Blood of the Faithful Read online

“Of course you didn’t ask. The Lord called you.”

  “My father died, that’s what happened. Then I was next. I should have said no.”

  “You think you had a choice?”

  “These are my people. I was their doctor, the one they looked to. And I knew I could change things. Stop them from driving out the boys. Stop trading women like cattle. Stop the crazy—”

  “You’re not listening to me,” she interrupted. “The Lord chose you—you had no say in the matter. The world has changed. The old rules don’t apply. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”

  No, he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t trying to convince her. Like there was any point in that.

  Instead, he was arguing with himself, the stupid decisions he’d made. When he agreed to take over after his father’s death, it was only so he could lead his people into moderation. Bring them to the real world, into civil society. Into the mainstream. And it had been working too, until the real world refused to cooperate. Until it collapsed. Now that it was gone, his people were clinging to their most fanatical beliefs, swept up in a howling sandstorm of religious hysteria.

  Fernie. David. Miriam. Probably even Eliza. All of them gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jacob maintained a glum silence as he and Miriam brought the pickup truck out of the garage and drove through Blister Creek. She tried to encourage him with a few words about their upcoming mission, but he refused to answer.

  Miriam had never quite understood her brother-in-law. From the first time she’d met him, back when she was living farther north in central Utah as part of the Zarahemla community, she’d seen his remarkable potential. He was bright, he was educated. He was fair-minded, and could consider other points of view, sometimes to a fault. It led him to pull back when a situation called for ruthlessness.

  But so much of what she saw was potential. Leadership potential. Spiritual potential. Always potential, never realized. When the situation needed him to raise his right arm to the square and call down the wrath of the Lord, he demurred.

  They swung past the cemetery and came up the east side of Witch’s Warts on the ranch road that ran parallel to the rocky formation. Jacob slowed when they were still a mile from the cliffs. Here he pulled off the road where a flat stretch of slickrock rose from the sand and forced the road to bend away from it. He drove across the slickrock for about twenty yards, then came down just before it climbed into a fat, tortoiselike hump. He drove through the packed sand until he had the truck around back of the stone and out of sight.

  Once there, Jacob turned off the engine. The trust level in Blister Creek was such that he usually left his keys in the ignition, but Miriam suggested that he pocket them. On the off chance their quarry discovered the truck hidden back here, she didn’t want to make it any easier for the man to tamper with their vehicle.

  “That’s it, then,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done for it now.”

  “We’re not that far from the cliffs,” she said, confused. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He gave her a look, then opened the door and climbed out. As they dropped the gate on the pickup truck, he added, “What am I supposed to do, step down and hand the keys to Elder Smoot?”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  “If there’s any time the church needs a level head at the steering wheel, it’s now.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Yet it worried her that he sounded unconvinced. Like he was trying to talk himself out of running from his responsibilities.

  They spent a minute changing their clothes from the Sunday best they’d worn to the chapel. Miriam stripped off her dress. Underneath she wore a sensible denim shirt and jeans, and she’d worn sneakers to the church. Jacob stripped off his tie and white shirt and had grabbed a tan, long-sleeve shirt when he climbed out of the truck. He took off his church shoes and replaced them with boots from the back of the truck. He grabbed two light jackets and handed one to Miriam.

  When they were more suitably dressed, Jacob dragged a backpack with an aluminum frame from the back of the truck and handed it to Miriam. She checked it over to make sure he’d packed everything. A canteen hung in a side pocket. Inside was a box of ammunition for her pistol, a folded-up solar blanket, a first aid kid, and some beef jerky in a Ziploc bag. Night vision goggles. A rechargeable LED flashlight. A package of AAA batteries, the blister pack cut open when Jacob had tested them.

  “And that’s how you see yourself?” she asked. “A level head? Nothing more.”

  Jacob responded with a grunt. He got out the handheld radios and flipped them on briefly to test them, before turning them off to conserve the power in the rechargeable batteries.

  “You didn’t answer,” Miriam prodded.

  “No, I didn’t.” He put away the radios, one in each pack. “They don’t hold a very good charge anymore, so leave yours off unless it’s needed. You know, if there’s one supply I regret not stocking up on before it was too late, it’s more and higher-quality batteries.”

  “I thought it was medical supplies, antibiotics, and all that stuff.”

  “That too. But in that case, I saw it coming and grabbed what I could. I blew it with batteries, and that would have been easier to acquire.” Jacob shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Between the rocks and the cliff, we’re unlikely to get much use out of the radios, anyway.”

  She checked her pistol in its holster, then grabbed the KA-BAR military knife that she’d tossed in the back and threaded the sheath through her belt.

  Jacob had his own pack, plus an AR-15 rifle with a scope. Miriam reached for the rifle, but he shook his head.

  “We’re not shooting anyone. We’re going to watch, that’s all. Then, when it’s time to move against Chambers, we’ll do it in broad daylight.”

  “That’s my call to make.”

  “No, really, it’s not.”

  Miriam put her hands on her hips and fixed him with a look. “Which one of us is the former FBI agent?”

  He smiled. “As you said, the world has changed. The old rules don’t apply.”

  “Hah. All right then, let’s go.”

  They returned to the road instead of trudging through the soft sand. Miriam listened for the sound of a two-stroke engine and kept an eye out for riders or people on foot, but saw nobody. There was still a bit of daylight left. If Chambers followed the same schedule as last night, it would be at least two hours until he stole the food, and then he’d have to drive out here.

  A jackrabbit came tentatively onto the road ahead of them. It spotted them, sat staring as if transfixed until they were only a few feet away, then exploded toward the sagebrush on the opposite side. Later, a big spiny lizard with a brilliant turquoise throat studied them from its perch atop a rock. It did a few warning push-ups as they passed before retreating to a crevice. A raven landed atop one of the sandstone fins and croaked insistently until they were out of sight.

  “The desert doesn’t like people,” Miriam observed. “The animals don’t, anyway.”

  “Tell that to the skunks who keep raiding our compost bin and spraying my dogs. They love us.”

  “Doesn’t it ever surprise you we ended up here?” she asked. “Who came into the Blister Creek Valley and thought this was a good place for a settlement?”

  “I know exactly who—I’ve read her diary. It was about hiding from Federal authorities so they wouldn’t get arrested on polygamy charges.”

  “I know all about Grandma Cowley’s diary,” Miriam said. “But still, of all the places. This isn’t the most remote, or the most desolate, but it’s some crazy combination of the two. You’d think in the past hundred and twenty years someone would have pulled up stakes and moved somewhere better. Even the old Montana or Alberta communities were green and lush compared to this.”

  “I happen to like the d
esert. It’s wild and beautiful, and the air is clean. Take a look at the cliffs,” he said with a nod toward the sheer sandstone escarpment looming ahead, the late sun casting it in burnt reds and orange, streaked with black desert varnish. “Who could get tired of that view?”

  “Sure, they’re beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. But that’s missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “The cliffs are a natural fortress. So are the mountains, the desert. You couldn’t build a better citadel than the one God provided in the Blister Creek Valley.”

  Jacob gave her the side eye. “This again?”

  “Admit it. It’s no coincidence that we ended up in the safest, best-protected place in the entire country. The Lord led your ancestors here. He knew. He prepared a sanctuary for His people and He kept it hidden from the world.”

  “You know what would have been easier? If God had simply told the Indonesian volcano not to blow its top. None of this would have been necessary.”

  “It’s in the scriptures, Jacob. The world has to be broken and destroyed for the Lord to return in all His glory.”

  “It didn’t have to happen now.”

  He was still arguing, but at least he was more cheerfully obstinate. More like his old self. He’d seemed shaken when she found him outside the chapel. That had worried her.

  “What would it take to convince you?” she asked. “Jesus himself appearing to you telling you it was the end?”

  “Maybe. It would certainly help. But that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Have you asked to see Him? Dropped to your knees and poured out your heart so that the Lord would come to you in person?”

  Jacob stopped. “So, former FBI agent. How are your keen observation skills now?” He pointed to the ground. “You were so busy pontificating you almost walked right past it.”

  At their feet, a set of knobby tire tracks left the road and cut across the sand toward a fissure between two sandstone fins. The tire marks were visible for only a few yards, then the wind had swept the sand into rippling waves, more peppered with the tracks of lizards and stink beetles than evidence of Chambers passing in the night.

  She grunted, annoyed that she’d missed it.

  “There’s a metaphor in there, somewhere,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it.”

  Miriam was happy to let Jacob take the lead in entering Witch’s Warts. She came after him through a pair of sandstone fins, following the tire tracks, and almost at once found herself surrounded by an intimidating maze of fins and columns, passageways through the stone that opened promisingly, then ended in cul-de-sacs that forced them to retreat.

  Here and there they came across more tire tracks, but it was not an easy trail to follow. The tracks would disappear for a stretch where the wind had run its shifting fingers over the sand. Then they’d find a sheltered spot and see it crisscrossed three or four times.

  She’d expected to use the nearby cliffs as a guide, but the fins were so close together and so tall that she couldn’t see the cliffs at all. Jacob seemed to have a better sense of direction among the rock formations, but he still halted regularly to study their surroundings. Once, he stopped for what seemed like five minutes, staring at a single hump of sandstone the height of a two-story building.

  “Are you lost?” she asked nervously.

  “Not yet.” He pointed at an angled line of light and shadow that slashed across the stone. The darkness crept up almost imperceptibly as the sun fell. “See that angle? Right there is southeast. Back that way is where we left the road.”

  “Really? I must be turned around.”

  “It’s easy to do in here.” He returned to studying the pink sand. “Let’s see if we can find those tire tracks. This seems like a good path through to the cliffs.”

  They still couldn’t find a clear set of tracks, but to Miriam’s relief, they popped out of the labyrinth a few minutes later. There, looming above them, were the Ghost Cliffs. They cut in a line from west to east along the extreme northern edge of the valley. Boulders lay tumbled around the base, most of them old and weathered, but others jagged, their colors fresh.

  The upper reaches of the cliffs were still bathed in light, with the blue sky overhead, but here at the bottom Miriam and Jacob stood in late-afternoon shadow, save for a stray shaft of light that found its way in a straight line through Witch’s Warts.

  Miriam shifted her backpack to get to her canteen. “We’re running out of daylight,” she said, after taking a swig. “Do you want to split up? You go west, I’ll go east?”

  Jacob nodded. “Sounds like a plan. But stick to the cliffs. I don’t want you going back into the maze and getting lost.”

  “Trust me, I won’t.” She hesitated. “You want to get out the radios?”

  “No point to that. Only chance of a signal would be to climb one of the boulders, and even then it would only work if the other person was in the clear as well.”

  “So how do we communicate? I hate to shout—if someone is out here, he’ll hear us too.”

  “You see anything, you come back to this spot.” Jacob slapped his hand on a boulder the size of a school bus. “Otherwise, we’ll meet here when it gets dark.”

  That gave them only fifteen or twenty minutes before they’d have to turn back for the boulder, so they set off without further discussion. Jacob went west, while Miriam cut to the east, studying the ground for tracks as she walked. She saw no evidence of tire tracks in the few places where there was enough space to maneuver a small vehicle. By the time she’d mentally ticked off fifteen minutes, she had no better idea about where Chambers would approach the cliffs than when she’d left.

  On the way back to the prearranged rock she studied the cliffs instead of the ground. That was the other limiting factor—finding a place to toss over the rope from above. Maybe she’d spot something up there. Something, or someone. But there was no movement; all was still except for a pair of blue scrub jays squabbling in the air overhead.

  Vegetation clung to the cliff in spots: shrubs and grasses, with the occasional juniper tree, its roots clinging to the rock, its branches twisted and stunted from the wind. A bristlecone pine stuck out at an angle a few dozen yards above her head. One green branch grew from a mass of bare trunk and branches, the dead part as lifeless as driftwood. A tree of that size might be hundreds or even thousands of years old.

  In spite of the vegetation, the overhangs, and the gullies eroded by seasonal runoff, there were more spots than she’d initially guessed where someone might toss over a rope without it getting snagged. She examined them as she approached, but couldn’t see any one location that stood out. Chambers could have any one of a dozen places prearranged, then wait for the rope to swing down from above. Worse, it was now dark enough that she might have stumbled right past a rope without spotting it.

  By the time she returned to the boulder, she was frustrated and irritated.

  Jacob was arriving at the same time, his rifle slung over one shoulder, and his backpack hanging from the other. He set them both down when he spotted her. “Anything?”

  “Just my own tracks. Hope Chambers isn’t looking for them. You?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s go back and wait at the silo,” she said. “If you’re right and he shows up every night it should be easy enough to grab him. Like we should have done last night.”

  “I want to see what happens here. There’s only so much cliff. I figure if we divide up, listen for the ATV, and keep watch with the night vision goggles, we’ll be sure to spot him. Then we’ll know how it’s being done.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Miriam, someone has found a way to smuggle food out of the valley. Don’t you want to know how?”

  “Not really. It doesn’t matter, so long as we put a stop to him.”

  “What if it
’s more than one person?”

  “It’s not. It’s Chambers acting alone in the valley, then that McQueen guy who put him up to it. But it’s not like McQueen is going to rappel down the cliffs every night. We stop Chambers, we stop the smuggling.”

  “Taylor Junior got into the valley by climbing down the cliffs. He found a fissure and worked his way down.”

  “Taylor Junior grew up in Blister Creek,” she pointed out. “And he was insane. You’d have to be to climb down the cliffs in the middle of the night. Chambers is not insane, he’s a greedy backstabber. A coward. I say we hoof it back to the silo. It’s a sure thing. Unless,” she added hopefully, “you’re getting a spiritual prompting telling us to stay.”

  “No spiritual prompting. At least, I don’t think so. The only prompting is my own head telling me to find out how Chambers is doing it. Besides, there’s no guarantee we’d reach the silos in time, not if we have to sneak up to them again. Anyway, if we can’t find him here tonight, nothing is stopping us from trying again tomorrow.”

  “Those are good points,” Miriam conceded. “Okay, then. Let’s get out the night vision.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “The spirit repelled him,” Ezekiel Smoot said. “It literally shoved Jacob out the door.”

  He studied his father’s troubled expression, wondering, worried that he was pushing the older man too hard and too fast. Elder Smoot stroked his beard with one hand and rubbed the brass beehive on the end of his cane with the other. He still sat in a chair directly behind the podium, where he’d been throughout the church meeting.

  The chapel had emptied and the lights were flickering. There were strict regulations about electricity use in the valley, but people would be arriving at home, turning on just one light so they could see to light a lamp, or justifying why they needed to run this electric pump or fire up that semi-licit appliance. It was the sort of behavior that led to brownouts. In fact, Ezekiel or his father should have already flipped the breaker on the chapel. With the sun down and the solar arrays off, that left the turbines at the reservoir, but they produced a limited quantity of electricity.