He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.”

It was a reference to one of their teachers at Princeton who had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on:

1. Speech is aggression
2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser
3. Curiosity is feigned
4. Lying is performative
5. Stupidity is power

They spent another quarter of an hour strolling about the hilltop, craning their necks to behold the outstretched cross arms, studded with nozzles that would soon hurl flame into the sky from sundown to sunrise. They gave the altar a wide berth; another Son of Aaron was in there whetting a long knife in preparation for today’s bloody oblation. Julian, unable to meet the gaze of his new lamb friends now that he understood that they were only here to die, instead tended to look out over the surrounding countryside. North of them a few miles, he saw a blue water tower, and, near that, a Walmart sign.

The two-lane road was a chute between walls of corn that were already, in early June, as high as a man’s head. Tom and Kevin’s pickup blocked the view forward. In the rearview loomed an even higher pickup truck whose driver very much wanted them to know that they were not going fast enough. None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart’s lot.

“I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore.

“Blast radius? Could you unpack that mysterious statement please?” asked Anne-Solenne.

“It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”

They clambered down out of the SUV and tried to find a walking speed that would get them into its air-conditioning as quickly as possible without causing them to get hotter because of exertion. Phil was walking backward, staring curiously at the water tower: a thing he understood conceptually but had never seen on such a scale, since he had spent his life in places with hills.