Destroying Angel (34 page)

The last man made a run for it a few seconds later. He stumbled out of the Humvee with his assault rifle blazing. He was out of ammo before he reached the edge of the road. He staggered into the brush. David heard shouts and then three gunshots in quick succession.

The Humvee was silent then, but rifles continued to shoot into the road at an enemy that no longer existed. David crawled beneath the Humvee to wait and cursed the people who kept shooting in his direction. How long could it take Stephen Paul to tell those idiots to stop?

To distract himself, he thought about Diego, about Miriam and the baby that was on its way, and how much he loved them. The rifle fire slowly died. One holdout continued to plug away at the Humvee, but at long last this final, clueless person stopped. Even then, David waited until he heard them calling his name before he climbed out from beneath the vehicle to tell them he was unharmed.

They greeted him like a hero. He wasn’t expecting that.

The angel brought the sword down at Jacob’s head. The weapon was a long, dark thing, blacker than the shadows cast by the sandstone fins around them.

Jacob ducked to one side. A chill slid past his face as the sword swooshed by, just missing. His cheek throbbed in its wake, like the burn of thawing skin after it has been exposed to an icy wind and then brought suddenly into a warm house. He rose with his gun at the ready.

Jacob had time to note the impossibility of the situation. An angel with a sword—a
physical
sword. And a gun in Jacob’s own hand, loaded with
physical
bullets.

He fired. The bullets struck the angel in the chest. He fired again and again until the gun was empty. The angel stood in front
of him unharmed, still carrying his sword. Black shadows snaked and twisted off the end of the blade.

An ugly smile crawled across the angel’s face. “Last time you tried to rebuke me with the priesthood. Now that you’ve failed, you use a gun. The only thing left to do is run for your life.”

Jacob’s heart pounded, but he forced down his fear and kept his voice calm and even. “I won’t run. I’m going past you and I’m going to finish Taylor Junior. You can’t stop me.”

A physical sword
, he thought.
And hands around my throat. But the bullets went right through him.

“How will you do that? There is one way past. Your gun is empty. I’m still armed.”

“I’ve been thinking about our struggle earlier in the evening. I felt your hands.”

“Many have felt my hands on their throats.”

“There’s a monster at first seems an angel of light,” Jacob said, “and he flies on beautiful wings.”

“What does that mean?”

“Something Grandma Cowley highlighted in a book. You appear to them as an angel, don’t you? They think you are beautiful, and you deceive them. And then, by the time they realize—like my poor son—it is too late. They can’t get rid of you.”

The angel smiled.

“But you’re no angel, because you stink of evil,” Jacob continued. “So you are an evil spirit. But an evil spirit has no physical presence, because he rebelled against the Lord and will never receive a body.”

“You felt my hands at your throat. You felt my sword just now. I am a destroying angel, sent by God.”

“You are not an angel, but you’re right. I felt them. So you can’t be an evil spirit either. Which means you’re a hallucination. Insanity passed down through the Kimball line.”

“But you’re a Christianson. And Rebecca Cowley saw me too. And so do you.”

“Annabelle and Rebecca were cousins, and since then the Kimballs have infected every family in the valley. Have the outsiders seen you? I’ve never heard Diego mention you, or Sister Miriam, or Steve Krantz.”

“You lack faith, Jacob.”

“Maybe. I’ve seen strange things over the past few years. But I’m certain you’re either an evil spirit or exist only in my head. Either way, you can’t touch me.”

“So you will refuse to believe in my powers and my priesthoods and I will go away?”

“Yes.”

“We shall see.” He lifted the sword.

“Wait.” Jacob forced himself to remain in place. “Before we find out for sure, what do you want from me anyway?”

“I want your obedience, Jacob. Your worship. Nothing more and nothing less. But I don’t think you will give it. Unlike that craven fool you are pursuing, you are incapable of bending a knee. Not to a prophet, not to me, not even to my enemy. And if you won’t, you must be destroyed.”

“Your enemy? You mean the Lord, don’t you?”

“This valley is mine. The world is tearing itself apart. From here I will rule and reign forever. I offer you kingdoms and principalities if you will only worship me. But if you won’t bow your knee, I must cut you down.”

“That’s at least the third time you’ve threatened to kill me,” Jacob said. He tossed the empty gun to one side. “I’m going to close my eyes. When I open them, thou shalt be forever gone from this place.”

“You fool!” The angel lifted the sword. It grew in his hands until the darkness was a cone of shadow that enveloped Jacob, cold and dank. “Now you die!”

Jacob closed his eyes. His heart pounded. He waited for the blow.

He heard it whistle down, and then something passed through him, like an icy blade that split his clavicle, divided his chest, sliced into his bowels, and passed out through the groin. He gasped in pain and doubled over, but then it was gone and he felt fine. He opened his eyes.

The angel was gone. Where he had stood a moment earlier, there was nothing. Not even footprints in the sand, except for Taylor Junior’s boot prints, staggering out of the clearing until the sand gave way to slickrock and they disappeared.

How long had Jacob stood arguing with the evil spirit? Two minutes? Three? Or, worse, had he suffered a blackout like earlier, when he was out searching for his son and lost almost two hours? No, he didn’t think so.

Even wounded, Taylor Junior would be well ahead by now, difficult to trace. But Jacob didn’t need to follow the prints—he was close to the center of town now. Taylor Junior was headed into the heart of Blister Creek—hoping to achieve heaven knew what, alone, unarmed, and injured—and Jacob knew the layout of this side of Witch’s Warts well enough to know that if he bore west, keeping to the high ground, he’d avoid an impenetrable clump of
sandstone fissures, ravines, and dead ends south of the chapel and would emerge next to the temple.

He continued on his way, mind still turning over the strange vision of the angel with the sword. He was no longer armed, but he remembered how Eliza killed Gideon Kimball in Witch’s Warts with a broken chunk of sandstone, and later finished Caleb Kimball in the dump outside Las Vegas in much the same way. He picked up a fist-size rock.

Now it’s my turn.

The sky was graying now. It would soon be daylight, even here in the shadows of Witch’s Warts. The stones stood as witnesses, dark and solemn, watching the violence play out at their feet. Jacob scanned the ground, looking for evidence that Taylor Junior was collapsing from his wound and searching for a place to hide.

Clumps of rice grass swished back and forth under the breeze, brushing the sand with concentric circles. Tracks crisscrossed the sand—the pinprick rows left by stink beetles, the twin crescent moons of a mule deer, the staggered track of a jackrabbit, a snake’s graceful cursive, even oversize lizard prints with a trailing tail like a thumb dragged through the sand, marking the rare passage of a Gila monster. Given the breeze, all these animals must have passed within the past half hour. The prints would be gone by full daylight, with no record these creatures existed.

Jacob stopped when he spotted something dark and gleaming against the stone. A drop of blood. A few seconds later, another drop. Taylor Junior was continuing toward Blister Creek, but he was still trying to keep off the sand, where he would leave prints. Jacob followed the blood trail over a hump of sandstone that
brought him to another view of the labyrinth, which glowed pink in the light of early dawn.

But the sinister feeling persisted. He thought about the bodies dumped in the labyrinth: Frederick van Slooten, Amanda Kimball, Grandpa Griggs. Others killed—Maude Kimball, Isaac Young, Gideon Kimball. Children had become lost inside while exploring or hunting lizards. They were usually found, dehydrated and confused, after a few hours, but once, back in the 1930s, a child had died inside. Perhaps he’d been climbing a sandstone fin to get his bearings and then fallen to his death—it was hard to say, because animals had eaten half the body by the time a search party found him a full week later. Most people didn’t venture more than a few hundred feet into Witch’s Warts, but over the years hundreds of people had carved their names in the sandstone near the fringes. Erosion had rendered most of the names and dates illegible, the wind scrubbed marks from the stone as thoroughly as from the sand, except over decades instead of hours.

Jacob caught a glimpse of the temple spire and quickened his pace. He picked his way between the last two sandstone fins. He was going to come out between the chapel and the temple. Taylor Junior had covered more ground than Jacob imagined possible, given his wound.

Something moved on the edge of his vision. He lifted his head to see Taylor Junior hurtling toward him from the sandstone fin above him. He must have come out the far side, then turned around and scrambled up the rock to wait for Jacob to pass below. A hunting knife glinted in his hand.

Jacob lifted his arm as Taylor Junior smashed into him. The blow knocked him back against the opposite wall, and the rock fell out of
his hands, but the blade caught harmlessly in his shirt. The two men rolled on the ground, flailing. A moment later they were on their feet again, facing each other in the narrow passageway between the two sandstone fins. Jacob found the hunk of sandstone and scooped it up.

“That was clever,” Jacob said when he’d recovered his breath. “You waited in the only place where my attention was distracted. I was looking at the temple spire.”

He kept his voice calm, but inside he boiled with anger. This man had murdered dozens, left Fernie paralyzed, sent Jacob’s father to the grave. But he eyed Taylor Junior’s knife and knew he had to control his temper.

Taylor Junior’s face showed no emotion either. Blood streamed from the gunshot wound in the left side of his rib cage. The pain would be excruciating, not to mention the blood loss, and every minute increased Jacob’s advantage.

Taylor Junior feinted with the knife. “I know this place better than you.”

“So why did you wait for me?” Jacob asked. “You’ve got a knife. You might have killed someone or taken a hostage before some old woman blew out your brains.”

“I have bigger aspirations than that. You understand.”

“Tell me. What exactly do you want?”

“I think you know,” Taylor Junior said. “Because we want the same thing.”

“I doubt it.”

“Power over the souls of men. The keys to the kingdom. To be the One Mighty and Strong.”

“Is that what the evil spirit promised you? Where is he? Shouldn’t he be at your side in your hour of need?”

Taylor Junior winced, lifted the hand with the knife blade toward his injured ribs, and looked about to stagger. Suspicious, Jacob made a false lunge forward, and suddenly Taylor Junior moved to a crouch, with the knife held out and ready for an upward thrust. Jacob pulled back, the hunk of sandstone still at the ready, as both men resumed their cautious stance.

“No?” Taylor Junior said. “Then whenever you’re ready.”

“After your trick with the artillery shells in Dark Canyon, I don’t take things at face value.” Jacob shifted the stone in his hand. “But that’s an ugly wound. You can’t even move that shoulder, can you? And you’re pale from loss of blood. You were right on top of me with your knife, and you couldn’t finish it.”

Jacob opened his mouth as if to say something else, but this time he really did charge. He had been tensing his muscles even as he acted as though he’d relaxed his arm. Taylor Junior ducked backward, but not in time.

Jacob landed a solid blow directly against Taylor Junior’s injured ribs, but the rock in his hand was old, flaking sandstone that crumbled on impact. Jacob punched at the man’s face with the fragment still in his fist, and then they were going down again. Jacob grabbed for Taylor Junior’s knife hand as he fell. They rolled on the sand as they fought for the weapon, and then the two men came to another impasse, wedged against a sandstone wall, limbs tangled. All four hands gripped either a knife hilt or a hand holding a knife hilt.

“You can’t defeat me, Jacob,” Taylor Junior wheezed. “You’ve been living soft while I gained strength in the desert. I’ve survived starvation and snakebite. Frostbite and heatstroke. Chemical burns. Even injured, I’m stronger than you.”

They resumed their wrestling. Jacob wanted to get a hand free and dig at Taylor Junior’s injured ribs again, but his muscles trembled with exhaustion and he was afraid that if he let go, the man would free the knife and gut him. Taylor Junior tried to bite his face, but Jacob got his elbow under the man’s chin. A moment later they were locked again, both gasping.

“I’ll kill you,” Taylor Junior said, “and then I’ll kill them one by one. Stephen Paul. Miriam. David. Fernie. They’ll get weaker and weaker until they have no choice and join me. Eliza will be my wife.”

“All by yourself? Because we destroyed your cult. Your men walked into an ambush at the reservoir. We killed one and the others surrendered. And we overran your base in the middle of the night.”

“You’re lying.”

“An underground military base?” Jacob forced a laugh. “You came out in a Humvee. The place was unguarded.” It was a mixture of guesses and bluff, but a sudden change in Taylor Junior’s breathing told Jacob he was close. “They didn’t even fight. Just threw down their weapons and begged for mercy, said they’d help us catch you. How do you think I found you? You were betrayed.”

Jacob summoned the last of his strength and launched himself into motion. He tightened his grip with his right hand and slammed his left into the wound on Taylor Junior’s ribs. He thrust in with his thumb, caught a fragment of bone, loose and jagged, and dug and pried as if trying to tear it free from the muscle and cartilage. Taylor Junior screamed and bucked. He let go with one hand and tried to get Jacob’s hand away from his ribs.