The End Is Now

TO WRESTLE NOT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD Desirina Boskovich

They said the world would end on Friday. The next moment we’d all be on Planet X, which was like heaven, but in real life.

In Missouri it was supposed to happen at exactly four o’clock. We gathered ’round the living room with the shades down and the lights off, watching the TV and praying while we waited to disappear. It was me, and Jane, and Larry, and Tim. Plus Sylvie, who was crying all the time now. And Dad, of course. Mom had been enforced.

Eventually the TV turned to static as the last station went off the air. We turned it down low and waited some more.

3:55. 3:58. 3:59.

Nothing happened.

4:01. 4:02. 4:05.

Nothing at all.

Larry got up first and peeked out the blinds. That was Larry for you: always curious, always wanting to know. “There’s people,” he said. “Runnin’ around.”

Dad went to the gun cabinet and took out two double-barreled shotguns. One for him, one for me—I was fifteen, old enough to drive, and old enough to shoot, even as a girl. “Can I have one?” Jane asked, but he shook his head. She was only twelve.

At 4:25 the TV picture came back, and every channel was the President, saying: “My fellow Americans . . . We were tricked.”

Apparently, like Dad, the government had had their suspicions. What if the aliens were con men, liars, cheats, and fakes? NASA, the Pentagon, the CIA—they’d reached out to others, through secret channels, the President said. They’d refused to be victims. They’d made other plans.

“We are bruised, but not beaten,” he declared. “Damaged, but not defeated. Now, we must go to war against the alien invaders. We must defend not just our country, but our planet. I stand here today—and I beg you—from the bottom of my heart: Stand with me. We must—we will—we will stand together. God bless the United States of America!”

My father cursed and turned off the set. “Aliens,” he said. “Bullshit. I knew it all along.” He turned on me, sharp and harsh. “Annette. Can you please get your sister to stop that damn crying? I’ve got to make some calls.”

“Okay,” I said. I put down the shotgun and picked up Sylvie. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s take a nap.”

When I came downstairs a bunch of men were sitting around the dining room table.

I listened to them whisper. They were saying what dad had said all along: that it was a vast conspiracy, the scientists and the government and the people on the news. They wanted to impose a one-world government, install martial law, confiscate our guns. “A war on the free-minded,” they called it, but actually there weren’t so many free-minded left. They’d all been enforced.

Mom had been free-minded. That’s why she was gone.

People kept coming to the door with stories to tell: Smashed cars scattered across the intersections. Fistfights in the streets. Gas stations run dry. City blocks aflame. Supermarkets with their windows bashed in and their shelves stark empty, three customers brawling over the last frozen ham.

And enforcers being chased down, beaten, and shot.

Jane stood behind me, listening in. She was twelve and thought she was awfully grownup, but she didn’t need to hear all that. “Come help me fix supper,” I said.

Supper was just sandwiches, a selection of bologna on white bread and PB&J. We were carrying the platters to the table, when someone outside started beating on the door, hammering the bell, screaming for help.

Dad looked around. “Anyone expectin’ someone? ’Cause by my count that’s everybody.” He went to the window by the door and peeked around the shades. “It’s Don.”

Don went to our church, before he’d become an enforcer. No one had spoken to him since.

Jane and I set the chips and sandwiches on the table. “Go get the soda,” I told her.

“You do it,” she said.

Dad opened the front door a crack, the chain still up. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“Please,” Don said, crying. “I heard people were meeting here. I’m begging you. Just let me in. They’re going to kill me.”

“Sorry,” Dad said, not sorry at all.

“But what about forgiveness?” Don pleaded. It was so quiet around the table you could hear our stomachs gurgling, but outside the door sounded the roar of building chaos: yelling crowds, screaming sirens, squealing tires, and the constant crackle-pop of guns going off. “What about mercy? What about fellowship? What about turning the other cheek?”

“What about it?” Dad said, and slammed the door in Don’s face.

Don shrieked and the mob howled and we heard tussling and scraping and something hard thudding against the door. A shot rang out, then another.

My brother began to move toward the curtains. “Larry,” my dad said, in a dangerous voice, “Don’t you dare look out that window.” Then he returned to the table. “Now. Where were we?”

They scarfed down the sandwiches and planned a war.

Later, when no one was watching, I peeked outside the window. I saw Don, or what was left of Don—a pile of torn clothes and leaking body fluids and splattered brain matter and a lake of blood—and a broken casserole dish, tuna noodles and busted glass mixed together with all the human gore.

That night they boarded up the windows.

When bedtime came, Jane and I took the kids upstairs. Jane led the prayers, but even after she said “Amen,” she continued to pray in silence, her hands folded and her eyes closed, her face turned toward the window and the night sky. I sat with her until the waxing crescent moon rose high and bright.

By the next morning the power was out, but our generator was on. Later that day the President got on TV and declared martial law, just like Dad had predicted.

Soon the army tanks were rolling down the streets, the soldiers waving, while people came out of their houses to clap and cry and wave the flag. Everyone was mad as hell; everyone was ready for war.

At our house more guys arrived all the time. Soon we had a dozen people living at our house ‘round the clock and another dozen coming in and out, all hours of the day. I wanted to listen to the war plans, but I had to spend all my time cooking, doing the dishes, washing the towels and sheets. I made Larry help me, though he complained the whole time. Jane had an entire nursery going upstairs now with the motherless babies and toddlers that other widowed fathers had brought along.

I folded the laundry and watched the news. It was all overheated talk shows, playing and replaying the blurry footage of the aliens landing in Siberia or Greenland, setting up a massive camp.

“Can’t we shoot them down?” demanded one panelist. “That’s what I want to know. We have the capabilities, right? The most powerful military in the entire world. Maybe the universe, I don’t know. Is the entire Air Force asleep at the wheel?”

“Nuke them from orbit, right.”

“Annette,” my father called. “We’re all starving. Can you put something together?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And turn that garbage off. You know it’s all a bunch of lies.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Typical: It was the end of the world and not only did I have to spend it waiting on everybody, I wasn’t even allowed to watch TV.

Everything was different with Mom gone.

It wasn’t about the practical stuff. I’d always helped with all of that. It was about the purpose. Because Mom always believed, and though the God of her faith was vengeful and cruel, He was always there. Her belief had gotten us through the past couple weeks when everything else began to crumble.

The schism at church happened as soon as the aliens arrived. Half the congregation believed this was false prophesy; there was no god but God, no heaven but His Kingdom, and Planet X was just another end-times distraction, sent to tempt.

The other half believed this might be God, working in His own mysterious way; He was the author of every force in the universe, and no one could understand the working of his hands. So they wanted to pray, and proselytize, and convert as many souls as they could, before the final day.

Of course, this was against alien orders; the aliens had commanded that everyone continue about their business as usual, no special preparations for the apocalypse, and certainly no last ditch efforts to save the world. They’d made one of every thousand people become an enforcer and punish violations. The punishment was instant execution. The punishment for refusing to be an enforcer was also instant execution.

Mom and Dad fought a lot that week, because he didn’t want her to die. “But the Lord has called us,” she patiently explained.

“Can’t He call someone else? For a change?”

They enforced her on Thursday, hand in hand with other martyrs as they prayed beneath the steeple.

We used to be homeschooled, before all this started. Now, Jane wanted to continue the lessons. “I’ll just start where we left off,” she said, but every time I went to check on them, they were listening to radio preachers and studying the Bible.

We’d been stockpiling food for a long time, in case the end of the world happened. Then, luckily, it actually did, so all that rice and creamed corn wouldn’t have to go to waste.

I expected the pantry stores to last a long time. But with the people coming in and out, making war plans and gobbling down all the stew, our food was gone in less than a week. Everyone kept saying the grocery stores were cleaned out, but somehow we’d have to find something to eat.

I went down to the basement and tried to get some help, but they were all busy and distracted, arguing over a pile of illegally encrypted two-way radios and a stack of hand-drawn maps, telling each other to shush so they could hear the news from Joplin, another rebel cell. Someone paused long enough to tell me they’d passed a ration station, just a mile down the road. So I grabbed a .22 pistol, tucked it in my purse, and set out on my own.

I hadn’t been outside in a while. The whole neighborhood looked pretty bad. There were cars stranded in the street where they’d run out of gas, after thieves had come in the night to siphon it away. There was trash everywhere, battered furniture, shell casings, burned siding, broken glass.

A neighbor girl stopped me three doors down. She stood in the doorway with her baby on her hip, waving frantically and calling my name.

“Nicole,” I called. “Are you okay?” My parents never let me talk to her; they said she’d be a bad influence.

“Yeah,” she called back. “But we don’t got no food in the house and James went out three days ago to get some and he never came back, and I’m starving and the baby won’t quit crying. I’m so scared and I dunno what to do.”

“You can come with me. I’m looking for food.”

“Scared to come outside,” she said.

“It’s okay. I got a gun.” I showed her the pistol in my purse, and we set out toward the corner where they said the ration station would be.

“They steal your gas?” Nicole asked, bouncing her baby a bit.

“We siphoned it off for the generator,” I said, before I thought.

“Generator. So you still got lights and stuff.”

“Yeah. They boarded up the windows so nobody would know.”

“Smart,” she said. Then she started crying. “I’m so glad you came outside,” she said. “I saw what they did to that guy standing on your doorstep. And the fires, and the fights, and the soldiers came through on tanks and hauled a whole bunch of people off. Then James boarded up our windows, and he disappeared. I guess they got him, too.”

“It’s all right,” I said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. “That guy on the steps was an enforcer. I’m sure they didn’t do that to James.”

“Maybe they just killed him. Because they wanted our food.”

This did seem kind of likely, so I didn’t know what else to say.

We reached the main road, and saw a group of people coming our way, eight or nine of them. They skipped along the yellow stripe, singing and clapping and shaking a tambourine, laughing like babies. They carried flowers and wore flowers in their hair . . . and those flowers were all they wore.

“What’s up with that?” I asked, but Nicole didn’t know.

“Hey!” I called out. “Whatcha doin’?” They didn’t seem to notice. We watched as they jiggled past in the nude.

An older woman followed a few paces behind them, dressed in normal clothes. Instead of flowers she carried a large stick.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “I’m Ruth. Don’t I know you girls?”

She lived down the street from us, but my mother would never let any of us kids talk to her, or even walk past her yard, on account of the pentagram she had hanging in her window. I was beginning to see that the end of the world might have its perks—for the first time I could talk to anyone I pleased.

“I’m Annette,” I said. “And this is Nicole. What are they so happy about?”

“Well,” Ruth said. “Bless their hearts, but they’re in paradise. Or at least they think they are.”

“They think this is Planet X?”

“It’s called seeing what you want to see. We all do it. Some more than others.”

“That’s fucked,” Nicole said. “Fucked up. Fucked in the head.”

“It’s no worse than setting half the city on fire. Are you girls headed to the bread lines? Let me walk with you. I like to follow the loonies, since they’re harmless. But you seem like better conversationalists.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We’ve got a gun,” Nicole added.

The ration station was nothing more than a big messy row of folding tables, guarded by military and manned by city workers and volunteers. We waited in line, while the soldiers strode back and forth alongside, their heavy rifles slung across their chests.

Ruth wasn’t intimidated by any of it. Straightaway she struck up a conversation with a baby-faced soldier lingering nearby: “Young man,” she said, “You hardly look old enough to be in the army at all.”

“I’m eighteen, ma’am,” he said, half-smiling.

“My god. They get younger every year.”

“I just signed up,” he volunteered. He really did look young, barely older than me. He was a Midwestern boy, with blue eyes and light brown hair and a clean fresh face. “Soon’s I heard the President’s speech, about how there was gonna be a war. I thought we was gonna be fighting aliens, but instead they sent us to two days of basic and then up here to guard supply lines, keep the peace.”

“I’m sure you’ll see your aliens soon,” said Ruth.

“I hope so,” he said. He seemed eager to talk to us, and who wouldn’t be, so young and suddenly far from home? “I heard there might be a big attack soon. Somewhere close. Like Chicago. Or St. Louis. We’ll be ready! You can count on that!”

The rest of us bedraggled, half-starved people waiting for white bread and government cheese weren’t so happy about the idea, and a low moan of dread ran through the line. It was bad enough with no power, and half the city a burnt-out wreck, and our kin dead and gone with no bodies to bury, but to be attacked by aliens, too? It was getting absurd.

“But you know what else?” the young soldier continued. “I heard there’s rebels. People who don’t even believe in aliens at all. So we got that, too. It’s a war on two fronts. Don’t make sense to me, though. We got an enemy, a real enemy. Like Nazis, but worse, you know? I heard they look like walking frogs.”

“Okay, okay,” his commander said, coming up behind him and clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s enough storytelling. Let’s keep it moving.”

Our soldier grinned sheepishly, half-saluted at Ruth, and headed up the line.

That night there were attacks on cities in India and China and Brazil. They showed it all on the news: crumbling buildings, burning foliage, eroding skylines. Raging lakes of fire and flame. And terrified people, as they ran and cried, everything they’d loved reduced to ash. The news announcers didn’t talk. They just watched with the rest of us, pale and afraid.

Nicole had followed me home, after the bread line. At first I was worried to bring her, but she was young and pretty and the rebels were mostly men, so they didn’t seem to mind. Right away she handed her baby off to Jane and the men gave her a gun. Now she was leaning into their circle with a thirsty look on her face, watching the wreckage on TV.

They weren’t afraid. They claimed it was all manufactured, nothing but fake. A false flag operation, they said.

“What’s that mean?” Nicole demanded, and Big Doug explained.

“But aren’t the dead people still dead?” I wanted to know. No one had an answer for that.

I brought dinner to Jane and the kiddies upstairs. They were all of ’em starving, because there’d been no one around to fix lunch, and nothing to fix. Timmy dove toward the plate like a hungry wolf, but quick as could be, Jane slapped him away. “Timmy,” she said. “We haven’t had time to pray. Close your eyes, Annette,” she commanded, so I did.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” she said, quoting from the Bible, a verse I once knew too. “But against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places . . .”

I didn’t want to listen. Eyes still closed, I slipped away.

The next day I had to go back to the ration station all over again. There were too many people at my house, eating too much food, but we had to keep it secret, or the soldiers would get suspicious. Someone else should wait in the line, but no one wanted to do that, because it was boring. It was way more fun to sit in the basement counting the hand grenades some lunatic from Rolla had brought in under cover of night. So food duty fell to me, again.

The baby-faced soldier recognized me; he came up and said hello. “Didn’t I just see you yesterday?” he asked. “Did they give you enough?”

“I, um, I’ve got a big family,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

He lit up. “Oh yeah? Me too. How many you got?”

“Well, there’s me, and Jane, and Larry, and Timmy, and Sylvie,” I said. “And Dad. And Mom, but she got enforced.”

“So did my sister Rae Ann,” he said. “And my big brother Jack, and he had two kids. I like to think I’m here for him. Those people, the ones who fought back at the very beginning, they were the real heroes, don’t you think? My momma says we should be grateful to them all. She’d say your momma was a hero too.”

Then his commander was giving him a look, so he moved on, down the line.

On the way back I ran into Ruth. “Oh, you again,” she said. “Listen, do you want to come by my house tonight? It’s a full moon and seeing as how the world was supposed to end and then didn’t, I figured some thanks to the goddess would probably be in order, don’t you agree? Bring your friend, too. It would help complete the circle.”

“I, um, okay,” I said. “That sounds good. I’ll see what I can do.”

Nicole didn’t want to go at first, because she said it sounded weird, and kinda lame, but I insisted. I’d been on my feet cooking and cleaning for days. Now the whole house reeked because we couldn’t take showers anymore and the toilets were all backed up. No one was even bothering about it, because they expected the war to begin any day. Their makeshift beds were scattered all over the house, heaped with dirty clothes and damp towels they’d used to clean their privates. I just wanted to get out of the house, away from all the men with their unkempt beards and stinking feet. So I reminded Nicole that she wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me, and finally she agreed to go.

We slipped away just after dinner when the kids had gone to bed and the men were talking by firelight to conserve the generator’s fuel. They’d banned the TV completely, because we couldn’t afford the power, and anyway they said it was nothing but lies.

Now that nearly all the power was gone, night was deeper than it had ever been before. Storm-heavy clouds shifted and scattered across the face of the moon. In Ruth’s backyard, surrounded by overgrown hedges and the low-hanging branches of sycamore trees, it was so dark we could barely see each other. The match flared bright for a moment as Ruth lit three candles, illuminating spooky shadows across her face—for a moment she really did look like a witch.

We stood in a circle with our arms outstretched, while Ruth explained that there is only one goddess, though she goes by different names—different names for different forms. Tonight Ruth called on Hecate, the goddess in three. Hecate was ours: maiden, mother, and crone. She was the goddess of transformations, of endings and beginnings, of birth and death. Here, in this moment, as one world perished and the next came into being, she was the goddess of now.

Then Ruth prayed, though it was not like Jane’s prayers. She prayed for strength, and wisdom, and harmony; she prayed for protection for women everywhere and for peace to come at the crossroads.

I could feel the heat radiating off my white candle, its warmth on my fingers and forehead.

When it ended Nicole was the first to blow out her candle without so much as an “Amen.” She tossed the dripping candle into the grass and said, “So, um, that was fun? I better be getting back. Annette—you’ll be along?” She slipped past the shadows and through the gate.

“And the circle is broken,” Ruth said. She knelt and lodged the three candles upright in a little pile of stones and rocks, and relit Nicole’s candle. She patted the grass beside her. I sat.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” I said. “But the people at my house . . . they’re planning a war. They’re going to attack the army base. Or maybe just the soldiers. I’m not exactly sure.”

“I thought that might be the case,” Ruth said.

“I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

“I know,” Ruth said. “They will, though, you know. The army is stronger. So much stronger. Your friends can never win.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“But you still don’t want them to die.”

“Of course not. I don’t want anyone to die.” I wasn’t a hero, not like my mother, not like my father. I just wanted to live.

“If you need anything, Annette, promise me you’ll come to me, alright?”

I promised.

Then she told me to go home, before they started worrying.

No one had missed me. They were getting updates from Joplin; the uprising there had begun tonight. Most had been killed in the skirmishes, and the rest had fled and gone into hiding. The army base was strong as ever. The rebels had failed.

“We won’t fail, though, will we?” Nicole asked. “We’re stronger. We have more people. We can do this. We can win.”

On the radio there was talk of new cities destroyed, demolished by alien weapons and leveled to cinders and ash. Albuquerque. Florence. Perth. Lahore. The announcers speculated on the next target. “I’ve heard military strategists fear an attack on the financial center of the northeast,” said one. “Or perhaps a psychological strike, aimed at America’s heartland.”

“Omaha? St. Louis? Des Moines?”

“Tomorrow,” my father said. “Dumb fucks in Joplin. Tipped our hand. Tomorrow, before they start doing block sweeps over here. Tomorrow we strike.”

Jane woke me a couple hours past midnight, gripping my shoulder with her bony fingers. “Annette,” she whispered. “Larry’s missing. Wake up. I can’t find Larry.”

“What time is it?” I groaned, but then I understood and I was up like a shot.

We crept barefoot through the house, over and around the sleeping hulks of men, passed out anywhere and everywhere. We looked in the kitchen, in the backed-up bathrooms that smelled of sewage, in the abandoned backyard, and even in the basement, where a couple guys were still awake, guarding the guns. They looked us up and down as if they barely knew us. “Nope. Haven’t seen the kid.”

We went outside, holding hands now, more afraid than we’d admit. We should have gotten Dad, but we understood that he was no longer here for us, not like that. He’d become part of something else—he was leading something else—and now we were the distraction.

We found Larry standing in the middle of the street as the Paradisers had done, staring up at the brilliant full moon. The clouds had passed. Jane called his name in a quiet voice, but he didn’t seem to hear.

I followed his gaze. There, soaring and zipping across the sky, I saw a spacecraft.

It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and I knew immediately that it was completely and totally alien, not of this world. It was dimly luminescent, speedy and nimble. Along one triangular side were racing patterns of turquoise and violet light.

“Look,” I said, pointing toward the sky, but Jane was occupied with Larry, and when I looked back, the spacecraft was gone.

“Is he sleepwalking?” But he seemed awake, just groggy and confused. We dragged him back to the safety of the front porch, demanding to know what was up.

“I got up to pee,” he said. “Then I looked out the window and I saw an alien standing here, in the front yard. I knew it was one because it was fat and scaly like a frog. Then it waved at me. It wanted me to follow. So I did.”

“But the windows are boarded up,” I said. “Remember? You were dreaming. It was just a dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” he insisted. “I’m awake.”

“No,” Jane said sharply. “Stop lying. Annette’s right. The windows are boarded up. You didn’t see a thing.”

“I’m not lying. I saw an alien. I did.”

She slapped him, hard. “There are no aliens, Larry. There’s no such thing. Jesus wouldn’t allow it. Now come back to bed.” She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him toward the front door.

He began to cry. “You’re hurting me.”

“Stop hurting him, Jane,” I said. “It’s okay. Everyone just go back to bed.”

But I couldn’t sleep for a long, long time. I lay on the floor by my siblings, remembering the way the glowing spacecraft had zigzagged across the sky. I wondered if I’d been dreaming, too.

The next morning I woke late. By the time I came downstairs, everyone was already eating breakfast. Nicole had taken over what she called “Provisions,” so I didn’t have to worry so much about cooking anymore.

But Nicole and Jane were telling everyone about the “witchcraft” Ruth had forced Nicole and me to do, and how it made Larry hallucinate an alien and sleepwalk down the street. All the men were cracking up at the idea of Larry following an alien because it waved at him. Embarrassed, Larry started laughing too.

Nicole and Jane were serious, though. “I’m telling you,” Nicole said. “There was something real creepy about that lady. I’m not going back there. And I think Annette best not either.”

“Agreed,” my dad said, looking at me as if he’d just remembered I was his daughter. “We need your help around here. And no more talking to outsiders! That kind of thing could get us all killed.”

I was going to tell them about the spacecraft, but then I realized they’d just laugh at me the way they’d laughed at Larry. So I didn’t say a word.

I still wanted to talk to Dad, though. I pulled him into the empty pantry where we could have a moment to ourselves. “Dad. I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t want you to do this. I don’t want you to die. Don’t you remember what you said to Mom?”

He looked like I’d hit him. “Don’t you see, Annette? Your mom fought back. Now we’re fighting back. Everyone else is a collaborator. They’re followers, Annette, traitors, sheep. Not us. Not me. That’s why we’ve all got to fight.”

“But what about me and Jane and Larry and Timmy and little Sylvie? If you die, we’ll be alone.”

“That’s just it. I’m doing this for you. So you kids can live in a future that’s safe and free.”

“I don’t care about the future. I care about now. I just want us to be okay.”

He promised that we would.

I went back to the ration station that day, hoping my soldier would still be there. I had to tell someone about the alien ship.

In the old days, if my parents said there were no such thing as aliens, I’d have believed them without a second thought, never mind what I thought I saw. But things were changing now. I could believe what I wanted to believe, be whatever I wanted to be.

I figured my soldier would understand. Maybe he’d even be pleased; his aliens were finally near.

Instead he bit his bottom lip and looked at me with brooding eyes. “A lot of people have been seeing things,” he said. “All kinds of weird things. Things that don’t always match up, don’t always fit the facts. My commander says it’s ‘stress-induced hallucinations.’ That’s what he called it. Some of the boys been gettin’ ’em too. Maybe sometimes we just see what we want to see.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “It looked so real. It felt real, too. I felt it in my skin. Like electricity. A tingle.” Then I got embarrassed, talking about my tingly skin.

“Maybe it was,” he said kindly, and I knew he was humoring me. “Anyway, I gotta say goodbye. I probably won’t see you no more . . . I’m headed out to St. Louis tonight.”

“Everyone? All the soldiers?”

“A good bit,” he said. “You know, I’m sure you’ve heard the talk.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like there could be an attack. What time you headed out?”

“Night. Maybe around oh one hundred hours,” he said, like I was supposed to be impressed. “Anyway, so long. Maybe I’ll run into you somewhere, after the war is over.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I’d like that. You seem like a real nice girl. Good luck to your family.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Aren’t you scared? Now that you might have to really fight?”

“I wish I’d stayed home in Oklahoma,” he said. “Now go on. Get your peanut butter and powdered milk.”

As soon as I got home, I went to Dad.

They’d been planning to launch the rebellion tonight, attacking lone soldiers and small patrols, raiding the ration stations, disrupting supply lines, sabotaging the movie theaters that played the propaganda reels.

But now they had my intel, they could go so much bigger.

Dad slapped me on the back. “See? I knew it. You’re a fighter, just like us. I’m proud of you, hon.” Then he called the rebels around. “New plan,” he said, and they began arguing about whether they should set a trap with the grenades as the military caravan rolled out of town, or if they should use the rifles to pick soldiers off one by one from the side of the road, or if maybe all that would be better suited as a distraction to cause pandemonium while the rest stuck with the original plan. They weren’t exactly master military strategists; the only war they’d seen was on TV.

I felt a little guilty for selling out my soldier, but he should have taken me seriously. I knew what I’d seen.

The rebels, and Nicole, set out just before midnight. Before they left, Dad gave me one of their two-way radios, so I could listen in.

The house was dark, to conserve fuel. I sat alone in the basement with a single candle, cradling one radio in my hand and listening to the other, tuned to the news. Jane sat upstairs, watching the babies while they slept, and listening to her own shows, the way she always did now. The preachers testified into the empty stretches between rural towns and lost lengths of highway; they spoke of Jesus and the devil, brimstone and blood. No wonder the kids had nightmares.

It all happened at the same time, just a little past one.

The big attack came, but it wasn’t St. Louis or Chicago or Des Moines—it was Oklahoma City. I listened as they narrated the fireballs, the melting asphalt, the endless flame. It was worse, not being able to see it, just hearing the voices as they described the worst thing they’d ever seen.

The soldiers who’d been headed to St. Louis turned around and headed south, along with most of the other soldiers in town. When I sat very still I could feel the rumble and quake of their tanks headed for the highway.

Our rebels primed for battle met their force armed for war; instead of a few prowling soldiers and peacekeepers, it was half an army.

“Run away!” I screamed into the radio, hoping my dad would hear. “Go home! Hide! They’re leaving! We can still be free!”

Maybe they couldn’t hear me. Maybe they didn’t have time to answer because they were fighting for their lives. I heard them, though; their screams and gurgles and shouts, their gasping cries for reinforcements, their pleas to fall back, their rattling breaths, just before death.

And then I understood. I was alone now, we were all of us alone, me and Jane and Larry and Sylvie and Tim. And we were fighters, too, except we were smart. Not like Mom. Not like Dad. We weren’t traitors, or collaborators; we were just going to do whatever it took to survive.

I went upstairs to tell Jane what had happened. The kids were fast asleep, the radio preachers droning on, but Jane was nowhere to be found.

I came downstairs again just in time to see her slipping in the front door, wild-haired and wild-eyed, her face smudged with dirt and ash, grinning like a jack o’ lantern, smelling of lighter fluid and flame. “My gosh, Jane. Where have you been?”

“I was lighting Ruth’s house on fire,” she said. “Ruth is a witch. This new world will be built on the ashes of the old, and in the new world there is no room for satanic practices and pagan corruption. So witches must burn.”

I stared, shocked into silence.

“Come here,” she beckoned, and I joined her in the open doorway, where I could see the crackling tongues of fire rising high above the roof, engulfing the ancient sycamores in flames.

“There will be no more war but holy war,” she said.

Part of me wanted to throttle her. But I didn’t, because she was my sister, and I knew we would need each other in the end. She was my deranged, murderous, starry-eyed sister, my mother’s daughter, but blood runs thicker than water and we would hold onto our own until our fingers bled.

“Never mind about Ruth,” I said. “I was just listening to the radios. I think Dad’s gone.”

“Not gone. Dead. I’m not a child anymore, you know, Annette.”

“I know,” I said. “Now go pack up whatever food is left. I’m going to drain the fuel from the generator. Then we’ll wake up Larry and Timmy and Sylvie. We’ve got to get out of here if we want to survive.”

“What about the other babies?”

“Jesus will take care of them,” I said. “We’ve got to care for our own. Let them sleep.”

Jane understood, as I knew she would.

I stood there with my sister at the crossroads, ready to call on goddesses vengeful and bloody, selfish and cruel . . . whatever it took to live. It didn’t matter what name she went by; for us she was the goddess of now, and we would make her power our own.