Sophia now finally cottoned on to something, which was that she and Pete had been having the same conversation the whole time. She wanted to join him on his foray across the river. He was basically opposed to it. But the Midwestern style was indirect and passive-aggressive. So instead of saying no he and the other men in the SUV were just trying to scare the crap out of her. Or—another way of putting it—to make sure she knew what she was playing at.

That stretch of the drive wasn’t long, and soon they were in the liminal zone outside of Sioux City where the vehicles of the Ameristanis began to peel off as if the city were emanating a repulsive force field only they could sense. They made a few moments’ detour through a Walmart parking lot, where Kevin threw a blue tarp over the machine gun so that they could pass through the city proper without offending local norms. The opposite bank of the river was visible here as the stream was circumventing a line of bluffs. Atop them, posted where it would be conspicuous to people who, like Sophia, were looking across the river, was the occasional religious site. The people over there had erected crosses, singly or in little clusters. Not huge ones like the flaming cross of the Leviticans, but more folk-art productions that looked like they’d been knocked together in a couple of hours from tree trunks or four-by-fours. Their simple lines were cluttered and complicated by stuff hanging off them. Sophia made sense of it as follows: These people were akin to the Leviticans they’d seen yesterday, but they didn’t have the money or organizational acumen to make natural-gas-fueled crosses out of structural steel. So they built them out of whatever they could scrape together in the way of lumber, wrapped them in rags, soaked them in fuel, and burned them at night.

Traffic across the bridge was limited to one vehicle at a time because it had been structurally weakened by tens of thousands of bullet impacts. Driven by the inscrutable algorithmically generated memes that dominated their edit streams, locals would from time to time gather on the opposite bank to empty mag after mag of 5.56-millimeter rounds into the underpinnings of the local infrastructure. As Pete put it, “Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.’”