Hell's Fortress (25 page)

Fernie wheeled her chair out of the kitchen when he came in, directing the troops to set tables and carry platters of beans and roasted chicken to the table. She did a double take as Jacob turned from putting his hat on the peg.

“Paul,” she said to one of Jacob’s half brothers, a boy of about fourteen, “set Jacob a place. Quickly, we’re almost ready to bless the food.”

“No, it’s okay,” Jacob said. “I can set my own place.”

Fernie wouldn’t hear of it, though, and quickly had a place set for him at the head of the main table. She was polite and friendly, but didn’t wheel herself down to eat next to him like she usually did. Instead, she stayed at the far end with the youngest children.

Dinner was a buzz of energy from the children, but Jacob settled them by asking about the work. Did the flax get planted? Who was in charge of tying off the tomato plants? Did he need to look at the injured steer after supper, or was it on the mend?

After dinner, Jacob sat on the porch and sharpened axes and garden shears with his two oldest sons while the sun dropped to the west. It was another gorgeous sunset that used every shade of red, purple, and orange. All across the valley, men would be finishing supper with disapproving wives. Were they arguing? Sharing tender embraces? And what of the women who would be widows by this time tomorrow evening? Did they know, sense somewhere in a black hollow of their stomach that tonight was their last night with their husbands?

“Have you changed your mind?” a soft voice asked behind him.

He turned to see that Fernie had wheeled herself quietly onto the porch while he worked.

“Put the tools away, boys,” he said. “We’ll finish another day.” When they were gone, Jacob swallowed his pride and rose to put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Be safe, please.”

Help us. Please, for the love of all that is good.

They would be so much stronger with the women at their side. This is what the saints had been training for, some of them for a year, others all their lives. To fight and defend this valley, this community, this church. Why would the women hold back now? Couldn’t they see?

He didn’t voice these thoughts. Instead, he nodded. “I will do my best.”

“Are you staying here tonight?”

“Until a quarter to five in the morning. Then David and Elder Smoot are picking me up in the Humvee.”

“You should go to bed early, then.”

“I’m too wired,” he said. “I don’t know if I can sleep.”

“I’ll rub your head. That always relaxes you.”

And it did. After twenty minutes in bed, in his pajamas, resting his aching feet, with Fernie massaging his scalp, his eyes felt heavy and he yawned. He wound the clock and set the alarm, but it was an unnecessary precaution; his body would jolt awake in a few hours with or without the alarm.

Before he allowed himself to sleep, Jacob rolled his wife onto her side so her back was facing him. He reached around, unbuttoned the top three buttons of her nightgown, and slid his hand against her breast. She sighed and nestled into his embrace.

“I love you,” she said. “Don’t forget that, please.”

“I love you too.”

“There’s something I need to tell you before you go to sleep.”

“You don’t need to say it. I know you haven’t changed your mind. I won’t push.”

“Not that, Jacob. Something else.” She took a deep breath, as if tensing herself for some big proclamation.

“Can’t it wait for later?”

“No. In case anything happens to you tomorrow—shh, let me say it—in case anything happens, I want you to know.”

He knew that whatever she had to say he wouldn’t like, but there was apparently no stopping her. “Okay, tell me.”

“I’m pregnant again.”

Jacob closed his eyes and took his own deep breath. “But we were being so careful.”

“It would seem that the rhythm method isn’t one hundred percent effective, Dr. Christianson.”

It was gentle sarcasm, and as she said it, she lifted his hand and kissed it before putting it back against her breast. But there was also a twinge of worry in her tone. She was afraid of his reaction, he could tell.

“Five children. It sounds like a lot. And on top of everything else.”

“This will make three of your own,” Fernie said.

“Daniel and Leah are just as much mine as Nephi and Jake.”

She rolled over with some effort and put a hand against his cheek. “That’s not what I mean. You love those kids and they love you. But I’m happy to have another with you. I’m proud to be carrying on the Christianson line.”

Even under the best of circumstances, it would be a high-risk pregnancy. Fernie’s paralysis was low enough that she would be able to feel contractions and push, but he wondered if he shouldn’t deliver via C-section instead of vaginally, just to be safe.

And what if he wasn’t here to perform it?

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“The timing . . .”

“Jacob,” she said firmly. “We didn’t plan for it, but now it’s here. Do you remember last time this happened? You said the same thing.”

Of course he remembered. He had been working for the FBI, and had infiltrated the Zarahemla cult to extract their agent. And worse, the hospital had suspended him for his ties to polygamy and he’d lost both his income and his home.

“Is now any worse timing?” she asked.

“Maybe not.”

“The Bible says to multiply and replenish the earth.”

“It doesn’t say we have to do it by ourselves.”

“Funny guy.” She kissed him. “This gives you one more reason to be careful tomorrow. Now get some sleep.”

He didn’t think that would be possible, not with this grenade tossed into his lap. On top of all the other emotions boiling inside, he found himself curiously excited. He had three boys, but only one daughter. Maybe it would be another girl.

That was his last conscious thought before his eyes opened several hours later. He grabbed the clock. 4:31. Four minutes before the alarm was set to go off. From outside came the low rumble of a diesel engine. That’s what had awakened him.

Fernie rolled over and her breathing changed as he slipped into his clothes and pulled on his boots, but she didn’t say anything. He put on his wristwatch.

Jacob paused at the door, and said to her in a soft voice, “Wake Sister Lillian. Tell her to get the clinic ready for trauma cases.”

He slipped out of the bedroom. Downstairs, he unlocked the gun safe and strapped on a KA-BAR knife, loaded his pockets with ammunition, then holstered a Glock pistol, grabbed an M16 and a 12-gauge shotgun, and made for the door.

The Humvee waited for him in the street. It was packed with men and the materiel of death and bloodshed.

Elder Smoot sat behind the wheel. As Smoot pulled away, the man prayed aloud, “Thou art my king, O God. Through thee will we push down our enemies. Through thy name will we tread them under that rise against us.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Eliza had hoped to make a run for it at dusk, but artillery was pounding the north and west side of the city like a thunderstorm rolling in from the desert. The companions hunkered down to wait it out.

Fayer by now was in a bad way. She drank gallons of their precious water, but it was like there was a straight pipe from her mouth to her backside. Every few minutes, while the others looked away, she squatted over a bucket, filling it with a splattering sound like a pissing horse. After she finished, Grover would take the bucket and cart it away to empty elsewhere in the warehouse.

But Eliza wouldn’t risk driving out of their hiding spot until the fighting subsided. The artillery rocked the factory again and again. Part of the ceiling collapsed. Twice in the night, vehicles rumbled by outside the factory warehouse. Small-arms fire came and went. Then came quiet that would only last a few minutes.

It was maybe four in the morning when she couldn’t wait any longer. The fighting hadn’t ended, but it had moved out of their neighborhood. That might be temporary, but she figured they had another hour before dawn caught them in the open. She wanted to put at least fifty miles between themselves and the city before the sun burned over the desert plain.

They’d been waiting outside the claustrophobic interior of the armored car. Eliza called over Steve, Miriam, and Grover. “Correct me if I’m wrong—I don’t have military experience—but here’s what I’m thinking. I’ll drive. Steve and Miriam man the machine guns. Grover, you can snipe with a rifle. If we get in a big firefight, drop your gun and help with ammo.” She turned her flashlight in Grover’s direction. “You can do that, right?”

He nodded, pale but determined-looking.

“I’m going to plow down anything in our way,” she continued. “This thing can take a lot of abuse.”

“Depends,” Steve said. “Small-arms fire is no problem, and we can muscle aside any standard vehicles blocking our way. But a tank shell will flatten us. You see a tank, or anti-tank guns, you get the hell out of there. As for machine guns, the wrong kind of ammo will punch through our armor, so don’t get us in a position where we’re slugging it out.”

Miriam shone her own flashlight along the exterior of the armored car, as if looking for weaknesses in the plate armor. “Your old prepper did a fine job. Shame he isn’t around to see how it performs.” She stood off the front bumper. “Look at how the two main guns have almost a 180-degree radius of fire.” She looked up at Eliza. “But the right side is better. More range of motion and stronger armor. If we get bogged down, show that side. Like a battleship giving a broadside. You understand?”

“Got it,” Eliza said. Give a broadside, don’t slug it out—it was inconsistent advice from the two former FBI agents.

“With any luck, we won’t get in any firefights,” Steve said.

“It will take more than luck to get us home in one piece,” Miriam said. She glanced at Fayer, who rested against the front bumper. “It’s going to take divine intervention.”

“Are we ready?” Eliza asked.

The woman struggled to her feet.

“I was hoping Chambers would show up,” Steve said. “Guess he didn’t make it.”

They helped Fayer inside and tried to fashion her a private corner behind some ammo cans. There she could continue with her miserable rituals. The old survivalist had packed in blankets and they wrapped her in one of them to try to make her more comfortable. Then they went outside and tore down the final flats of equipment to clear a path for the truck. Eliza climbed into the driver’s seat.

Steve sat shotgun. “You know how to work this thing, right?”

“Please,” she said with considerably more bravado than she felt. “I learned how to drive a tractor before I could ride a bike. This is nothing.”

“In that case, let’s get going.”

She kissed him. “This is going to be easy. What do they call it in the military? A milk run?”

“Great, now quit stalling, kid, and get us out of here.”

He went back with the others to man the guns. As Eliza slipped the vehicle through the entry into their hiding place and onto the open warehouse floor, they slid open specially cut slots in the side of the armored car to expose the guns. Eliza’s window was a narrow strip of bulletproof glass with limited view. She risked the headlights until she reached the front of the loading bay.

It took all four of the healthy people to drag over the heavy loading ramp and put it in place. When it was done, Eliza eased the truck down it and the others jumped back inside when she had reached the asphalt outside.

It was still dark and she didn’t dare use the lights, so she groped her way through the industrial park by the glow of the burning city.

Eliza had almost reached the end of the complex and the open road when a man came sprinting along the right side of the vehicle. He carried a rifle in his hands and it looked like he was trying to get ahead of them so he could shoot them straight on.

Startled by the suicidal attacker, she jerked on the wheel to veer away, but before she could get past, he leaped in front, fumbling with his weapon.

“I got him,” Miriam said in a grim tone. The breech bolt snicked back.

“Hold your fire!” Steve yelled. “Stop the truck.”

Confused, Eliza hit the brake. With so much weight, the vehicle came to a sluggish halt. Even before it did, Steve was tossing open the back doors and hopping down. He came around to the front of the truck and clapped the man on the shoulders.

Miriam walked up to Eliza and shone her flashlight through the glass. “I don’t believe it. It’s Chambers.”

Chambers was a tall man, almost Steve’s height, but so thin and lanky, he looked like a child’s drawing of a stick figure with clothes draped over him. After losing his job with the FBI, Steve had developed a cool relationship with his former partners—including Chambers—but there was none of that now as Eliza’s fiancé led the man into the back of the armored car.

“Go figure,” Chambers said. He sounded gruff, but was grinning wide enough to split his face. Already he was reaching for a water bottle and tearing open one of the boxes with vacuum-sealed beef jerky. “You bozos almost left me, didn’t you?”

“What? We’d never do that,” Steve said. “We were going to drive around the city hanging lost FBI agent fliers.”

Chambers snorted.

“What took you so long?” Miriam asked.

“The usual. Gunfire, missile strikes.” His eyes fell on Fayer. “Oh, crap.”

Fayer looked up at him through bleary, sunken eyes, her face shrouded monk-like by the blanket. “Crap. Yes, you could say that.”

“What happened?”

Eliza didn’t wait for the explanations, but returned to her seat and shifted into gear. All her attention fixed on the view through that three-inch-by-twenty-inch portal of bulletproof glass, she pulled onto the road. Steve came up front.

“Chambers has the other machine gun. I thought I’d help you navigate.”

“Left here? Then what was it again?”

“Drive to Palms Boulevard and take another left,” he said.

“Wish I could risk the headlights. I can’t see a blasted thing.”

The light was marginally better when she got to Palms. A row of glass offices to her left reflected enough of the burning city to illuminate her path. Palms was a divided, two-lane road with a xeriscaped median, now overgrown with cactus thickets and desert weeds. Most of the palm trees had died, some torn up by gunfire. Abandoned, gutted cars littered their way, and the pavement glittered with thousands of spent casings.

Eliza made it two more blocks before she reached a blocked intersection, so strewn with rubble and wrecked vehicles that she had to go up on the sidewalk and then shove aside an overturned sedan with the machine’s nose. This bought her another block, when she came upon a looming black shape in her path. There would be no pushing this aside. It was a battered tank with its treads blown off, surrounded by other dead and smoldering military vehicles, and several wrecked field guns. Dead soldiers littered the ground. Another man lay draped over the tank turret.

“Turn back,” Steve said. “We’ll cut around that last block.”

She didn’t like the idea of backtracking, in case they’d been spotted. And when she got there, she liked even less the narrow, apartment-lined street that would get them around the blocked intersection. It was the perfect place for snipers. There were more cars, some of them inconveniently placed. She got around the first several, but had to push aside a little Hyundai that was perfectly positioned to block the entire street. It groaned with metal on metal.

Something clanged against the side of the truck like the sound of a ball-peen hammer striking a metal drum. Then two more shots pinged against the right side. Tentative, probing. Chambers answered with three short bursts through his side gun port. Suddenly, a hailstorm opened up. Small-arms fire rattled them from every side.

Eliza turned on the lights and rumbled to the end of the block. She rounded the corner to get them parallel with Palms Boulevard, then killed the headlights when she got back to Palms and slowed to a crawl.

It was a narrow escape and nobody spoke for several seconds.

Steve turned on a penlight and studied a map. “Get us onto Dwight Eisenhower and then find a place to pull over. I want to ask Chambers about the map. He knows Vegas better than I do.”

That was five more blocks. Once onto Dwight Eisenhower, Eliza maneuvered to a place of shelter between a city bus with missing tires and a concrete retaining wall painted over with graffiti. More drainage canals like the ones that had carried them from the hotel lay on the other side of the retaining wall. She killed the engine.

Steve went back to talk to Chambers. Miriam also wanted to know about changing ammo. They had a can of incendiaries that might be useful as they faced vehicles on the highways.

Grover picked his way forward while the others were talking. “The lady agent isn’t doing very well.”

“Worse than before?” Eliza asked.

“She wouldn’t drink any water. I’m not sure she’s fully conscious.”

Eliza rubbed at her temples. She’d dozed in the stifling heat of the warehouse the previous afternoon, but was now on her second full night without a good, unbroken stretch of sleep. Her mind was too fuzzy to deal with this new information.

“Are all the diarrhea pills gone?”

“There’s one left. I don’t think they’re helping.”

“I don’t know what else to do. Grind it up and dissolve it in one of the water bottles. See if you can get her to drink a little. Also, while we’re stopped, empty her bucket. It stinks, and we don’t want it sloshing out and getting the rest of us sick.”

“All right.” As he rose from the passenger seat, he winced and rubbed at his left arm.

“Are you okay?”

“That stupid poker chip shrapnel. It’s nothing—I don’t have the right to complain, given the circumstances.”

She glanced back at the three agents—former and current—still arguing about the guns. What was taking them so long? And why hadn’t they settled it before leaving the factory?

“Here, let me take a look.”

Grover wasn’t as shy this time. He rolled up his sleeve and she unwound the bandage. It had absorbed a little blood, but not too much. Grover was right; he should count himself lucky. However, the wound itself looked worse than it should. She grabbed the penlight Steve had placed in the coin holder and examined his arm more carefully.

The wound oozed pus and had a sour smell. She chewed her lip.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s infected.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing, but it’s moving pretty quickly. Like Fayer’s cholera. There’s a risk of gangrene, of sepsis—I don’t want to mess around. Get me iodine from the first aid kit. And some matches. Also, cotton gauze.”

He made a sound in the back of his throat. “What are you going to do?”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad,” she lied. “Go on, hurry. Unless you want to lose your arm.”

Grover pushed past Steve as the man came back up front.

“Chambers says the 95 is crawling with Bear Republic troops,” Steve said. “He thinks they’re preparing a push into downtown.”

“We don’t have a choice—we have to go north. If we can get past that military base, Highway 93 is clear all the way up the east side of Nevada.”

“At least it was a couple days ago,” Miriam said, also making her way up from the back. “For all we know, the federal troops have sealed the road.”

“Why would they bother?” Eliza asked. “There’s nothing in that part of the state. Badlands. A few abandoned towns. Any troop movement is flowing east-west. Maybe up from Arizona.”

“Chambers thinks there’s a gap directly north of the city,” Steve said. “A no-man’s-land between the two armies. Nothing big—maybe a few hundred yards wide.”

“If we find it,” Eliza said, “we can shoot the gap.”

“That’s one heck of a gamble. We could just as well be volunteering for bombardment from both sides.” He let out his breath. “But, okay. I don’t see much choice. Miriam?”

“I say we go for it.”

Grover arrived with the gauze, the matches, and the iodine. Eliza took them and gently tugged him forward. He flinched, like a kid being pushed into the dentist chair. When he was past Miriam and next to Steve, she took his wrist.

“Hold him,” she told them.

They grabbed Grover before he could jerk back.

“Listen to me,” she said in a firm voice. “This is deadly serious.”

Grover trembled. “What are you going to do?”

“What would you do if your lamb had an infected wound and you didn’t have any access to antibiotics?”

Eliza rolled up his shirt while Steve held his arm still. Miriam held his other arm behind his back.

“You’re going to cauterize it.”

“A lamb will kick and scream,” Eliza said, “because it doesn’t understand. You understand. You won’t do that, right?”

“Can’t you pour iodine on it and see how it looks in the morning?” Grover’s trembling grew more violent, but to his credit, he didn’t cry or try to fight free.

“No, Grover. I’m sorry, but it’s moving too quickly. I’m not a doctor, but I’ve learned enough to know there’s a better than even chance that if we don’t stop this, by tomorrow my brother will be breaking out the bone saw. You’ll have a stub instead of an arm.”