Righteous03 - The Wicked (10 page)

The purification pit lay hidden beneath an overturned refrigerator. Christopher had dragged her to the hole while three others pushed the fridge out of the way. She’d climbed into the pit herself, then taken the box of lettuce lowered down to her while they lifted up the ladder and slid the fridge back into place. The pit widened at the bottom, to the width of two filthy mattresses. Laid side-by-side, the mattresses covered the earth.

Madeline huddled in one corner. It was cool in the pit, and stank of human waste. She’d awakened a few minutes earlier, unsure if it was day or night and now counted to pass the time.

How long since the last head of lettuce? At least twelve hours, she thought. Maybe as long as twenty. The previous day she’d been convinced they’d forgotten about her entirely. She’d yelled for help, but if anyone could hear, they hadn’t answered.

She counted to a hundred and back twenty times and then stopped. She took a swig of water from a milk jug, then got up to pee in another milk jug. Took a sniff from each jug first, to make sure she had the right one. An overwhelming wave of despair crashed down on her. Satan was here, she could feel him. She groped in the dark until she found the exposed edge of one of the mattress springs and started to slash it across her arm before she stopped herself with a heroic effort.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul, he leadeth me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

Here she stopped for a long moment, her breath short and shallow. The evil presence had grown until it pressed like a weight on her chest and a blackness swirled in her head, deeper than the black at the bottom of the pit. A moan escaped her lips. The enemy was here, he wanted to take possession of her. Her fingernails dug into the flesh on her arm.

She managed to open her mouth. “Thou annointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and…and
mercy
…shall follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” This last part came in a gasp.

Madeline repeated the Twenty-third Psalm three times before Satan left her, and with him, the urge to cut herself. The need to eat the lettuce remained.

But if she took too much and they checked, as they sometimes did, the Disciple would double her ordeal. Her only hope was to exercise self-control. How long had it been now? Twenty hours? Could she make it another four?

But just as she thought this, someone banged three times on the fridge at the top of the pit. Madeline let out a sob of relief. She groped in the corner for the crate, couldn’t find it. She felt along the wall, but couldn’t find it anywhere, and so started to work her way around the tiny room. At last, it came to her, on the opposite side from where she’d started searching. Either she’d moved it, or she’d become completely turned around.

Her fingers found one of the heads of lettuce, pulled it out, cradled it in her hands.

“Dear Lord Jesus. Bless this food and with it, purify me before thy mercy.”

And with that, she tore off a hunk and ate it. In moments, it was gone. She had a bloated feeling, but that was mostly water. Very shortly, that bloated feeling would dissipate, to be replaced by the consuming hunger.

Twenty-four hours. One head of lettuce. Three down, seventeen to go. She’d been weak and bony when she entered the purification pit. She didn’t know if she’d be dead when they carried her out.

#

It was almost evening when Eliza found the old road. The dry wash cut a gash through the decades-old pavement. Another hour and it would have been too dark to see the clues, and she would have ignored the road and continued to follow the wash.

But it was still light when she reached the spot where the wash bisected the road and Eliza was alert. Her water was gone and she faced the prospect of spending the night in the desert. The air would shed its heat and she’d shiver all night, only to wake up in the morning still in the middle of the wilderness. Why hadn’t she found them yet? Eliza was a strong girl, surely as physically strong as the Chosen Ones. She couldn’t believe they’d taken a multi-day journey through the desert on foot.

And so she was in the perfect frame of mind when she reached the road. She noticed immediately the tire tracks cutting through the wash from one side to the other. And the footprints stopped.

A new problem, then. They’d walked for hours, yes, but then someone had picked them up in a truck and followed an old road. None of that made sense. Why walk at all? Why not just drive in and out of Las Vegas?

Eliza had to be close. If not, if she had made a bad assumption somewhere, she’d be in serious trouble. Unless she took the road back toward Las Vegas. She could follow it in the darkness and reach the city by morning. Water gone, dehydrated, but alive. For a moment, she hesitated and looked to the glowing city behind her.

At last, she turned away from Las Vegas and followed the road deeper into the desert. Walking on the road was a relief to her aching calves after all day spent trudging through the sand. For a good hour there was nothing but the sound of footsteps, the wind, and the drone of cicadas in the scrub that lined the wash. The drone faded as the wash snaked away to her left. And then, a snatch of voices, carried on the wind. Her pulse quickened.

She came upon an overturned motor boat, a hole punched through the fiberglass. A little farther, a rusting car, then two washing machines, open to the air as if waiting to be loaded. And then the garbage began in earnest: rusting cans, shoes, metal office furniture, a pile of televisions—the old kind with knobs—and later, a heap of printers, monitors, and other office equipment. A huge tire from a piece of construction equipment, almost as large as the front half of the VW bug that lay next to it. Ahead, she could see several mountains of tires.

The voices picked up as she drew closer to the tires. A woman said something about Jesus, before the wind shifted and the voice died. Eliza slowed down, worked over her story. It was twilight, finally cooling.

Eliza wanted to have a look around, wanted to explore the dump before she announced her presence. Maybe she could even come up to their campfire, or whatever it was, and watch them from the shadows to see if she could recognize Madeline. For a moment she entertained the fantasy of bumping into Madeline, explaining her purpose, and then escaping into the desert before anyone realized the girl was gone.

But she had to accept that Madeline might not want to be rescued. Eliza had seen it a dozen times. A child bride, desperate not to get married, but refusing to testify against her family. Or what about Sister Miriam, an FBI agent who’d infiltrated the Church of the Last Days, then become indoctrinated enough in the cult that she’d never bothered to check back in? Even after the FBI tried to rescue her, Miriam had denounced her career and stayed in the Zarahemla compound.

And what if someone heard Eliza snooping around? She’d blow her chances before she could introduce herself. Eliza dialed Jacob’s cell phone. He picked up on the first ring. “It’s me,” she said in a low voice.

This far into the desert, she barely had a signal and couldn’t hear his answer. Rather than fumble through greetings and possibly lose the call, she said the agreed-upon words to indicate everything was okay. “Blessed are they whose feet stand upon the land of Zion. Did you hear that? I’m fine.”

“Great, but…” His voice broke up again and then she lost the call entirely.

She found a sofa on its side, cushions missing, the stuffing torn out by animals, turned her phone off, and tucked it inside a torn flap of fabric, among the springs. She didn’t want to be caught with it on her person. She tossed the empty backpack. The voices continued somewhere in front of her.

“Hello!” she cried. “Is anyone here?”

The voices stopped at once, like crickets going silent when they hear footsteps. Eliza came around the corner of the nearest stack of tires to discover a double-wide trailer and two of the old-style, silver-colored campers. There were so many tires stacked on and around them that she might have passed right by if she hadn’t heard the voices, at least this close to dusk.

“Hello?” She came to a stop fifteen feet from the front door of the trailer. A thin, flickering light—like a Coleman lantern—seeped through one of the trailer windows, then went dark. In that brief glance she’d seen bars over the windows. Someone had been paranoid enough to fortify the trailer as if it were a house at the edge of the slums, instead of an abandoned trailer in the desert.

Still no answer, so Eliza sat down on an overturned refrigerator and waited. After a few minutes, she tried again. “Hello? Can someone come out and talk to me?”

“Who are you, and what do you want?” a man’s voice asked. Movement behind one of the open windows.

“My name is Eliza, I just want to talk.”

“About what? Are you looking for someone?”

“Not someone, but something, yes.”

“Well?”

“Are you the ones who were talking to people at UNLV last week?” she asked. “I talked to a man about the Book of Revelation, but then I never saw him again.”

A long, quiet moment, and she could sense the wheels of suspicion turning in his mind.

“I’m looking for Caleb Kimball,” she said.

The door opened. A young man stepped down the makeshift cinder block steps to the ground. He was about six feet tall, thin but wiry, with a dirty, unwashed look. He was dressed in a robe, tied off with a cord, wore a beard and sandals. Apart from looking like John the Baptist, there was a glint in his eyes that Eliza had seen a hundred times before. A true believer. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t cynical about his claims. But was it Caleb Kimball? In this light, behind the beard, it was hard to tell if he looked like Gideon and Taylor Junior.

He frowned. “What are you sitting on that for? Get off there.”

She stood up, looked around in confusion. “Off what, the fridge?”

He shook his head. “No, never mind. You look too comfortable, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering how much danger you’re in.”

Her mouth felt dry. They’d almost killed David, and that was just to rob his produce truck. She couldn’t afford to make a mistake; she needed the same kind of confidence her brother Jacob could wield.

“Of course I’m in danger, the world is coming to an end. I need to make sure I’m on the right side of the Lord. Are you the Disciple?”

“Who told you about us?” he demanded.

“I talked to you, don’t you remember? I was reading my Bible on campus and you started a conversation.”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t remember you.”

“I remember
you.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what you told me about the world coming to an end. And when I prayed that night to the Lord, I knew I should find you and talk to you some more. I’ve been asking everywhere.”

“And how did you do that? Nobody else has ever found us.”

“But people talk,” Eliza said. “You didn’t just get here and you need to go into town to get food and water. Once I figured out where you were, I had a taxi drive me as far as he’d go on this road, then I walked the rest of the way.”

“I don’t believe it. Did someone send you? Where did you hear that other name?”

She ignored the last question. “Look at me, I’m just a girl. There’s nobody else here, and I didn’t bring anything. I don’t have a cell phone or food or anything. I tossed my empty water jug an hour ago.”

He stepped closer and put his hands on the side of her head, pulled her face close to his. Intensity burned in his gaze. Eliza forced herself to remain calm, and didn’t look away. “You can’t walk in and join. You must be chosen. I’m the one who chooses.”

“All I want is what you have. Is that so wrong?”

“Where did you hear that other name?” he asked a second time.

“I’ll answer that as soon as you tell me whether or not you’re the Disciple.”

He let go, then lifted her arms one by one, pulled back her sleeve to study her forearms. He ran a finger along the inside of her arm, an intimate gesture that made her skin crawl. “They’re clean. Have you ever done drugs? Cut yourself? Tried to commit the ultimate crime against God?”

“What do you mean, the ultimate crime? Fornication?”
“No, not fornication, although I’m sure a pretty girl like you must face regular temptation. What I wonder is if you’ve ever attempted suicide?”

“No, never,” she said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Eliza leaned closer and whispered, “I came here from Blister Creek.”

“What?” He drew back.

“I grew up in the same church as you. We lived in Harmony, but my family is in Blister Creek now. And when I heard you speak, I recognized your accent, your way of speaking. You were from southern Utah. Your family practices plural marriage. Am I right?” He said nothing, so she pressed, “You said that you choose who joins and who doesn’t. I want to know, who chose
you
?”

“God chose me.”

“And God chose me in the same way. I called home and asked around and they told me that Caleb Kimball had been collecting followers in the desert and I knew it was you and that I needed to find you, because the end of the world is coming.”

“There is nobody here with that name. Just me, and I’m the Disciple. When they speak to me, they call me Master.”

“I understand, Master. There’s nothing else to me but what you see. Can I join you or will you send me away?”

“If there’s something else, anything, I’ll find it. You know that.” The Disciple turned toward the trailer and gave a gesture for Eliza to follow.

She felt a surge of relief, but also fear. If he’d sent her away, she could have struggled back to the road, maybe begging him for water before she left, then returned to Allison Caliari and told her that she’d tried, but it was impossible. As soon as she stepped inside that trailer, it would be too late, she would be fully committed.