Didn’t he understand that she was capable of protecting herself? What if she’d had her Remington with her the day the family had been attacked? She could’ve picked off the agents from the hilltop. Maybe she could have shot down the men who assaulted Mama. She just wanted to be somewhere safe, with all of her family still alive and untouched by the evils of the road agents. Not standing under a tree in the middle of a wasteland, surrounded by wailing women who had not been strong enough to defend themselves. She wanted everything back as it had been.

Part of her hoped that this retribution might draw a line under it all.

Of the three dead men they had captured and strung up for execution, for some reason she took a particular dislike to the fat one in the middle. There was just something gross and upsetting about even looking at him; something deeper than the surface detail of the maggots seething in his wounds, of a giant worm nosing blindly around in the bloody crater on the side of his head. It was something deeper and more elemental than that: a sense of his complete evil. Maybe it had something to do with knowing what he had done to the captured women. They had not spoken about it in detail, of course, but in her dream – a very distant and rational, but disconnected part of her understood this was a dream – Sofia had a very good idea of the indignities visited on the Mormon women.

While none of the ghouls her father prepared for execution had been at their homestead, they were of the same type – they were monsters. And according to Papa, they all worked for the same end and the same man anyway. This devil in Fort Hood called Blackstone. It was he who should’ve been bound and trussed up on one of those Satanic mounts with a noose of rusted razor wire around his neck, but she kept those thoughts to herself. She knew the Mormon women were uncomfortable around her, finding her hunger for vengeance unseemly and disturbing. But Sofia did not care. She put it down to their being Mormons. She was a Catholic, and in its heart the one true church believed in the redemptive value of blood sacrifice. Also, it quietly regarded all outsiders as marked for purgatory at the very best.

The agents, however, they were going straight to hell. And as awful as she expected it to be, she wanted to watch them go. How annoying then that she should miss the drop of the gross one in the middle because she had rushed – or floated, really, this being a dream – to the side of the girl called Sally Grey, who had fainted under the taunts of the youngest of the condemned.