Blood of the Faithful

by Michael Wallace

  A year ago she would have crumpled the note and thrown it away. No, she would have shown it to David, and if her husband dismissed it, she would have taken it to Jacob. And if Jacob dismissed it, she would have investigated personally.

  The danger of such a thing was obvious. The Zarahemla Compound—her first religious community, and where she had cast aside the errors of her old way of life—had been torn apart by an inner circle of conspirators who thought they knew better than the prophet. Here in Blister Creek, the Church of the Anointing had suffered repeated attack from the Kimballs acting out a similar conspiracy.

  This note, Miriam would have known a year ago, threatened more of the same. At best, questioning the prophet was steadying the Ark, as the scriptures put it. At worst, it was a plan concocted, whispered by Satan himself, designed to send doubt and evil into the hearts of men.

  A year ago, she was proud to have married the prophet’s brother, to have taken the Christianson name. Jacob had repeatedly saved them from destruction, and was evidently the One Mighty and Strong, who would lead the saints into the Millennium.

  Then Jacob seemed to lose his nerve. He’d flinched at the violence of the reservoir battle and the subsequent fight to drive off bandits and army irregulars south of town. Maybe all the death led him to think he could compromise with evil. Or maybe he’d proven unable to handle the rigors of plural marriage—heaven knew it wasn’t easy—when Jessie Lyn had requested and received Jacob in marriage after Jessie Lyn’s first husband died under Jacob’s command.

  Either way, this mission to Panguitch tomorrow was pure folly. And giving supplies to the refugees was worse than folly. You couldn’t buy off a plague of locusts. They’d keep eating until nothing remained.

  Miriam reread the note. The wind picked up and rustled the pages of her scriptures. She shut the book and set it on a rock, then laid another piece of sandstone on top to pin it down and keep the pages from flapping. Then she dropped to her knees, clenching the piece of paper.

  She poured out her heart to the Lord. Should she ride to Yellow Flats? Should she speak with the conspirators? What if they advocated open rebellion against the Lord’s anointed?

  “If the prophet commands, I’ll kill on his behalf,” Miriam continued. “I will die in defense of my people.” She paused, licked her lips. “But what if he is no longer the prophet? How would I know?”

  A simple impression came into her mind. Not a voice, exactly, but strong enough to squeeze the shifting sands of her own thoughts and compress them into stone.

  Go to Yellow Flats. Listen. Share your testimony and your knowledge. Then decide.

  Miriam rose slowly to her feet. She brushed the sand from her dress. Now that she’d decided, a warm feeling of peace filled her bosom, and this told her she was obeying the will of the Lord.

  Her thoughts turned to speculation about the meeting as she picked her way out of Witch’s Warts. Sister Rebecca would be there—it was her home. The woman thought of herself as something of a prophetess, and had proclaimed herself the spiritual reincarnation of Henrietta Rebecca Cowley, founder of Blister Creek. And Elder Smoot would be there, she presumed. Who else? What others worried about the spiritual lethargy weakening their leader? Plenty. Maybe every member of the Women’s Council and man in the Quorum of the Twelve would be on hand. Every important person but Jacob himself.

  Miriam was relieved when she emerged behind the temple to find both the temple grounds and the chapel parking lot next door deserted. There was nobody on the sidewalk, no riders in the street, no people standing on porches on the opposite side of the street to observe her coming out of the labyrinth. She hurried to the sidewalk and then walked casually toward home.

  It was only an hour later, sitting at the table as David blessed the food, that she realized she’d forgotten her scriptures in Witch’s Warts. The book was still sitting there, weighed down by a broken chunk of sandstone. How had she forgotten to pick it up on her way out?

  It seemed like a bad omen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After lunch, Jacob rode out to meet Stephen Paul on the highway north of town. He’d have rather been meeting Eliza. Not only for her sharp mind, but so he could test her, see if she was racing down the same pathway of fundamentalism as David. But his sister now lived on the far east side of the valley with her husband, and he hadn’t managed to speak with her at church before she’d set off for home.

  Although if he was honest with himself, he hadn’t tried very hard to track her down. He was afraid of what he’d discover when he questioned her.

  Jacob felt more confident when he saw his counselor astride a mare on the north end of the grid of streets that marked the center of Blister Creek. Stephen Paul stood tall and confident in the saddle. He had always been faithful, first to Abraham Christianson, then to his son.

  The man was waiting outside the boarded-over windows of a brick building. Over the years, the building had taken turns as town department store, a diner, and a five and dime, but commerce was a relic of the time before the collapse. Now it was town storage. Inside lay old-fashioned plows, crank threshers, grain augers, and other farm tools rescued from barns where they’d been abandoned decades ago and brought here to be refurbished for reuse.

  “What order do we take it?” Stephen Paul asked as Jacob trotted up on his own horse.

  “Let’s start up at the Poulsen place, then the Smoot’s. After that, we can hook around the valley clockwise until we finish out by Yellow Flats.”

  “That’ll be what—about five hours to make the circuit?” Stephen Paul said. “That has us finishing around sundown. Sound right to you?”

  “It does,” Jacob said, reconsidering. “Come to think of it, we’re better off hitting the Smoots last, when everyone will be inside getting ready for supper. I’d rather not be riding suspiciously across his land.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s Sunday, and he’s unlikely to be outside working.” Stephen Paul adjusted his wide-brimmed hat. “But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. Let’s go.”

  They trotted north in silence for a few minutes. It was not unusually warm for this time of year, but still in the low eighties, by the feel of it. Seasonal for late May. This time the past two years they’d still been facing late frosts, cold rain, and sleet. The heat and dry weather were encouraging. The volcano had done its worst, and now the earth was recovering. Too bad Jacob couldn’t say the same for human civilization.

  That would happen eventually. It had to.

  “Thanks for coming along,” Jacob said.

  “Of course.”

  “I can tell you think it’s a waste of time. But you didn’t argue.” Jacob smiled. “You’re about the only one these days who doesn’t. Even my wives were full of questions as I headed out the door.”

  “That’s what wives do. It’s in the job description.”

  Jacob chuckled.

  “Anyway, it’s a nice day for a ride,” Stephen Paul said, “and I enjoy your company. You make me think. I don’t get enough of that these days.”

  “It’s hard to be philosophical when you have to chop fifteen cords of wood to survive the winter.”

  “Not to mention plowing fourteen hours in back of a mule team. You know, I used to wish I lived back in the nineteenth century,” Stephen Paul added. “Forge trails, cut a homestead out of the wilderness. Didn’t seem there was much for a man to do these days. That was my biggest gripe when you set up the Women’s Council. You know my wife Carol—nobody would say she wasn’t as tough and smart as a man. A woman like that should be making decisions for the community.

  “But you take a man and you drag him into the modern world,” he continued, “put him on a tractor, give him a gas-powered log splitter. A snowblower, a chainsaw. Anyone can do that kind of labor. A kid, a woman, my father—he’s eighty years old. Then you give women an equal say in running things. Not saying th
ey shouldn’t, just that it’s a change. What’s left for a man? He’s not a woman, he can’t do the things a woman can do. But he can’t do male things anymore either. Not better than anyone else can. See what I’m saying?”

  “A little bit, yeah.” Jacob wasn’t sure he agreed, but he couldn’t dismiss the question out of hand either.

  “Anyway, no worries now. We all work like draft animals these days, and with tractors gathering dust in barns, a man’s muscles are suddenly a valuable commodity.” Stephen Paul glanced over with a smile. “Turns out, I don’t like that much either. It’s exhausting work, wrings the sweat out your body. At the end of the day you want to collapse. Not much energy left for thinking.”

  “You’re making me think right now,” Jacob said.

  “Good. That’s a change, me making you think.”

  They rode the horses down the center of the abandoned strip of blacktop. A distance they’d covered in ten minutes yesterday in the Humvee now took an hour. To the right lay Witch’s Warts; to the left, fields of wheat sprouting with tiny shoots of green, laid out in neat rows, laced with empty irrigation ditches, their sluices closed. Shortly, a shimmering steel grain silo squatted near a pair of red-painted barns set a quarter mile off from a white farmhouse with two wide wings. It was the Poulsen compound.

  “What do you think, should we tell Brother Poulsen we’re on his land?” Stephen Paul asked. “Wouldn’t want him spotting a couple of unannounced riders and grabbing his gun.”

  “Poulsen’s not the type to come out shooting. And if he asks, we’ll tell him. Besides,” Jacob added, “it’s not his grain in the silo. It belongs to the church.”

  A concrete bunker topped with sandbags sat twenty feet off from the silo. During the Federal occupation of the valley at the start of the crisis, the government had stationed gunmen there at all times. After the military pulled out, Jacob had posted his own guards for a time, before withdrawing them for more clearly useful purposes.

  To one of the starving war refugees in California or Las Vegas, this silo sitting in the open would have looked almost stupidly unguarded—twelve hundred tons of wheat waiting to be plundered, a couple of chains to cut, easily done with a pair of bolt cutters like the one in Jacob’s saddlebags. There were enough calories in that single silo to feed a small town for a year.

  But how would you get it out? You’d need a grain truck to move any significant quantity. That required fuel, which didn’t seem to exist outside Blister Creek. And you’d need to get past the bunkers that guarded the valley entrances. Say you somehow fought your way past, pulled up in a grain truck, cut the locks, positioned the grain hopper, powered up the grain augers, and filled the truck while the valley swarmed you, then managed to fight your way back out. Anyone who could do that would dispense with a couple of silo guards without much difficulty. So Jacob had figured there was no sense guarding it. He now hoped that hadn’t been a mistake.

  Jacob dismounted and climbed the feed bin ladder on the side of the silo. He eyed the ports in the grain access doors. “It says 975,” he called down.

  Stephen Paul had pulled out a notebook and glanced at the figures. He lifted a gloved hand and gave Jacob the thumbs up.

  When Jacob was back down, his counselor looked at the notebook. “We were at 1,165 after the harvest, then drew down twice in December, then distributed another fifty tons on March tenth. That should put us at 983, which is close enough.”

  “Right. A little settling.” Jacob nodded to the northeast. “Let’s hit the corn silos at your brother’s place.”

  They continued north to the base of the cliffs, then followed the dirt road that cut east where the cliffs met Witch’s Warts. It had proved difficult to maintain the rarely used road at the base of the cliffs, and it would have been impassable to a vehicle. Sand had swept across in great drifts, some of the dunes permanent enough that clumps of long, slender rabbit grass had taken root. Later, two huge boulders had sheared from the cliffs and lay like giant toppled dominoes across the roadbed.

  They came out in the hills on the east side of the valley. Sand and rock gave way to juniper trees and then flat fields laid across the tan, brown soil on this side of the valley. The corn silos on the edge of Richard Young’s property sat behind a chain-link fence, but Stephen Paul produced the keys, and they repeated the survey. Even in the dry climate, corn didn’t keep as well as wheat, so Jacob had made a greater effort to rotate this corn through. The levels were lower, but just what the book said they should be, plus or minus two or three percent.

  The work was hardly difficult, and Jacob enjoyed the next few hours as they made a circuit through the valley on horseback. They met a few curious saints who wondered what they were doing on a Sunday afternoon, and then ran into Steve Krantz, Eliza’s husband, patrolling on horseback near the double set of bunkers that protected their southern flank.

  Eliza wasn’t with him. Instead, his companion was Larry Chambers, the stray FBI agent Eliza’s expedition to Las Vegas had returned. After escaping Vegas, they’d come rolling up the highway in an armored car they called the Methuselah tank after the old prepper who’d modified it into a rolling fortress. Miriam and Steve hadn’t cared much for their former partner in the FBI, but hadn’t wanted to abandon him either.

  Jacob was glad to see Chambers out and doing something. Presumably, he’d be as useful as Miriam or Steve if Blister Creek fell under attack, but otherwise seemed to have few useful skills, and no interest in developing any. And the saints were reluctant to work with him, anyway, being paranoid about outsiders.

  The four men met on the highway, the horses stomping and blowing. Steve looked worried to see them here, while Chambers wore a sour expression, like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him.

  Chambers wasn’t as strong and powerfully built as Steve, but he was solid enough. He was a former military guy like Steve, a veteran of the Iraq War from before the collapse. Each man had a shotgun in one holster and an assault rifle in the other. With their weapons, their wide-brimmed hats, and the dusters they wore as jackets, the two would present an intimidating sight to anyone coming into the valley.

  “Were you looking for us?” Steve asked, brow furrowed.

  “No problems, nothing to worry about,” Jacob assured him. “We’re taking a ride through the valley. I haven’t visited most of it since last fall.”

  That’s how he’d left it with the others who’d asked. He was reluctant to explain further. They’d already checked two-thirds of the food stores, and he was growing certain there was nothing missing. Not that it had been the most likely explanation in the first place, but someone was feeding McQueen and his squatters. And until Jacob knew who, he wanted to keep his investigation quiet, especially in front of a gentile like Agent Chambers.

  “Who’s manning the south bunker?” Stephen Paul asked.

  “Rebecca Cowley and Lillian Christianson,” Steve said, “but it’s almost time for a shift change. The Anderson boys are up next.”

  Steve glanced at the sun as he said this, as if gauging the time of day. Jacob guessed it was almost three. Jacob and Stephen Paul had better hurry if they were going to finish their rounds by sundown.

  When they’d put some distance between the two groups, Stephen Paul spoke up. “What do you think about the gentile?”

  “Chambers doesn’t want to be here, that’s for sure. Can’t say I blame him. We’re a suspicious lot these days. Blister Creek is hardly a welcoming place for an outsider.”

  “We’ve got reasons for being suspicious.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s easy for him,” Jacob said. “I expect Chambers to take off the first moment it looks safe, but for now I’m glad Steve is giving him something to do. Mostly I’ve seen Chambers moping around his cabin.”

  “Way I see it, the sooner Agent Chambers leaves, the better.”

  “All the more reason to drive up to P
anguitch tomorrow and see if anyone else is out there. Maybe he can find somewhere to go.”

  Stephen Paul grunted. “Can’t say I agree with your plan, but it’s your choice.”

  “With what part? Bribing McQueen to let us past or the idea of going to Panguitch in the first place?”

  “Either.”

  They rode a few minutes in silence, before Jacob spoke up again. “How is your father doing?”

  “Poorly. Too weak to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom, and sometimes not even then. It’s almost his time.”

  “It wouldn’t be his time if I could get my hands on some ACE inhibitors to arrest his congestive heart failure.”

  “If it’s the will of the Lord, he’ll die, anyway.”

  Jacob stared hard at Stephen Paul, who continued to look forward, back up the highway toward the center of town, about a mile north of them now.

  As if reading his thoughts, Stephen Paul turned toward him. “These are hard times, Brother Jacob, and there’s no denying it. But at the end of the world, which would you rather have on your side—medical science or the power of the priesthood?”

  “Why not both?”

  “Trust in the Lord, Brother Jacob. Not the arm of flesh.”

  Jacob found what he was looking for at the final set of silos. If he’d simply taken the opposite circuit around the valley, he’d have spotted it earlier in the day.

  It was almost dusk when he and Stephen Paul came sneaking around the back way onto Elder Smoot’s ranch and farm. They dismounted in a dry wash, its sandy bottom glittering with quartz, and tied their horses to a jutting thumb of rock that hung over the wash. Then they proceeded on foot at the bottom of the wash until they were safely past the Smoot compound.

  Smoot owned six silos of varying sizes. One double silo held barley on one side and wheat on the other. A third, smaller silo held feed corn. These he used for his own family and livestock, but he was required to report their levels to the church. These checked out, and while Jacob supposed that Elder Smoot or his sons might have been falsely underreporting their harvest, he didn’t think so. The yield per acre had been typical, given the climate issues.