Hell's Fortress (5 page)

“That’s crazy,” Grover said. “We have to find a way back. What choice do we have?”

“A big choice,” Trost said. He leaned back against the eroded sandstone. “We can take our chances walking home, or we can help Eliza.”

“You mean go to California to look for her boyfriend? That’s crazy. The Lord is raining destruction upon the wicked. I’m not going out there. No way.”

“If you go back, you do it alone,” Miriam told him. “The rest of us are sticking with Eliza. Right, Brother Trost?”

“Don’t answer that,” Eliza told the man. “Miriam, that isn’t fair. To any of you and least of all to Grover.”

“If you have objections,” Miriam said, “take them up with the Lord. It was His decision. He chose this company. Jacob made his vote, and God overrode him.”

“That’s nonsense, and you know it. Trost, tell her.”

“Oh,
now
you want him to speak up. Yes, Trost, tell me. Tell us all.”

“I’m not telling anyone anything,” he said. “I’ve had one pistol-whipping and I don’t need another.”

Miriam turned back to Eliza. “You don’t want to find Steve?”

“Of course I do. But we have no supplies. No weapons. Grover is a kid. Trost didn’t ask to do this.”

Miriam turned to him. “Trost, no more equivocating. Are you in or not?”

He dropped his hand from his head and rubbed instead at his walrus mustache. He looked steadily at Eliza. “Jacob rescued my daughter from Las Vegas. He gave us a home in Blister Creek. You know I don’t believe in your church, but I respect your brother. And I owe him one. It’s your call.”

“Grover?” Eliza said.

“I told you,” Miriam said. “He can go home alone—probably get scorched on the road by a drone—or he can come with us.”

“That’s not fair,” Grover said.

“Suck it up,” Miriam said. “This is your chance to be a man. To prove your worth to the Lord.”

“Please stop the religious stuff,” Eliza said. “I need to think clearly—that’s not helping.”

Miriam shrugged. “Fine. The next few years are going to be ugly, whether it’s the end of the world or not. We need men and women, not boys and girls. This is Grover’s chance to mature. Right now he’s a boy. When we return, he’ll be a man.”

“
If
I return,” Grover said. “What if I don’t?”

“You think it’s chance that took you out of that bunker?” Miriam asked. “Are you saying your brother died for some random shake of the cosmic dice? No, the Lord pulled you out for a reason. This is it.”

That sat uncomfortably in the air for several seconds before Eliza cleared her throat. She already knew which way this was going to go. She was desperate to go west, to find a way across the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and California. To find Steve and throw herself in his arms. Grover was dead weight, in her opinion, and Trost wasn’t quite as useful as Stephen Paul would have been, but Miriam?

Lillian would have been fine, but Miriam was a killer. Former FBI. Cold-blooded defender of the saints. Eliza felt bad for David and his children, but was suddenly more confident of her chances of getting through to L.A. If only she could figure out logistics.

“We have no animals, little food,” she said. “No weapons. Everything Jacob sent with us those jerks stole.”

“We tighten our belts and cross the mountains,” Trost said. “When we come down the other side, we’ll be in Cedar City. Assuming it’s still there. I have friends in town. They’ll restock us.”

“Even if they’re starving?” Eliza asked.

“Trust me. They’ll do it.”

Miriam rose to her feet and hoisted the sole remaining saddlebag, light enough it could be carried by one person, slung over the shoulder. “Good, then it’s settled.”

“Again, what about the drones?” Eliza said.

“They’re watching the highway. North-south. We’re headed west, over the mountains. Do you think we can reach the foothills by dusk?”

Miriam didn’t wait for an answer, but stepped out of the rock shelter and trudged into the dusty sagebrush plain, heading west. Trost climbed to his feet and gestured for Grover to do the same. Miriam was already thirty or forty feet away and moving swiftly. Grover set out after her, but Trost waited for Eliza to move.

Eliza looked after her sister-in-law. What was it Jacob said about Elder Smoot? You can’t stage-manage a grizzly? What about a lioness?

Trost gave Eliza a penetrating look. “There’s a reason why your brother wanted to send Lillian instead of Miriam. And it’s not just because Miriam is a nursing mother. My advice? Keep that one on a short leash.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know, but if you don’t, this is going to be a bloodbath.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Jacob lay next to Stephen Paul, who had a shard of wood jutting from the small of his back. The wagon had showered off splinters like a Gatling gun firing crossbow bolts. One of them had hit its mark. Jacob had dragged his companions off the roasting highway, then forced them down.

“Don’t move.” Jacob’s ears were ringing and when he spoke it sounded like he was at the bottom of a well.

Stephen Paul groaned and reached back to grasp at the splinter of wood. It was the width of his thumb and as long as his forearm.

Jacob took the man’s wrist and moved his hand to his side. “Leave it alone. You’ll break off the tip.”

Not to mention Jacob’s worry that it might be nicking one of the lumbar vertebrae. That could be disastrous.

The first blast had stunned Smoot, but the elder seemed to be recovering. Now he was calling in anguish for his sons. Bill, blown to kingdom come. Grover, missing.

“My wife,” David said. He lay a few feet away. “Oh, God. Please.”

Lillian was blinking and stunned, but he meant Miriam, of course. She should be home nursing her child, only a few months old. Jacob never should have called her out. And now she was missing.

But alive. They were all alive except for Bill. Jacob saw them get onto the school bus, first Grover, then Eliza and Miriam. And Trost was there too, already on board before the attack started.

“My boys,” Smoot said. He was trying to get up. “Dear Lord, why?”

“Stay down,” Jacob said. “That’s an order.”

“I have to see.”

“There’s nothing you can do for Bill. Grover got on the bus. So did Miriam and Eliza. He’s safe with them.”

“We have to—” Smoot began.

“No. We don’t. They’re gone. There wasn’t a third blast. The drone let them go. But it might still be overhead. Stay down.”

What had happened on that bus? Miriam was armed. Eliza too. A fight? Why did they keep going instead of stopping? Kemp had taken an insane risk driving off like that. One more missile and dozens would have died.

The bunker kept burning. Inside, ammunition exploded like popcorn. A booming woof rumbled through the air as one of the larger crates went off. Bullets whizzed overhead.

Worse than the burning bunker were the screams of dying horses. One of them, trailing its intestines, had staggered from the road and lay gasping a few feet away, with blood foaming at its nostrils. Another had run several yards on pure momentum before collapsing.

Slowly, the bunker fire began to die as it burned up the limited fuel inside. Jacob rolled over and squinted against the sun. Nothing. No movement. No sound.

“Stay down. Don’t sit up, don’t draw your weapons. Nothing.”

“What are you doing?” David asked.

“You too. Stay here.”

Jacob climbed to his feet. He moved quickly away from the others to the highway. If the drone was lurking, he’d rather it target one person and not all five.

The pickups were burning, one a total wreck, and the other with a fire in the truck bed, where a canvas tarp provided fuel. He grabbed a fire extinguisher from beneath the seat and hosed it down until it was out. Then he retrieved a box of shells from the glove compartment and searched the highway until he found his rifle.

He went first to the horse with its intestines lying in the dirt. Flies were already dropping to lap at the blood. The horse looked up at him with its eyes rolling back in their sockets.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. He aimed at its skull and fired. Its hooves shuddered, then went still.

Next came the two horses with broken legs—shattered, really—and then a pair of mules on the highway, one of them pinned beneath another dead animal. Most of the animals had run off. He looked through the scope of his rifle and was horrified to discover his own horse a hundred yards off, on her knees. Her rib cage lay open and three splinters stuck out of her neck like spears broken off at the shaft. She was a good horse, patient and tireless, which was why he’d planned to send her into the desert with Eliza.

He’d named the mare himself.
Jenny.
Father hadn’t liked it. “A horse shouldn’t have a woman’s name.”

“Why not? You give horses male names all the time. Even the old billy goat is named Heber, after your uncle.”

“That’s different. We’re going to call her Pear, ’cause of that patch of hair that looks like a fruit. And that’s final.”

Jacob never bothered with “Pear.” She was always Jenny to him. The rest of the family took it up too. After a while, even Father abandoned the struggle and called her by her real name. How old was she now?

That must have been ten years ago. It had been late summer and he was home from medical school to help with the haying.

With a sick feeling in his heart, Jacob wiped his eyes, then fixed the horse’s chest in his scope. The gun was a .30-06, powerful enough to bring down an elk. It would do this ugly business just as well. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle shot rolled across the desert. Jenny slumped forward, head collapsing. She didn’t move. For a long time, neither did Jacob.

He engaged the safety on the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. Still nothing in the skies. No other attacks or explosions, including south along the highway where his sister and the others had disappeared in the bus. He walked back to his companions, still lying flat on the edge of the highway in the baking soil amid brush and anthills.

“Elder Smoot, come with me. The rest of you stay here.”

Smoot stumbled onto the road. Jacob took his shoulder to steady him. Together, they approached the collapsed bunker. The fire was mostly out, and the ordnance had stopped exploding, but it spit an acrid smoke through holes in the wall.

Smoot shielded his face from the heat as he approached. “Bill! Are you there? Bill!”

“He’s gone,” Jacob said. “He never felt a thing.”

“Why? Why would this happen?” He started forward. “I’ve got to get him out of there.”

Jacob grabbed his arm. “No. We’ll come back for him later when it’s cooled. Now, it’s time to take care of the living. I have to get Elder Young to surgery.”

Smoot turned with a haunted expression. “Bill has a family. Children. Why would the Lord let this happen? Please, Brother Jacob, help me understand.”

How could Jacob answer that? Platitudes? Or the truth? Bad things happened. Nobody had set off the volcano on the other side of the world that had started this whole nightmare. That was nobody’s fault; it just
was
.

But with the world collapsing around him, Jacob struggled to hold on to even that. More and more it felt like the universe—or God, if you went that far—was conspiring against them. Against Jacob. No matter what he did, people kept dying. And so he didn’t have an answer for Elder Smoot. Nothing that would satisfy either of them.

But Jacob had to try.

“He died defending his people.”

Smoot looked him in the eyes, waiting for more.

Bill must have spotted the drone circling and opened fire. Not one chance in fifty of dropping it out of the sky. The first missile had been a warning; otherwise, why destroy an empty cart and a few animals? The second had been a response to a threat. Bill Smoot had thrown his life away. If he hadn’t fired, the enemy wouldn’t have either.

“We’re alive because he drew the enemy’s attention,” Jacob lied. “Those drones carry two missiles. The first one missed. The second killed your son. It could have easily destroyed the rest of us. Or blown up that bus. Then forty-seven refugees would have died. Plus four of our own.”

“Only two missiles? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” he said, though he knew nothing of the sort. “Why do you think it left? It was out of ammo.”

“But you ordered us to lie flat. Why?”

“There might have been a second drone. I had no way of knowing. We were lucky. There wasn’t.”

“My son. His body.”

“Later. I promise.”

Smoot stared at the bunker, but let Jacob draw him away. Moments later, Smoot, David, Jacob, and Lillian were carrying Stephen Paul to the remaining truck. They cleaned the ash and burned tarp from the bed, then salvaged a filthy sleeping bag and some charred clothing from one of the overturned wagons, which they used to make a bed.

“Lillian and David, ride in the back. Keep him from moving. Elder Smoot, come up front with me.”

Jacob hesitated next to the driver’s side door and stared south. How far had the bus gone? Should he go after them? What if that invited another attack?

Would Eliza come back? Not with the continued threat of a drone strike on the highway. Not when she’d waited months for just this opportunity. She’d forge west, going alone if she had to. But he guessed Miriam would relish the chance to accompany Eliza, baby at home or not. Miriam would try to talk Trost into joining them. Jacob had brought Trost’s daughter out of Las Vegas; the man would feel obligated. That left Grover, but would the boy risk venturing back on his own with drones in the sky? No, Jacob thought not.

Eliza. Miriam. Officer Trost. Grover Smoot.

Not the group he would have sent to cross the desert and the war zones, bandits, starvation, and disease they would encounter along the way.

Let Eliza go. Trust her. You’ve got plenty to worry about here.

First, he had to remove the splinter from Stephen Paul’s back. Then the dead animals and broken carts needed cleaning up. Then there was the recovery of Bill Smoot’s charred body. What an awful task that would be.

“Are we going?” David asked.

“One second.”

Something about the scene still bothered him. If the drone quarantine wasn’t broken, how had the refugees approached in the first place? A momentary lapse of vigilance?

Or something more sinister?