The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  He turned on the penlight and looked around. It was a single room, no more than ten feet wide and twenty feet long. The floor was hard-packed earth, and there was a bed of dry grass in one corner. It smelled faintly of venison and of the musty odor of human bodies too rarely washed, and then that smell of geraniums again. He couldn’t see any flowers. Jacob turned the light toward the door and spotted Taylor Junior’s trap.

  A nail protruded from each of the planks, held together with a wire loop. The loop was one end of a taut wire that dropped to the ground, where it met an artillery shell. Someone had duct-taped a hand grenade to the top of the shell, with the other end of the wire tied off on the grenade’s pin. It looked clumsy, but the intent was obvious.

  Jacob sucked in his breath. If he’d yanked open the planks, he’d have jerked out the pin on the grenade. It would have detonated the artillery shell and blown him to pieces. And if he screwed up now, seven other people would die as well.

  “Are you okay in there?” came Agent Fayer’s voice from the other side.

  “One second.”

  He took a closer look around the room to make sure there weren’t any other traps set to spring, then bent and gingerly lifted the artillery shell. With the slack released on the wire, he was able to slip the loop off the end of the two nails and disarm the trap. He set down the shell.

  Jacob pushed aside the planks and blinked at the light that flooded into the room. The others stood in silhouettes, framed by the doorway. As Sister Miriam and Agent Fayer stepped into the room, Jacob’s eyes began to adjust.

  “The rest of you stay back,” Fayer said. “You too, Krantz. You won’t fit.”

  The two women examined the room. Fayer had a hand on her gun, but lowered it after the first glance. They settled first on the artillery shell, then on a wooden crate in one corner.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Fayer asked in a low voice as she looked back to the shell. “Where did it come from?”

  Sister Miriam said, “There’s an army depot at Dugway. Maybe he got it from there.”

  “So it’s some kind of high explosive,” Fayer said. “Just what we need. And the grenade is a detonator. What is it exactly?” She took the penlight and examined the crate, then turned to Miriam with a frown. “LWST. Do you know what that means?”

  “No clue.”

  But as soon as Jacob heard Dugway his mind started to make connections. “Lewisite. It’s a vesicant.”

  “A what?” Sister Miriam asked.

  “A blister agent,” he said. “After the Cold War, the army shipped their old chemical munitions to an incinerator at the army proving ground at Dugway. Mustard gas, nerve gas, Lewisite, all sorts of nasty stuff. They’re still destroying it.”

  “How do you know all this?” Agent Fayer asked, a touch of suspicion in her voice.

  “I was writing a paper on the Bhopal disaster when a professor saw my work and asked me to collaborate on a project testing chemical weapons on mice and rats. I know it sounds horrible, but when you grow up castrating sheep and processing turkeys—slicing off their heads in a machine, I mean—you don’t get sentimental about rodents.”

  But neither of the two women looked squeamish at the thought. “But what’s it do?” Fayer asked. “What do you mean by a blister agent?”

  “It attacks the mucous membranes—nostrils, lips, mouth, ears. Your eyes, too. Eventually, bullae—blisters, I mean—will cover any exposed part of the body. It’s a horrible way to die.”

  “Do you smell that?” Agent Fayer asked. In spite of Fayer’s warning, Abraham had started to push into the cliff dwelling to listen to what Jacob had to say.

  “Everyone move back,” he said. “That flower smell is the chemicals leaking out. You don’t want it in your lungs.”

  They crowded the ledge outside the cliff dwelling. Fayer took Jacob’s arm and gestured for her partner to come over. Krantz had pulled Abraham from the dwelling, and Jacob’s father was now glaring at him and exchanging glances with Stephen Paul.

  After Krantz approached, Fayer turned to Jacob. “Tell it to me straight. You can recover from a chemical burn, right? If it’s a short exposure, I mean.”

  “I guess. It’s a burn, but it’s not radioactive or anything. Chemical weapons are weapons of terror, really. You want to clear out a trench, you bombard it with mustard gas. You want to empty a Kurdish village, you shell it with chemical weapons. You kill a bunch, you maim a bunch, and you render the place uninhabitable.”

  “Hold on,” Krantz said to Fayer in a low voice. “What are you thinking?”

  “You know what I’m thinking.”

  “The shell is evidence,” Krantz said. “You want to take it with us.”

  “Are you serious?” Abraham demanded.

  “Stay out of this,” Fayer said. “Let us make the decision.”

  “You bet it’s my business. This filth is of the devil. It’s poison from the very belly of the beast. It—”

  Jacob turned to say something, but Eliza had her hand on Father’s arm. “Dad, please. Let Jacob handle this.”

  “My father may be blunt, but he’s right,” Jacob said. “You don’t want to mess with this stuff. Get a good dose and you’re in trouble. One minute your skin is burning. The next minute you’re screaming and clawing at your skin. A rat will chew off its own legs to get away from the pain. You’ll die coughing up a bloody mass of your own lungs.”

  “See,” Father said. “You see, don’t you? Let’s leave this place. It’s got a dark aura.”

  Fayer ignored him and said to Jacob, “Sounds delightful. All the more reason we’ve got to get that shell out of here. They’ll come back for it.”

  “We could throw it over the edge and destroy it.”

  “Not good enough, Jacob. You know this isn’t the only one. He might have a hundred of the damn things. If we get this back to the lab, they can tell us exactly where it comes from, figure out if Taylor Junior has a pipeline. Now how do we get this out of here safely? Will the backpack stop it, absorb the leak, I mean?”

  “No. Not even plastic or rubber will stop it.” He gave it some thought. “It’s old and leaky, but a short exposure should be fine. Once we get to the top we could make a sling from some sticks so no one has to touch it.”

  “Good thinking,” Fayer said.

  “But we need a volunteer to haul it up to the plateau,” Jacob said.

  “I could do it,” Krantz offered.

  “No, I’ll carry it,” Fayer said. “You worry about getting yourself up the cliff without falling to your death. You too, Miriam. No arguing.”

  Nobody else volunteered. Fayer took a deep breath and went back into the dwelling. She emerged a second later holding the shell by the tips. It looked even uglier in the full light outside the cliff dwelling, squat and sinister with its letters stenciled across the surface like a curse in some ancient language. Krantz took her backpack and held it open so she could ease it in.

  Jacob joined the others in crowding the ledge as far from the two FBI agents as possible, but he happened to glance at the shell as it dropped. Something seemed off. His stomach lurched.

  There was something wrong with Taylor Junior’s booby trap. In the full light outside the cliff dwelling he saw that what he’d taken for an unsophisticated mass of duct tape over and around the grenade to hold it to the artillery shell was something else entirely. There was coiled wire taped near the pin, something that looked like the spring of a rat trap.

  The first trap had been a feint. Maybe it would work, maybe not. But if Taylor Junior’s enemies proved too clever, if they came in through the windows or cut away the boards rather than pulling them open, he’d give his weapon a second chance.

  The shell gave a little plink as it fell from Fayer’s hand. The coil snapped and the grenade pin—attached to a second piece of wire—popped out.

  Fayer jerked back as the shell rolled from her hand and into the backpack. “Krantz!” she screamed.

  He looked down,
blinking. He didn’t understand, he hadn’t seen. “Wha—?”

  “Grenade!” Jacob shouted at the same time. “The pin!”

  We’re dead. We’re all gone.

  Suddenly every beat of his heart seemed to take seconds. It was like ER surgery, standing over the cracked chest of a man with a gunshot wound. He would stare into the ruin of the man’s heart, take in everything at a glance—aorta, anterior vena cava, left atrium, right atrium, ventricles, valves, veins. See the wound. Decide what to do. He would reach for a severed artery, knowing that one slip, one fumble as he groped through the blood, and the thing would be over. And so everything moved in slow motion.

  Even as these thoughts flashed through his mind between one heartbeat and the next, David was grabbing Miriam and Eliza and yanking them to the ground. No point. Not on the short, crowded ledge, with the canyon walls and the Anasazi ruins to focus the blast. They’d never know what a chemical burn felt like. The blast would vaporize them. He had to get it away. Over the edge, let it fall far enough and…

  You’ll never get it over.

  Ten pounds? Fifteen? Too heavy to throw far. If he heaved it over the edge, it would start to fall, but it wouldn’t go far enough. Not now. Too late. But if he grabbed it, shoved through the crowd, leaped over the edge of the cliff. Cradle the artillery shell with his body as he fell. Save the others.

  Jacob dived for the shell.

  But Krantz moved first. He grabbed the pack with his right hand and used his left to sweep people out of the way. Stephen Paul stumbled back and almost fell from the ledge, but Abraham grabbed his arm. Jacob saw it wouldn’t be enough. The others didn’t see, they didn’t understand what he was trying to do. Krantz couldn’t get through without knocking someone off the cliff.

  “Everyone down!” Jacob screamed.

  Krantz crouched into a hammer thrower stance, spun, and hurled the backpack. The others ducked, threw themselves to the ground. The pack launched over their heads and out of the alcove, flying faster and farther than seemed possible. For a long second there was nothing. And then the explosion.

  It shattered the silence. A booming shock wave rolled through the canyon. It echoed and then echoed again as it bounced back and forth against the sandstone cliffs. And then there was no sound except for the ringing in Jacob’s ears and a crow somewhere, hollering in alarm.

  Miriam recovered first, climbing to her feet, followed by the two FBI agents, both of whom looked stunned.

  “I guess you did throw the hammer at USC,” Miriam said. She turned to Fayer. “I always wondered if that was just a story, didn’t you?”

  “Sometimes.” Fayer was breathing hard and looked flushed. “He milks it enough.”

  Krantz reached for his back with a wince as he helped Eliza up. “Good thing I’m not anymore,” he said, a tremor in his deep baritone voice. He licked his lips. “Anyone saw that technique, the only throwing would be Coach tossing me off the team.”

  Stephen Paul and Jacob got up next. David and Abraham had somehow ended up jumbled together on the ground and now extricated themselves, neither father nor son looking pleased at the contact. David said to Father, “I thought you weren’t going to duck in time. That would have knocked you to your death.”

  “I’m not going to die before the Second Coming,” Father said. “I only ducked because I was worried about the rest of you.”

  David and Eliza looked dumbfounded and Jacob blinked, but then he caught the upturned corner of Father’s mouth. David, Eliza, and Jacob all laughed at once, the tension broken.

  It wouldn’t last.

  * * *

  It took another hour to get everyone to the top of the cliff where Charity Kimball waited. From there, they had to share information, then come to a consensus about pursuing Taylor Junior and the three other men—the counselors of his secret combination, Abraham called them. At last, with a good deal of bickering and recriminating comments, the entire group returned to the trail Eliza, Charity, and the FBI agents had followed into the mountains.

  Jacob lingered behind. He wanted to be alone. Songbirds kept up a cheerful song that belied the gloomy, guilty feeling settling over him. He couldn’t sort through the confusion of the past two days. Fernie’s accident. Taylor Junior’s clever double trap. It had almost killed them all.

  Eliza pulled back, and he could see from her scowl that she hadn’t come to chat about birds of the high desert. “You see what happened here, right?”

  “What do you think happened?” he asked.

  “Don’t be glib.”

  “I’m not being glib, I’m trying to figure out why you look like you’re going to tear my head off. Why are you so angry?”

  “I’m not angry, I’m surprised and disappointed.” She hesitated. “Yes, I guess I am angry. You let me down. You’ve never done that before.”

  “That stings,” he said. And it did.

  “Taylor Junior lured you into attacking his camp. He knew you were smart enough to find his hideout, but at the same time your mind would be dulled by thoughts of revenge. It was, and he almost killed you, not once, but twice. If you’d been thinking clearly, that wouldn’t have happened. You were lucky.”

  “Is that it, you want to lecture me? I get enough of that from Father.”

  “That’s hardly fair, Jacob. I saved your life.”

  “You did,” he admitted. “I made a mistake. But Taylor Junior didn’t get what he wanted, either. I’m still alive. So is Father, so is everyone else. Yes, it was thanks to you, and yes, I let myself…I don’t know what happened to me. But it’s done now.”

  “It’s not done, Jacob.” Eliza’s voice rose in pitch. “All that other stuff doesn’t matter. Taylor Junior is gone. You think that’s the only chemical warhead he has? What do you think he’s doing with the rest of them?”

  Jacob felt hollow inside, as if he’d just given blood. He stared at his sister, unable to respond, because of course she was right.

  “They’re going to murder people, that’s what,” Eliza continued. “Our people. And you? You managed to drag eight people—practically anyone who could stand up to Taylor Junior—into the wilderness where we can’t do a thing to stop it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tonight I will die.

  The thought came to Elder Kimball as he drove north along Highway 24. Once he gave this premonition conscious thought, it took hold in his imagination like a Joshua tree, spiky and uninviting above, with a taproot sunk thirty, forty feet into the ground, burrowing deep into his mind.

  “I’m not ready,” he whispered, so as not to wake the others. His voice sounded loud in the dark, quiet interior of the truck, where the only sound for the past hour had been the rumble of the engine and the soft snores of the three other men. He continued his prayer in silence. Please, Lord. I need more time. I need to repent, I need to get my affairs in order. Tell me what to do. I’ll obey thy will.

  His muscles ached, from his calves to his shoulders, from the long scramble out of the mountains. They’d trekked half the night and all day with their cursed loads, pushed to exhaustion by Taylor Junior. He was supposed to wake Aaron for a turn at the wheel when they reached Loa, but in spite of his exhaustion, he knew he’d never be able to fall asleep.

  Tonight I will die.

  Why couldn’t he be like Abraham Christianson? Abraham wouldn’t be afraid to die. He would know that his calling and election had been made sure, that he would rise on the morning of the First Resurrection and would stand on the right hand of the Lord. He knew it.

  Elder Kimball knew no such thing.

  Taylor Junior had tied the backpacks together to keep them from rolling around in the back, then wrapped the bundle in a wool blanket and strapped it into the truck bed with a bungee cord. He’d instructed the men to drive with cruise control on, exactly at the speed limit.

  I can’t do this. It’s too horrific.

  It didn’t matter if they were obeying the will of the Lord or not—he no longer cared.
But whenever they’d stopped hiking to let the older man catch his breath, Kimball had remembered Brother Stanley crying for help as the Lewisite burned his skin and ate his lungs away. He imagined women and children screaming and tearing at their clothes. Only one thing scared him more: the fear that if he resisted, his son would turn him into one of the victims. That he might suffer the same fate as Brother Stanley. And so he had pushed himself to exhaustion.

  But now, his thoughts vacillating between his own death and the deaths of hundreds of innocents, he decided to resist. Elder Kimball glanced at his son, asleep in the passenger seat, then glanced in the rearview mirror at the two men in the backseat of the extended cab Ford F-150. Eric was still snoring, and Kimball hadn’t heard Aaron for more than an hour. All three men were asleep.

  He let the truck veer into the wrong lane. Slowly he drifted back toward the middle, then across into his own lane. He slowed to forty-five, still weaving. Two cars came up behind him, hesitated as if wondering whether to risk passing, then swerved around, accelerating to get past as quickly as possible.

  There was a town a few miles ahead—Kimball assumed that there was cell phone service and one of the two cars would be calling the highway patrol to tell them about the drunk driver swerving back and forth on the highway. He could only hope.

  There were no other cars on the road for the next five minutes, and then he saw a pair of headlights coming toward him, fast. Utah Highway Patrol? The Wayne County Sheriff? He let the truck drift back into the far lane. The other car laid on its horn, swerved onto the shoulder, and flew past, horn still blaring with a falling pitch as it receded in the rearview mirror.

  Taylor Junior jolted upright. “What the devil?” He grabbed for the steering wheel and yanked it back into the right lane.