Parable of the Sower

Paints enter Robledo, set fires, and kill many people in the neighborhood. Lauren grabs her pack and a gun from Edwin Dunn’s dead body, shoots a paint who grabs her, and walks toward the hills to the north, going along backstreets. She wonders what she will do now that she is homeless and alone.

She finds a burned-out house and crawls under it to rest. In the morning, she awakens after a restless night and realizes she must go home. She needs to know what happened to her family, although she’s afraid of what she will find: “No matter. I have to go and see. I have to go home” (163).

She goes in, trying to find signs of her old community but only seeing the dead. No houses escaped the burning. Scavengers are stripping everything. There’s a green-faced paint dead on her porch, and people are ransacking her home. She anonymously ransacks it along with them, retrieving clothes, a holster, food, toiletries, and the money from under the lemon tree. She finds more dead neighbors—Richard Moss, purveyor of his own religion, Robin Balter, Michael Talcott, eight-year-old Lydia Cruz, and many others. She cannot find her family.

Zahra Moss and Harry Balter, looking ragged and bloody, call out to Lauren.