Blood of the Faithful (14 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jacob had stopped the lead pickup truck at the turnoff to Yellow Flats. David had pulled up next to him in the second truck, with the two vehicles idling side by side in the highway, and asked if there was a problem.

“Miriam spotted a man climbing into the barrel,” Jacob explained, “but only women live at Yellow Flats.”

“I thought you wanted to check everyone.”

“I do. We need to know where this stops. I need to verify that everyone is where they are supposed to be, and that nobody sneaks back into the valley while we’re not looking.”

Jacob didn’t need to add that he didn’t entirely trust Rebecca. Of all the women in the valley, she was the most like Miriam, a shoot-first sort of person. What’s more, Rebecca also believed she had some strange ties to the nineteenth century that made her some kind of prophetess. Or so she claimed in her more manic phases. If Miriam hadn’t been so insistent that Chambers’s confederate was a man, Rebecca would have been high on the suspect list.

“What do you want to do?” David asked.

“Come with Miriam and me to the bunker. Send Lillian to Yellow Flats alone.”

David shrugged and turned to his second wife. Lillian and David had a quick conversation that Jacob couldn’t hear, then David climbed out carrying his rifle. Lillian slid across to the driver’s seat and turned down the ranch road toward Yellow Flats.

When David had squeezed into the front seat and the three of them were headed north again, Miriam scowled first at Jacob, then at David.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Miriam said.

Jacob gave her a sharp look. “After what you pulled at the cliffs? I’m not so sure about that.”

“Oh, please.”

David broke in. “It won’t hurt to have a third person on hand in case anything funny happens.”

“I can handle anything the Smoots try to pull,” Miriam said.

“What if they ‘pull’ a .50-caliber machine gun?” Jacob asked. “That’s what they’ve got up there.”

“Fine, but if they’re going to do that,” she said, “a third person won’t stop them. They could mow us down in the road and claim they saw a strange truck and panicked.”

“For all they know, it’s their own family coming to check on them,” Jacob said.

“Unless someone has radioed to warn them.”

“In which case, there are witnesses. And once we’re out of the truck,” he added, “it’s going to be a lot harder to claim it was an accident.”

“So we need three people?” she asked.

“Killing three of us is harder than two, no matter how tough and nasty one of those two thinks she is.”

Miriam grunted at this.

“Okay,” David said. “We’re all on the same side, right?”

The lights of town reflected in Jacob’s rearview mirror as the turmoil of his pronouncement continued to roil through Blister Creek. He had left his remaining family members to organize a complete accounting of every person over the age of sixteen in the valley. Jacob’s half brothers Joshua and Trevor were speeding toward Stephen Paul Young’s house, where Jacob’s counselor on the Quorum would organize a sweep of that side of the valley. In the center, he’d already roused the Griggses, the Davidsons, and the Madsens. Their adult members vetted, they’d joined in the census.

After that, he’d joined Miriam, David, and Lillian in driving toward the north bunker and Yellow Flats in a pair of pickup trucks.

“So you think the Smoots are behind this?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” Jacob admitted. “What do you think?”

“The Smoot house seemed normal when we arrived, nothing weird going on. And when we get to the bunker, I’m not sure how we’d be able to tell.”

“It’s been, what? Ninety minutes since we left the base of the cliffs?” Miriam added. “Plenty of time for him to run back along the cliffs and get down to the bunker. Then pretend nothing happened.”

Jacob had been busy during those ninety minutes, but not so busy that the wheels hadn’t been turning in his mind. First, he and Miriam had left Chambers’s body at the cliffs, located and disabled the ATV, and then jogged back to the truck so they could organize a rapid search of the town. If someone was missing, he intended to find out before the man had a chance to sneak back into the valley by some alternate means.

During that time, pieces started to come together, beginning with Miriam’s knowledge about the missing grain. How had she known about that? Directly from Stephen Paul, or from someone else? And then there was Jacob’s alarming experience at the scripture study earlier in the evening. The scripture study had morphed so quickly into an old-time revival meeting that it must have been going on for weeks, or even months. Speaking in tongues, people falling to the ground, overcome by the spirit—that sort of transformation didn’t happen overnight.

If not for Eliza’s warning, Jacob would still be stumbling blindly as his people turned into fanatics and mystics. Even then, his sister must have known for some time without telling him. The same could be said of David, Fernie, Miriam, and any number of other people who might have warned him. Not one person had.

“Is Elder Smoot in on it?” Jacob asked.

“What do you mean?” David said.

“Your conspiracy. Does he know?”

“Huh?” David sounded legitimately confused.

Jacob glanced at Miriam. She stared straight forward, her brow furrowed, a deep, unreadable expression where her face caught the reflected light of the dashboard controls.

“Miriam, it’s time to talk.”

She looked at Jacob. “What? Sorry, I was thinking.”

“Quit screwing around. What’s going on?”

“There’s nothing going on,” David insisted. “Nothing we know about, anyway. If Smoot is up to something, it’s all his doing.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you know something.” He said this not to David, but to Miriam.

They’d reached the cliffs, and Jacob followed the twisting road as it climbed the switchbacks. The headlights reflected off the squat concrete bunker above them before the building fell temporarily out of sight. Then they were rounding the last bend and pulling to a stop next to the bunker.

“Miriam,” Jacob said in a sharp voice.

“What?”

“Tell me the truth.”

“There’s nothing going on. Nothing I know about, anyway. If Smoot was the other man we saw tonight, it’s a mystery to me too. And if he was, I intend to stop him.”

Jacob was still suspicious, but enough of Miriam’s confidence had returned that his certainty wavered. The problem was that he was paranoid, and why not? There was nobody left who would listen to his doubts. Maybe there was no conspiracy.

Spotlights bathed them in cold white light as they exited the truck. They grabbed weapons and strode up to the door without waiting to be challenged. A bulb flickered on inside. They entered to find Smoot at the light switch, his son Ezekiel sitting up in his sleeping bag, yawning. The younger man’s hair was mussed, and he wasn’t wearing his shirt, only his white church undergarments.

Ezekiel blinked at the light, glanced at the newcomers, then back to his father. “What’s wrong? Why are they here?”

“I don’t know,” Smoot said. “Something is happening down in the valley. Bunch of lights and cars. Brother Jacob?”

“You let me sleep through it?” Ezekiel said.

“Where is your other son?” Jacob asked.

Smoot gave a confused shake of the head. “Which one?”

“Grover. They said he was up here.”

“No, it wasn’t his night.”

“That’s what they said at your house.”

“You must have heard wrong. It was supposed to be my son
Garrison’s
night, but he’ll be up here tomorrow instead.”

“I’m pretty sure they said Grover,” Jacob said. “You, Ezekiel, and Grover. I remember, because I was surprised that it was three of you and not two.” Jacob looked to Miriam for confirmation. “Isn’t that right? Were you in the room at the time?”

“No, I was downstairs talking to the women,” she said. “But that’s what you told me back in the truck.”

“Whoever told you made a mistake, then,” Smoot said. “It was always just the two of us. I’m sure if you go back, you’ll find Grover in bed. How long were you at the house?”

“Not long enough, I guess,” Jacob said.

Jacob was doubting his earlier assumption that Smoot would be involved. Neither of these two gave any sign of having been anywhere but in the bunker. It even
smelled
like they’d been here, like sweat, from continual occupancy of the bunker through the heat of the day.

In any event, it couldn’t have been Grover Miriam had spotted at the cliffs. The young man didn’t have facial hair, and she’d clearly spotted a man with a beard.

David poked around at the guns on the rack, inspecting the ammo cans sitting next to the mounted machine gun.

“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” Smoot asked. “Why is everyone in such an uproar down there? Why did you drive up?”

“Someone spotted—or thought they spotted—intruders,” Jacob said.

“Really?” Smoot sounded dubious. “They didn’t come through here. That’s for sure.”

“So you haven’t heard or seen anything strange?” Miriam asked.

“Nothing unusual. Typical stuff. The motion sensors got tripped a couple of times. Mule deer. Hardly worth mentioning.”

“Didn’t even bother waking me up, in fact,” Ezekiel said. “But what about the radio? That
did
wake me up. You forgot about that, Dad.”

“That’s right,” Smoot said. “After I got the call, I tried to radio town, but nobody was picking up. Then I saw the lights and—”

“Wait, someone radioed from outside the valley?” Jacob interrupted.

“Yeah, your sister.”

“Eliza!” David exclaimed.

All thoughts of the intruder vanished from Jacob’s mind as Elder Smoot told them about the call. It had been short and frustrating, with Smoot struggling to communicate back, because of insufficient power from Blister Creek’s end, but it seemed that Eliza and Steve had arrived safely in Salt Lake City. And they didn’t seem to be in any danger. Jacob took a deep, relieved breath.

“And what’s it like up there?” he asked. “Is there still a functioning government?”

“We didn’t get to that point,” Smoot said. “Sorry, I tried to ask, but she was struggling to hear me. She kept fading out.”

“My dad was too busy asking about the roads and bandits along the way,” Ezekiel said. “I told him to find out.”

Smoot blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally said, “I was getting to it. I didn’t know she’d only be on for a minute. Then we lost her.”

“And that’s all she said?” David asked. “Did you try to call her back?”

Smoot cast a quick glance at his son, then shook his head. “No. I told you, we didn’t have enough power. We only broadcast with seventy-five watts. I didn’t think there was much of a point.”

Jacob wanted to have a go at the radio anyway, so he spent the next couple of minutes messing around on different frequencies that Eliza and Steve would know Blister Creek used. Nothing came back.

“Come on,” Miriam said at last. “We’ve got other places to check.”

“Stay alert,” Jacob told the Smoots. “Keep an eye on both directions, down to the valley and up into the cliffs. If something trips the detectors, don’t assume it’s an animal. Go check it out.”

“Elder Smoot was lying,” Miriam said when the Christiansons were back outside and climbing into the truck.

“How do you know?” Jacob asked.

“Trust me, he wasn’t very good at it. When his son made that comment about the roads, Smoot was caught flat-footed. He’d already claimed Eliza couldn’t hear him, but then his son seemed to contradict him.”

Jacob started the truck and drove slowly back down toward the valley. Lights were on at Yellow Flats to the west. That would be Sister Rebecca and the other women roused by Lillian.

“Smoot said Eliza
struggled
to hear him, not that she couldn’t hear at all.”

“And think about the timeline,” Miriam continued. “Eliza calls on the radio, waking Ezekiel up. No way he hears that and goes right back to sleep. Smoot then tries to raise Blister Creek, sees lights in the valley. You’re telling me that fifteen minutes later Ezekiel is still in his sleeping bag? He didn’t bother getting out to take a look through his binoculars?”

When she put it that way, it did sound suspicious.

“And did you notice that the bunker door was unlocked?” she added.

Another good point.

“So you think they made up that part about Eliza?” David asked. He sounded upset. “She never called in the first place?”

“Who knows?” Miriam said.

Jacob gave it a moment of thought. “Forget the radio, why wasn’t Ezekiel out of the sleeping bag in the first place to see what was going on in the valley?”

“He was still in the sleeping bag,” Miriam said, “because he’s all hot and sweaty from running down from the cliffs. It’s got to be five miles from where that elevator came up, around the back of the reservoir, and down to the bunker. He didn’t want us to see that he’d been running.”

“It smelled strong in there,” David said. “I thought it was because men had been sitting in there around the clock. Men who no longer take regular showers.”