Blood of the Faithful Read online

  “You sound like a fundamentalist,” Jacob accused.

  “I have a family to protect now. The world has destroyed itself. Then I look around and see this safe place, filled with my people, my tribe. People who fight and die to keep me safe. Of course I’m a conservative in these circumstances. And yeah, suspicious about outsiders. The only question I have is why you aren’t.”

  Jacob drummed his fingers against the side of the Humvee.

  “Jacob?”

  “What if it’s over and we’re staying here for no reason?”

  “How do you mean?” David asked.

  “Say the war has ended. The famine too. The survivors are pulling together. We’ll go to Panguitch, Richfield, Cedar City. Find the survivors, pull them together. Trade, exchange information. Fight the bandits together. Keep pushing outward until we form a new government. Maybe just a few towns to start, then the whole state. After that, who knows?”

  “Get real, Jacob. Nothing like that will happen. The only thing that will bring peace is the Second Coming. You need to stand up straight and start acting like our prophet. If you don’t, the Lord will choose someone who will.”

  Jacob stared, dumbfounded. With that comment, he knew for certain. He’d lost David.

  His gaze fell on the faithful old dog. Still standing there, still wagging his tail. Still hoping to go for a ride. Not that Jacob expected people to be dogs, but couldn’t his closest brother, at least, be more trusting? He determined to keep his doubts to himself, at least so far as David was concerned.

  “I’m sorry,” David said after a moment, his voice softer. “I didn’t mean that. I’m worried about this scheme is all. You won’t win friends in the squatter camp. They’ve killed our people, we’ve killed theirs. No amount of gift giving will ever change that hatred.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but I’ve got to try.”

  “You’re dead set on this?”

  “I am.”

  David chewed on his lip and glanced back and forth between his brother and the truck. Finally, he sighed. “Okay, then. I’m not convinced, but fine. I’ll support you. But don’t talk about the food until we’re under way. Then you can argue it all you want.”

  “That was my plan all along. About Miriam—what if we took Lillian instead?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Lillian, I trust her. But we need Miriam. If things turn ugly, nobody else gives us a better chance.”

  “Then talk to her first,” Jacob said.

  “About what?”

  “Make sure she’s on a short leash. I’m happy to have Miriam finish a fight, but I can’t have her starting one.”

  Jacob went inside for breakfast. When he came back out, David and Miriam had already come from next door and were standing by the front bumper of the Humvee, chatting. Miriam had changed out of her prairie dress for the occasion, and wore jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, with a tan utility vest, full of pockets. Her hair had grown out since she’d cut it trying to sneak into Las Vegas, and she wore it in a simple ponytail.

  While David and Miriam spoke, she was laying out an array of weapons across the hood: an AR-15 assault rifle, two pistols, a pair of shotguns, plus a zipper case carrying a second rifle, this one fixed with a scope and tripod. Also, various ammo cans and boxes of shells, plus a pile of Kevlar vests. Seeing Miriam’s smooth, businesslike movements filled Jacob with confidence. When she wanted to be, Miriam was calm and efficient.

  She glanced up as Jacob arrived. “Why’d you lock the truck? I couldn’t get this stuff in.”

  “Habit, I guess.”

  “What habit? You usually leave the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition.”

  “Do I?” Jacob avoided David’s gaze and handed Miriam a pair of handheld radios. “I’ll load it up. You two test these radios, and make sure the batteries are good. I had to change out one of them the other day—it wouldn’t hold a charge anymore.”

  He opened the back and tossed the vests on top of the blanket concealing the foodstuffs, then loaded the ammo and guns. When he came back around, his sister Eliza was riding up on a chestnut mare.

  She wore jeans and a long-sleeve denim shirt, with boots and a baseball cap. Apart from the hat, she was looking suspiciously like a polygamist wife. Even though many other women had begun to wear their hair in shorter, more practical styles, Eliza had been growing her own hair out again. It was now in two long, blond braids that trailed halfway down her back. How long until she came to Jacob asking for a second wife for her husband?

  Don’t be paranoid, he thought. You’re worked up because of David. Eliza would never do that. And Steve wouldn’t go for a second wife either.

  Two of Jacob’s younger brothers came out for Eliza’s horse, which they led around the house toward the stables.

  Jacob and David loaded the rest of the gear in the back of the Humvee while Eliza and Miriam exchanged pleasantries. By the time it was in there, the food under the blanket didn’t stand out so much. When Jacob came back, David suggested they pray before setting out. That was a good idea, Jacob said. How about David do the praying?

  Jacob opened his eyes midway through the prayer. The others—even Eliza—stood with their hands together in front of them, their heads bowed solemnly. The faith seemed to radiate off them like the heat shimmering from the hood of the Humvee. Each of these people had saved his life before. Yet he felt more distant from them now, more lonely than he could ever remember.

  The four of them climbed into the Humvee, Eliza up front with Jacob. Fuel was so precious, the sound of a vehicle so rare, that people hurried out to their porches to watch as they drove through town. Jacob cruised at a slow speed, waving through the open windows to let them know there was no emergency.

  “Glad we’re not driving past the Smoot house,” Eliza said. “Soon as he spotted us he’d raise an army and march it into the cliffs. Just in case.”

  “I warned Elder Smoot we were going,” Jacob said, “and for exactly that reason. I told Sister Rebecca and the Griggs family too. Don’t need the alarmists riled up.”

  They pulled past the temple, gleaming in the morning sun, then drove up the highway along the edge of Witch’s Warts. It stretched toward the cliffs in a vast maze of red fins and knobby hoodoos that stood like rows of silent sentinels off the shoulder of the road. Soon they were in the open land with the cliffs looming ahead of them. The highway cut straight to their base, then became a twisting snake as it climbed a series of switchbacks to the top.

  Grover and Ezekiel Smoot were guarding the guns at the main bunker halfway up, and Jacob slowed as they approached. A pair of horses loafed in the shade of a lean-to shed on one side of the bunker.

  Ezekiel came out to Jacob’s rolled-down window, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The young man was in his midtwenties, with the same dark hair and intense gaze as his father. He had a short-cropped beard and thin lips. He wasn’t the most handsome man in town, but he carried himself with a confidence that Jacob respected.

  “Trouble?” Ezekiel asked.

  “Nothing to worry about. A little reconnaissance. Been a long time since I’ve been to the reservoir, and I want to make sure the squatters aren’t up to anything. Has it been quiet here?”

  “Dead,” Ezekiel said with a shrug. “Need me to come along? Grover can handle the .50-cal while I’m gone.”

  “Nah, we’re good. I’m not expecting trouble.”

  Ezekiel nodded. “We’ll listen for gunfire, just in case.”

  “Sure, if you hear anything send Grover to Yellow Flats and warn Sister Rebecca. But you stay at the machine gun.”

  “Got it,” Ezekiel said with a curt nod. “God be with you.”

  After they’d pulled away, Miriam spoke up from the back of the vehicle. “Hey, Jacob. Want to explain all this food?”

  “Nothing much to explain. It’s exactly what it looks
like.”

  “Looks to me like a gift. Or a bribe. So I guess I have no idea, because it couldn’t be either of those things.”

  “It’s a gift,” he admitted. “We barely dipped into the food stores last year, and this year we’ve got a good crop planted and no late frosts.”

  “No late frosts yet,” David said.

  “Yet,” Jacob conceded. “But you’ll have to admit the weather seems less . . . weird. I think we’ll get a solid harvest. We can spare some food.”

  “It’s not a question of whether or not we can spare it,” Eliza said. She sounded equally concerned. “You know that. We’re trying to shrink the squatter camp, not grow it. How many millions of hungry people are there in the world at this moment, ready to come running the instant they hear we’ve gone soft?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Jacob said. “We don’t have any idea. For all we know, the government has sorted out the food situation.”

  Some scoffing came from the others at this.

  “Anyway,” Jacob continued when they quieted down, “people can hardly come running across two hundred miles of desert. And they’re not going to do it for two barrels of flour, three buckets of powdered milk, and a few sacks of dried peas.”

  “I’d rather not find out for sure,” David said.

  Jacob didn’t say anything more, and it seemed that all the objections had been voiced.

  They reached the cliffs and the reservoir. It was quiet up here, the water lapping against the shore to their right. The floods had receded from the old picnic grounds, leaving behind a thick layer of mud and sticks. Scraps of clothing lay half-buried in the mud, and a single tent pole stood upright with a plastic garbage bag flapping against the side.

  A single cut tree blocked the highway, but there was no sign of gunmen hiding in the boulders that had rolled down from the hills to abut the road. They quickly winched the tree out of the way. David went up top to man the .50-cal behind the gun shield, but Jacob told him to keep the gun pointed away from the camp and into the hillside as they approached, so as not to look threatening.

  “Pass up that white sheet,” Jacob told Miriam. Then, when Eliza had it, he told his sister to hang it out the window.

  Moments later Jacob slowed as they reached the outskirts of the camp. The squatters had dragged more logs across the road and down the shoulder toward the reservoir, with two battered cars without tires pushed up behind to reinforce them. It wasn’t a serious barrier—the Humvee could winch it all out of the way—but it might stop them for thirty minutes or more, plus force them to leave the protection of the vehicle and expose themselves to gunfire while hooking up the winch.

  The refugees in the camp must have heard the engine, because several hundred came up to line the road behind the barrier, staring toward the approaching vehicle. Plenty of rifles and shotguns in evidence, but no hostile moves. Not yet, anyway.

  A year had passed since the battle up here, and little had changed with the camp’s outward appearance. There were tents and camper trailers and wagons overturned and converted into dugouts. Nobody had bothered to build anything so substantial as a log cabin or a shack with a corrugated metal roof.

  But as Jacob stopped the Humvee in front of the barrier and studied the camp more closely, he noticed a few important differences. First, no latrines near the reservoir. After last fall’s bloody battle, precipitated in part because the refugees were polluting Blister Creek’s water supply, Jacob had broken the subsequent standoff a few months later to send in another armed excursion. Not to attack, but to deliver demands. Stop fishing with poison. Shift the camp two hundred yards from the water’s edge. And move the latrines to the other side of the highway.

  The moment someone in Blister Creek sickened from cholera, Jacob warned, he would send his forces into the hills and wipe the camp off the face of the earth. But if the squatters respected the town’s water supply, he would leave them be.

  The other obvious thing that had changed was the surrounding landscape. Pine and aspen forests had once covered the hillsides above the reservoir. Before the collapse, when the summer sun blasted the valley floor, half of Blister Creek would decamp for the reservoir. They boated and fished and swam, while the cool mountain breeze washed down through the trees, shaking the leaves of the aspens and making the pines sway. They picnicked in the cool shade of the cottonwood trees that grew up to the water’s edge.

  But the downside of the extra elevation was the bitter cold and snow that pounded the mountains during the winter. It wasn’t easy to stay warm up here. By last spring, the refugees had already burned up the picnic tables and cottonwood trees from the park, then moved across the road to attack the woods that grew up the mountainside. Now it looked as though some brutal logging operation had attacked the surrounding hills, leaving thousands of naked stumps. There wasn’t so much as a sapling left standing.

  “Like goats in a pea patch,” Eliza said, taking it in beside him. “It’ll be fifty years before this grows back.”

  Jacob was so shocked by the destruction of their beautiful mountain sanctuary that he was out of the truck before he noticed the other surprising change to the refugee camp.

  He was a doctor. His eye naturally went to the children wearing dirty rags for bandages, the old woman bent nearly double by scoliosis, using a ski pole as a cane. A man had a forearm poorly splinted between two flimsy pieces of particleboard. A couple of people were missing limbs. Probably had them sawed off nineteenth-century-style after last year’s firefight. But what Jacob didn’t see was obvious malnutrition.

  These people should be starving. They had been starving. He’d seen them last spring, hungry and lean and bony. And when Joe Kemp’s band of refugees had come limping into the valley from the south, they’d had that same starved look. Even Steve, when Eliza brought him back from Vegas, hadn’t lost his hollow, hungry look for weeks.

  These refugees were not fat by any means. Not even well fed. But they weren’t starving either. And there were several young children and old adults. Not the sort of people to survive a famine.

  Something or someone was feeding these people.

  He was about to whisper his observation to Eliza, who had come up next to him as Miriam also stepped out of the Humvee. Only David stayed with the vehicle, up top with the machine gun. But then a man stepped over the logs and approached them.

  His filthy, layered clothing, unkempt beard, and matted, dirty hair made him look like the homeless men Jacob had seen in Salt Lake when he was a medical resident. The homeless had slept on cardboard mats beneath the freeway overpasses or had come shuffling out of the Salt Lake Rescue Mission. Most were mentally ill or suffering from a substance abuse problem.

  But this man carried himself with a confidence that belied his appearance. He wore a pistol in a nylon shoulder holster, like an FBI agent or police detective. The sight of it made Jacob and his companions stiffen.

  “Stay calm, all of you,” Jacob said, although the comment was mostly directed at Miriam.

  Her typical behavior was to shoot first and then ask questions, except never mind the questions. Who needed to question a dead body? And the dead guy was probably a servant of the devil, anyway.

  Thankfully, she remained still, her gun in its own holster. Instead, she met the man’s gaze, her mouth drawn tight, then cast a significant glance up to David at the machine gun. A message and a warning to the approaching man. Jacob could live with that.

  The man approached warily until he stood about fifteen feet off. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Jacob Christianson. I’m from Blister Creek, and I—”

  “Yeah, I know who you are. We all know. Now get the hell out of here before you start another war.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jacob stared back at the man, unwilling to simply turn around and go home. The man stared back. His expression darkened further.

/>   “I don’t want trouble,” Jacob said. “Keep your people back. We’ll talk. There’s no harm in that.”

  For a moment he thought the man would resist, and then there would be trouble, but then the man turned to the approaching squatters, some of whom were preparing to come over the barrier.

  “Stay calm, all of you. I’ve got this.”

  “Send them to the camp,” Jacob said.

  The man glared at him for a long moment, then ordered his people back.

  Again, they obeyed, retreating into the camp, some seventy or eighty yards distant. There they massed, watching, whispering amongst themselves. They were still too close. A couple of snipers hidden down there could kill Jacob and his companions before they could reach the safety of the vehicle. But that would be the death of the snipers. First, David would light into them from behind the safety of his gun shield. Then the machine gun would chew through the camp, killing hundreds. And then, when Blister Creek heard about the treachery at the reservoir, they’d mount a full campaign.

  “So what do you want?” the man said.

  “All I want is to talk. But first I brought you something. Can I give it to you?”

  “Yeah?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What kind of something?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “It’s a name, that’s all.” Jacob was growing impatient. “Do you want to be enemies?”

  “Too late for that, asshole. We tried, you came in shooting.”

  “You didn’t ‘try’ anything. This is our land, we own it. You invaded, destroying everything and making demands.” As soon as the words came out, Jacob regretted them.

  Miriam tapped Jacob’s shoulder. She leaned in and whispered. “Let me talk to him.”

  Jacob frowned and gave a slight shake of the head. The last thing he needed was Miriam striking a match to things.