“Somebody blew himself up along with a bunch of others and now they are all shooting at each other and there are bodies everywhere,” Joey Castiglione says when he comes back after they’ve bandaged her up. He’s trying to be cool but his voice is shaking. Because the emergency generator still runs the hospital, all the TVs are off, except the one at the nurses’ station, and while they were digging out the bullets, Joey, who most people out here think is her brother, left the room and joined the crowd clustered around the set there. “It’s really gross, Angie. I saw some people down on their knees praying and they suddenly just keeled over!” Angela hopes she didn’t know them and is glad her dad is here at the hospital and far from trouble — and Joey, too. He says she ought to see it, but no, there are some things it’s better not to look at. When bad things happen on the TV, even when it’s just a made-up movie, she always closes her eyes or leaves the room. People go crazy, especially around other crazy people, and you can go crazy watching them. Joey also said some things about religion that she didn’t want to listen to. A Baptist preacher out there in the hallway now is blaming everything on the sins of the town and has got people into an emotional prayer meeting right in the hallway, and that’s the sort of thing, Joey says, though less politely, that gives him stomach cramps. Joey thinks he saw her brother Charlie right in the middle of everything. Well, Charlie was made for trouble, he can take care of himself. And if he can’t she’ll be sad, but mostly because her dad will be sad. Charlie is a total pain, and she doesn’t want him to die, but she does wish he’d just go away and stay away. His latest idea was to take her to the city and make money with her in an evil way. Angela told him he was the most disgusting person she ever knew and he only laughed and popped his gum in her face.
When people die — and when you almost die! — it makes you think about things, so she and Joey have been having a very intimate conversation about how short life is and what it all means, and though neither of them have mentioned marriage, it seems like that is what they have been talking about. Joey is not any taller than she is and has the knobby Castiglione chin, and she’s not sure she really loves him, certainly not in the my-heart-stood-still way, but she has always felt easy around him, in some ways he has been her best friend ever since they were little, and she knows he would do his best to make her happy. They could go visit the fountains of Rome on their honeymoon and have their marriage blessed by the Pope, even if Joey’s not very religious. That’s what she finds herself thinking. But then, out of the blue, he says something that makes her cry. He says not to worry about the kid she is carrying, he’ll help her take care of it, and she breaks down in tears and tells him the truth but begs him not to tell anyone else. “I’ve made such a fool of myself, Joey!” she weeps. “I’m so embarrassed!” He smiles. “Hey. It’s okay,” he says. He kisses her. It’s awkward, with her lying face down and her sore bottom in the air, but she likes it. Not a lot. But enough. The word “comforted” comes to mind. Like in some romances she has read, though usually about older women. She feels comforted. And now, if anyone asks, that stupid girl from the drugstore, for example, who is also somewhere here in the hospital with cuts from the broken mirror which crashed down, she’ll tell them she is dumping that jerk Tommy because she has found true love with Joey, who is not such a spoiled selfish egomaniac and is ten times a better lover.
At the Brunist Wilderness Camp, Young Abner is standing up on Inspiration Point, sometimes also known as the Higher Ground, leaning on his rifle and gazing down in fascination upon the burning cabins beginning to snap and crack, and he asks himself if — should his father die — he is ready to take his place. He decides that he is. Why else has God spared him by sending him here to the camp away from the terrible punishments on the Mount of Redemption? He has much to learn, but he already knows a lot, too. You don’t live all your life with a father like that without it becoming part of you. Since he is all alone here now, he has been reciting out loud some of his father’s famous lines—“The moment of holy retribution and rivers of blood is at hand!”—and, with practice and a little more courage, he’ll be able to sound just like him. “Ye shall set the city on fire!” Also, he’s taller, so he’ll be able to look down on people and not have to shout up at them like his father. He may be called on soon. Since the bomb went off over at the Mount, there has been a ceaseless poppety-pop of gunfire and a lot of people, he can see from here, are falling over, and that doesn’t even count the ones who must have died when the bomb went off. He can’t see his father, so he may already be dead.
Young Abner may have seen the making of that bomb. After Darren sent him back here, he patrolled the grounds, finding little of interest (a pair of cracked sunglasses that he is wearing because they make him feel more heroic, a jar of honey with a homemade label in a cabin cupboard which he ate) and there were still some pesky children running around, so he posted himself up here on the Point to guard the camp as he was asked to do. It’s drier and the chiggers aren’t so bad. He was resting against a tree, half asleep, considering what acts of retribution he might have undertaken had that jezebel’s trailer still been down in the parking lot, and keeping a lazy eye meanwhile on the sky over the Mount just in case something started to happen, when his brother’s motorcycle gang suddenly came roaring in below, guns out and firing into the cabins. That woke him up in a hurry, and he spread himself flat, peeking at them over the edge, his heart banging away at the stones under his chest. He recognized Nat immediately, even though he was supposed to be one of the ones who got killed. The one without a head, they said. Well, he was certainly still wearing it. And bossing everybody like he always does. Who was missing was his other brother, the little one. They left their motorcycles outside the Meeting Hall and charged in like storm troopers, kicking the doors open, blazing away.
After that it was quiet and they stayed in there for a while and Young Abner was just thinking about rising from his prone position and scuttling down the back way while he still could, when two of them came out and started prowling around and he ducked his head again. The next time he got up the nerve to look, there they were, the whole gang, coming up the path to the Point. He had to scramble behind some thick bushes, which were not much protection. Scared spitless, as that wall-eyed boy who worked for Clara Collins used to say. Then the worst possible thing happened: his family has been eating a lot of canned beans lately with the inevitable consequence and it was like the devil had got into his bowels and was just trying to get him killed. But Nat and the others kept studying the Mount through their binoculars and arguing and they didn’t hear it (it was only the softest little poot), so God was still watching over him and answering his prayers. He saw now that Nat was wearing a leather jacket that said KID RIVERS on it in metal studs, and the main thing you’d say about him was that he didn’t look like a boy anymore. But it was Nat. Or at least the head was. Maybe they sewed it onto somebody else’s body. He realized, seeing him again up close, how much he hated him. And feared him. The big one in the undershirt, who looked like Goliath in Young Abner’s Illustrated Bible for Children, had a shiny policeman’s badge on his greasy leather vest, and the others wore bracelets and necklaces and upside down crosses in their ears like earrings. Not all of them were real Americans. Maybe none of them were. Some kind of monster aliens. Young Abner knew he could shoot them. That’s probably what he was expected to do — but what if he missed? He didn’t want to die! And if they weren’t all human, it might not do any good to shoot them. Nevertheless, he kept the revolver Darren gave him pointed at Nat the whole time just in case they did see him there; at least, before they killed him or did other terrible things, he’d be able to get back at his cruel brother for scarring his forehead. Nat shouted and shook his fist in what might have been some kind of prayer but sounded more like cussing, and then at last they all went away.