The Gates of Babylon Read online

  The other man humphed at that, but he didn’t object to the part about riding with Miriam, which was what Jacob had been hoping with his hint that she’d be riding for Mo’s protection and not for the security of a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of diesel fuel.

  Jacob glanced back at the others, who still waited near the flatbed. Miriam had dropped her hand from the pistol at her side.

  “Let’s pump our fuel and get out of here,” Jacob said, “before our buddies at the Department of Agriculture wake up and notice we’re missing.”

  Mo backed his tanker up to the front of a metal tank plug flush with the ground. Jacob unlocked the cap, and he and Stephen Paul helped the truck driver get it open and unspool the hose on his tanker. A moment later and it was slurping thousands of dollars of diesel fuel out of the ground and into the truck.

  The pump on the truck changed its tone and Mo reached over without looking and shut it off. A frown crossed his face when he looked at the gauge. “That’s only eight thousand. Where’s the rest?”

  Jacob put a look of dismay on his face. “Really? Dammit, I thought it was a ten-thousand-gallon tank.”

  He felt uncomfortable at the lie, but he couldn’t let Mo think they could tap into unlimited diesel fuel.

  “Might be,” Mo said, “but it ain’t got ten thousand in it, that’s for damn sure, because we only loaded eight. Got another tank we could tap?”

  “Not here, I don’t,” Jacob said. “And what I’ve got at the house wouldn’t make any difference anyway. A hundred gallons, tops.” He turned to Stephen Paul. “How about you?”

  “Same.”

  “I figure it will be close enough,” Jacob said. “I’ve got about twenty thousand bucks—not counting your fee, I mean—to pay this guy off if he balks.”

  Mo turned back to his hose and pulled it out of the underground tank, and Stephen Paul and David gave Jacob a side look. Eight thousand gallons was nothing compared to the rest of the fuel on this site, hidden in huge tanks around back, covered with brush, dirt, and a rusting heap of junker cars without tires. Father’s legacy. Always prepping for the end of the world.

  Yay, Dad, you were right! Millions of people are going to die!

  Jacob imagined Abraham Christianson up in heaven, nodding with grim satisfaction as civilization swirled around the drain and his children and grandchildren clawed to survive the coming apocalypse.

  No, that was superstitious nonsense. A rough patch. A failed harvest—no matter how widespread—didn’t mean the end. The volcano had quieted down—well, mostly—and next year would be warmer, the business of agriculture more certain.

  Meanwhile, a millstone of trouble around Jacob’s neck. Worries about food, fuel, power. The coldest winter in generations on its way, and propane supplies drying up. Guns and security.

  Then there was the medical situation. Wait until the antibiotics ran out. Then they’d know what it meant to return to the nineteenth century. It wasn’t an adventure; it was a row of gravestones with children’s names. The only thing that terrified him more was the religious implication of a collapse: plagues, famine, warfare. And that the Lord had chosen him to keep all these people alive.

  “Miriam, have you got your sat phone?” Jacob asked.

  She had been walking around the back of the truck, peering underneath the tanker, kicking at the tires, as if checking the general road worthiness of Mo’s vehicle. Jacob guessed it had more to do with the natural suspicions of former law enforcement and less to do with mechanical concerns.

  She straightened and patted her jacket pocket. “Yep.”

  “I’ll only call if something changes. Otherwise, follow us.”

  “Where are we going?” Mo asked.

  “Not far from here. But we can’t get there directly. So pay attention.”

  “And so the faithful, goodhearted people of Blister Creek, Utah, drove into the desert with their precious cargo,” David said, “never suspecting they were driving into a trap.”

  Stephen Paul snorted from behind the wheel, and Jacob looked up from the map he had laid across the dashboard and was studying with a penlight. “Does this black market guy have you spooked?”

  “His name is Scorpion,” David said. “You don’t find that spooky?”

  Jacob smiled. “Would you feel better if his name were—I don’t know—Kimball, for example?”

  “I’m going to say no. But now that you mention it, are we sure he’s not?”

  “Elder Kimball has to run out of murderous sons sooner or later. Besides, this guy has a foreign accent. Spanish, I think, but it was kind of faint.”

  David said, “Any of the Kimballs in the theater? Good with foreign languages, that kind of thing? No? How about long-lost cousins of Fidel Castro?” David paused. “What did your wife say? You told her you were doing this?”

  “Not the specifics, but close enough,” Jacob said. “She doesn’t like it, of course, but Fernie is suspicious of anything that takes me out of the valley. These days, she doesn’t even like me driving to Panguitch on a drug run.”

  “That’s one worry out of the way,” David said.

  “Yes.”

  Not only had the pharmacy closed, but the entire hospital was chained and boarded with the evacuation of the town to Green River. Five weeks had passed since Jacob last filled a prescription. The elderly were running out of their cholesterol medication, their blood pressure pills, their insulin. Nobody had died yet, but it was only a matter of time unless he could get his hands on the goods.

  And then there was Jacob’s son. Yesterday, the bottle of Risperidone had an alarming rattle when Jacob gave Daniel his meds. The meds that suppressed the night terrors and visions of a dark angel. Sometimes, when Jacob looked at his son across the table, he felt like a medieval physician with his lancet and jars of leeches, while a priest in a cassock stood next to him, clutching a crucifix and muttering in Latin against the devil.

  ’Tis a corruption of the blood. Spread through the family by miasmas and unbalanced humours.

  Put that way, it sounded like nonsense, but Jacob couldn’t help wondering if there was some truth hidden beneath the pseudo-medieval jargon. Daniel Christianson was Jacob’s adopted son from Fernie’s earlier polygamist marriage. And the boy’s biological father had fathered three dead murderers—Gideon, Caleb, and Taylor Junior—each one suffering visions as a child. Paranoid schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations.

  A handful of pills left in the jar. And then what?

  Jacob brooded over these worries until Stephen Paul slowed before the turnoff to Bryce about twenty minutes later, flicking his lights to illuminate the road sign at the approaching intersection. All three men glanced in rear or side mirrors to make sure the tanker truck made the turn as well.

  “Hand me the phone,” Jacob said to David.

  His brother handed it over. A man’s lightly accented voice answered on the first ring.

  “Is this Scorpion?” Jacob asked. He had a hard time not putting air quotes around the man’s nickname.

  “Where are you?”

  “Small change in plans. We’re meeting at the head of Bryce Canyon National Park. East on Twelve. Do you know it?”

  The man’s answer was low, suspicious. “You said north of Panguitch. I’m all the way up by Circleville.”

  “We’re short on fuel,” Jacob lied. “It took everything we could to fill the tanker.”

  “I can’t get there by four a.m. It’ll be four twenty at the earliest.”

  “If that’s what it takes. You’ll find us behind Ruby’s Inn.”

  The other man didn’t answer for so long that Jacob thought he’d lost the call. Even the satellite service was getting spotty these days. But at last the man grumbled that he would be there.

  They continued in silence over the darkened landscape. Once outside the valley, they had passed occasional vacation homes in the wooded hills, dark and deserted, but twice, when they drove by ranch houses, lights turned off sudden
ly at their approach. An hour now and they hadn’t spotted a single vehicle on the road.

  It had been more than a year since Jacob visited Bryce, during a quick trip with his brother and their boys, Daniel and Diego, when Jacob needed a break from the pressures of running Blister Creek in the wake of his father’s death and in the face of opposition from the church graybeards. That was before the climate crisis.

  At the time, the place was packed. German and French hikers, scruffy backpackers unloading cars with Colorado and California plates. Young men with huge packs and backcountry permits hiking from the rim down into the otherworldly red rock landscape of the canyon. At the overlooks Jacob met families from New Jersey and trim, strong-backed seniors with walking sticks and plenty of sunblock. Cars, campers, motor homes, and tour buses with Japanese lettering on the side.

  Nothing like that now. No cars on the road, no shops or motels open on their approach to the park. The wind carried smoky wisps of snow across the road. So far it was only a dusting across the high plateau, but the first serious storm would isolate this place in a way it hadn’t been for a hundred and fifty years.

  “You still think we’ll pull out of this?” Stephen Paul said.

  “I’m having doubts,” Jacob admitted.

  “You get people starving and the very idea of a national park sounds kind of silly.”

  “Nobody in this country is starving,” Jacob countered. “It’s gas at ten bucks a gallon and lawless roads that shut this place down. Anyway, we pulled out of the Great Depression—we’ll pull out of this, too.”

  “Did Ruby’s shut down in the Depression?” David said. “Far as I know, it didn’t.”

  Jacob didn’t have an answer to that.

  The closer they got, the more ominous it seemed. The village itself had become a ghost town, the shops boarded over, the gas stations dark and quiet. Ruby’s Inn, which had sat at the mouth of the park for nearly a century, didn’t have a single light on. Stephen Paul turned on his headlights when he pulled into the empty parking lot. When the lights raked the big glass windows on the side of the main building, they illuminated the enormous hotel gift shop, once filled with Native American jewelry, racks of T-shirts, bins filled with trilobites, quartz crystals, and fake arrowheads, but now empty.

  Jacob lifted his eyes to the upper floors of the hotel, looking for a flashlight or a face in a window, but saw nothing. So far as one could see from the parking lot or the road, the place looked 100 percent unpopulated. That was good. If he couldn’t see the watchers, he assumed Scorpion couldn’t either.

  And that was their insurance policy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They parked the tanker truck and the flatbed truck in the huge, empty lot behind Ruby’s, and sat in the cabs while sleet hit the windshield and ran down in icy rivulets. After a few minutes, Miriam came over from the tanker truck and squeezed in next to David, who took her hands and rubbed them. All four of them crammed into the front seat now, practically on each other’s laps.

  “I don’t like that guy,” she said.

  “In what way?” Jacob asked.

  “He was nervous as hell. Sweaty hands on the wheel, looking in the rearview mirror.”

  “We’re all on edge,” Jacob said. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

  “You should have seen him jump when I pulled out my Beretta to check the clip.”

  “I’m sure that helped his nerves,” David said.

  “Needed him to see that I could take care of myself,” she said. “And if he tried anything funny, he’d end up with a bullet in his head.”

  Jacob gave Miriam a hard look. What had gotten into her tonight? Was she freaking out about the pregnancy again, and trying to prove it wasn’t turning her soft?

  “Did you show him the back way out of here?” he asked.

  “I did. Didn’t make much of a difference. He seems to be afraid of us as much as the other guys.”

  “Who cares what he thinks?” David said. “We’re here to do this deal on our terms. And if he thinks we’re going to rob him, that’s his problem, not ours.”

  “They’re here,” Stephen Paul said.

  Three trucks pulled into the parking lot. The first two were extended cab pickup trucks, and the third was a flatbed truck not much different from their own. The vehicles lined up side by side with their lights crossed into a brightly lit space in front of them. Seconds later, a tanker truck edged in behind them, an older, filthier version of Mo’s own truck, and sat idling a few dozen yards behind.

  “Three trucks and a tanker,” David said. “That’s a whole lot of fuel to burn. Someone is cheating on his ration cards.”

  “That’s what black market means,” Miriam said. “Anyway, so are we.” She hesitated. “Jacob, you’re sure about this?”

  “Do you think the brownouts are going to go away on their own? Neither do I. So, yes, we need those turbines.” He nodded at his brother. “Assuming David knows how to hook them up and produce power.”

  “I’m getting there,” David said. “And I’ve got a stack of books and the electrical burns to prove it.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Stephen Paul grumbled. “Sooner we’re done with these gentiles, the better.”

  Jacob was studying the situation cautiously but saw nothing from the other side to raise suspicion.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go. Don’t make them nervous. Pull up slowly, park next to their flatbed truck. Miriam, go back and keep Mo calm and compliant.”

  Miriam trotted back to Mo’s tanker. Stephen Paul turned the key, and the engine kicked over with a growl. As he crept forward, the driver’s side door opened on one of the pickups opposite them, and a man armed with a rifle stepped out and into the cone of light in front of his truck. He wore a baseball cap pulled over his eyes and a ski jacket zipped to his neck.

  Stephen Paul stopped the truck long enough for Jacob and David to pile out, and then inched forward as Jacob slammed the door behind him.

  The chill, damp air hit Jacob and he buttoned his sheepskin jacket. If it wasn’t winter already here at seventy-five hundred feet on the canyon rim, it would be soon. He and David shielded their eyes as they stepped into the sleet and the bright headlights of the trucks.

  “It’s me, Jacob Christianson,” he said as he approached the man with the rifle. He felt the weight of his pistol in the holster in his jacket, saw David behind his right shoulder, carrying his deer rifle.

  “Your tanker is full?” the man asked.

  “Not quite, but almost,” Jacob said.

  “What do you mean, almost?” he said, voice tightening.

  The man stepped out of the blinding headlights and showed his face for the first time. Jacob wasn’t sure what he’d expected, maybe a younger, equally tattooed version of Mo Strafford, or some Latin American drug lord type. Like a Hollywood criminal.

  Instead, he had the lean, wiry body of a younger man, even as his face showed years of sun and wind exposure. A ski jacket, a shaggy haircut, and a stubbled chin. He looked like the kind of guy who spent his winters on the slopes and his summers biking the slickrock trails of Moab and tossing back bottles of the local microbrew, even while other guys his age had long since settled down with a wife, kids, and an office job. He was Hispanic but light skinned, almost Mediterranean in appearance. One thing was for sure, he didn’t look like a man whose nickname was Scorpion. How about “Weed” or “Boner”?

  Careful. Don’t underestimate him.

  In six short months a supervolcano on the other side of the world had reduced the Southwest to patches of civilization surrounded by a lawless wilderness. Only a certain type could thrive in such an environment, and he wouldn’t be the type you’d want to cross.

  “I’ve got a shade over eight thousand gallons,” Jacob said.

  “You said nine. That was the deal.”

  “And I thought I’d get it. Fell a little short. But I do have twenty thousand dollars to make up for the missing fuel. That�
��s twenty bucks a gallon. Twice the going rate.” He reached his hand slowly into his jacket and pulled out the wad of hundred-dollar bills to show he was sincere.

  “I’ve got money,” Scorpion said. “I need fuel.”

  “And I don’t have it. I’ll be lucky to get these trucks back to Blister Creek and I won’t have more diesel for three more weeks.”

  More lying, but in the end, nothing would make them a bigger target for theft than the general belief that Blister Creek could easily meet large orders for fuel.

  “Either you take eight thousand and twenty grand in cash,” he continued, “or the deal is off. Sorry. Plans change. Got to take what you can get.”

  Jacob kept his eye on Stephen Paul as the man came to a stop side by side with the other flatbed truck. He met the other driver, and the two men exchanged curt nods, but not handshakes. Stephen Paul tossed back the tarp on the truck’s cargo and then busied himself hooking the chain from the mounted crane on his own truck to the biggest piece of equipment in the back of the other. Jacob took that as a good sign, as was Scorpion’s failure to wave off the movement of goods between the two trucks.

  “All right,” the other man said. “Get that tanker up here, let’s go.” He looked around at the empty two-story motel buildings, and the larger main building itself. “For all we know, there’s some caretaker still on site and he’s already phoned the sheriff.”

  That’s more true than you know, Jacob thought. He could almost feel the other pairs of eyes watching from opposite sides of the parking lot.

  Mo pulled his full tanker next to the empty one brought in by Scorpion’s team, and here he met the other driver and they started fiddling with hoses. Meanwhile, Miriam climbed down from the other side and started walking around the perimeter, looking at the undercarriage again. Hard to say what she was looking for, but it looked suspicious and Jacob caught Scorpion watching with a frown.

  Still, it looked like everything would come off without a hitch, and when Stephen Paul backed up moments later, cargo secured, Jacob felt the tension releasing. He handed Scorpion the money. The man didn’t pull off the rubber band and count it but tucked it into an inner pocket of his ski jacket.