Destroying Angel (30 page)

“No. Not now.” She squeezed Miriam’s arm as hard as she could. “Later. You’re going to back me up. I’m going down. You follow.”

She thought Miriam would break, but then something tensed in the woman’s body and she gave a curt nod. “Okay, go.”

Eliza lowered herself into the vertical shaft. The darkness enveloped her.

Lillian was only a few feet down from the sound of it, inching her way ever lower, her breathing ragged through her rebreather mask. She hadn’t gone far, and Eliza realized she had two terrified women on her hands.

“You’re doing great,” Eliza said to the darkness below her. “But you have to go faster.”

“I’m trying. I’m getting tired. I don’t think I can do this. Can we get back out?”

“Wedge your back against one side and your feet against the other. Let yourself slide to the next set of rivets. They’ll stop your slide. Miriam, you good? Miriam?”

“Coming.” The nerves sounded in her voice.

Eliza would have been fine but for the weakness in her two companions. A rising tide of panic came up from her gut. Amplified by the mask, her own breathing roared in her ears.

This is nothing. I killed Gideon. I survived the purification pit in the desert. I killed Caleb Kimball. I fought off Taylor Junior. I can do this. I can save those people.

“Everyone good?” she said, hoping they didn’t hear the tremble in her voice. “Okay, all three of us down to the next segment. Ready? Slide.”

Foot by foot they crept down. Sweat dampened Eliza’s armpits, and the muscles in her back screamed for relief. The pipe kept going and going. Would the blasted thing never end?

And then, unexpectedly, Lillian called up to say that she’d reached the bottom, her voice heavy with relief. She was only a few
feet below them. Eliza let herself slide down until she reached the bottom. Miriam joined them a moment later.

At the bottom, each woman took a turn wriggling until she got herself into the next horizontal shaft, where she could crawl forward on her belly. If Krantz had struggled through the upper shaft, he would have become hopelessly wedged down here. As it was, Eliza had to scrunch and twist to get herself in position.

“The air isn’t moving,” Lillian said over her shoulder.

“Is it supposed to?” Eliza asked.

“Remember how I said we almost got poisoned one other time? I figured the bad air was entering from the shafts on the other side, so I went down there and closed the air vents. It caused a pressure change in the east lounge. You could feel a breeze coming down this pipe and into the room. I don’t feel anything this time.”

“Maybe we’re blocking the flow,” Eliza said. “I can’t imagine they’d forget to close the other vent again to keep the bad air out.”

But what about Caleb Kimball’s followers in the desert outside Vegas? They’d walked into the trailer as the fire took hold and then barricaded themselves inside. Could these people be in the process of killing themselves too? Instead of fire, had they closed the vents and waited for poisonous air to seep into their bunkers and kill them all?

Light entered the ventilation shaft, enough to show Lillian’s dim figure and the gray metal walls around them. The glow grew as they continued, marking the end of their tortuous passage through the pipes. And then the tunnel ended with a square of light between Lillian’s hands and knees. There was no ventilation cover, just a straight drop into the room.

Lillian lowered herself down, followed by Eliza and Miriam. They found themselves in a lounge, almost like a shabby hotel lobby but with no windows. There were couches, a fridge, pale fluorescent lights, and an old-fashioned console TV mounted on one wall, black and dead.

And people. Women and children lay in neat rows on the floor, more than twenty people in total. None of them moved.

Lillian’s voice sounded like lead. “We’re too late.”

The bubble of carbon dioxide and noxious gasses must have overwhelmed the ventilation system faster than Lillian had imagined, filled the underground compound, and suffocated them all. They’d come all the way down for nothing.

Miriam had taken out her gun at some point, but now she tucked it back into her holster and made her way to the nearest woman. She bent, and the woman stirred.

Miriam rose with a start. “They’re not dead. Hurry, we have to—” She stopped abruptly.

Someone entered the room through the doorway on the far side, wearing a yellow hazmat-style suit with a mask and ventilator. And holding an assault rifle lowered in their direction.

Stephen Paul took a bullet.

One minute he was by David’s side, calmly rising to fire his rifle at the Humvee, which spit death in all directions like a fire-breathing monster. The next he lay on the ground, writhing and groaning. David dragged him fully behind the boulder.

The .50-caliber machine gun chewed at the rock for a few seconds before turning south to engage the rifle fire to the southeast. The guns on that side immediately fell silent, and David imagined the people—many if not most of them women—would be cowering, unable to stand before the hundreds of rounds pouring into their position. Survive until the guns turned away, and then fire with their feeble arsenal until they enraged the beast sufficiently to repeat the entire hopeless process.

Stephen Paul groaned and grabbed at his left leg. He’d been hit a few inches above the knee. He must have exposed his leg while firing. Not the .50-cal, thank goodness, or the leg would be gone. One of the assault rifles, then. But it was a big, gaping wound, and David felt suddenly light-headed and had to look away.

He glanced at the boys. Diego and Daniel sat to one side, their rifles in the dirt in front of them, hands clamped over their ears. Terrified by the ear-bruising sound of battle.

David tore away Stephen Paul’s shredded pant leg. There was a lot of blood. He needed Jacob’s help to tell him what to do. But his brother would be deep in Witch’s Warts by now, hopefully finishing off that bastard for good. Doubtful Jacob could get a radio signal down among the stones, and if he could, surely he’d have the thing turned off.

“Is it bad?” Stephen Paul asked between clenched teeth.

“You’ll live.”

But only if David could stop the bleeding. He pulled off his belt, wrapped it around the man’s leg, and cinched it as tight as he dared. Stephen Paul grunted when David tied off the ends in a knot, but he didn’t cry out, though it must have hurt like hell. Blood still oozed around the sides, but it wasn’t gushing.

Stephen Paul leaned forward and peered through the darkness. “Give me my gun.” He tried to rise, but David pushed him back down.

“Don’t be an idiot. If you move, that belt will come loose and you’ll bleed to death.”

“It’s not that bad. I need to help.”

“It
is
that bad. You need a doctor or you’ll lose that leg, and you sure as hell aren’t going to go limping around on it like some
kind of movie star. We’ve got plenty of firepower. Enough to keep them pinned down.”

“But not enough to finish it,” Stephen Paul said.

No, not enough, either with or without Stephen Paul’s rifle. And that was the problem. They’d taken out the Humvee’s tires, but Taylor Junior’s men could back up at any time on their rims, laying down a withering hail of bullets until they were safely out of range. And then what if they had another vehicle stowed away up the road? They’d get away unscathed.

A rocket-propelled grenade screamed through the air and detonated a few feet away. Sand and rock rained down on their heads. The boys cried out and clutched each other.

An assault rifle rattled to the north, and the .50-cal swung in that direction. It must be Rebecca, and even though her gun fell silent under the withering fire of the heavy machine gun, that assault rifle was the only thing that seemed to get their attention. The rifle fire simply pinged off the side of the Humvee with no more efficacy than a handful of flung pebbles.

An idea formed in David’s head. He groped until he found Stephen Paul’s two-way radio, which he pressed into the man’s hand. “You can still direct the troops. First thing, get someone over here to man this position.”

“My wife Carol is on her way already.” He must have seen David glance at his wounded leg, because he added, “Don’t worry, she knows her duty. She won’t be nursing me, you can count on that.”

“Second,” David said, “make sure everyone knows I’ll be running around. I don’t want some trigger-happy fool blasting me when I stagger out of the darkness.”

“But where are you going?”

“I need to reach Rebecca,” David said. “She’s the only one who can pin them down for more than a second or two. Tell the others…” He paused, his breath suddenly short just from saying it aloud. “Tell them that when Rebecca starts firing on full auto, everyone needs to shoot at once, and as fast as they can. Rifles, handguns, anything you got. Just as much fire as you can manage, directed at the Humvee.”

“I don’t like where this is going, David.”

“Me either, heaven help me.” He looked at Diego, thought about leaving the boy without a father again. He thought about his pregnant wife. If he died, would he see them again on the other side? For the moment he desperately wanted,
needed
, it to be true. “When everyone is firing, I’m going to make a run at that machine gun. If I can get inside that gun shield and kill the shooter, we’ll have a chance.”

Stephen Paul said nothing, and David thought he would pull rank. Jacob had left him in charge, not David, and he was the senior member of the quorum. He could order David not to throw his life away. But after a long pause, the man said, “You’ve got the Christianson guts, brother. Your father would be proud.”

“I doubt that. He’d snort and say, ‘Yeah, we’ll see.’ Besides, I’m about to piss myself I’m so scared.”

“That’s what makes it brave. Go. The Lord will protect you. No bullet can withstand the power of the priesthood, remember that.”

Except the bullet that killed his father, David thought as he crept away from Stephen Paul on his hands and knees. That particular bullet had been no respecter of priesthood authority. It had
punctured all those layers of righteousness without thought or motive. What David wanted more than all the priesthood power in the world was a big honking gun to blow those SOBs sky-high. Nevertheless, he prayed furiously for divine intervention as he crawled through the darkness.

He radioed Rebecca to tell her he was coming and not to mow him down when he stumbled out of the darkness, only to find out that Stephen had already called and she was expecting him. He knew exactly how to find her position, but it took nearly ten minutes of cowering and creeping to make his way back through their own positions along the road to the south, and then north along the edge of the reservoir. Twice he threw himself to the ground and lay flat as roadkill while bullets zipped by his head. At last he staggered up to the rock where she’d made her stand.

It was closer to the stalled Humvee than any of the positions farther south. She’d tossed flares onto the road to illuminate the enemy vehicle. Most lay well short, but they cast enough light to join with the moonlight and show the rough outline of the Humvee, even from thirty or forty yards distant.

Rebecca looked him over as he skidded into the dirt by her side. “You don’t look like a hero.”

“Hah.”

“But Stephen Paul says you’re willing to go down in a blaze of glory, so I guess that makes you one.”

“Will you stop that?”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course not. None of us do. If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t be getting our butts kicked by a few jerks in a truck.”

The .50-cal fired down the road toward Stephen Paul’s position. Rebecca rose and squeezed off a short burst. In answer, the two assault rifles blasted their position on full auto.

“Geez, how much ammo do they have?” Rebecca muttered as they waited it out.

“I get the feeling they can carry on like this all night. That’s why I’ve got to kill that guy at the big gun. I’ll take out the rest if I think I can, but most likely I’ll make a run back and you can try to get the other guys before they climb out and reman the machine gun. While avoiding crossfire and a retaliatory bullet to the back.”

“Doesn’t sound promising when you put it that way. And here’s another problem. You’re planning to go up there with the handgun and shoot him from close range?”

“It’s the only way I can be sure that I can get around that metal gun shield.”

“But it isn’t just the metal shield,” she said. “I hit him at least once. He was swiveling around, and I got a side shot. I saw his machine gun jitter as I was firing, and it fell silent. Thought I got him. He paused, and then a few seconds later started shooting again. I hit him, I know I did. But he kept going.”

“You’re sure?”

“Certain. He’s got body armor. What’s your weapon?”

“A nine millimeter.” He showed her his gun.

“Not good enough. Someone on our side was blasting away with what sounded like a .44 a few minutes ago. I wonder if we can get our hands on it.” She reached for her radio.

“And how would we find each other in the dark? I don’t want to go out there again unless I have to. Besides, I’m not such a great shot that I want to be experimenting with a new weapon
anyway.” He thought about his practice with Miriam at the firing range. He’d picked up a .44 once, and the recoil about took off his hand.

“You’ll never get through with a Beretta, not unless you get so close you can shoot him in the face.”

David said nothing.

“That’s what you’re planning to do, isn’t it? Get right up in his face. Maybe your father was wrong about you.” There was admiration in her voice, and for a moment David knew what it must be like to be Jacob. “Too bad Abraham is dead. He’d like to hear about this.”

“I might get a chance to tell him in person in a few seconds,” David said.

She laughed, and then unexpectedly grabbed him in a tight embrace and whispered in his ear, “May the Lord protect you.” She pulled back and was all business again. “Run north until you get past the flares and the crossfire, and then come around the back side of the vehicle, where you’ll be hidden by the darkness.” She grabbed his arm. “Wait, take this.”