The Gates of Babylon (27 page)

“They’ll come. They know how we feel. If they give us a day or two, we’ll have this valley closed up like a tortoise in his shell. It would take tanks and jets to pry it open again.”

“You’re sealing it off anyway,” she pointed out. “Did
all
of the USDA men leave?”

“I don’t know.” His tone turned peevish and he urged his horse forward. When she caught up again, he added, “Do you have anything useful to add or are you going to keep pestering me?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” she said. “You know those arroyos off Yellow Flats, where Blister Creek turns toward the old Cowley cabin?”

“Of course.”

“My brothers cut and trimmed pine trunks a couple of weeks ago. They were going to run electric lines from the new hydro penstock into town.”

“Go on.”

“What if we roped a few of the trunks to horses and dragged them across the road where it runs up next to Witch’s Warts? We could block the highway easily enough.”

“Hmm,” he said in a grunt that sounded like grudging acceptance. “We could send men into the rocks to scale the fins and get a view down on a convoy.”

“Say we shoot out the tires of the first few vehicles,” she said. “That would force them to stop and negotiate.”

“The time is past for negotiation,” Smoot said. “But I like the rest of it. We stop them dead, see what kind of firepower they hit back with. And keep riders in reserve to come at them from the rear. Not bad, Sister Eliza.”

She counted it as a small victory that he used her name instead of addressing her with the dismissive “girl.” But he was still setting about to shoot first. Somehow she needed to put him off that.

“Elder Smoot,” she said, with her own emphasis on “elder,” “why would you go to war with only half your army?”

“What do you mean?”

“No, not even half.”

Eliza reached across to his saddle, and before he could protest, she drew his .30-06 deer rifle and sighted down the scope, as if she were aiming at a distant enemy, even though it was dark and she could see nothing beyond a few yards.

“Give me that,” he said.

She held it out of reach. “For every man in this valley, I’ve got three women who know how to shoot a gun. Give me the word and I’ll get two hundred more people. Enough to hold off a small army.”

Yes, and under Eliza’s direction those two hundred women would block the road and keep Malloy from reentering the valley. But if the government forces pushed, if they proved willing to use force, Eliza would order them to stand down. And they would force the men to pull back too. There would be no bloody, unnecessary war with federal forces. The loss of the food would be a
terrible blow, but nothing compared to dead church members strewn across the road.

“An army of women,” he said slowly.

“An army of saints,” she corrected. “Of which women are a critical part.”

“In braids and prairie dresses.”

“Elder Smoot,” she said, and let her voice carry, while taking care not to let it rise in pitch until it sounded shrill. “Do you want to prove a point, or do you want to win this battle?”

Elder Smoot held out his hand, and she reached over to return his rifle. He sat quietly for a long moment, staring back through the darkness. Around them, low voices murmured about what she’d said. It was the same groundswell of opinion that had pushed Smoot into letting Eliza ride out with them in the first place.

His horse moved the bit in its mouth and let out a long snort that was mirrored moments later by a grunt from the man himself.

“Okay, Sister Eliza. Raise your prairie-dress army.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was only when the convoy came down from the mountains and entered the deserted interstate east of Salina that Fernie stopped worrying about an ambush from Raymond Smoot and the elders of the Quorum of the Twelve. She’d been sitting so long in one place that her back ached, and her semiparalyzed left leg was thrumming like a piece of sheet metal in a windstorm.

When she drove with Jacob he would pull over every half hour or so to recline her chair, move her legs, or otherwise give her relief, but she wasn’t about to ask Chip Malloy to help, and what could he do anyway? He sat up front, staring through the swishing wipers at the taillights of the grain truck in front of them, his hands rigid as grappling hooks on the steering wheel.

Her sons had been nervous at first, but they began to relax twenty or thirty miles north of the Ghost Cliffs and soon fell asleep, Daniel slumping forward, and Jake with his head against
Fernie’s shoulder, rumbling like a cat. She wished she could join them in sleep. Maybe when she woke this nightmare would be over. But even as the adrenaline faded, leaving her drained, the ache in her back and leg spread.

Malloy fiddled with the radio until he found an AM station out of Denver, with a signal strong enough to reach across the Colorado Plateau to the desert wilderness. The host was an evangelical Christian, which made Malloy mutter in irritation, but there was some real news between all the talk about the Rapture and the sifting of wheat from tares. The marines had hoisted a flag over the Azadi Monument in the heart of Tehran, and Israel had finished occupying Syria. The Saudis and the Americans had worked out some sort of fuel-for-food swap, but the Ghawar oil fields were still on fire, so it was rather academic until that could be set right. Meanwhile, China had torpedoed three Japanese merchant vessels, and Tokyo was making increasingly belligerent noises—while refusing to give up their demands for first call on Australian wheat, of course.

Fernie was most interested in what was happening in California, but the talk show host didn’t address the crisis except to opine that this was God’s wrath for the sins of Hollywood and San Francisco. The choice for California was simple: repent or be destroyed.

“Professional agitator,” Malloy said and shut off the radio. “Someone ought to arrest that idiot and try him for treason.”

“For the crime of voicing unpopular opinions? We
must
be on the brink of disaster.”

“Of course you’d think that. You people are rubbing your hands with glee at the thought of all the famine and war if this crisis doesn’t pass.”

“You’ve lived in our valley for several months now, Mr. Malloy. Surely you know better by now.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Just be quiet. I need to think.”

“Next time won’t be so easy,” she said. “Once people learn that you’re sneaking out with our grain, they’ll try to stop you.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“The only reason you got away with it this time is that my husband convinced them you had a truce. You’d confiscated the food stores, but nothing was settled until you loaded it up and drove off.”

“Not like I ever kept it a secret what we planned to do.”

“So why like this?” she asked. “Why leave in the middle of the night?”

“Not to keep it hidden from you people, though that was an added benefit. The roads aren’t safe, you know. Better to do it quietly.”

“Again, that might work the first time. But you’ve got to move thirty-five hundred tons of wheat and nine hundred tons of beans and rice. At this rate that’s almost thirty round-trips to Green River.”

He glanced back with a sharp look. “Who told you that?”

“We’ve been in agriculture for generations, Mr. Malloy. I know how much a silage box holds.”

“Oh.”

“You’re going to do this again and again? When our people are angry, and the highway robbers plot your route? You’ll be on the road for hours, guarded by a handful of men. At night.
Moving food, with half the country going to bed hungry every night. Half the
world
starving to death.”

“Will you be quiet? I didn’t make the call. I have orders.”

“
Who
gave you orders?” she pressed. “Because whoever it was, they’re not your friends.”

“Why didn’t I leave you home?” Malloy said. “You’re an even bigger pain in the ass than I imagined.”

“Please keep a civil tongue in front of my children.”

“They’re asleep, and maybe you should be too.”

He flipped on the radio again and searched in vain for several minutes across both FM and AM stations, but all he could get was something very faint in Spanish and the evangelical station out of Denver. He turned it off with a frustrated grunt.

It was about eleven o’clock, according to the dashboard clock, when they approached the refugee camps of Green River. Fernie had never seen the camps but had been through the town itself on several occasions over the years. Green River sat on a flat plain strewn with sagebrush and volcanic rock in eastern Utah, bordered by the Book Cliffs to the north, and the drier, red-rock desert south of the town on the way toward Moab and Canyonlands. One of the small, gridded pioneer towns of Utah, it had been known for its melons and alfalfa.

None of that was visible now. Instead, all she could see was a low-slung tent city, stretching for miles, its tendrils reaching into the desert and enveloping the freeway. Spotlights bathed the road in bright light, shaded by the smoke of cookfires that curled into the air by the thousands. The air circulating through the car soon tasted like ash.

At their approach, people poured out of tents and immediately set off down the road after them. The crowd grew as Malloy’s convoy slowed to pass through checkpoints manned by soldiers at sandbag bunkers. They exited the freeway at a makeshift dirt off-ramp bulldozed through the sagebrush, and rolled up to a set of chain link and razor wire gates. Soldiers waved them through and then shut the gates behind them.

Fernie looked over her shoulder at the people pressed against the gates, hands gripping chain link. Pushing and fighting. One man held up a child with a thin, ravenous face and pressed him against the fence, shouting something incomprehensible with spittle flying from his lips.

“Sweet heaven above,” she whispered. “What are they doing?”

“They must think we’re carrying relief.”

“Those poor people.”

“Now maybe you’ll stop whining about Blister Creek,” Malloy said. “There are people who need this food more.”

She supposed they did. For now. But her compassion for hungry refugees shifted as her thoughts turned to her own children. Those thirty-five hundred tons of wheat and nine hundred tons of beans seemed like an endless quantity of food, until you imagined pouring it into the mouth of this hungry camp. The refugees would chew through it like a plague of locusts, and then they would look for more. What then? Go after Blister Creek’s personal food storage? How long until Fernie’s own children had that pinched, desperate look?

The caravan continued through a depot of Jeeps, Humvees, and armored transports, past a pair of black helicopters with shells like giant metal beetles, and up to another set of gates. The caravan
came to a stop, and Malloy got out and disappeared into the darkness. He came back a minute later, brushing the rainwater from his hair as he climbed behind the wheel.

“They’re confiscating our guns,” he said, sounding disgusted. “And keeping my guards outside the gates. What do they think we’re going to do? We’re
bringing
food, the idiots. Not taking it.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Fernie asked.

He didn’t answer but shifted into gear and followed the grain trucks. The truck carrying his guards stayed outside the gates. On the other side, they found themselves driving between two warehouses lined with loading bays. Men in green uniforms unloaded boxes or sacks of flour from the back of tractor trailers.

“I thought the state was running this thing,” Malloy said. “Looks to me like the army is in charge. I don’t like it. If the state can’t manage…”

“Then what? Turn it over to the USDA?”

“If necessary. It’s better if a civilian agency is running relief efforts than the army. Trust me on that.”

“When a civilian agency carries assault rifles and kidnaps women and children, I’m not sure it makes much difference.”

The grain trucks came to a stop with the hiss of brakes. Chip Malloy swung around to pull in next to the lead vehicle. The first driver was already climbing down from the cab and arguing with a soldier who was trying to herd him to one side.

Malloy let out a sound that was midway between a curse and a groan. “What now?”

He left her behind with the swishing wipers, the whir of the heat, and two sleeping boys. Malloy approached the soldier and his
driver as two more soldiers in green fatigues hopped down from an empty loading bay. Malloy and the soldiers started to argue in the rain, but about what, she couldn’t hear.

Something was wrong. Maybe it was the spirit whispering to Fernie’s heart, or maybe she was simply piecing together everything from the late-night run across the desert, to the way they’d held his armed guard at the entrance to the warehouses, but there was no mistaking the growing dread in the hollow of her stomach.

She tried the window, but he’d locked it from up front. What, had he been afraid that she’d climb out the window and throw herself into a ditch and then crawl away on her stomach with her useless legs trailing behind her?

He hadn’t locked the door, though, and she opened it a crack, intending to shout at Malloy and get his attention. But something stopped her.

More men came out of the bay, these ones armed. Soon, half a dozen men surrounded the USDA agent. Other soldiers forced the rest of the drivers from their trucks and pushed them into a knot to one side.

Voices rose. Malloy gesticulated, and when a soldier jabbed menacingly with his gun, Malloy turned on his heel and strode back toward the car. One of the soldiers grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. He pushed back. Two other men closed in, swinging rifle butts. They smashed him in the gut and again on the back. He doubled over with a cry.

Fernie gasped. Jake still slept against her shoulder, but Daniel was awake and staring through the windshield at the drama playing out in their headlights, his eyes wide.

The soldiers dragged Malloy to his feet and shoved him toward the open door of the empty loading bay. He staggered, tried to break free, but they drove him forward with elbows and rifle butts. They forced him inside, and then one of the men pulled the door to the ground with a bang of metal on cement, enclosing Malloy and several of the men inside the loading bay. The remaining soldiers ordered the drivers back into their trucks then climbed into the cabs themselves. The trucks pulled away.