Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (31 page)

“No,” Taylor Junior said. “No, he isn’t. We’ll have to do it alone.”

He pulled the truck to the side of the road. He waited while a car whizzed by in the other direction, then dragged Eric out.

Eric screamed at the touch. He fell to the ground and screamed again. Aaron came around from the other side, and the two men dragged him from the road and shoved him into the brush-choked ditch just off the shoulder. More screaming.

“No, please,” Eric moaned, his words thick and burbly. He rose to his feet and staggered toward them. “Help me, someone. Help me! Kimball, please.” He reached out pleading hands, but the older man couldn’t take it anymore and squinted his eyes shut.

The other two men returned to the truck.

“We can’t leave him here,” Elder Kimball said, opening his eyes again. “He’ll stumble into the road. Someone will stop. He’ll tell them everything.”

“That’s a good point,” Taylor Junior said. He turned to Aaron. “Make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Aaron reached into the glove compartment and took out a nine millimeter handgun. He turned it over in his hand, checked to make sure it was loaded, and then rolled down the window. He took aim with the gun.

Meanwhile, Eric Froud had almost regained the shoulder of the road. Blisters had transformed his face. They stretched down his naked body, bleeding and oozing fluid after his tumble down
the hill. Aaron Young lifted his gun and what he aimed at was no longer human, but some monster, transformed beyond recognition. The gun fired twice. The noise shattered the air inside the truck.

Eric Froud fell backward. He tumbled into the brush and disappeared. Taylor Junior pulled onto the road. Elder Kimball lowered the window to clear the acrid smell of burnt powder. He felt sick. His hands and back itched and burned.

* * *

Taylor Junior’s body tingled with a mixture of dread and excitement. He kept his face slack as they drove away from Eric’s dead body, but inside, he was jumping all over.

With the extended exposure to the leaking munitions, his own hands and back must be blistering like Aaron’s or his father’s. But he didn’t feel it. Instead, he kept seeing Eric, his face a mass of blisters, staggering toward the truck like a corpse risen from the grave.

Eric Froud had been one of them, more so than Brother Stanley, whom he’d tossed into the sinkhole with little thought. Eric had been one of the original Lost Boys recruited by Taylor Junior and his brother Gideon. Taylor Junior himself had promised the man kingdoms and principalities both on earth and in heaven. Eric and Aaron had been best friends since childhood. Taylor Junior had ordained him as counselor less than twenty-four hours earlier. And yet Taylor Junior had ordered the man’s death and Aaron had carried out the execution. Neither man had hesitated.

Of course, this caused difficulties with Taylor Junior’s plans. He had to calm down and think clearly.

“We’ll be in Blister Creek in less than an hour and a half,” Aaron said a few minutes later as they approached the outskirts of Panguitch. “What happens then?”

“It’ll be ten thirty when we arrive,” Taylor Junior said. “Where will everyone be?”

Aaron looked confused, but Elder Kimball said from the backseat, “It’s Sunday morning, remember?”

“They’ll be in sacrament meeting,” Aaron said.

“Exactly,” Taylor Junior said. “Most of the town will be sitting in the pews listening to the bishop, including the men. I’ll detonate the last two shells inside the church. You two will be outside with rifles, ready when the survivors flee. You will shoot every man and every boy over the age of twelve.”

His father groaned from the backseat at this last part. It was a hard thing, Taylor Junior knew, but necessary. At twelve, a boy received the Aaronic Priesthood, and he couldn’t take the chance that some of these boys might be infected with whatever had poisoned Abraham Christianson.

“When that’s done, we’ll gather the women and children and carry them into the wilderness. If a few escape or hide, that’s okay. We’ll come back for them later. So long as we get Eliza. We don’t leave town until I have her in my hands.”

If she survived the initial blasts. It was a risk, he knew.

“But what about our enemies?” Aaron asked. “What if Jacob and Abraham are still alive and still searching for us in the mountains?”

“They are dead. I can feel it, can’t you? But yes, there might be a survivor or two. It depends on who was standing there when our trap detonated on the cliff. That woman who was in the FBI, maybe. We don’t know about her. Maybe she died, too.”

“Sister Miriam,” Aaron said. “I don’t like her. I hope she dies.”

“And Abraham’s drug-addicted son. David. We don’t know about him. Maybe even your brother.” He shrugged. “Unless Stephen Paul dies with the others. But what can they do? Abraham and Jacob will be dead, Zarahemla destroyed. Blister Creek emptied. Any surviving men will be outcasts, and we will return later to finish them.”

His calm returned as he imagined how it would play out. It would have been easier with Eric Froud, but it was doable. He’d detonate one shell at the back door of the church building, another on the side. That would only leave one escape—the front door.

They reached Panguitch. Whenever he drove through the town, he took one of the handful of side streets instead of cutting through the center as Highway 89 turned into Main Street. There was a diner at the juncture of Main and Center that seemed popular with the highway patrol, and he didn’t want to take any chances this morning.

And so he happened to drive past the hospital. As he did, he saw a woman in a prairie dress and her three young children walking toward the hospital entrance. There were several vans in the parking lot, the ten- or twelve-seaters you saw so often in Blister Creek.

The hospital. Of course.

Fernie and Eliza Christianson had been in that car, together with Fernie’s children. There must have been injuries. Not
Eliza—he’d seen her get out of the car—but what about Fernie? Had she been injured? Maybe the children, too. If the injuries were severe, Abraham’s wives would be here. They might have some of the older boys with them, maybe even husbands—cousins and in-laws of the Christianson clan.

He pulled the truck into the parking lot and parked next to one of the vans.

“What are you doing?” his father asked.

Taylor Junior didn’t answer right away. He watched the polygamist woman, thoughts roiling. “Look at that woman,” he said at last. “She’s a polygamist. Look at all those vans.”

“So they’re not all at the church,” his father said. “We can’t finish it today. We should go back, wait for a better opportunity.”

“Don’t be a fool, old man,” Aaron said. “It has to be today.” He turned to Taylor Junior. “Well?”

“We have to split up. Someone will take care of the hospital. Someone else Blister Creek.”

Taylor Junior considered their limitations, their remaining assets. Again, he wished they hadn’t lost Eric. “The two of you will take one shell and use it on the hospital. I’ll go to Blister Creek with the other shell.”

“Alone?” Aaron said. “How are you going to handle the men when they come out of the church?”

“Blister Creek doesn’t have as many men as it used to. Let’s say twenty or thirty at the church, maybe an equal number of older boys. Some will die in the attack. They’ll come out in ones and twos, herding their families. None of them will be armed. I will be.”

The frown deepened on Aaron’s face. It was doubt. “Even if you can, what if they flee out the back way? With only one shell…”

“I’ll enter the church from the back and detonate it there, then run around to the front, ready with the gun as they come out.”

“Too risky,” Aaron said. “Anyone can handle a bunch of women and hospital workers, but you need someone with you. At least take Elder Kimball.”

“I don’t want my father in Blister Creek.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror at his father, who sat with a numb expression. Maybe it would have been better if the older man had died instead of Eric. He’d become a dead weight on their operation. No, that wasn’t quite right. He could at least serve as a distraction. Maybe he would die. Maybe it was his time.

“Blister Creek is a spiritual sinkhole for him,” he said. “The closer we get, the more it saps his willpower. That won’t change until we cleanse it of the Christiansons.”

“Then bring me,” Aaron urged. “I’ll help you do it. And I can face my brother. If I see Stephen Paul—”

Taylor Junior cut him off. “No. I need you with my father, to help when his will fails him. Do what I command, no more arguing.”

He popped the glove compartment and handed them pistols, together with a box of ammo for each man. “Gather as many women and children as possible. Meet me on the east side of Witch’s Warts by two thirty this afternoon if you can. If not, I’ll see you either at the final sanctuary or on the other side of the veil.” He popped the trunk. “Now go.”

Aaron grabbed one of the packs from the back. As he pulled away, Taylor Junior caught a glimpse of his father’s face in the side mirror.

Elder Kimball’s expression was dull and expressionless, and suddenly Taylor Junior was certain of one thing.

My father is going to die.

Fernie dreamed she could walk. In the dream she hurried through Zarahemla, pounding on doors, begging people to wake up, to get out. The compound was dark and silent. There was something in the air, some sort of sickly sweet smell, like a woman’s cloying perfume. Fernie was certain without understanding why—the mysterious way that one knows things in a dream—that it meant death to whoever smelled it. But nobody answered her cries.

She woke in the hospital bed, her clothes damp with sweat that chilled in the overly circulated air-conditioning. They’d strapped her down at the waist to keep her from rolling and injuring her spine.

The memory of the dream hung in front of her, damp and sticky, like a spiderweb, then began to break apart. She grabbed for the pieces to fix them in her memory, certain the nightmare
meant something. She needed to warn people, but about what? She almost had it, but then the dream memories melted away and left her with a dark feeling of fading panic.

A nurse stood by her bedside, adjusting the IV drip. She looked over and smiled.

“The baby?” Fernie asked.

“Fine, no worries. His oxygen saturation is up, so we’ve got him out of the incubator. I’ll bring him down and see if you can nurse. How do you feel? Need a little more morphine?”

Fernie said she didn’t need another dose. The truth was she wanted to clear her head. She put a hand to her belly as the nurse left the room. It was sore, but not achingly so, where they’d cut her open and stitched her up again. When her contractions started, they’d tried to suppress labor, but when that didn’t work, they decided to go ahead with the delivery. With the spine injury, vaginal birth had been out of the question. Everything below the waist was numb, though she’d felt a twinge or two before the C-section.

Jacob, where are you?

She didn’t romanticize childbirth like women had in Salt Lake City. It was a job for midwives, mothers, and sister wives, not for husbands. But Jacob said it was important, and if it was important for him, it was important for her. So where was he?

And I need you.

Not to help with the baby. To help with the spine injury. Give her the medical scoop and buck up her spirits for the grueling rehabilitation. And not just to comfort her, to let
her
comfort
him
and wipe away the guilt that he’d let her down.
I’m still the same person,
she needed to tell him.
It’s not my legs that matter.

And where was Eliza? Nobody had seen her since the car accident, two days earlier. Abraham Christianson hadn’t shown up to give Fernie a blessing. And what about Sister Miriam, or even David? How about Eliza’s friends in the FBI, wouldn’t they want to interview her to figure out how to track down their attackers? Something was going on, and Fernie was no idiot. She could guess. Her emotions flipped between anger that Jacob would abandon her and terror that he’d get himself killed.

Her stomach was hurting now. It felt like a too-tight rubber band cutting into her skin. Rather than wait for the nurse to return with her baby, Fernie stretched and grabbed the IV pole to pull it closer to the bed, then adjusted the port on the morphine bag, to add a small dosage to the saline drip. Enough to dull the pain without dulling her mind. There were advantages to being both the wife of a doctor and a close observer of human behavior.

What was keeping the nurse? Fernie’s breasts had started aching as soon as the nurse mentioned feeding the baby, like getting into the car for a long drive and realizing she needed to pee. Just when Fernie thought she’d ring, the nurse wheeled in the cart. The baby snuggled into a blue receiving blanket with a blue stocking cap over his head. His eyes were open, blinking. Fernie felt an immediate swelling of love. When the nurse lifted him out and set him in Fernie’s arms, she thought she would burst. If only it had been Jacob handing her the baby.

The nurse bent over. “Let’s help you with that gown. No, don’t move, I’ve got it.”

Daniel and Leah had been strong nursers from the start. Nephi had needed time to get used to the idea, but once he started he didn’t want to stop for the next five months. This little guy—Fernie
had started to think of him as Jacob, a name her husband didn’t like, saying that Jacob Junior reminded him of Taylor Junior—took to nursing right away. He started rooting for the nipple as soon as it brushed his cheek. Two turns of the head and then he’d latched on and was sucking hard.

Fernie looked up. “Have you seen my husband?”

“No, I’m sorry. Your mother was asking if she could come in. Maybe she knows. If not, I—” The nurse stopped and cocked her head.

Fernie listened. There was some commotion down the hall, a man shouting, and then the sound of someone running past in the hallway.

The nurse frowned and excused herself.