Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,42

had caused major interruptions in the production and distribution of goods, and that included the illegal ones. At the same time, it had created hordes of unprotected boys and girls. As a growing number of these children—many more girls than boys—began to disappear, it was clear that they were falling into the hands of human traffickers, whose own numbers kept growing now that other illegal trades, like drug dealing, had become much harder to ply. Evil, too, has to eat. The traffickers kept their eyes on the children’s homes, and runaways were sometimes overtaken within yards of their own front door. Sometimes the foxes didn’t wait for the chickens to fly the coop. In Boston, a man, his wife, and their teenaged daughter all volunteered to work in the same children’s home with the purpose of procuring minors for a porn ring.

Long after the last case of pandemic influenza had been diagnosed, the bodies of young people would keep turning up, victims of hunger, exposure, various infections, murder, and (more and more) suicide. But the pandemic had inured people to the sight of young corpses. Far scarier to many Americans were the living: kids of all ages who’d banded together and were surviving by their (criminal) wits, often under the head of one or more nefarious adults. Fierce and sometimes murderous gangs that had come to menace every city and suburb and many small towns, where they often outnumbered police.

In the wake of the pandemic, there was no shortage of places to hide out or squat. Houses and buildings and sometimes entire streets stood abandoned. The flu had even turned some rural villages into ghost towns. There were plenty of ordinary citizens who’d survived the virus but whose lives had been ruined by the pandemic in one way or another and who now found themselves squatting side by side with criminals. Those who’d seen the slums and shantytowns and refugee camps in countries crushed by warfare or poverty compared the new settlements to such places.

Though their house, like their income, was small, Pastor Wyatt and Tracy would have liked to take in more than one child. But, as Tracy put it: “The authorities keep banging us into walls.” In fact, they now considered it a miracle they had managed to get Cole. Even in his case, there’d been so many questions and hesitations that Pastor Wyatt had lost his temper—only to be shouted down by a child welfare official who informed him that, bad as things were, they weren’t so bad yet that people could just drop in and pick out a kid like a puppy.

“And let’s face it,” he told Pastor Wyatt unapologetically. “It wouldn’t exactly be the first time a man of God turned out to be a you-know-what.”

Boots Ludwig, though he was past seventy and had eighteen grandchildren, wanted to adopt “a whole football team and all the cheerleaders.” He spent a lot of broadcast time thundering against the system. “Let my children go!” It was a matter of urgency in more ways than one: many of the orphans were unsaved.

“If it weren’t for those godless pigheaded fools, we could get those kids right with God before it’s too late.” In which case, they would be spared the great tribulation.

Boots Ludwig liked to say the reason he loved radio so much was that he was too ugly for television. In fact, it wasn’t so much that he was ugly as that he looked as if he’d been slapped together in a rush: one of his shoulders was higher than the other and he had tiny dark eyes, like coffee beans, stuck unevenly on either side of a nose that had been broken in boyhood and had healed askew. He always dressed Western, from the boots that gave him his nickname to his hat, and he wore several chunky rings, like brass knuckles, on each hand. Of all the people Cole had drawn, drawing Boots was the most fun. PW said Boots was only joking about the reason he preferred radio. The truth was, both men regarded it as the superior means of spreading the Word.

“The idiot box has a way of putting everything on the same superficial plane. Plus the remote encourages a short attention span.”

Contempt for TV was one thing PW and Cole’s parents had in common.

“Televangelism,” said PW. “To most folks today it’s a dirty word. I can’t tell you how much I hate the word myself. Oh, I can see how it looked like