The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  “That’s not what happened!” Stanley protested, his voice shrill. “Not in the Bible and not here, either. Aren’t you listening to me? Aaron was trying to take over.”

  “Eric, Aaron, get Brother Stanley to his feet. Phillip, get the gun.”

  For a moment, they hesitated, and then Aaron set down the gun and moved to grab Stanley. Eric followed. Aaron was suddenly efficient and ruthless in obeying Taylor Junior as if he hadn’t, in fact, been trying to take over.

  Stanley cried out in pain as they got him up. “What are you doing? Where are you taking me?”

  “Bring him to the bowl. Brother Jason, get a torch. You too, Father.”

  Stanley shook his head. “What are you doing? What’s wrong with you? Why won’t you listen?”

  The church body moved as one to the bowl. It was a sinkhole in the sandstone a quarter mile from the camp, maybe ten feet across and twenty feet deep. Every year a deep, cold pool of water formed from the spring runoff. The water lasted for weeks, growing brackish as the season wore on and filling with toad spawn and mosquito larvae until it evaporated. This spring had been dryer than last and the water was already gone. Half the bottom was sand, perfect for cushioning a body as it fell. Bare sandstone rose from the other side.

  “Bring him to the edge,” Taylor Junior said. “No, on the other side, above the sandy part.” When they’d done so, he turned to Brother Stanley. “I’m afraid your time has come, Brother.”

  Stanley’s eyes darted from person to person as if searching for someone to come to his defense. “Don’t do this to me,” he said. “I’ve been faithful. They shot me because I was on your side. I was arguing for you!”

  “I understand, Brother. You’ve done your best—it’s not your fault you are a weak and miserable soul.” He pushed Aaron and Eric to the side and took the older man by the wrist. “There’s a reason the Lord brought you to our church. Brother Abraham didn’t realize he was doing the Lord’s will by driving you out. Well, not in the way he thought. This is your purpose, your mission in this mortal world. The Lord will reward you for your faithfulness.”

  Brother Stanley didn’t struggle, but hung limp on Taylor Junior’s arm, so weak the younger man had to hold him up. The man’s blood made Taylor Junior’s palm slick, and he shifted his grip.

  He despised this man. It was Stanley’s weakness, the way he sniveled for his life instead of demanding justice. There was too much of the old Taylor Junior in the older man. This is what he would have become if he’d remained under his brother Gideon’s tyranny.

  “No,” Stanley whispered. “I’ll do whatever you want. I wasn’t the one—I didn’t do it.”

  Technically, that was true. Aaron had been in the midst of a coup when Taylor Junior arrived, of that there was no doubt. But it wasn’t because of Aaron’s own strength, it was because of his leader’s weakness, or perceived weakness. Time to change that perception.

  Taylor Junior set down the backpack and lifted his right arm to the square. “Brother Stanley, in the name of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood, I seal thee unto death. Go now, and plead with thy maker for His forgiveness. Amen.”

  “Thou sayest,” Aaron murmured.

  Taylor Junior pushed.

  Brother Stanley windmilled his arms, then lost his balance. He screamed as he fell. There was a thud, and then he shrieked in pain. Taylor Junior grabbed a flaming, pitchy branch from Eric’s hand and held it over the pit to cast light into the shadows. Stanley had landed on the sandy part. He tried to regain his feet, but one leg buckled underneath him.

  He cried out again, then seemed to regain control. “I’m sorry. Let me out, please. I’ve learned my lesson—it won’t happen again.”

  The others looked to Taylor Junior. He waved them back. “Move away, all of you.”

  He put on the gloves, then removed the artillery shell wrapped in plastic bags from the backpack. Holding his breath, he unrolled the bags and picked his way to the other side of the dark hole. Stanley moaned from the pit below him. A murmur passed through the group, and someone’s baby began to cry.

  “What is that, what are you doing?” Aaron asked.

  “Stay back or you will die.”

  Taylor Junior tilted the bags upside down over the rocky part of the hole. The shell slipped out the end, the weight gone suddenly from his hands. He flinched from the pit, even though that was pointless. If the shell hit in the wrong way and detonated, he’d die. So would everyone else.

  It clanked off the rock, but didn’t explode. For several seconds there was nothing.

  “What’s that smell, what is that?” Stanley asked, voice pinched and frightened. And then, a moment later, he screamed. “Ahh! Get it off me! Help me!”

  His words faded and turned to screaming, coughing, retching. It was too dark to see what was happening in the pit. The crowd was quiet for several seconds while Brother Stanley screamed, and then children started to bawl. Mothers dragged them away. Taylor Junior turned to see his father watching, face pale and trembling in the dying light of a burning branch. Aaron stared at Taylor Junior, eyes wide. His own branch had died to a glowing tip with a trickle of flame not much bigger than a lit match head.

  Taylor Junior raised his voice. “Someone bring us some light!” Eric Froud returned with another burning branch. Taylor Junior snatched it and held it over the sandstone bowl.

  He didn’t want to look. He wanted to turn away, to fix his gaze anywhere but down at the man in the pit. Brother Stanley’s fate was sealed, there was no way to save him, so why do it?

  He looked.

  Stanley writhed at the bottom of the bowl. He tore at his face and clothing, flailing and bucking like a live snake thrown onto a skillet. Desperate to get away. To escape the torment. There was something on his skin that gleamed in the torchlight, but Taylor Junior couldn’t tell if it was the poison itself or the blood where his nails gouged at his face.

  Aaron looked down, face grim. Eric took one look and staggered back with his hand over his mouth. He made sounds like he was going to be sick, but didn’t throw up.

  “He’s suffering,” Taylor Junior said.

  “What?” Aaron asked. “Of course he’s suffering. Look at him.”

  “It could last for hours. He has been sealed unto death.” He gave Aaron a hard look. “You started it. Now you finish it.”

  Aaron lifted his rifle. He aimed and fired. Stanley’s head snapped back and he collapsed, then lay still. Aaron lowered the weapon and studied it.

  “Now you see,” Taylor Junior said in a low voice. “You shouldn’t have doubted me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am in charge.”

  “I should have been patient.”

  “You did what you had to,” Taylor Junior said. “All is forgiven.” He raised his voice. “I want everyone up the hillside. We’re leaving the camp. Abraham Christianson is coming. If we stay, we’ll die. We have to reach the second sanctuary before he arrives. Jason and Phillip, load up guns and ammunition. Charity, get the women and children ready to move. Aaron and Eric, come over here. You too, Father. The rest of you return to camp and wait for instructions. Father, I said come here!”

  Elder Kimball crept over like a whipped puppy, shaking with fear. Taylor Junior stared with disgust. “Hurry up, I’m not going to push you.”

  “Why did you do that? Why did you—”

  “Quiet!” Taylor Junior took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “No more questions. Do what I say.”

  When he opened his eyes, he saw Charity Kimball standing a few paces away, still watching him. The other women had already left, taking the children with them. He turned his gaze on her and stared until she turned away.

  Taylor Junior led the remaining men up the hillside, away from the sinkhole. They stayed on his heels as if anxious to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the horror in the pit. He said, “We’ve set the wheels in motion. No more games. The time has come to destroy the apostates.”

/>   “They’re ready for us now,” Aaron said. “They’ll be in an uproar, too.”

  “Abraham doesn’t sit still when someone threatens his community,” Elder Kimball said. “He has no choice. We attacked him in Blister Creek. His daughter and stepdaughter were in the car, his grandchildren. He’ll be gathering weapons. And then he’ll come looking for us. How long until he finds us?”

  “He might know already,” Taylor Junior said. “Satan is whispering in his ear.”

  “And what about Jacob?” Aaron asked.

  “I don’t know,” Taylor Junior admitted.

  Abraham was easier to understand. A jealous, temperamental leader. But Jacob? Try as he might, he couldn’t shine a light into the sinkhole of Jacob’s mind.

  He said, “We didn’t kill Fernie, but she might have been injured. He might join his father. Or he might go to the police. He won’t get anywhere if he does that. Not in time.”

  “He’ll join his father,” Elder Kimball said. “He won’t have a choice. They’ll come here, and if we flee deeper into the wilderness, they’ll track us.”

  “We could take cover and let them stumble into an ambush,” Eric Froud said.

  Aaron frowned. “Are we strong enough? We’ve got ten men and a few rifles.” He looked back over his shoulder, toward the pit, hidden in the darkness on the hillside below them. “Nine men.”

  “We’re not waiting for them to attack us,” Taylor Junior said. “And we have more than a few rifles. The Lord has delivered a weapon into my hands.”

  “Is that what that was?” Elder Kimball asked. “Whatever it was that you dropped into the pit?”

  “Yes, in part.”

  “What is it?” his father asked.

  “Something to wipe our enemies from the face of the earth.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Eliza left the hospital in Panguitch and arrived in Blister Creek no more than forty-five minutes behind her brother. She expected to find him on the porch, arguing with Father over the best way to approach Taylor Junior’s wilderness camp. Jacob wouldn’t let Father direct the attack, would he?

  But they weren’t at the big house, and when she drove out to Stephen Paul Young’s home east of town, his senior wife, Carol, said that the men had driven up in a haste a half hour earlier, thrown some boxes from the shed into the back of the truck, and then tore off again a few minutes later. She was alarmed and wanted to know if Eliza knew what was going on. Eliza didn’t have time to get into specifics and claimed ignorance.

  Jacob still wasn’t picking up his cell phone. She sent him a text message, but he didn’t answer that, either. She tried Father, too, but got nothing. In mounting frustration, she drove back into town. Brother Simon at the gas station confirmed that her father had filled up his truck no more than an hour earlier. Father hadn’t been alone, but Brother Simon hadn’t been observant enough to confirm that the others had been Jacob and Stephen Paul.

  At last she went back to the Christianson house and texted an update to Agent Krantz. She spent the next few hours putting together camping and hiking gear and then tried to get a few fitful hours of sleep in the guest room.

  Krantz and Fayer arrived at the house at 5:48 the next morning. They stumbled out of the black Crown Victoria, stretching and yawning. Fayer managed to look both bleary-eyed and alert at the same time. And annoyed.

  Eliza had been waiting on the porch since receiving Krantz’s call twenty minutes earlier, saying they were descending from the Ghost Cliffs. She gave him a hug.

  “Now that we’re all reacquainted,” Fayer said, dryly, “is there anything new since we set off on our late-night sightseeing tour of the Great Basin?”

  “No. By the time I got back to Blister Creek, they’d already left.”

  “That was quick,” Fayer said.

  “Too quick,” Krantz said. “You don’t set off into the wilderness without gear.”

  Eliza said, “We’re always prepared around here. Have to be ready for the end of the world, you know. Still, he’d have to consult maps, figure out a plan of attack.” She shook her head. “My father had already thought this through.”

  “Problem is, we can’t set off that quickly,” Fayer said.

  “Actually, we can. I put together three packs—cook gear, a camp stove, sleeping bags, food, canteens, everything else we’ll need. I even got a hunting rifle with a scope and scrounged up extra clothing. We can leave right away.”

  Krantz gave her a look. “Nice work. Of course, we’re already ten hours behind.”

  “Maybe Jacob is in charge,” Eliza said. “He’ll be cautious, will want to scope things out for a while before he moves. We can make up time.”

  But that presumed they’d be able to find the entrance into Dark Canyon, and she worried that would prove difficult. They drove out of Blister Creek, stopping some time later in Hanksville to grab prewrapped sandwiches from a convenience store that was cut into the side of the mountain. Krantz bought gas and two Styrofoam cups of coffee while Fayer and Eliza sorted through the maps of southeastern Utah. They set off a few minutes later and within an hour had reached the outskirts of the Dark Canyon Primitive Area.

  The problem was that there were numerous ways into Dark Canyon, including ranch roads, hiking trails, and several paths that didn’t make the maps. Deer trails, mostly. They discarded most of these as unsuitable approaches to penetrate the wilderness area—presuming Taylor Junior’s sect would need to haul in supplies from time to time—but each of the other roads took twenty minutes to an hour to search, and they couldn’t spot either trucks from Blister Creek or Taylor Junior’s new Ford F-150. In fact, they saw only one vehicle, a jeep with Colorado plates, a mountain bike rack, and bumper stickers from Snowbird, Sun Valley, and several other ski resorts. Just hikers. They kept looking.

  Back on the highway for the third time, Krantz drained his second coffee, surely cold by now, while Fayer fidgeted with the maps and glanced at her watch. “We could drive into Blanding,” she told him. “See if we can call in a chopper from St. George.”

  “And get my ass chewed out? No thanks. Besides, there’s nowhere to land up there. We could spot them, but then we’d have to turn this into another major operation. There are about twenty reasons why that’s a bad idea.”

  “Most of them referencing our assault on the Zarahemla compound,” Fayer said.

  “Exactly.”

  “We can’t give up,” Eliza said from the rear seat. “People are going to die.”

  “We don’t know that,” Krantz said.

  Eliza leaned forward, her hands clenching at the vinyl seat in front of her. “Actually we do. You know it and I know it. We’ve got to keep looking.”

  “Watch out,” Fayer said. “Hitchhiker.”

  “Sorry, buddy, we don’t have time,” Krantz said and veered into the center as they bore down on the hitchhiker, who held out a hand for them to stop.

  Eliza turned her head as they flew past. It wasn’t a man, but a woman in a prairie dress with a shawl wrapped around her head that had looked like a hat from a distance. “Slow down, stop!”

  Krantz pulled over, then backed up along the shoulder after Eliza explained what she’d seen.

  It was Charity Kimball. Krantz stopped the car, and Eliza got out. Charity turned her sunburned face up, and if she was surprised it didn’t show through the exhaustion on her sweat-streaked face.

  “What are you doing?” Eliza asked.

  “Do you have water?”

  They gave her a water bottle and got her into the air-conditioning of the car. She smelled of stale sweat and campfire smoke and seemed to know it. She edged to the far side of the backseat and looked down at her hands.

  “What are you doing out here?” Eliza asked.

  Charity looked pointedly at the two FBI agents in the front seat.

  “They’re here to help,” Eliza said. “You can talk in front of them.”

  But Charity didn’t say anything, and eventually Agent Fayer said, �
��Charity Kimball, right? You’re married to the guy they just paroled. Are you going to cooperate, or should we arrest you and take you in for questioning? And we’ll send Kimball back to prison, too.”

  Anger flashed in Charity’s eyes. “You think it’s so easy. You’re an apostate Mormon. That’s right, I know all about you and your gentile friend. I made covenants. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Eliza kept her voice gentle. “You covenanted to obey him so long as he obeyed the Lord. Is he obeying the Lord?”

  Charity looked so small and old and frightened—in spite of her defiant words—that Eliza had to remind herself she’d once been intimidated by this woman. When the Kimballs had lived in the big house in Blister Creek, Eliza had occasionally stayed with the family when she’d come down from Alberta for the summers.

  At the time, it seemed as though Charity Kimball had everything she could want. She was the senior wife of a wealthy elder in the Quorum of the Twelve. She hadn’t seemed to harbor any bad feelings toward Abraham Christianson, like her husband and his sons, but for some reason seemed to resent Eliza. She never yelled at Eliza, didn’t give her any more chores than any of the other girls in the house, and even turned a blind eye when Eliza escaped to play in the desert with her brothers. But she was cold and resentful. Why, Eliza still didn’t understand.

  Eliza hesitated, then put a hand on Charity’s bony shoulder. The older woman tightened, but didn’t pull away. “We’re not going to hurt you. Fayer got a little carried away, that’s all. We’re jumpy because of what’s going on.” She addressed Krantz and Fayer. “Could you give me a moment? I know we’re pressed, but—well, I only need a few minutes.”

  The agents got out of the car and walked along the shoulder of the road until they stood several yards away.