And dark hints of someone called Drake and a creature called the gaiaphage.
The graphic that Fox News used was “Little Monsters” over a shot of Sam.
People drew comparisons to war criminals. To the killing fields of Cambodia. To the Nazis.
The outrage over the attempt to blast open the dome with a nuclear weapon had died very quickly to be replaced by the muttered suggestion that maybe next time the bomb should be bigger.
People were demanding the army be sent in to surround the anomaly—just in case the “containment” failed. The containment. Like these were dangerous wild animals in a zoo.
There were others who argued that the kids of the FAYZ—that word from the handwritten signs, “FAYZ,” was quickly gaining currency—were victims, desperate survivors who could not be blamed for doing whatever it took to stay alive. But these people were fewer in number and not nearly as loud.
The president was avoiding the press. Many politicians were not, and were using every opportunity to talk about being tough, being firm, sending National Guard and army troops. One congressman from South Carolina had said flatly that the Perdido Beach Abomination, as he called it, should be obliterated. “A quick and easy death is the only way,” he said. “Let God sort them out.”
This, finally, led some to try and calm the building hysteria.
The pope had issued a statement calling for compassion. The movie stars Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance, parents of the island kids inside, had issued an angry denunciation of the media, reminding everyone that these were children. Just children.
The American Civil Liberties Union had issued a press release with much the same message: children, just children trying to survive.
In a Wall Street Journal poll, 28 percent of respondents said that the FAYZ and everyone in it should be destroyed.
All of this had happened before the video that had crashed YouTube: a little girl ripping the arm off the first adult to somehow blunder into the FAYZ and then eating that arm.
The effect had been electric. Suddenly it was clear: this wasn’t child’s play. Whatever power was in there could kill adults as well. Connie had no doubt that the next poll would show many more people in favor of simply wiping out the FAYZ.
She carried a thick art pad and two black Sharpies and headed toward the barrier. It wasn’t easy getting through the crowd that had grown despite the California Highway Patrol roadblock, despite all efforts to get people to back off.
It wasn’t just parents now: it was every kind of nut who could wave a sign. It was people with their kids eating picnic lunches like this was a county fair. It was vendors offering flashing pins that said “FAYZ!” and T-shirts that said “Don’t Let ’Em Out.”
And the crowd had spread, north of the highway and south across the grounds of the abandoned, truncated half of Clifftop. Surfers rode beside the barrier, and in deeper water boats pressed close.
A no-fly zone had been established, but it didn’t apply to news helicopters, or to the drones on loan from the army. Google had repurposed one of its satellites to watch. It was getting crowded in orbit as foreign powers also looked in to see whether this was all some American conspiracy.
Connie walked north at the edge of the crowd, looking for an opening. Over the heads of the lookers she saw the kids, maybe a hundred of them, peering out like suffocating fish from a badly maintained fishbowl.
She had to climb halfway up a dusty hill before she could achieve a little piece of privacy. There were no kids up there, but she thought if she waited, one might come. She wrote a sign:
I am Sam Temple and Caine Soren’s mother.
Then she waited. What felt like ages passed before a girl who might have been fourteen or so noticed her and climbed the hill. She did not have paper or pen, but she had a stick, and the ground at that spot was bare dirt.
The girl used the stick to write:
Team Sam
Connie wrote:
What’s your name?
Dahra.
Dahra Baidoo? I’m friends with your mom!
She told me.
Each time Dahra wrote she had to first wipe the ground clear with her hand.
I need to speak to Sam, Connie wrote.