“I don’t like it,” Jacob said.
He looked to David, sure that his brother wouldn’t let his wife do this crazy thing. But David was scratching at the stubble on his chin, the look in his eyes saying he was considering it.
“Are you serious?” Jacob asked him. “You want to leave your children without their mother?”
“That’s not going to happen,” Miriam said, confidently. “The Lord has a purpose for me.”
“Yeah, and He did for Grover too. Isn’t that what you were saying? His purpose was to die?”
“The Lord has protected her before,” David said. “He’ll protect her again, assuming she is following His will.”
“Ezekiel knows everything about Blister Creek,” Stephen Paul said. “We can’t leave him up there scheming with our enemies.”
Jacob cast around for some other possibility. “How about we offer to trade? They give us Ezekiel, and we give them food.”
“Haven’t they stolen enough?” Miriam said. “And you want to give them more?”
“It would be worth it.”
“Besides,” Stephen Paul said, “what if they don’t agree to the trade? What if they keep Ezekiel and demand food, anyway?”
“Then we put the gun back on the Humvee,” Jacob said, “wait for Eliza and Steve to return in the Methuselah tank, and mount another attack on the camp. We’ll take Ezekiel by force.”
“Only now they’re armed with the stolen machine gun,” David said. “And who knows what else. For all we know Ezekiel and Chambers had been sharing out our weapons for a long time. Instead of a few hunting rifles like last year, we might be facing fully automatic assault rifles, improvised explosives, and whatever else they’ve stolen from us.”
That was a good point.
“How about a compromise plan?” Miriam said.
“What kind of compromise?” Jacob said.
“I’ll infiltrate the camp tonight.” She held up a hand as he started to object that this wasn’t a compromise, it was the same plan. “Just to look, not to attack. If Ezekiel is gone, then no worries. We forget it. We assume he’s fled into the desert and there’s nothing we can do. In that case, I’ll reconnoiter, get a better idea of whether they have, in fact, stolen weapons from the valley. That information would be valuable in and of itself.”
“And if Ezekiel is there?” Jacob asked, warily. “What will you do?”
“Nothing. I’ll come back and tell you.” She shrugged. “That’s it. We’ll have another argument, but with better info.”
It was hard to argue with that. Her proposal was reasonable, in fact. Still dangerous, but at a level of danger that he could accept. And it didn’t involve more violence.
“What do you guys think?” he asked the men.
“Got to be fifteen hundred people up there,” Stephen Paul said. “How will you even find Ezekiel?”
“Easy,” she said. “I’ll look for Jacob’s truck. No way Ezekiel takes his eyes off it. It’s got three-quarters tank of gas, could get someone two hundred miles. Until he knows what’s what, he won’t leave it and risk someone stealing it. And if the truck is not there, it will be obvious he took off.”
“Unless they took it from Ezekiel by force,” Jacob said.
“In which case they’ll probably have him tied up somewhere. That should be easy enough to find out too.”
“That makes sense,” Stephen Paul said. “Sure, I think you should go.”
“David?” Jacob asked.
His brother hesitated a moment longer, gave a worried glance at his wife, then nodded. “I say we go for it. I trust the Lord will protect her.”
“Good,” Miriam said quickly, “then it’s settled.”
“Hold on,” Jacob said. “When will you go, tonight?”
“Sure, tonight. I’ll stay right here until then. We won’t want to leave the bunker short-handed, anyway. Why don’t you go home, look in on your patients, and get some rest. We’ll come find you when I’ve returned.”
He tried to decide if she was attempting to deceive him. He’d have a hard time telling if she were. What if he drove down to the valley only to learn later that she’d waited until he was gone, remounted the machine gun, and talked Stephen Paul and David into rushing the squatter camp? He couldn’t risk it.
“I think I’ll stay here. None of my patients have life-threatening injuries. Lillian is there to render post-op care. I’ll radio town later to make sure everything is okay.”
“What about sleep?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not exhausted.”
“No more exhausted than the rest of you.”
“Sure you are,” she insisted. “None of us spent half the night in surgery.”
“You seem to be trying awfully hard to get rid of me.”
“Fine, then. Do what you want,” Miriam said. “I figured you had more important things to do than guard duty. But stay or go, it doesn’t matter to me.”
Jacob held her gaze. “Thanks, I will.”
They decided to alternate keeping watch and resting. Nobody wanted to touch Ezekiel’s sleeping bag, but fortunately David had thought to grab a couple of bags from the house before he’d left. He hauled Ezekiel’s out to the truck and unrolled the other two on the floor, unzipping them to open flat, since it would shortly be too warm to climb inside.
In truth, Jacob was exhausted, and happily accepted the first sleep shift. David flopped onto the second bag and yanked off his boots. Miriam and Stephen Paul handled gun and watch duty while the brothers napped.
It was still cool lying on top of the sleeping bag where it touched the cold concrete, and Jacob pulled the edge of the unzipped bag over his legs. His mind was racing. If only he could get an hour or two of sleep, he’d have a much better time of it tonight. Gradually, his mind calmed.
Some time had passed when he woke up, and the light cut a different angle across the floor. He was sweating from the heat that had invaded the tight quarters as the sun pounded down on the bunker roof overhead. Outside, insects buzzed from the dry brush that grew on the hillside around them. David and Stephen Paul sat near the gun slits, speaking in low voices about the amount of grain and beans needed to sustain all those squatters. Miriam was gone, but he was so fuzzy-headed that this didn’t register fully at first.
Jacob climbed to his feet. His mouth felt like cotton. Stephen Paul handed him a sweating canteen, which he gratefully accepted. David acknowledged him with a nod, then picked up his binoculars and looked through the bunker slit up at the cliffs.
“How long was I out?”
“Four, five hours,” Stephen Paul said. “It’s still early afternoon.”
Jacob looked around. “Where’s Miriam?”
“Don’t worry,” David said. “She went back to town is all.”
Jacob was suspicious about this, but David showed him that the Humvee was still parked outside, though the pickup truck was missing. She wouldn’t have taken the lighter pickup to the reservoir.
“They radioed from home,” David explained. “I guess the kids are upset, so Miriam went back to check in with the family. Then I figured she may as well sleep in her own bed for a few hours while she was down there. Better there than the hard floor.”
Jacob yawned and rubbed at his neck. “Floor’s not so hard if you’re tired enough.”
“You were out of it,” David said. “Snoring like a pig.”
Stephen Paul had picked up on the yawn and made it his own, and Jacob remembered that his counselor hadn’t slept yet. He told the man to take his turn getting some rest, then got on the radio to check in with Blister Creek.
Ostensibly, it was to tell Lillian—the one who picked up on the other end—to send up food to the bunker with Miriam, but really to verify that Miriam was where David claimed she was. Lillian said she was asleep in her own bed.
David watched him with raised eyebrows when he got off the radio. “Did you think I was lying?”
“She’s a free spirit, David. She follows her own counsel.”
“Don’t I know it. But she’s also a mother and a wife. She was worried about her family.”
“You’ve got to have misgivings about this scheme of hers.”
“A little,” David admitted. “But she seems to live a charmed life. Or a protected one.”
“Everyone alive could say the same thing.” Jacob glanced at Stephen Paul. The man was already asleep. “It takes a lot of luck to survive war and famine. Every survivor everywhere has a charmed life, right up until they’re killed like everyone else.”
“Does that mean you’re having second thoughts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Still seems risky.”
“You sent Eliza to Salt Lake. What about that?”
“She’s a free spirit too,” Jacob pointed out. “Anyway, Eliza didn’t go alone. Steve went with her. I’d send someone else with Miriam—you, maybe, or Lillian—but I think she’ll be safer infiltrating on her own.” He hesitated. “So you don’t have misgivings? None at all?”
David shrugged.
“You’re not worried she’s going to get killed?” Jacob pressed.
“Look, can we talk about something else besides whether or not my wife is going to die?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“It’s like you’re trying to wind me up or something. Get me freaked out.”
“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
David grunted.
After that awkward exchange, the brothers spent the next hour in silence, studying the cliffs or simmering in their own thoughts. After a while, David radioed Blister Creek again.
Miriam came on the line, and Jacob finally received his confirmation that she hadn’t, in fact, slipped up to the reservoir to have a go at the squatters.
When David was done with the call, he set down the receiver and cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I know how I must have sounded.”
Another uncomfortable pause, then David said, “Hey, do you remember that time we were camping in the desert and fed those foxes?”
“The time you screamed your head off?”
“It was your fault with all that ghost stuff.”
They’d been out with Grandpa Griggs in Goblin Valley. Three brothers: Jacob, Enoch, and David. Jacob was the oldest, David the youngest. Grandpa was asleep. Jacob had been telling ghost stories to the younger boys, getting them worked up with a tale of a grizzled prospector whose body was found in the desert, dried to a mummy, his eyeballs and nose eaten by vultures. They said his ghost still wandered these parts.
Suddenly, David squealed in terror. Jacob looked up to see glowing eyes at the edge of the firelight. Enoch saw it too, gasped, and scrambled back toward the tent.
Jacob smiled at the memory. “Poor guy was just hungry. He and his dozen brothers and sisters.”
“Whose brilliant idea was it to feed them hot dog buns, anyway? Was that Enoch’s?”
“No, it was mine,” Jacob admitted.
“That’s right. And when we ran out of buns, you made me sneak into Grandpa’s camper to get a bag of potato chips. We had six or seven foxes by then, all wanting to be fed.”
“Then Enoch started putting potato chips on Grandpa’s chest,” Jacob said.
David laughed. “Remember Grandpa’s expression when he sat up to find a fox staring him in the face?”
After running through the fox story, Jacob and David talked about other camping trips, the adventures and misadventures of life in the valley. Lizards caught, arrowheads discovered. The time David almost drowned in the reservoir, or when they went sneaking out the back door with an entire box of ice cream sandwiches, only by the time they found a safe place to eat them, the ice cream was already melting into a sticky goo. Kids weren’t very supervised back then, and they’d had their run of the entire valley. Of course, that meant mishaps. Broken bones two miles from home, or stupid stuff they did, like climbing crumbling rock at the cliffs or wandering deep into Witch’s Warts.
“Yeah, I’m worried about Miriam,” David said at last. “I’m worried as hell. I’m worried every time she puts herself in danger. I know she seems hard and determined, but she’s the one who has kept me sane in all of this. Every time I get depressed or lose faith, she lifts me up.”
“She’s a good woman.”
“I love her so much. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.”
“You won’t lose her.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Stephen Paul stirred, cleared his throat, and the brothers fell silent. He got up, stretched and yawned, and came over to take the final chair next to the gun slits.
“All clear?” he asked.
“All clear,” Jacob confirmed. He glanced at the angle of the sun in the sky. “Looks like it’s about six, six thirty.”
About half an hour later, the rumble of a truck caught their ears from the direction of the valley. A few minutes later, Miriam pulled up.
She’d grubbed up her appearance. Her hair was greasy, her face covered in grime that seemed to rub right into her pores. She wore a filthy, oversized denim jacket torn at the elbows, and men’s jeans with frayed cuffs rolled up above her scuffed boots. A man’s belt had been cinched to hold up the jeans, but it only made her look thin and starved. Which was exactly the look she was going for, Jacob realized.
Miriam carried in a cooler from the back of the truck. “Fernie packed us a nice picnic dinner. Ham sandwiches, potato salad.” She raised her eyebrow. “No ice cream sandwiches, though, melting or otherwise.”
David started. “How did you know about that?”
Miriam set the cooler on the floor and walked over to the radio and picked up the receiver, then thumbed the switch twice to get it to pop up. “The switch sticks on this thing.”
“So you heard our entire conversation?” David asked.
She nodded, then bent and kissed him. “I love you too. And you can stop worrying. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Miriam had one final argument with Jacob before they left the bunker. He wanted her to go up unarmed, which she thought was ridiculous. Jacob’s thinking was that if she were caught, the squatters would be less likely to harm her if she weren’t carrying a weapon.
In the first place, she had no intention of getting caught. In the second, she might need to use the weapons preemptively. That was something he would not understand, and she had no intention of explaining.
Miriam opened her denim jacket to show him the pistol. “You’d have to look right up under my arm to see it. Nobody is going to get that close.”
“What about your knife?” Jacob asked.
“What about it?”
“We can see it bulging under your jacket,” David pointed out. “Every time you move, there’s a hard object visible on your back.”
“That’s only because it’s not dark yet. Once it’s dark, it will be as good as invisible. Anyway, I don’t hear either of you complaining about the night vision goggles. That looks just as bad if I’m caught.” She had them tucked under her arm.
“But you need those,” Jacob said. “You don’t need the weapons.”
The three of them stood in the road while Stephen Paul remained in the bunker manning the machine gun. The dying light of the sun had cast pale yellow beams across the valley floor and streaks across the face of the Ghost Cliffs. The sun was now descending in a ball of fire behind the western mountains. Ten more minutes and it would be dark enough to move without worrying about watchers in the cliffs.
Miriam would just as soon have set off alone from the bunkers, but Jacob and David insist
ed on accompanying her up to the reservoir and waiting for her there. The two brothers unloaded rifles with scopes from the Humvee.
She joined them around the back of the vehicle and grabbed two more magazines for her Beretta. She put one in each front pocket of her jeans. Then, to be sure, grabbed another and stuffed it into the left pocket of her denim jacket.
“Guys, stop worrying,” she said when she saw Jacob and David watching anxiously. “I’ve done this sort of thing before. I’m confident.”
“Confident?” David said. “Or overconfident?”
“Don’t try to psyche me out, it won’t work.”
“We’re not doing that,” Jacob said. “We just need to be sure.”
Miriam glanced up at the sky. Still too much light. Five minutes, maybe, then they could go. “There is one thing you could do for me,” she admitted. “I could use a priesthood blessing before we set out.”
“Good idea,” David said, nodding.
“Jacob, could you?” Miriam asked.
“Of course.”
She had expected an argument. But maybe Jacob saw the psychological benefit of sending her in with a blessing, or maybe cracks were forming in his armor of doubt. She could only hope.
They did it right there, with Miriam standing in her filthy clothes in the middle of the road. Jacob and David put their hands on her hair, which she’d rubbed with dirt and bacon grease to simulate a woman who hadn’t bathed in weeks, like the filthy squatters from the reservoir.
After opening the blessing, Jacob got right to the meat of the matter. It wasn’t exactly what she’d been hoping. She’d wished in her heart that he would call on divine strength to flow through her veins, that she would have the power to lift her hand and smite their enemies. What Jacob gave her was something different.
“Sister Miriam, thy life has value beyond measure. The wisdom of thy counsel to thy brothers and sisters in the gospel, the love thou hast for thy husband and children. Their love for you in return. And to all of the community, thou art a shield and a protector.”
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