Free Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars by Cody Goodfellow Page B

clipboard and slashed at it with a felt tip marker. “We’ve tried and tried with this area, and none will hear us. They are dead to the word.”
    Caleb nodded mutely at the solemn verdict. More of the world was dead to them every year, with this simple marking out. Television, Catholics, Jews, Islamists, evolutionists, fornicators, his teachers, his fellow students, Caleb’s mother—all dead.
    “We’ll go spread the word down here, today,” he announced, tracing an arrow across the map, like the scythe of a conquering army, into the Hollows.
    A maze of steep hills, canyons and cul-de-sacs that seemed to twist on forever, the Hollows was mercifully out of their territory. Caleb truly pitied whoever had to walk it every Saturday. “Isn’t that someone else’s route, Father?”
    “No, son,” Jubal answered, “not for a long time. The church gave up on it years ago. I’ve heard…” he clammed up, then leaked a little smile, as he knowingly sinned. He wanted so badly to excite his son that he gossiped. “I heard once that a couple of missionaries even quit the church after walking the Hollows. Nobody ever knew why—”
    “What happened to them, Father?”
    “They left the church, Caleb. Their faith was broken. We never saw them again—”

    They set out from the park and plunged into the eucalyptus-shadows of the Hollows. Though the shade was a blessing, the heat was, if anything, even thicker, a syrupy membrane pregnant with thirsty mosquitoes. Caleb marched on behind his father, who consulted his pocket Bible in preparation for the first house.
    No one answered the first door, or the second, or the third. Oh, they were home, and made no secret of it. TV’s blared cartoon and baseball noises, but no suspicious phantoms darkened the fisheye lens set into each door, no children peeked at them out the mail slots.
    Father knocked louder at the fourth house, and made Caleb ring the doorbell. At the fifth house, he knocked and read from his Bible in a braying shout, like a battlefield chaplain saying mass over artillery strikes. Inside, someone laughed, and a lawnmower started up in the backyard. Caleb backed off the porch and called, “Come on, Father,” wanting to add, We’re dead to them.
    Caleb’s father was apoplectic, face mottled with red rage, jaw muscles working like fists in his mouth. Caleb began to worry that if anyone ever did answer their door, he was going to pummel them with his tiny Bible. It went on like this until the bottom of the next cul-de-sac.
    Jubal Gibbons stood in the middle of the dead end street, ringed by haphazardly parked cars and overflowing recycling bins, looking up at the brutally blue sky like he was daring lightning to strike him down. The look on his face made Caleb shy away to the curb. “Father, come out of the street. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea—”
    “A few more, then we’ll turn back,” Jubal finally said, as if he were relaying a message from on high that he didn’t particularly care for. He crossed to the sidewalk and went up the crushed gravel path of the house at the end.
    It was a swaybacked two-story villa with Spanish colonial trappings, cracked pink adobe walls and red tile peeking out through lush tufts of glossy green-black ivy. Eucalyptus and willow trees vied with rampant stands of bamboo and pampas grass for dominance over the front yard, flanked the sprawling house to climb the hills and join an unruly backyard wilderness. Caleb heard birds—not the croaking crows that had driven every other flying creature from the suburbs, but a lively symphony of mating calls and twittering sirens that drowned out the other muted sounds of the neighborhood.
    Caleb approached the house with a new spring in his stride, but he stopped dead when he came up to Father at the porch, his Bible and pamphlets held out in a rare and terrifying gesture. “You do this one, son.”
    Fresh waves of sweat oozed out of Caleb’s armpits and stung his eyes and acne. He