Hell's Fortress (27 page)

Jacob barely heard him over the buzzing in his ears. He kept seeing the woman with her child, taking a bullet in the back, sprawling over. What about the child? He wanted to be sick. All those injured people back there—he was a doctor, he belonged in a trauma room, not
causing
trauma.

Smoot kept complaining until Jacob got the Humvee out of the camp and was heading back around the reservoir, then the elder sank to the ground with a long, heavy sigh. David came down from the machine gun and took out the first aid kit. He examined his own arm with a penlight.

Jacob glanced back. “You okay?”

“It’s nothing.” His tone was bitter.

Then he slammed his fist into the roof and let out a string of oaths that Jacob hadn’t heard from his brother since the days when he was a Lost Boy, drug addicted and living in Las Vegas.

Smoot grunted with displeasure. “Remember who you are, brother.”

“Leave him alone, Dad,” one of Smoot’s sons said, his voice raw. “We were all thinking it.”

“That woman,” David said. “Why did I have to see her face? That look in her eyes. Oh, God.”

“Proved one thing, anyway,” Smoot said, his own voice flat. “We didn’t need the women after all.”

“Please, all of you,” Jacob said. “Can you be quiet?”

He was so distracted by his own thoughts that he almost forgot to look across the reservoir to see if the others had obeyed his command to retreat. They had. Their lights were on, but the sky was turning gray with the predawn and it was no longer necessary.

Jacob looked at his watch. 5:53. The battle at the camp had lasted less than twenty minutes. And only forty-five minutes had passed since they’d driven into the hills and faced their first opposition. Forty-five minutes, thousands of rounds spent, hundreds dead.

You had to do it. They left you no choice.

Jacob had almost convinced himself of this when the Humvee reached the end of the dirt road and connected with the highway at the top of the cliffs. Some of the other trucks had arrived already and waited, idling, as if wanting him to lead a triumphant procession into Blister Creek. To show the women that their men had protected them. The very thought was ridiculous.

Not to mention dangerous. He could see injured men in the truck beds. They had to be carried to the clinic, where a hellish day of triage and emergency operation awaited. The sooner they brought the wounded to the Christianson compound, the better.

And then he glanced down to the valley floor as the sun rose from behind the eastern mountains. The light caught the golden Angel Moroni atop the temple spire, and turned the sandstone columns of Witch’s Warts brilliant hues of red and orange. Carpets of neatly laid alfalfa and corn sprouted with hopeful green in those fields Jacob had dared plant in defiance of the crippling late frosts.

It was when his gaze fell on the black ribbon of highway south of the valley that he understood why the trucks had stopped. The reason lay south of the gridded streets at the center of town, past the cemetery on the knoll, past the abandoned service station where he’d hidden his father’s hoarded diesel in underground tanks.

Smoke climbed into the air at the south end of the valley. A black trail of ants crawled up the road. It could only be men and equipment entering the valley. A cold, greasy knot formed in the pit of Jacob’s stomach.

While Jacob and his men had been at the reservoir battling squatters, an invasion force was thrusting into the valley from the south.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The second time Eliza cauterized Grover’s wound, he didn’t scream. He only watched Eliza through those awful, bulging eyes. The smell of charred flesh hung in the air when she finished. At least this time she’d done it properly.

When the ugly business was finished, she got them back on the road. Steve guided her through the streets. The main fighting, judging by flashes of lights and thundering explosions, lay to their east, but the west side was still burning, and whenever they had an open view, pockets of gunfire and explosions flashed throughout the city.

The fighting seemed pointless. What were they fighting for? A ruined ghost town in the desert?

Her worry was that she’d round a corner to find themselves in the midst of a full-scale battle. And if the Californians were making a major push, as Chambers seemed to think, what if they’d completely overrun the highway? There might be no gap to thread.

They crept forward another mile before a foot patrol spotted them and dove for cover behind the wreckage of a downed helicopter, then opened fire. Moments later, more gunfire lashed from windows on either side of the street, all targeting the armored car.

Eliza hit the lights and punched it forward while Steve ducked into the back to help Miriam and Chambers. Their two main guns opened up in sharp bursts. Tracer bullets slammed into the buildings on either side.

“Look out!” Miriam shouted.

Something streaked in from Eliza’s left. A rocket-propelled grenade. It hammered into the vehicle with enough force to make it rock off its wheels momentarily.

This is it. This is the end.

The grenade failed to detonate. Chambers let out a string of oaths.

Miriam let loose her gun in a sustained burst that lasted several seconds. “Got you!” Then, to Eliza, she said, “Get us out of here!”

The truck was sluggish to respond. It carried extra armor, water, spare fuel, cans of ammo, boxes of food, and six people. Gunfire rattled against the sides. Most of it was no more effective than a handful of gravel flung against a tin roof. But then a hollow thump-thump-thump started. A fist slammed into them. Tracers lit up the night on either side.

Miriam and Chambers kept firing, while Steve and Grover struggled to keep the guns fed. Eliza was finally picking up speed. She rammed aside two wrecked cars, swerved to get around a burned-out army truck.

At last they rounded the block. The road lay open ahead of them. Gunfire followed, but they shortly outran it. For a long moment there was nothing but heavy breathing and Fayer groaning in the back.

“Thank you, Father in Heaven,” Miriam said in a solemn voice, “for sparing our lives this night.”

The night may have been ending, but surviving the day would be another matter. They hadn’t yet escaped the city, and two hundred and fifty miles lay between them and the safety of Blister Creek.

A block of gutted apartment buildings sat to their right. Dawn’s first light streamed through perforated walls and shattered windows, emerging in glowing shafts through the thick smoke. The tang of burning fuel and plastic seeped into the truck.

Steve returned to the passenger seat. He gave Eliza a wan smile. He reached for the map, but there was no point. Block after block of ruined buildings stretched ahead of them, and in some places it was impossible to tell the former street from the general destruction. There certainly were no more road signs in this part of the town to guide their way.

“Look,” he said. “There’s the highway.”

The smoke was especially thick to the north, but the wind was shifting and it cleared a path. Her heart lifted as she caught a glimpse of the long ribbon of cement and its overpasses cutting through the north of the city. Less than a mile to go.

Then the smoke cleared further and what she saw was a punch to the gut.

An army marched east along the highway, cutting across the vehicle’s path: trucks, horses, men on foot, mules hauling artillery pieces. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Four tanks rolled along the near flank, creeping along at a few miles an hour. It looked like a major offensive by the rebel forces, pushing toward the federal troops that held the north and east of the city.

Then, to her horror, the trailing tank stopped. It swung its turret in their direction.

“Stop the truck,” Steve said.

Eliza hit the brakes. The armored car came to a halt.

“Nobody shoot!” Steve said.

The tank aimed its main gun directly at them. It sat on an overpass, maybe twenty feet above their own road, and five or six blocks distant. The rest of the caravan kept moving while the tank seemed to study them. Eliza braced herself. She would see a flash of light and then it would be over.

The others came up front, with the exception of Agent Fayer.

“One false move and the gunner will blow us to hell,” Steve said. “It won’t miss.”

“Why hasn’t he fired?” Eliza asked.

“Look at all the nonstandard equipment in the column. Our armored car wouldn’t look out of place up there. That gives us cover while he radios for instructions.”

She didn’t know what she was looking at, only that the size of the enemy formation filled her with dread. Two foot soldiers stopped and studied them through binoculars, no doubt looking for identifying marks.

“I can’t sit here forever.”

“They’re using smoke as cover to infiltrate the city,” Steve said. “And that helps us as much as it helps them. When the wind shifts again, make a run for it.”

That made a lot more sense. “Where do I go?”

“Run straight at them,” Steve said. “Get under the overpass where they can’t see us.”

“Are you crazy?” Chambers asked. “Take us back the way we came.”

Miriam snorted. “Into that firefight? You think that’s safer?”

“We could be killed either way,” Steve said. “But they’re not securing the road, they’re trying to force men and materiel into the city. We can wait it out. And if we have to run, we’ll be north of the highway, not south. Eliza, what do you think?”

“I don’t want to backtrack.”

“Then it’s settled,” Miriam said.

All the while, the tank kept its gun trained on them. The smoke wasn’t rolling back over the freeway; it was clearing in the face of the morning winds that so often blew off the desert as the sun warmed the air. Visibility opened both east and west, all the way to the Strip, where columns of smoke still rose hundreds of feet into the air.

“Get back there, all of you,” Steve said. “Get those guns ready.”

For what? They sat in the open, with a tank pointing its main gun at them. If the gunner got the orders, there would be no fighting back. No warning, even.

The armored car shook. It sounded at first like another heavy artillery blast, then the freeway erupted in flames and roiling explosions. Two jets thundered over the freeway, their guns spraying down on the troops. They were in view a split second, then were gone.

“Go! Go! Go!” Steve yelled.

Eliza threw the truck into gear and mashed down on the gas. The vehicle rumbled forward. Little by little, she picked up speed as she approached the freeway underpass. In the smoke and fire and general destruction, she could barely keep on the road.

The smoke pouring from the city fires changed direction again. Suddenly, everything was night and her visibility was only a few feet. They reached the freeway. She passed directly underneath.

And to her relief, the aerial assault hadn’t collapsed the highway and blocked the underpass. Gaping holes opened in the roadbed overhead, marked with jagged blocks of concrete and twisted rebar.

Bodies clogged the road beneath the holes. Most of the soldiers were dead—long dead, with their boots and weapons scavenged—but several had fallen right through the gaps after the bombing. Some were still alive, and struggled to regain their feet. The smoke and dust was so thick, she couldn’t see to avoid them, and the truck tossed them aside, rolling over the dead and dying alike. Nobody attacked them.

The armored car burst out the other side. Eliza plowed through smoke and dust, her visibility terrible for two or three more blocks before the air began to clear.

At last Eliza got a glimpse of the open road. It was a straight shot of double-laned asphalt cutting through squat working-class homes, looted pawnshops, abandoned nail salons, and used-car dealerships. A gutted Pizza Hut sat on one corner, the signage intact but the distinctive red roof blown away.

And the road was clear. No dead bodies, no burned-out vehicles. No tanks. No men at sandbags with machine guns, holding the intersections. Eliza didn’t know where the road led and didn’t care. Steve was studying the map, muttering, and she counted on him to figure it out before they reached the dry hills ahead.

She continued to accelerate until the vehicle was shaking and the wind whistled in through the jagged holes in the armor cut by enemy machine guns. One hole was right next to her knee. A .50-caliber bullet had passed through there. It could have easily taken off her leg.

A few minutes later the city ended. One block it was strip malls and subdivisions and the next it was a brown desert plain dotted with sagebrush and dry grass.

They had escaped Las Vegas. As far as Eliza cared, it could burn to ash behind them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

By the time Jacob reached the bunker at the south end of the valley, the women were already in motion. Jacob could see them streaming in on horseback and crammed in the back of pickup trucks. When they reached the battle, they threw themselves into the ditch on the east side of the highway, or crouched behind piles of volcanic tuff. They fired at the enemies who came riding, rolling, and walking down the road toward them.

The bunker itself, so recently rebuilt, was nearly in ruins again. Rocket-propelled grenades streaked from the back of enemy trucks to slam into its side. Gunfire pounded against the concrete, throwing off chips, and tore up the dirt berms piled up around its sides. The noise inside must have been deafening—the conditions suffocating with smoke and fire.

And yet the bunker’s main gun chugged away with grim determination, turning the south highway into a slaughterhouse. Men and animals lay dead and dying. The gun swept back and forth, cutting through enemies with every pass. But it was a tenuous position, almost overrun as enemies fanned out to flank the building or set up their own positions.

Jacob had gathered every man in town for the reservoir attack and its aftermath. Neglecting the other main approach into the valley had seemed a safe bet as compared to the risks of waging a halfhearted battle in the cliffs.

But apparently, an enemy had been watching. Waiting for the men to abandon their posts. When that happened, they’d attacked in full force. And if not for the vigilance of the Women’s Council, the valley would have been overrun.

All of this went through Jacob’s mind as he roared down the highway behind the wheel of the Humvee. Up above, David fired his gun into the sky as a warning, which sent women scattering from their path. A few, caught by surprise, turned and squeezed off a shot or two before their eyes widened in recognition and they threw themselves clear. Others shouted in joy. One woman with gray braids raised an AK-47 overhead and cheered. She looked like a jihadi in a prairie dress.

As soon as the road was clear of women, David let loose. He didn’t try to conserve bullets, but let it tear, stopping briefly only as his loader struggled to keep the weapon fed with fresh ammo belts. Smoot and the others fired through gun ports as fast as they could shoot and reload.

The Humvee’s arrival broke the back of the enemy attack, or what little remained after it had ground to a halt in the face of the women’s furious defense. Within seconds the assault turned into a full-scale retreat. Women rose from behind their hiding places and fired after them.

Jacob waited for a lull from the bunker, then pulled ahead and swung across the highway a few yards short of the first dead enemies. He jumped down from the Humvee and waved his arms to call a ceasefire.

A caravan of trucks screeched to a stop. Men and women alike shouted at him to continue the pursuit.

“No! We’ve won. It’s over!”

He knew they would disagree. Their bloodlust was up. But enough blood had been shed. If there were any enemies left on either end of the valley, they would surely pause after a pair of crushing defeats.

David climbed down from his gun, and Elder Smoot came out the back of the Humvee. Behind him, Rebecca and Lillian emerged from the bunker and Carol Young followed a moment later. They peeled off earmuffs, staring grimly from blackened faces. Ash coated their hair.

Jacob stared at them. Rebecca, Lillian, and Carol. That was why they’d held on with such tenacity.

Fernie had assigned her three sharpest, most steel-nerved women to the bunker. How long had they held out against withering fire before reinforcements arrived? They were heroes.

Carol spotted Stephen Paul at one of the pickup trucks and they embraced. When he pulled away from his wife, his face was smeared with soot and tears. David and Lillian did the same and just like that the bloodlust faded, almost visibly, from the saints. They hugged and wept. Men clutched wives. Women embraced sister wives.

Jacob ached, knowing that Fernie was home in her wheelchair. She must have been listening to the gunfire, sick with worry. He needed to tell her he was unharmed. And to open the clinic. Men clutched bleeding arms or lay groaning in the backs of pickup trucks. A woman cried for help from the ditch. Already, Jacob was running triage scenarios in his mind.

The time to kill was past. Now it was time to heal.

Once free of the hell that was Las Vegas, Eliza and the others fought their way gradually north and east, coming under fire three times before they hit the empty road. None of the attacks were serious, although once they blew past a pair of sandbagged bunkers without realizing it. Men watched them from behind anti-tank guns capable of blasting them to pieces, but were perhaps as confused by the armored car as had been the Californians on the highway. Nobody fired a shot. One man stared as they passed, jabbering into a radio. Eliza braced for an attack, but it never came.

Soon they were back on the desert highway the original companions had spent so many days traveling the previous week. By eight o’clock that morning they were hooking east into the desolate western desert of Utah. They stopped by a salt pan shimmering with briny pools long enough to pee and gas up. Fayer took a little water from the jugs, but it passed directly through her. The inside of the armored car smelled like a latrine by now. They’d cracked the gun vents to let fresh air flow through, but it provided minimum benefit. As they started up again, Fayer slipped into a delirious slumber and couldn’t be roused.

The four healthy people took turns driving and trying to nap, with limited success. The smell, the heat, and the aftershock of battle kept Eliza dozing in and out of consciousness.

She was driving again a little after ten in the morning when they came east on the dirt road that had taken them away from I-15. They’d covered a stunning amount of ground, more than two hundred miles already, but one final challenge awaited them. Cedar City shimmered against the mountain range on the eastern horizon. Unless something had changed in the past week, Hank Gibson would still be in charge, and nursing his anger about the stolen horses.

Eliza slowed the truck as she filled in Steve and Agent Chambers about what had happened in Cedar City and how they’d bluffed and stolen their way out of town.

“That took guts,” Steve said. “Let me guess, Miriam’s idea?”

“It got us out of there, didn’t it?” Miriam said.

“We could stay west of the freeway, continue north, and try for Parowan,” Eliza said. “There’s a road that cuts over the mountains. We’d enter the valley through the Ghost Cliffs.”

“Is Parowan still occupied?” Steve asked.

“Probably not. If we’re lucky, it’s deserted.”

“How far out of our way?”

“Maybe a hundred miles.”

He looked at the gas gauge and frowned. “We’ll be coming in on fumes as it is. No way we can squeeze another hundred.”

“Cedar City can’t stop us,” Miriam said. “Gibson and all his deputies could stand in the road blasting away and not penetrate this truck.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Eliza said. “With all those army convoys passing through last fall, you’ve got to bet some heavy weaponry found a home in town.”

“Don’t provoke them,” Steve said. “Drive quietly through Cedar City and make for the canyon road. Do you think they’ll attack?”

Eliza chewed on her lip. “Maybe not. They might think it’s the army.”

“Or bandits,” Miriam said. “I say we go for it. If they try to stop us, we make them pay.”

“Chambers, what do you think?” Steve asked.

The FBI agent was eating an MRE while sitting atop a flat of bottled water. The smell from Fayer’s illness didn’t seem to put him off his appetite. “Right now, I don’t really care if they attack or not. What I don’t want is to run out of gas and spend the next week on foot. The sooner we find your cult, the better.”

“The sooner you stop calling it a cult, the better,” Miriam said.

Chambers shrugged. “No offense meant. I’m grateful. My point is, I don’t want to walk. And I’m sure she doesn’t either.” He hooked his thumb at Fayer, who lay hunkered in her blanket, shivering, while Grover tried to get her to take sips of water.

Nobody made an argument to bypass Cedar City, so Eliza gritted her teeth and continued straight toward town. About a mile west of the freeway, a rider on a horse paced them for a stretch, trying to keep up. He looked like he wanted to gallop ahead to give warning, but of course Eliza didn’t intend to allow anything of the kind. She clattered over the train tracks.

She slowed to thirty when she reached the burned-out box stores on the west side. It was fast enough to outpace the riders who kept appearing and then scattering. Any faster and it would look like she had something to hide. Let them think she was a lost army vehicle and they wouldn’t want to risk attacking.

Somehow the word got ahead of them, because they came up past the cemetery and its huge number of fresh graves to find the way blocked with trucks dragged across the road. A dozen riflemen stood behind the vehicles.

“Looks like they figured it out,” Steve said.

Chambers and Miriam manned the guns.

“Don’t start anything,” Eliza said.

“I can take them out in three seconds,” Miriam said. “Cut those cars in two as well.”

“I mean it, don’t fire.”

Eliza hit the gas and hurtled toward the barricade. Rifles fired, pocking the window and pinging off the grill. The gunmen scattered just before the armored car hit. Eliza slammed into the barricade and the cars spun out of the way with a shriek of metal. Then they were through. Gunfire followed them up the hill until they rounded the corner.

Eliza let out her breath. So many worries and fears now evaporated that she felt like she was floating. For a moment that feeling cut away the exhaustion, the stress of battle, the horrible memories of men dying. Of Trost, his head blown apart by a sniper’s bullet. All she could think was that if the gas held out, she’d be home in ninety minutes.

The numbingly hypnotic drive down empty roads had combined with three days of sleep deprivation to dull Eliza’s senses by the time she reached Highway 89. Blister Creek was close now, no more than ten miles away. The others were in back, sleeping. Collapsed in exhaustion, really.

The vehicle was drifting, and she fought that leaden, nodding feeling that threatened to send her into the ditch. Suddenly, she found herself approaching a force of pickup trucks and horsemen traveling south.

Eliza shouted for the others to wake up. As they scrambled to their feet, she acted on pure instinct, hitting the gas instead of the brake. Men raised guns. Some threw themselves from the road or swerved their trucks to the shoulders. In an instant she was tearing down the middle of them.

Some of the men wore fatigues, others jeans and T-shirts. They were filthy, bloodstained, and thin. Haggard faces and scraggly beards. Young men, mostly white, but with a few darker faces. The remnant of an army or maybe bandits—she couldn’t be sure which. But they were retreating from Blister Creek, either driven off or having just plundered and murdered its citizens.

No, not the latter. This was a defeated force. An army in retreat. She could see it in their drooping expressions and the sheer exhaustion of their movements.

Whoever they were expecting, it was not Eliza. She was in the heart of the force before the first shots went off. She swerved around trucks, but forced aside men on foot or horse. One man bounced off the hood and went flying.

As they passed, the enemy gunfire picked up strength, attacking their retreat. Miriam and Steve got their guns working. But it was only a few seconds and then Eliza had them out of range.

A mile north of the caravan, they passed two men lying in the middle of the road. Their companions had taken their boots, but they were still alive. One man lifted a bloody face from the pavement and waved feebly for her to stop. She hardened her heart and swerved around him.

“Damn,” Steve muttered.

“You know we can’t.”

“I know. There’s about thirty reasons why not. But it’s a hard world where you can’t stop for a wounded man begging for help.”

She started to catch familiar sights: hillocks of volcanic rock and sagebrush, a sandy wash, the old gravel quarry. When she reached the flapping sheet-metal sign for the Blister Creek city limits, she pulled to a stop.

“We drive in there, we’ll get the same welcome as those poor jerks behind us,” Eliza said. “Blister Creek will see the armored car and think it’s another attack.”

“Hmm,” Steve said. “Good point. So what do we do?”

“There’s a flare gun back here,” Miriam said. “What if we fire it down the road to signal?”

“Signal what?” Eliza said. “That could mean anything.”

Grover spoke up from the back. “The lady FBI agent is wrapped in a white blanket. We could wave it out the windows.”

“I like that idea,” Steve said. He went back to help the others get the blanket off the sick woman. “Come on, Fayer, let go. The sooner we get into town, the sooner we get you help.”

Eliza searched the road ahead. Someone might be studying them even now, lining up for a shot with a heavy gun. The others were murmuring to Fayer, who seemed to be uncooperative. Then they fell silent.