The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2012 by Michael Wallace

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612182216

  ISBN-10: 1612182216

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent, Katherine Boyle, for her support this past year, and my team at Thomas & Mercer: Rory, Megan, Jacque, and David. I’m grateful to my parents for encouraging me over the years, and to my brother Daniel and my sister Wendy for celebrating my successes and for encouraging me when I struggle. Special thanks go to Grant Morgan for providing valuable feedback of an early draft of The Blessed and the Damned, and to Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, who serves as my sounding board when I need help with medical details.

  And finally, I’m grateful to Melinda for supporting me for so many years while I pursued my dream.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two men stepped out of a pickup truck in the desert northeast of Las Vegas. The older man, Elder Kimball, lifted the bloodstained tarp in the truck bed. The man underneath groaned. His hands and feet were bound, and his mouth and eyes wrapped in duct tape.

  “Forget him for now,” Taylor Junior said.

  “He needs help.”

  “He’ll get it later.”

  “But he can’t walk,” Kimball protested. “Look at his leg.”

  Taylor Junior glanced down. There was no concern on his face. “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s see if we can find it ourselves.”

  The bound man had lost a good deal of blood already, and the gunshot wound on his upper thigh was still oozing. His face was gray, and he barely struggled now. They should get him back to the city and look for a hospital. But Taylor Junior was already walking into the burned-out dump.

  Kimball reluctantly followed. He felt what could almost be described as a horizontal vertigo, a need to get back inside, behind a door or a wall. It had been strange enough driving across the empty stretches of desert after staring at it for so many years from behind chain link topped with razor wire. This was worse.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “Eliza was here,” Taylor Junior said.

  “We already knew that. She died in the fire.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “But that man told us—” Kimball turned, beginning to point back at the truck, but a hard look on his son’s face stopped him. “Okay then, what proof do you want? They held a funeral. There’s a gravestone in Blister Creek with her name on it. That’s not good enough for you?”

  “Were you at the funeral?”

  “You know I wasn’t. I was still behind bars.”

  “I wasn’t either,” Taylor Junior said. “And I didn’t send anyone. I knew they’d be watching for me. Abraham Christianson, maybe, or the FBI. But I hear there was no casket. They never found her body, or so they claim. So how are they so sure she died?”

  “She wasn’t the only one they couldn’t find,” Kimball said. “You know how hot those tire fires get. And they pushed the wreckage around with bulldozers to finally put it out. They almost couldn’t find your brother, and he was the one they were most desperate to identify. All they found was a single tooth and a couple of bone chips. Just because they didn’t find Eliza doesn’t mean she’s alive.”

  But Taylor Junior wasn’t listening to him. Instead, he moved methodically across the burned-out dump.

  What does it matter anyway? Elder Kimball wondered. She’s either dead or she’s not. What is Eliza Christianson to us?

  He covered his mouth and nose with his hands and followed Taylor Junior. The air smelled like vulcanized hell—burned rubber and smoldering fires that had wormed their way below the surface to gnaw at rotting furniture, plastic jugs, and broken toys. And tires. There must be some still burning underground, and that was the smell that trickled up through wisps of smoke here and there. The smoke burned his throat and made his eyes water.

  Taylor Junior searched for several minutes, then straightened his back and took a wider look across the desert. Kimball watched, impatient and anxious to get back to the truck.

  “It’s no good,” his son said at last. “I can’t see it. I don’t even know where the trailers were. Come on.”

  As they returned to the truck, Kimball hoped they would get back in and drive away. Take the injured man to the hospital and forget the whole thing. But Taylor Junior lowered the tailgate and dragged the bound man from the truck bed.

  “Get his hands and feet,” Taylor Junior said.

  Elder Kimball untied the ropes while Taylor Junior peeled off the duct tape. The injured man looked at them, his expression surprisingly defiant. The color began to return.

  “I just want out, man. I don’t care about the Disciple, I—”

  “Shut up.” Taylor Junior hit him across the face with an open palm. The man’s head rocked back.

  The injured man looked around him, seemed to notice the dump for the first time. His legs trembled, and he would have fallen if the other two men hadn’t held him up. He swallowed hard and nodded.

  “Good,” Taylor Junior said. “Listen to me. Your so-called prophet is dead, and all his followers, too. The only ones left are weasels like you who ran away. We have nothing to do with the Disciple, and we don’t care about your cult or why you left. Do you understand?”

  The injured man nodded.

  “Good. All we care about is what you told us about the pit.”

  “I already told you everything I know…” His voice trailed off as Taylor Junior’s expression turned mean. The man looked at the older man with a pleading look, but Kimball turned away, afraid to intervene.

  “You have a chance,” Taylor Junior said. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed the same gun he’d used when the man tried to flee his apartment. “Only a chance. Find the trailers and you live. If you can’t find the spot, I will kill you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” The insolent look was gone now.

  “Good. Take a look around. Don’t rush. Find us the spot.”

  Taylor Junior gave a push and the injured man staggered away. He shot one final look at the other two men, then began his search, head bent to the ground. His feet stirred up ash, which the wind lifted and whisked away in swirling
gray eddies. After a minute, he stopped, looked off at the distant mountains, then back toward the ranch road, as if trying to get his bearings.

  “Caleb could have been a great man,” Taylor Junior said to his father. “Now he’s ash.”

  “Great? Maybe. I’m not so sure.”

  “He couldn’t sort out the voice of the Lord from the voice of Lucifer. Someone whispered in Caleb’s ear, flattered him, told him he was God’s chosen disciple. He wasn’t the first of my brothers to follow that path.”

  “You mean Gideon,” Kimball said, thinking about his older son, dead at Eliza Christianson’s hand. Gideon had dragged her into Witch’s Warts as he’d fled the temple, but she’d escaped and dropped a chunk of sandstone on his head.

  “Many are called, but few are chosen,” Taylor Junior said. “The key is to know what to listen for. It’s clear enough to me now. I was blind, but now I can see.”

  And how did that happen? Kimball thought. Did something change you?

  He didn’t know this man who had picked him up at the rest stop forty miles north of the Federal Correctional Institute in Safford, Arizona. No longer a weak, sniveling narcissist. His son’s skin was sunburn over tan over sunburn, skin peeling around the ears and neck. He’d spent a lot of time in the desert, maybe even done manual labor outside, if that were possible. The muscles in his forearms and shoulders said he had. The boy Kimball had known worked only under duress.

  Ahead of them, the injured third man stopped his limping shuffle and looked around. “Here. This place.”

  Taylor Junior approached, then paced back and forth across the space three times before nodding his own confirmation. “Yes, exactly. This is where Caleb kept his double-wide trailer.” He pointed. “And there and there, two teardrop trailers. He slept in the smallest one, sometimes with one of the women.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Kimball said. “Are you sure?”

  “I remember the spot.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  A look of irritation flashed over his son’s face. “I came to tell Caleb to join me. He was too far gone, so I shook the dust off my feet and condemned him to destruction. You see what happened. The Lord burned him alive a few months later.”

  “That’s not what the news said. They said Caleb’s followers killed him. Isn’t that right?” Kimball asked their prisoner for confirmation, but the man shook his head and shrugged.

  Taylor Junior said, “Don’t believe what you see on TV.”

  “It was a newspaper, actually. There was a library in prison. It said someone bashed in his skull with a piece of concrete.”

  Taylor Junior walked away. “What was he up to out here? Was he planning an attack on Blister Creek, or was Lucifer using him to get at me? And why Eliza?” He moved in a direct line deeper into the bulldozed dump. He waved his gun for the other two men to follow.

  “He didn’t say anything about Blister Creek,” their captive said. “I don’t even know what that means. We were waiting for Wormwood to fall from the sky. I couldn’t take the abuse anymore—I had to get away.”

  “Nobody cares,” Taylor Junior said. “So stop talking.”

  Kimball still couldn’t piece together what Taylor Junior was looking for, and he was reluctant to move farther away from the truck. The Nevada sun burned down like fire from the sky and sweat trickled down his neck. He’d lost weight in prison, and in the glare, the skin on the back of his hands looked like an old man’s. He felt like a pale thing dug out of the ground and now writhing in the sunlight.

  “Show us the pit,” Taylor Junior told their captive.

  “The pit?”

  “You know, where they put the sinners to punish them. What you told me in the apartment. It’s around here somewhere.”

  “I know, but why would you want to see that? I found the trailers, can’t you—?” He stopped when Taylor Junior gestured with his gun, before starting his way across the dump again.

  As the other two men followed, Kimball asked, “How do you know so much? Did you come back after that first time?”

  “I sent in one of my wives. She pretended to be a follower. When she recognized Eliza, she came back to get me. I knew what was going to happen, that the Lord would destroy them all, and I needed to get my wife out before she was killed.”

  “What? I thought you said she’d already left.”

  “Not that wife. Eliza.”

  “Oh.” He blinked and looked at his son. Wife? Are you out of your mind?

  Taylor Junior said, “I got here too late. They were all dead.”

  “Except you’re not sure.”

  “Except I’m not sure.”

  “This way,” the injured man said. He looked back over his shoulder, eyed the truck as if gauging the distance, and then looked back to where the destroyed trailers had stood. “Wait, right about here.”

  The smell seemed less strong now, not so oppressive. Kimball supposed one could grow accustomed to any foul-smelling thing, given enough time breathing it into the lungs. Taylor Junior bent to turn the twisted metal of what looked like a truck’s bumper. He pulled at a melted slag of tires, grunting and working to yank it free, but when Elder Kimball approached to help, the younger man waved him off. At last, it came loose.

  “Here it is.”

  Taylor Junior worked for another minute moving garbage and revealed a pit dug in the ground. A ladder emerged from the bottom, almost reaching the top before it became a melted twist, like blackened taffy.

  Taylor Junior handed Kimball the gun. “Don’t let him move.” He started down the ladder, stopping when his head was the only thing left above ground. “My wife said Caleb was going to put Eliza down here for one of the trials. She would have been down here when the Lord destroyed their cult. By the time I arrived, the fires were out of control and there were cops and firefighters everywhere.”

  Kimball finally put the pieces together. “That’s why they never found Eliza’s body.”

  He peered into the gloom after his son, wondering what the body would look like, if it would be cooked by the heat of the fire, or if Eliza had curled into a ball and suffocated. Over time, the dry desert air would mummify her body. A dank smell wafted up, so strong it even penetrated the acrid smell of the fires. It smelled like human waste. The injured man covered his mouth and stepped back.

  “Well?” Kimball demanded when Taylor Junior emerged. “What did you see? What’s down there?”

  “It’s empty.”

  “Still,” Kimball said after a moment. “We can’t be sure. She might have got out before the fire but then died with the rest of them.”

  “She’s alive,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  “Well, what do you care? Forget Eliza. The prophet will never let you marry his daughter.”

  “Abraham Christianson is a fallen prophet. An apostate. Stripped of authority to lead God’s people. This is not his decision, it is the Lord’s, and the Lord has said Eliza is mine.”

  Elder Kimball kept his voice even. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a prophet or not. He still won’t let you marry Eliza. Brother Abraham has sons who will protect her, elders in the church who hate us now. They’ll turn you over to the FBI if you set foot in Blister Creek.”

  “I’m not afraid of the corrupt and weak leadership in Blister Creek. The Lord will deliver Abraham’s followers into my hands. Most of his quorum are old men. The rest are weak in the mind. Abraham is strong, but he’s only one man.”

  “What about his son? What about Jacob?”

  “Can I go now?” the injured man interrupted. “I did everything you wanted. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, you can go,” Taylor Junior said. “Thank you for your help.”

  He lifted his gun and fired. The man had time for his eyes to widen in surprise and terror, and then the bullet slammed into his chest. He slumped to the ground. Taylor Junior walked to the groaning, shuddering man and fired once more, int
o the head. The man lay still.

  Kimball stared in horror. “Why did you do that?” he cried. “You promised if he helped…”

  Taylor Junior tucked the gun into his pocket. “I had no choice. You said too much. He might have gone to the police.”

  He dragged the body to the pit and pushed. The dead man fell onto the ladder and then bumped and slid to the bottom. Taylor Junior covered the pit back over. When he finished, his sunburned face was flushed and sweating. He met his father’s stare.

  Elder Kimball pulled his gaze away. Who was this man? He didn’t know him.

  He made his decision. As soon as his son returned to the wilderness, he’d go to Abraham Christianson, bend his knee, and ask the Lord’s prophet for forgiveness. And tell Abraham everything.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Abraham Christianson was already waiting on the curb when the van pulled in behind his pickup truck. He studied the tall man who stepped out and admired the clear look in his eyes, the strong set of his jaw. The man had the kind of arms that could wrestle a steer to the ground and faith that could wrestle the devil himself.

  This is the husband for Eliza.

  Of course, his daughter remained single and he’d lost the ability to compel her to marry, but he knew who he’d choose. If Abraham had pushed harder a few years ago, when she was seventeen and humble, he’d have this match, but he hadn’t and so she didn’t. But maybe he’d try again now that she’d dropped the ridiculous theater of faking her own death. It had been two weeks since the fire. Even Jacob had to admit that if they meant to flush out Taylor Junior, they’d failed.

  The man opened the back doors of the van to retrieve a crowbar, then stepped onto the cracked cement of the curb, to where Abraham stood eying the house. Abraham held a tire iron and wore a gun in a holster at his side, cowboy-style, in case things turned ugly when they approached the door.

  Abraham gave the other man a nod. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Good morning, Brother Abraham,” Stephen Paul Young said.

  “There’s nothing good about it. It’s grim business we’re about.” He felt the heft of the tire iron, imagined it smashing bones. The thought gave him little pleasure. “Are you ready?”