Destroying Angel (2 page)

And so much work done already. An acre measured, with an irrigation channel dug from the creek. In the next week I’d hoped to dig a well, retrieve timber from the cliffs, and put down the foundation for two houses. Backbreaking, exhausting work, all of it. A dozen men couldn’t do as much in so little time, and I’d be d—ed if I was going to abandon our efforts to start fresh somewhere else.

But Annabelle had one final trick. She smiled sagely, set down her mending—but not the gun, I noticed—and walked to face me, her rifle tucked under her arm. “You’ve done your best, sister. But look around—it’s not enough. I thought it was a mistake to stop here, but I doubted myself. I didn’t trust my own judgment enough to tell you this was the wrong place.”

The devil you say
, I thought.
You’ve been undermining me since we arrived.

Annabelle turned to face the other women. “While you were sleeping last night, I was talking with an angel.”

“A blessing from the Lord,” Maude said in a hushed voice. Laura gasped and Sister Lila put a hand to her mouth.

I was taken aback and didn’t respond quickly enough. By the time I recovered, the other women were chattering and talking about the signs and wonders that would precede the Second Coming.

Of course I didn’t believe it. Why would I? It sounded so clearly self-serving. Annabelle had tried to turn the other women against me, but apart from Nannie, only fourteen years old and barely fluent in English, they had accepted my role, had worked from dawn to dusk with little complaint. There would be time enough to rest later. The men had given us a task, and we would move heaven and earth until it was done.

There was no angel. Nobody had come to Annabelle in the night. It wasn’t even a dream, it was a lie of the most cynical, corrupt sort. And truth would out. They would see her story as a manipulative attempt to turn their desires down an easier path. And then she would be finished. Or so I told myself.

But a few days later I saw the angel myself. Only it wasn’t a being of light. It was an evil spirit.

Jacob Christianson shut the diary with a groan. “Not you too.”

A child whimpered somewhere in the slumbering house, but he didn’t give it much thought at first, still caught up in Grandma Cowley’s story and noticing again the sleet pinging against the window. He’d picked up the diary in part to distract himself from the unseasonable weather—the dread of any farming community. Jacob sank into the bed next to Fernie, who was breathing heavily in her sleep. A hard day of physical therapy had sent her to bed early.

He fingered the diary. When he’d opened it the first time, a distant, musty smell had reached his nose—dirt and dry rot and yellowed paper—a smell that jerked him backward to that day in his childhood when he’d discovered Grandma Cowley’s cellar. The pages were thick, rough beneath his fingers. Insects had tunneled through the heart of the book, riddling the pages with pinpricks. He wrapped the diary in a dry cloth and tucked it into the nightstand, where it had slumbered, unread, for almost a year.

The problem wasn’t Great-Great-Grandma Cowley’s story. That had drawn his interest at once. Who was this man she had
killed? The Paiute on the horse? Would the government have cared enough to make Grandma Cowley afraid of hanging? No, at the slightest hint their virtue might be at stake, the women would have been given carte blanche to shoot any number of Indians.

He wanted to know why the founders of Blister Creek sent their wives into the wilderness alone. And who was Sister Annabelle? The daughter of a member of the Quorum of the Twelve from the Salt Lake–based church? Brigham Young Junior’s daughter, maybe?

But then there was the part about the dark angel. More religious superstition. He’d always thought Grandma Cowley was different. Maybe that’s why he’d waited for a year to read what she had to say—he was afraid to discover she was like everyone else in Blister Creek, with their talk of angels and evil spirits.

The whimper turned into a cry. His ears strained. His daughter, Leah, shared a room with two of his young half sisters across the hall, and at first he thought it came from there. But then he was sure it came from the attic. Daniel and Nephi’s room.

Jacob slipped from bed and pushed past Fernie’s wheelchair and into the hall. Fernie stirred but didn’t wake. He felt his way to the foot of the attic stairs and listened, hoping that whoever it was would settle down.

The crying stopped, and then Daniel spoke in a high, terrified voice. “Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

Jacob’s mouth went dry. He took the stairs two at a time and threw opened the attic door. There was something palpably wrong in the room, and a shudder crawled up his spine. Moonlight filtered through the blinds to cast stripes of gray and black across the room. A man’s shadow lay across Daniel, struggling to subdue
the boy, who cried out and writhed to free himself. Jacob flipped the light switch and rushed toward the bed with fury rising in his chest.

There was no one else there. He drew short, confused. What he’d taken for a man was a twist of blankets coiled around the boy like a gopher snake squeezing a rat. Daniel thrashed and bucked, and the veins in his neck bulged. His eyes were open, but he had the glazed look of a child under sedation.

“Daniel! Wake up!” He shook the boy, but his son kept struggling. Jacob fought with both blankets and child until he had Daniel free. His son trembled in his arms. “Shh, it’s me, it’s Daddy. You’re okay, I’m here.”

“I can’t get away!”

“You’re okay, I’m here. You’re safe.”

“Daddy, make the man go away.”

Jacob held the boy to his chest and rocked him back and forth. “Shh. There’s nobody there. It was a nightmare, you’re okay now. It’s just me.”

He repeated this again and again. Gradually Daniel’s struggles eased, and soon he was only trembling. And then, like a light flicking off, the fit passed. The boy’s breathing slowed, he closed his eyes, and with a final whimper his body relaxed. Jacob laid him back on the pillow, stroked his sweaty forehead, and then covered Daniel with the blankets.

He sat on the edge of his son’s bed, his own heart still pounding. Was this how it started? Did it run in the family? Had Daniel’s biological brothers—Gideon, Caleb, Taylor Junior, Jonathan—suffered night terrors as boys? Had they already heard voices when they were ten?

Meanwhile, Jacob’s younger son, Nephi, lay quiet on his bed in the corner, the blankets pulled up around his head. Jacob had a sudden fear about him too, even though he was biologically a Christianson and not a Kimball. He was too still. But no, Nephi was just asleep, oblivious to the light and the cries of his older brother.

Get a grip on yourself.

Daniel had had a bad dream. They happened. And that dark sensation that had flooded over Jacob when he opened the attic door had been nothing more than the superstition of Grandma Cowley’s diary falling from his imagination like dust knocked from the rafters of an abandoned barn.

He creaked his way back down the stairs to find Fernie waiting at the bottom in her wheelchair. “Was that Daniel?”

“A nightmare. No big deal.”

“Really?” A twinge of worry touched her voice. “Are you sure it was a nightmare?”

“Night terror, I guess. Half-awake but incoherent.” He looked at her more closely. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing. I just—well, never mind. I thought it might be something else.”

He wheeled her back into the bedroom and helped her into bed. Her left arm was stronger, but she still couldn’t put weight on her paralyzed legs. After a year of therapy, there was little chance she ever would.

“That stuff is normal,” Jacob said. “I had bad dreams as a kid. Eliza too, all the way up until she was a teenager. Unless you’re talking about something besides the usual kid stuff.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Get it out. What are you thinking?”

“You know what I’m thinking.”

“That dark-angel stuff is Kimball family superstition,” he said.

To explain paranoid schizophrenia
, he thought, but didn’t say.

“Maybe, but how can you be sure?”

“Children have nightmares. They’re scared of the dark. They cry out, and we calmly look under the bed and shut the closet door and then tuck them back in. Kids see monsters, and it’s our job to tell them there’s no such thing.”

Fernie started to say something else, but Jake began fussing in his crib and Jacob brought him to the bed for her to nurse. In a few minutes, both mother and child were asleep. Jacob couldn’t get comfortable. Sleet pinged against the window. The wind howled off the Ghost Cliffs and tried to force its way into the house, rattling the bedroom door in its frame.

What was wrong with this weather? He walked to the window and saw that it was changing to snow, as predicted. They were saying four to six inches by morning. The kids would love it, but it filled Jacob with dread. If there was a hard frost, they’d lose the wheat crop. The peach and cherry crops were already ruined from the hailstorm at the end of May. There would be farmers worrying about this cold front from the Central Valley of California all the way to Missouri. It was the third time in the past three weeks that unseasonably cold weather had dipped from the Arctic, and wheat futures were through the roof. If they could get a crop this year they’d make a killing, but at this point they’d be lucky to replenish their own food stocks.

Did it matter if the meteorologists could point to natural explanations for the crazy weather? The end result was the same.
Today was the twelfth of June, and it was snowing in the desert Southwest. When was the last time that had happened?

“They’re always predicting the end of the world,” he whispered. “And it never comes.”

Until it does.

Taylor Junior crossed the last ten miles on foot. It was a bare plain with little shelter, speckled with black volcanic rock, covered in rabbit brush and half-dead juniper bushes. Dry water holes pockmarked the flat stretches, and he was so tired that in the fading light of late afternoon, they seemed to sprout beneath him and sent him sprawling. He came up once with hands bloodied from the jagged rock.

A helicopter buzzed in the distance, barely audible over the moaning shrieks of the wind. Had they found his abandoned motorcycle? His feet ached with cold and the pounding of worn boots, but he didn’t dare slow down. It wasn’t the searchers in the sky that terrified him.

Don’t let it catch you, don’t let it find you out here.

He had to reach the sanctuary tonight. But then what? It had been a year. Would his people still be there? What would they say
when they saw him after all this time? He hadn’t led them to the promised land, he’d only sent them deeper into the wilderness, to live as fugitives, hated and hunted.

But that wasn’t his fear either.

Something crunched like breaking twigs. He looked down to see bones, bleached and desiccated, so brittle that they crumbled into shards beneath his feet. He had stepped on a cow’s skull, its eye sockets filled with dry snow that was lighter than flour.

A boneyard stretched ahead of him for a hundred yards. Cattle, sheep, goats. A coyote, then a dead vulture with feathers that still fluttered in the breeze. Sheep skulls grinned up from skeletons long since picked over by vultures and crows. In one place, two cows had lain down during their last moments and crossed their necks as they died. Creatures had gnawed away the flesh and picked the skulls clean, but the hides had hardened and drawn tight over empty rib cages.

This tableau of death horrified and repulsed him, but he couldn’t look away. He stood staring and licking his dry lips while the buzzing grew louder in his ears. What had caused it? Poison? Like Eric Froud, his body covered in blisters. Blowback from the detonated chemical warhead. It had eaten his skin, burned his lungs and eyes.

“I had no choice. We had to shoot him. We had to kill them all.”

Exactly
why
he’d had no choice was a problem he didn’t want to visit. That would open uncomfortable questions, remind him what he had learned in the sinkhole in Witch’s Warts.

The buzzing roared in his ears.

Instinct took over. He threw himself to the ground. A black shape swept across the desert like an enormous, hovering bat. A
helicopter, black and sleek, military-style. Almost a year now, and still the pursuit was relentless. They’d almost caught him twice, not counting those first few weeks of terror.

It roared by, and already he could see it turning for another pass. They would come back around and this time fly right over his location. They must have seen his motorcycle and guessed he was out here somewhere. Had they spotted him already?

He had to find cover, but there was nothing. No ravine, no boulders, nothing but a few clumps of sagebrush that wouldn’t hide a jackrabbit, let alone a man. A fine, dry snow fell on the high plateau, but the relentless wind whipped it to drifts while leaving most of the ground scoured clean. He fought the urge to make a run for it, but then they’d see him and swoop down for the kill.

He was face-to-face with the dead cattle. Their leering skulls taunted him.
This is the end of the line. They’ll shoot you dead, and crows will pick out your eyeballs. Your bones will lie bleaching in the sun.