The Gates of Babylon (4 page)

Seconds later, the shooting ended and Jacob hazarded a glance around the front of the truck. The other side had taken refuge behind their pickups, except for the injured man, who lay in the light between the two sides, crying for help. A moment of eerie calm followed, the injured man’s moaning broken only by the low hum of the wind and the sound of sleet plinking against the truck.

Jacob gathered his most booming voice. “You haven’t been watching the news,” he called, “because you missed what happens when you cross a polygamist cult.”

Stephen Paul snorted and said in a low voice, “Cult. I hate that word.”

“They’re going to use it anyway,” David said. “May as well go with it.”

Jacob told them to be quiet and then waited for the answer. It came a moment later.

“We still have you outgunned,” Scorpion yelled back. “Walk away while you can.”

“You’re dead as soon as I give the word,” Jacob said. “I have two sniper rifles trained from opposite sides of the parking lot. One of the shooters is a former army ranger who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other is my sister, who has killed men before and is an excellent shot. None of you will leave this place alive.”

There was no answer. Maybe they were trying something, or wanted him to think it. But they’d have to be weighing his words
and perhaps thinking about Miriam as well, who had crept away in the darkness.

“I’m giving you one minute,” Jacob said. “The next shot won’t be a warning.”

“What do you want, Christianson? You want your turbine, is that it?”

“You’ve got your money. You gave us crap and wasted our time. Get your injured man, be grateful we don’t blow your heads off, and drive away. Got it?”

There was quiet for a moment, and then he heard movement. He looked around the truck again and saw two men dragging the injured man back, and the others climbing into their vehicles. Moments later, the pickup trucks pulled out, and then the flatbed truck, and finally Scorpion’s fuel tanker, still empty of fuel. Mo backed up his own tanker until it was well clear of the road and behind the main hotel building.

David walked around the flatbed truck, a penlight in hand, looking at the old turbine. “Piece of crap. Probably missing half its parts.”

“We’ll try again,” Jacob said. “And we still have our fuel.”

How discouraging. Two weeks organizing this, plus careful work selecting a safe location and figuring out how to slip out of town undetected by the government minders that kept Blister Creek under virtual occupation. All for nothing.

Sister Miriam came out of the darkness from the hotel carport. Moments later, Jacob’s sister Eliza and her fiancé, Steve Krantz, crossed the parking lot from opposite directions of each other, sniper rifles in one hand and tripods in the other.

Before he could call out a greeting, headlights flared on the side of the parking lot and he twisted to see Mo accelerating in the tanker truck on the far end of the hotel. He barreled through the parking lot and toward the highway.

“That idiot,” David said. “What is he thinking? Oh, tell me he isn’t… he
is,
the bastard.”

All except for Jacob ran for the road to watch Mo jackknife his rig west, after Scorpion’s departing crew. Jacob scrambled into the flatbed truck, turned it on, and headed after them. As he approached the highway, the others jumped into the truck or onto the back. All except Miriam, who had reached the road and held out her hand for Jacob to stop.

Scorpion’s pickup trucks waited down the road a stretch, and when Mo passed in his tanker of stolen diesel fuel, they pulled in behind as protection. Mo Strafford. He’d been working with the other side all along. No wonder he’d been so jumpy, the traitor.

A sick feeling sank into Jacob’s gut. Disgusted with himself, he shifted to park and climbed out, stepping into the driving sleet again, to watch the enemy departing with all their fuel.

The others came around to stand glumly at his side, all except Miriam, who walked forward several yards on the highway and stared after the departing lights as they disappeared across the desert.

Krantz clapped Jacob on the shoulder. “Sorry, buddy,” he said in his low, rumbling growl. “At least we’re alive.”

Miriam called back over her shoulder. “Next time, shoot to kill.”

“I was following orders,” Krantz said tersely.

“Orders didn’t tell you to shut off your brain. They were robbing us, anyone could see that.”

“No,” Jacob said. “He did the right thing. Our lives weren’t at risk. Not really.”

“They will be at risk, if we can’t stop this kind of thing,” Stephen Paul said.

“It was my idea,” Jacob said, “and my responsibility.” His sister tried to say something, but he didn’t need Eliza giving him meaningless encouragement. “No, he’s right. Everyone was right. We can’t make this mistake again. It’s just that we need so many things and have no way to get them.”

Nobody responded. And why would they? They’d all voiced their misgivings in one way or another, as had plenty of other members of the community.

The grid is still working, what do we need to make our own electricity for?

It’s dumb to let criminals know we have fuel.

You want to prepare for the collapse? Why don’t you figure out how to get our stolen grain back from the government?

And Jacob’s favorite, proclaimed by older members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and whispered even in his own home:
The world is ending in fire, so what’s the point?

Miriam still stood at the edge of the lot, looking down the road. “Stephen Paul is right about one thing, though. Nobody gets away with ripping us off. Even if it makes us look like a crazy cult.”

“Come on,” Jacob said. “They’re gone.”

“How far would you say they are down the road by now?” she asked.

“A mile, maybe two, tops. You’re not still thinking we’ll go after them, are you? Even if we caught up, they’ve got all those guns.”

“No, that’s not what I’m thinking.”

There was something odd in her voice, and David must have heard it too. “Miriam?” he said, tone suspicious. “What are you doing?”

She pulled out something from her jacket pocket that powered up with an LCD-lit screen. It looked like a cell phone.

Jacob suddenly remembered all that walking around the tanker truck back in the valley, and again, here in the lot. His suspicion bloomed into sudden knowledge.

“Miriam!”

She punched something in her cell phone as he reached her in quick strides. He pried the device out of her hand. And then a flash of blinding light flared west along the highway, a few seconds of silence, followed by a roaring boom that rolled across the high plateau. A fireball curled into the sky, eight thousand gallons of diesel going up at once. The others came up to stand in silence and watch the column of fire.

“Miriam, damn you,” Krantz said.

Stephen Paul watched the fireball with something that looked like admiration on his face. David stared at his wife with awe and not a little fear. Eliza’s face mirrored the horror that Jacob felt himself.

“Mo Strafford was in that truck,” Jacob said at last. “And you just killed him. Maybe the others, too.”

Miriam said, “When you live on the frontier, you hang horse thieves. When martial law is declared, you shoot looters.” She
took back the control device and met his gaze. “Sometimes the Lord requires hard measures to protect His people.”

Jacob stared back, jaw clenched. “I have heard that before. The men who said it to me are all dead.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Eliza Christianson was so busy daydreaming about sex that she didn’t immediately notice when the other women on the porch fell silent and reached for their rifles. Eliza’s students were busy feeding apples into the corers and carrying trays to the dryers, and she had been thumbing through an old USDA handbook about meat preservation, but reading every paragraph twice as her mind wandered.

Two nights earlier, before the disastrous failed trade, she and Steve Krantz had arrived at the Bryce Canyon village two hours before the others to scout out places to set up their sniper rifles. Steve had been all business at first, but Eliza was so aroused by the danger and the proximity of their upcoming wedding that when they finished setting up the second gun, in a hotel room on the third floor of the main building, she had set the LED lantern on the nightstand and sprawled across the bed.

“Maybe we should come back to Ruby’s for our honeymoon.”

Steve looked up from fiddling with the scope and raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t prefer a place with heat? Maybe room service? A toilet that flushes?”

“It will be like camping. And we’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”

“A little too spooky for my tastes. Like the abandoned hotel in
The Shining
, where that dead woman comes out of the tub and… you haven’t seen that movie, have you?”

She smiled and shook her head.

Eliza patted the bed and gave what she hoped was a fetching smile. She couldn’t tell from his grin if he found it enticing or silly, but he came and lay next to her. She stroked his face and ran her finger along his lips.

“Unmarried and lying on a bed next to a man,” she said. “Five generations of Christianson women just rolled over in their graves and groped for their chastity belts.”

“If their ghosts materialize in this room this very minute,” Steve said, “I’ll tell them I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself. Eliza Christianson is too sexy to resist.”

“Really? Let’s see if that’s true.”

She swung her leg over him and brought her mouth down. He lifted his head to meet her and they kissed hungrily. Steve’s hand crept under her shirt to stroke his thumb along her belly and she gasped and shivered at the contact with her skin.

“My hands are cold,” he murmured.

“I like them there.”

And she liked them higher. That’s what she wanted, his fingers exploring up under her undergarments, beneath her bra, his fingers brushing against her aching nipples, and his other hand
lower, slipping into her pants. She wanted it so badly. If he had done it then, she wouldn’t have resisted. She would have given herself to him.

But he didn’t. He respected her wishes to wait. Only three weeks until the wedding. She could make it.

They lay on the bed kissing for some time, legs entwined, hands roaming next to every danger spot on the body, but never quite crossing the lines. At last he pulled away.

“Don’t stop now,” she said.

“Eliza.” He was breathing heavily and his voice was even more husky than usual. “They’ll be here soon.”

She plunged her fingers into his hair and pulled in tighter, until her lips brushed his. “A few more minutes.”

“The clock is ticking. If we don’t—”

He stopped as her mouth found his, but a few moments later she drew back with a sigh. He was right. They couldn’t risk it; he needed time to get to the other side of the lot and double check equipment.

And now, two days later, sitting on the porch, imagining his hand running up her thigh, she was grateful there had been a ticking clock, or she might have lost her virtue right then and there.

Lost.
Wasn’t that a funny word for it? Like virtue was a diamond that would slip through your fingers into the reservoir if you weren’t careful, fall careening and glittering to the bottom, and then sink into the mud, never to be seen again.

What was it Father used to say? A girl unmarried by twenty-one was an overripe peach. Prone to masturbation and lesbianism, or cursed with hysteria and spinsterhood. Rotting fruit, sitting on the counter, less appealing with every passing day. Eliza was
twenty-four now, and sometimes she could hear the fruit flies buzzing around her head.

A few more minutes the other night, and that peach would have been fully consumed. If only she were there now, in that chilly hotel room, warmed by Steve’s body, his hands roaming over her body. But this time he would touch her everywhere. He would—

Next to her on the porch, Rebecca bent to pick up the rifle and place it on her lap, and Eliza snapped out of her misty fantasies. She realized that the other women and girls had stopped talking several seconds earlier. Miriam and Lillian were frozen at a card table with an army ordinance explosives manual open in front of them, and several electronic geegaws that Miriam had been explaining. Jacob’s wife, Fernie, rolled her wheelchair out of Rebecca’s cabin and up to the porch rail. The girls assembling the beehives and loading fruit into the dryers stood and looked in the same direction as the women on the porch. All stared across the sagebrush-strewn valley, toward the highway.

A man rode toward them on horseback. He was clean-shaven, with a wide cowboy hat and a rifle in a holster. With the sun rising behind the rider—warm today, thank goodness—Eliza had a hard time picking out his features.

At first she guessed Elder Smoot from size and gait of the horse, come out to look for his daughter Lillian, but as the man drew closer, she saw his bare arms. Church undergarments went all the way to the wrist. The rider wasn’t a member of the church.

The horse crossed the stream, kicking up stones and then heaving as it climbed the bank on the other side. As the man came into
Rebecca’s field, plowed under and planted with winter wheat, the rider seemed to notice that the women were armed and watching him warily, and slowed. His horse, Eliza noticed, had large saddlebags, a bedroll, and a rolled-up mummy bag. This man had ridden in from the desert.

“I don’t mean any trouble. I’m looking for Jacob Christianson.”

“He’s not here,” Fernie said, voice tight. “What do you want with him?”

“He told me to meet him here.”

“Here?” she said. “You can find him in town. Why don’t you look there?”

“Because I’m trying to avoid the Feds. Dr. Christianson said it would be safer outside town.”

Fernie gave a quarter turn to her wheelchair and gave a questioning look to the other women, who shook their heads. Eliza rose from her seat and set down the handbook. She hated this feeling of suspicion, but nothing good came these days when strangers wandered into the valley unannounced. And after the incidents two nights earlier, she was doubly wary, worried about retaliation from the surviving smugglers. She came down from the porch warily.