The Gates of Babylon (2 page)

Jacob patted his jacket pocket.

“How much?” Stephen Paul asked.

“Twenty grand.” He permitted himself a thin smile. “Doesn’t go far these days.”

“Not when they pay you half and charge you double, nope.”

A wind knifed from the direction of the Ghost Cliffs, moaning like a dying man, and carrying a distinctly December-like chill, even though it was only October. It was a hint of the brutal winter both men knew was lurking on the downward slope of the calendar. They lifted the collars of their sheepskin jackets and Jacob pulled the cap Fernie had knit him down over his ears, and then the men stood silently and stared up the highway in the direction of Blister Creek.

A few minutes later, a car engine carried over the sound of the wind. It grew until the pickup came slinking down the road
through the darkness and pulled into the parking lot. Jacob’s brother David hid the car behind the station, by Jacob’s horse, then he and his wife came around to stand next to Jacob and Stephen Paul. The four exchanged greetings. Miriam was starting to show, maybe four months along now, but the former FBI agent’s body language was confident, even aggressive. She checked the clip on a Beretta 9 mm, which she rammed shut and then tucked the gun in a holster beneath her left arm. She zipped up her jacket.

“Who is this jerk we’re waiting for, anyway?” Miriam asked.

“We’ve used him before,” Jacob said. “He delivers propane to the valley. Hauls fuel oil to scattered gas stations.”

“You trust him?”

“Not really,” he admitted, “but we don’t have a tanker to move the fuel. And he hasn’t ripped us off yet.”

“That was a couple of hundred gallons at a time,” David said. “This is eight thousand. And it’s under the table. If he robs us, what are we going to do?”

“Shoot him?” Miriam said.

“That
might
be enough to dissuade him,” David said. “But I wouldn’t count on it. Thieves are idiots, as a general rule.”

“Even idiots don’t appreciate a 9 millimeter round to the head.”

“Not so sure about that. But maybe you know a higher quality of idiot than I do.”

“You sure?” she said. “I once dated a drug lord for a sting operation.”

“And I dated his junkies.”

“Touché.”

Jacob might have smiled at the exchange, at seeing Miriam enjoy her husband’s newfound confidence. But this casual talk of violence left him troubled. Four months had passed since the last violent attack on Blister Creek and when Jacob woke in the night he could still feel another man’s blood, slick between his fingers.

I’m a doctor. I don’t raise my hand in violence.

Stephen Paul cleared his throat. “None of us trust this guy. But we’ll be leading in the flatbed. What’s he going to do, make a run for it? What does eight thousand gallons of diesel fuel weigh?”

“Seven and half pounds per gallon,” Jacob said, running the math in his head. “So, about thirty-three, thirty-four tons.”

“He’s not going anywhere in a hurry,” Stephen Paul said.

“I’ll ride shotgun in his truck to be sure,” Miriam said. “Let him see my Beretta. Chitchat about the penetrating power of a 9 by 19 round. You good with that?” she asked David.

David gave what looked like a doubtful nod.

“You’ll be safe?” Jacob asked Miriam.

“I’ll do what it takes.”

“It’s diesel fuel. It’s not life and death.”

Miriam’s expression hardened. “Everything is life and death these days.”

A few months ago, Jacob would have argued. Now, he wasn’t so sure Miriam was wrong, not with the way human civilization itself was coughing up blood.

“Anyway,” Jacob said, “it’s not the driver who worries me, but the guy on the other end.” He turned to David. “You pick up anything?”

“Nothing about a big-name black marketeer,” David said. “But it’s kind of hard to Google ‘scorpion’ without coming up with
stinging bugs or comic book supervillains. Krantz even phoned a buddy at FBI headquarters and called in a few favors. Nothing.”

“If it’s a scam, we’ll find out quickly enough,” Jacob said.

“And if it’s a robbery attempt,” Miriam added, “they’ll be sorry.”

“Here we go,” Stephen Paul said.

He had been staring down the highway that led south from the Blister Creek Valley, and now Jacob followed his gaze to see a pair of headlights cutting through the desert several miles distant, where the black bowl of the mountains intersected the inky, star-speckled indigo of the night sky. Shortly, the low rumble of the tanker’s engine cut the thin air.

When the truck was a few hundred yards away, Stephen Paul stepped onto the highway and blinked his flashlight twice. In response, the truck swung into the abandoned station in a wide turn to get the long tanker truck into the cracked and heaving parking lot.

The driver brought the rig to a stop with the hiss of brakes, killed the lights, and kept the engine running as he swung open the door and leaned out. His features couldn’t be read in the darkness.

Jacob kept his distance, wary. “Mo, is that you?”

“Come closer,” the man said in a tight, nervous voice.

“You first.”

“Four of you. One of me.”

Yes, that was reasonable. Jacob ignored his misgivings and started forward, even as Miriam made warning sounds.

“Christianson?” the man said.

“You’re alone, right?” Jacob held his hands out in front of him. “Don’t do anything crazy. My friends are jittery.”

The man let out his breath and at last he came down. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re good.”

The two men shook hands.

Mo Strafford was a lean, middle-aged man with a blond ponytail and gray stubble, skin tanned almost to leather and showing wrinkles, especially on the left side, where he’d spent decades leaning out the window as he rolled down the Western highways. Tattoos peeked out the bottom of his shirt cuff when his sleeves rode up.

“Nervous business, huh?” Jacob asked.

“It’s hell out there, man. Guys are dying, three this last week. They shot up one dude for five hundred gallons of LP, plus a thousand bucks, you believe that? Goddamned highway patrol didn’t even send a car to check out the scene, the bastards.”

“It’s not like we haven’t worked together, Mo. You can trust us.”

“I still got to drive out here to butt-plug nowhere in the middle of the night. And from here to God knows where. Where we going, anyway?”

Jacob didn’t answer the question. “Miriam will ride up front with you. She’s ex-FBI, so you’ll have that security. The rest of us will be following in the flatbed truck. We’re armed, too. If there’s any trouble, we’ll be prepared.”

The other man humphed at that, but he didn’t object to the part about riding with Miriam, which was what Jacob had been hoping with his hint that she’d be riding for Mo’s protection and not for the security of a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of diesel fuel.

Jacob glanced back at the others, who still waited near the flatbed. Miriam had dropped her hand from the pistol at her side.

“Let’s pump our fuel and get out of here,” Jacob said, “before our buddies at the Department of Agriculture wake up and notice we’re missing.”

Mo backed his tanker up to the front of a metal tank plug flush with the ground. Jacob unlocked the cap, and he and Stephen Paul helped the truck driver get it open and unspool the hose on his tanker. A moment later and it was slurping thousands of dollars of diesel fuel out of the ground and into the truck.

The pump on the truck changed its tone and Mo reached over without looking and shut it off. A frown crossed his face when he looked at the gauge. “That’s only eight thousand. Where’s the rest?”

Jacob put a look of dismay on his face. “Really? Dammit, I thought it was a ten-thousand-gallon tank.”

He felt uncomfortable at the lie, but he couldn’t let Mo think they could tap into unlimited diesel fuel.

“Might be,” Mo said, “but it ain’t got ten thousand in it, that’s for damn sure, because we only loaded eight. Got another tank we could tap?”

“Not here, I don’t,” Jacob said. “And what I’ve got at the house wouldn’t make any difference anyway. A hundred gallons, tops.” He turned to Stephen Paul. “How about you?”

“Same.”

“I figure it will be close enough,” Jacob said. “I’ve got about twenty thousand bucks—not counting your fee, I mean—to pay this guy off if he balks.”

Mo turned back to his hose and pulled it out of the underground tank, and Stephen Paul and David gave Jacob a side look. Eight thousand gallons was nothing compared to the rest of the fuel on this site, hidden in huge tanks around back, covered with brush, dirt, and a rusting heap of junker cars without tires. Father’s legacy. Always prepping for the end of the world.

Yay, Dad, you were right! Millions of people are going to die!

Jacob imagined Abraham Christianson up in heaven, nodding with grim satisfaction as civilization swirled around the drain and his children and grandchildren clawed to survive the coming apocalypse.

No, that was superstitious nonsense. A rough patch. A failed harvest—no matter how widespread—didn’t mean the end. The volcano had quieted down—well, mostly—and next year would be warmer, the business of agriculture more certain.

Meanwhile, a millstone of trouble around Jacob’s neck. Worries about food, fuel, power. The coldest winter in generations on its way, and propane supplies drying up. Guns and security.

Then there was the medical situation. Wait until the antibiotics ran out. Then they’d know what it meant to return to the nineteenth century. It wasn’t an adventure; it was a row of gravestones with children’s names. The only thing that terrified him more was the religious implication of a collapse: plagues, famine, warfare. And that the Lord had chosen him to keep all these people alive.

“Miriam, have you got your sat phone?” Jacob asked.

She had been walking around the back of the truck, peering underneath the tanker, kicking at the tires, as if checking the general road worthiness of Mo’s vehicle. Jacob guessed it had more to
do with the natural suspicions of former law enforcement and less to do with mechanical concerns.

She straightened and patted her jacket pocket. “Yep.”

“I’ll only call if something changes. Otherwise, follow us.”

“Where are we going?” Mo asked.

“Not far from here. But we can’t get there directly. So pay attention.”

“And so the faithful, goodhearted people of Blister Creek, Utah, drove into the desert with their precious cargo,” David said, “never suspecting they were driving into a trap.”

Stephen Paul snorted from behind the wheel, and Jacob looked up from the map he had laid across the dashboard and was studying with a penlight. “Does this black market guy have you spooked?”

“His name is Scorpion,” David said. “You don’t find that spooky?”

Jacob smiled. “Would you feel better if his name were—I don’t know—Kimball, for example?”

“I’m going to say no. But now that you mention it, are we sure he’s not?”

“Elder Kimball has to run out of murderous sons sooner or later. Besides, this guy has a foreign accent. Spanish, I think, but it was kind of faint.”

David said, “Any of the Kimballs in the theater? Good with foreign languages, that kind of thing? No? How about long-lost
cousins of Fidel Castro?” David paused. “What did your wife say? You told her you were doing this?”

“Not the specifics, but close enough,” Jacob said. “She doesn’t like it, of course, but Fernie is suspicious of anything that takes me out of the valley. These days, she doesn’t even like me driving to Panguitch on a drug run.”

“That’s one worry out of the way,” David said.

“Yes.”

Not only had the pharmacy closed, but the entire hospital was chained and boarded with the evacuation of the town to Green River. Five weeks had passed since Jacob last filled a prescription. The elderly were running out of their cholesterol medication, their blood pressure pills, their insulin. Nobody had died yet, but it was only a matter of time unless he could get his hands on the goods.

And then there was Jacob’s son. Yesterday, the bottle of Risperidone had an alarming rattle when Jacob gave Daniel his meds. The meds that suppressed the night terrors and visions of a dark angel. Sometimes, when Jacob looked at his son across the table, he felt like a medieval physician with his lancet and jars of leeches, while a priest in a cassock stood next to him, clutching a crucifix and muttering in Latin against the devil.

’Tis a corruption of the blood. Spread through the family by miasmas and unbalanced humours.

Put that way, it sounded like nonsense, but Jacob couldn’t help wondering if there was some truth hidden beneath the pseudo-medieval jargon. Daniel Christianson was Jacob’s adopted son from Fernie’s earlier polygamist marriage. And the boy’s biological father had fathered three dead murderers—Gideon, Caleb, and
Taylor Junior—each one suffering visions as a child. Paranoid schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations.

A handful of pills left in the jar. And then what?

Jacob brooded over these worries until Stephen Paul slowed before the turnoff to Bryce about twenty minutes later, flicking his lights to illuminate the road sign at the approaching intersection. All three men glanced in rear or side mirrors to make sure the tanker truck made the turn as well.