Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (34 page)

Taylor Junior fired twice in their direction, and Krantz and Stephen Paul dropped to the ground, surrounded by screaming,
frightened people. Eliza, farther back, didn’t drop. Taylor Junior met her eyes, gave her a hard look, and then turned into the building.

Stephen Paul started after him, but Krantz grabbed his arm. The two men struggled, but Stephen Paul, as tall and strong as he was, couldn’t match the former hammer thrower, and soon Krantz had the man’s gun.

“Let me go.”

“You idiot, it’s contaminated. You’ll die.”

Eliza said, “But there are still people inside. We’ve got to go after him.”

“We’ll stay in the hallway,” Stephen Paul said. “The blast was over the chapel, right in the middle of the building.”

At last Krantz nodded and returned Stephen Paul’s gun. The two of them went in together with orders for Eliza to stay out and stay put. People clustered around her, wanting help, asking where the prophet was, or if Jacob would come to help. She told them she didn’t know anything, told them to help the injured people, then pulled free and went around the side of the building. She couldn’t take the chance Taylor Junior would escape out the back.

It was quiet around the side. Smoke leaked out the side door, coils of black and yellow. She kept clear. He wouldn’t have come this way.

And then she saw the broken window. It was a small glass pane, high up on the wall, glazed, for light only. It sat directly opposite the sandstone fins of Witch’s Warts, and she could see now what he’d done. He’d come around the side and broken his way out so he could escape into the maze without going through the contaminated doorway.

Eliza shoved her face up to the window. It was the women’s bathroom. “Hello! Steve? He came through here! Steve!”

Krantz burst into the bathroom and came to the window. “Move back.” He looked down from the window toward the ground. “I can’t fit through there. Wait a second, do not go into the rocks.” He disappeared again into the interior of the building, shouting for Stephen Paul.

Eliza was frustrated at the thought of wasting valuable seconds. She looked back at Witch’s Warts and gave a start. Taylor Junior stood on the outside of the maze, watching her from no more than fifteen feet away. He held a gun.

“Eliza Christianson. The Lord has delivered you into my hands.”

“Murderer.”

“Avenging angel,” he said. “I only killed apostates.”

“You killed innocent people.”

“Blister Creek is finished, Zarahemla in ruins. There’s nothing for you here. Come join me. Marry me and we will raise up a seed together. You shall stand by my side as we rule Blister Creek at the End of Days.”

“Your wife? I don’t think so.”

Come on, Steve. Where are you?

As if reading her thoughts, Taylor Junior glanced toward the front of the building. He lifted his gun and pointed it at her chest. “Eliza Christianson, come with me or thou shalt taste destruction.”

“Don’t
thou
me, Taylor Junior. I know what you are.” She lifted the metal baton. “You can shoot me, or you can come after me and take me by force. Or try. I killed Gideon and I killed Caleb,” she added. “I killed your brothers, and I’ll kill you, too.”

A slight smile played across his lips. She thought he was going to shoot her. And then he turned and disappeared into the maze of Witch’s Warts.

Moments later, Stephen Paul and Agent Krantz came around the building. The three of them set off in pursuit.

* * *

They lost Taylor Junior’s trail in the maze. His footprints ended where a sandstone fin climbed from the sand. They searched the perimeter and decided he must have climbed onto the fin itself and then jumped across to one of the other fins that joined it on the far side. And then there was a stretch of hard-baked soil and heavily eroded slickrock beyond that. It took more than twenty minutes to pick up the trail again. They lost it again a few minutes later, and lost it for good shortly thereafter. He had disappeared into the vast sandstone maze.

No matter.

Taylor Junior had abandoned his truck in the church parking lot. Beyond the center of town lay a wide, flat expanse, punctuated by the occasional farm or ranch house, a valley stretching between two and eight miles in every direction. The only place to hide was Witch’s Warts. Meanwhile, Taylor Junior was alone and on foot. Move quickly and they’d have him.

Eliza went back to the church building to organize a search party to seal off Witch’s Warts. Agent Krantz and Stephen Paul took off in the truck to search the ranch road on the far side of the sandstone maze.

The first thing Eliza did was set up a perimeter of men with rifles. She wanted to send them searching the houses along this side, to see if anyone was in the temple. The men listened to her at first, seemingly relieved that someone was taking charge and willing to listen because she was the prophet’s daughter, but then one of her father’s counselors arrived. Elder Smoot had been home from church with a head cold.

The first thing he did was send Eliza back with the women. She bristled and refused. Nobody could force her—nobody seemed to dare—but she found herself marginalized. Of course. Why would she expect any differently? And so she asked herself what Jacob would do. He wouldn’t fight it, she decided, not when there was so much else to do. And so she returned to take charge of the women and children. She covered the dead and ordered anyone who’d been exposed to the chemicals to strip their clothes and wash under a hose.

Miriam and David showed up about an hour later. They brought shocking news about the death of Abraham Christianson. David joined Elder Smoot’s posse of seventeen men and boys. Forty-five minutes later, two federal marshals arrived from St. George in a national guard helicopter. Within the next three hours, four highway patrol officers came across the border from Arizona, followed by a team from the BATF. The next morning they would be joined by eleven FBI field agents and several more UHP troopers. By then, they had bloodhounds, helicopters, and a dragnet that encircled the entire valley.

In spite of this, Taylor Junior could not be found.

Over a thousand people crowded the cemetery for the funeral. They spread across the knoll in a wave of black suits and pastel dresses. They’d come from Alberta and Montana, and included hundreds of refugees from Zarahemla. More people crammed into the valley than Jacob had seen in Blister Creek since the church imploded after Gideon Kimball’s attack.

Jacob, David, and their younger brother Joshua carried one side of the casket, and Jacob had decreed that women would carry the other side. Who was going to tell him no? The first was Eliza, opposite Jacob, followed by two of Father’s wives, including Fernie and Eliza’s mother.

Sister Charity and two daughters stood next to Fernie, her former sister wife, out of the hospital for the first time. Fernie sat in a wheelchair. She held the new baby, her other children
standing solemnly by her side. To their left, more of Father’s wives, then Sister Miriam with Jacob’s Grandma Griggs. Agent Krantz and Agent Fayer stood by themselves, looking out through mirrored sunglasses. A few feet away, also by herself, the only woman besides Fayer who wore pants instead of a dress. Rebecca. Maybe she thought she could lurk about, concealing her secrets. He would disabuse her of that notion soon enough.

The reporters had the decency to keep their distance, staying on the road next to their vans, though Jacob could see cameras and zoom lenses. A woman from one of those trashy investigative programs spoke to a man with a news camera and gestured toward the cemetery. Similarly, black cars with government plates stood out among the vans and pickup trucks. Men and women in dark suits with ear pieces stood next to these vehicles.

The cemetery was a grassy rise on the south side of Blister Creek, a green patch surrounded by sagebrush and tufts of dry, brown grass grazed by cattle. Lichen covered the older headstones, which had been carved from sandstone, their names scoured by the wind until they were nearly unreadable. Once, when he was a boy, Jacob had come across Great-Great-Grandmother Cowley’s gravestone, which read 1872–1969. And below her name and the dates, the cryptic remark
Lay Me Up One Thousand Bushels of Wheat.
Curious, he went looking for anyone who might have lived even longer than she had. He hadn’t found anyone, but he made a gruesome discovery in one corner of the cemetery, which was filled with gravestones from 1897, when an epidemic had apparently swept through Blister Creek, taking away dozens of people, most of them children under the age of five.

Jacob led the pallbearers between solemn rows of women and children, their heads bowed. It was quiet except for the occasional sob. Four bearded men stood in a tight knot near the gaping hole by the Christianson family plots. Stephen Paul led them. He looked like an undertaker, tall and wearing a dark suit. The men parted, and Jacob saw the line of other holes in the ground, stretching to the far end of the cemetery. There were seventeen other holes to be filled. And that wasn’t the total number of dead, either.

Thirty-three gone so far. Three murdered in the initial blasts at Zarahemla, and eighteen more of chemical burns later. Five at the hospital in Panguitch, including his father. Seven more dead in Blister Creek. Forty-two people remained hospitalized, including at least four who weren’t expected to survive their injuries, one boy with a gunshot wound to the head who would survive, but in a vegetative state, and another woman with spinal injuries who was unlikely to walk, joining Fernie in that grim category. The remaining wounded suffered chemical burns from moderate to severe.

Thirty-three dead. No, thirty-three
saints
, he corrected himself. Taylor Junior’s grim harvest had taken in several gentiles at the hospital as well. Their deaths were no less tragic. Even Aaron Young, Eric Froud, and Stanley Clawson deserved to be remembered. A cautionary tale, if nothing else.

Jacob dedicated Father’s grave with a prayer. He opened the lid one final time before ordering the casket lowered into the ground. Abraham Christianson lay with his eyes closed—not sleeping, no, there was nothing like that on his face—but somehow still holding that look of confidence. He wore his temple clothes, white robes tied over his right shoulder, a white cap on his head, and a green
apron around his waist. Ready to rise on the morning of the First Resurrection.

Jacob leaned down and whispered, “I hope it’s true, Dad. I hope we see each other again.” And at that moment he imagined it
was
true, imagined his father on the other side, dressed in white, looking down at him, face stern but hopeful.

You know who you are,
he would say.
You know what to do.

Eliza and David joined him for a moment, and then they shut the casket and stepped back so Stephen Paul could lead the surviving members of the Quorum in lowering Abraham Christianson into the ground.

Someone started to sing “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet.” Within moments, the entire gathering had joined, and the sound rolled across the desert valley in a single, vast chorus. As they sang, they wept for Jacob’s father. Their prophet was dead.

Fernie pulled on his hand. He leaned over so he could hear her over the song, and she said in his ear, “They’re not singing about Brother Abraham.”

He looked around him with shock. The others weren’t watching Father’s grave anymore, they were looking at him. Hope pulled on their faces as they started in on the second verse.

We doubt not the Lord, nor His goodness, we’ve proved Him in days that are past. The wicked who fight against Zion, will surely be smitten at last.

Fernie pulled him back down. “You know what you need to do.”

Do I? Do I have any clue?

He didn’t want any of this. He wasn’t their leader. He didn’t believe in the mission. He didn’t want any of it—the wives, the
priesthood authority, the duty of leading his people in the Last Days.

Jacob thought about the moment when he’d come upon Fernie in the wrecked car lying in the canal. She’d suffered a spine injury, and it was his job to heal her with the priesthood. That had been the time to prove himself. He hadn’t. He’d utterly failed.

I’m no prophet.

He glanced at Eliza to see her watching him carefully, then at David and Sister Miriam, who held hands on the far side of the grave. Miriam met his eyes and gave him a little nod that said everything Fernie had told him moments earlier. How about Stephen Paul? He could be the other claimant for the mantle of the prophet—but no, he was looking at Jacob. Waiting.

The song came to an end. Hundreds of people fixed their attention on him, waiting for him to speak. Waiting for him to make sense of what had happened. What choice did he have?

And so Jacob did what he always did. He pretended he knew what he was doing. Most people couldn’t tell the difference.

He stood in front of them and spoke with the voice of a prophet—or at least a benign dictator, which was pretty much the same thing in these parts. The time had come to consolidate their people. Zarahemla had been destroyed. It wouldn’t be habitable for months. And it was a fortress, not a community. White Valley and Harmony were too isolated and small.

Meanwhile, Blister Creek was full of empty houses. It had water rights, a hundred square miles of farm and ranch land. It was naturally protected by the cliffs and the surrounding desert. They had the money to rebuild and the people to do it.

There would be one church now, no more Church of the Anointing or Church of the Last Days. They would be known only as the Saints, and would be open to anyone, fundamentalist, mainstream LDS, Jew, or gentile who wished to join them. One community in the desert, every man, woman, and child pulling in the same direction. Zion.

He left out the troubling details. They’d be subjected to yet another round of scrutiny by the media, FBI in their midst. Their enemy was still loose, together with more of his followers. Taylor Junior would certainly make another attempt. He didn’t tell them any of that. Time enough to worry later.