The Gates of Babylon Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL WALLACE

  Other titles in the Righteous Series

  The Righteous

  Mighty and Strong

  The Wicked

  The Blessed and the Damned

  Destroying Angel

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Michael Wallace

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477809693

  ISBN-10: 1477809694

  Library of Congress Number: 2013907888

  For Melinda, who brought me water in the desert

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

  —Genesis 8:22

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jacob Christianson’s wife woke before he could sneak out of the bedroom. Maybe she heard leather creak as he pulled on his boots, or maybe she shifted in her sleep and sensed, in the way wives do, that the other half of the bed was empty. In any event, something changed in her breathing, and he knew she was listening.

  When he finished buttoning his shirt, he rose from the chair and made his way silently to the closet for his sheepskin jacket. She was awake, and she knew that he knew she was awake, but maybe if they kept up the fiction she would let him go in peace. He would walk down the long hallway lined with rooms—rooms filled with children, unmarried half siblings, and his father’s widows—then slip out the back door without argument. Armed men would be watching the driveway, so instead of the truck, he’d saddle up a horse and ride across the desert to meet the others. Get this ugly business over with and return home by breakfast.

  But instead of making a run for it, Jacob paused at the door and waited for her to speak. He rested his hand on the back of her empty wheelchair.

  “I assume you have a reason,” Fernie said at last.

  “I always do.”

  “Medical supplies?”

  “Not this time.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “I’ll share if you want me to. But I can tell you how and why and with whom, and it won’t make you worry any less.”

  “I’m going to worry either way,” she said. “I’m going to lie here, wishing my legs would carry me down those stairs so I could be by your side while you did whatever it is you do.”

  Jacob wouldn’t want that in any event. It was bad enough putting his brother and sister in danger, and putting his friends into morally compromising situations, without placing Fernie in physical and moral risk as well. And what if she told him no, it wasn’t worth it? The time had come to trust in the Lord and not the arm of flesh.

  And what if we’re alone? What if there is no God and we have no help?

  Then he was alone, and that was the nightmare. Every time a patient came into his clinic, he wondered how he would remove an appendix without analgesics, or treat conjunctivitis without antibiotics. Any day now—any day—someone would come in with a strange lump in the armpit or breast and then he’d collide headlong with the near nineteenth-century reality of their situation. How to treat cancer without an oncologist. Because nobody from the church would leave Blister Creek for Salt Lake, knowing she was likely to end up in a refugee camp, unable to return.

  “Who else?” Fernie asked, jarring him from his worries.

  “Steve Krantz. Eliza and David. Sister Miriam. Brother Stephen Paul.”

  “So many.” Fernie sounded surprised. “It’s something big, then.”

  “Bigger than usual,” Jacob admitted. “We’re leaving the valley.”

  “And everyone you’re taking can shoot and kill, so it must be dangerous.”

  “That’s also true.”

  “Don’t forget the people who love you and need you.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “You can’t worry so much about filling your father’s shoes that you forget you have a wife and four children.”

  “I’ll never fill his shoes, even if I wanted to. And nobody in the church would believe it anyway. They’re too quick to notice my flaws and doubts.”

  So much pressure. As their physical and spiritual leader. As a doctor. A husband and father. He was so busy these days that he barely noticed until it was lifted from his shoulders.

  Last week, during a warm stretch that marked a feeble attempt at an Indian summer during this cold, wet fall, Jacob made the time to take the oldest two, Daniel and Leah, into the Ghost Cliffs with a map, a compass, and handpicks. It took about an hour to find the fossil bed where his own father had brought him as a boy. They flaked open shale like leaves of a stone book. Between the pages lay the record of an ancient sea, written in fossilized shells and trilobites. Daniel found the skeleton of a sardine-sized fish and Jacob took his son’s thumb and traced it over the fine rib bones. The stone, freshly exposed to the air for the first time in ages, gave off a faint, distinct smell.

  And Jacob was suddenly caught in a moment of nostalgia so deep it was as if his hand were the one being held. As if he were the son, and his father stood behind his shoulder, so tall and strong and knowing everything about everything. Would Daniel and Leah remember this moment some day, and in the same way?

  Thinking about his children, and then about his father, brought a deep ache. “I’m not taking casual risks, you know that.”

  “Come here for a minute,” she said.

  “Fernie,” he began, but thought better of his objections, and made his way back to the bed.

  Fernie shifted her pillows and maneuvered in the bed until she was sitting with her back against the headboard. She groped in the darkness for his hand. “Can we say a prayer before you leave?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “If it’s quick. Go ahead, you say it.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Our Dear Heavenly Father,” she began. “We come before thee to ask thy blessing upon thy servant, Brother Jacob…”

  As she asked the Lord to watch over his endeavor, Jacob’s mind turned to the practical problems crowding in from all sides—how to get seed for next spring’s harvest, whether to rebuild the old mi
llrace so they could still make flour if the power failed, when and how to recover their grain from the US Department of Agriculture. And what about the road to Panguitch? The highway patrol had given up securing it against bandits, and if Blister Creek didn’t do something about it themselves, it would take a major expedition every time they wanted to leave the valley. Did they have enough wood to keep warm this winter?

  His mind snapped back to Fernie’s prayer as her tone changed.

  “… and help Jacob to recognize right from wrong.”

  What was that about? Not like he was going out to kill anyone, he only—

  “And build his faith. Wipe away his doubts, and soothe his troubled heart. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

  Wipe away his doubts? As if it were no more than cleaning up a grimy little face. Here, I’ll spit on my thumb and wipe it off. Oh look, here’s another smudge of doubt up here. There, isn’t that better?

  “Thank you,” he said with some effort.

  “Whatever you do tonight,” she said, “do it with love and hope.”

  “As opposed to fear and pessimism?”

  “Yes, that. We know the Lord is on our side, and all we have to do is trust Him always. He has promised to protect His chosen people during the horrors of the Last Days.”

  “Assuming these are the Last Days,” he said. “And assuming that we are the chosen people and not some crazy polygamist cult in the desert.”

  The painfully earnest tone dropped from her voice. “Are you sure those two things are mutually exclusive?”

  As he kissed her goodbye, Jacob felt his wife settling into her faith. The narrative that she wove for herself, the hand of the Lord in all things. She had prayed and now she knew it would turn out fine.

  Love and hope, he thought, as he reached the hallway and felt his way toward the stairs. He was setting out tonight determined to do business with thieves and smugglers. Love and hope? More like desperation.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jacob was the first conspirator to arrive. He rode from the west side of the valley on his horse, following a ranch road by moonlight until he arrived at the ruined gas station with its gutted foundation filled with tumbleweed. Once he was around back, he slid from the saddle, pulled his deer rifle from the saddle holster, and tied his horse to a clump of sagebrush. He returned to the front of the gas station to wait beside the fiberglass brontosaurus with its broken tail.

  The lights of Blister Creek flickered to the north, huddled beneath the frowning might of the Ghost Cliffs that marked a fortress-like boundary on the north side of the valley. A full moon hung over the cliffs, glimmering a strange orange color, like a huge jack-o-lantern suspended in the sky.

  A few minutes later, a V8 truck with a mounted crane above its flatbed crunched up the road from the south—no lights, navigating by the light of the moon. When the truck stopped, a tall, lean man with a strong jaw and piercing eyes stepped down to the pavement. He carried an M6 assault rifle slung over one shoulder.

  He gave a curt nod. “Jacob.”

  “Stephen Paul,” Jacob acknowledged. “Were you followed?”

  “I was not. They left the road unguarded—all the way into town, I think—but I didn’t take chances. We’re expecting David and Miriam?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And who is driving the tanker?”

  “Our usual guy. Said he’d be here by one thirty.” Jacob checked his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes. If he shows, we’ll be to there and back by dawn.”

  “You’ve got the cash?”

  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.”