“Tonight, Miss Marion, you get a fire and a hot meal. We’re over the line.”

And that was how Sasha learned she’d crossed the border into the United Christian States. She had successfully fled her country, and the secular rule of law entirely. The UCS wasn’t a true Godly state, not by her standards. Its multi denominational acceptance was a denial of the harsh truth of God’s love. Not everyone who called themselves a Christian truly lived in such a way as to earn God’s gift of salvation. But just being in a country that acknowledged the primacy of God Almighty in their law and public policy was enough. For now.

There’s no abortion here, she thought with awe. No atheists on television mocking the Lord. No callow acceptance of premarital sex. She felt a thrill at being in a place that was so much closer to her conception of “right.” It didn’t even matter that she was still stuck in the woods.

“Jonah?” she asked. “Do you live here?”

“Most of the time, yes.” He had a quiet, soulful voice that made him seem even older than he looked.

“What made you decide to start smuggling people out of the AmFed?”

He stared into the treeline as his hands stuffed thin sticks into the base of the growing fire. Sasha watched his jaw clench and unclench, as if he was mentally rehearsing his response before he said it out loud.

“I was a United States Army Ranger once. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, though. Southern Baptist. I grew up in a country just as lost to sin and vice as yours is. And when the fighting started I saw an opportunity to bring my nation back to its Godly roots.”

Hands emptied, Jonah rooted around in his bag and pulled out a kettle. He filled it up with water from a heavy fabric bag and placed it on a flat rock on the edge of the fire. Then he stood up, gestured for her to follow, and walked over to a nearby copse of trees.

“I joined a local militia in Marietta, near Atlanta,” he said. “Most of us were vets, like me, and either Baptist or Pentecostal.” He crouched down next to a tree that had been cracked in half by lightning. It was dead, and very dry. The ground around it was littered with tree limbs and thick slabs of bark. He started gathering up some of the larger pieces,

“C’mon, get down here and help. Some of these are a little damp, but we’ll stick ’em around the edges to dry out. Most important thing right now is to get some middlin’ sized logs in there, so we can build up a little bed of coals.”

Sasha wiped a runnel of snot from her face and knelt down to help. Jonah continued his story while they filled their arms.