Blood of the Faithful (24 page)

Jacob was tempted. For just a moment, knowing there was nothing he could do to bring her back, he thought about trying, anyway. Call her spirit back to its body. Command her to live. But no, that would be wrong. Plus there was the damage to all of these people when they saw their prophet try to raise a body from the dead and fail.

He was only a man. He had no magic that flowed through his hands. He had no power over life and death except for those tools given to him by his medical training. And that training was helpless at a time like this.

Jacob placed his hands on Miriam’s forehead. It was still damp with her sweat, still warm from her body heat. Twenty minutes ago she’d been a living, breathing person. A woman filled with passions and prejudices. A mother, a wife, a protector of her people. She had saved lives and taken them. Always, Jacob knew, she had acted according to the dictates of her own conscience, even when they were flawed.

The words of a blessing came to Jacob’s mind. He didn’t try to shape them or spin them to his own purposes, but spoke the words as he felt inspired. His voice came out strong and confident, filled with power. Maybe, just maybe, he spoke from a divine source.

“Miriam Christianson, in the name of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood, I lay my hands upon thy head to give thee a final blessing as thou preparest to meet thy savior.”

A collective sob rippled through the gathering crowd.

“And when thou shall look upon the face of the Lord, He will take thee into His arms and say unto thee: Well done, thou good and faithful servant . . .”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Eliza and Steve hadn’t known what to expect when they set off for Salt Lake in the converted armored car they called the Methuselah tank. Panguitch had been deserted, and they knew there was some sort of armed camp at Richfield, because it had stopped the larger group in the Humvee earlier in the day. How fiercely would the survivors in that town resist their passage?

After some discussion, they decided to cut over to I-15 when they reached I-70, which was the rural east-west freeway in Central Utah, passing through Green River on its way to Colorado. Heading north on I-15 would be a dangerous way to approach Provo and Salt Lake, since the freeway was the main artery through Utah. If there were any bandits, rogue army units, or hostile state forces, they would be here. But approaching Richfield a second time also seemed risky.

Foolishly, they didn’t have a road map in all their supplies. Eliza hadn’t thought to check for one, maybe because she thought she knew the roads of Southern and Central Utah well enough by memory. But it occurred to her that it would be a good idea to have a map in case they reached I-15 to find it unsafe and needed to look for an alternate route.

So when they reached the deserted town of Panguitch, they stopped to search for a map. They found one amidst the looted contents of the old M&D Food Town. The shelves had been emptied of the last can of dog food and the final roll of toilet paper, but the book rack by the checkout was untouched. Nobody wanted to read the latest Harlequin Romance or James Patterson thriller in the apocalypse, it seemed. And neither had anyone taken the Utah road maps.

There was some trouble getting from the I-70 junction to I-15, where the road had washed out at one of the mountain passes, but Jacob had wisely sent them with a chainsaw in case they encountered fallen trees. They used it instead to cut saplings at the mountain pass, which they laid across the gap so they could get over.

By the time they reached the other side of the washout it was almost dark, and they decided this was a good place to spend the night. They drove higher into the mountains, where they found a ranch exit that led to a dirt road. It proved a good place to hide off the freeway.

The night was cold that high in the mountains, but they slept in the sheets and blankets they’d brought from home, cuddled in each other’s arms. Soon they fell to kissing and undressing each other. Lying in Steve’s arms felt like making love at the end of the world, but when they’d finished, Eliza felt happy and content.

They came down from the mountains the next morning and finally reached I-15. The juncture of the two freeways was a flat, grassy plain, empty between mountain ranges on either side. The interchange itself was littered with the burned husks of semitrucks and motor homes, but continuing north, I-15 itself was deserted.

They’d come onto the freeway between the towns of Beaver and Fillmore. The latter town was abandoned, a picked-over corpse, much like Panguitch had been, so they continued past it without stopping on their way toward Nephi, another hour to the north. Nephi lay on the southern outskirts of Utah’s main population center, and had been almost an exurb of the Provo area, which centered on the Mormon temples and Brigham Young University.

Eliza was sure they would encounter people again once they reached Nephi. Maybe even a functioning government. Yet as they approached, nobody emerged to challenge them. The houses on the outskirts of town had either been burned or bombed. Many lay in rubble; others were blackened shells.

The freeway hooked around the bench at the foot of towering Mount Nebo, with Nephi’s downtown area lower and to the left. Eliza got her first good look and caught her breath. The town was gone, its trees cut or burned, the houses themselves reduced to their foundations. The hotels, restaurants, and shops, leveled. A handful of old buildings downtown stood with one or two brick walls still upright, but they only accentuated the appalling devastation.

Steve was driving and slowed the vehicle as they passed by the town. “Oh, my God.”

Eliza glanced up at the charred foothills. The juniper and scrub oak had burned up the mountainside, and perhaps north over the pass and into Utah County as well. But it hadn’t been a recent fire, because the grass was fresh and green from the spring rains.

“Could have been a forest fire,” she said. “Lots of grass to burn because of all the rain we had. Probably late last summer when things dried out. Lightning started it, maybe. Or maybe someone’s unattended campfire. It got going, and there was nobody left in town to fight it.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “More likely the fire started in town and spread in the opposite direction.”

They rumbled up the freeway. It climbed the lowest shoulder of Mount Nebo, then brought them down into Utah County, with the snow-topped peak of Mount Timpanogos on the far end, thirty-five or forty miles distant.

It had been a few years since Eliza had entered the main population center along the Wasatch Front. At that time, the Salt Lake and Utah Valleys had seemed so lush compared with the desert around Blister Creek. Mile after mile of subdivisions, with their green lawns and wide, leafy trees. And so many cars; between Provo and Salt Lake, there were half a dozen lanes in each direction, and each one had been packed with cars driving at what seemed to her breakneck speeds. People weaving in and out of traffic, always in such a hurry. It was frightening.

The other thing that had tormented her was the pollution. Sometimes, when there wasn’t enough wind to push the smog up and over the mountains, a haze would suffocate the valley floors. During her first winter in Salt Lake, a temperature inversion had cut visibility to a few miles and made her lungs burn. People complained, but they didn’t stop driving their cars.

No smog now. It was clear from horizon to horizon. And as they approached the southernmost towns of Santaquin and Payson, she saw that the lawns were dead, the trees cut down. Sagebrush and tumbleweeds had begun to reclaim those few farms and orchards that had not yet been bulldozed for strip malls and subdivisions before the collapse.

A giant McDonald’s sign still rose next to the freeway at Payson, but the restaurant itself and all the surrounding buildings were gone, as if they’d been wiped from the earth. Instead, nothing but weedy lots.

After Payson, Spanish Fork, then Springville both seemed to have suffered the same fate.

“Where is everyone?” Steve asked.

“Gone.”

“Gone, as in they left? Or gone, dead?”

“Thousands of people lived in these towns. They can’t have all died.”

And yet, by the time the freeway bisected Provo, she’d begun to wonder. The entire west side of the city, between the freeway and Utah Lake, was rubble. Houses had burned to their foundation, warehouses lay gutted. To the right, a row of vacant, windowless houses stared down at the freeway from the ridge.

They came around the bend into Provo’s sister city of Orem to see signs for Utah Valley University, but the school itself seemed to have been the site of a battle. Alongside the gutted husks of buildings lay burned-out tanks and other armored vehicles. More wrecked military vehicles clogged the off-ramp and the road up the hill.

They slowed to maneuver around the burned-out wreckage of a helicopter that had fallen or been shot down over the freeway. Eliza stared out the window, and could see only devastation: a swath of burned, destroyed buildings, entire blocks where it was impossible to tell street from house. Not a tree to be seen.

“It’s worse than Las Vegas,” Steve said. “What the hell were they fighting over?”

They continued into the northern part of the county, where one town after the next lay devastated: Pleasant Grove, American Fork, Lehi. Tens of thousands had made these cities their homes, but now there was nothing. Not a single person, not a sign of life. Most of the buildings had burned, leaving behind only billboards, an entire forest of them lining the freeway like metal trees, advertising long-dead businesses.

It took an hour to cross the next stretch of ten miles. Wrecked vehicles, both civilian and military, clogged the lanes in both directions, and bomb craters had rendered other portions of the road hazardous. Weeds and brush were already growing up through the gaps left by the battle.

They weaved back and forth, pushing aside smaller vehicles, running onto the shoulder, or crossing to the other side to get around the biggest craters. The dead traffic cleared out when they reached the Point of the Mountain, the freeway pass that led up and out of Utah Valley and down into Salt Lake Valley.

When they reached the top of the pass, with its view over Salt Lake and its suburbs, Steve pulled to a stop. They got out and stared, neither speaking for a long moment.

A million people had lived in the valley before the collapse. Now it was a wasteland.

“And the city shall lie in dust,” Eliza said.

“What?”

“Something Fernie said to me, once. When she and Jacob lived in the Avenues above Temple Square during his residency, she had a dream, a vision, really, that Salt Lake would be destroyed. In the dream, Fernie was walking the streets of the city and all the buildings were burning. Ash was falling from the sky.”

“Is there any point?” he said. “Should we turn around?”

She sighed. “I was hoping . . .”

“Yeah, me too.” He squeezed her hand. “It will be okay.”

“I hope so.”

“It will be,” Steve said, more insistently this time. “We’re not alone. Our people are still alive and fighting.”

Eliza smiled at this.
Our
people. Not your people.

“We’ll go home,” he added, “tell them what we found, and make the most of it. At the end of the day, we’re still the lucky ones, right?”

“Let’s be sure,” she said.

Eliza grabbed the binoculars and an assault rifle from the truck. She didn’t see the slightest risk of attack, but it seemed like a wise precaution, anyway. She handed Steve the gun and lifted the binoculars to study the scene.

She started with the south end of the valley. Ruins and destruction everywhere. More towns completely annihilated. Farther north and west, the towns were in somewhat better condition, with several vast subdivisions seemingly untouched except for their missing trees. But there was nobody on the streets, no movement that she could spot. Tumbleweeds had blown out of the western deserts and piled into house-size mounds in driveways and parking lots. Continuing north, she saw abandoned shopping centers. The LDS temple at Daybreak was a gaunt skeleton on its hill, the spire toppled. Then there was a stretched of burned, emptied land for several miles. East of the freeway was more of the same.

There were still buildings standing in downtown Salt Lake, and she could even spot the main temple at Temple Square, but that was so far to the north that it was impossible to pick out details, even with the binoculars at their highest magnification. No doubt downtown had been gutted by war and fire as well.

“Hey, what’s that?” Steve asked. “See that big line?”

“Where? I don’t see anything.”

“Here, let me have a look.”

She handed him the binoculars. He lifted them, lowered them again as if to pick out landmarks, then held them steady. He let out a low whistle.

“Check it out. About 1300 South, follow the freeway exit east toward the university. Yep, it’s definitely something.”

She was squinting, unable to see what had caught his eye. She could see all the way to downtown, but couldn’t pick out anything in particular from this distance except for the larger buildings.

Until Steve handed her the binoculars. Then she found it at once.

It was a wall. A berm of dirt and rubble ran in a straight line from the freeway along the southern edge of downtown, then all the way up to the foothills and the University of Utah, where she lost track of the wall around the football stadium. She’d missed the wall the first time; perhaps sweeping over the berm she’d dismissed it as more bombed-out rubble.

“That’s not following 1300 South,” she said. “More like Ninth. It climbs the hill and hooks toward the football stadium at the U.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“A wall.” Eliza shifted the binoculars back down toward the freeway and found where the berm cut north. “A two-story wall of dirt and pavement and wrecked buildings. That took an awful lot of manpower to build.”

“Must have been vicious fighting to force that. And at the end of the day, that’s all they saved? That little square downtown?”

“You save what you can,” she said. “Toss it up, protect a few square miles. The rest of the city is lost—hold on to what you can.”

“It’s like the Dark Ages all over again,” Steve said.

The thought was chilling. It had only been a few years since the supervolcano exploded and the crops failed. Already the center had collapsed out of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. There was no government left, no civilization—not in this part of the country, at least. Only a few frightened, huddled communities fighting off the wandering, starving survivors.

They passed the binoculars back and forth. Eliza wondered if there was someone on the wall looking back at them. Perhaps the alarm had already been raised, and the battle-hardened survivors of Salt Lake City were scrambling to prepare a defense against this strange armored car lingering on the outskirts of the valley.

“What now?” Steve asked.

“Somehow, we’ve got to approach the wall, indicate we’re peaceful, and see if they’ll let us in.” Eliza nodded. “And we find out who is in charge.”