Hell's Fortress 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 Gates of Babylon

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  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

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477824504

  ISBN-10: 1477824502

  Cover design by Scott Barrie (Cyanotype Book Architects)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014903901

  CONTENTS

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jacob Christianson was in surgery, setting a broken bone, when his brother David brought word of the invaders. A patrol had spotted them eight miles south of Blister Creek, trudging up the highway toward the southernmost gun emplacements.

  He left his work to his nurses, and the two men galloped south. It was late May and the outside world was collapsing in spasms of war, famine, and disease, while the weather was more like late winter than the end of spring. Nevertheless, a certain complacency had slipped into the valley. People stared in curiosity from their porches and fields as the men thundered past.

  They arrived at the roadside bunker to find Elder Smoot waiting inside behind a .50-cal machine gun. His beard trailed to his chest, gray as the unkempt hair on his head. Decades of sun and wind had tanned the skin on his hands to leather, but his arms and shoulders were still broad and powerful. His teenage son, Grover, stood on top of the pillbox with a pair of binoculars.

  David jumped down from his horse and took the stairs into the half-buried pillbox, while Jacob scrambled up top to look. He grabbed the binoculars from Grover and sent the boy below.

  The caravan was still a half mile down the abandoned highway. It was led by two huge hay wagons drawn by mules, their beds stuffed with possessions, like some vision from the Dust Bowl. An old Bluebird school bus followed, towed by a team of shabby horses. Figures trudged alongside. Twenty, thirty people, all on foot. They were bundled in coats, scarves, and gloves.

  Smoot’s voice came out hollowly from below Jacob’s position. “At last it comes. The locusts have arrived.”

  Jacob came down to find Grover and David prying open a crate with a crowbar and unloading ammo cans. Smoot stared grimly down the barrel of the gun, his eyes and nose the only visible parts of his face over the long curly gray beard.

  “What do we do?” David asked.

  “Shoot them,” Elder Smoot said. “Blow them away.” He pulled back the breech bolt with a snick.

  Jacob didn’t immediately rebuke Smoot. Eight months had passed since the army pulled out. Seven months since they lost phone and Internet. All through the frigid, lingering winter, they’d stayed isolated in their desert fortress while the outside world crumbled. Jacob was supposed to be the voice of reason in the church and community, and here he was, terrified of outsiders like anyone else.

  The date was May 27. A lean winter. Months of crushing isolation. Nothing but drones in the sky to remind them that the outside world existed. Keeping them prisoner.

  The military had ended its occupation after Jacob’s cousin drove a Winnebago packed with explosives into the heart of town and blew himself up in front of the temple, together with a number of army personnel. Since then, quarantine, mostly enforced from the sky. For months now, he’d expected them to invade, this time in greater force. Seize the grain and everything else of value in the valley.

  “Jacob?” David prodded.

  “Hold your fire.”

  Jacob went outside for another look. Two days earlier, one of the crazy weather swings brought a few brief days of springlike weather, melting the snow from the highway. It stretched south through red rock and sagebrush, like a black line painted through the desert. The caravan was taking its time. They had no fuel, of course, only animals, but that didn’t explain the desultory way the refugees trudged forward, step by exhausted step.

  They radiated hunger and desperation. No doubt there were sick and injured in the party, who he could help in the clinic. That didn’t mean they weren’t also dangerous. And armed.

  “Get your wives on the radio,” Jacob called in to David. “Tell them to open the armory and rouse the militia.”

  His brother obeyed, flipping on his radio as he came outside for better reception.

  “We don’t need the militia,” Smoot said. “We can finish it here.”

  “I’m going to talk to those people. You man the gun, but do not shoot unless you hear it from my mouth. Grover, help with ammo if your father needs it.

  “I don’t see the point in talking,” Smoot said. “We posted warnings. They ignored them.”

  “Maybe it’s over. Maybe the quarantine is broken.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “That’s why I’m going to find out.”

  “No good will come of this,” Smoot warned. “We can’t let the gentiles into the valley. They’ll destroy us.”

  Jacob was growing annoyed. He had made his decision, but yet again, Smoot kept pushing, and always down more violent, aggressive paths.

  “For all we know they’re saints. Refugees from Colorado City, or one of the other polygamist communities. What happens when you shoot them all and discover they’re cousins of one of your wives?”

  Smoot sputtered. Jacob didn’t wait for him to find an argument, but walked away from the pillbox. He left the horses where they were cropping at the grass and wildflowers that grew among the sagebrush, drew his rifle from its holster, and slung it over his shoulder. David stood to one side, speaking in urgent tones into the radio. Jacob walked to the highway and checked again through the binoculars.

  The caravan had picked up pace. The refugees must have spotted the gun emplacement. Most of them appeared to be ad
ults, but he saw at least four or five children. That was good. More likely they were families than raiders. But at least one of the men was black and a few looked Hispanic, which ruled out fellow saints. Descended from the early Mormon settlers, polygamists were invariably of northern European descent.

  David joined Jacob. “I spoke to Miriam. She wants to load up the trucks and drive out with the militia. I told her to stay in town.”

  Jacob lowered the binoculars. “And she listened?”

  “Reluctantly. You know how she is.”

  “Good. Elder Smoot is more than enough for me to handle. I don’t need Miriam’s itchy trigger finger too.”

  David’s first wife was ex-FBI. She was only one of many hardheaded people in town, men as well as women, but in some ways she presented more challenges for Jacob than an Old Testament–style patriarch like Elder Smoot. She had her training, she was ready for the end of the world, and she was convinced she knew the will of the Lord at all times. If anyone thought that giving birth to a child would mellow her, they were mistaken. She was stronger than David, stronger than David’s younger wife, Lillian, and probably stronger than Jacob, in all honesty. In all of Blister Creek, only Jacob’s sister Eliza could match her will. And Eliza was in the Ghost Cliffs again, searching for a way out of the valley to reach her fiancé.

  The caravan halted some fifty yards away. Maybe this was Eliza’s answer. If someone found their way in, then maybe she could get out. Had the drone quarantine broken? Jacob looked into the sky, but didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear the familiar and hated whine of turboprop engines.

  A man stepped forward from the caravan. He raised hands covered in fingerless gloves. No weapon. Stubble covered his face. Behind him, people leaned against the hay wagons, or sat on the pavement, wrapped in blankets. Faces looked out from behind steamed-over windows on the bus.

  The man stopped about thirty feet away. “Is this Blister Creek?”

  “Who are you?” Jacob asked.

  “Name is Joe Kemp. And you are . . . ?”

  “What do you want?”

  “We’re starving. We heard you have food.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Drive them off,” David whispered. “We have nothing to give them.”

  “Or what?” Jacob asked his brother. “We shoot?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a hard thing, a cruel thing. But Jacob worried that his brother and Elder Smoot were right. Helping these people would only bring more refugees. If the army had called off the drones to fight elsewhere, Blister Creek could find itself inundated with survivors from southern Utah and beyond.

  Kemp started walking again. He kept his hands up.

  “Hold it right there,” Jacob said. “Not another step.”

  David lifted his rifle.

  The man faltered. “For God’s sake, please. We have sick children. They’re dying. They said you have medicine. You have to help us.”

  Jacob had decided to turn them back, all of them. Now he stopped. Withholding food was one thing, but medicine?

  Kemp seemed to sense the hesitation and he pressed. “Bandits robbed us in the mountains. They shot my mother in the stomach.”

  “Keep your story straight. Is it sick kids or an injured mother?”

  “Both. For God’s sake, listen to me. I’m telling the truth. She caught part of a shotgun blast. I took out the pellets, but it only got worse. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Took them out, how?”

  “Pried them out with my fingers. She’s unconscious.”

  “Shouldn’t have done that. You probably introduced sepsis.”

  “Are you the doctor? Please look at her. And the children.”

  “I don’t like this,” David said.

  Jacob motioned for his brother to lower the rifle, then turned back to the man. “Take off your coat. Put it on the ground.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “If you want our help, you’ll do exactly what I say.”

  Kemp obeyed. He folded the coat and set it in front of him, then stood shivering. Beneath, he wore a filthy flannel shirt.

  “The scarf too. I want to see your face.”

  Removing the scarf revealed a gaunt face with skin stretched over sharp cheekbones.

  “Now take a couple steps back.”

  Kemp did it. He had a lean, hungry look, and eyes that sparkled with dangerous intelligence. He stood on the balls of his feet, taut as a piano wire. He stared at Jacob, as if sizing him up. It was the look of a man who had done terrible things to survive. His pants were combat fatigues. Ex-military?

  David stepped forward, searched the man’s jacket, and confiscated a hunting knife. Then he stepped to the man and patted him down, but didn’t turn up any other weapons. David rejoined Jacob, who told Kemp to put his coat back on.

  “Listen to me carefully,” Jacob said. “That concrete box behind me is fortified with a Browning M2 and enough ammo to hold off a small army. We have other defenses along the road, including mines, anti-tank guns, and ambush sites. We’re not a soft target.”

  “I understand.”

  “If you disobey me, we will kill you to set an example. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “How many people do you have?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “They’re all here?”

  “That’s right. We were bigger a few weeks ago. Almost eighty when we left Las Vegas, but we left the others along the way.”

  “Where did you leave them, St. George? Is there a camp there?”

  “No, I mean they died. A few killed by outlaws. But most fell from exhaustion. There wasn’t anything we could do. The bus couldn’t hold any more people—it carried our supplies too.”

  “So they starved to death,” Jacob said.

  Kemp scowled. “Nobody starved. Yes, they were hungry. Sometimes we didn’t have anything for days. But we shared what we had. The trip was too much for some people. They stopped walking and wouldn’t move.”

  “That’s what starvation looks like. You die of cold or exhaustion or disease. If you were out of food, why didn’t you eat your animals?”

  The man shifted and looked at his feet. “We did. These ones are new. We found them in an abandoned camp. Their owners had been driven off or killed.”

  He was equivocating, or at most, sharing a part of it. No way was he telling the full truth. Jacob should have turned them back. But now he was involved.

  “Will you help my mother?” Kemp asked. “The wound is bad. She needs help.”

  Jacob looked north toward Blister Creek. The town was three miles away, waiting, vulnerable. The white spire of the temple. The clean, gridded streets, laid down by his ancestors. Generations of Christiansons and Kimballs and Smoots and Youngs. Devout, convinced they were God’s chosen, destined to hold out in this desert sanctuary against the forces of Satan. So much superstition and delusion. Why would God choose this place above all others? Why these people?

  He might have laughed, if somehow he hadn’t ended up as their leader at what appeared to be the end of human civilization. First a supervolcano in Indonesia had trashed the growing seasons of the world. Then humanity, instead of pulling together, was now tearing itself apart.

  War came first to the Middle East, dependent upon the outside world for grain it could no longer provide. Starving, they’d cut off the oil. That prompted an American invasion. After that, it was just one bloody step after another until half the world was in flames, and the other half starving. Those same conflicts were playing out here in the United States, with outright civil war on the West Coast and a hundred bush wars all throughout the interior of the continent.

  The sun was a fiery red ball cutting a bloody gash on the horizon. Particles of volcanic dust mingled with the ash of burning cities to leav
e the sky a purple bruise. It was almost dusk; Jacob had to decide.

  “Okay. We’ll help. Pull back to that rocky outcrop.” He pointed to a sandstone hillock. “You have two nights. We will give you what food and medical care we can, but forty-eight hours from now—by sunset—you’ll be on your way out of the valley.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If anyone leaves your camp, they will be shot. Tell your people. Make it clear. There will be no second chances.”

  “And my mother? The sick kids?”

  “I’ll send a truck to take them to the clinic.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jacob walked back toward Smoot and his son at the pillbox.

  David followed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. There’s no user manual for the end of the world.”

  “I thought there was. It’s called the scriptures.”

  Jacob gave him the side eye. “Now don’t you start.”

  “Why are you doing it? We’re bursting at the seams. Eating through our food, burning up the fuel. Another year of crop failures ahead of us. Are you going to give away our medicine now too?”

  “There’s one thing we don’t have. Information. We don’t even have AM radio anymore. Who’s in charge out there? Anyone? I want info.”

  “What good is that?” David asked.

  “Is the army planning to occupy the valley again? Are there more refugees on the way? How about other towns? Are any of them holding on? Or are we alone? Sooner or later we have to find out.”

  “Not yet we don’t. Now we weather the storm.”

  What had gotten into David? He sounded like Miriam, or maybe one of the older men from the quorum. One by one, Jacob’s friends, family, and confidants were succumbing to the siege mentality. And now his own brother.

  When they returned to the pillbox, Jacob called Smoot and his son out and let David explain the situation. Smoot glowered, but held his tongue. Jacob radioed town and got David’s senior wife on the phone.

  When Miriam heard that newcomers had arrived, she fired off a number of breathless questions, all of which Jacob deflected. He asked her to pass a message to Lillian to prep his clinic, then told Miriam to send a truck to haul the sick and injured into town.