Blood of the Faithful (20 page)

That was interesting. And alarming, at the same time. Where were they carrying all that fuel?

When the fuel scavengers were gone, the man with the shotgun returned to watching the camp, his back to the truck. Someone in camp lit a fire.

Keeping an eye on his guard, Ezekiel used his toe to ease the machete out from beneath the seat. He tried to get it turned onto its side so the sharp edge would be facing up, but this proved impossible with his hands bound behind his back and his feet tied together.

With a final glance at his guard, now in shadow as it grew dark outside, Ezekiel lay down across the seat bench. He twisted his shoulders until he got his hands on the floor. He groped blindly along the carpet until his fingers found the blade. It took more struggling to lift the knife up to the seat. When he had done so, he waited with the machete hidden beneath his body in case the guard opened the door and demanded to know why the truck was rocking from all of Ezekiel’s movement.

After several seconds of silence Ezekiel breathed a sigh of relief and began again. He twisted the machete until the blade was against the cord binding his wrists. Then he went to work sawing through.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Miriam, Jacob, and David hiked up the switchbacks in silence. It grew darker and darker as they snaked higher. By the time they reached the heights it was night. The moon, now waxing from the crescent of the past couple of nights, would be brighter in the sky than it had been, but it wouldn’t come up for at least an hour or two.

The three of them stood in the cool breeze that washed down from the higher mountains above. Miriam shivered, glad to have the denim jacket. The night was quiet. No insects or birds up here. The trees were all gone, and only tumbled boulders marred the landscape, spilling right up to the edge of the road. To the right of the highway lay the wide, inky pool of the reservoir. It would take twenty or thirty minutes to round the reservoir on foot and reach the squatter camp from the opposite side. She figured that was a safer bet than approaching directly from the highway.

Miriam turned on the night vision goggles just long enough to verify that no figures were lurking in the darkness. “All clear.”

Jacob pointed to the left of the highway. “We’ll take position behind those rocks and wait.”

“I’ll be awhile.”

“Don’t linger. Just go through the camp, look for Ezekiel, anything else you see that might be out of the ordinary, then come back. No heroics, no side adventures.”

“I know what to do.”

“Give me a minute with Miriam,” David said to his brother. “I’ll meet you at the rocks.”

As Jacob left for the boulders, Miriam and David picked their way along the dirt road on the south shore of the reservoir.

“Are you planning to follow me all the way around?” she asked.

“I’ve half a mind to, yes.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ve done this sort of thing before, and against worse odds.”

“I wish you’d give this up. It’s not worth it. Not to me, it isn’t. Not to your kids.”

“It’s just reconnaissance.”

“You keep insisting. It’s less convincing every time you say it.”

“Oh, come on, what are you talking about?”

“You may have fooled Jacob. Barely—he seems suspicious. But I’m your husband, and I know you. I know what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not going in with any preconceived ideas,” she said, truthfully. “But if I see that traitor, if I have the chance, I’ll do what must be done.”

“Insofar as thou art faithful and true, thou shalt be protected from harm. That’s what the blessing said.”

“And I will be.”

“You told Jacob you were going to reconnoiter. He’s trusting you to keep your word. If you go against that, how will you claim you were faithful and true?”

“I’ll be faithful and true. But maybe not to what Jacob is expecting.”

“So you’re trusting your own wisdom, and not the prophet?”

“I’m trusting my own
inspiration
,” she corrected. “What the spirit tells me directly.”

“Jacob gave you a blessing. That
was
the spirit speaking.”

“There are two ways to interpret that blessing. One is Jacob’s way. Caution, compromise. Hold out and things will blow over.”

“And your way?”

“Not my way, the Lord’s way. The world is ending. You know it, I know it. Everyone in Blister Creek knows it, even Ezekiel Smoot. Everyone except Jacob. Either everyone else is right and Jacob is wrong, or Jacob is right and we’re all wrong. Every single one of us, wrong.”

“I believe this is the end,” David said, “but I don’t know it.”

“I do.” She put her hands on his shoulder. “And I know that the Lord has chosen me to protect this valley. A shield, yes, but sometimes a sword too. And even as I protect our people, so will the Lord protect me in turn. I know this.”

“But I
don’t,
” he insisted, as stubborn as ever. He took her hands from his shoulders and held them. “Miriam, I really don’t.”

“There’s one way for you to know for sure,” she said, as something occurred to her.

Even as the thought came to her mind, a shiver worked itself down her spine at the implications. Was that a whisper of doubt in her mind? She pushed it aside.

“If I’m right, if this is the End of Days, I’ll destroy our enemy and return unharmed this very night. If I’m wrong and Jacob is right—”

David stiffened. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

“I’m not tempting Him. I’m trusting Him. My life is in His hands.” Miriam took a deep breath and began again. “If I’m wrong and Jacob is right, if this is nothing more than a natural disaster, then the Lord shall remove me for my folly.”

“Please, don’t say that.”

She nodded. “Then this very night shall mine enemy smite me unto death.”

Miriam continued alone. Last year they’d used this road to circle the reservoir in the Humvee and attack the camp from the back side and she wasn’t surprised to see that the squatters had taken steps to render it impassable to vehicles and horses.

Every few hundred feet a trench had been cut across the road. In other places, logs blocked the road. Once, she almost stepped on a nail strip thrown across the road, but was traveling with the night vision goggles and spotted the dark stripe against the dirt. She stepped gingerly over it, watching for other traps or snares. It occurred to her that with McQueen in charge, a former military man, they might have improvised mines to catch the unwary. Was she heavy enough to trigger them?

Heavenly Father, guide my steps.

The light of a small fire flickered on the far side of the reservoir, but otherwise the camp was dark. The arrival of spring must have come as a welcome relief for the refugees. With the hillsides denuded and firewood farther and farther away, it must have been a frigid, miserable winter up here. The lucky lived in dugouts or campers, while others would have suffered through the cold in tents or beneath propped-up tarps. Some must have died. Many of the survivors no doubt wished they had.

Why didn’t they go away? Blister Creek couldn’t help them; the church members had enough worries caring for themselves. It wasn’t fair for them to stay up here starving and freezing, their presence making the saints of the valley struggle with fear and guilt.

Listen to yourself. Have you no compassion? These people are suffering.

Miriam shook her head. Compassion was a trap. It would have been kinder for Jacob to drive the refugees away the moment they’d arrived rather than to leave them up here, filled with hope. And then Jacob’s compassion had made the treachery of Chambers and Ezekiel possible.

She slowed when she came within a few hundred yards of the camp. She could see the sentries through her goggles. Two people sat behind a barricade of logs, their heads and rifle butts poking up. A third person lurked to one side, this one wrapped in a blanket, his back against a tree stump. He was either asleep or sitting so still she might have missed him with a more casual examination.

Miriam took out her pistol. She swung to the right of the road, then crept up to the sentry at the tree stump. The camp had chosen their guard positions well; it was the narrowest point between the reservoir and the hillside.

But she was quiet and careful, and he didn’t turn toward her. She passed behind the man at the stump, no more than a dozen feet away at the closest, moving step by step, placing her feet with extra caution so she wouldn’t kick a stone or crunch gravel. The man cleared his throat and she froze. But he didn’t move or look in her direction.

It took several minutes before she was past the sentries and approaching the outer tents of the camp. One final survey showed numerous people milling around the camp or gathering at the fire, but no more sentries. She turned off the goggles and shoved them into an inner pocket of her jacket.

That had been surprisingly easy. She’d learned how difficult it was to maintain an endless vigil, but she’d expect to find the camp still in turmoil from the loss of their food source last night, plus Ezekiel’s no-doubt unexpected arrival.

A panel truck sat directly ahead of her, its tires missing, a tarp stretching from the side to form a crude canopy over the ground. Someone’s home, but it was dark and quiet, and she thought it would be a good place to hide and study the camp from closer range. She stepped up to the back bumper.

“Hold it, there,” a woman’s voice said. A figure stepped from behind the truck, a rifle or shotgun in hand.

Miriam’s stomach flipped over, and she had a hard time not grabbing for her pistol. She forced herself to remain calm. “Holy shit, you scared me.”

“What are you doing, where did you come from?” The woman sounded nervous. And young.

“Chill out, it’s just me.”

“Who?”

“Someone thought they saw something, so McQueen sent me around the reservoir to check things out. Of course it was nothing. Look, I already checked in back at the checkpoint. Are you going to give me crap too?”

Without waiting to see if the woman would challenge her further, Miriam resumed walking toward camp. She didn’t know if the young woman was watching her or if she’d already turned back to study the road emerging from behind the reservoir, convinced by Miriam’s casual behavior that she wasn’t a real intruder.

Again, the long months since the last attack on the reservoir worked to Miriam’s advantage. They must have had a million false alarms. And it was still a camp of strangers—no way to know all fifteen hundred people, or however many they were now.

Miriam walked between rows of tents. A harmonica wailed somewhere to her right, accompanied by the strum of a guitar that seemed to be missing a string. The wind picked up, flapping tents and snapping the edges of poorly secured tarps.

Someone, presumably McQueen, had drawn out the campers and tents from the water’s edge and arranged them in rows, with footpaths between. It looked more like an actual, organized refugee camp than the chaotic jumble of the previous year. To keep the Humvee from simply driving through and mowing people down again, they’d buried tree stumps in strategic places. Those would trip up any vehicles, but posed no obstacle to an intruder on foot.

The moon rose behind the mountains to the northeast, and she could suddenly pick out figures. Two people sat on lawn chairs in front of a tent, smoking. She saw the harmonica player and his guitar-playing friend. A woman sat next to the guitar player. Maybe she was his wife. Maybe she’d come to listen to the music.

A man stood down by the shore, fishing. Miriam couldn’t imagine there were any fish left after all this time. Even if they were no longer poisoning the lake to send fish floating to the surface, surely they’d used every other tactic to catch and eat the last few fish. She couldn’t see any trout leaping for flies in the moonlight, or the little pools of water that showed them stirring below the surface. No doubt any other animal that could be eaten had been, from deer and rabbits down to crickets and meadow voles.

Fifteen or twenty people stood around the fire in the center of camp. She expected to see some of them cooking, but there were no pots and nothing going in and out of what she now recognized as a crudely built bread oven sitting to one side. All the bread in that oven, she realized, had been made from grain and flour pilfered from Blister Creek.

But why weren’t they cooking anything now? Could they already be out of food? They must have truly been living day to day if less than twenty-four hours after Chambers’s last delivery they had nothing whatsoever to eat.

Well, sure. A thousand, fifteen hundred people. What did a person need to survive, maybe a pound of grain per day? Even adding what they could hunt and fish from their surroundings, that stolen food had been barely enough to keep them alive.

The discussion at the campfire rose in volume. It was animated—almost, but not quite an argument. She was suddenly sure they were discussing Ezekiel and Blister Creek. Food supply gone, now what do we do? And will those polygamist whackos attack us again?

Miriam was itching to get closer and eavesdrop on their conversation, so she wandered back and forth through camp, coming at the clearing from several directions. But she couldn’t find any way to approach without stepping into the firelight. She didn’t see Ezekiel, so she didn’t worry about getting recognized. But with so many men and women, it wouldn’t take long to figure out that
nobody
knew her. Two seconds after that there’d be trouble.

Instead, she gave up and went looking for Jacob’s truck. She picked her way through the tents until she found a fifth-wheel trailer up by the road, two of its windows broken out and taped with old newspapers instead. There was nobody lurking around it, and so she pressed herself against the side and put on the night vision goggles, dialing them down to compensate for the moonlight. She looked up toward the highway.

Jacob’s stolen truck sat off the shoulder of the road, several yards down the muddy slope, roughly a hundred yards distant from the edge of camp. A man with a long-barreled gun stood guard. He wore a long, scraggly beard, but he was too skinny and short to be Ezekiel. She was wondering where to look next when she spotted movement inside the truck cabin. There was someone in there. And that could only be one person.