Hell's Fortress (12 page)

“What was I supposed to do? Tell them to shoot at will?”

“How about asking for genuine guidance?”

“David, one of two things is true. Either God is leading us, or He isn’t. If He’s not leading us, I’ve got to do the best I can. If He is, then He knew what He was getting when He chose me. Some people know, some people believe. And some people doubt. I’m a doubter.” Jacob eyed his brother. “What about you? Seems like you’re changing.”

David shrugged. “Miriam and Lillian are strong in their faith. They’ve been working on me. And you’ve got to admit that circumstances seem to indicate it’s all true.”

“Every doomsday cult from Waco to Tehran is convinced of the same thing. That’s human nature.”

“Never mind that,” David said. “What if the squatters fight back? They’re hungry, they’re desperate. They’re convinced we could feed them all if we weren’t so damn selfish. What are you going to do then?”

“If they don’t listen, we’ll escalate. I understand that. I accept it.”

The pickups were ready to go, truck beds filled with rifle-toting men and women. People looked expectantly at the brothers, still standing apart and chatting.

“Then it’s settled,” David said. “If we have to, we use any means necessary.”

Jacob didn’t answer.

“So what are we waiting for?” David asked.

“You’re pulling away, all of you. The doubters are now believers, and the believers are fundamentalists. The fundamentalists have become fanatics. I’ve lost Miriam, I’m losing Stephen Paul. My own wife is terrified of the outside world and wants it to hurry and collapse so it will all be over. My children pray for God to burn the wicked so they’ll leave us alone. Eliza is gone—I need her back. Until she returns, you’re all I have left.”

David said, “Before you came for me I was a Lost Boy. A drug addict. Father proclaimed me a failure and I believed it. You brought me home. You saved my life. I would follow you into hell itself.”

“I don’t want you to follow me to hell. I want you to listen to my doubts. I want you to use reason and not faith. That’s how we’ll survive this.”

“I know you’re a man with human weaknesses. Dude, you’re my brother—of course you’re not perfect.” David gripped him by the shoulders. “But God has whispered into my heart. I doubted before. I don’t anymore. You are the prophet. You are the One Mighty and Strong.”

No, I’m not.

David turned to climb into the back of one of the trucks. All but the first one started up with the familiar, yet by now so rare sound of rumbling diesel engines.

Jacob cast a longing glance at the sandstone maze of fins and spires behind the temple. How easy it would be to walk into Witch’s Warts and disappear. Then emerge from the other side and make his way to the mountains. Leave all this behind.

In spite of his lofty words, his attempts to mold the others into a peaceful army, he knew the truth. The moment he climbed behind the wheel, he would set them down a terrible path.

But if he felt unsure, he didn’t dare show it. So he straightened his shoulders and walked with long, confident steps until he reached the lead pickup truck. Stephen Paul sat in the passenger side with an assault rifle across his lap. He handed Jacob the keys, which were received without comment. Moments later they were rolling north toward the reservoir.

As they did, Jacob said a silent prayer.

I don’t know if you’re listening. Chances are, you don’t exist. But if you do, if you are listening, please spare us bloodshed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jacob and his companions drove into the Ghost Cliffs to search for the squatters’ camp. The speed of travel stunned him. Over the past year the valley seemed to have grown. The distances, which he’d once measured in minutes—ten minutes to the grain silos, thirty to the Young ranch—had stretched now that those same miles needed to be covered on horseback, foot, or bicycle. You noticed details at those speeds that you never would when zipping along in an air-conditioned cocoon. Colors, smells. The feel of gravel beneath your boot.

And there was time to think.

He had none of that now. Instead, he sat in a truck filled with grim-faced men and women. The other trucks held the same. Give them orders and they would kill and be killed according to his will. His father had relished that sort of power. Jacob feared and mistrusted it.

Long shadows stretched from the cottonwood trees to lean over the reservoir, which was so high that it crept almost to the road. Clouds of bugs hovered over the water, and leaping trout drew circles across its surface. Jacob felt a pang that he wasn’t coming up here with his kids to drop their lines into the water and wait for the telltale tug and the dip of bobbers as fish hit their bait.

Right now the only people fishing these waters were the hungry refugees on the far side.

Let them. Why couldn’t they stay, taking what they could from the land, until the crisis passed? Blister Creek didn’t need fish and game to survive. So long as these people stayed above the valley, the two sides could live and let live.

By the time they hooked around the reservoir and came upon the squatter camp on the other side, Jacob was calmer and more determined than ever to find a peaceful solution. And so his first glimpse of the camp was a slap across the face.

Occupying a wedge of land maybe five acres in size between the highway and the reservoir, it was bigger than he’d expected, dozens of tents and lean-tos.

The site was an old picnic area, now trashed. They’d chopped down the hundred-year-old cottonwoods that had provided shade. On the other side of the road they’d hacked a gash through the trees a hundred yards into the forest, a wound marked by broken branches and snapped-off pine boughs. Limbs and sticks marked a path across the road. And what a mess: empty cans strewn about, torn tarps flapping in the breeze, strips of corrugated metal, piles of deer bones and hides. They’d dug their latrine too close to the reservoir. When he rolled down the window, he could smell the long, filthy trench.

A bonfire lit either end of the camp, together with half a dozen cookfires that sent smoky trails into the sky. People tossed logs onto the bonfires, which roared eight, ten feet high.

“Blasted fools,” Stephen Paul said. “Haven’t they ever heard of wildfires?”

Where were the children? Jacob couldn’t spot more than a handful. Hiding? Dead of starvation? Abandoned on the road? And if the refugees had brought any animals—horses, chickens, dogs—they were nowhere in sight. Probably devoured, based on the starving look of the squatters. Some of these people must have owned horses at one time, because there were wagons and trailers and no vehicles to tow them.

Jacob parked the truck in the highway. The other vehicles stopped behind him. The people from Blister Creek unloaded. They passed around boxes of shells.

The squatters spotted the newcomers and came streaming toward the highway, shouting, calling for others. More poured out of tents. Soon, a hundred people were descending on them. Fearful murmurs rippled through the saints.

“Steady,” Jacob warned. “You!” he shouted as the leading refugees reached him. “Stay back.”

A number of the squatters had armed themselves with guns, knives, metal pipes, and branches cut into clubs, but most came running with buckets, empty jugs, and burlap sacks. They were looking for handouts, he realized.

They ignored his orders and pressed in, hands outstretched. Begging, pleading for food. A woman grabbed Jacob’s wrist, screeching that she was first. Stephen Paul pushed her back, but not before her long, dirty nails dug a painful scratch into Jacob’s skin. The saints formed a tighter and tighter knot around the trucks.

“Is it time?” Smoot said.

“Steady,” Jacob warned. He pushed at a man with a bucket. “Get back. Don’t touch me.”

He drew his pistol and fired twice into the air. The noise died. The squatters drew back onto the shoulder of the highway.

“Listen to me! We have no food for you. We’re not here to give handouts.”

“You have food, you liar,” a woman cried.

He tried to identify the speaker. He thought it came from the woman who’d scratched him. Her light-brown hair was so filthy and matted it had almost become dreadlocks. She glared at him, eyes bloodshot and watering from behind hollow cheekbones.

“That’s right,” she said when he met her gaze. “Look at you, bunch of greedy bastards. Stuffing your faces while we starve on fish bones and grasshoppers.”

“Feed us!” someone cried. The clamor started up again and Jacob lifted his gun skyward. The noise died again.

He whispered to David, who had sidled up to him, “Mark the ones with guns. If it turns violent, they’re the ones to worry about.”

David nodded and eased through the crowded saints to pass the word.

Had Stephen Paul and David said a hundred squatters? There were at least twice that many packed together, ready to surge at the truck. More lingered at the back. Tension vibrated through the mob. They might go off at any time.

“You can stay at the reservoir,” he said. “But the moment you come down those cliffs, you will be shot. Do you understand?”

Murmurs, both from the squatters and from his own side.

“All we want is food!” someone shouted.

“You won’t get it. We won’t feed you. So if that’s what you’re expecting, turn around and go back.”

“Go back where?”

Jacob didn’t answer this question. “But you’re welcome to stay up here. Fish, hunt. But I’m warning you, there’s only death for you in the valley. We can defend ourselves. And we will.”

“
Now
you can,” said the woman who’d scratched him. “How about when the rest of us arrive? You can’t fight us all off.”

“What do you mean, the rest?”

“Don’t play dumb. You know where we came from. The Green River camp. Everyone there knows you’re hoarding food. You could feed half the country if you weren’t so damn selfish.”

The shouts started up again. People banged their buckets.

It wasn’t the impossible notion that Blister Creek could feed crowds of hungry refugees that caught Jacob. It was the fear that the refugees in Green River thought it could. His wife had spent time at the camps last fall and described the government-run refugee camp as a vast city of plywood and corrugated metal. Tens of thousands strong and growing with every refugee-filled train.

“That’s ridiculous. We don’t have that kind of food. Who told you we did?”

More shouts of anger, more banging buckets.

“The army stopped feeding the camp,” the woman said when the noise died down. “You either starve to death or you go look for food. Most are coming here. We’re only the first. The strong ones. The rest will be here soon.”

Green River was in the eastern part of the state, across the inhospitable terrain of the Colorado Plateau. Across deserts and mountain ranges that offered little food, and were torn by war and infested with bandits. If what this woman said was true, most of the refugees would die before they came within a hundred miles of Blister Creek. But there were two hundred people standing in front of him that proved it could be done. Even one person in ten getting through was too many. One in a hundred, too many.

“And that’s just the start,” the woman said. “They’ll be coming from Salt Lake, from Denver, from Las Vegas. Everyone knows. You’ll have a million people here by the end of the summer. So you have no choice. Either you start feeding us now, or we’ll wait until there are enough of us and we overwhelm you.”

“I told you—” Jacob began.

“Our numbers are doubling every day,” the woman said. “You do the math.”

“And a plague of locusts did fall upon the land of Egypt,” Stephen Paul murmured.

Jacob looked at his own people. Anger in their eyes. And fear. They were ready. One word from his mouth and it would be a massacre. Kill them all, then burn their camp. Then man the bunkers and hold out against the quarantine, the plague of refugees. Mow them down until they stopped coming.

What choice did he have? He had to protect the valley for his wife, his children, his brothers and sisters, his cousins, uncles, aunts. His people. Every man, woman, and child in Blister Creek counted on him. He had to drive these invaders away, or watch his own people die of disease and starvation.

And he still couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill these refugees in cold blood. If that was the will of the Lord, then the Lord had chosen the wrong man. Jacob lifted his hand to order the others back into their trucks.

And that’s when his eyes drifted toward the shore of the reservoir. Two yellow pesticide drums sat in the shallows, lapped by the gentle waves. Six more lay side by side higher up the bank. Fish heads and guts sloshed up on shore, where people had been cleaning their catch and tossing the entrails back into the water.

Except they weren’t catching the fish so much as poisoning them. That’s what the pesticide was. The refugees must have found chemicals at the abandoned farms of central Utah and hauled them south to the reservoir. Where they promptly dumped them into the water to wait for fish to float to the surface.

The same water that circulated through the reservoir. That came down the creek into the valley. That irrigated the fields and replenished the wells throughout the valley. The water they drank. And these people were poisoning it.

Why should they care? They drank from the creek upstream, not the reservoir like Blister Creek. And they were hungry—this was the quickest way to get fish.

Two drums used, six more to go.

This cannot stand. There is no reasoning with these people. There is no compromise.

“Enough,” Jacob said. Then, in a louder voice, “Enough!” He glared at the crowd of refugees. “You will clear out of here. All of you. We will return in the morning, and if you are not gone—”

He hadn’t fully formed his threat when a gunshot rang out. Suddenly, refugees were screaming and diving for cover. Others surged forward, lifting weapons, fists, hunks of rock, or strips of rubber tires. A bullet whizzed past his head. Another smacked into the side of his truck.

David dragged Jacob back. Then he jumped forward and lowered his assault rifle. He emptied the magazine on full auto. Other saints dropped to one knee or took cover behind truck bumpers. Jacob looked for the enemy who’d fired the shots, but the refugees were already in full retreat, and he couldn’t pick out what had happened.

“Hold your fire!” Jacob shouted.

The gunfire ceased. At least a dozen refugees lay bleeding in the dirt. One woman, her jaw shot off, tried to lift herself off the ground. Jacob holstered his pistol and started toward her.

Stephen Paul and David dragged him back.

“Let me go.”

“You can’t,” David said.

“I’m a doctor. I have to. Damn it, let go!”

Elder Smoot tossed his rifle into the back of a truck and came up to lend his aid in holding Jacob’s arms; he had almost torn himself free. Smoot threw his arms around Jacob and the three men pinned him against the truck.

“Listen to me,” Stephen Paul said. “Brother Jacob, in the name of the Lord, listen!”

Jacob gave up the struggle. He knew what his counselor was going to say. Knew he was right. And couldn’t stand it. The sound of men and women crying for help, only yards away . . .

“We have to go,” Stephen Paul said, “or there will be more shooting, more deaths.”

Jacob looked to David, his brother’s face inches from his own. Compassion and sorrow showed in David’s eyes. Then he looked to Smoot. Righteous anger there, determination. Smoot must be itching to drive forward, to finish it now. Ten minutes of killing and the camp would be no more. Let it stand as a lesson to others who might come. They would find no sanctuary here.

The squatters down by the
shore had broken into two groups. The first kept fleeing, running around the edge of the reservoir for the woods on the far side. They were mostly women and older men, together with a handful of children. The second group was mostly younger men who dove into tents or took refuge behind piles of firewood. Preparing for battle.

A few feet away, David’s wife Lillian fired a shot. A man emerging from a tent fell to the ground, a pistol in hand.

Jacob cast a final, anguished look at the injured people on the ground. None of them were his own. Then he gave orders to retreat.