Free Light by Michael Grant Page B

interviewers—MSNBC, the BBC, and Nightline .
    She had noticed the sudden change in . . . temperature. Even a week ago an interview with the media would have been sympathetic. She would have been one of the brave band of bereaved mothers.
    Now she was the mother of not one but two killers.
    The entire country had turned on a dime. One minute it was concerned but bored—the whole thing had dragged on too long. People were “over” the whole Perdido Beach Anomaly. Ho-hum.
    Now the kids inside were a threat. Dangerous. Monsters.
    The pictures were everywhere. Kids dressed like something out of a Mad Max movie with knives and spiked baseball bats. A sullen, bedraggled girl with a cigarette and a gun. Toddlers wandering filthy and naked. Kids with the hollow eyes and sunken cheeks of famine victims. A twelve-year-old who had once been an altar boy but was now all-too-obviously drunk.
    Video of Sam using some supernatural light to burn a dead girl’s crushed body. That played over and over and over again.
    Kids relayed stories by writing on scraps of paper and then holding them up to be read. This had yielded pictures and video of children relating terrifying accounts of hunger, murder, carnivorous worms, talking coyotes, a parasite that ate kids from the inside out.
    And dark hints of someone called Drake and a creature called the gaiaphage.
    The graphic that Fox News used was “Little Monsters” over a shot of Sam.
    People drew comparisons to war criminals. To the killing fields of Cambodia. To the Nazis.
    The outrage over the attempt to blast open the dome with a nuclear weapon had died very quickly to be replaced by the muttered suggestion that maybe next time the bomb should be bigger.
    People were demanding the army be sent in to surround the anomaly—just in case the “containment” failed. The containment. Like these were dangerous wild animals in a zoo.
    There were others who argued that the kids of the FAYZ—that word from the handwritten signs, “FAYZ,” was quickly gaining currency—were victims, desperate survivors who could not be blamed for doing whatever it took to stay alive. But these people were fewer in number and not nearly as loud.
    The president was avoiding the press. Many politicians were not, and were using every opportunity to talk about being tough, being firm, sending National Guard and army troops. One congressman from South Carolina had said flatly that the Perdido Beach Abomination, as he called it, should be obliterated. “A quick and easy death is the only way,” he said. “Let God sort them out.”
    This, finally, led some to try and calm the building hysteria.
    The pope had issued a statement calling for compassion. The movie stars Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance, parents of the island kids inside, had issued an angry denunciation of the media, reminding everyone that these were children. Just children.
    The American Civil Liberties Union had issued a press release with much the same message: children, just children trying to survive.
    In a Wall Street Journal poll, 28 percent of respondents said that the FAYZ and everyone in it should be destroyed.
    All of this had happened before the video that had crashed YouTube: a little girl ripping the arm off the first adult to somehow blunder into the FAYZ and then eating that arm.
    The effect had been electric. Suddenly it was clear: this wasn’t child’s play. Whatever power was in there could kill adults as well. Connie had no doubt that the next poll would show many more people in favor of simply wiping out the FAYZ.
    She carried a thick art pad and two black Sharpies and headed toward the barrier. It wasn’t easy getting through the crowd that had grown despite the California Highway Patrol roadblock, despite all efforts to get people to back off.
    It wasn’t just parents now: it was every kind of nut who could wave a sign. It was people with their kids eating picnic lunches like this was a county fair. It was vendors offering