The Gates of Babylon (30 page)

But penetrating this somnolent haze was something else. Fear. For her child, Diego, who had suffered so much and would now be motherless. For the fetus growing inside her, what had once felt like an unwelcome intrusion, an alien life form that stole its nourishment from her blood, messed with her hormones, and weakened her body. It was now a child, and she owed it life. If she died, it would die with her.

David’s face was up to hers, his hand on her cheek. She didn’t remember moving, but she was in the backseat of the pickup truck now. Someone was driving down the road, but it wasn’t Jacob, who knelt sideways in the space between the front and back seats, and was pawing through a plastic box. She lay on her back with her head in David’s lap.

“Miriam,” he said, stroking her hair.

“Sorry,” she mouthed.

“You can’t leave us. I love you. Please.”

I love you too. I love you so much.

But the words wouldn’t come out through her wheezing breath. She felt like she was breathing through a straw, and now the pain came, like a clawed hand, reaching into her chest and squeezing.

Something black crowded at the edge of her vision and when David kept speaking, it was as if she was behind a thick wall and could hear voices on the other side, but muffled and indistinct. And growing fainter with every sentence.

Miriam lost her hold on consciousness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Eliza urged her horse forward along the darkened highway. Lillian rode to her left, a solid presence that Eliza heard and felt but couldn’t see. She was counting on the horses to find their way, but they were cautious, anxious at the speed and the darkness, not trusting their own footing. The sleet came down hard and icy.

After about ten minutes a light winked to the left. That would be the cabin at Yellow Flats. It had to be well after eleven by now, but Rebecca was still up. Eliza pulled up short and turned toward Lillian.

“I’m going out to Yellow Flats. Ride into town. I want everyone awake, every woman and teenage girl.”

“What do I tell them?”

“I want them heading out to the cliffs—horses, trucks, whatever they’ve got. We have to stop Smoot before Malloy gets back or there will be bloodshed.”

“What about the grain?”

“We’ll do what we can to stop the shipments. But we’ll be talking, not fighting. I want the women armed, but make it crystal clear. No shooting unless they hear it from my mouth.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“Start on the east side—Mattie McBride,” Eliza said. “Then Gillian Potts, Elianor Griggs. Unless Fernie has them moving already. Then Carol Young. Once I’m done here, I’ll come through on the west side of town. Meet me back at the cliffs as soon as you can.”

“Got it!”

Eliza slowed to search out the ranch road and Lillian clomped past her. When she found it, she urged the skittish horse off the highway and let it slow to a walk. She was careful to avoid the cattle guard where her mount might break a leg in the dark, but when she was around that trotted as fast as she dared along the rutted dirt track.

When Eliza arrived, she jumped from the saddle and scrambled to the porch. The door was locked, so she pounded with the palm of her hand and called out for Rebecca to open up. The woman came out with an alarmed expression. In the front room behind her sat the loom she’d been working on the past few days. A single electric lamp sat at the window.

“Get your guns and grab your boots and coat,” Eliza said. “I’ll saddle up your horse.”

Five minutes later and they were riding back up the ranch road. Eliza explained their purpose, and when they reached the main road, the women urged the horses into a canter, fast enough that it approached a gallop, dangerous as that was down the
darkened highway. Rebecca peeled away before they reached town, to hit the ranch compounds owned by the Whites, Robertsons, and Smiths, while Eliza continued toward home. She stopped at three different houses before she arrived and each time set more women in motion.

Eliza arrived at the Christianson house expecting that Fernie would have it in an uproar. It was hours now since Fernie escaped the Smoots with her sons. How much did she know already? Was there enough gas in the car for Eliza to drive out to the cliffs where Fernie might defuse the situation?

To Eliza’s surprise and alarm, the house was dark and the inhabitants asleep. No sign of Fernie, or Daniel and Jake for that matter. Eliza tore through the house, waking women, and looking anxiously for her sister.

She made her way back to Elder Smoot’s house, more alarmed than ever. The Smoot women had been roused already. The younger, braver women were out waking other people in town, while the older women filled thermoses with hot soup and set their daughters to making sandwiches.

Nobody had seen Fernie. They thought, in fact, that she was upstairs asleep. She wasn’t. Neither were the boys.

Eliza tried not to worry and continued through town, raising women, horses, trucks when she could find someone with fuel in the tank. She ordered the owners to fill the vehicles with food, ammunition and weapons, lanterns, flares, and anything else she could think of to send toward the Ghost Cliffs. The women without horses or vehicles she moved to houses lining Main Street. Others she sent to break into the chapel to take control of the abandoned USDA headquarters. She wasn’t entirely sure why. To
show Smoot she was serious about protecting the town? A contingency against violence from the Feds? By the time Eliza returned to the Ghost Cliffs at the head of three dozen horses, every house and every woman was on the move from one end of the valley to the other.

Elder Smoot had taken her advice and barricaded the highway with Jacob’s utility poles, choosing two separate places where the canal bordered the road on one side and sandstone ledges lined the other. That left just enough room on the shoulder for horses to thread their way through, but unless the invaders came with tanks they would need to clear the road before their vehicles could pass.

Eliza grabbed Lillian and they sought out Smoot near the front where several men milled around on foot. Elder Smoot’s son Bill studied a map, shielded by one man holding an umbrella while another held a flashlight. The elder Smoot was talking on a radio. It was noisy on the road with all the clomping hooves, snorting, and people yelling back and forth, and Smoot shouted to be heard.

He gave Eliza a look as she slid from the saddle. “Is this the prairie-dress army you promised? I expected more.”

“They’re on their way.”

There were a good hundred people here already, most on horses. How many could they raise in total?

In September, when Jacob began to wonder out loud if they could survive on nineteenth-century technology, he sent Eliza and Steve on an animal census of the valley. They’d come back with the pitiful number of 6 mules, 5 draft horses, and 11 donkeys, plus 182 riding horses. Most of these horses were now jostling and snorting and pulling at the reins at the base of the Ghost Cliffs and the rest would be on their way.

“It might be enough,” Smoot said. “For a good show, at least. So long as it’s dark and nobody sees they’re all women. If they get past… ”

“I’ll have two hundred more in town, organizing the defense.”

Smoot gave a grunt that sounded almost satisfied.

“Has anyone seen Fernie?” she asked.

Nobody had, so Eliza climbed back in the saddle and went to search the vehicles pulling up the road, to see if her sister was arriving that way. She asked everyone she passed.

One of Father’s widows, a woman in her early thirties named Sister Nell, said she’d also asked around town after Eliza came to the house. Nobody had seen her there, either.

Nell pulled back on the reins to calm her skittish mare. The woman wore black riding boots beneath her dress and one of Father’s tan Stetsons with a leather band, too large for her head.

“Maybe she stopped at the Smarts,” Nell said.

But Eliza had already questioned both Grace and Eleanor Smart, who rode up with Rebecca’s group from Yellow Flats. They hadn’t seen Fernie either.

What could have happened? Had Fernie tried to ride in her modified saddle? If her horse stumbled and she fell, she might be lying in a ditch somewhere.

But that wouldn’t explain the missing boys. They hadn’t turned up either.

Elder Smoot had a radio. If Eliza could pry it loose for a minute she could call around. She approached the clump of men, who gathered on foot, arguing strategy.

A sound like distant thunder caught her ear. With the sleet turning gradually to snow, thunder would be strange, but there
had been so much odd weather these past few months that almost nothing would surprise her.

The sheer noise of the makeshift army made it hard to figure out the sound, but it was growing so loud by the time she reached Smoot that it became clear it wasn’t thunder. Something mechanical.

“Elder Smoot, what is that?”

His radio was squawking, and a voice shouted incomprehensibly on the other end when he answered. He yelled back in an irritated tone, telling the man to speak up and articulate his damn words. Smoot’s eyes lifted skyward. She followed his gaze.

Eight black shapes flew over the cliffs in a long line, one after the other. They swooped down from the bluffs to the valley floor and then swept over the highway a hundred feet off the ground. Military helicopters. The roar shook the road. Horses reared and whinnied in terror. One tossed its rider and another galloped away. Shouts of fear and surprise rolled up and down the lines.

The helicopters roared past. Six continued toward Blister Creek, but two broke off and curved around in a wide arc to fly over the highway a second time, this time approaching from the other direction. Men and women drew rifles and handguns. Nobody had given any sort of order, and nobody had fired. But that first shot would set off a firestorm.

Eliza was suddenly terrified. They had a nineteenth-century cavalry unit, unorganized and under armed, while a modern military force flew above them with the ability to rain down death and hell upon their heads. And her people were going to fire shots to provoke the attack.

Don’t shoot! Dear Lord, stop them!

She was shouting these things as she thought them, but there was too much noise. Nobody could hear her, nobody was watching or listening.

A rocket roared from the belly of the lead helicopter. It raced toward her, directly at the front of the column, where Eliza and Elder Smoot and the rest waited, helpless. She barely flinched before it arrived.

But it didn’t hit her, continuing instead another thirty, forty yards, and then slamming into the ground. It detonated with a flash of light. An ear-shattering explosion, a concussion of heat that momentarily turned the wintery night to summer. Pebble-sized chunks of asphalt rained down on her head, followed by a shower of sandy road base. The helicopters thundered past.

They missed? How did they miss?

Because they weren’t trying to hit them, that’s why. If they had, that rocket would have exploded in the middle of their ranks. It would have torn apart people and horses and replaced the confused shouts with screams of pain. Instead of asphalt, body parts would have been thrown into the air.

A warning. A provocation.

Nobody shot back, thank heavens for that. Instead they watched the sky, aimed their guns, and waited until the helicopters peeled away again. This time they continued south, following the others toward the center of the town, where some of the helicopters turned on floodlights and came down for a landing, while others circled above. Again, no shooting. That, in itself, was a small miracle.

Elder Smoot came up to Eliza moments later. “I was right. You see, I was absolutely right.”

“Oh, really?” she said. “If you were so right, why are we all standing around like idiots while they occupy the town?”

“But they came, and tonight, like I thought. And anyway, there are only a few helicopters. We can handle them.”

“Handle them? Are you insane?”

It wasn’t a
few
helicopters. It was eight of them, heavily armed, each one no doubt crammed with soldiers. Forget Chip Malloy and his handful of guards; these looked like regular army.

“We’d have been better off staying home,” Eliza said. “Not only did we
not
stop anything, now they know we were out here ready to try.”

“So what?”

“They’ll be bracing for an attack,” she said. “Did you see that missile? We can’t fight that. Send everyone home. When Jacob gets back he’ll know what to do.”

Smoot ignored her. He lifted his voice to shout to one of his sons, who came riding toward them. “Get everyone back to town! You heard me. Move!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Fernie steered the car while her son Daniel sat on her lap and operated the pedals. Once they escaped the warehouse complex and drove into the refugee camp itself, she only let him operate the brakes and crept forward with the engine at idle. People kept walking in front of the car and she honked to keep from running them down. Others spotted the USDA logo and glared at them or shook their fists.

The number of people on the street surprised her. It was late and the weather awful.

Once, when she brushed down a crowded alley, half a dozen young men crowded her door. One of them tested the lock.

“A little gas,” she told Daniel, trying to keep her voice steady.

He punched down too hard, and the car lurched forward. Fists beat against the roof as she forced her way through. Jake crawled
in the backseat, delighted to be unrestrained, overstimulated by the excitement and the late hour.

“Jake,” she said, voice stern. “Sit down. Mama needs you to be a good boy.”

He obeyed, at least for the moment.

When she was no more than half a mile into the camp and still on the main road, the air shuddered and the car vibrated with some low pulsing noise. Lights thrust down from the sky, piercing the smoky haze over the camp. Several shapes swooped fifty feet overhead, shadows against the snow falling from the sky. Military helicopters—she counted eight roaring over. Their speed and direction told her they weren’t searching for her—but the sight filled her with a sense of foreboding.