Prologue PROLOGUE
Sarah is already awake when the alarm clock goes off. She silences it and pulls herself out of her sleeping bag. It is midnight. Around her, on the floor, lie her husband and three young children. No doubt the alarm has roused them, too, but they’ll fall asleep again before long. They always do.

Sarah pulls on a T-shirt and a long dark skirt. She is twenty-six years old, with swishy nutmeg hair, blue-green eyes, and a bracing, falcon-like beauty. She steps over and around the warm little bodies at her feet. In the darkness she watches their chests rise and fall, rise and fall. And then, silently, she says good-bye.

In western New Mexico, a single sky can contain a multitude of weather systems—rain in one area, sun in another, haze in a third. But on this particular night in September 1999, the sky screams with a uniform, navy clarity. The moon casts a chalky paleness over the scrub trees and the wildflower patches Sarah rushes past—quickly, quietly—on her way to the wood stack, maybe forty feet from the house.

Already her heart is racing with terror, with excitement, with guilt. What if she’s caught? What if someone walks into the kitchen and notices she isn’t there, baking banana bread, as she has so many thousands of midnights before this one? What if the dogs catch a whiff of her scent in the cool, loamy air? She can hear them even now, whining and trotting along the bluffs out back.

At the wood stack Sarah digs out a backpack she has hidden in preparation for her escape. It contains everything of value Sarah owns, plus supplies for the journey ahead: a water bottle, a passport, some granola bars, about $200 cash. She has also packed a flat metal cheese grater that belongs—belonged—to her mother, who bought it at a sidewalk sale many years earlier. The grater is a reminder, to Sarah, of who her mother once was. Before she changed. Before she realized she was God’s holy chosen oracle.

Nervous sweat trickles down Sarah’s back as she turns and takes in the compound before her. It’s a jumble of rusty vehicles, wooden shacks, and thick, teeming orchards. An old school bus sits parked near a massive metal warehouse. About thirty men, women, and children live here under the leadership of Sarah’s parents, self-proclaimed Generals of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. “True Spirit-led Christianity is war,” the couple preaches. “Civilian Christians” have gone “whoring from God,” transforming his temple into an “orgy parlor.” The Generals’ idiom always veers toward the extreme, often with a distinctly sexual emphasis. The mainstream church is a “harlot,” they say, an “abomination,” a “spiritual brothel.” It is a “monster” covered in “cankered, oozing sores”; a “repugnant,” “putrefying mess”; a “morgue.”

The group, by contrast, is actually serious about its faith. “WE ARE A WAR MACHINE,” Sarah’s parents insist. “God is absolute and He is a dictator.”

Since its earliest days in Sacramento, California, in the eighties, the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps has warded off prying investigators, angry families, conniving journalists—even a million-dollar lawsuit. As a result of these persecutions the group has been forced to flee here, to the land of jackrabbits and mule deer, along the western flank of the Continental Divide, where only the coyotes can find them.

There is a self-evident extremism to the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. But the group has also long embodied more mainstream trends in American religious life—trends evident not just since the late 1960s, when Sarah’s parents were hippies, but from the very founding of the country. What appears radical about the group is, in fact, a product of the same forces that have given the United States its particular spiritual character; and in this way, Sarah’s parents have illuminated how hazy, indeed, are the lines between faith and fanaticism, between devotion and destruction.

It is a haziness evident in ACMTC members themselves, most of them otherwise ordinary men and women who have, through years of inurement, come to accept the brutality of their lives as ordinary. They are a self-contained unit, this group, almost entirely off the grid. They wake early, at around four o’clock in the morning, and submit to violent “deliverance” ceremonies where demons of lust and laziness and a thousand other vices are purged from their bodies. They eat little and fast often; children are forced to go weeks at a time living only on broth. They take biblical names like Joab, Obadiah, and Philemon. They have no contact with friends and family on the outside.

Sarah wants more than this. She wants a proper education. She wants to wear regular clothes, not military uniforms. She wants to eat junk food, to be touched by a man other than her husband, whose mere presence repels her. Five years earlier, following the birth of her first child, she’d felt as if she had something to live for. But Sarah’s love of being a mother has been counterbalanced by an oppressive sense, equally strong, that if she doesn’t leave now, she will remain chained here forever.

Sarah gazes through the darkness for the young man who has agreed to come with her. Anthony is a recent recruit, a handsome drifter type from New Zealand who has only ever planned to stay at ACMTC for a short time, until his visa expires. He and Sarah have grown close in the months since his arrival—too close. They’ve taken walks on the trail behind the compound. They’ve held hands. They’ve kissed.

Sarah was the one to propose leaving together. What if they headed north, to Seattle, where Sarah could enroll in midwifery school and Anthony could catch a ride up to Canada? Then, after getting a job and a place to live, she would return to New Mexico for her kids. By this point she’d accepted the impossibility of bringing them with her. She could never get away with three young children in tow, to say nothing of the journey ahead. This, in any case, is what she has told herself. It has been an agonizing decision, and one that lays bare the most fundamental, conflicting loyalties of Sarah’s life—to herself on the one hand, and to her children on the other. To her own survival, and to theirs.

Sarah has been crouched at the wood stack no more than a minute or two when she stands up and starts walking toward the front of the compound. She avoids the driveway, where the crunch of the gravel may give her away, passing instead through the orchard, where the soil is soft, moist, muffling.

Near the entryway Anthony materializes out of the darkness. She says nothing to him, nor he to her. Is he as nervous as she is? Does he worry that, by leaving the group, he is damning himself to hell? Sarah can’t tell. She’s more concerned with the practicalities of escape than with God’s judgment, but she still has her misgivings.

Together they arrive at the front of the driveway—and there it is. The road.

They walk slowly at first, taking care not to make a sound. And then, when the compound is decisively behind them, when their fear has rearranged itself into a kind of anxious euphoria—then, at last, they run.