Instead, I placed my hands in his blond hair and kissed the top of his head. His jaw softened. He reached up for my hand with the one that wasn't holding the knife.
Ginger was huddled with her arms around her knees, hands tucked into her sleeves. Unblinking, she stared through her glasses at the creatures clamoring below. Most of it was inarticulate hissing and howling, but phrases could still be heard:
"Come here. Let me release you."
"Pretty thing. You can't run forever."
"Nothing can protect you. We are legions of legions, and you are so very few."
"Aren't you tired of fighting? I promise that it won't hurt."
I sat beside her, put my arm around her shoulders. I didn't want her staring at them for long. They had the power to reason, and also a kind of glamour. Though we were theoretically shielded from them on this hill, I didn't want her to be tempted. And I didn't want her to begin to view them as people.
She reached up to rub her eyes beneath her glasses. "I keep thinking," she said. "About Dan and the kids, that . . ." She gestured to the twisted faces below.
I squeezed her shoulders. "That hasn't happened to them. Dan's safe with the other soldiers. And your daughter is at the kibbutz in California with her friends."
"But my son . . ." She shook her head. "The college surely doesn't know how to deal with this. Didn't," she amended.
"He's smart. And Dan is looking for them." That was the last we had heard. Before the Elders had destroyed Ginger's cell phone as a symbol of the contagion from Outside. Before the end of the world, Ginger had been visiting, and she was accidentally trapped in our settlement when the end had come.
"I hope . . ." She fell silent. Articulating hopes in this world seemed futile.
Hands in the darkness crooked toward her, beckoning.
"God is watching," I said firmly.
The eastern horizon grew pink and the stars began to fade. As gold began to lighten the undersides of clouds, the vampires started to slip away, like pale eels. They growled and snarled as they receded, sliding into the protective shade of the tall grass. Horace blew and snorted at them.
I tipped my face to the sun, feeling its light upon my skin. I scrubbed my fingers through my hair, wanting it to soak into my pores. The sun felt like love. I unpinned the Himmelsbrief from my breast and folded it carefully away in my pocket for safekeeping.
I prayed again, as I always did: at dawn and sunset. At sunset, I prayed for protection. At dawn, I prayed in thanksgiving that we had lived to see it once again.
"We should get moving," Alex said. He stood and shifted his weight from foot to foot. "Get as far from them as we can before nightfall, lose the scent."
I wearily climbed to my feet.
"How far today?" I asked. We had decided to go north, to Canada. Alex had family there. Perhaps vainly, we hoped that the contamination hadn't spread as quickly in sparsely populated areas.
He squinted north. "As far as we can get before the sun goes down."
***
"Do you think that it will always be this way?"
I heard hopelessness creep into Ginger's voice. We'd convinced her to climb up into Horace's saddle to save time while Alex and I walked. Her fingers were tangled in the horse's white mane and the reins, and her gaze between its ears was unfocused.
"No," I said. "The Rapture is brief. Then there are the Tribulations before the Second Coming of Christ."
"I must have missed the Rapture part," Ginger said, bitterly.
"We don't know that," I insisted. "Some people could have been taken away to heaven." But I didn't really believe it. Though the world seemed empty, it seemed its inhabitants had been taken by darker forces.
"I wonder how many people were seriously expecting to be taken away from this," Alex said. He walked through the sunlit grass with his hands jammed in his pockets. "Did they just sit down and pray, waiting? Why?"
It was in his nature to question. He had been an anthropology graduate student before the end of the world came. He knew almost as much about the Bible as I did, but viewed it through the lens of a curious detachment, as an artifact and not the word of God.
I frowned. "I don't know how many righteous children of God there are. I thought . . . I thought that we were faithful." I squinted up at the sun. "I thought that my community was good. That we were doing as God commanded us. We followed the Ordnung, the rules."
"I thought so too, Katie," Ginger said. "We were all safe there . . . well, in our way," she amended, glancing at Alex. Ginger had been safe until the Elders had caught her contacting the Outside world with a cell phone, had been accused of going mad. A bit of that had been true. She'd been safe as long as she was quiet and said nothing.
"They just locked you in a room," he said. "Me, they threw out, once they found me."
"That was my fault," I said. I violated the Elders' rules. They ordered that no one was to come into or leave the settlement. Alex was hurt when I found him. I brought him inside, and pulled the wrath of the Elders down on all our heads. And I had done more than that. I had lain with him, and they had discovered us. I had used up my virtue on an English man outside the bonds of marriage.
He kicked a stone. "I feel bad for that. You'd still be safe there if it wasn't for me."
I shook my head. "No. The vampires had come in anyway." That was the fault of a boy I'd been intending on marrying. A boy who saw the brothers he thought were dead resurrected as vampires beyond the fence, and foolishly let them in. Elijah had betrayed me, turned away from me and toward something I didn't understand. I was pretty sure it wasn't God.
"The ground is no longer holy," I lamented.
But I still ached for home. Before the end of the world, I could not wait for my Rumspringa, the testing of the Outside world. I was looking forward to being able to experience a different kind of life. Sit in a movie theater. Wear jeans. Perhaps learn to drive a car. And now . . . now that I was in the Outside world, it was more fearsome and terrible than I ever could have imagined.
I remembered when we'd been exiled, when we had been cast beyond the gate of my community. My family and the Elders had watched. I felt their sorrow pressing against my back as we walked down that dirt road with the horse, feeling the horizon too large before us and my familiar life shrinking behind.