Hell's Fortress (26 page)

Eliza tore off a strip of gauze. She struck a match and held it against the cotton. It caught slowly, the flames licking up the sides. Grover watched with his eyes bulging. The firelight reflected off his boyish face. She twisted the gauze to keep the fire from consuming it all at once. Then, when the flames had grown to the point where she only held the bottom part with pinched fingers, she slapped it onto Grover’s wound.

He bucked and screamed. The others held him fast. When the burning gauze nipped at her fingers, she used the butt of the penlight to hold it in place. The fire smothered between the end of the flashlight and the flesh of the young man’s arm.

When it was out, Steve opened the door and tossed the still-smoking gauze onto the pavement, then waved the door open and closed to get the smoke out of the cabin.

Grover wept silently. “I’m sorry. I tried not to scream.”

Steve patted his shoulder. “No worries, man. Any one of us would have done the same thing.”

Eliza shone the light on the blackened flesh of the wound. She took some cotton balls and dabbed at it with some iodine. When she had it cleaned off, she took another look, intending to wrap it up and be done with him. What she saw was a job half-finished.

“Grover,” she said slowly, reluctantly.

He whipped his head up from the wound to stare at her through watering eyes.

“I’m afraid I have to do it one more time.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

A caravan of trucks waited for Jacob on the shoulder of the highway near the base of the Ghost Cliffs. The final vehicle was the military Humvee. Jacob hopped down and approached it slowly, dreading what lay ahead.

This was the same vehicle and weapon used against Blister Creek two summers ago when Taylor Kimball Junior and his cult made one final assault to take over the church. Even with advance notice, the FBI hadn’t managed to get field agents in to stop the attack. That had been Jacob’s first warning that something was seriously wrong in the outside world.

David was up top with the machine gun. He rose from behind the gun shield and gave Jacob a curt nod. The darkness hid his expression. Was it anxious? Eager? Jacob returned the nod. He climbed in the driver side.

Smoot rode shotgun—quite literally, in this case, with his twelve-gauge across his lap. Two of his sons sat in the back, together with the Hawthorne brothers. The Hawthornes were sober, middle-aged men, several years older than Jacob, each with two wives and numerous children. Their beards showed the first hints of gray. All four men in the back carried assault rifles and were surrounded by ammo cans.

Jacob pulled into the road. As he did, headlights kicked on all around. Dozens of vehicles pulled in behind him. They carried more than two hundred armed men. Fathers with their sons. Brothers, cousins. White-bearded patriarchs who remembered when Blister Creek lay off the electric grid and who had lived to see those days return. Teenage boys who had been handling firearms since they were five years old, but had never before been asked to gun down a fellow human being.

Jacob feared that many of them would not return.

“We have a lot of trucks,” Smoot said. “Plenty of light and noise to warn our enemies.”

“It’s still faster and safer than attacking on horse,” Jacob said. “Anyway, that’s part of the plan. A noisy assault up the highway with the main force, while we sneak the Humvee around the reservoir to attack from the rear.”

“And a lot of fuel to burn.” A note of suspicion tinged Smoot’s voice.

“This is what we’ve been saving it for.”

“I counted sixty-two vehicles.”

“Sounds about right.”

“They all gassed up at your place, from what I hear. Filled the tanks. That’s got to be better than a thousand gallons of fuel.”

“Do you want to get up there and run out of fuel?”

“But only diesel, that’s the funny thing. I’ve got a good truck I’ve been working on to make it battle worthy, but it takes ethanol. We distilled some, but you wouldn’t let me take ethanol from the bishop’s storehouse.”

“We need it for other purposes.”

“But you can spare diesel?” Smoot pressed. “Why is it so plentiful?”

“Leave it alone, Elder. We have other worries.”

“Are you the only one who knows?”

Knows what?
Jacob started to ask. He stayed silent instead. His fiction was unraveling.

“Because if something happens to you,” Smoot continued, “I don’t want the secret to be lost.”

Jacob decided to come clean. “Others know.”

“Who?”

“David, Miriam, Eliza, and Stephen Paul.”

“How much fuel are we talking about?”

“A lot. My father was stockpiling diesel in his last few years.”

Smoot nodded. “He was a true prophet. He knew what was coming.”

“He also bought a million dollars in U.S. savings bonds six months before his death. That was less prescient. Those bonds are worth nothing.”

“No, no, it makes perfect sense. Abraham was preparing for contingencies. He understood when, but only the Lord knew the how. Where is the diesel stored, Brother?”

“I’d rather not say. The fewer people who know, the better.”

“But you trust the others. Why not me? I am one of the senior members of the quorum.”

Jacob turned from peering out the windshield. “Do I need to answer that?”

Smoot narrowed his lips until they disappeared behind his mustache and beard. “I made mistakes. I learned my lesson.”

“Did you?”

“I sustain you as prophet, seer, and revelator. I didn’t always trust you—I thought you were young and soft. Weak in testimony, and not worthy to wear your father’s boots. And what a time to have a weak leader. That’s why I did what I did. That’s why I didn’t trust the Lord or His prophet. But I have seen you move, Brother Jacob. Cautiously, sometimes too gently, yes. But with conviction. And so I will stand by your side as the mouth of hell yawns before us.”

“If that’s true, why do you push me so hard?” Jacob asked.

“Do you want a man who bows his head at every word out of your mouth? Is that what you’re looking for?”

Of course it wasn’t. Jacob didn’t want that from his wife, his sister, his brother. And what about Miriam, or Rebecca? Even Stephen Paul could push him back. But it was different coming out of Smoot’s mouth.

The elder reminded Jacob of his father. Of an earlier, harder generation. One of Smoot’s sons had died in the drone attack, another had gone missing, yet the man didn’t complain or carry on. Instead, here he was, ready to sacrifice himself and two more of his boys for Blister Creek.

Meanwhile, Jacob’s own family was safe at home. Yes, his children were young, but in three more years Daniel would be as old as some of the kids in this caravan. When that day came, would Jacob shove a rifle into Daniel’s hands and drive him into the desert to battle with squatters and bandits?

“No,” he said at last. “I’m not looking for blind obedience. Tomorrow—assuming we get out of this thing unscathed—I’ll share the details of my father’s diesel storage.”

The caravan snaked its way up to the cliffs with the Humvee in the lead. Jacob fell under attack the instant he rounded the final turn. Muzzle flashes came from the left and right, with even fiercer fire from the road ahead, where someone had dragged a downed tree across the road. Men stood from behind the tree to shoot. Bullets ricocheted off the Humvee.

From above, David squeezed off bursts from the machine gun. Tracer bullets guided his fire. Smoot and the men in the back stuck their guns out of gun ports and added their fire. In less than a minute they had suppressed the enemy attack and driven the survivors from the road.

Jacob pulled forward to let the rest of the caravan catch up. He hit the floodlight and turned it into the partially hacked-down woods to the left and along the shore of the reservoir. Two bodies lay in the road, and another stretched over the downed tree trunk, almost cut in two. The violence was sickening.

“Easy as shearing sheep,” Smoot said. “We get that tree off the road and we could roll straight into camp and end it before dawn.”

“No, it could be a trap to lure us in. We stick with the plan.”

“All right, then let’s go.”

Jacob checked his watch. It was now 5:18 a.m. He lifted the CB radio. “Five thirty-five. Over.”

Other radios in other trucks would be picking up his message and spreading it. Jacob and the others in the Humvee would split right to creep around the reservoir. In seventeen minutes they would rejoin the battle on the far side of the reservoir. The others had better be ready to move.

He cut his lights and turned the Humvee off the highway to the frontage road that circled the reservoir in a counterclockwise direction. Behind him, men jumped down from pickups and fanned out with guns at the ready. Under their cover, other men connected chains to the downed tree to winch it out of the way.

Using the glint of moonlight off the placid waters of the reservoir as his guide, Jacob crunched along the dirt road at two or three miles per hour. They reached the penstock that led down to their hydro turbines, which provided the largest, steadiest supply of electricity for the valley. The turbines were below, at the base of the cliffs, where the head of water was strongest, but someone could have messed with the penstocks themselves. Destroy them and the cobbled-together electrical grid below would fail. Jacob considered it fortunate that nothing like that had happened.

But if the enemy had failed to consciously harm the valley, their unconscious actions had done plenty of harm. Debris had almost clogged the sluice gate into the penstocks.

Jacob checked his watch. Ten minutes until the scheduled attack. He’d be around the reservoir in less than five. He warned the others in the vehicle, called up to David to alert him of his intentions, then hopped out of the Humvee.

The first thing he noticed was the bodies in the water. There were dozens, mostly naked. They were thin, starved, some rotting and chewed up by fish or scavengers. Others had distended abdomens bloated from expanding intestinal gasses. The squatters must be simply tossing the dead into the reservoir, where they gradually drifted across to pile against the grating. Other refuse floated among the bodies: branches, discarded cloth diapers, a pair of pants, plastic bags, and a battered cooler.

Smoot came out. “Disgusting. My hogs care more about keeping clean.”

“These people are starving. They have bigger worries than the integrity of our water supply.”

“Maybe so. But we don’t. We’re damn lucky there hasn’t been an outbreak of cholera in the valley. But there will be if we don’t stop it now.”

Jacob didn’t answer. The man was right.

“They shot Clancy Johnson in the leg when he was hunting deer east of the reservoir,” Smoot added.

“I know, I treated the wound.”

“And someone was up in the cliffs yesterday shooting down at Yellow Flats.”

“Sister Rebecca told me that. She also said the range is too great and they’re wasting their ammo.”

“We should go,” Smoot said.

Jacob hesitated. There was still time to radio the others, call it off.

“Brother Jacob, for the love of all that is holy. We have to do it. There’s no other choice.”

“Five twenty-nine,” David called from atop the Humvee. “We have six minutes.”

The two men returned to the vehicle and continued to inch around the reservoir. With every roll of the wheels the leaden feeling in Jacob’s gut grew heavier. Gunfire sounded on the opposite side of the reservoir. The main Blister Creek force. Muzzle flashes answered from the darkness on the hillside and the lakeshore in what was proving to be a spirited defense. The gunfire from his own forces was stronger, but not overwhelmingly so. Jacob’s caravan looked to be bogged down, and was no doubt taking casualties.

Campfires lit his way as he flanked the camp from the east side of the reservoir. True to the boasts of the squatters during the previous confrontation, the camp had metastasized since his last visit. It spread all along the far shore and into the woods to the north. The forest itself was gutted, replaced by hundreds of tents and lean-tos. If the population above the valley hadn’t yet outstripped the number of people living down below, it would soon.

The road didn’t completely circumnavigate the reservoir, but ended a few hundred yards short of the camp. There had been a dock here once for canoes and small fishing boats, but the decking was gone, the planks apparently pulled up for firewood, leaving only the pilings sticking out of the water. The gentle slope between the missing docks and the camp was a trammeled, muddy meadow.

Jacob checked his watch. One minute.

“Time to go.”

One of Bill’s sons climbed up above to help David feed ammo into the .50-cal. When he was secured, Jacob pressed the pedal to the floor and lumbered toward the camp.

For the first few seconds he thought he’d break through undetected. Then a torch waved to his right and the air filled with flashes of light. Most of it missed the dark shape lurching toward the squatters, but a few shots pinged off the front and right side. The Humvee did not yet return fire.

Moments later, they burst into camp. Jacob gritted his teeth and plowed into tents and mowed over lean-tos. People scrambled out of the way or simply cowered. Others stood upright and shot at them with pistols and shotguns.

And now David answered. An arc of tracer bullets cut like a glowing knife in big, sweeping movements. Smoot and the others opened their doors periodically to gun down the closer opposition. Smoot’s son tossed grenades into the night, which exploded in flashes of light and ear-splitting booms.

Jacob found a flattened stretch between a line of tents, where he accelerated and swung in a loop through the camp. Gunfire erupted all around them, as if they’d kicked over a giant hive of wasps that darted in, desperate and stinging. Everywhere he looked, more gunfire. Jacob’s companions mowed down the shooters without mercy, and anyone else who moved as well.

David stopped shooting and screamed down for more ammo. The Hawthorne brothers passed up fresh ammo cans while the other men—Jacob included—fired out the sides of the Humvee to keep them clear. The enemy took advantage of the quieted machine gun to rush in with guns blazing. Calmly, the men inside the vehicle picked them off.

And by now the trucks from Blister Creek had broken through to the west and the gunfire from that direction was more intense than the slaughter on this side. Jacob turned the Humvee around as David started up the .50-cal again, this time with shorter, more carefully considered bursts. No longer worried about giving away their position, Jacob turned on the spotlight and swung it through the camp as he drove. Every place he illuminated, people were dying. His light caught a woman with a child in her arms and he tried to turn the light away, but not before bullets dropped them to the ground.

Dear Lord, wouldn’t it ever stop?

Not until you call them off.

Jacob could finish it now in one final, bloody orgy. Give the orders to go back and forth over the land until there was nothing left but bodies.

What would that accomplish? The dead already numbered in the hundreds. Many more would die from their wounds. People were fleeing north, away from the reservoir, and the enemy gunfire was flagging. Soon the battle would be nothing more than shooting people in the back.

He picked up the radio. “It’s over. Pull back. Everyone, back.”

“What are you doing?” Smoot shouted. He stood at one of the gun ports with his shotgun shoved out. “We’re winning. Don’t retreat!”