Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (17 page)

Before he knew what he was doing he had turned the motorcycle onto the dirt road. He rode through the open gates and past the warning sign. A mile into the proving ground, the motorcycle passed between a pair of pillboxes that flanked the road. Someone had painted a doodle on one of the pillboxes of a bald-headed face with a long nose peering over a wall and “Kilroy was here – May ’43” written underneath. Lichen speckled the concrete and the corners were crumbling, but Taylor Junior half expected to see the
snout of a machine gun thrust from one of the embrasures to gun him down.

About ten minutes later, he stopped on the road in front of a red sign with skull and crossbones that read “DANGER – MINES.” Off the road some twenty yards lay the rusting remains of a camouflage-painted truck with the front half of the vehicle blown apart. Taylor Junior shielded his eyes. In back, a tattered canvas sheet flapped in the wind and he could see the nose of a crate poking out. It was the size and shape of a coffin built for a child. After a moment, the canvas fluttered down and left only the hint of a bulge beneath. The truck must have gone off the road, hit a mine, and then the army had abandoned the truck rather than send someone to clear the minefield. How long ago? Decades, he guessed. What was in that crate? Bombs? Ammunition? Rusting cans of pork and beans? Suddenly, and unexpectedly, he had to know.

You’ll know what to do.

The words came into his head, perhaps not as strongly as when he heard the man speak them on the salt flats, but vividly enough. Taylor Junior licked his lips and reached for his saddlebag. He fished out his last canteen, but it was almost empty and he wasn’t that thirsty yet, so he put it back.

Someone must have crossed that minefield to the truck. They hadn’t left a dead or injured man in the cab for the last thirty years. In fact, the door hung open. Taylor Junior imagined a single man with a minesweeper crossing in a straight line to clear a path for medics to get the driver out. Once in, once out.

But what about that path? Taylor Junior could follow the shortest course to the driver’s side door, then edge around the
truck to the back and retrieve the contents of the crate. But not now. Now he stood in the glaring sunlight of late afternoon on an open plain. An army truck might come down the road. A jet might fly overhead on a bombing run and spot the glint of his motorcycle. They’d send a helicopter out. He’d flee on his bike. They would shoot him.

Before leaving, Taylor Junior spent a few minutes eyeing the angles between the road and the truck cab, the same calculation surely performed by a minesweeper all those years earlier. He gathered stones and stacked them at the point where the road and the truck cab intersected in the shortest possible line and then lay a double row of pebbles across the road itself. This took about five minutes. When he finished, he mounted the motorcycle and rode for the gates.

Back on the highway, Taylor Junior drove a mile down the road and stashed his motorcycle in an arroyo. He waited until dark, with nothing but the low moan of the wind to keep him company, then returned to the proving range on foot, guided only by the moonlight. He walked past the broken gate and into the military base, walking for some time until he stumbled across the pebbles he’d laid across the width of the road. He spent a moment scattering the pebbles with his boot before searching out the little mound he’d placed on the edge of the road. He squatted and peered through the darkness.

The truck was a dark shape against the flat expanse. The wind picked up and flapped the canvas up and down. Staring at it from this angle and in this light, the truck looked like a woman’s head, and the canvas her hair waving in the wind. The missing windshield made it look like half the woman’s face was gone. And when
the canvas lifted, the lump of the crate deformed the back of the skull. It was as if someone had shoved his fist through the woman’s face and half pushed it out the back of her skull.

Taylor Junior fixed on the crate. “What is it?” he whispered. The wind moaned its response, and the canvas thumped its agreement. It sounded like a warning.

DANGER – MINES.

Don’t be a coward. Do it, go.

He had a path. What was he afraid of?

The first step was the hardest. He left the road and walked in a straight line toward the skull-like shape in front of him. Each step was a little more steady. Within moments, he’d reached the truck. Up close it wasn’t so frightening. He ran his fingers along the twisted hood, metal with its paint worn off and rusting through, felt the handle on the open door. Hugging the truck, he edged around until he reached the back. The canvas whipped him in the face, and he pushed it aside. There was the crate.

Taylor Junior ran his fingers over the surface and felt the lettering branded into the wood. “What are you? What’s your secret?”

He imagined a crate of nuclear waste, knifing him with millions of gamma particles with every second he sat here fondling it. No, more likely high explosives. Artillery shells. There was a rope handle and he gave it a tug, felt something pulling back, perhaps a canvas strap that had been used to secure the crate in the truck. He was about to reach farther in to find what was resisting, but then the crate gave way and slid toward the edge. It wasn’t as heavy as he’d thought.

But that initial movement had deceived him. As soon as he got it over the edge, the crate proved too heavy to support. It jerked down on his arms, then fell to the ground with a clank.
He flinched, expecting to feel the ground rise beneath him as the bombs detonated. He caught a curiously floral smell, like geraniums. And then it was gone and the crate sat still.

Terror returned as he heaved and dragged at the crate to get it in motion. It was wider than his footsteps. He could see the road in the gloom, but wasn’t sure he was following the same way out as he’d taken in. The crate moved inch by agonizing inch toward the road, catching on rocks and the roots of sagebrush. Behind him, the canvas thrashed a furious beat as the wind gusted, and he swore the moaning now sounded like a woman’s voice, shrieking in anger. At any moment, he expected to stumble over a mine and be hurled into the sky. He wasn’t.

When he finally gained the road, Taylor Junior doubled over, gasping and shaking with fear. He stood for a long moment until he regained his composure, then grasped the rope handle and pulled. It slid across the pavement. He spent most of the night dragging it down the dirt road and out of the proving ground. Another two hours to get it to the arroyo where he’d hidden his motorcycle. He pulled the sagebrush off his motorcycle and used the brush to hide the crate instead.

Just as dawn crept over the eastern horizon, Taylor Junior drank the last mouthfuls of water from his canteen, kick-started his motorcycle, and then drove down the highway. The bands around his chest relaxed with every mile he put between himself and the crate he’d pilfered from the army base.

That’s it,
he thought.
I’m not going back there. The devil can open that crate—I won’t do it.

For a while, he kept his promise. It would be almost sixteen more months before he would return to the arroyo with a pickup
truck to retrieve the crate. By then he’d come to recognize what he’d been looking for in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Skull Valley. A refuge. A fortress. Even then, after he’d found that place in the Dark Canyon wilderness, all the way back where he’d suffered the rattlesnake bite, even after he’d hauled the crate to the edge of Dark Canyon, he hadn’t dared bring it into the box canyon. Or show it to the others as he began to gather the faithful to his side.

He found Eric Froud working in an adult video store in Las Vegas. Eric’s father had told him he was a good-for-nothing pervert, and so he’d set about to fulfill expectations. Philip and Levi Cobb were a pair of drunks living beneath the freeway overpass on the west side of Salt Lake with a short, brown-skinned woman from Guatemala whom they both claimed as girlfriend. Taylor Junior promised them kingdoms and principalities.

Aaron Young was living with two wives and three kids near the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He stood on the cinder block stairs in front of his trailer watching with a hand shading his eyes as Taylor Junior rode up on his motorcycle.

“Is it true?” Taylor Junior asked. “Have you declared yourself the One Mighty and Strong?”

“I am waiting for the word of the Lord. Nothing more.”

“I shall make thee a leader among men. Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. Thus sayeth the Lord.”

“And the men who drove me into the wilderness?” Aaron asked. “What about them?”

“They shall be utterly destroyed, yea, even thrust down to hell. And the Lord shall bless thee with the lands and wives of thine enemies.”

Something glinted in Aaron’s eyes then, some secret memory of hatred toward his brother Stephen Paul, no doubt. The man bowed his head. “Thou sayest.” He called for his wives and children, and the lot of them loaded into their car to follow Taylor Junior’s motorcycle. They didn’t so much as close their front door.

All this time Taylor Junior thought about the crate from the proving ground, but he delayed, hesitated until the last possible moment.

In fact, it had taken another hard winter and a blistering summer before he’d even opened the thing. Four years after his flight from Blister Creek. Two years after braving a mine field. When he finally worked up the courage to pry open the lid, he stared at the contents, not yet recognizing what he was looking at. But he knew one thing.

He hadn’t found the crate by accident.

Miriam and David crouched behind a boulder, guns in hand, while two men argued up the hillside from them. The first man said, “Geraniums. The dew of death.”

A moment later, a second voice said, “It is better for one man to die than a nation to dwindle in disbelief.”

“More than one man will die,” the first man said. “They’re all apostates.”

Two voices. And yet there had only been one set of footprints climbing out of the sandstone fissure and up into the box canyon. Two men changed the math. Miriam had imagined several scenarios, half of which involved Taylor Junior in custody, the other half ending with the man lying on his back, eyes glassy. Blood spume at his mouth, bullet holes in his chest. She had little doubt she could kill two men, but could she arrest them? And if there
were two men, there could easily be a third, silently studying the canyon through the end of a sniper scope.

Miriam took David’s arm. She leaned forward until her lips brushed his ear. “Where did he come from? Is there some other way into the canyon?”

“You’re wrong,” David whispered back. “Listen.”

“But how many?” one of the men said. She didn’t know if it was Taylor Junior or the other man. “That’s the question.”

A pause. “The Lord will decide. But there’s a reason we have so many geraniums. We have multiple targets.”

Miriam started to puzzle over what he meant with his talk of flowers when she realized something. The second voice was the same as the first. Taylor Junior wasn’t speaking to a second man—he was talking out his plans. Miriam had done the same thing herself when hiking in the hills above Zarahemla. An hour, two hours in the solitude of the desert, and it was almost like she could hear her own thoughts anyway—it became a natural thing to voice those thoughts.

David met her gaze and nodded.
One man,
his look said.
We can take him.

She leaned back to his ear. “This is it. Remember what I said.”

He turned and whispered back, “Don’t wet myself?”

She squeezed his arm. “I don’t care if you pee your pants. It’s your blood I don’t want to see. Be ready. Shoot first if you have to.”

“I’m not killing a man in cold blood.”

“Of course not. But if he’s armed, if he lifts a weapon of some kind, don’t assume he’s bluffing. Finish him.” He frowned, and looked like he hadn’t caught the last part, so she whispered, “Blow him away.”

“My main goal is to not blow off my own foot.”

“That too.”

Taylor Junior wouldn’t surrender. She knew it. Instead he’d go down like his brothers Gideon and Caleb. Only this time it wouldn’t be Eliza killing one of the Kimball sons, it would be either Miriam or David. No, Miriam. David was backup, only. Well, what of it? She could kill one man now or wait until it ended in a pitched battle, like the FBI attack on the Zarahemla compound last year, or worse, in a horror like the immolation of Caleb Kimball’s followers outside Las Vegas.

They heard Taylor Junior start moving again. They crept up the box canyon after him. The walls narrowed on either side.

No way out of the canyon. The upper reaches ended with towering sandstone walls. The east and south faces were sheer cliffs, perhaps scalable by a skilled climber carrying full gear, but that was neither a practical nor speedy way out of the canyon. On first glance, the northern edge of the canyon was more promising. One could hike halfway up the cliff on that side, scaling the fissures and brush growing from the heap of boulders piled against the rock wall, but the last hundred feet was damp and slick with moss on that side, streaked black with desert varnish, the sandstone weeping drips of water from an underground stream. Not even a trained rock climber could make it out that way. No, to get out, Taylor Junior would have to escape via the sandstone fissure at the base of the box canyon, and that would mean getting past Miriam and David.

Only a few more yards now. The gun felt heavy in her hand, deadly. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her ears picked up every whisper of air, every chirping bird, her shoe scraping a rock, David breathing behind her. No more voices ahead of them and no
more kicked rocks or bending branches, but that was only because their quarry had reached the end of the canyon and would be attending to whatever had brought him in this far.

And then the canyon ended. It terminated in a copse of Douglas firs that snugged against the east wall. Miriam climbed between two boulders, her gun in her right hand, and emerged in the middle of the trees. She thumbed off the safety as David came in behind her. Miriam held out the gun, steadied with her left hand on her right wrist, ready to scream for Taylor Junior to surrender. The firs grew from a flat, hard-packed surface. There were at least a dozen trees, but none of them more than twelve inches in diameter. Not one was wide enough to hide Taylor Junior. And there were no boulders or fissures in the rock, either.