The Gates of Babylon (31 page)

Fernie entered a narrow alley crowded with houses made of plywood and corrugated metal, with additional structures of any available material shoved into the gaps: cinderblock, stacked cars, tarp-covered pallets, railroad ties, and single-wide trailers, sometimes stacked two deep. Metal stovepipes belched smoke. The smell penetrated the car and left an oily taste that coated her nose and throat. Wires ran back and forth above the street, giving it a semipermanent look, like a Third World slum.

Before she realized what was happening, the car reached a dead end. The alley had been gradually narrowing, and she’d expected it to widen again onto another main road. It was snowing hard now, and between the near whiteout conditions and the attention required to give Daniel instructions with the pedals, she didn’t see the camper lodged at the end until she was almost on it.

“Brakes!”

He mashed down and the car shimmied. They came to a stop two feet from the camper and sideways across the alley with the front bumper inches from someone’s door, and the back bumper only slightly farther from a door on the opposite side.

Fernie flipped the car into reverse and tried to maneuver her way back, but whenever Daniel touched the gas, the tires spun and the car slid. Any more and she’d crash into someone’s front room. At last she turned off the car.

“What do we do now, Mama?” Daniel asked.

Curious faces leaned out of houses. It was quieter here, with a more permanent feeling than the tents, and many of the people were women or middle-aged men, not the young, shiftless types who had been menacing the car earlier. The door of the shack she’d almost hit banged against her bumper. A woman’s face squeezed out and turned to anger. She thwacked the hood then turned and shouted something back into the house.

Fernie didn’t have a plan, except to put distance between herself and the soldiers who would be searching for her. Jacob was a strong man, but what would he do if they had his wife and children? Almost anything to get them back. She couldn’t put him in that position.

A man zipped up his coat and walked around the car, trying the doors. A second man appeared at the doorway Fernie had blocked where the woman had banged the hood moments earlier. He was younger than the first, maybe in his early thirties, with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth and wearing a scroungy white T-shirt in defiance of the cold. He squirmed sideways until he got through his partially opened front door and onto the hood of her car. He crawled a few feet up the hood to get clear then slid off into the snow.

The older woman reached out a hand with a dirty coat. He grabbed it with a shrug then huddled with the first man a few yards from the car. The two gestured at the car and the smoker suddenly burst into a barking laugh.

“Mommy?” Daniel said.

“Shh, I’m thinking.”

Watching the two men talk over their fate left Fernie terrified. Gentiles and refugees. Smoking, probably drinking, no doubt planning to rob her for liquor money, but worried about the government car. When they found out she was alone with two kids and paralyzed…

Stop it. Just stop. You have no time for that kind of thinking.

Fernie tapped her horn to get their attention. The smoker nudged his companion and then walked around to the driver’s side. She rolled down the window.

“You’ve got some balls,” he said, without really looking at her, “coming down here after what happened tonight. Drag you out and cut off your goddamned head is what.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” Fernie said.

The man blinked and leaned in, eyes widening in surprise. He looked at Daniel, sitting on his mother’s lap where he could operate the pedals, and then into the backseat.

“Dude, check it out. Some lady and her kids.”

Other people were coming into the street, but something changed in the younger man’s expression. He said something in a low voice to the older man, who waved people back into their houses and yelled at a couple of kids who didn’t immediately obey.

“You steal this car or something?” the first man said around his cigarette. “Says USDA on the side.”

He leaned his head into the car interior to look around, and though he had the manners to remove the cigarette and hold it outside the car, he brought the smell with him. It was strong and turned Fernie’s stomach.

The second man came up behind the first. She tried to decide how much to tell them.

“I did steal it, kind of. The government was robbing us and I tried to get away to warn my husband.”

“You don’t live in the camps?”

“No, we’re from Blister Creek.”

“Never heard of it.” He looked at her dress. “Mormons?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from Phoenix. But Snod here is from Vernal. He’s a Mormon.”

Snod, if that was his real name, leaned over his friend’s shoulder. He was thickly built, with one of those square necks that looks like an extension of an equally block-like head. Fernie could see from his expression that he could tell exactly what kind of a Mormon she was. Not the same kind he was, that’s for sure. That look wasn’t judging, exactly, but it was guarded.

The two men peppered her with questions. The younger was named Dave, but his friend called him by his last name, Jackson. Jackson had been a vinyl fence installer before the construction industry went belly-up that summer. He’d been in the camp for nine weeks.

“And when I say belly-up, I don’t mean no 2008 housing crash, either.” He flicked his butt into the snow. “There’s nothing. Might be years from the looks of it.”

“Can you push the car around?”

“What are you planning to do? Drive out of the camp in this thing? There’s only three exits.” Jackson held out three fingers and ticked them off. “One, you got your depot. Two, the highway, which goes through six—count ’em, six—checkpoints. And three, the entrance into Green River town, which is closed up to refugees. Only cops go in and out that way.”

“She can’t stay here, either,” Snod put in.

“No, you can’t, lady. Not after what happened tonight. Not after General La Crow murdered three protesters in the street.”

“I heard it was six,” Snod said.

“Whatever.” Jackson turned to the other man and gesticulated. “Point is,
hombre
, that there are men on the streets and they’re bashing skulls. Once they get word that this fine Mormon lady is tooling around in a hot car, they’ll be down here bashing
our
skulls.

“Anyway,” he added, as he eyed the car and the alley. “You got this car wedged in nice and tight, lady. I don’t think this is going anywhere.”

“We can’t leave it here,” Snod said.

“No. Better take it apart and move it in pieces. I know just the guy.”

“I’m getting a tarp,” Snod said. “We can cover this thing up until he shows.”

“Fine thinking.”

Snod disappeared into one of the shacks a few doors down.

Fernie shivered from the cold air coming in through the open window. “What about me and my children?”

“You can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” Jackson plucked out another cigarette from a nearly empty pack, stared at it for a second, then put it back and tucked the pack into his jacket pocket. “Me and Snod will take care of you. If the shit hits the fan, we’ll get you out the back door. I been in this camp longer than about anybody and I know the place real good.”

She hesitated. Could she trust this man? It wasn’t the smoking, or the coarse language—these made her uncomfortable, of course, but she was trying not to judge—but the way he leaned into her personal space, carrying the smell of smoke and body odor. The way he looked her up and down like he was eying a piece of drywall before hacking it to pieces.

And what possible motive could he have for helping her? The pure goodness of his heart?

“I don’t know,” she began.

“For a beggar, you sure are a chooser, lady.”

A siren sounded somewhere in the city. Jackson glanced back up the alley, the casual expression vanishing, replaced by the lean, furtive look of a coyote.

“You think I just want the gas out of your car?” he said.

“I don’t care about the gas. You can have the whole car. That’s not it.”

“Then come on already. You know you’re going to do it. Look, my mom is inside. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Unless you keep sitting on your ass.”

Fernie gave a final glance at her children then turned off the car.

“Good, good. Leave the keys in the ignition. Come on.”

“You’ll have to help me.”

“Yeah, I will. Hurry up, grab the kids and get out.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m paralyzed. My wheelchair is in the trunk. You’ll have to get it out.”

He stared. “How did you drive in here then?”

“My son helped.”

“That’s something—” he started to say, then he seemed to recognize the implications. “Oh, crap. This sucks.”

“Are you going back on your offer?”

“I don’t know, jeez. It’s one thing to reach out your hand to a drowning lady, another to jump after her as she goes over the waterfall.”

Snod came back holding a couple of black plastic tarps. “Come on, what are you still doing? Get a move on.”

“Check this out,” Jackson said. “The lady is in a damn wheelchair.”

The two men scowled. Then, without another word, Jackson went around to get the chair out of the trunk, while Snod spread the first tarp over the hood of the car.

The wailing siren drew closer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Jacob lost precious seconds clearing people out of the backseat of the pickup truck, getting Krantz over from the flatbed to drive, and then arranging Miriam as best he could in the back. At any moment he expected another gunshot like the one that had taken down his sister-in-law. The enemy would regroup. Counterattack.

Others would have to worry about that. His patient was bleeding to death. His mind was like a telescope fixed and focusing on a distant object until everything else disappeared from view.

He crouched in the space between the front and back seats of the extended cab pickup truck, with his duffel bag stuffed in front of him. He unzipped the bag, found a blue plastic surgical tray, which he placed on her knees, then grabbed a pair of scissors. He cut away Miriam’s shirt and snipped the strap off her bra to get it out of the way.

Two things. First, she wasn’t dead. She was still wheezing and had a fair pulse, but more importantly, the bullet had missed her heart. It penetrated her ribs near the anterior axillary line, with no exit wound. Hard to say for sure, but if he had to guess at the yaw, he’d say the bullet was lodged in the middle lobe of the right lung.

Limited entry wound, which meant a small caliber, low velocity bullet, which was something. Maybe one of those .25 caliber air rifles, which meant the gunshot had come from their own side. If this had been from a .45 caliber assault rifle, Miriam would probably be dead. But if ER surgery had shown him anything, it was that you simply could not tell. Some cop might die from a single shot from a .22, while the gang banger on the other side took six .38 rounds to the chest and lived.

Jacob rolled Miriam onto her right side to keep the left lung clear. Keep her from drowning in her own blood. She was unconscious, perhaps from shock, but possibly from low oxygen content in the blood. Several minutes had passed already.

There was enough blood draining out the wound that while she wasn’t in danger of immediate bleed-out, she would die without medical attention. The nearest hospital was hours away, assuming they could reach it in the face of bandits and washed-out roads. Any treatment she received would be right here, in the back of this pickup truck hurtling down the road at night.

Jacob understood all of these things without conscious thought. It had been almost two years since he’d participated in active surgery at Sanpete County during his residency, but in spite of the awful conditions, he was moving almost automatically. Working around his limitations.

David was a babbling, crying wreck, alternately begging Miriam to stay alive and telling Jacob to hurry. What was he waiting for? Couldn’t he see she was going to die if he didn’t do something?

“David, listen to me,” Jacob said, his voice firm. Not unkind, but there could be no argument, no room for discussion. “If you want to save your wife, you need to pull it together. Can you do that?”

“What do you want me to do, should I—?”

“No,” Jacob interrupted. “None of that, we have no time. Those cabin lights aren’t doing it. Get me some light. I don’t care how you do it.”

He kept working as he said this. He peeled open a package of disinfectant wipes that he kept on hand for cleaning gravel from scrapes and used them to clean the grime from his hands, then scrubbed with Betadine. He grabbed a few packages of sterile towels, a boat of 4x4 gauze pads, some Prolene sutures, a half sheet drape, and a couple pair of sterile gloves.

He opened the tray and wedged it between Miriam’s butt and the backseat, then unfolded the blue paper so that he’d have a sterile field, and finally placed these other items on top of the paper where he could get to them.

Krantz handed back a flashlight, which David took in bloody hands, and moments later a kerosene lamp sputtered then shone, hissing. Good, some real light.

By now they’d raced several miles down the road from the bridge, and Jacob had to take a chance that they’d evaded pursuit.

“Pull over,” he said.

“I’d rather not,” Krantz said. “Whoever is still alive back
there is going to be pissed. I want to put a few more miles between us.”

“I need you to pull over now.”

Krantz obeyed. Jacob kept his hands clenched together until the truck had come to a complete stop on the shoulder of the highway. The other two vehicles stopped and Krantz rolled down the window momentarily to shout back and forth with the others to explain what was going on.

“David,” Jacob said. “Look in the bag. Get me the BVM.”

David spread the duffel bag. “The what?”

“A mask with a bubble on the end. See it?”

David handed it over. Jacob rolled Miriam onto her back again, tilted her head back, and threaded the endotracheal tube down her throat. Her legs stiffened and she coughed, which made David flinch. Jacob took it as a good sign.