Blood of the Faithful (22 page)

They meant to assault Blister Creek that very night. Cram the van full of gunmen and run the gauntlet past the bunker and thunder down the highway into town. Or seize the bunker and let the rest of the squatters pour into the valley under cover. Take Ezekiel with them, no doubt; the traitor could show them whom to take as hostages, how to get to the food.

Maybe McQueen had been working on his plan for months, or maybe he’d just slapped it together only today after Ezekiel delivered the gun and fuel into his hands. Either way, this was a disaster. At the moment, only Stephen Paul was at the bunker, with Jacob and David hiding behind the boulders with their rifles. The two brothers wouldn’t be able to stop it, and Stephen Paul would be hard-pressed to hold them off alone until he could summon help.

She was torn in two different directions. On the one hand, she could run down the highway, find her husband and brother-in-law, and they could make for the bunker to see if they could hold the highway while they called in reinforcements.

But a better plan would be to attack the van herself. If she’d had Jacob’s .308 sniper rifle with its night vision scope, she could do it from here. She didn’t, but she did have a shotgun with two shells and her Beretta with spare magazines. Her night vision and the element of surprise would give her the upper hand. She could circle them, killing, until the squatters brought reinforcements up from the camp. By then, she’d be on top of the van with the machine gun and pouring fire into their midst. After she was done, there would be no more threat from the squatters. Now, or ever.

Take out the man on top first. That was the key. Get him before he could bring the machine gun to bear and sweep it across the slope on full automatic. The man was on his stomach, so she didn’t have much of a shot from this angle. She needed to get closer. Then she’d need to spring to her feet at the last moment and charge.

And so it was that Miriam found herself squirming forward on her belly, ready to assault a dozen armed men and women. She couldn’t remember ever making a conscious choice to press the attack.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

As Miriam crawled through the darkness, ready to leap to her feet to make a charge at the gunner atop the van, she saw that reaching the machine gun would be harder than she’d imagined. What she’d taken at a distance for the bubble top of a camper van was a row of sandbags. The vehicle was a standard van, flat-topped, but they’d built a protected machine gun nest up top. The man wasn’t on his belly, as she’d assumed, but sitting behind the sandbags. She needed to get even closer to pull off a good shot.

Voices reached her ear. A man called for another man to pass up one of the ammunition cans Ezekiel had stolen from the bunker. The second man opened the double doors at the rear of the van. The interior had all its seats pulled out, and on closer inspection seemed more like a panel truck than a passenger van.

There were two people inside, one of whom pushed out the ammunition can toward the man calling for it. Suddenly, she saw her opening. From the inside, only a thin metal shell protected the machine gunner from below.

Miriam jumped to her feet and broke into a sprint. She was sixty feet away, then forty. Still, they were too concentrated on their efforts to notice her. Only when she was twenty feet away, eating up the last few strides, did the man turn from lifting the heavy ammo can to the man up top. He looked at her, and his eyes widened as he seemed to take in the sprinting figure, the gun, maybe even the night vision goggles. He shouted and grabbed for something. A gun, perhaps. He never reached it.

She was only five feet away, with the doors open in front of her. There was the man reaching for his weapon, plus two more inside. All within range of the shotgun. She fired into their midst. The first man fell without a sound. Two others screamed in pain from inside.

Without waiting to see if her shot had delivered a lethal blow, she leaped into their midst and into the back of the open van. She collided with bodies. She rolled onto her back, steadied herself long enough to aim straight up through the roof, and pulled the trigger. The roar was deafening in the enclosed space.

The shot was straight and at close range. She knew at once that it had blasted straight through the flimsy roof and into the body of the machine gunner. He would be dead or dying. All she had to do was get up top and take control of his weapon.

Miriam tossed aside the empty shotgun and grabbed her pistol as she fought through the writhing, injured bodies she’d blasted on her initial approach. There were weapons lying around, but she didn’t know if they were loaded, and didn’t have time to find out. She had to get out of the enclosed space inside the van.

She came out firing her Beretta. Her first bullet hit a woman with short hair. The woman’s rifle went off as she fell. The shot missed, but the flash of light and angle of the gun was enough to stop Miriam’s heart. The bullet must have zipped past her head. She turned, firing twice more at a man who threw himself to the ground a few feet away. This missed, and he rolled over, lifting his own weapon. Miriam ducked around the back side of the van as he fired. Glass shattered on the windows of the open door.

There were two more people on the side of the van next to the reservoir. She shot one of them point blank in the chest, and the other in the back as he turned to run. Neither was armed, and she ran around the front, stumbling over yet another man, this one dropping to one knee with an assault rifle. But his back was turned to her, as if he’d spotted the fighting on the opposite side, ducked to ready himself, and been caught unaware from behind.

Miriam did a little dance to disengage her legs from him. He swung out, grabbing for her ankle. She threw herself backward. As she fell, she shot him in the head. After that, he presented no more trouble.

She had regained her knees when the enemy finally recovered and began to return fire. Bullets pinged against the van: handguns and semiautomatic rifles. She flattened, afraid she was about to be killed, but it was clear the firing was blind. They couldn’t see what she’d done, and it was doubtful they’d even figured out there was only one gunner. Instead, they seemed to have retreated up the hillside and were blasting away at her position. Which was a grim enough situation to find herself in, but hardly fatal.

Miriam reached down to grab the assault rifle from the man she’d shot in the head. When she looked at his face, she stopped. He had a drawn look, with deep-set eyes, now holding the glassy stare of the dead. A scraggly beard. It was Whit McQueen. She’d killed their leader.

His weapon was an AR-15, converted to full auto, with an extended magazine. One of Blister Creek’s own, no doubt given to them by Ezekiel, that bastard. She checked the ammo. One magazine: sixty bullets. Satisfied it would serve her purposes, she put away her Beretta and took stock of her situation.

One dead outside the van, two more inside the van, wounded and perhaps dead. Another dead person at the machine gun. Then there was the woman she’d killed with the Beretta as she exited the van. Two more men killed as she came around the side of the van. Plus Whit McQueen, with a bullet through the forehead.

Miriam had already hacked down half of their assault team, and one of them was the camp leader, the man who had no doubt hatched this vile plan. Maybe they could recover and would mount another attack, but it wouldn’t be tonight.

Meanwhile, the gunfire had died down, but she had no illusions. The survivors had regrouped and would be waiting for more people to join them from camp. The entire reservoir would have heard the gunfire and would be running toward the battle, laden with more weapons. She had to get out of here or she would die. That meant abandoning the plan of reaching the machine gun, but so be it. She’d done plenty of damage already.

Miriam came around the front of the van to find two men creeping in the other direction to get to her. But they were groping blind, their free hands feeling the van, their eyes open and staring into the darkness. Miriam wore night vision goggles and could see them clearly. She squeezed the trigger on the assault rifle. Gunfire snarled out the end on full auto, catching her by surprise.

Damn!

The two men fell, but she’d wasted several bullets and nearly lost control of the weapon in a haphazard spray of gunfire. She switched to semiauto and began stalking toward the road, keeping an eye on the knot of people to the northwest, who had their guns trained in her direction but didn’t seem able to see her.

Then her eyes turned south and caught a glint. Someone was trotting up the highway from the direction of the cliffs, a rifle in hand. It was not David or Jacob. A woman, she thought.

The glinting object had come from the woman’s eyes. Miriam had caught a reflection off a pair of night vision goggles. They must be the pair that Jacob had left in the truck, and Ezekiel had stolen. And now this woman had them, and she was looking right at Miriam, able to see her as easily as Miriam could see the woman.

All these thoughts went through Miriam’s head as the woman dropped to one knee and lifted her rifle in Miriam’s direction. Miriam drew down in response. But she knew at once that she would not get off a shot in time.

It had been at least an hour since Miriam had vanished into the darkness. Jacob and David were taking turns staring down the night vision scope attached to the .308 sniper rifle.

The brothers had taken refuge behind one of the boulders that lay like giant marbles alongside the road, spending a few minutes to build a little bunker of small rocks next to it. The makeshift bunker sheltered the man at the rifle, while the other brother sat next to him with his back at the boulder. Whenever Jacob was at the scope, David wrung his hands and asked anxiously if he could see anything. It was driving Jacob crazy.

Finally, he moved away from the gun and said, “Maybe you’d be happier if you just stayed at the gun instead of taking turns.”

“Can I? Great.”

David lay down at the gun and mumbled a prayer, something about the Lord guiding his aim so that he would strike down his enemies.

Why not pray that the scope was properly calibrated while he was at it? That the Lord retroactively align the factory machinery that had manufactured the ammunition, so the bullets would have precise tooling and the exact correct amount of powder in each casing? Hate to misfire under such critical conditions, after all. Heck, why not pray that their enemies each suffer an acute myocardial infarction? Kill them by good old-fashioned heart attack. That would be even more useful.

But Jacob kept the scoffing to himself. He waited until his brother had finished praying. “Since when have you become so devout? Seems only yesterday you were living in Las Vegas, wanting nothing to do with Blister Creek.”

“You lured me back. I’d have never come home if it meant living under Father’s thumb.”

“And here I thought you’d stuck around so you could get inside Miriam’s pants.”

“Hah. Well, that too.”

“When did it happen, all at once?” Jacob asked.

“My testimony? Little by little. First, I only wanted to ease my doubts. It sucks living in the middle of religious people when you don’t believe any of it.”

Tell me about it,
Jacob thought.

“Then I started
wanting
to believe. That’s the first step, you know. Everything else comes in a hurry.” David glanced up from the scope. “You should try it sometime.”

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

“You know what it was? I was spiritually blind when I was in Vegas. It was all that stupid stuff I was doing—gambling, strippers, drugs. Especially the drugs. I needed to get free of that crap first.

“Meth is an elegant-looking drug,” David continued. “Little crystals, sophisticated-looking product and delivery system. A man smoking a pipe. Not like a heroin junkie shooting poison into his veins.”

“At least at first,” Jacob said. “I’ve seen a few heavy users. Not pretty.”

“Exactly. And I was on the fast track. Another year and I’d have been dead.”

“I’m glad you’re not.”

“I’ll always be grateful to you and Eliza for tracking me down. And to Miriam for giving me some tough love, a good slap in the face.”

“But have you ever thought that maybe you’re trading one kind of drug for another?”

David’s voice turned wary. “How do you mean?”

Jacob ran his hand along the boulder. The surface was pockmarked with bullet holes, and he realized this must have been the same spot where his people had taken refuge when the Kimball cult made their final attack on Blister Creek, using the same Humvee now parked at the bunker with Stephen Paul.

“The meeting last night,” Jacob said, more carefully this time. Had it only been last night? So much had happened since then. “People were throwing themselves on the floor, frothing at the mouth, their eyes rolled back, screaming gibberish.”

“Surely you felt the spirit.”

“Hmm.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not really. A shared hallucination—that’s what it felt like. And I was the only one awake. I used to think you were awake with me. Guess not. I’m not even sure about Eliza anymore.”

David was quiet for a long moment as he scanned the road ahead. “What are you waiting for, Jacob?”

“Peace and quiet. A return to normal.”

“That’s all behind us now. There is only staying faithful until the Lord arrives in all His glory.”

“Great, wonderful.”

“You don’t
want
the Lord to return?”

“No, I don’t.”

“But why? The Millennium will be a wonderful time. No death, bounty for all. Peace across the land. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together. Who wouldn’t want that?”

“It’s the pain and suffering that precede it. The death of billions.”

“Most of the hard stuff is behind us now.”

“Behind us? What the hell do you think we’re doing up here? Grover Smoot was murdered by his own brother not twenty-four hours ago. And a dozen others hacked up with a machete. Your wife is out there right now. They’ll kill her if they catch her sneaking into their camp with a gun.”

“Not a hair harmed on her head,” David said, firmly. “That’s what your blessing promised. And I for one believe it.”

Jacob wanted to scream. David had taken a beat-up hydro turbine and used it to rig together an electrical grid for the valley. He’d mathematically calculated how much manure and biochar they needed to generate annually in order to maintain soil fertility in perpetuity with zero input from rock fertilizer. How could David be so smart and yet flip a switch and turn off his brain when it came to matters of faith and religion?

Those words from the blessing had come out of Jacob’s mouth. He’d made them up!

Insofar as thou art faithful and true.

That was meant to remind Miriam that she was not supposed to mix it up with Ezekiel and McQueen, but to reconnoiter and come back. But of course she and David had both seized on the part of the blessing they liked, then molded the rest of it to suit their preconceptions. Why was that a surprise? Jacob should have known better.

It was time to step down. Jacob’s hopes of turning the church away from polygamy, or at least softening its edges, had proven illusory. Hell, he’d been trapped into a second marriage himself. And what good was empowering women within the community if most of them decided they wanted to conform to the same patriarchal hierarchy that had plagued Blister Creek since its founding? Even the men and women he’d surrounded himself with had all taken hard turns toward fundamentalism.