Hell's Fortress (8 page)

Both men looked eager now that they were down to the nuts and bolts of it.

“You know the desert,” Shepherd said, leaning forward. “You survived it. You know where you left those four—the kid, the FBI woman, the former cop, Christianson’s sister. And we know where they’re going.”

“So I track them, locate their camp, and pick them off one by one?”

“Too hard for you?” Alacrán said.

“Like shooting jackrabbits. Assuming I can find them. And keep myself alive. It’s hell out there. But I don’t know—my beef is with Christianson, not these others.”

“That’s how you get to Christianson,” Shepherd said. “Kill off his support and he’ll be weak.”

“So it’s not really the head of the snake,” Kemp said. “It’s cutting off the body to get to the head.”

“Quit dicking around—you know what the general meant. Are you in?”

Kemp enjoyed being needed. And of course he was turning it over. He didn’t have the stomach to kill civilians, but he wasn’t sure there was such a thing in this day and age. Not in Iran, not in the U.S. Could he peg them, one by one, from a distance? Yeah, he could.

“Might take a couple of weeks to get west and finish the job,” he said. “Depends on where I catch them. Maybe Cedar City if I hurry. That cop will take them there first. To resupply.”

“Take as long as you need,” Alacrán said.

“Will we be ready to move on Blister Creek when I get back?”

“We’ll make it happen,” Shepherd said.

“Two conditions. Satisfy them, and I’m in.”

“Name them,” Shepherd said.

“First, you keep your promise. When I get back, I’m number three. No more grunt work. No more ‘yes Sarge, no Sarge.’ And as number three, I make the call what happens to those people up at the bus. If I come back and find them slaving around for you, some heads are going to roll.”

The sergeant nodded. “You got it.”

“Second, when it’s time, you leave Christianson to me. He killed my mother. No long-distance sniping. I’m going to look into his eyes and tell him I offed his sister, right before I put a bullet through his brain.”

The other two men exchanged smiles.

“Check the supplies,” Alacrán said. “Take anything you need except fuel. We’re down to a couple hundred gallons of diesel.”

“Can you spare a horse?”

“Yeah, that we can spare. Can you leave first thing in the morning?”

“Why wait? I can hoof it ten miles back up the road before midnight. Give me flashlights, batteries,
two
horses—so I can push them harder—and I’ll catch these bastards before they make it down from the mountains. Come on, let’s go.”

The other two men pushed away from the table to do his bidding. Kemp waited until they were gone, shouting orders, then wandered into the kitchen to forage. He’d travel lean and mean. He was used to that. But he’d be damned if he’d set off on an empty stomach. He found a can of peaches and pried off the lid, then guzzled them straight from the can.

CHAPTER NINE

Eliza got up at the first sliver of dawn. She’d been awake and shivering, her bladder full to bursting for what seemed like hours, waiting for daybreak. Miriam slept peacefully next to her in their makeshift bed of broken pine boughs, with more boughs serving as blankets. A few feet away, Trost snored softly while Grover mumbled in his sleep.

Eliza slipped out from beneath the branches. Her body ached from sleeping on roots and jutting stones, and her calves and leg muscles groaned, unwilling to cooperate. How far had they run yesterday? Fifteen miles?

Massaging her thighs and stretching as she walked, she picked her way through the fir trees until she reached the highway. Not a single vehicle, not a rider, nobody on foot or bicycle. The road yesterday had been like those strips of faded blacktop near abandoned mining towns, except the pavement was still black, the dividing lines still yellow and fresh. Reflectors on the shoulders warned nonexistent traffic whenever the highway curved. Here and there, culverts had overflowed and carved gullies across the road, or trees had fallen and blocked the way, but most of the time it was easy to imagine the rumble of an engine and the glow of headlamps rounding the corner. Only it never happened.

She stood in the middle of the road, listening. Thinking. Mostly about Steve, wondering if he was okay, but also about her family in Blister Creek. About the wars and the famine.

To her surprise, it was Trost who woke first. He approached from the camp.

“Five thirty-two a.m.,” he said. “Pretty early to be up and about.”

“You’re still keeping time?”

He held up his wrist to show an old-fashioned windup Timex. “Belonged to my dad. Been ticking since the seventies.”

“Are your folks still alive?” she asked.

“No. My dad died of cancer when I was a kid—he was a downwinder who caught fallout from the weapons tests. My mother passed away two years ago just when things started to get interesting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I miss her, of course, but it was a mercy that she passed when she did. All this would have terrified her.”

Eliza changed the subject. “What do you figure, about fifteen more miles before we reach the summit?”

“Something like that, yeah. We’ve been lucky—we haven’t reached the snow line yet. It’s hard to say what it will look like up top, but what if the road is still covered?”

“If it is, we’ll make snowshoes.”

“How is the food holding up?” he asked.

“We’ve got a bit of jerky and some dried apricots. Enough for breakfast, then it’s gone.”

“I checked the snares. Was hoping to get a rabbit in the night. Nothing. Not even a chipmunk.”

“We didn’t have time to do it properly,” she said. “Plus, no tools.”

Grover roused himself next, then Miriam, the latter well rested and full of energy. They ate the last of their food and drank water from a mountain spring.

Miriam led them in prayer before setting out. After the usual stuff asking for guidance and inspiration, her prayer turned weird.

“Clear the way before our passage, oh Lord. Strike down the wicked. Burn those who strive against us. Turn their food to filth. Let their water taste of bile. Plague them with boils and fill their throats with ash. Let those who live by the sword perish by the sword.”

Eliza opened her eyes. Grover had his arms folded, eyes scrunched, nostrils flaring. Trost cracked his eyes and looked curiously at Miriam. He glanced at Eliza and when their eyes met, he shook his head.

Miriam continued. “Wield us in thy hand, Lord, that we may smite thine enemies a mighty blow. That they shall tremble and flee before us. That the earth shall be cleansed in our passage. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

“Amen,” Grover said, firmly.

Eliza looked at Miriam. “Amen? What was that?”

“I felt inspired,” Miriam said. “Let’s go.”

“ 
‘Fill their throats with ash’?” Trost muttered for Eliza’s benefit as they set out.
“ 
‘Plague them with boils’? Surprised she didn’t command their gonads to fall off.”

They came upon the first evidence of Miriam’s so-called “cleansing” a couple of hours later when they rounded the corner to discover a large cabin at the edge of a mountain lake off the shoulder of the highway. Built of logs with an A-frame roof to shed snow, the cabin looked like a rich person’s vacation getaway except for the beat-up pickup trucks parked in the driveway. Clumps of snow still spotted the yard, which was dotted with aspen seedlings.

They studied the house without approaching, afraid that they’d come upon someone’s mountain redoubt.

“It’s abandoned,” Miriam proclaimed.

“What about the trucks?”

“See that truck parked beneath the eaves? There’s still snow in the bed—it must have slid off the roof during the winter. Nobody has driven out of here since last year.”

“So maybe they ran out of gas?” Eliza asked.

“And that broken window to the left of the door. It got frigid last winter. It’s
still
cold up here at night. If anyone were living here, they’d board it over, put a blanket up, or do something to block the drafts.”

They still approached cautiously. The front door was unlocked. Eliza pushed it open and stepped back.

“Hello?” No answer.

She stepped into a foyer with a vaulted ceiling. Dirty blankets and clothes lay scattered across the floor. Muddy boot prints marked the carpets. Blankets and couch cushions were tucked into the corners where people had made beds. The furniture itself—chairs, couches, dressers—was missing, presumably burned for warmth. The others came in behind her.

“There were people here,” Eliza said. “Wonder where they went.”

“Not our concern,” Miriam said. “Let’s see if we can find anything useful.”

There was no food in the pantry, nor so much as a ketchup bottle in the fridge. No power, of course. No batteries or flashlights, or even toiletries to take from the bathrooms. There was a loft over the living room, and Eliza climbed up to investigate. She found more bedding and a couple of mattresses. The loft smelled of stale sweat.

“Hey,” Grover said from the kitchen. “Look what I found.”

It was a hand-written note, sitting in open sight on the counter, overlooked in their first pass through the kitchen. Trost took it from him and read aloud.

“ ‘April 3. My name is Kelton O’Reilly. I am thirty-seven years old and used to work as a web designer before the crash. The others are gone. I’m setting out for the polygamist town as soon as the storm lets up. I hear they have food. There’s still three feet of snow on the highway and I’m so weak, I don’t think I’ll make it far on foot. All I have to eat is some pine bark and two field mice I caught in the traps this morning. But maybe I’ll find a frozen deer that the coyotes haven’t discovered yet. The others are in the shed.
’
 ”

Trost turned it over, but there was nothing on the other side. “That’s it?”

“O’Reilly?” Grover said. “That’s not one of our families. Why would he make for Blister Creek?”

“Same reason Joe Kemp and his crowd came to the valley,” Eliza said. “Word is spreading. We have food and supplies.”

Miriam grabbed the note and looked it over. “It won’t do them any good. We’re not open for business.” She slapped it back in Trost’s hand with a sour expression, as if she was suffering from indigestion. Then, when he made to put it back on the counter, added, “No, don’t leave it here. If anyone else stumbles in, we don’t want them getting ideas about Blister Creek.”

He looked it over one more time before folding it and stuffing it in his back pocket.
“
 ‘The others are in the shed.’ I don’t like the sound of that.”

Eliza’s stomach churned. “I hope I don’t regret this, but . . . let’s have a look.”

They found the toolshed around back, tucked against the patio, which overlooked the small lake. Miriam threw open the doors and a foul smell roared out. They staggered back a pace and she shut the doors hastily.

“Let me see,” Eliza said.

“Are you sure? It isn’t pretty.”

She was sure. She lifted her shirt over her mouth and nose and opened the doors. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she could only stare, speechless.

Bodies lay side by side on the floor, stacked two deep. Men, women, children. Maybe fifteen in all. They stared at the ceiling through glazed eyes, sunken deep behind sharp cheekbones, the skin pulled taut. The youngest child was no more than three, with blond, curly hair. So thin, like the dried-out animals you found in the desert. Only this was a child.

“What is it?” Grover asked. “What do you see?”

“Stay back, don’t come in here.”

A figure moved closer and she turned to tell Grover to mind, but it was Trost, with one hand covering his mouth and nose. He looked over her shoulder and made a swallowing sound deep in his throat.

Eliza shut the shed doors.

“They must have driven up in the fall,” he said, “and got trapped when the weather turned.”

“It snowed all winter,” Eliza said. “What did the note say, April? I’m surprised they held out that long. They must have found food in the house.”

“Not enough, though. O’Reilly was the last, and the only one to make it out.”

“He didn’t, though, did he, because we never saw him. He must have died on the road.” Eliza looked at Miriam. “That’s what it means to cleanse the earth. Horrible suffering. Children starving to death. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Miriam looked at the ground.

Trost pulled out O’Reilly’s note and read,
“
‘There’s still three feet of snow on the highway and I’m so weak, I don’t think I’ll make it far on foot.
’
 ”

“Wait a minute,” Eliza said. “You don’t think there’s still gas in those vehicles, do you?”

CHAPTER TEN

There
was
gas in the tanks, but getting to it was a different matter. First, Grover and Miriam searched the house for the keys while Eliza helped Trost siphon gas into buckets from a garden hose they found around back. They got two gallons into one bucket and about a gallon and a half into the other, all unleaded, according to the gas caps. The plan was to mix it and pour it back into whichever vehicle they could get started.

The problem was the keys, which didn’t turn up. After the initial search, the four companions scoured the house. They shook every piece of clothing, lifted every blanket, checked and double-checked drawers in the kitchen. They searched the vehicles themselves, which sat unlocked, then around the house. Perhaps they were under a rock or loose paving stone. No.

A sour feeling turned over in Eliza’s stomach. “We have to go in the shed and turn out their pockets. Any volunteers?”

Grover licked his lips. “I bet O’Reilly took them. So if he ever made it back he’d have the vehicles.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but that doesn’t do us any good. Our best hope is in that shed.”

“I’ll do it,” Miriam said.

“Are you sure?” Eliza asked.

“The rest of you stay here.”

Miriam disappeared for several minutes, while the others waited, looking at their hands or staring into the distance without communicating. When Miriam returned, she looked ill. “No.”

Eliza fought down her frustration. “Great. And now we’ve wasted so much time we’ll have to stay here tonight. There’s no way of making it over the pass before dark, and it will be too cold to sleep out.”

She didn’t want to stay in the house. After seeing all those dead bodies, the house had a creepy feeling about it. It was hard to imagine sleeping. Besides, the house was right off the highway; they’d have to keep watch in case someone else came along.

“On the plus side,” Miriam said, “I found a bunch of tools in the back of the shed behind the bodies. I set them out. We could carry them for trade in Cedar City.”

“That’s something,” Eliza said. “What kind of tools are we talking about?”

“Screwdrivers, hammers, and so on. Plus bigger stuff—axes, picks, shovels. Couple of saws. Fishing poles—nobody seemed to have used them all winter.”

“The lake was probably frozen over,” Eliza said. “But we could catch our supper if we can dig up worms for bait.”

Trost went around the house to look at the tools while Eliza and Miriam discussed how they would spend the night. Miriam agreed about the safety of the house. If not for the possibility of catching fish to rebuild their food supplies, she was in favor of setting out and getting higher into the mountains before calling it a night.

Trost was grinning when he came back. He held a heavy toolbox.

“Forget the keys, I can hotwire us a ride.”

After looking over the vehicles, he settled on an old Dodge pickup. Less computerized and easier to hotwire. It was also more sluggish after sitting in place all winter, plus they’d drained the tank, and it took a good forty-five minutes of messing around until he got it to turn over. As he fiddled with it, the other three kept busy. Grover dug up the yard looking for worms, then took the poles down to the lake. Miriam and Eliza changed out the Dodge’s bald, rotting tires for better ones off the other vehicles.

It was late afternoon before they were gassed up, loaded, and ready to set out. Grover had caught three trout, which he’d cooked as fast as he caught them. As the pickup rattled up the mountain road, they shared out the fish. It was just enough to leave Eliza hungrier than when she’d started. But she felt stronger, and was relieved she wouldn’t have to spend the night in the house.

Trost drove. “With any luck,” he said, “we’ll be down in Cedar City in time for supper.”

“Which is what these days?” Miriam said. “Boot leather and toasted grasshoppers?”

“The fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who prepared for the end, you know,” Trost said. He sounded testy. Like the majority of Utahns, he was part of the mainstream LDS church that had given up polygamy over a hundred years earlier. “Our prophets have been warning us about a year’s supply of food forever.”

“They aren’t real prophets,” Miriam said. “They’re a bureaucratic gerontocracy, but fine, whatever.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Don’t we have enough worries without starting a religious war?” Eliza said. “Miriam, when we get to Cedar City, act civilized, will you?”

“I know what I’m doing. I grew up among gentiles, remember?”

“Starting with calling other Mormons saints, not gentiles, for one. For that matter, don’t call
gentiles
‘gentiles,’ either.”

“Sure, why not? Anything else?”

“Just . . . good manners, right? And if that means you keep your mouth shut, then do that.”

They zipped along for the next ten minutes, making excellent time as the road snaked higher and higher. They passed through gorgeous meadows dotted with wildflowers and thick stands of aspen with their leaves quaking in the breeze. The higher they got, the more snow remained, until soon only the road itself wasn’t covered with a blanket of white.

Then they were passing through a slushy film, then shifting to fuel-burning four-wheel-drive to climb through several inches of snow, then a wet, icy foot of snow that remained. They had to get out several times to push when the pickup got stuck. Another time Trost lost traction and nearly drove them off the road while the others braced themselves to go crashing over the hill and into the forest. He fought it under control at the last moment. When they reached the summit—9,900 feet, according to a roadside sign—the needle was nudging at empty.

They stopped to refill their canteens from a mountain stream and to shake off some of the motion sickness from the long, winding drive.

“That was a good day’s hike right there,” Eliza said. “If we’d come up on foot, we’d have been spending a night up here any way you looked at it.”

“Not only that,” Trost said, “we were lucky there weren’t any more washouts. I hope our luck holds.”

They coasted down the mountain where possible, even when it meant creeping at five or six miles an hour until they reached the next dip. Trost only nudged the gas when the road made a temporary climb. Even so, they’d only reached the foothills above Cedar City before the engine died altogether. He managed to coax out another half mile or so by coasting before the road rose a little too high to the next crest and they couldn’t make it any farther. They parked the truck and got out.

The Great Basin stretched beneath a bruised sky. The opposite mountain range lay shrouded in smoke or a fine haze of dust, but the view was wide open both south and north, where the freeway sliced across the western edge of Utah. Fields shimmered green, though whether from the heavy spring rains or because people were actively planting them, it was hard to say.

Cedar City itself sat below them like a giant map. It was a Mormon pioneer town with wide, leafy streets laid out on a grid in the downtown, sprawling from there into the surrounding farm and grazing land. Or that’s what it had been two years earlier. Now, block after block of the newer subdivisions to the south and west lay in blackened ruins. Houses gone, fields turned to ash. No trees. Essentially, anything that touched or drew near I-15 was gone. Nearly two-thirds of the city of thirty thousand people, obliterated.

“Good lord,” Trost said. “What the devil happened down there?”

“It wasn’t that way last fall?” Eliza asked.

“No, it wasn’t like this at all. We were holding on—by the tips of our fingers, but managing. And look, there’s not a single car on the freeway, or any of the side roads. Is there no fuel? None at all?”

“There’s more traffic in Blister Creek,” Grover said.

“Look, there’s a rider,” Miriam said. “No, two.”

About a mile away and several hundred feet below, two men on horseback trotted down the road before disappearing beneath the trees that still grew on the east side of town.

“There had better be cops,” Trost said with a grumble. “If I get down there and find my officers have deserted the force, I’m going to crack some skulls.”

They pushed the truck to the side of the road, where they unloaded the tools salvaged from the house. These they hid in the scrub oak that lined the road.

From there, they descended into town on foot. The air smelled of a distant brush fire. It was quiet. No chainsaws, lawnmowers, trucks, or any of the other sounds you’d associate with a small town on a summer day. The houses in the uppermost foothills were abandoned, yards overgrown with weeds. Front doors hung open, with the contents of the homes salvaged—or looted, depending on your point of view. Several had burned down.

Lower still, they came upon a farmer’s wide field, now given over to hand-carved wooden grave markers. Hundreds and hundreds of them marched across the field. The upper part of the makeshift cemetery showed signs of fresh digging, while below, grass had grown up around the markers. They came upon another field of fresh graves around the next bend, this one even larger.

Four men were digging graves at the end of the field, while a fifth stood at watch, armed with a rifle. Three bodies lay side by side next to the first grave, wrapped in sheets. One of the men stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand. He leaned against his shovel and happened to glance up the road. He spotted the newcomers and dove for the ground with a shout.

The man with the rifle swung it around and aimed it at the four companions. He screamed for them to freeze. They raised their hands.

The man with the rifle started to come forward, then stopped after several paces. “Dale Trost? That you?”

“Hank Gibson?” Trost said. “What the devil is going on here?”

“TB. More victims.”

“What’s with the chain gang?”

“Looters.”

The scene shifted in Eliza’s mind as they followed Trost’s lead and cautiously approached the others. It wasn’t a man protecting workers. It was a man standing guard over four prisoners. Chains and manacles linked them together; she hadn’t noticed that at first. Their heads were shaved and they wore gaunt, hungry expressions. Two of them were kids, no older than sixteen. One of these was missing an ear. An angry gash, poorly stitched, marked its absence.

Gibson was a tall, wiry man with an iron-gray mustache. He was missing two fingers on his left hand.

He turned to the men. “Get to work, you dogs.”

The prisoners returned to their labors. Picks clanked stones. Shovels tossed dirt out of the hole.

Trost gestured at the boy with the missing ear. “Who did that?”

“You steal a man’s food, you join the work crew. You break into his house to do it, you lose an ear. Second time, it’s a hand. Hard cases, we fit ’em with a necktie.” He stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and pantomimed raising a rope at his neck.

“Is that the law these days?” Trost asked.

“You have a better idea? These vermin are like rats. We can’t keep them out.”

“Did you say tuberculosis?” Eliza asked. “I’ve never heard of that around here.”

“Third outbreak since December. We’ve lost hundreds already.”

“Yeah, I can see from the graves,” Trost said. “Though it looks more like thousands, to me.”

“You can thank the army for that,” one of the prisoners said. “Bombed us out. That’s why we stole that food. What choice did we have?”

“Shut up and get digging,” Gibson said. He turned back to the newcomers. “He’s mostly right. Bandits took over the old Walmart and instead of sending in the National Guard like we asked, the government flew a couple of B-52s over and turned half the town to rubble. That made the problem worse.” He looked Trost over with a critical eye. “They say you hooked up with the polygs. Looks like they’re keeping you fed.”

“I’ve been earning my keep,” Trost said. “But I’ve still lost a good twenty pounds.”

“Could have been fifty. Could have been all of it.” He met Eliza’s gaze, then sized up Miriam and Grover. “Is the mountain road open?”

“No, it’s closed,” Miriam said.

“How did you get over, then?”

“It’s closed with .50-caliber machine guns,” she clarified. “And land mines. Sniper rifles. Grenades.”

“Yeah, I got it. You fundies take care of your own. Well, Trost, it’s a good gig if you can get it.”

“Who’s in charge?” Eliza asked. “Is there a mayor?”

“The army came through last fall after bombing the place and arrested the mayor and the city council. When the army pulled out, the Cedar City PD declared martial law. I’m chief of police now. So that means me, I’m in charge.”

“You?” Trost sounded aghast.

“What was I supposed to do? You left. Mendoza died of meningitis. Phillips and Wirtz were killed in the riots.”

“What about Nielsen? Udall?”

“Nielsen is a young guy—the army drafted him when they came through and we never heard from him again. Udall disappeared. They say he ran for the hills with his wife and kids. His brother has a ranch somewhere by Price. Or maybe it was in Arizona. That makes me the last guy standing. What are you doing here anyway? These your new wives? Who’s the kid?”

“We’re on our way to Los Angeles,” Eliza said. “We had a run-in with bandits, and we’re hoping to resupply in Cedar City.”

“What do you need?”

“Mostly food, but also firearms. They took everything.”

Gibson grabbed a shovel from one of the prisoners and used it to measure the depth of the last grave. “That’s good enough, boys. Get those bodies in the ground and cover ’em up. Looks like you earned supper tonight.” He turned to the others. “Have you got anything to trade?”

“We do,” Eliza said. “Good tools—axes, saws, wrenches, all sorts of stuff.”

“Shovels too,” Trost said. “Yours look well-used.”

“We’ve got plenty of tools,” Gibson said. “We’ll take what you’ve got, of course—stuff wears out, there’s no way to replace it. But we can’t pay much. What we need is fuel. Or silver. That still has value. Got anything like that?”

“I told you,” Eliza said. “We were robbed by bandits.”