The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  “Why did you run away?” Taylor Junior demanded. “You said there was a secret. There wasn’t any secret, you wanted to get me lost. I could have died in there!”

  “That was the secret.” A smile etched itself into Gideon’s face.

  He leaned his weight into the butter knife. The initials and names of dozens of others marked these outer rocks, some dating back to the earliest years of the settlement. The oldest Taylor Junior had seen belonged to someone named H. R. Cowley with the date of 1891, but they were eroded and barely readable. Gideon seemed to want his own name to last forever.

  Taylor Junior watched him with growing frustration. “What’s wrong with you? Why would you do that? You were nice this morning. I thought—”

  “It’s part of your training,” Gideon said. “Teach you how to survive in the—”

  He never finished the sentence. No doubt he meant to say something about toughening up Taylor Junior, like that time when Gideon held him underwater at the reservoir to “teach him how to hold his breath.” Just another cruelty.

  But at that moment, Gideon’s hand slipped with the butter knife. It flew out of the groove and gouged the back of his hand.

  “Damn it!” Gideon lifted his left hand to his mouth. “You piece of shit!” He chucked the knife, and it glinted end-over-end before banging off a sandstone fin and falling into a clump of sagebrush.

  Taylor Junior hadn’t yet seen the blood. If he had, he’d have known this was a dangerous time to goad his older brother, thirteen years old and in the thrall of puberty. Instead, he sneered. “I’m telling Father you said a swear. He’ll give you a whipping.”

  Gideon jumped off the sandstone rock and came at him. An ugly look stretched across his face. Taylor Junior stiffened in terror. He turned to run. The temple was only two hundred feet distant and he thought if he could reach it an adult might stop Gideon, but his brother caught him and threw him to the ground. Gideon lashed out with his fists.

  Taylor Junior lifted his hands to protect his face, but he was only nine and his brother so much stronger that he was helpless to stop the blows. They crashed into his jaw and temple. Pain exploded in his head. Gideon’s knee drove into his gut, and Taylor Junior couldn’t get away.

  He’d pushed too far. He hadn’t recognized the signs. Now it would end badly.

  Suddenly, it was as if someone jerked Gideon off him. Taylor Junior looked up, expecting to see that someone had heard his cries and come around the back of the temple to separate the two boys. But Gideon lay on his back, alone. Taylor Junior rose to his feet. Blood trickled down his face, but he couldn’t tell if it came from his nose or from Gideon’s cut hand, which was slick with it.

  Taylor Junior watched, stunned, as Gideon seemed to struggle with an unseen foe. Gideon tried to climb to his feet, but it was as though someone kicked his feet out and he flopped onto his back. For several seconds he writhed on the ground, wrestling with something or someone that Taylor Junior couldn’t see.

  Eventually, Gideon stopped fighting and lay on his back, gasping for air. He lay there for almost a minute. Once he was calm, he regained his feet and stood with his gaze alternating between his bloody hand and his younger brother. “I tripped,” he said simply, then turned to go.

  Taylor Junior stared, unable to process. Only years later, after he started to piece together his family’s history, did he understand. Caleb heard angels and demons in his head. Jonathan killed himself after hearing voices. Father believed that an angel was telling him to take over the church. And Gideon, who seemed to play along only so he could manipulate others into crowning him the prophet of the Church of the Anointing, wrestled with some sort of invisible being that day at Witch’s Warts.

  Of course they were all insane. That was the conclusion Taylor Junior reached the day he came out of Dark Canyon, limping from the rattlesnake bite that nearly killed him. Why had he been bribing fertility clinics? His father said to build a righteous seed to help reign in the Millennium. It was a weak plan that would leave them sitting, waiting for years, even decades before it bore fruit. He was done with it. He gave up drinking and bought a 1979 Honda motorcycle to replace the ruined truck.

  For the next two years he wandered the desolate stretches of the Southwest, thinking and brooding. What he couldn’t keep in his saddlebags, he didn’t need. When he grew tired of riding he’d hike into the desert. He penetrated the most forbidding wildernesses of the Southwest: Skull Valley, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Mojave Desert, Death Valley. He was more cautious than before the accident in Dark Canyon and always carried food, water, and maps.

  He avoided cities and larger towns. And green places. The air there scratched his throat and made his eyes water. The pollen made him sneeze. His lungs felt like a rotting sponge there, damp and turning black with mold. After a few days that feeling spread until he thought some living thing had taken root in his chest and would grow and suffocate him until he made his way back to the desert. Only dry air could kill that growing thing.

  Taylor Junior found himself eyeing canyons and ravines. This valley had a seasonal stream. That high-desert meadow had protective walls and an overhang that would be both invisible from above and defensible from attacks from below. In the Weminuche Wilderness in southwest Colorado he discovered an abandoned mining camp and spent a morning clearing aspen saplings from the dirt road leading up to it. Clear out enough trees to let a 4x4 work its way in, but not enough that the road would be obvious from the air.

  At midday, chewing on beef jerky and staring at his work, he realized what he’d done. He’d started to build a camp for his followers. He imagined men, women, and children fixing the derelict buildings of the camp, while using the granite boulders at the entrance to defend against attackers. It would be a refuge for when—

  This isn’t it. Close, but not yet. Keep searching.

  The jerky fell from Taylor Junior’s mouth. He whirled around, half expecting to discover that someone had come up behind him while he rested. There was nobody. The voice had sounded as clear as the blue jays fighting in the trees above him. The memory of it faded until he was certain it had been his imagination.

  A tickle of dread wormed into his gut. This was it. This was the way it started. Strange compulsions. Voices. Next thing you knew you were hurling yourself off the cliff or wrestling in the sand with a demon.

  He said, “I will not go insane. I will not.”

  Taylor Junior stuffed his things into his backpack, rolled his sleeping bag into a quick, sloppy roll, tied it to his pack, and hiked out of the camp as quickly as he could. He reached his motorcycle the next morning where he’d hidden it among the rocks, lashed his pack to the seat, and tore down the dirt road toward the highway. He rode for the next eleven days.

  The wind and the roar of the motorcycle drowned any voices he might have heard, and when he stopped at night, he was too exhausted to do anything but stagger into whatever roadside motel he’d come across, plunk down his cash, and then stumble off to bed.

  And then one day his aching legs couldn’t take another mile and he stopped the bike. He stood on a shimmering, blindingly white salt plain that extended to the mountains on the horizon. The mountains might have been ten miles away or fifty—it was hard to tell. There was no road. He vaguely remembered coming north along a highway near the Utah-Nevada border, then cutting off the road to race across the salt flats.

  Taylor Junior let the motorcycle fall on its side. He walked a few feet away and squatted with a canteen in hand. He spat out the first, salty mouthful, then wiped his brine-encrusted lips on his shirt and tried again.

  “Get up,” a voice said.

  This time, when Taylor Junior turned around, he saw a man standing barefoot on the salt. The man wore a white robe with a black apron tied across his waist. Taylor Junior fought down the rising panic. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “You’ve driven too far off the road. You don’t have enough gas to cross the salt flats in that directi
on. And if you run out of gas, you don’t have enough water to reach the other side on foot.”

  “I’ve got half a tank.”

  “Not enough. Not in that direction. Keep going and you’ll die in the desert. The salt and sun will mummify your body, and you’ll lie undiscovered until the end of the world.”

  Taylor Junior blinked his eyes. They burned with salt and dust. When he opened them, the man was still there. “I don’t believe you. I don’t think you’re real. I’m dehydrated and exhausted and I’m seeing things.”

  “Turn around. Drive west. When you get back to the road, follow it until you see the black-and-white sign. You’ll know what to do. And then you can deal with the apostates.”

  “What apostates? What are you talking about?”

  The sun glinted off the polished aluminum of Taylor Junior’s canteen. He squinted his eyes shut and lowered it, and when he opened his eyes again, the man was gone. Taylor Junior climbed to his feet and looked around. Nothing but a sea of salt in every direction, shimmering in the heat until it looked molten.

  It’s the salt and the heat—it’s making me hallucinate. I’ve got to get back.

  He went back to the motorcycle. His back, legs, and bottom complained as he remounted, started the bike, and turned it around. He followed his tracks out of the salt flats. An hour later, back on the highway, he considered. The man hadn’t said which direction to go—and Taylor Junior was pretty sure he didn’t want to obey in any event—but north would take him to I-15 and he hated freeways. Instead, he went south. A few minutes later, he stopped, stared at a black-and-white sign on a dirt road that branched from the highway.

  WARNING – RESTRICTED AREA

  This area has been declared a Restricted Area by authority of the Commanding Officer, US Army Dugway Proving Ground in accordance with the provisions of the directive issued by the Secretary of Defense on 20 August 1954, pursuant to the provisions of Section 21, Internal Security Act of 1950.

  Unauthorized entry is prohibited.

  USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED

  There was a gate and a fence topped with razor wire. Shockingly, the gate hung open, half torn off its hinges as if a truck had been driving off the proving ground late at night and failed to see the gate until it was too late. There were no vehicles or guards, and the road penetrated deep into the proving ground before disappearing into a set of dusty hills that rose from the plains several miles to the west.

  Taylor Junior had driven this stretch of highway before, knew about the proving ground. It occupied a vast stretch of the desolate western desert, at least a thousand square miles of bombing ranges and depots. The army had a disposal facility for chemical and biological weapons, and Dugway was infamous for an incident in which a chemical weapons spill killed thousands of sheep on adjacent lands. In the Cold War, the army had probably stored nuclear weapons out here as well. They still might.

  And he’d ridden past a few hours earlier, just before he’d turned onto the salt flats. Had he noticed the sign then? He must have. His subconscious must have taken note both of the sign with its ominous black-and-white stripes and the gate lying broken and unguarded. And later, when he’d hallucinated…

  He sighed in relief. There had been no angel, then. Just exhaustion, dehydration, and the white wasteland stretching in every direction. He’d spent so long looking at that blinding salt that his mind had formed its own patterns.

  Taylor Junior looked up and down the highway. There were no other vehicles. He turned back to the sign. The wind had picked up over the past few minutes, and the sign wobbled back and forth in a sudden gust, humming like sheet metal struck with a hammer. That final sentence gave him pause. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.

  Before he knew what he was doing he had turned the motorcycle onto the dirt road. He rode through the open gates and past the warning sign. A mile into the proving ground, the motorcycle passed between a pair of pillboxes that flanked the road. Someone had painted a doodle on one of the pillboxes of a bald-headed face with a long nose peering over a wall and “Kilroy was here – May ’43” written underneath. Lichen speckled the concrete and the corners were crumbling, but Taylor Junior half expected to see the snout of a machine gun thrust from one of the embrasures to gun him down.

  About ten minutes later, he stopped on the road in front of a red sign with skull and crossbones that read “DANGER – MINES.” Off the road some twenty yards lay the rusting remains of a camouflage-painted truck with the front half of the vehicle blown apart. Taylor Junior shielded his eyes. In back, a tattered canvas sheet flapped in the wind and he could see the nose of a crate poking out. It was the size and shape of a coffin built for a child. After a moment, the canvas fluttered down and left only the hint of a bulge beneath. The truck must have gone off the road, hit a mine, and then the army had abandoned the truck rather than send someone to clear the minefield. How long ago? Decades, he guessed. What was in that crate? Bombs? Ammunition? Rusting cans of pork and beans? Suddenly, and unexpectedly, he had to know.

  You’ll know what to do.

  The words came into his head, perhaps not as strongly as when he heard the man speak them on the salt flats, but vividly enough. Taylor Junior licked his lips and reached for his saddlebag. He fished out his last canteen, but it was almost empty and he wasn’t that thirsty yet, so he put it back.

  Someone must have crossed that minefield to the truck. They hadn’t left a dead or injured man in the cab for the last thirty years. In fact, the door hung open. Taylor Junior imagined a single man with a minesweeper crossing in a straight line to clear a path for medics to get the driver out. Once in, once out.

  But what about that path? Taylor Junior could follow the shortest course to the driver’s side door, then edge around the truck to the back and retrieve the contents of the crate. But not now. Now he stood in the glaring sunlight of late afternoon on an open plain. An army truck might come down the road. A jet might fly overhead on a bombing run and spot the glint of his motorcycle. They’d send a helicopter out. He’d flee on his bike. They would shoot him.

  Before leaving, Taylor Junior spent a few minutes eyeing the angles between the road and the truck cab, the same calculation surely performed by a minesweeper all those years earlier. He gathered stones and stacked them at the point where the road and the truck cab intersected in the shortest possible line and then lay a double row of pebbles across the road itself. This took about five minutes. When he finished, he mounted the motorcycle and rode for the gates.

  Back on the highway, Taylor Junior drove a mile down the road and stashed his motorcycle in an arroyo. He waited until dark, with nothing but the low moan of the wind to keep him company, then returned to the proving range on foot, guided only by the moonlight. He walked past the broken gate and into the military base, walking for some time until he stumbled across the pebbles he’d laid across the width of the road. He spent a moment scattering the pebbles with his boot before searching out the little mound he’d placed on the edge of the road. He squatted and peered through the darkness.

  The truck was a dark shape against the flat expanse. The wind picked up and flapped the canvas up and down. Staring at it from this angle and in this light, the truck looked like a woman’s head, and the canvas her hair waving in the wind. The missing windshield made it look like half the woman’s face was gone. And when the canvas lifted, the lump of the crate deformed the back of the skull. It was as if someone had shoved his fist through the woman’s face and half pushed it out the back of her skull.

  Taylor Junior fixed on the crate. “What is it?” he whispered. The wind moaned its response, and the canvas thumped its agreement. It sounded like a warning.

  DANGER – MINES.

  Don’t be a coward. Do it, go.

  He had a path. What was he afraid of?

  The first step was the hardest. He left the road and walked in a straight line toward the skull-like shape in front of him. Each step was a little more steady. Within moments, he’d
reached the truck. Up close it wasn’t so frightening. He ran his fingers along the twisted hood, metal with its paint worn off and rusting through, felt the handle on the open door. Hugging the truck, he edged around until he reached the back. The canvas whipped him in the face, and he pushed it aside. There was the crate.

  Taylor Junior ran his fingers over the surface and felt the lettering branded into the wood. “What are you? What’s your secret?”

  He imagined a crate of nuclear waste, knifing him with millions of gamma particles with every second he sat here fondling it. No, more likely high explosives. Artillery shells. There was a rope handle and he gave it a tug, felt something pulling back, perhaps a canvas strap that had been used to secure the crate in the truck. He was about to reach farther in to find what was resisting, but then the crate gave way and slid toward the edge. It wasn’t as heavy as he’d thought.

  But that initial movement had deceived him. As soon as he got it over the edge, the crate proved too heavy to support. It jerked down on his arms, then fell to the ground with a clank. He flinched, expecting to feel the ground rise beneath him as the bombs detonated. He caught a curiously floral smell, like geraniums. And then it was gone and the crate sat still.

  Terror returned as he heaved and dragged at the crate to get it in motion. It was wider than his footsteps. He could see the road in the gloom, but wasn’t sure he was following the same way out as he’d taken in. The crate moved inch by agonizing inch toward the road, catching on rocks and the roots of sagebrush. Behind him, the canvas thrashed a furious beat as the wind gusted, and he swore the moaning now sounded like a woman’s voice, shrieking in anger. At any moment, he expected to stumble over a mine and be hurled into the sky. He wasn’t.

  When he finally gained the road, Taylor Junior doubled over, gasping and shaking with fear. He stood for a long moment until he regained his composure, then grasped the rope handle and pulled. It slid across the pavement. He spent most of the night dragging it down the dirt road and out of the proving ground. Another two hours to get it to the arroyo where he’d hidden his motorcycle. He pulled the sagebrush off his motorcycle and used the brush to hide the crate instead.