Hell's Fortress

by Michael Wallace

  “The children should be better soon,” Jacob said. “Follow my instructions exactly. If you try to save the medication, the giardia will come back stronger than ever.”

  “You could let us stay. We’ll work for our living.”

  It took effort not to agree. How could he turn these people away? He could make it work. Forty-seven mouths to feed; he’d done the math. But what about the next forty-seven? And the forty-seven hundred who came after them?

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there,” Kemp pressed. “Thousands dead already. Around the world, millions. Tens of millions. When I was in Iran . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “I know weapons. I fought in the war. I can help defend this valley.”

  “We have defenders already.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t drive us off.”

  “I know places you can go. I’ll send you with seed to plant. There are abandoned farms and ranches. If you’re careful—”

  “We’re not farmers. And the climate has gone to hell. If you haven’t managed to plant anything yet this year, how are we supposed to raise crops?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll give you what help and advice I can, but you must leave.”

  “Damn you, Christianson.”

  Jacob hardened his heart. He had to do this. They stopped in front of the side garage door, opposite from his clinic.

  “In addition to the seed, I’m sending you with provisions. Three months’ worth.”

  Kemp’s eyebrows raised. “Three months? That’s a small fortune these days. What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is you need to take my sister with you.” Jacob nodded back at Eliza as he said this. “Together with two of her companions. They need to leave the valley and I want you to smuggle them out.”

  The man stared at Eliza, his expression unreadable. “Because of the quarantine?”

  “That’s right. You heard about that?”

  “I heard it. I don’t believe it. Sounds like a cop-out, a lame justification for why you guys won’t help anyone, because they’re forcing you to stay in your own little valley. But here I am, and you still won’t help.”

  Jacob wasn’t going to argue this point. “Those are my terms. Take three people out of the valley with you and you get three months of food in return.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s our business, not yours.”

  “Wait until you see what’s out there,” Kemp said to Eliza. “You’ll be sorry you ever left.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I need to get out.”

  “They’ll travel with you a couple of days,” Jacob said, “then slip away at night. That’s all you need to know. What’s your answer? Yes or no?”

  A calculating look came into Kemp’s eyes. “Tell you what, how about I smuggle them out, then return with my people? Instead of paying us with food, you let us stay in the valley and earn our keep.”

  “Last fall I let in several families from outside the valley,” Jacob said. “They were Mormons—Salt Lake City variety, but still. My people were up in arms. If I let you in, a bunch of gentiles, a mob would drive you out. There’s already grumbling. Word spread you were drinking whiskey in your camp and that scared people. People are terrified God will abandon us.”

  “I’ll toss the liquor. We’ll be Mormons if that’s what it takes.”

  “If I let in one caravan, how do I turn away the next? And the one after that? How long until fifty thousand starving people descend on the valley?”

  “I’m talking about forty-seven, not fifty thousand.”

  “No.”

  “Not even to help your sister?” Kemp looked at Eliza.

  “Not for anything,” Jacob said. “You must leave. Will you leave with three months of food or not?”

  “You bastard.”

  “Is it a deal?”

  “Yeah, it’s a deal. Now open that door and let me see my mother.”

  Jacob took a deep breath and lifted the garage door with a clank of metal on metal as it slid to the ceiling. Miriam stood inside, standing discreetly to one side. She gave Jacob a nod. Some of the hardness had returned to her face. Jacob nodded back and let his eyebrows climb in warning.

  Be careful, Miriam.

  Kemp didn’t look at her. He only stared at the bed. At the shape beneath the sheet, which had been drawn up over her head.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jacob said. And he was. Deeply, numbingly sorry.

  Kemp rushed to the bed and drew back the sheet to reveal the blank, gray face of his mother.

  Eliza came up behind Jacob and put her hand on his shoulder. Her fingernails dug in. Warning him not to tell Kemp the truth.

  “How did she—?” Kemp began.

  “She was suffering septic shock when you brought her in. Her organs were failing and her blood pressure crashing. Maybe if I’d seen her a few days earlier, but it was too late.”

  “I killed her!”

  Jacob made his way to the side of the bed. He put his arm around Kemp’s shoulder, but the man shrugged him violently away. “I lost them all. My God, I lost everything. My father, my brother, my girlfriend. Her kid—only two years old—he died. I tried to save him.” Tears streamed down his face and marked streaks in the road grime.

  Jacob’s resistance crumbled. How could he send these people away? He would let them stay. Then deal with Smoot and other members of the quorum if they raised a stink. If necessary, he’d find another way to smuggle Eliza out of the valley. Maybe the drones were going away. Maybe all they had to do was wait.

  “I’ll kill myself,” Kemp said. “That’s what I’ll do. What’s the point? I’ll end it.”

  “You can’t do that. Those people out there need you.”

  “Why, so I can kill them too? Like I killed my mom?”

  Jacob took him by the shoulders. “Listen to me. You didn’t kill her. You tried to help. There were no doctors, you didn’t have medical training. Of course you’d try to dig out the pellets.”

  “How could this happen? She had an infection, I get that. But why didn’t the antibiotics help? Was it really too late?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Tell me what did, what you tried. I have to know.”

  Jacob hesitated. It wouldn’t do any good telling the truth, but he wasn’t in the habit of making up stories to cover his own shortcomings. “Well, you see—”

  Kemp must have caught the guilt in his voice. He whipped his head up. “Wait. You did try, right? Tell me you didn’t give up.”

  “It was too late. She was suffering multiple organ failure. Her odds were less than ten percent—probably some fraction of that—even if somehow we’d been able to airlift her to a world-class hospital. Out here, in the desert, with what I’ve got to work with . . .”

  Kemp stared him down. “So you didn’t give her anything for the infection.”

  “It would have been throwing those antibiotics away. I’m running out. If I’d given them to your mother, other people would die.”

  The man stared at him in silence. Muscles clenched on the side of his jaw. He took a step toward Jacob. Before he could make another move, Miriam was at his side, her gun aimed with rock steadiness at his temple.

  “Make a move and I splatter your brains,” she said.

  Kemp slowly swung his head to look at her. Cold fury raged behind his eyes.

  “She’s former FBI,” Eliza said. “Push it and you’ll be sorry.”

  His gaze swung back to Jacob. He took a step back.

  “I am truly sorry,” Jacob said. “Would you like to take the food with you, and take my sister and her companions? Or will you go alone?”

  “Send the food. Send the people. And bring me my mother’s body. I won’t bury her in this valley. Before the en
d comes, you’ll be digging up corpses for food. Mark my words.”

  “What do you think he meant by that?” Eliza asked as the two pickups rolled down the highway toward the refugee encampment. She was in the lead pickup with her brothers, Jacob and David, as well as Stephen Paul Young.

  Jacob had been stewing over Kemp’s curse—almost biblical in its flavor and the dread it inspired—since the man muttered it six hours earlier.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “You mean that thing about eating corpses?” David asked from the back. “Miriam told me about that. Damn creepy. He’s lucky she didn’t shoot him.”

  Kemp was so unhinged after Jacob’s ill-advised admission that they were escorting him back to the camp with what passed for Blister Creek’s entire police department, now that Steve Krantz was gone. Kemp sat in the backseat of the other pickup truck’s extended cab, flanked by Miriam and Dale Trost, formerly of the Cedar City PD, a refugee himself. Lillian drove. Jacob had radioed ahead to the Moroni checkpoint, where Smoot and his sons were back on the guns, and warned them about the situation.

  “If you ask me,” Stephen Paul said, “we’re too lenient with this ungrateful jerk. Those kids would have died if you hadn’t gifted them our precious medicines.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” Jacob said.

  “Until your own children get sick next winter and you’ve got no way to treat them.”

  “Three months of food is ridiculous,” David added.

  “It’s not a gift,” Jacob said. “We’re asking him to take three people out of the valley.”

  “That covers their medical care,” Stephen Paul said. “And the food you already gave them. If they balk, we force them at gunpoint.”

  “I might have saved his mother. I didn’t. That’s worth something.”

  David started to say something else, but Jacob asked them all to stop arguing. They continued in silence.

  The sun squatted overhead by the time the trucks reached the Moroni checkpoint. A cloudless sky stretched from horizon to horizon, unbroken by cloud or contrail. It wasn’t the brilliant blue of years past, but tinged with slate, with a reddish smear around the horizon. When Jacob’s group stepped out of the truck, he was surprised to discover the air was as hot and dry as over-toasted bread. It tasted chalky. They shuffled out of their jackets and left them in the trucks.

  “Maybe summer is finally here,” David said. “Time to plant the fields?”

  “It’s one day,” Stephen Paul said. “Don’t get too excited.”

  “Go ahead,” Jacob told Lillian as she rolled down the window of the second pickup truck. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Smoot came striding over from the pillbox. He eyed Miriam, Trost, and Lillian as they drove off with Joe Kemp toward the refugee encampment.

  Smoot stroked his beard and scowled after his daughter; like the other two women, Lillian wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Over the past six months, the prairie dress had been falling out of fashion with the women of the valley; it was a look now reserved mainly for girls and elderly women. The women of Smoot’s household maintained the older style, and no doubt he would have insisted that his daughter dress appropriately. Jacob enjoyed the discomfort in Smoot’s face; the man wanted to speak up, but couldn’t. Once he’d given her to David for marriage, he’d surrendered that right.

  Smoot turned to Jacob. “Regretting it now?”

  “Regretting what?”

  “Not cutting them down like I suggested. I warned you—they’re locusts.”

  Jacob felt his face flush. With Helen Kemp’s body stiffening in the back of the truck, Smoot’s callous words rubbed him raw.

  Eliza interposed herself between Jacob and the church elder. “Now is not the time to push my brother, Elder. Get in the truck. You can help us with these supplies.”

  Smoot ignored her. His sons manned the .50-cal in the pillbox, and their presence seemed to bolster his recalcitrance. Today it was Grover again, plus his older brother Bill, a man with two wives and several children. Their horses grazed nearby, tethered to an iron ring on the side of the bunker.

  Smoot lifted the tarp on one of the pickups to inspect the supplies beneath. “Giving away the farm, Christianson?”

  “You know why.”

  “Yes, to chase down your sister’s boyfriend. Don’t know why she can’t marry a righteous man of the church instead of a gentile.”

  “Steve Krantz is one of us now.”

  “Fine. Former gentile. He’s still one man. You ever think maybe he doesn’t want to come back? That Eliza tricked him into baptism and he took the first chance to run like the devil? And straight into the devil’s arms, I’d say.”

  Eliza bristled visibly at this, but didn’t take the bait. Good for her. Neither did Jacob. He reached into his truck to fetch several sheets of paper from the glove compartment. Then he called Stephen Paul over and handed him the papers.

  “A list of stuff we need. I’m sending you with silver coins to buy it all, if you can. Don’t go mucking around war zones and abandoned towns, but if you can get these things—especially antibiotics—it will save lives.”

  “Justification for a foolhardy plan,” Smoot said. “We’re going to risk three lives to save one, that’s the bottom line.”

  “Where’s your faith?” Stephen Paul demanded. “Brother Jacob wouldn’t send us into the desert to be killed.”

  “And did you test that or swallow it blindly?” Smoot asked him. “Did you fall to your knees and ask the Lord if it was right to leave your wives and children?”

  “Of course I did.” Stephen Paul sounded shocked at the question. “The instant Jacob called to ask, I gathered my wives and we all prayed together to know the Lord’s will.” He gave Smoot a sharp look. “You must have heard the plan at the same time I did. Didn’t you pray about it?”

  “Well, no,” Smoot said, sounding uncomfortable. “It was all so sudden, and I wasn’t asked to go.”

  “But I was. So I did.”

  Stephen Paul had played a trump card, against which there could be no argument. The Lord had confirmed it. What greater proof could there be? Of course both elders were operating on the assumption that Jacob would never take such a dangerous step without praying about it himself first. Which he hadn’t done, shamefully enough.

  He was doing it for Eliza. If he didn’t, she’d go off on her own, and he could never allow that. So yes, Smoot was at least partly right about the supply-gathering nonsense.

  “I still say it’s a fool’s errand,” Smoot grumbled after a long, uncomfortable pause. “But fine, let’s get this over with.” He called over his shoulder. “Bill, anything funny happens on that ridge, you know what to do.”

  “Um . . .”

  Jacob made his way to the bunker and looked in the gun slit. “What you do is you wait for my signal. Don’t start shooting because something looks funny. You got that?”

  “Yes.” Bill didn’t look at his father.

  “You too, Grover.”

  “Yes, Brother Jacob.” Smoot’s younger son looked even more frightened to be obeying Jacob instead of his father.

  Fortunately, Smoot didn’t make an issue of it, but climbed into the pickup truck with the others. They drove slowly down the road until they caught up with Kemp and his minders, waiting in the road opposite the refugee camp.

  Kemp and two other refugees retrieved the body and carried it up to their camp. Jacob waited until they were gone before he called his companions out of the trucks. They waited for Kemp to return. When he did, his face was stony and unreadable.

  Jacob cleared his throat. “Does your bus have a working engine?”

  “It did two weeks ago,” Kemp said. “That was the last time we had fuel. It was barely enough to get us to the outskirts of Vegas. Don’t know if it would still work or not.”
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br />   Trost and David pulled back the tarps on the first pickup truck and hauled out plastic buckets filled with wheat and dried peas and carried them to the camp.

  “Sounds like you could use some diesel,” Jacob said.

  He grabbed a five-gallon container and dragged it to the edge of the bed. There were four fuel containers in all.

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “We are savers. It’s almost gone, but I think I can spare twenty gallons.”

  That was a lie. Slowly but surely they were draining the supplies Jacob’s father had laid up before his death, but they still had several huge tanks hidden in the ground behind the abandoned service station.

  “What about our wagons?”

  “Load your people into the bus and stuff it full. The draft animals will make better time pulling empty wagons.”

  “Five miles an hour, maybe. And twenty gallons is nothing.”

  “You show up, you make demands,” Miriam said. “You take our food, our fuel, and give us nothing in return. You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

  “Heaven forbid you help your fellow humans in need,” Kemp said.

  “Twenty gallons,” Jacob said. “Five miles an hour. Five miles per gallon for the bus—isn’t that about right?”

  “Not quite, but okay.”

  “That’s a hundred miles. I know a place you can go, near the abandoned marina at Lake Powell. The lake is deserted and full of fish. There’s water for irrigation. Might be some old trailers to live in when winter comes.”

  Kemp stared. “And that’s your best offer?”

  “That’s my only offer. You’ve got a chance, anyway. That’s the best anyone can hope for these days.”

  The refugees and the men and women from Blister Creek worked together. Kemp’s people were sullen at first, but they warmed when Eliza distributed mended socks and handwoven wool mittens. Children squealed with delight when Lillian produced homemade honey drops. The bus was clean of vermin, but the stench of body odor and unwashed clothing made Jacob’s eyes water.