Righteous03 - The Wicked (28 page)

As soon as it was shut, the remaining man gave a glance further into the dump and a frown crossed his face, as if he’d expected one more person. He lifted his good hand and David saw that he held a butane lighter with a long tip. He touched it to one of the tires stacked outside the door of the trailer. It burst into flame so quickly it must have been doused in lighter fluid or gasoline. Jacob, Miriam, and David started toward the trailer.

The man squared his body to block their path. Already, the fire was spreading along the tires that surrounded the trailer, although the building itself hadn’t yet caught. “You’ll have to get past me, first,” the man said. “There are three of you and I’m injured, but I’ll put up a fight. It will be too late.”

“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “We don’t have time for that.” She lifted her gun. “Move, or die.”

“And you’re going to shoot an unarmed man? I don’t think so.” He smiled. “The problem with threats is you have to be prepared to carry them out, and not just bluff. I can see on your face that you’re bluffing.”

“Boy, are you a bad judge of character,” Miriam said. Her gun barked twice in succession, and the man fell backward, good hand flying to his chest. A look of surprise crossed his face, even as the blood burbled out of his mouth.

David gaped. Beside him, Jacob started toward the man, rolling up his sleeves, as if forced by his medical training to intervene. Miriam grabbed his arm and he looked up at her, blinked, and then he was in control again. He nodded, looked away with a grim expression. Already, David could see the light fading in the man’s eyes as his spirit slipped from his body, speeding toward its eternal reward. Or punishment.

“Don’t just stand there like a pair of idiots,” Miriam told them. “Eliza might be in there. You have to get them out.” She turned to cover the dump with her gun, while Jacob and David ran toward the burning trailer.

Chapter Twenty-six:

The Disciple swung the iron bar. The women stood side-by-side, Eliza still holding Madeline’s wrist. Eliza ducked backward and pulled Madeline, who didn’t move as quickly. The bar struck her a glancing blow across the side of her head and she fell with a cry.

The momentum of the swing and the partial miss turned the Disciple at an awkward angle, and Eliza rushed forward and shoved him. He stumbled backward, but didn’t lose his balance. He brought the rebar around again, like a backhand in tennis. Eliza tried to jump back a second time, and he didn’t have as much force to the swing, but it hit her on the shoulder. She fell.

He came at her again. Madeline lay on the ground, moaning and clutching the side of her head. Eliza scrambled away on all fours and when he was over her, ready to swing down, she gave him a mule kick with her right leg and he fell back. She turned, grabbed him around the legs while he was still unbalanced. The two of them tumbled to the ground. He wore a surprised expression, like he hadn’t expected her to fight back. The rebar flew out of his hands and landed to one side.

Eliza only had the advantage for an instant. He recovered quickly, flipped her onto her back. He was too strong. He held her with one arm and got the other one free, then slammed his fist into her temple. Pain exploded in her head.

“Madeline!” she cried.

The other woman had rolled over. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her face, but she hadn’t caught the same kind of blow that had killed Kirk in front of the trailer. She looked up, blinking, and crawled toward Eliza and the Disciple.

Eliza fought for her life. He beat her about the face, and some of the blows landed. She got her knee up into his groin, then a forearm across his throat, and for a moment, pulled free, tried to crawl away. He dragged her back down.

Madeline reached Eliza and handed her something heavy. It felt solid in Eliza’s fist. She brought it around with a cry. It crushed him in the nose and he fell back with blood spurting from his face.

Eliza tried to get to her feet, but she felt shaky and sick. Her head ached and she was bleeding from her ear. She looked down at the object in her hand. It was a piece of concrete the size of her fist, a jagged, aged chunk, like something torn up from an old patio before being dumped in the desert.

The air was so thick with smoke that she had a hard time catching her breath. Her eyes watered. A wave of black smoke rolled down over the Disciple and he coughed as he rose to his feet. He groped around on the ground and found the rebar.

“Caleb Kimball!” she shouted. “In the name of the Lord, I command thee to stop.”

He drew back. A moment of confusion crossed his face. “No, you can’t. You don’t—”

“I do.” She regained her feet, kept the block of concrete in her hand. “The Lord sent me to bring you back to Blister Creek.”

One hand gripped the rebar and the other went to his nose, now streaming blood. He looked down at his hand, then anger flashed over his face and he met her gaze. “You liar.”

“Did you know I killed your brother?”

“What?”

“Gideon Kimball. The Lord told me to kill him.”

“What? That was you?”

“He dragged me into Witch’s Warts, was going to make me his wife. The Lord spoke to me then, Caleb. You know that, don’t you? And do you know what he said?”

“What did he say?”

Eliza said, “ ‘I have marked Gideon Kimball for destruction. Kill him now.’ And so I did. I took a piece of sandstone and I crushed his skull. And you know why He told me to come to Las Vegas and find you? Because you have been marked for destruction, too.”

And with this, she charged him. He brought the rebar up, but too late. Her words had stunned him, made him doubt just long enough to get under his defenses. She hit him on the side of the head with the concrete. The blow landed hard enough to break off a corner. He went down.

The Disciple looked up in fear and confusion as she came down for another blow. He was done, she could see it in his eyes. It was almost certain that if she spoke with that commanding voice again, he would cower and tell her to go, he wouldn’t bother her again. But Eliza was injured, Madeline, too, and somewhere out there were Christopher and the others. She couldn’t take the chance that he would regain his senses and order the other Chosen Ones to hunt her down.

Eliza hit him again. And then again. She kept swinging until it was over.

#

Eliza pushed through the smoke and the air so hot it felt like it could burn her flesh. She held Madeline’s hand and the two of them ran with shirts over their mouths and coughing. They came to the trailers, now burning, surrounded by tires, also shooting up flames.

“Stop!” a voice shouted.

It was Sister Miriam, gun in hand. As she recognized the figures, she lowered the gun. “It’s you, thank heavens. Jacob! It’s Eliza!”

Jacob and David were at the trailer door, trying to pry it open and they turned with a look of naked relief. She realized they’d thought she was inside, ready to burn to death.

“Where are the others?” she shouted.

“Inside,” David said. “We can’t get them out!”

The people in the trailer didn’t have long, maybe seconds, before it would be too late. The entire east side of the main trailer burned, and a second trailer had just caught fire, as well. The heat from the surrounding blaze was intense and even here in the clearing, the smoke was so thick that all five of them coughed and struggled for breath.

Dead bodies lay on the ground. Kirk, his head bashed in, another man and a woman, and finally, Christopher. Blood still trickled from his mouth and flowed from his chest to the ground.

David and Jacob tried to kick in the door, but without success. Jacob leaned his shoulder in and rammed at the door frame. It held.

“Benita!” David cried. “You don’t have to do this. Open the door.”

A face appeared at the window, parting the blinds. It was Benita, staring out at them, while the fire licked around the window frame. Her face was blank, like someone already dead.

Madeline let out a cry and ran from Eliza’s side to the door. She grabbed it and twisted in vain at the knob, as if she could somehow pry it open where David and Jacob had failed. She banged on the door with the flat of her hand, crying for her friend to open up. And still the face stayed at the window.

Eliza came up to Miriam. “Can you shoot out the lock?”

“I tried that already, it’s no good. They’ve got it latched up top and slid something in front.”

Eliza remembered the bars installed on the trailer door. She’d wondered why they’d tried to fortify the trailer and now realized why. It was designed as much to keep people in, keep them from panicking when they saw the fires and trying to escape, as to keep people out.

“There’s no one else behind me,” Eliza said. “Nobody alive. Put the gun away, let’s help.”

By the time they reached the door, the fire consumed the front of the trailer. Benita stood at the window watching through the bars, coughing, arm lifted to her mouth. Fire reflected off her face. Madeline’s face was a mask of terror as she and David pounded on the door, begged Benita to open.

Life itself is too painful to bear,
Madeline had said.
Sometimes, suffering feels like an escape.

Benita was ready to leave that pain behind. They’d entered the trailer willingly, knowing they would be burned alive, convinced the fire would cleanse their sins and carry them to a tranquil place where there would be no more suffering.

The fire forced them back one by one, first Miriam and Eliza, then Jacob, with a fist slammed against the door and a final cry of desperation. He grabbed David and pulled him back. His brother struggled. Finally, they grabbed Madeline and pulled her away.

Burning tires spilled from the roof. One of the mountains of tires behind them started to break apart. A helicopter thumped overhead, but the smoke was too thick to see it. The smoke was choking now and the heat so intense it felt like Eliza’s shirt would catch fire. The need to escape the heat and smoke overwhelmed everything else.

“We’ve got to go,” Jacob cried. “Now, before it’s too late.”

Part of the roof of the trailer collapsed and then Eliza heard a horrible new sound over the roaring fire. Screams. The sound was like an animal, screaming in pain and terror, a rising, wailing shriek. For those inside the trailer, Wormwood had fallen.

#

Jacob led them through the smoke. Eliza’s eyes were a mass of stinging tears and her lungs burned. A foul, chemical taste filled her mouth. She let her feet carry her numbly away from the spreading fire. The screams continued at her back. At last, they were safely away from the fire and could no longer hear the cries of the dying over the roar of the fire. They spent a few moments bent over, coughing, spitting the bitter taste from their mouths.

“Eliza,” Jacob said. “Where are you hurt?”

She looked down, saw what a mess she was. “Most of it is someone else’s blood. He’s dead now.”

“We have to get out of here,” Jacob said. A defeated tone clouded his voice. “We did what we could, now we have to keep from getting tangled up in all this.”

The helicopter circled around the fire to the east. How long before police and fire trucks found their way down the old road to the illegal dump? It was early morning and news would just be reaching the authorities, but they clearly didn’t have much time.

“They’ll figure out what happened,” Miriam said. “Some of those bodies were in the clearing, they won’t be totally consumed. You can’t burn away the evidence so easily.”

Madeline said, “There are other Chosen Ones, some who were in the city and survived. They know the Disciple was planning for the end of the world. Nobody will come looking for you.”

“Only if we get out of here,” Jacob said. “We can’t do anything more. We got who we came for, that’s what matters.”

Eliza could tell by his anguished tone that he didn’t mean it. He wanted to win, Jacob always needed a complete victory and both as a doctor and a human being, he would be tormenting himself for months about the people who had died, who might have been saved if things had gone differently. And maybe if Jacob had come instead of Eliza, that would have happened. But she didn’t think so. She guessed they’d all be dead, anyway. And Madeline, too.

The fire continued to spread through the dump. There had to be fifty thousand tires here, if not a hundred, and Eliza had seen a tire fire in Alberta, knew how hard they were to extinguish.

Jacob led them toward the car. They squeezed into the vehicle and Jacob tore down the dirt road, hammering at every pothole. Eliza sat in front with Jacob, turned occasionally to study his grim expression or glance over her shoulder at the fires of hell raging at their backs. Gradually, the air cleared.

But Eliza couldn’t get the stench out of her mouth. It would stay there through the long drive back to Blister Creek and later, when she stood under the shower, scrubbing her body with soap until it ached, she could still smell it in her hair and skin, still taste it even after she’d brushed her teeth three times. She heard the screams and the awful cracking of the chunk of concrete against the bones in Caleb Kimball’s face.

Only after she threw up twice in the shower, then came out, cleaner but drained and shaken, did she start to feel better. Jacob found her later the next evening, sitting on a bench on the porch, listening to crickets in the night air. She cried in his arms as she shared the horror of her ordeals, while he told her how proud he was of what she’d done.

When she finished crying, she was strong again.

Chapter Twenty-seven:

Jacob had underestimated law enforcement. He’d seen so many cases where people had pulled off crimes while the authorities remained oblivious, that it had been a shock the first time he’d realized that law enforcement was not a single, monolithic entity, but a collection of thousands of individuals with varying intelligence, organization, and resources. He got a reminder of that lesson when they found him in Blister Creek less than twenty-four hours after the escape from the burning cult compound.

Sitting on his father’s porch, debriefing Eliza about the horrors she’d survived, he’d felt a cold lump settle into his stomach when the black Lincoln Towncar pulled up to the curb. Eliza glanced at Jacob, then went into the house to warn the others.