The Remnant (38 page)

With that the girl strode up onto the porch,
and staring directly through the window into Rendt’s face, grasped
the lid of the coffin with both hands and flipped it open, frowning
at the contents. She then walked around behind it to glare directly
through the window. Trace wouldn’t have been surprised if Rendt
produced a gun and shot Marie dead right there, but Rendt seemed
thunderstruck, unable to move or speak, much less attack.

Finally Marie turned and shoved the coffin
with far more strength than she had any right to own. The supports
beneath it seemed to give, and it clattered to its side, spilling
large stones out across the concrete portico and onto the lawn.

"Here is your Prophet!" Marie shouted at the
murmuring crowd of women. "Here is your faith! Here are the lies
Frederick Rendt and all the men before him have used to hold you in
bondage! Frederick Rendt murdered the liar you called Prophet. His
bones rot in the desert now. I am here to set you free."

A shot rang out, and glass clattered into the
room. Rendt wiped blood from his temple where the bullet had
creased his scalp, then stared dazedly at the crimson stain on the
palm of his hand. Before Trace could move him Rendt turned and fled
past, shoving Jedadiah into Trace. Marie ignored the shot that had
whizzed past her head.

"God never meant for you to live like
slaves!" she screamed.

"Never again!" shouted a large woman in the
front row, waving a rifle over her head and glaring toward the
stones on the ground. "I won’t be no man’s chattel again. I say we
finish Frederick Rendt and hunt down the rest of them!"

Marie gave no answer as the crowd milled and
argued, but Trace could see more murder in the womens’ faces, and
suddenly the gunshots around town made sense. It hadn’t been the
Mormons that Jedadiah had supplied doing the shooting, and it
wasn’t only the Angels getting their just deserts. Some old men had
died as well at the hands of their own
wives.
Now the ones
that hadn’t been killed in the Meeting House were probably hiding
out, praying for a salvation that wasn’t coming. Trace couldn’t
find much sympathy for them.

"The One Mighty and Strong," muttered
Jedadiah, staring through the window at Marie’s back.

Trace laughed mirthlessly, shifting the old
man off of him. "I thought you said I was the One Mighty and
Strong."

Jedadiah shrugged. "I’m not sure what you are
any longer Mister Wentworth."

Trace glanced toward a set of shelves that
was swinging shut in the dark corner.

"I’m just a rat killer," he said, rushing to
catch it before it closed.

Jedadiah stepped through the front doors and
onto the wide veranda to the sound of a hundred drawn breaths. He
was aware that some of the women had their guns pointed directly at
him, and he was equally aware that at the moment men-any men-might
be considered fair game. But he was also in the throes of a
religious experience that could not be denied. He could feel the
power of the girl, sense it in the very air around him like the
charge of an electrical storm, and as a man raised to the
prophethood he could not quiver in fear inside Rendt’s house while
the hand of God Almighty was at work so visibly.

Marie glanced in his direction as he ambled
around the fallen stones and crashed coffin to stand beside her.
Her eyes flashed a warning, but he ignored it, stopping only when
he was within touching distance.

"He’s a false prophet, too!" screamed one of
the women, and more ominous murmuring followed. But at least no one
took a potshot at him, although the crowd did close in another
step.

They seemed far more afraid of approaching
the girl than him, though. As he studied their enraged faces he saw
that all of them sent fearful glances in her direction.

"How did you get them all to follow you?" he
asked, quietly.

Marie frowned. "God touched them."

Jedadiah nodded. "Are you certain it was
God?"

The girl’s eyes blazed. "You question
God?"

"I question when murder is done in his
name."

"You came here to do murder."

Jedadiah sighed. "I came here knowing it
might happen. That is upon my soul. What will you do now?"

"We will have vengeance for the abomination
that has been done here and elsewhere in God’s name."

"Vengeance belongs to God."

"We work it in God’s name."

"That’s what Rendt said."

The girl’s eyes blazed even brighter.
Jedadiah waved one hand out around the crowd in an all encompassing
gesture.

"You have freed these people, Marie. Just as
Moses freed the Israelites. Would you lead them into bondage
again?"

"What bondage?"

"The bondage of guilt," said Jedadiah. "The
bondage of shame. They are fired now by your words, by the idea of
freedom, and by the idea of revenge. But when the deed is done the
heat cools, and there is nothing left but the bitter ice of truth.
These women would do more murder in your name, the murder of men
they have until now called their own husbands. I see by their eyes
that some have already done so."

"Not husbands," said Marie, shaking her head
bitterly. "Slave holders."

Jedadiah nodded. "Yes. And liars and
apostates and fornicators and pederasts, too. But soil no more
hands with their blood, nor your own."

"They killed my family," said Marie, fire
still glimmering in her eyes. "My mother and father. Paulie. All
the Brethren. All dead."

"Yes," agreed Jedadiah, "and we shall see
that they pay for it, the ones who knew. But not by murder. You do
not deserve to carry such a weight."

For an instant indecision cracked the girl’s
hardened features, and he watched as her shoulders sagged, and
Jedadiah sensed a sagging in the crowd as well. They were like a
lynch mob after the hanging. A leaderless but still dangerous
group. And he was still a man.

"I think you all know now that you have been
mislead!" he called, holding up one hand and wrapping the other
around Marie’s shoulders.

"Lied to!" screamed one woman.

Jedadiah nodded.

"Too many lies," he said, quietly. "Far too
many lies."

The crowd seemed to hang on the cusp, and he
wondered if he could hold them. But they seemed to be listening.
Perhaps he could end this now after all. Perhaps he could salvage a
few souls from this bloody shambles.

"No," said Marie quietly. "You don’t know
what God wants."

And suddenly Jedadiah knew he was lost,
because he could feel the power in the girl again, and he knew that
there was no way he, a mere man, could stand against such a
power.

He sighed. "God truly told you to murder all
the men in this town?"

"Yes. Leave not one fornicator here with life
in his veins."

Could it be so? Could God Almighty have
commanded such retribution for the sins committed here in his name?
Why not? He had brought down far worse punishments on blasphemers
in the past. Jedadiah wondered if he were placing his own soul in
jeopardy by the decision he was making. But-God help him-he could
make no other.

"God’s will," he said, quietly, watching the
crowd. The women glanced from him to Marie. When the girl nodded
they began to disperse into smaller clusters again. Hunters. Groups
of killers, searching out vermin. Jedadiah felt sick to his
soul.

"Where is Trace?" asked Marie.

"I think he’s finishing something he started
a long time ago," said Jedadiah, sadly. "More killing."

"Sometimes God requires sacrifices," said
Marie.

Jedadiah stared into her eyes searching for
something soft and human, but there was no remnant of anything soft
there any longer.

Divine fires illumined them.

Rendt crouched in a pitchblack hallway of the
temple, listening to the soft sound of footsteps on the stairs. He
knew it was Wentworth and that he should simply kill the man now,
but stabbing Trace in the gut in the dark seemed a hollow revenge
for all the devastation he had caused. What was going on outside
was no less than a complete insurrection. Rendt was certain now
that most if not all the men in California City were dead,
including his Angels. The damnable women had gone crazy at the
instigation of the Veras girl. What had he been thinking even
considering bringing her here?

But of course he’d had no way of knowing that
she was some kind of female Svengali. How in the world had she
convinced all the wives to revolt? The women had been broken and
completely obedient-except for the rare ones like Ruth and
Ashley-and had never shown the slightest hint of mutiny from their
lords and masters. But Rendt had been shocked to see some of his
own wives out amid the crowd, and he could tell by their faces that
they were intent on murder and mayhem.

There was another way out of the temple, the
long hidden tunnel that led to a subterranean garage Rendt’s father
had constructed at the same time as the temple and the house.
Mormons-his father had explained-had a long history of near misses,
and it was best to be always prepared. Rendt had used the tunnel to
dispose of Jefford’s remains, but he had no intention of using that
route until he’d had his revenge. Trace Wentworth was going to
die.

But first he was going to watch Ashley
die.

He slid the key as silently as possible into
the heavy lock, slipping the knife from the sheath in the small of
his back at the same time. He swung the door wide on well-oiled
hinges, but suddenly hands gripped his lapel, and before he could
bring up the heavy blade a knee contacted his groin, and the wind
whoofed from his lungs.

A hand slammed into his nose hard enough that
he felt bone snap and saw red, but he lashed out with his own palm
and felt it contact a narrow chin. There was a loud grunt. Another
hand locked around his throat, but it was small and feminine. He
followed the arm, tightening his fingers around Ashley’s larynx
until she released her grip and started to claw at his wrist. When
she tried to kick him in the shin he deflected the blow with the
side of his foot and kicked her back. She shuddered, gasping
beneath his pressing fingers. Finally he spun her around, locked
his arm around her throat and dragged her across the corridor into
the temple proper, finding his way by sliding the blade of the
knife along the wall.

"We’re in here, Mister Wentworth," he called,
teasingly behind him.

Ashley could barely breathe with her father’s
forearm crushing her throat, and every time she lifted her hands to
try to pry it away he’d tighten his hold and temporarily cut off
her air altogether. She got the message, dropping her hands to her
sides and backing with him through the darkness.

A meager hint of light, hardly more than that
of one star from a frigid and distant galaxy, shone somewhere
ahead, and from its glimmering she surmised it was a candle. But as
they passed down a narrow passageway and into another open space
she saw that the candle was still somewhere ahead, and glancing
around she gasped.

There seemed to be a thousand red eyes
surrounding her, and her first thought was rats.

Then, peering closer she could see that the
eyes
were unblinking and multi-faceted. They were jewels,
inset into the wall, one more display of her father’s all
encompassing power and wealth. Something to awe the faithful and to
impress the sycophants.

She felt herself falling, but it turned out
that Rendt was simply sitting down, and she ended up in his lap.
She could feel his erection, and she jerked aside in disgust, but
he locked on her throat again, and she stilled. Slowly she ran her
fingers along the cold arms of the chair that seemed to be some
kind of stone throne. Her fingers found something colder, and she
flinched.

It was a large knife.

Rendt sensed her hand and twisted the blade
slowly beneath it, and she withdrew her fingers.

Trace stared down the narrow corridor at the
thousand gleaming eyes.

The vision had caught him unawares, and he
staggered. But he had faced the same terror as a youth simply for
his own pride. Facing it again for Ashley was no huge stride. He
gulped down a lump in his throat, swallowing his fear with it, and
as he drew near the end of the corridor he realized that they were
not eyes at all but simply blood red jewels, probably rubies. A
fortune’s worth. This was where the Rat King kept his horde. This
was where he would want to finish the business begun decades
before, and this was where Trace intended to see it finished as
well. One way or the other his dreams of rats would end.

He stroked the scars on his belly and gritted
his teeth, tiptoeing into the larger chamber. Somewhere in the
distance a candle flickered. Just enough light eked into the
darkened room for Trace to make out what looked like a throne at
the far end. He didn’t have to see Rendt seated there in the
shadows to know that was where the man was.

The Rat King would want to bask in the
fullness of this moment.

"I’m here," said Trace.

Ashley knew that Trace was no match for her
father, even with the difference in age. Frederick Rendt was
heavier by at least thirty pounds, kept himself in shape, and had
training Trace could only imagine. That he could kill Trace with
the knife in this darkened arena was a foregone conclusion. That he
would kill her first so that Trace could watch was equally
certain.

"Step closer," said her father, speaking
almost into her ear.

As Trace strode slowly across the floor
toward them Ashley ever so lightly rested her fingers atop the wide
blade again.