The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  Just as dawn crept over the eastern horizon, Taylor Junior drank the last mouthfuls of water from his canteen, kick-started his motorcycle, and then drove down the highway. The bands around his chest relaxed with every mile he put between himself and the crate he’d pilfered from the army base.

  That’s it, he thought. I’m not going back there. The devil can open that crate—I won’t do it.

  For a while, he kept his promise. It would be almost sixteen more months before he would return to the arroyo with a pickup truck to retrieve the crate. By then he’d come to recognize what he’d been looking for in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Skull Valley. A refuge. A fortress. Even then, after he’d found that place in the Dark Canyon wilderness, all the way back where he’d suffered the rattlesnake bite, even after he’d hauled the crate to the edge of Dark Canyon, he hadn’t dared bring it into the box canyon. Or show it to the others as he began to gather the faithful to his side.

  He found Eric Froud working in an adult video store in Las Vegas. Eric’s father had told him he was a good-for-nothing pervert, and so he’d set about to fulfill expectations. Philip and Levi Cobb were a pair of drunks living beneath the freeway overpass on the west side of Salt Lake with a short, brown-skinned woman from Guatemala whom they both claimed as girlfriend. Taylor Junior promised them kingdoms and principalities.

  Aaron Young was living with two wives and three kids near the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He stood on the cinder block stairs in front of his trailer watching with a hand shading his eyes as Taylor Junior rode up on his motorcycle.

  “Is it true?” Taylor Junior asked. “Have you declared yourself the One Mighty and Strong?”

  “I am waiting for the word of the Lord. Nothing more.”

  “I shall make thee a leader among men. Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. Thus sayeth the Lord.”

  “And the men who drove me into the wilderness?” Aaron asked. “What about them?”

  “They shall be utterly destroyed, yea, even thrust down to hell. And the Lord shall bless thee with the lands and wives of thine enemies.”

  Something glinted in Aaron’s eyes then, some secret memory of hatred toward his brother Stephen Paul, no doubt. The man bowed his head. “Thou sayest.” He called for his wives and children, and the lot of them loaded into their car to follow Taylor Junior’s motorcycle. They didn’t so much as close their front door.

  All this time Taylor Junior thought about the crate from the proving ground, but he delayed, hesitated until the last possible moment.

  In fact, it had taken another hard winter and a blistering summer before he’d even opened the thing. Four years after his flight from Blister Creek. Two years after braving a mine field. When he finally worked up the courage to pry open the lid, he stared at the contents, not yet recognizing what he was looking at. But he knew one thing.

  He hadn’t found the crate by accident.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Miriam and David crouched behind a boulder, guns in hand, while two men argued up the hillside from them. The first man said, “Geraniums. The dew of death.”

  A moment later, a second voice said, “It is better for one man to die than a nation to dwindle in disbelief.”

  “More than one man will die,” the first man said. “They’re all apostates.”

  Two voices. And yet there had only been one set of footprints climbing out of the sandstone fissure and up into the box canyon. Two men changed the math. Miriam had imagined several scenarios, half of which involved Taylor Junior in custody, the other half ending with the man lying on his back, eyes glassy. Blood spume at his mouth, bullet holes in his chest. She had little doubt she could kill two men, but could she arrest them? And if there were two men, there could easily be a third, silently studying the canyon through the end of a sniper scope.

  Miriam took David’s arm. She leaned forward until her lips brushed his ear. “Where did he come from? Is there some other way into the canyon?”

  “You’re wrong,” David whispered back. “Listen.”

  “But how many?” one of the men said. She didn’t know if it was Taylor Junior or the other man. “That’s the question.”

  A pause. “The Lord will decide. But there’s a reason we have so many geraniums. We have multiple targets.”

  Miriam started to puzzle over what he meant with his talk of flowers when she realized something. The second voice was the same as the first. Taylor Junior wasn’t speaking to a second man—he was talking out his plans. Miriam had done the same thing herself when hiking in the hills above Zarahemla. An hour, two hours in the solitude of the desert, and it was almost like she could hear her own thoughts anyway—it became a natural thing to voice those thoughts.

  David met her gaze and nodded. One man, his look said. We can take him.

  She leaned back to his ear. “This is it. Remember what I said.”

  He turned and whispered back, “Don’t wet myself?”

  She squeezed his arm. “I don’t care if you pee your pants. It’s your blood I don’t want to see. Be ready. Shoot first if you have to.”

  “I’m not killing a man in cold blood.”

  “Of course not. But if he’s armed, if he lifts a weapon of some kind, don’t assume he’s bluffing. Finish him.” He frowned, and looked like he hadn’t caught the last part, so she whispered, “Blow him away.”

  “My main goal is to not blow off my own foot.”

  “That too.”

  Taylor Junior wouldn’t surrender. She knew it. Instead he’d go down like his brothers Gideon and Caleb. Only this time it wouldn’t be Eliza killing one of the Kimball sons, it would be either Miriam or David. No, Miriam. David was backup, only. Well, what of it? She could kill one man now or wait until it ended in a pitched battle, like the FBI attack on the Zarahemla compound last year, or worse, in a horror like the immolation of Caleb Kimball’s followers outside Las Vegas.

  They heard Taylor Junior start moving again. They crept up the box canyon after him. The walls narrowed on either side.

  No way out of the canyon. The upper reaches ended with towering sandstone walls. The east and south faces were sheer cliffs, perhaps scalable by a skilled climber carrying full gear, but that was neither a practical nor speedy way out of the canyon. On first glance, the northern edge of the canyon was more promising. One could hike halfway up the cliff on that side, scaling the fissures and brush growing from the heap of boulders piled against the rock wall, but the last hundred feet was damp and slick with moss on that side, streaked black with desert varnish, the sandstone weeping drips of water from an underground stream. Not even a trained rock climber could make it out that way. No, to get out, Taylor Junior would have to escape via the sandstone fissure at the base of the box canyon, and that would mean getting past Miriam and David.

  Only a few more yards now. The gun felt heavy in her hand, deadly. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her ears picked up every whisper of air, every chirping bird, her shoe scraping a rock, David breathing behind her. No more voices ahead of them and no more kicked rocks or bending branches, but that was only because their quarry had reached the end of the canyon and would be attending to whatever had brought him in this far.

  And then the canyon ended. It terminated in a copse of Douglas firs that snugged against the east wall. Miriam climbed between two boulders, her gun in her right hand, and emerged in the middle of the trees. She thumbed off the safety as David came in behind her. Miriam held out the gun, steadied with her left hand on her right wrist, ready to scream for Taylor Junior to surrender. The firs grew from a flat, hard-packed surface. There were at least a dozen trees, but none of them more than twelve inches in diameter. Not one was wide enough to hide Taylor Junior. And there were no boulders or fissures in the rock, either.

  But Taylor Junior was not there.

  Miriam stopped short, confused. She’d heard his voice just minutes earlier, and definitely above
them, deeper into the canyon. There had been no path leading from the valley floor. She scanned the walls around them, but the only movement she saw was a hawk or buzzard soaring overhead. Nothing moved on the rock. She removed her finger from the trigger and toggled on the safety.

  “What the hell?” David muttered as he looked around with a bewildered expression.

  What the hell indeed. She’d seen Taylor Junior enter the slot canyon. She’d seen his footprints crossing the sand bowl above the fissure. She’d heard him speaking and pushing through the brush, heard his shoes scraping sandstone and dislodging pebbles. And yet here she stood at the end of the box canyon, and Taylor Junior had simply disappeared.

  David put away his gun. He shaded his eyes as he scrutinized the canyon walls, his expression growing more and more perplexed. Miriam opened her mouth to suggest going back down to where they’d spotted Taylor Junior’s footprints, then come back up the canyon, more slowly this time. Maybe they’d missed a gap in the canyon wall, some secret exit into the mountains, although why they hadn’t seen this from their watch post above, she couldn’t say. But before she could speak, a rifle shot echoed through the canyon. They froze.

  Miriam waited until the last echo died. “How far was that?”

  “A mile, maybe. Sounds like it came from the camp.”

  “That’s what I thought. The others must have come back.” She considered. “But what were they shooting? Deer?”

  “Maybe,” David said. “Would they really be hunting here, right by their camp?”

  She was suddenly afraid. “David, we’re in a box canyon. We’ve got to get out of here before we’re trapped.”

  They fled in the same direction from which they’d come. Where the fissure of the slot canyon opened at their feet, they found the deer trail leading up to their camp and scrambled back up the hill. The trail seemed twice as steep as it had on the descent. Miriam pushed David to go faster. By the time they were halfway up the ridge, David had to stop, doubled over and wheezing. He drank some water and promptly threw it up. She squatted next to where he rested on his knees and put her hand on his back—slick with sweat—until he lost some of the gray look.

  Miriam said gently, “David, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “I don’t know if I can make it. Go on ahead.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Here, give me your arm. Come on, I’ll drag you up if I have to.”

  He lifted his head and gave her a skeptical look. “What, throw me on your back?”

  “If I have to. Now move!”

  He set off again. She kept up a stream of insults, encouragements, mocking jokes—whatever it took. At last, they cleared the loose rubble and entered the fir trees that lined the higher passes. She called a stop and David threw himself onto the ground. Miriam waited until his breathing slowed before handing him the canteen.

  “I hope you didn’t mean all that stuff,” he said after a minute.

  “No, I wasn’t going to shoot you to put you out of your misery, and no, you’re not a kindergarten girl.”

  “Considering how you ran me into the ground,” David said, “I didn’t take the comparison to a girl as an insult.”

  Miriam rolled onto her stomach, took out her binoculars, and looked down into the canyon. Their progress had seemed pathetic at the time, but the half-hour sprint up the deer trail had taken them a considerable distance up the mountain. They could hike the rest of it at a slower pace, taking advantage of the cover.

  She was still wondering about the hidden exit to the box canyon, but didn’t expect to see anything as she searched more carefully. Movement caught her eye. She blinked in surprise. A figure picking his way among the boulders and sagebrush down the same path they’d just been searching. He wore a backpack. Taylor Junior.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  David rolled over, and she handed him the binoculars. He wiped sweat from his face before lifting them to his eyes.

  “See him?” she asked.

  David adjusted the binoculars and then let out his breath in a low whistle. “Where did he come from?”

  Miriam had no answer. She took back the binoculars and found the man again just as he disappeared into the sandstone fissure. “What’s going on here?” She felt a chill, dark feeling. “Someone is hiding him. Someone or something.”

  “What do you mean?” David asked, sounding surprised. “Like an evil spirit?”

  “Maybe. It closed our spiritual eyes. He didn’t need to hide. We walked right past him.”

  David hesitated a moment. “No, come on, that’s insane. Jacob would tell us to keep looking. Like that time with Grandma Cowley, he’d remind me about that.”

  “Who is Grandma Cowley?”

  “Great-Great-Grandma Cowley. She died before I was born, but people still talk about her. She moved out to Yellow Flats after her husband died and had a way of disappearing whenever anyone went to find her.”

  “What do you mean, disappearing?” Miriam asked.

  “She was in her eighties and then her nineties—no car, no horse—and it’s not like she could have walked anywhere, surrounded by desert. It made people angry and suspicious.”

  “So what happened? Where did she go?”

  David shrugged. “My father used to tell the story. If he knew where, he never told anyone. It was Jacob who figured out her secret. She’d already been dead thirty years by then.”

  “Okay, I’m interested. Go on.”

  David said, “We had this cabal of rule-breakers that my brother Enoch called the Half-Breeds. Four half siblings. Jacob was the leader, then Enoch, who was a couple of years younger—I want to say about fourteen—and then me—twelve—and Eliza, who was nine or ten. We couldn’t always take her with us. It’s one thing for boys to wander the desert, hunting lizards and arrowheads. Riding horses, swimming in the irrigation canals, that sort of thing. It’s another thing for a girl.”

  Miriam found herself irritated on Eliza’s behalf. “It’s not like girls don’t want adventures, too.”

  “That’s exactly what Jacob said. We came down one summer from Alberta for a conference and everyone sat around telling stories about Great-Great-Grandma, including the one about how she’d disappear whenever someone annoying came looking for her. It turned out that her cabin was still out there by the Ghost Cliffs, at Yellow Flats. Nobody had lived there for thirty years. It was an old cabin without electricity or running water. And there was something about the bones of an Indian—or maybe it was some murdered guy, I don’t remember—that creeped people out. Once people started gossiping about bones, my father shut it down. But you can imagine how that set us off. We had to get a look at this place.

  “Eliza got wind of our plans, begged to go with us. Jacob got her out of her chores, and we all sneaked out the back door, swiped some horses from the stables, and rode off toward Yellow Flats.

  “The cabin was boring—at first. Half the roof had collapsed, and anything interesting was long picked clean. It was a hot day, and we splashed around in Blister Creek where it came by the house. We’d left the horses in the orchard. Most of the trees had died, but there were a couple of overgrown apple trees growing near the creek. Someone—Enoch, maybe?—stumbled into a yellow jacket nest. I don’t know if it was the fruit that attracted them or maybe the shade. Anyway, the horses spooked, and we ran like hell for the cabin. Eliza was the slowest and took the brunt of the attack.”

  “Yikes,” Miriam said. “What happened?”

  “Jacob went back and kicked at the nest so she could get away. The rest of us ran for the cabin, got in and shut up the door while we waited for him. Enoch pulled up some loose boards to cover the windows. That’s when we discovered my Great-Great-Grandmother Cowley’s secret hiding place.

  “I can’t remember how Jacob got away from the yellow jackets—I guess they stung him quite a bit—but once we were safely inside and finished swatting wasps, he produced a penlight and shone it down the stairs into the hidden cellar. It smelle
d like canned fruit and old paper. Who knew what was down there? Eliza was so excited she stopped whimpering about the stings and begged us to let her go down. We were pretending it was haunted. I guess it was, in a way.”

  “How do you mean, haunted?” Miriam asked.

  “There was something in the air. I don’t know, like a presence. It’s like when you’re praying by yourself and suddenly you’re not alone anymore. Know what I mean? We went down anyway. How often do you discover a secret room that nobody has touched in thirty years? We found books, journals, food, lanterns, and candles. I don’t know why or when she built—or had built—this cellar, but you could sense that she’d spent a lot of time down there. And there was still something of that time in the air. It’s hard to explain.”

  Miriam said, “The town where I grew up in California opened a time capsule once. It had newspapers and photographs from the 1920s. Looking at that stuff you felt like you were transported back in time, like all the years between had shortened into a few weeks.”

  “Exactly like that,” David said. “Anyway, that’s where she hid all those times. It’s like this thing with Taylor Junior. They’d see Grandma on the porch, but by the time they rode up to the house she’d disappeared. There were rumors that an angel—or an evil spirit, depending on who was telling the story—would whisk her away. The truth was she had a secret cellar beneath the cabin. What do you think Jacob would say now?”

  “He’d think Taylor Junior dug himself a secret hiding spot in the box canyon.”

  “He wouldn’t come up with supernatural explanations, that’s for sure.”

  “He never does.” She thought about it. David was probably right, and yet… “Maybe life is too easy for Jacob,” Miriam said as she worked through her thoughts. “I wonder if that’s what causes his doubts.”