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Sons

Where is Charlie?

Where is Bette?

We love you! With the ink bleeding from the rain

We miss you!

Are you okay?

There wasn’t much paper left in the FAYZ, and kids had co But some found pieces of wallboard or tattered windblown scraps of cardboard, and used bits of gravel to write back

I love you, too

Tell my mom I’m okay!

Help us

And all of this atched by the TV camera on the helicopter, and the people, the adults--parents and cops and gawkers Half a dozen s video Astrid knew that inning to appear on the ocean outside the dome And they, too, stared with binoculars and telephoto lenses

An old couple can read, Can you check on our cat, Ariel?

No one would answer that, because the cats had all been eaten

Where is hter? And a name

Where is my son? And a name

And whose job was it, Astrid wondered bitterly, to write the answers? Dead Dead Died of carnivorous wor of chips

Dead of suicide

Dead because she was playing with matches and we don’t exactly have a fire department

Killed because it was the only e could deal with hi eyes what life was like inside the FAYZ?

Then a familiar car that almost rear-ended a parked police cruiser A man jumped out A woman moved slowly, unsteady Astrid’sher ht of them tore Astrid apart The adults and older teens who had been in the FAYZ area when Petey had performed his mad miracle had obviously made it out How ure it out, trying to walk through each possible outcome? Parents dead, parents alive, parents all off in some parallel universe, parents with all memory rewritten, parents erased fro, waving, staring, carrying loads of e explanations that most kids--Astrid included--could not somehow reduce to a feords scratched on a piece of plaster, or gouged with a nail on a piece of wood