Hell's Fortress (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Eliza and Grover were waiting down the highway when Miriam returned. She was riding a horse and leading a second. It had been an hour since the gunshots—first three suppressed rifle shots, then a shot from Miriam’s pistol—and at least two hours since she’d left the other two hidden in a rocky gully so she could double back to watch the camp. It had been easy to spot. Miriam was certain the sniper would find the camp as well.

That shot from the Glock said she was right, but Eliza was still relieved to hear her sister-in-law calling in a soft voice that she was coming. Miriam slid from the horse. She wore a new hunting knife on a sheath and carried a new rifle tied to her saddle.

“It was Joe Kemp,” she said.

“What?”

“I should have guessed. He told Jacob he was a sniper.”

Miriam shared the man’s story, but it didn’t make much sense. Apparently Kemp had met Alacrán, the smuggler turned bandit who’d tried to rob Blister Creek of nine thousand gallons of diesel fuel last fall. The smuggler had armed Kemp and sent him off on horseback to track them down. Kemp resupplied in Cedar City and raced ahead to cut them off on the road.

“And he tracked us all this way, why?” Eliza said. “Because he blames my brother for his mother’s death? That’s crazy. Jacob tried to save her life.”

“Not hard enough, apparently.”

“But Kemp is dead now, right?”

“No. I let him live.”

Grover stiffened next to Eliza. “You mean he got away?”

“He didn’t, so calm down. He’s not coming after us.” Miriam sighed. “It’s dark and I’m cold. I’ll explain on the road.”

Within a few minutes they were riding south by the light of the moon and the red glow on the horizon. Miriam filled in the missing details as they traveled. Kemp had gunned down the three campers, which allowed her to pinpoint his exact location on the hill and take him prisoner. Instead of killing him, she’d shot him in the leg to force him to surrender the information about Alacrán, then left him with food and water to find his way out of the desert.

“But as long as we’re on horse and he’s injured,” Miriam said, “there’s not much chance he’ll catch up to us. That’s why I felt justified in sparing his life.”

“I suppose that executing him wouldn’t have helped matters,” Eliza said, reluctantly.

She was shaken by the thought that three innocents had died, on top of the haunting image of Trost staring at the sky with his forehead a ruin, but the idea of Kemp still alive to their rear didn’t fill her with confidence.

“I am not getting soft, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“She’s not implying that,” Grover said. “She’s saying there’s enough killing in the world without you adding to it. Bad enough that you shot him and left him to die.”

“And what would you have done?” Miriam said. “Given him a kitten and fluffed his pillows?”

“Leave him alone,” Eliza said. “Anyway, that’s not what I was saying.”

“Do
you
think I was too hard?” Miriam asked.

“No,” Eliza said. “I think you were too soft. Kemp murdered Trost. He was already our enemy, and now you’ve shot him, but left him alive. If he survives we’re bound to face him again sooner or later.”

Miriam looked surprised at this, and a little pleased, as well. “I thought that too. My first instinct was to finish the job. The only tragedy would be the loss of a bullet. But the Lord spoke it in my heart. I had no choice but to obey.”

“Spoke what?” Eliza asked, suspicious.

“He told me to let the man live. Kemp will be spared if he leaves us alone. If not, he is sealed unto death.”

Eliza had no answer for this, so she fell silent. The others followed her lead. They continued south. Not long now. Another day at most. Steal fresh supplies in Vegas and then make for California.

The blacktop was a ribbon of ink across the desert. The southern horizon burned and the rumble of artillery seemed to redouble in ferocity. About an hour later a jet roared overhead. Soon after it passed, the wind shifted. It suddenly smelled of burning rubber and fuel, and something metallic that left a bitter taste.

“It smells like hell,” Miriam said in a flat voice.

Kemp made himself a leg splint from two straight branches broken from a scrubby tree and strips of fabric chewed off his shirt. He found another branch to use as a cane.

Fueled by his anger, he hobbled down the highway. He should rest, should concentrate on finding food and a source of water so he could camp out for a few days and heal. Instead he continued, one agonizing step after another. Up ahead, he guessed, his enemies would be talking over their plans. Maybe he could catch them before they left. Then they’d be sorry.

He didn’t make it more than a half mile before he grew weak and shaky. What was wrong with him? He wasn’t bleeding that hard. The wound hurt like hell, but he could handle pain. He stumbled and fell to his knees. His breath came out in a hiss and he ground his teeth together to keep from screaming.

When he put his hand down to his leg, he was terrified to discover that so much blood had streamed out that his pant leg was wet and gummy all the way to his ankle. It hurt so bad it was almost numb and he hadn’t noticed that the bleeding had increased. Why? It had only been oozing before.

Of course, you idiot. You didn’t give it a chance to clot and scab over.

And all the walking kept tearing it open afresh. His pulse up with the exertion, every beat of his heart had forced more blood from the wound.

Get the straps from the brace. Make a tourniquet.

The fabric was slick with blood and the knots so tight from shifting back and forth as he hobbled that he couldn’t get them undone with his shaking fingers. He lay prone on the pavement and tried to regain his strength. He took a swig of water from his canteen, but it turned sour in his stomach and he puked it up. His dizziness spread and the pain eased from his leg.

Now that he was weak and fading, he could only curse at himself. Why hadn’t he waited until his leg healed? Why hadn’t he given up the whole thing? These polygamists—what did they matter? He was going to die if he didn’t stop the bleeding.

He grabbed for his canteen to wash the blood off the knots on the brace. Maybe then he could untie them. Only he’d dropped the canteen when he threw up, and most of the water had spilled onto the road. What was left didn’t rinse away enough to matter. And anyway, the blood kept oozing from the wound. Slowing now, but only because he’d lost so much blood. He didn’t even have the strength to press his hands against the wound to hold in what blood remained.

As he sank back to the pavement with a moan, he remembered the chilling words Miriam had uttered when she left him on the hillside.

You have a chance. But I swear to you, if you come after us, you will die.

When dawn broke, Eliza, Miriam, and Grover found themselves riding across a scorched landscape of toasted juniper bushes surrounded by blackened grass and sagebrush. The hills to the west of the road had burned for miles, while to the east, it looked like the fire had made a couple of attempts to leap the highway but failed to catch. Another mile down, a bomb crater tore a chunk out of the highway. A dead traffic jam of burned semis, twisted family sedans, and motor homes with their roofs peeled off clogged the road south of the crater. All the vehicles faced north, filling both lanes and the shoulders of the road. It stretched for miles.

A caravan of refugees had been fleeing Vegas along this desert highway, only to be stopped by a bomb crater. Then what? Helicopter gunships? Drones? Tanks coming in from the desert? Someone or something had attacked the refugees and annihilated them.

It took almost an hour to pick their way through the sea of wreckage. Even though it had been months, maybe longer, since the attack, the dead lay everywhere. In cars, on the highway. Dead in the ditches on the side of the road, where they’d attempted to flee the fire. Their bodies were too charred to identify gender, and maybe that’s why they hadn’t been carried off by scavengers. Or maybe they were so numerous that even the greediest vultures and coyotes couldn’t eat them all.

The companions reached the small town of Caliente, at the junction of Highway 93 and Route 317. It lay in ruins. The dead sprawled in the street outside a gutted casino, their bodies humming with flies. Most were soldiers, but there were civilians among the dead as well, cut down as collateral damage. Burned pickup trucks and army vehicles lay scattered across the pocked road. An LDS church was a pile of blackened beams beneath a single standing wall. Train tracks came into town and promptly turned to twisted, snaking rails, like a scorched piece of modern art. On the south end of Caliente, the devastation was so complete it was impossible to pick out the streets. Then, beyond the town, craters rendered the road impassible. In the desert, more signs of a battle: two downed helicopters, the blackened hulls of armored vehicles, and thousands of brass shell casings littering the hardpan.

“We should back up to Caliente and continue west on 93,” Miriam said, when they’d found 317 and were headed due south. “That way we’ll bypass Las Vegas to the north.”

“What about resupplying in the city?” Eliza asked. She was chewing on horse meat that had started to taste funny.

“I know what Trost was thinking, and it made sense at the time. But if there’s nobody to rob, nothing to steal, then it’s pointless. We thought we’d run into refugees, but the only ones we’ve seen have been scorch marks on the highway. Plus those three Kemp killed, I guess. There’s no food this way.”

“It’s not like we’re having much luck scavenging the desert,” Eliza said.

“We have the extra horses,” Grover said. He hooked his thumb back at the two animals Miriam had taken from Joe Kemp.

“You’re not sick of horse meat?”

“Makes me want to puke,” he said. “And I’m still having nightmares about killing it. But horse meat sounds a lot better than stumbling into that artillery bombardment.”

Eliza turned it over. She’d thought to trade the horses in Las Vegas. The military could surely put them to use, if nobody else was willing to pay. That was assuming the army didn’t simply seize them. But what if the three of them avoided the city entirely and made for the salt pans of the Nevada desert? Could they find enough water to survive while they salted and smoked horse meat? Maybe the meat of one horse would take them to California, and they could trade Kemp’s other horse there, or butcher it if they ran out of food again.

Before she could decide, a thumping roar sounded to their rear. A military helicopter swooped behind them, long and black. It followed the highway, passed overhead, then doubled back to hover some two hundred feet overhead. The horses reared and snorted at the noise and gusting currents of the rotor wash. After several seconds, the helicopter turned and continued south. It soon disappeared.

They didn’t know what it meant, but nobody wanted to stick around and find out. So they dug their heels into their tired horses and took them off the road. Before they’d made it a mile across the flat desert plain, two Humvees cut from the highway to give pursuit.

Eliza had pulled ahead. Now she slowed down until her companions caught up. “What do we do?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Miriam said. “Get down from the horses. Leave your guns.” When they were down, Miriam drew her hunting knife and handed it to Eliza. She stretched out her braid. “Quick, cut it off.”

Eliza took Miriam’s braid in her left hand and the knife in her right. She hesitated. Miriam had been growing her hair for the past several years, ever since she’d joined the Zarahemla cult as part of an FBI infiltration gone wrong. Even as other women in the community had been modernizing their look, shedding prairie dresses, trimming their hair, and even wearing a touch of lipstick in some cases, Miriam had kept her hair growing like a female Samson. Her hair now stretched halfway down her back, a braid as thick and healthy as the faith that sustained it.

The Humvees kept racing toward them, now a half mile distant and closing quickly. Sunlight reflected off the two windshields and made it impossible to pick out details. But Eliza imagined mounted machine guns up top and men with assault rifles inside.