He stood for a moment, hoping he was saying good-bye to this place.

Sam turned and walked away, heading toward home.

Brittney woke up facedown in the sand. For a terrible moment she thought she was underground again.

The Lord might ask anything of her, but please God, not that. Not that.

She rolled over, blinked her eyes and was surprised to see that the sun was still in the sky.

She was above the tide line, several body lengths from the thin lace of surf. Something, a soggy lump the size of a person, was between her and the water. Half in the surf, legs stretched onto dry land, like he’d been running into the ocean, tripped, and had drowned.

Brittney stood up. She brushed damp sand from her arms, but it stuck to the gray mud that coated her from head to toe.

“Tanner?”

Her brother was not near. She was alone. And now fear began to make her shake. Fear for the first time since she had emerged from the ground. It was a dark, soul-eating monster, this fear.

“What am I?” she asked.

She could not tear her gaze away from the body. She could not stop her feet from moving her closer. She had to see, even though she knew, deep inside knew, that what she would see would destroy her.

Brittney stood over the body. Looked down at it. Shirt torn to ribbons. Puffy lacerated flesh. The marks of a whip.

A terrible animal noise strangled Brittney’s throat. She had been there, on the sand, unconscious when it happened. She’d been right there, just a few feet away when the demon had struck this poor boy.

“The demon,” Tanner said, appearing beside her.

“I have not stopped him, Tanner. I failed.”

Tanner said nothing and Brittney looked at him, pleading. “What is happening to me, Tanner? What am I?”

“You are Brittney. An angel of the Lord.”

“What aren’t you telling me? I know there’s something. I can feel it. I know you’re not telling me everything.”

Tanner did not smile. He did not answer.

“You’re not real, Tanner. You’re dead and buried. I’m imagining you.”

She looked at the damp sand. Two sets of footprints came to this place. Hers. And the poor boy in the surf. But there was a third set as well, not hers, not the boy’s. And this set of footprints did not stretch back across the beach. It was only here. As if it belonged to someone who had materialized out of thin air and then disappeared.

When Tanner still said nothing, Brittney pleaded with him. “Tell me the truth, Tanner. Tell me the truth.” Then, in a trembling whisper, “Did I do this?”

“You are here to fight the demon,” Tanner said.

“How can I fight a demon when I don’t know who or what he is, and when I don’t even know what I am?”

“Be Brittney,” Tanner said. “Brittney was good and brave and faithful. Brittney called on her savior when she felt herself weaken.”

“Brittney was…You said Brittney was,” Brittney said.

“You asked for the truth.”

“I’m still dead, aren’t I?” Brittney said.

“Brittney’s soul is in heaven,” Tanner said. “But you are here. And you will resist the demon.”

“I’m talking to an echo of my own mind,” Brittney said, not to Tanner, to herself. She knelt and put her hand on the wet, tousled head. “Bless you, poor boy.”

She stood up. Faced the town. She would go there. She knew the demon would go there too.

Mary worked on the next week’s schedule in her cramped little office. John stood in the doorway.

In the plaza they were starting to cook food. Mary smelled it, even through the omnipresent stink of pee and poop and finger paint and paste and filth.

Charred, crisping meat. She would need to gag some of it down and do it publicly. Or everyone would look at her and point and whisper “anorexic.”

Crazy. Unstable.

Mary’s losing it.

No longer Mother Mary. Crazy Mary. Off-her-meds Mary. Or on-too-many-meds Mary. Everyone knew now, thanks to Astrid. They all knew. They all could picture it in their heads, Mary searching for Prozac and Zoloft like Gollum chasing the ring. Mary sticking her finger down her throat to vomit up food even while normal people were reduced to eating bugs.

And now they thought she’d been tricked by some fraud. Made a fool of by Orsay.

They thought she was suicidal. Or worse.

“Mary,” John said. “Are you ready?”

He was so sweet, her little brother. Her lying little brother, so sweet and so concerned. Of course he was. He didn’t want to get stuck taking care of all these kids alone.

“That food smells good, huh?” John asked.

It smelled like rancid grease. It smelled sickening.

“Yes,” Mary said.

“Mary.”

“What?” Mary snapped. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m…Look, I’m sorry I lied. About Orsay.”

“The Prophetess, you mean.”

“I don’t think she’s a prophet,” John said, head hung down.

“Why, because she doesn’t agree with Astrid? Because she doesn’t think we just have to be trapped here?”

John moved closer. He put his hand on Mary’s arm. She shook him off.

“You promised me, Mary,” John pleaded.

“And you lied to me,” Mary shot back.

There were tears in her brother’s eyes. “Your birthday, Mary. In an hour. You shouldn’t be wasting time on the schedule, you should be getting ready. You have to promise me you won’t leave me or these kids.”

“I already promised you,” Mary said. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Mary…,” John pleaded, having run out of words.

“Get the kids ready to go outside,” Mary said. “There’s food being cooked. We have to get our share for the littles.”

THIRTY-SIX

47 MINUTES

WORD HAD GONE out about the cookout. But it wasn’t really necessary. The smell of food cooking was all that was necessary. Albert had arranged it all with his usual efficiency.

Astrid sat on the town hall steps. Little Pete sat a few steps behind her, playing his dead game like he was playing for his life.

Astrid swallowed, nervous. She smoothed the two sheets of paper in her hands. She kept crumpling them unconsciously and then, realizing what she had done, straightening them out. She pulled a pen out of her back pocket, scratched out some words, rewrote them, scratched them out, and started the whole crumple and uncrumple pattern again.

Albert was nearby, watching the whole place, arms folded over his chest. He was, as usual, the neatest, cleanest, calmest, most focused person there. Astrid envied that about Albert: he set a goal and never seemed to suffer any doubt about it. Astrid was almost, but not quite, resentful of the way he had come to her and ordered her to quit feeling sorry for herself and get her act together.

But it had worked. She’d finally done what she needed to do. She hoped. She hadn’t shown the results to anyone yet. People might just decide she was crazy. But she hoped not, because even after all the self-doubt, after all the abuse she’d endured, she still thought she was right. The FAYZ couldn’t just be Albert making money and Sam kicking butts. The FAYZ needed rules and laws and rights.

People were coming, drawn by the smell of meat. Not a lot of it per person, Albert had made that clear, but in the aftermath of the fire, with many kids having lost their limited stocks of food, and with nothing coming in from the fields, the prospect of any food at all made stomachs rumble and mouths water.

Albert had guards ready, four of his own people armed with baseball bats, the default weapon of the FAYZ. And two of Edilio’s guys, and Edilio himself, walked with guns slung over their shoulders.

The strange thing was how it no longer seemed strange to Astrid. A nine year-old dressed in rags, sharing a bottle of Scotch with an eleven-year-old with a shaved head and a cape made out of an olive green bed sheet. Kids with sunken eyes. Kids with open sores, untreated, barely noticed. Boys wearing nothing but boxer shorts and boots. Girls wearing their mother’s glittery formal gowns, shortened with rough scissor hacks. A girl who had tried to remove her own braces with pliers and now couldn’t close her mouth because of the jagged wire sticking through her front teeth.