Blood of the Faithful (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Ezekiel was shaking so violently by the time the truck reached the base of the cliffs that it was all he could do to control the stolen vehicle. His hands were damp with sticky, coagulating blood. The machete sat like a black, malevolent thing on the passenger seat. The interior of the truck had a thick, metallic smell to it. That smell was Grover’s blood.

Sweet heavens, I killed my own brother.

In his mind he saw Grover’s outstretched hands imploring him not to do it. Heard the boy’s scream as the heavy blade hacked into his arm, shoulder, chest, head. Then the final, devastating blow.

He closed his eyes against the horrific images and missed the curve of the switchback as the highway wrapped its way back around in its ascent. His tires went onto the shoulder, kicking up gravel. Ezekiel’s eyes flew open and he slammed on the brakes. He stopped a few feet short of the edge.

The truck headlights thrust into the empty sky over the edge. There was a hundred-foot drop below. A split second longer and he’d have gone over.

For a moment he thought he heard a deep, chuckling voice in his head. The owner of the voice had distracted him and nearly sent him to his death. And then thrust his soul into the depths of hell.

Save me, it’s the destroying angel!

But as quickly as the impression came, it faded away. He was no Kimball; he was not insane. Ezekiel backed slowly onto the highway.

He beat the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Get a grip.”

Down on the valley floor, he could still see plenty of lights in the center of town, even vehicles moving around, but to his surprise, no vehicles racing up the highway after him. Not yet. When he realized why, he almost laughed.

Jacob, that pathetic weakling. Instead of immediately commandeering another vehicle and sending an armed party after him, he had no doubt been distracted by all the wounds left by Ezekiel’s machete-waving flight from the Christianson house. Jacob would be more concerned about stopping bleeding and stitching wounds than stopping his enemy.

Ezekiel hadn’t cut down all those people to delay pursuit. He’d done it simply to escape. He’d burst into the Christianson house hoping to find Jacob alone or maybe with one of his wives, but instead, the house had been full of women and children, some of whom tried to stop him. Ezekiel was already shaken from his plan when Jacob came out with Miriam behind him, armed. And all Ezekiel had was a machete. He’d had to flee and then cut his way through a dozen innocents to get to Jacob’s truck.

Miriam. That bitch. What a mistake to call her out to Yellow Flats the other day. She was as treacherous as a snake. She’d already killed Chambers and would have more murder in her heart after seeing all those injured people. She’d forced Ezekiel to cut past them—didn’t she see that? Of course not; she’d only blame him.

Miriam would come after him, he knew. But as he waited and no pursuit materialized, he guessed that Jacob must have stopped her, at least temporarily.

“There,” he said, feeling calmer. “You see, you have time.”

But not if he sat here idling in the truck like an idiot. He got back onto the road and continued up the switchbacks. Moments later he came upon the bunker, empty since they’d abandoned it earlier in the night. He was starting to grow worried about the reaction of the gentiles at the reservoir upon his arrival. Earlier in the evening, after riding the supply elevator up, he’d been speaking with McQueen when gunfire sounded at the base of the cliffs.

The gunfire meant Chambers was in trouble down there, and McQueen’s men were filling the barrel with ballast to send Ezekiel back down when someone sawed the rope. The counterweight gone, the barrel had plummeted to the bottom. No doubt it was Miriam. She must have killed Chambers.

As soon as the elevator was cut, McQueen and his men went crazy. They fired down at the base of the cliffs until they’d wasted their ammunition on hand. Then they’d turned on Ezekiel and angrily insisted he go down and keep the food coming.

Ezekiel had been only too happy to get the hell out of there. He’d been an uneasy partner in the alliance from the beginning. Giving the squatters Blister Creek’s precious food was no different than feeding rats. They were vermin; they would only multiply if fed.

A few weeks ago, after he’d infiltrated the Holy of Holies to search for the sword and breastplate, he’d been troubled by the ramifications. They were missing, and the Lord had ordered Ezekiel to replace Jacob at the head of the church, but He had not provided any way for him to do so.

It must be known to all that Ezekiel had done the killing. If he secretly cut Jacob’s throat, the leadership would simply fall to the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve, Stephen Paul Young. Ezekiel was not even a member of the Quorum, let alone in line to assume the mantle of prophet. But if Ezekiel tried to assemble a collection of allies first, an alternate power structure, he’d be denounced and attacked. The Kimballs had attempted that strategy, and it had led to their death and disgrace.

A few nights after his entry into the temple, he’d gone outside at night, confused and unable to sleep. There had been a full moon, and it cast the ranch in a pale, ghostly light. He walked past the barn, listening to the lowing cows before continuing down the trail toward the tool shed, several hundred yards from the house, and midway to the grain silos. There, he came across a wheelbarrow filled with tools that someone had carelessly left outside. Probably one of Ezekiel’s lazy brothers.

One of the tools was a machete that made him think of the sword he’d been searching for in the temple. He picked it up and felt the heft of it in his hand. For a long moment he stood there with the weapon and imagined what it would be like to kill Jacob. It wasn’t the Sword of Laban, but it would serve the same purpose.

He was returning the machete to the wheelbarrow when the sound of a distant engine caught his ear. He stopped, frowning. The engine was somewhere to the east on their own grazing lands. Who the devil would be out at this hour? He started walking toward the sound when it quit.

But by now his curiosity was raging. And his suspicion. There was nothing in that direction but the silos and open desert beyond. He followed the ranch road to the silos, where he crouched in an old, weed-infested irrigation ditch to wait. Soon enough, Larry Chambers appeared, the former FBI agent quite visible in the full light of the moon. He’d come to steal grain.

Ezekiel simply watched and waited instead of confronting the man. It couldn’t be an accident that Ezekiel had been outside, unable to sleep, turning over the problem of Jacob, when Chambers appeared with his cart and shovel. There had to be meaning to it.

And then it hit him. This was the solution to his problem.

The next day Ezekiel rode out to Chambers’s cabin. He carried several quarts of near-pure grain liquor in his saddlebags. Normally it was distilled for fuel, but he figured it would be a valuable trade good for the vermin at the reservoir. Like most gentiles, they’d be drunks and alcoholics, no doubt.

Once at the cabin, Ezekiel made his proposal to the suspicious FBI agent: He’d help Chambers and the squatters get everything from the valley they needed to survive. In return, Ezekiel needed to make contact with the camp. He needed to arrange for sanctuary for when he’d killed Jacob Christianson. Chambers agreed. Rather quickly, in fact.

Ezekiel wasn’t stupid; Chambers was playing his own game. The man was currying favor with the squatters—he was a gentile, like them, and a natural enemy of the church. Maybe he meant to weaken Blister Creek from within. Maybe the ultimate plan was to let the squatters flood into the valley and overwhelm the saints. Drive them off, enslave them, kill them. Murder the men and take their women as sexual slaves. Some evil or other. The exact manner of that evil wasn’t important.

Once Ezekiel was prophet, he would do what Jacob had been too soft to do: kill every last man, woman, and child in the squatter camp. Only then would the threat be eliminated. Meanwhile, he would use Chambers as their motives overlapped.

Ezekiel was still convinced that the plan would have worked if Miriam hadn’t shot Chambers at the base of the cliffs. A few more weeks to gather the faithful, convince important people that Jacob was a fallen prophet. All that had been thrown in chaos the moment the gunshots sounded and Miriam cut the rope to the makeshift elevator.

But even after Ezekiel descended from the reservoir to the bunker where his father and brother waited, he’d believed there was still time. He could come into the valley before Jacob had organized, finish the ugly business, then flee with enough weapons and food supplies to buy off McQueen’s camp. Later, when Miriam and the rest quieted down, he’d return to Blister Creek and take over. They’d be desperate for a leader. Only now he was doing the fleeing, Jacob was still alive, and he had nothing to trade. He needed something or McQueen would turn him away in rage.

So when Ezekiel reached the abandoned bunker, he stopped the truck and ran inside. He hauled out the spare guns and ammo cans first, then returned from the truck with a toolbox he’d found in the back. He unbolted the .50-caliber machine gun that was mounted at the gun slits, slung it over his shoulder, and hauled it back to the truck, where he put it in the back with the other weapons.

Now he was set. He had a machine gun, several other weapons, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. That should satisfy McQueen.

When he climbed into the truck, he eyed the dark, bloodstained machete on the seat next to him. It had an ugly, malevolent air to it. When swinging it earlier, it had been easy to pretend that it really was the Sword of Laban and not a sharpened ranch tool. Now it looked like neither, but some horrible weapon wielded by a murderer. He couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, so he shoved it under the seat. As soon as it was out of sight he felt better.

Ezekiel slowed the truck when he reached the top of the cliffs. He flashed the truck lights and inched up the highway. He honked his horn. Gunmen would be watching; if they thought he was a threat, they might open fire.

A few minutes later, when the headlights illuminated the gate across the highway, he slowed even further, until he was traveling at a creep. He honked and flashed, and rolled down his window to wave. Figures came out of the darkness armed with rifles and shotguns. They surrounded the truck, some twenty or thirty men and women in all.

A figure stepped forward from the pack. He was filthy and bedraggled, but with a straight back and strong arms. It was McQueen.

“It’s only me,” Ezekiel said, relieved. Of any of the squatters, McQueen seemed the most practical. Some of these people were survivalist fanatics, and they scared him.

McQueen looked past him into the empty passenger seat. “Where’s Chambers?”

“Dead. Sister Miriam shot him.”

The man’s face hardened. Chambers and McQueen had enjoyed a good rapport. Had almost been friends. They were both gentiles and former military men, and would think of nothing holy or sacred, only how to survive, how to take.

That hard look made Ezekiel anxious. He wasn’t sorry about Chambers’s death. The man had disgusted him, was nothing but a tool to get what he wanted. But he’d been useful for protecting Ezekiel from these savages.

“I brought you some stuff,” Ezekiel said nervously. “Look in the back.”

McQueen glanced in the back, then ripped open the door, seized Ezekiel’s shirt, and dragged him out of the truck. He threw him to the ground, where Ezekiel lay, terrified of all the people now surrounding him, their sneers showing how badly they wanted to smash in his face with their rifle butts.

“Don’t kill me! I brought you guns.”

“Screw guns,” McQueen said. “Where the hell is our food?”

Sister Lillian served as nurse and Jacob’s two wives managed the patient flow, with Jessie Lyn triaging the patients according to their severity of their injuries. Fernie calmed family members, found beds for postoperative patients, and did everything else to keep the external environment orderly.

Nellie Haws was Jacob’s most serious patient, suffering a savage abdominal wound that cut all the way through the transverse abdominis. Doubling the risk, Nellie was thirty-five weeks pregnant. There were a few anxious minutes trying to stanch the blood flow when he thought he should perform an emergency C-section, but he got her stabilized.

After that, he gave morphine to two children screaming in pain from deep gashes across their arms, then helped an older man, one of Jacob’s neighbors from down the street, who’d suffered an ugly slash that had taken off his left ear and broken his jaw. An inch lower and the blow would have severed the artery in his neck. Jacob reattached the ear, then reduced the fracture by realigning the shattered bone into its original anatomical position, before fixing it in place with surgical pins. This was more like carpentry than the delicate work he’d performed reattaching the ear. After that, he returned to the children to whom he’d given morphine. They were now quiet and whimpering. He sutured their wounds and sent them home with their mothers.