Blood of the Faithful (9 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Miriam watched with righteous fury rising triumphantly in her breast. She was right!

Larry Chambers. The bastard. He was pulling a handcart with an aluminum scoop shovel in it. The handcart had a hitch on the end.

She reached slowly for her rifle, which she’d propped against the bank to her right. Jacob grabbed her wrist and held it. She relented rather than struggle. But not without frustration. She hadn’t planned to shoot Chambers. Not if he surrendered.

In a moment, Chambers was inside the chain link and she lost the opportunity for a good shot, anyway. But as he moved to the nearest silo, she saw also that he was trapped. No doubt he was armed, but they could hold him at the gate. He’d be unable to get through the chain link or over the coiled razor wire up top.

Again she tried to pick up her gun. And again Jacob stopped her. What was wrong with him?

She grabbed his head and dragged it down so she could whisper fiercely in his ear. “I won’t kill him,” she promised, pleading. “I swear.”

“No. We’re letting him go.”

Dammit!

Chambers was messing around with a door or hinge of some sort. Miriam wasn’t a farm girl; she didn’t know how these silos worked. It seemed there was a way to get out foodstuffs for testing or simply to remove a small portion without using one of those big hoppers to fill a truck or wagon. He scooped a shovelful of what sounded like dried beans into his cart. The first scoop rattled like pebbles in a can, then it was quieter as he worked.

It took three or four minutes to fill the cart. When he was done, he shut the panel on the silo, hauled the cart through the gate, and locked it again. He moved slowly, his breath loud, the cart crunching now over the ground with its heavy load, instead of bouncing.

Miriam waited, teeth clenched, while Jacob held out an arm to keep her from snatching her rifle. She felt coiled like a rattlesnake, ready to strike. It was all she could do to keep from scrambling out of the wash, saying the hell with the rifle, and going after Chambers with her pistol instead. But as the minutes passed, the tension eased from her body, and she trembled when the adrenaline had drained away. The cold air raised goose pimples on her arms.

The engine started up again and disappeared east into the desert.

The instant it was gone, she wheeled on Jacob. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Cool down,” he said.

“That’s what I’ve been doing, cooling. For the last twenty minutes. Pointlessly. I could have taken him at any point. What are we doing, letting him rob us? Don’t you care?”

“Miriam, will you calm down?” He sounded so even and measured, but his tone only made her more irritated. “Chambers isn’t going anywhere. He’ll come back tomorrow. And the day after that. A few more bushels of wheat and beans isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Are you crazy? It makes a huge difference. That food is life and death.”

“Not for us, it’s not. He’s been doing it for months and we never noticed. That means we can take our time while we figure out what he’s up to.”

“We know what he’s up to. We saw it with our own eyes. And we know he’s trading or giving it to our enemies. What more do we need?”

“We need the big missing piece in the middle between the stealing and the giving,” Jacob said.

Miriam turned it over in her mind and shortly saw what he was driving at.

Some of the pieces were easy enough to put together. What Miriam had taken for a motorcycle was undoubtedly one of the ATVs that had been used among the farms and ranches but were now gathering dust in barns and sheds for lack of fuel. That meant Chambers had found a place to steal gas too. Where? It was so precious, every liter was rationed and measured.

More likely grain ethanol, she thought. He probably had a still hidden somewhere on his property, and he had a ready supply of wheat right here.

Chambers would drive onto Smoot’s land from the desert, hauling the cart by hand the last half mile so he wouldn’t be heard. Once he filled it with stolen grains or beans, he’d hitch it to the ATV and drive it . . . where, exactly? South, west, and east would take him nowhere but mountains or desert, even if he could get past the bunkers guarding the approaches to the valley.

That left only a direct approach to the Ghost Cliffs, but it was well protected and in the open. Even if Chambers wasn’t spotted getting to the road, the highway would take his vehicle past Yellow Flats. Sister Rebecca would hear him driving past every night. Twice—coming
and
going. She could practically snipe him from the porch of her cabin. Then he’d still have to get past the bunker guarding the switchbacks up the reservoir.

“Now do you see?” Jacob asked. “We don’t know how Chambers is moving the food out of the valley. And we don’t know why he’s doing it either.”

“It doesn’t matter how or why. We only need to stop it from happening again. The rest of it is not important.”

“It’s important to me,” Jacob said firmly. “If this goes beyond Chambers, if there’s a conspiracy, I need to know. And if there’s a secret path in and out of the valley, I want to find it.”

“Chambers will tell us. We’ll ride out to his cabin tomorrow and take him at gunpoint. Then we take him back to the chapel and interrogate him. If we need to be rough to make him talk, all the better. He deserves what he gets.”

“And after that?”

“A short trial. A quick punishment.”

“We don’t have a court. We don’t even have a jail.”

“We’re not putting Chambers in jail,” she scoffed. “This calls for frontier justice. That’s the law these days. The law of survival.”

“So hang ’em high. Watch him twitch in the wind. Sure, why not?”

“We can’t do nothing.”

Jacob sighed. “Miriam, please. Eliza and Steve are gone. You’re the closest thing to law enforcement I’ve got. I need your help. But I can’t have you waging a holy war every time you see some injustice or other.”

She clenched her jaw and glared at him. That it was dark and he wouldn’t be able to see made no difference. Her anger and frustration had reached the point of boiling.

“Fine,” she said at last, through gritted teeth. “I’ll come out tomorrow on horse to look for tracks for the ATV, see where they go.”

“I know where they go already.”

Miriam blinked. “You do?”

“They go to the base of the cliffs. Here, in the desert. They can’t go up the switchbacks for all the obvious reasons, and anything west of the highway is too close to Yellow Flats.”

“Yeah, I already figured out that part. So, what, he climbs the cliffs by hand, a couple of hundred pounds of beans strapped to his back?”

“He doesn’t have to,” Jacob said. “Only the food needs to reach the reservoir.”

“Well, sure. But how does that change things? It can’t fly up.”

“Let’s say Chambers shovels the food into sacks. Then he drives his ATV into Witch’s Warts where the maze abuts the cliffs. Someone up top throws a rope over the edge and hauls up the sacks of food by hand.”

“By hand? That has to be three hundred feet.”

“More like four hundred.”

“That’s a lot of rope,” she said. Still, the idea intrigued her. “How would they get the rope up and down without it snagging on something? It’s not a straight drop to the bottom in most places. There are crevices, overhangs, trees clinging to the side. And then they’d have to haul it up four hundred feet. Multiple times.”

“They’ve got plenty of manpower for hauling—that’s not a problem. As for keeping the rope from snagging, I don’t know. I figure we’ll go out tomorrow night and wait for him to show up.”

“Where? There’s a good three miles of cliff front we’d have to watch. And it’s not much of a moon. It will be dark.”

“Yes, but we can hear the ATV for a good mile. We each take a spot and wait.”

“If we get there early,” Miriam said, warming to the idea, “we might even be able to find tracks in the sand. Most likely he’s going back to the same place every night.”

“Good, now you’re thinking. To deal with the darkness, we’ll bring along night vision goggles.”

“My batteries won’t hold a charge anymore,” she pointed out. “I’d swipe the radio batteries, but they use double A, and the night vision takes triple A.”

“I’ve got batteries.”

“They still hold a good charge?”

“Non-rechargeable, unopened. Eliza and Steve brought them from Las Vegas. They were in the prepper supplies left with the Methuselah tank. I’ve been saving them for an emergency.”

“Great, that will make a big difference. I’d better come by tomorrow afternoon and get them. I’ll want to test out the goggles in the basement, make sure they’re still good and the batteries have a charge. After that, when do you want to leave? Right after dinner?”

“Tomorrow is Tuesday. Scripture study at the chapel.”

“I can skip the meeting,” she said. “It’s not mandatory.”

“Actually, I wanted to go myself.”

That surprised her. “Really, you want to go to scripture study?”

“Am I not allowed?”

“Of course you’re allowed, but I haven’t seen you there for months. Not really your thing, is it?”

“I should go more often, but I’m busy.”

“But why now?”

“I got to thinking,” he said. “Seems there’s a big crowd hanging around the chapel these days. Like you said, it’s not mandatory, so why so many people? I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.”

“Okay, sure.”

Miriam thought about what she’d seen at meetings lately. Jacob wasn’t going to like what he discovered. He must have suspicions or he wouldn’t be going tomorrow, of all times. His brother or sister must have said something to him.

“I know you attend with David and your sister wives,” Jacob said. “But do you think you could slip out midway through?”

“Of course. They knew I was heading out tonight, but nobody asked for details. They won’t tomorrow either.”

“Good. It’ll be dark around eight thirty, more or less. I’ll take the pickup truck so we can go faster. We’ll leave about seven, seven fifteen—that will give us time to hide the truck and hike along the base of the cliffs before dark, looking for tracks.” He straightened, stretched. “Go get your horse. We’ll ride back together.”

As soon as Miriam was away from him, climbing up the wash and then picking her way back to where she’d left her mount, she started to reconsider. Jacob’s plan was reasonable, the sort of thing she might have proposed herself back in her FBI days. Like going on stakeout. They knew the culprit, they knew he wasn’t going to escape. What was the problem?

She untied her horse from the rocks where she’d hidden it. It was fortunate Chambers hadn’t discovered the animal. He must have driven his ATV not far from here. If the horse had whinnied or nickered, Chambers would have realized he was being watched. Maybe he
had
realized. Miriam climbed into the saddle and picked her way slowly back the direction she’d come, toward where Jacob was waiting.

The problem is you don’t trust Jacob.

She didn’t trust Jacob, and he didn’t trust her. He wanted to ride home with her to make sure she didn’t go after Chambers. Because Jacob knew that she was itching to deal with the man now. And why not? It was the right thing to do.

She remembered what Ezekiel had said at their secret meeting at Sister Rebecca’s cabin.

The problem with Brother Jacob is that we need him to act like a prophet, and he won’t do it.

Miriam had no intention of joining a conspiracy against Jacob. It would take more than a few misgivings to turn her against her prophet, it would take a divine command by the mouth of the Lord or one of His angels. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t protect Jacob from his own weakness. His misguided sense of mercy.

This was not the time for mercy. This was the time for justice.

Ahead, Jacob waited for her, horse and rider a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky. And when she saw him, Miriam made a decision.

She’d go with Jacob tomorrow to search the base of the cliffs. But when the time came, she would put a bullet through the head of Larry Chambers.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As Jacob pushed Fernie’s wheelchair to the chapel the following night, he decided he really should attend Tuesday scripture study more often, if for no other reason than it would give him a chance to spend more time with Fernie.

Not that they were remotely alone. Three of Father’s widows accompanied them, including Jacob’s own mother, together with several of his unmarried half sisters and brothers. David and his wives and children met them out front of the house, and together they formed a large clump walking down the sidewalk. They met other families, and by the time they reached the chapel, Jacob and Fernie were in the middle of a crush of thirty or forty people.

But it felt like cheating (in a good way) to be with Fernie, and not Jessie Lyn, on a night that was technically scheduled for his second wife. Jessie Lyn had stayed home to work in the garden while kids cleaned up after dinner. Jacob had no aversion to Jessie Lyn; he could have helped her tie tomato plants and enjoyed her company. But he ached to spend more time with Fernie.

As he helped her into the pew, he shooed aside one of his sisters so he could sit next to his wife. His mother sat on his other side, and she of course wanted to chat. And Eliza’s mother—one of Father’s other widows—wanted news about her daughter. Nothing yet, he assured her. She’d been gone only a day, and only the most optimistic scenario would have had her returning right away. And then there were all the people who came to shake his hand and thank him for coming.

At last Elder Smoot arrived. He walked up the aisle, leaning on his cane. Smoot seemed to need it
only
during meetings, but it was hard to deny that he looked far more the Old Testament prophet than did Jacob. His dark beard and sharp gaze gave him a deep, intense aura, and he was old enough to carry a certain gravitas without being so old as to seem feeble. He seemed much like Jacob’s father had been, in fact.

Smoot spotted him. “Brother Jacob. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Last-minute decision. I had a free evening for once.”

“Come up front, you can preside.”

“No, I’m not here for that. Y
ou go ahead and lead the meeting.”

“I can lead it if you’d like, but you should come up front. I can’t have you sitting down here while I’m up there presiding.” Smoot gave him a smile. “It looks bad.”

Fernie squeezed Jacob’s hand and said with her expression that it was okay. And by now half the people in the chapel had broken from their whispered conversations and were looking at him. The others on his aisle stood, and he reluctantly left the Christianson pew and accompanied Smoot to the stand. Other men from the Quorum joined them: David and Stephen Paul, plus Elder Griggs.

Jacob sat next to his brother, facing the audience. Smoot shook hands with the other elders before taking the lectern. The audience hushed. Smoot waited while Elder Potts came up front, leaning on a four-legged aluminum cane that he most certainly
did
need. His son Peter helped the frail old man up the stairs, then took a seat next to him facing the congregation with the rest of the men on the stand. The chapel was full, people standing around the edges where they couldn’t find seats.

David whispered in Jacob’s ear, “It gets a little weird. Try to have an open mind.”

Jacob waited for his brother to explain. But then Smoot opened with prayer. After that, the congregation sang Jacob’s least favorite hymn, “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet.” It seemed obligatory at any meeting he attended, and only reminded him of how little he felt like a prophet.

After that, the meeting started off normally enough. Jacob hadn’t expected anything different in spite of Eliza’s warning. In spite of what David had whispered.

Smoot’s son Ezekiel came up to the stand to read from the scriptures. It was a chapter from Revelation—end-of-the-world stuff. Nothing unusual about that.

“ 
‘And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And I saw the seven angels which stood before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer, and there was given him much incense . . .
’
 ”

Ezekiel’s words turned into a drone. Jacob was watching the congregation. They seemed especially rapt. No young children out there, unlike Sunday’s sacrament meeting, but some teenagers sat among the adults. Every face stared, wide-eyed, at the reader. No eyes drifted closed, no women knit, no men fiddled with ties. Nobody followed along in their own scriptures either, which was unusual on the surface, but hardly cause for alarm. Strange things at scripture study? Like what? This was more of the same.

Church meetings of any kind were rigid, well-regulated affairs. Whether they involved business or scripture study, they followed a set schedule. Even the temple rituals, with their mystical elements, followed an identical script each and every time. Only testimony meetings could be quirky, with members occasionally bearing testimony not of the gospel or the scriptures, but of the US Constitution or of some strange vision one of his ancestors had seen about the end of the world. Once, before Jacob’s father died, an old woman had gone on for about twenty minutes about how the government was putting rat poison in ice cream, until finally Father had tugged her sleeve and suggested she sit down. But that sort of thing was rare, even at testimony meeting.

Things had been different in early Mormon history. New doctrines sprang from Joseph Smith’s mouth as the spirit moved him. Angels appeared to church members at the Kirtland temple, and people spoke in tongues. When Brigham Young was speaking at Joseph Smith’s funeral, it was said that he had taken on the appearance of the murdered prophet, had spoken with Brother Joseph’s voice.

Jacob wondered how he’d slip out midway through the meeting, as he’d promised Miriam. It wouldn’t be so easy from up on the stand. Everyone would take note. He picked out Miriam to discover his sister-in-law s
taring at Ezekiel with her eyes wide. Her lips were mouthing something. Other people’s lips were moving too. That was odd.

Suddenly, from the audience, a woman cried out, “Praise the Lord!”

Jacob flinched, startled. After a lifetime of well-ordered meetings, the unexpected outburst was like a jolt.

Another woman cried out. A man rose to his feet in the front pew. He lifted his hands above his head, but said nothing as tears began to run down his cheeks. He continued staring at Ezekiel. A woman stood and did the same thing. A teenage girl cried out, “Heavenly Father, save us!”

Through this, Ezekiel kept reading. Or so Jacob initially thought. Suddenly, his ears tuned in to the young man’s voice. Ezekiel wasn’t speaking English, he was babbling. Speaking in tongues. His voice rose in pitch. More people cried out in the audience.

Speaking in tongues was rare these days, but not unheard of. Never in a church meeting, though. Suddenly, half a dozen people in the audience erupted into their own chattering babble. Shouts sounded from every corner of the chapel.

“Save us from the fire!”

“Burn the wicked!”

“We are the faithful, Lord! Do not shed our blood!”

“Jesus Christ! I’m here, Lord!”

“Heavenly Father, save us!”

Men wept. Women threw themselves convulsing to the floor. Other people collapsed, caught by family and neighbors before they brained themselves on the pews in front of them. Half a dozen people broke out in ragged song: “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” More people shouted and babbled in tongues. Above them, Ezekiel’s voice rose to a high pitch. Behind his son, Elder Smoot was trembling, tears running down his face.

As Jacob watched, stunned, the chapel had changed from a calm Mormon meeting into a wild, charismatic revival. This wasn’t scripture study. It was a mass psychotic event. He could almost picture the fMRIs of their brains, the neurons firing like mad in their frontal lobes as they were swept along in the revival, while parietal lobe activity faded away. They were no longer individuals; they were one with the Holy Ghost and their fellow saints.

His own family was as caught up in it as anyone. Fernie lifted her hands above her head and shouted a prayer. One of his teenage sisters whipped her head back and forth, her braids coming undone and thrashing about her face. His mother and Eliza’s mother clung to each other, weeping ecstatically. Other family members danced and sang or threw themselves to the floor.

Horrified, Jacob tore his eyes away and turned in alarm to his brother to see what he was making of all of this, only to discover David’s eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth hanging slack. He’d fallen into a trance.

Jacob rose, shaken, to his feet. He made his way down from the stand between the rows of pews, pushing through the people clogging the aisles. Hands grabbed for him, people begging him to bless them, crying out in joy that the prophet had come among them. Others shook and spasmed without seeing him, or lay writhing on the carpet as if caught in epileptic seizures. He pushed through the doors and stood in the hallway, breathing heavily. The tumult continued behind him, muffled by the doors. He kept going.

In a moment he was in the open air and striding toward the sidewalk. Outside, everything was so quiet. So normal. A dog barked a few blocks away, and from the south came the whinny of a horse. Somewhere, a man was chopping wood. Elsewhere, a woman called for a child to come indoors. The temple sat quietly to his right, white and clean, the golden angel on top silently blowing his horn. The heat shimmered from the street while the sun dipped low on the horizon, already stained red and orange.

The church door opened behind him and Miriam came out. She was wearing a prairie dress, but as she came down the stairs, he caught a glimpse of jeans beneath it. And she wore sturdy shoes.

Miriam eyed him, not unsympathetically, it seemed. “So, now you know.”

“How long?”

“A few months. It started slowly. The last few weeks people have been more worked up.”

“Is anyone leading it?” he asked.

“It’s spontaneous. People know the end is near. They want to be prepared.”

Jacob started walking toward the house. “They’re afraid. I understand.”

“Of course they’re afraid. Aren’t you?”

He let out a bitter laugh and picked up his pace. “More than I was an hour ago, yes. Now I’m terrified.”

Miriam caught up with him. “Why?”

“Because it’s clear now. I’m alone.”

“No, you’re not! We’re all with you. Every single one of us. Everything we do. Everything you see—everything!—even when people argue with you. Those are your followers. We’re tools in your hands. All you have to do is wield us.”

Jacob shook his head, angry with himself. He shouldn’t have let Eliza and Steve leave. They would have listened.

“Jacob, you can do this. Take us in your hands. Shape us, tell us what to do.”

“I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of it.”

“Of course you didn’t ask. The Lord called you.”

“My father died, that’s what happened. Then I was next. I should have said no.”

“You think you had a choice?”

“These are my people. I was their doctor, the one they looked to. And I knew I could change things. Stop them from driving out the boys. Stop trading women like cattle. Stop the crazy—”

“You’re not listening to me,” she interrupted. “The Lord chose you—you had no say in the matter. The world has changed. The old rules don’t apply. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”

No, he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t trying to convince her. Like there was any point in
that.

Instead, he was arguing with himself, the stupid decisions he’d made. When he agreed to take over after his father’s death, it was only so he could lead his people into moderation. Bring them to the real world, into civil society. Into the mainstream. And it had been working too, until the real world refused to cooperate. Until it collapsed. Now that it was gone, his people were clinging to their most fanatical beliefs, swept up in a howling sandstorm of religious hysteria.

Fernie. David. Miriam. Probably even Eliza. All of them gone.