Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (13 page)

At last they reached the irrigated green patchwork of the Blister Creek Valley. The road stretched smooth and flat for several miles. Eliza punched the accelerator. Her jaw clenched.

Fernie gripped the door handle. “Be careful!” She turned to look in the backseat. “Daniel, for heaven’s sake, fix your seat belt.”

“I’ve dealt with these jerks before,” Eliza said. “They just want to scare me.”

“Don’t let them scare you right off the road.”

“We’ll be in town soon, and then they’ll run and hide. You’ll see.”

The speed limit was fifty-five, but she reached seventy-five without trouble. There was no other traffic and the road was good, except for a few bone-rattling potholes.

The truck edged into the passing lane until it drew even with her back bumper. Eliza looked in the side mirror and caught a glimpse of the other driver. It was a young man, his face set in a grim mask. He drove with his left hand. He held his right arm funny—was that a sling?

Eliza gave a start. It was the man she’d bashed with the steel baton. She accelerated.

The truck swerved into her lane. It scraped her back bumper and the car shimmied. Heart pounding, Eliza fought to straighten out.

“He tried to run us off the road!” Fernie shouted. She craned her neck around. “You said they wanted to scare you!”

“I was wrong.”

Daniel and Leah made worried comments about their speed, and Nephi started to fuss. For a moment, she thought she’d escape, but the truck had straightened out after the near collision and was gaining on them again. She could go faster—not much, but a little—but every bump sent them flying. One pothole, one patch where the wind had blown sand across the road, and she’d lose
control. The speedometer edged past ninety, then hit ninety-five. The car shivered violently.

And still the truck crept closer. It was back in the opposite lane, edging up on her right bumper, no more than twenty feet back. If it caught up, no more than a nudge could send her spinning off the road. She pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor. They hit another bump, and the children screamed in the backseat. The speedometer was flirting with a hundred, and the car felt like it would shake itself apart.

But at last the truck stopped gaining. It held its distance, even began to fall back a few feet.

Fernie was breathing heavily. She had her hands on her swollen abdomen and was clenching her eyes shut. When she opened them, she glanced at Eliza and gave a weak shake of the head.

“Are you okay?” Eliza asked. “You’re not in labor, are you?”

“I’m fine. No contractions. Just holding on for dear life, I—” She stopped and picked up her phone. “I’ve got service!”

They were only a few miles out of town now and starting to come upon some of the ranch houses on the outskirts. If she’d had time to slow down without getting rammed, Eliza would have pulled onto one of the dirt side roads, driven up to a house.

Fernie had the phone at her ear. “Jacob! We’re almost there, we—shut up and listen! Someone is trying to run us off the road. We’re coming in from the Ghost Cliffs. Yes, I’m sure. Black pickup truck. I have no idea, we—Eliza, look out!”

A green car barreled down the road toward them. At first Eliza reached for the lights, thinking she could warn the other car about their speed, maybe even let the driver know she was in trouble.
But the car was out of its lane. It flew down the center of the road, approaching with startling speed.

Eliza gripped the steering wheel so hard it felt like she’d tear it off. Suddenly, she felt a jerk to the rear of the car. The truck was up on her bumper, having closed the distance as she eased up on the gas. She stomped the accelerator and straightened out, pulled away from the truck again. The green car hurtled toward them. The distance closed in a flash.

She veered left, tried to hug the shoulder and jerk free from the truck at the same time. For an instant she thought she’d fly by on the left and the other two vehicles would slam into each other. But then they corrected. The green car flew past, braking hard, wheels screaming on the pavement. Eliza’s tires caught the gravel, spun. She wrestled with the shimmying steering wheel. Almost had it.

And then the truck bumped her, hard. Suddenly, the car was spinning, then off the road and rolling. Children screaming. A woman’s voice, high, terrified. Eliza couldn’t tell if it was her own or Fernie’s. Or maybe the shrieking of metal.

The car flipped again and again. Eliza’s head whipped back and forth. They landed with a terrific crash. The car lay on its side for a long moment, then thumped down with a final, bone-jarring crunch. The airbag had deployed—she couldn’t say when. She fought it down.

The children screamed in the backseat, but when Eliza turned, she saw them flailing and trying to get free and knew they were okay. Eliza felt her face. Blood streamed from her nose. She had a gash on one arm, but couldn’t feel it yet. The car smelled like burning chalk, and there was a noxious powder in the air. From
the deployed airbag, she guessed. The horn blared. Fernie groaned behind her own airbag.

The front of the car looked like a crushed aluminum can, but the interior cab was intact. Front and back windshields had given way in the crash, and two of the four side windows were gone, including the one on the driver’s side. Water reached halfway up the tires. They’d come to rest in an irrigation canal. Eliza was shaken, but at the same time relief surged through her when she realized they were all alive.

During the crash, the car had spun around until it sat parallel with the road, and now she looked back up from the canal and froze in shock. The black truck had come to a stop on the road above them, and a man was stepping out. The green car backed up on the shoulder and jerked to a halt next to the truck, and two more men climbed out. The men from the car scrambled down the hillside toward Eliza and Fernie’s wrecked car. One man clenched a tire iron in his hands. The other man held a gun.

“Fernie! Get the kids out.”

Fernie moaned. She feebly pushed at the deflating airbag.

Eliza unbuckled her belt. Quite suddenly, she hurt all over, her shoulder aching, her nose throbbing and still bleeding, and the gash on her arm throbbing to make its presence known. But everything seemed to be working, nothing broken or torn. A glance out the window. The men were almost on her. She remembered her steel baton, groped for the glove compartment around Fernie’s deflating airbag, and fished it out. Eliza opened the car door, fell into the water, which rushed past her, and then struggled to her feet. She flicked open the baton.

The two men drew short at the edge of the canal, surprise on their faces. The man with the tire iron was Aaron Young, who had attacked her in Salt Lake. She almost didn’t recognize the man holding the gun.

Taylor Kimball Jr.

He was older than when she’d seen him last, thinner, his skin tanned to leather, his hair bleached by the sun. And something was altered in his expression. After that initial look of shock, his face hardened. She recognized that look. It was like Jacob’s, but with an added measure of arrogance. This was not the bully and coward Eliza remembered, who’d tried to rape her, then cowered under Jacob’s fury.

It was the desert. She could see it in his face and body. He’d entered the wilderness and come out a different man. A harder, more dangerous man. And the expression on his face was frighteningly sane. Calculating. Measuring her strength with a glance.

“Eliza Christianson,” he said with a nod. “It has been a few years.” His tone was calm, possessive.

It had been several years, but she felt a chill as she remembered the time he’d told her she had good hips for bearing children. The words were different, but the tone was the same, like that of a man who is talking about his cow or his land. His possessions. Taylor Junior looked over Eliza’s shoulder to the wrecked car. An infuriating smile crept across his face.

Blood dripped from her nose onto her hands, and her dress was torn, arm gashed. Her entire body ached, but she held her head high and met his gaze. She drew back the steel baton. “Don’t come any closer, I’m warning you.”

“Or what? I’m not Philip Cobb. You won’t stop me with a metal stick.”

“Try it and you’ll see.”

He started toward her. Aaron moved to flank her left side. She saw it now. The rest of it, all that business in Salt Lake, had been a feint. Scouting her, testing her weaknesses. This was the time. She might get one blow, but the other man would knock her down and then it would be over. These lean, hardened men would drag her into the desert. They would beat her, abuse her. Break her. Eliza waved the baton, determined to make at least one of them pay. Dimly, as if from a distance, she heard Fernie’s children crying for help, the car horn wailing.

Suddenly, Taylor Junior cocked his head. The whine of an engine sounded across the valley, tone rising in pitch. A car flying down the long, straight highway, coming toward them.

A man appeared on the hillside, waving one arm. “Hey! They’re coming.”

A wild hope leaped in Eliza’s chest.
Hurry! Whoever you are, for heaven’s sake, hurry up.

“Take her,” Aaron urged. “Grab her and bring her with us.”

“No time. And she’s not why we came.” Taylor Junior glanced at the wrecked car in the canal. “We’re done. The girl later.”

He grabbed Aaron by the shoulder and physically pulled him back. Aaron struggled, growling like an animal, but Taylor Junior spun him around. “No!”

For a moment Eliza thought the two men would come to blows, but then Aaron turned away. The two men scrambled up the hillside toward the road. Eliza stared after them. Her relief
bloomed into rage. She opened her mouth to shout her defiance, but a moan from the car drew her short.

“Eliza,” Fernie said. “Help me.”

Eliza turned back to the car, and only gradually took in the accident again. The children screaming, the horn blaring. She rushed around to Fernie’s side of the car. The handle had snapped off, but she reached through the broken window and got the door open from the inside. Fernie winced, eyes closed. Her face looked gray with shock. She had one hand on her pregnant belly and the other on the dashboard, knuckles white from gripping so hard. The deflated airbag hung limply from the dash to drape in her lap.

“What’s the matter?” Eliza asked, alarmed. “Is it the baby?”

But Fernie just moaned. She put a trembling hand to her forehead, so pale Eliza thought she might be on the verge of throwing up. Eliza searched desperately for a cell phone. She couldn’t find either of them.

She turned back to the road. The truck and car that had run them off the road were just pulling away. Eliza gripped the steel baton and climbed out of the canal.

She needed to reach the road and flag down help.

Jacob and Abraham Christianson came upon the accident a mile outside of town, on the highway leading into the Ghost Cliffs.

Jacob’s heart had been pounding since Fernie’s aborted phone call.

Eliza! Look out!

And then a horrible, screeching crash, while Jacob cried into the phone for his wife, trying desperately to reach her. The line went dead and he was left only to wonder, in fear and terror, what had happened.

Moments later, he saw it for himself. A cloud of dust hung in the air, looking from a distance like a dust devil that had spun itself out and left a haze suspended in the still air. The dust cloud floated above the edge of the road, and as they drew closer Jacob saw his car lying in the canal at the bottom of the hill.

Two other vehicles—a pickup and the green Taurus they’d seen outside the house—sat on the shoulder. They peeled away as Jacob sped closer, kicking up fresh dust.

Abraham slapped the dashboard. “There they are! Follow them.”

“The accident, Dad. We have to make sure they’re okay.”

“No! Someone else can help. Follow them.”

But Jacob pulled to a stop rather than tear off in pursuit. He jerked the keys away before his father could get them. He grabbed his trauma bag from the backseat. His father came after him, still protesting. Both men drew short when they reached the edge of the road and looked down.

A canal followed the curve of the road, carrying water down from the reservoir in the Ghost Cliffs to feed the ditches, sluices, and gates that irrigated the valley farms. The car sat in the middle of the canal, so mangled that it looked like it had fallen from a semi carrying crushed automobiles to a salvage yard. The accident had thrown a spray of water and mud twenty, maybe thirty feet up the hill.

The two men scrambled down the hillside. A sick feeling tugged at Jacob’s stomach. Children screamed over the blare of the car horn.

Eliza came around the car from the opposite side, her face pale. “Jacob, oh, thank heaven. You’ve got to help.”

Jacob felt distant, almost detached from his body, like he was watching someone else move. He splashed through the water to the car and peered into the backseat. There were his children, screaming. Daniel, the oldest, had a look of terror on his face like you might see in an adult. Someone who knows he has almost
died. Leah and Nephi simply screamed and tried to get out of their car seats. But all three were frightened, not hurt. Jacob’s own fear eased. And then he saw Fernie. She sat in the front seat with the collapsed airbag hanging in front of the glove compartment.

Her face was ashen, her eyes glazed. She had a hand to her face and the other on her belly, but she wasn’t moving.
Shock.

“Fernie, it’s me, it’s Jacob. Tell me what’s happening, talk to me.” She grimaced, but didn’t answer. Jacob turned to his father, who had waded through the water and stood a pace back, worry carved into his face. “Go back to our car. There are two more bags in the trunk. Bring them down. Quickly!”

Jacob set the trauma bag on the trunk and got out a stethoscope and a pair of bandage scissors. He cut away Fernie’s seat belt, then scissored open the front of her dress and her undergarments from her neck to her belly. The seat belt had left a nasty red strip from her neck to her abdomen, with the worst part where it crossed her chest between her breasts. He didn’t like the look of that, specifically, the thought of the pressure on her neck and spine. He imagined that the airbag had deployed properly, but then the car kept rolling and came to a stop with a final crash into the canal. She’d slammed forward on the belt.