontosaur, circled around it to slam the passenger door closed, then jumped into the cab. Ruppert found the key and hurried to crank up the Goblin Valley truck. He followed Lucia out of the parking lot just as the door to Bertha’s opened and two younger men in khaki uniforms stumbled out, laughing, their arms flung around each other.

Once they were on the road, Ruppert passed Lucia in order to drive in front of her. They’d decided that a truck from Goblin Valley would likely be ignored by local police, so the safest thing to do was let that truck lead the way, with the Bronto close behind, hopefully conveying the impression that the Bronto driver was some out-of-town guest of a school official.

They drove to a narrow canyon they’d selected along the western side of the San Rafael Swell plateau. Ruppert parked, then immediately removed his clothes and stripped the bloody school official down to his underwear. He moved the man delicately, not wanting to cause him any pain if he were alive. He still could not detect a pulse.

The driver’s side door opened and Lucia leaned in. “Are we ready?”

“Working on it.” Ruppert hauled on the man’s pants, his shirt, fumbled with the tie.

“Don’t worry about that,” Lucia said.

“Make all the difference if some kid sees me.” He managed to complete the knot and tighten it. He dressed in the school officer’s jacket, though one sleeve was spattered with blood, then his shoes and hat. The Goblin Valley security system relied heavily on automated radio tags, which might be located anywhere in the man’s wallet or uniform.

“How long until his buddies notice he’s missing?” Ruppert said. He found the man’s handkerchief and used it to soak up blood from the jacket sleeve.

“They think he hired me for the night,” Lucia said. “They don’t expect to see him back.”

“Hired you?”

“Yeah. These guys are starved. You know they don’t allow any females inside the walls of the school? None. Ever. Nando’s probably never seen a girl since he got here.”

They transferred the school officer from the Goblin Valley truck to the Bronto, Ruppert taking extra care about the man’s wounded head. Lucia just shook her head at his concerns. They laid the man out in the truck bed and covered him with the forest-camouflage tarp, then closed the tailgate and covered the Bronto itself with the desert-camo tarp.

Ruppert checked his reflection in the Bronto’s window. The school official was three or four sizes too big for him, and the uniform drooped, and of course had those dark red blotches soaking the right arm. He adjusted his hat.

“Do I look believable?” he asked Lucia.

“We’ll say you do. Come on.”

They drove back to the school together in the Goblin Valley truck. Ruppert couldn’t stop thinking of the man he might have killed. Did he have family? Children? He imagined how it might be to die violently, at the hands of a stranger, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with you.

Then again, it was possible the man was abusive to the boys in his charge, and the world wouldn’t particularly suffer his loss. If he was married, he hadn’t demonstrated much loyalty to his wife.

“Good luck,” Lucia said, and she crawled behind the seat, into the narrow area where the man had lain. She covered herself with a fire blanket they’d found in the truck’s emergency kit. From a distance, those in the compound might think Ruppert was a guard or an instructor, but they would certainly notice Lucia, a female, did not belong.

Ruppert slowed to a crawl as he approached the western gate in the high walls of the Goblin Valley School. The gate showed no signs of moving aside for him, so he had to stop altogether. There was a guard booth beside him, but thankfully it appeared dark and empty.

“What’s happening?” Lucia whispered behind him.

“Nothing.” Ruppert reached for the touchscreen mounted in the dashboard. “Maybe there’s some kind of-”

Before he finished his thought, the dashboard screen emitted a rapid series of high-pitched beeps. Ahead, the gate clattered as it rolled aside. Ruppert drove into the compound.

The buildings inside were dull cubes of cinderblock, a style of architecture that screamed government bureaucracy. He might have been visiting a public school, or a prison, or the local office of the Department of Faith and Values.

The row of buildings on his left gave way to a paneled aluminum wall. He checked the map of the compound.

“We’re passing the ordinance sheds,” he said.

“Here.” Lucia passed him a bundle of six plastic tubes, each of them about ten inches long and painted black to make them less visible to security cameras. Each had a number between 1 and 6 scratched into it. As he drove, he pitched four of them over the wall on his left, hopefully scattering them among the storage sheds on the other side.

Lucia had built the explosives from household chemicals and fixed each with a detonator. The number buttons on Lucia’s specialized remote control each corresponded to one of the bombs. She’d gutted most of the remote’s parts, along with most of its functionality, to help prepare for the mission.

Ruppert arrived without incident at the row of long, narrow lodges housing boys in Nando’s age group. He parked right in front of Lodge 10. They would need quick access to the vehicle if things turned sour.

“We’re here,” Ruppert whispered. He climbed out of the truck, then helped Lucia crawl out to join him.

The lodge was made of the same dusty concrete as the other buildings. Five concrete steps led up to a shallow concrete porch, where a single closed door gave access to the windowless lodge. Lucia looked at the door and trembled. He took her hand, but she gave no sign of noticing it.

Ruppert gazed along the unlined black road. From the security map, he knew the school bristled with cameras, not all of them visible. They would have a video record of him, which would undoubtedly find its way to Terror, though he hoped bureaucratic inefficiency and territorialism might delay that a day or two. It was a slender hope.

The main concern, of course, was whether anyone was monitoring the cameras right now and might notice that Ruppert wasn’t actually a school employee, or that Lucia wasn’t in any sense a male. They’d had plenty of luck so far. Lucia’s carnovirus must have done its job on Liam O’Shea’s home office, as well as the Child and Family server.

He’d half-expected a pack of Terror agents lying in wait when they arrived. Or maybe they were here, still waiting for the order to ambush. Ruppert glanced at the dark alleys between the cinderblock buildings, but they were pitch black. If men in dark coats or uniforms hid there, he would not be able to see them.

“Are you ready?” he whispered to Lucia, who continued staring at the door.

After a moment, she nodded.

They proceeded up the steps, Lucia’s hand still shivering in Ruppert’s. Ruppert waved the school officer’s identity card at the keypad beside the door, and its single light turned from red to green. They entered the lodge.

Inside, they stood in a sour-smelling, wood-floored anteroom. To their right, a rectangular window looked into a room that served as a station for a guard or supervisor, but fortunately was not occupied at the moment. It contained a flat table with a data console, its cluster of pinpoint lights burning blue in the darkened room. There was an office chair behind the table and three smaller, plain chairs facing it.

Ruppert stepped to the office door and waved the identicard to unlock it. He held it open for Lucia, who tossed aside the fire blanket and walked to the tall microphone next to the data console. She unscrewed the mesh bulb at the top of the microphone, and then she withdrew from her pocket a circuit board, once a part of her remote control, and wired it into the microphone. She depressed the last of a row of buttons at the microphone’s base, labeled with a strip of masking tape: GENERAL/OUTDOOR. Then she pushed the power button to activate the microphone.

They took care to make no sound as they left the room, and closed the door very cautiously. She gave him a thumbs-up sign and an attempt at a smile.

They continued from the anteroom into the hallway running down the center of the lodge. They passed a dreary rec room hung with dusty, unpainted drywall and furnished with a few badly wounded sofas facing a chunky, outdated video screen. A dusty ping-pong table occupied a back corner of the room.

There seemed to be no interior doors in the dorm area, not even for the bathroom, where a row of toilets faced a row of showerheads. The boys were clearly meant to live with zero privacy of any kind. Ruppert wondered if they were instructed to watch each other for misbehavior, like the pastors encouraged at Golden Tabernacle.

They crept into the long dorm room, where twenty boys between the ages of ten and twelve slept on twenty bunk beds. Everything was gray-the walls, the sheets, the t-shirts and pajamas of the boys. The only splashes of color were large posters warning against the evils of foreigners and masturbation.

Lucia stalked from one to the next, looking for her son. Ruppert struggled to remember the picture of the boy he’d seen in Liam’s office. He could feel the seconds ticking past, each one bringing him closer to the moment when a boy would waken and notice them, or a guard would come to investigate why a school official had returned to work late on a Friday night.

Lucia grabbed his sleeve, motioned excitedly towards one of the lower bunks. They edged toward the bed, and Lucia reached out her hand. The boy slept like a tin soldier in a box-flat on his back, arms and legs perfectly straight. The sole sign of childishness was a spit bubble swelling on his lips.

Lucia nodded, and they closed in on him. She covered her son’s mouth with her right hand, and then pinned down both his arms with her left arm. At the same time, Ruppert seized Nando’s feet to prevent him from kicking out against the bunk bed frame to make noise and alert the others.

Nando’s eyes snapped open and he immediately tried to swing his arms, then his feet. Ruppert struggled to keep his feet pinned. The boy was incredibly strong for his small size.

Nando grunted and tried to speak, but Lucia kept him muffled. His eyes rolled to her and grew wide, and he bucked his entire body several times, trying to break loose. He reminded Ruppert of a spooked horse.

“Sh,” Lucia whispered. “It’s okay, Nando.”

Nando continued struggling until he looked at Ruppert. His gaze dashed over Ruppert’s hat and jacket, and then the boy fell limp and quiet. It took Ruppert a moment to realize the boy was automatically obedient to any adult wearing the school uniform.

“Stay quiet,” Ruppert whispered. “Come with us right now.”

Nando nodded, and they released him. He stood, saluted Ruppert, then strode towards the foot locker at the end of his bunk bed. Lucia took him by the arm, shook her head. Nando looked to Ruppert, who shook his head and pointed towards the hall.

Nando walked towards the empty doorframe on the balls of his bare feet, making no sound on the warped floorboards. Ruppert did not have as much luck-one of the boards groaned under his shoe.

A boy in a top bunk sat up suddenly, like Frankenstein’s monster jolting to life. His eyes locked onto Lucia and scanned down her body: long hair, breasts, curving hips. From the horrified expression on his face, she might have been a slimy, tentacled alien. He reacted in probably the only way he knew how. He opened his mouth and screamed:

“ Foreigner!”

The other boys snapped up to a sitting position as if each one were a spring-loaded bar on a mousetrap. The call repeated itself from bunk to bunk. Boys jumped to their feet and hurried towards them, falling into a tight semicircle formation around Ruppert, Lucia, and Nando.

“Stop!” Ruppert yelled, and they froze, straightened up their backs, and saluted him. He noticed puzzled looks on some of their faces-he’d probably used the wrong terminology. He sifted his memory for war movie dialogue.

“Atten-tion!” he said. Twenty boys, including Nando, lay the flats of their hands parallel to their sides and lifted their chins, their faces stoic. Ruppert struggled to think of something to say next. As he looked among them, it occurred to him that it might be best to say nothing at all.

He tapped Nando’s shoulder. “Come along…” Happily, the school’s name for the boy popped into his mind. “Liberty.”

“Yes, sir.”

The three of them moved on into the hall and towards the front door. Ruppert’s nerves were on a hair trigger, urging him to run, but he fought them down.

He opened the front door, looked out into the road. It seemed clear. They left the lodge, down the steps, and towards the Goblin Valley truck, and then a pair of high beams swung out from a corner down the road and rushed towards them.

“Get going!” Ruppert shouted, and they hurried to the truck, Lucia half-dragging Nando, then boosting him up through the passenger door. She climbed in after him.

Ruppert was running around to the driver’s side, unfortunately located in the direction of the approaching headlights, when the lights swerved and a Goblin Valley truck parked slantwise in front of him. A second truck pulled in behind it.

A uniformed, pimpled young man with very bloodshot eyes leaned out the driver’s side of the nearest truck.

“Hey Gus, what the hell are you doing back here?” the young man asked, blinking rapidly.

“That ain’t Gus,” said the other uniformed man riding shotgun with him.

Ruppert jumped up into the cab and slammed the door. He cranked it and slammed the gas. The two trucks peeled out as they turned to pursue him. Piercing blue lights strobed from their headlamps and grilles-apparently Goblin Valley trucks had been authorized as police vehicles, too. Sirens howled from both trucks.

“Permission to speak, staff sergeant?” Nando asked. Ruppert swerved around a tight corner, intent on reaching the gate before the guards put the school in lockdown. It took him several seconds to process what Nando had said, then grasp that the boy was addressing him.

“Yeah, go ahead.” Ruppert glanced in the rearview and could have wept. There were now four trucks chasing him, blue lights flashing. He made another sharp turn, tires skittering and squealing across the pavement, then righted the truck and accelerated.

Lucia found the controls for the blue lights in their own truck and switched them on.

“Is this a special night exercise, sir?” Nando asked.

“Sure, call it that,” Ruppert said.

The boy frowned and sat back, folding his arms in.

Lucia lifted her modified remote, which no longer had any wires dangling from it. She pressed the PLAY button. Every loudspeaker in the compound sprang to life, repeating a single phrase again and again:

“ Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

It was the suicide bomber slogan “God is great!” They hoped it would confuse the people in the compound about what was happening-maybe they would think the next event was a suicide bombing.

Lucia pressed the 4 button on her remote, and thunder and smoke exploded behind the wall, which was now on the right side of the truck. Seconds later, char and ash rained down on the trucks behind him.

She worked back from 3 to 1, summoning columns of flame behind the aluminum wall. The last bomb actually blasted loose a panel of the aluminum fence, which slammed into the truck immediately behind him. That truck swerved and crashed sidelong into a cinderblock wall, but more trucks were close behind.

Lucia lifted one of the two remaining bombs.

“I’m taking 5,” she said. She slid open the rear window of the truck and crawled through it, then dropped facedown into the truck bed behind Ruppert. Ahead, the western gate blocked his path, and hadn’t even begun moving for him. He remembered how long he’d waited last time, and swore under his breath. He lightened up on the accelerator.

He glanced in the rearview. Lucia squirmed on her stomach along the bed of the truck, bomb in one hand, remote in the other. He hoped she kept her fingers away from the number buttons. Blue lights flashed from the rear of his own truck. Maybe some of the pursuers in the back would lose track of which truck was the quarry, since they all looked identical. In the confusion, some of them might not even grasp that they were chasing one of their own trucks.

His speed dropped to fifty, then forty-five. The gate wasn’t budging.

Lucia leaned up over the tailgate and flung the bomb. It cracked into the lead pursuer’s windshield, then she pressed the remote and dropped to the truck bed, covering her head with her arms.

Red light filled the rearview mirror. Ruppert had no choice but to slow even more as he approached the gate. Fire engulfed the truck behind them. Fortunately, the driver had managed to hit the brakes and slow the truck, or it would have slammed directly into Ruppert’s tailgate, and into Lucia.

Then the truck immediately behind that one crashed into it, which boosted the flaming truck forward. Ruppert waited, idling, at the western gate, and could only watch it approach, like a burning barge on a swift current.

Lucia scrambled toward the open window. Already, another Goblin Valley truck was nosing its way around the side of the bombed truck, its driver struggling to avoid the burning pyre on one side of him and the solid concrete wall on the other. The truck crept forward.

A guard leaned out the passenger side door and raised something long and black in his hands.

“Get the fuck down!” Lucia screamed as she slithered in through the window. She smacked Ruppert’s face sideways into the seat, then rolled on top of him. Ruppert reached for Nando, but the boy was gone-he’d already tucked himself down on the floorboard, knees drawn to his chin. His face was eerily placid. A sane boy would have been screaming right now. Ruppert felt like screaming himself.

The machine gun sounded like a thousand corks popping from a thousand bottles of champagne. The guard strafed the truck, obliterating the front and rear windshields, the headrests, chunks of the steering wheel and upper dashboard, the side view mirrors. Lucia tumbled down to the floorboard to protect Nando with her body.

The stutter of bullets ceased, and Ruppert dared to poke his head up and look over the dashboard, through the remnants of the windshield. Miraculously, the western gate was rolling aside. Already it stood half-open, nearly wide enough for the truck.

He turned his head and looked out the rear at the next Goblin Valley truck, the one that had shot at them. It had forced its way past the burning truck and now accelerated towards him.

“We’re going.” Ruppert still spoke in a whisper, despite the sirens screaming behind them and the loudspeakers chanted Arabic battle prayer. “Get ready with number six.”

Lucia pulled herself up to a kneeling position on the floorboard and grabbed the final bomb.

Ruppert swung his feet down to the pedals, so that he was halfway between sitting up and lying on his side. He stomped the accelerator and swerved the truck to drive it through the opened portion of the gate. Twin metallic squeals sounded along the sides of the truck as the side mirrors sheared away. The truck scraped between the gate on one side and the concrete wall on the other.

Then they pulled loose and they were free, charging towards the menagerie of stone goblins filling the valley. Ruppert squinted against the wind pressing in on him through the open windshield area.

“Now!” Ruppert yelled, but Lucia was already pitching number 6 out through the demolished rear window. It struck the ground just outside the open gate, a few yards ahead of the caravan of trucks.

Lucia clicked the remote, and a fireball engulfed the gate area, which was still close enough behind that a wave of heat ruffled through Ruppert’s hair. She hurled the remote itself, entirely stripped and useless now, out the window, and it shattered against a passing boulder.

With all his mirrors shot away, and a field of giant boulders ahead, Ruppert couldn’t waste time looking back to see whether the bomb had destroyed the next truck, or in some other way blocked the gate. They would know soon enough.

He pushed himself upright and rammed the gas pedal to the floor, and soon he was dodging the maze of elevated boulders on their narrow sandstone stalks. The fire and smoke at Goblin Valley School retreated behind them. Ruppert let himself breathe again, and glanced down at Nando, who’d remained silent through the entire ordeal.

The boy glared up at him, his mouth fixed in a thin, straight line, his dark eyes blazing. Was the kid going to cause trouble now?

“Incoming!” Lucia cried. She grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. A screaming, whistling sound punctured the air next to Ruppert’s ear. He saw the artillery rocket slam into a cluster of the big goblin boulders ahead, enveloping them in flame, kicking up wide jets of sand. The dirt track they were traveling led directly into the flames and the swelling black cloud of smoke.

Two large boulders, the first one the size of a beach ball, the next one much larger, hurtled out of the smoke, rolling towards them.

Ruppert slewed off the road into sand, and found himself dodging rock formations that seemed leap towards him wherever he turned. Some of them towered above the truck.

More artillery pounded the unbalanced spires of rock around them, and a rain of shattered stone hammered the roof of the cab, denting it in more than a dozen places. Ruppert threaded among the goblins as best he could, losing most of his speed to the difficult maneuvering and the jagged, rocky ground. A few times he even caught a tire against a boulder and had to reverse and change course.

The rockets screamed down at them, toppling more of the rocks, which not only pummeled the truck but also blocked off many of their potential escape routes. Ruppert noticed they all seemed to land very close to the truck. The guards, or perhaps students, weren’t shelling the valley at random, but knew exactly where to find Ruppert and Lucia.

“GPS!” Ruppert shouted at Lucia. She was reaching down and trying to take Nando’s hands, but the boy wanted nothing to do with her. Nando ignored his mother, but he was glowering at Ruppert.

Lucia kicked at the underside of the console, then grabbed underneath it, gritted her teeth and pulled. She ripped free a plastic module the size of a poker chip and flung it out the passenger window.

Ruppert continued to push ahead, and within a minute they were out of range of the falling shells. He looked behind him, but saw only solid black. Smoke and clouds of sand occluded the valley.

He found his way back to the dirt road, and at last he could really make some time.

“Sir?” Nando asked. He was still lying curled on the floor, staring up at Ruppert.

“What is it?” Ruppert asked. “Are you hurt?”

“You’re not really a staff sergeant, are you, sir?” the boy asked.

“Nando,” Lucia said, and the boy cast her a sharp look. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Nando stared at her for a long moment. “Are you in the movies?”

“Nando, I’m you mother.”

The boy’s brow furrowed. “Is this…an interrogation exercise?”

“Please, Nando.” Lucia’s eyes glistened. “Try to remember.”

They climbed up out of the smoke-filled valley, heading northwest. Then, at last, the fires among the ordinance sheds must have touched something serious, because a narrow geyser of flame ejected straight up and out of the smoldering school compound, reminding Ruppert of the pillar of flame in the movie Exodus. He thought of the boys he’d left standing at attention, and hoped they’d had the sense to scatter and lay low when the fighting started.

Nando climbed up to look out the passenger window, and Lucia moved aside to let him sit.

“My parents died in the wars,” Nando said. He stared at the pillar of fire. “Like all the kids at school. My dad in Nigeria, my mom in the Philippines. Commandant Redding told me. He showed me pictures.”

“It isn’t true, Nando.” Lucia reached for his hand, but again he jerked away.

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“It is your name. Fernando Luis Santos. And mine is Lucia Santos. Your mother.” She took his hands in hers. "Look at me, Fernando."

Lucia leaned close to his ear and whispered, most of it too low for Ruppert to hear. It was Spanish, too low and fast for Ruppert to understand.

“Stop it,” Nando said. His voice was low and quivering. “I have to think.”

“Nando,” Lucia whispered. “Do you remember-”

“I have to think!” the boy snapped. He looked directly ahead, squinting into the wind that rolled over the bullet-scarred dashboard.

Lucia looked at Ruppert with a pained expression, her lips drawn and thin. He tried to smile, and he drove on.

Ruppert felt himself relax a little as they pulled into the tight canyon where they’d stashed the Bronto. Lucia and Nando left the Goblin Valley truck, while Ruppert lingered inside to change out of the bloodstained school uniform, in the process lifting the cash from the staff sergeant’s wallet. Through the shattered windshield, he overheard them:

“Where are we going?” Nando asked.

“We’re leaving for somewhere safe, up north.”

“When do I go back to school?”

“You don’t ever have to go back there. You’re free now, Nando.”

“I’m always free,” Nando said. “I’m an American.”

“Yes, you are, Nando.”

“If you’re my mother, is that man my father?” Nando whispered.

“No.”

“Is he your commanding officer?”

“No, I am the commanding officer.”

“Excuse me?” Ruppert asked. He’d finished changing, and now closed the door of the Goblin Valley truck behind him.

“I am,” Lucia insisted. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I know we have one more thing to do before we can go.” Ruppert glanced at the rear of the Brontosaur, sheathed in its desert tarp. Lucia nodded.

“Nando,” she said, “Why don’t you go stand at the front end of this truck, and wait there for a minute, all right?”

“Yes, sir.” Nando turned on his heel and marched to the front of the camouflaged truck, where he stood at attention.

Ruppert and Lucia lifted the tarp from the back of the truck and pushed it forward, unveiling the rear half of the Bronto. They lowered the tailgate and raised the door panel in the back of the truck’s camper top. Ruppert stared at the heap of forest-colored tarp for a moment.

After seeing what the school did to boys in their charge, he felt a bit less sorry for the men they’d hurt or even killed in the course of extracting Nando. He hoped some of the other boys had used the opportunity to escape, though he didn’t know where they might have gone. Perhaps they were too brainwashed to try such a thing, in any case.

He lifted up the tarp. There was nothing underneath but a long smear of partly dried blood.

“Shit,” Ruppert said, just before the impact on the back of his head spun him forward and slammed his head into the side of the camper top. He felt like he was caught in a small tornado as something swept him up, pulled him back, slammed him a few times against the side of the truck, then pitched him forward, Ruppert’s face dragging the desert-colored tarp off the remainder of the truck.

A large pair of rough, calloused hands grabbed Ruppert up and shoved him back against the door of the Bronto. The school official, the staff sergeant Ruppert thought he had murdered, loomed before him, the size of a grizzly bear, his upper torso and his entire head encrusted with sand glued on by dried blood, one eye swollen shut, looking very much like one of the wilderness demons Pastor John preached about. He snarled at Ruppert through broken teeth.

The staff sergeant hissed, his body curling to one side. Lucia had slashed him across the ribs with her obsidian blade, and then scurried back from him. He dropped Ruppert and charged after her.

Ruppert struggled to his feet, pushing himself up along the truck door. He thought he could hear a bass drum thumping somewhere deep inside his brain. The moonlit world around him blinkered in and out.

The staff sergeant snatched Lucia’s knife hand in one of his own, then pinned her thumb back while twisting her wrist. The blade spilled from her fingers and stabbed deep into the sand at her feet.

Ruppert forced his right foot to slide forward, then his left. He focused on the staff sergeant’s twisted, glowering face, pushing himself toward the bigger man. His ribs ached from repeated slamming against the truck, possibly cracked. He didn’t know what he would do when he reached the man-Ruppert doubted he could do much more than lean on him.

Then the staff sergeant rolled backward out of his field of vision. Ruppert’s aching neck turning slowly, and he saw the large man sprawl out on his back onto sand and sharp rocks, a look of shock on his face.

Nando scurried on his hands and knees away from the man’s legs and up to his head. He held Lucia’s blade in one hand, and it was dripping. In one nimble, fluid movement, he knelt beside the fallen man, raised the blade high with the tip of its blade pointed straight at the man’s Adam apple, and then he stabbed it downward in a perfectly straight line.

The man’s hands wrapped around Nando’s upper arms, and his legs kicked from the knees, his feet flopping uselessly. Ruppert saw that the Nando had slashed across the man’s heels, severing both his Achilles tendons.

Nando dragged the blade around the man's neck, with the calm expertise of a butcher, halfway decapitating him. Then Nando let the staff sergeant's head flop back, bleeding out into the sand. Every muscle in the man twitched, as if he were having a small seizure, and then he died.

Lucia stepped gently toward her son.

“Nando? Nando, are you all right?”

Nando swiped both sides of the knife across the man’s chest, painting a bloody X.

“That’s Staff Sergeant Meyers,” Nando said. “Now I can never go back.” He stood, and he offered the blade to Lucia, handle first. “The Commandant is going to kill me.”

“He won’t find you,” Lucia said. “Come on, we’re behind schedule now.” She began gathering the desert-colored tarp. Nando and Ruppert stared at the dead man.

“Are you all right?” Ruppert asked him. The boy nodded. “Thank you. You saved our lives. I’m sorry you had to do it.”

Nando stayed quiet for several seconds, and then he shrugged. “It’s okay. Everyone wants to kill Staff Sergeant Meyers.” And the boy turned and marched toward the Bronto’s cab.