Hell's Fortress

by Michael Wallace

  Cedar City itself sat below them like a giant map. It was a Mormon pioneer town with wide, leafy streets laid out on a grid in the downtown, sprawling from there into the surrounding farm and grazing land. Or that’s what it had been two years earlier. Now, block after block of the newer subdivisions to the south and west lay in blackened ruins. Houses gone, fields turned to ash. No trees. Essentially, anything that touched or drew near I-15 was gone. Nearly two-thirds of the city of thirty thousand people, obliterated.

  “Good lord,” Trost said. “What the devil happened down there?”

  “It wasn’t that way last fall?” Eliza asked.

  “No, it wasn’t like this at all. We were holding on—by the tips of our fingers, but managing. And look, there’s not a single car on the freeway, or any of the side roads. Is there no fuel? None at all?”

  “There’s more traffic in Blister Creek,” Grover said.

  “Look, there’s a rider,” Miriam said. “No, two.”

  About a mile away and several hundred feet below, two men on horseback trotted down the road before disappearing beneath the trees that still grew on the east side of town.

  “There had better be cops,” Trost said with a grumble. “If I get down there and find my officers have deserted the force, I’m going to crack some skulls.”

  They pushed the truck to the side of the road, where they unloaded the tools salvaged from the house. These they hid in the scrub oak that lined the road.

  From there, they descended into town on foot. The air smelled of a distant brush fire. It was quiet. No chainsaws, lawnmowers, trucks, or any of the other sounds you’d associate with a small town on a summer day. The houses in the uppermost foothills were abandoned, yards overgrown with weeds. Front doors hung open, with the contents of the homes salvaged—or looted, depending on your point of view. Several had burned down.

  Lower still, they came upon a farmer’s wide field, now given over to hand-carved wooden grave markers. Hundreds and hundreds of them marched across the field. The upper part of the makeshift cemetery showed signs of fresh digging, while below, grass had grown up around the markers. They came upon another field of fresh graves around the next bend, this one even larger.

  Four men were digging graves at the end of the field, while a fifth stood at watch, armed with a rifle. Three bodies lay side by side next to the first grave, wrapped in sheets. One of the men stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand. He leaned against his shovel and happened to glance up the road. He spotted the newcomers and dove for the ground with a shout.

  The man with the rifle swung it around and aimed it at the four companions. He screamed for them to freeze. They raised their hands.

  The man with the rifle started to come forward, then stopped after several paces. “Dale Trost? That you?”

  “Hank Gibson?” Trost said. “What the devil is going on here?”

  “TB. More victims.”

  “What’s with the chain gang?”

  “Looters.”

  The scene shifted in Eliza’s mind as they followed Trost’s lead and cautiously approached the others. It wasn’t a man protecting workers. It was a man standing guard over four prisoners. Chains and manacles linked them together; she hadn’t noticed that at first. Their heads were shaved and they wore gaunt, hungry expressions. Two of them were kids, no older than sixteen. One of these was missing an ear. An angry gash, poorly stitched, marked its absence.

  Gibson was a tall, wiry man with an iron-gray mustache. He was missing two fingers on his left hand.

  He turned to the men. “Get to work, you dogs.”

  The prisoners returned to their labors. Picks clanked stones. Shovels tossed dirt out of the hole.

  Trost gestured at the boy with the missing ear. “Who did that?”

  “You steal a man’s food, you join the work crew. You break into his house to do it, you lose an ear. Second time, it’s a hand. Hard cases, we fit ’em with a necktie.” He stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and pantomimed raising a rope at his neck.

  “Is that the law these days?” Trost asked.

  “You have a better idea? These vermin are like rats. We can’t keep them out.”

  “Did you say tuberculosis?” Eliza asked. “I’ve never heard of that around here.”

  “Third outbreak since December. We’ve lost hundreds already.”

  “Yeah, I can see from the graves,” Trost said. “Though it looks more like thousands, to me.”

  “You can thank the army for that,” one of the prisoners said. “Bombed us out. That’s why we stole that food. What choice did we have?”

  “Shut up and get digging,” Gibson said. He turned back to the newcomers. “He’s mostly right. Bandits took over the old Walmart and instead of sending in the National Guard like we asked, the government flew a couple of B-52s over and turned half the town to rubble. That made the problem worse.” He looked Trost over with a critical eye. “They say you hooked up with the polygs. Looks like they’re keeping you fed.”

  “I’ve been earning my keep,” Trost said. “But I’ve still lost a good twenty pounds.”

  “Could have been fifty. Could have been all of it.” He met Eliza’s gaze, then sized up Miriam and Grover. “Is the mountain road open?”

  “No, it’s closed,” Miriam said.

  “How did you get over, then?”

  “It’s closed with .50-caliber machine guns,” she clarified. “And land mines. Sniper rifles. Grenades.”

  “Yeah, I got it. You fundies take care of your own. Well, Trost, it’s a good gig if you can get it.”

  “Who’s in charge?” Eliza asked. “Is there a mayor?”

  “The army came through last fall after bombing the place and arrested the mayor and the city council. When the army pulled out, the Cedar City PD declared martial law. I’m chief of police now. So that means me, I’m in charge.”

  “You?” Trost sounded aghast.

  “What was I supposed to do? You left. Mendoza died of meningitis. Phillips and Wirtz were killed in the riots.”

  “What about Nielsen? Udall?”

  “Nielsen is a young guy—the army drafted him when they came through and we never heard from him again. Udall disappeared. They say he ran for the hills with his wife and kids. His brother has a ranch somewhere by Price. Or maybe it was in Arizona. That makes me the last guy standing. What are you doing here anyway? These your new wives? Who’s the kid?”

  “We’re on our way to Los Angeles,” Eliza said. “We had a run-in with bandits, and we’re hoping to resupply in Cedar City.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Mostly food, but also firearms. They took everything.”

  Gibson grabbed a shovel from one of the prisoners and used it to measure the depth of the last grave. “That’s good enough, boys. Get those bodies in the ground and cover ’em up. Looks like you earned supper tonight.” He turned to the others. “Have you got anything to trade?”

  “We do,” Eliza said. “Good tools—axes, saws, wrenches, all sorts of stuff.”

  “Shovels too,” Trost said. “Yours look well-used.”

  “We’ve got plenty of tools,” Gibson said. “We’ll take what you’ve got, of course—stuff wears out, there’s no way to replace it. But we can’t pay much. What we need is fuel. Or silver. That still has value. Got anything like that?”

  “I told you,” Eliza said. “We were robbed by bandits.”

  “Then you’d better go back to Blister Creek and get something useful.”

  “If we could do that, we wouldn’t need your help in the first place,” Miriam said.

  Trost had been edging forward during this conversation and now stood close enough to Gibson to lay a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Help me out here. It was me who got you that job in the first place. Don’t you at least want to
see the tools?”

  “Tell you what,” Gibson said. “Come down to the house and I’ll feed you the same supper I was going to give to these fools. Two hardboiled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal.”

  “How generous,” Miriam said.

  Eliza gave her a look and she closed her mouth.

  “You have any idea what that’s worth these days?” Gibson said.

  “We’ll take it,” Trost said. “What about the tools?”

  “We’ll check them out in the morning. If they’re any good, I’ll give you enough food to see you back over the mountains where you belong. You want to come this way again, you’d better be prepared to pay your way.”

  By the time the prisoners had finished burying the bodies, the sun was sinking over the western desert behind a rim of red and purple fire. The distant mountain ranges were almost glowing. It was the most brilliant (and weird) sunset Eliza had seen yet.

  The prisoners trudged down the highway, chains clanking together, while Gibson followed with his rifle slung over one shoulder. The four companions from Blister Creek brought up the rear.

  It was still late afternoon in Los Angeles, four hundred and fifty miles across the desert. Somewhere out there, Steve was waiting. Eliza had no intention of returning to Blister Creek until she found him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Minutes after finishing their miserly dinner of oatmeal and hardboiled eggs, Miriam rose from the table and said she wanted to go back and hide their tools better. They hadn’t planned to leave them overnight and she said she was worried about bandits.

  Eliza was suspicious of the overly casual tone in her sister-in-law’s voice. “Alone? It’s dark up there. Can you even find the way?”

  “I’ll be fine. Look, if thieves find our truck, they’ll find our tools. We lose those and this jerk won’t give us so much as a dog biscuit.”

  Gibson lived in a mansion on the bench overlooking Cedar City. A pair of Ferraris sat in the front yard like the world’s most expensive lawn ornaments. They certainly weren’t going anywhere. The interior of the house was posh, with cathedral ceilings and a kitchen dripping in marble. Eliza didn’t think Trost’s eyebrows could rise any higher to see how his former deputy had set himself up. Then the servants appeared.

  But even though Gibson seemed to think of himself as some sort of overlord of the struggling town, when the last daylight faded, he did not have any lights to turn on. They ate on the deck, beneath the moonlight. Cedar City lay dark as a ghost town below them.

  And when Gibson joined them for dinner, the only concession to his status was a package of stale cookies that he snacked on when they’d finished the eggs and oatmeal. He didn’t offer to share.

  “Stay here,” Eliza told Miriam. “Maybe later we’ll all go out together.”

  “I’m going,” Miriam said. “You can come with me or hang out here, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m serious. We need to stick together. Look, will you take Grover, at least?”

  “What good is he going to do?”

  Grover rose to his feet. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  “What, because you think I need a man?”

  “Two is safer than one,” Eliza said. She wasn’t worried about Miriam’s safety so much as the woman’s intentions. “Take him. Please.”

  “Fine. Come on, Grover.”

  “Don’t go mucking around,” Gibson said. “You get tempted to help yourself to anyone’s property, you think long and hard about those men on the chain gang this afternoon.”

  Miriam fixed him with a hard look. “Weren’t you one of the deputies who came with Trost to investigate Blister Creek a couple of years ago after the chemical weapons attack?”

  Gibson stammered. “Well, yes.”

  “You saw what we did, and you still want to pick a fight?”

  Gibson fell quiet until Miriam and Grover were gone, picking their way around the wraparound deck instead of going back through the house. “Damn it, Trost. What kind of game are you playing here?”

  “No game,” Trost said.

  Eliza leaned across the table. “We’re not enemies, Mr. Gibson.”

  “Doesn’t mean we’re friends either.”

  “As far as I know, Blister Creek and Cedar City are the only towns left standing in southern Utah. Why can’t we help each other out?”

  “So you’re planning to share your food?” Gibson asked. “That’s right, I know what you’re sitting on. Word is spreading fast. Soon everyone will know.”

  “We don’t have to share food to help each other,” she said. “We can keep the mountain passes open. Spread information. Guard the roads north and south against bandits. When things quiet down, we can trade.”

  “I don’t think so. I see what you’re trying to do.”

  Trost snorted. “And what’s that? You think we want to take over or something?”

  “Why not? Everyone else does.”

  What a paranoid fool, Eliza thought. Anyone could take Cedar City at any time. It was right on the freeway, exposed to the desert on three sides. But why would they want to? All it meant was more mouths to feed. More desert wilderness to fight over. The town had little food and poor prospects of growing their own.

  She had to get Gibson off this aggressive stance. “You can share information, though. That’s free, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “We lost our last AM station in the spring,” she said. “Did India and Pakistan ever go to war?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “No,” Trost said. “What happened? It didn’t go nuclear, did it?”

  “That’s all it was. Between the famine and the fuel shortages they didn’t have the ability to fight a ground campaign. Pakistan tried a sneak attack. India wasn’t fooled. For two weeks they went back and forth nuking each other’s cities.”

  “Sweet heavens,” Eliza said.

  “Pakistan hit the Indians with about three dozen bombs before they ran out,” Gibson continued. “India kept up the war for another two weeks before exhausting themselves. India landed about a hundred nukes. Nobody knows the exact number—news is scarce these days from that part of the world.”

  The horror of it made Eliza’s head swim, her stomach clench. “How many died?”

  “Maybe thirty million in India. It’s too big and Pakistan’s arsenal was too small to finish the job. But they’ll get their revenge. India is starving. Thirty million is just a start.”

  Her mouth was dry. “And Pakistan? How many died?”

  “All of them.”

  “There were two hundred million people in Pakistan,” Trost said. His voice was flat and heavy. “Surely not all.”

  “Close enough. Have you seen the sunsets? Volcanic ash and fallout. Bet we’re getting a nice dosage of radiation all the way over here.”

  “What about Japan and China?” Eliza asked. “Are they still fighting?”

  “Yeah, but the Chinese haven’t gone nuclear. Guess they know it would blow back in their faces. They tried to land a huge army in Kyushu. The navy didn’t make it across. A million men bobbing around in the Sea of Japan. The Chinese government is admitting to a hundred million dead from the famine. It’s probably worse than that. You heard about Europe?” Gibson added.

  “You mean the revolution in Britain?” Eliza said.

  “Germany and Italy now too. Spain is one big refugee camp. By the time they started turning away the Moroccans it was too late. In fact, about the only country still defending its borders over there is France. Nobody knows what is happening in Russia.”

  “We heard some of that,” Eliza said. “The evangelical radio station out of Denver claimed that whoever ended up with the Russian nuclear arsenal was going to blow up the Middle East and bring about the Second Coming.”

  “Not much left to blow up,” Gibson said
. “In March, the Israelis launched nuclear artillery shells against the Sinai camps. Couple of million Egyptians were trying to storm the country. It was a massacre. By that time there wasn’t an Egyptian government left to protest.”

  “We heard about that,” Trost said. “We still had radio then.”

  “Point is, most of those countries are simply gone. More or less starved to death or descended into anarchy.”

  “It can’t keep getting worse,” Eliza said. “Sooner or later the weather will clear and people will come to their senses.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Gibson said. “I’ll bet a billion people have died already. By the end of the year it will be another billion. Maybe more. For all we know, another nuclear war is going off right this minute. We lost radio contact ourselves about two weeks ago.”

  “Maybe it really is the end of the world,” Trost said. “Maybe only the coming of the Lord will save us.”

  Eliza didn’t want to dwell on that. That thinking pervaded Blister Creek; it was the belief that drove Miriam. The elect, in their desert sanctuary. Waiting for the end, when the wicked would burn like chaff. Jacob urged caution. Prepare for the worst, but don’t try to bring it on. She admired how he could maintain his faith in humanity and his doubt in doomsday prophesy against so much evidence. She struggled to do the same.

  They fell into silence. Crickets chirped from the darkness around them. Down the hillside, horse hooves clomped on pavement. A gunshot sounded from a few blocks away, up by the foothills to their rear. Eliza hoped it was a hunter in a blind. Not someone shooting at looters—say, at Miriam and Grover. Gibson didn’t react. Apparently gunfire was too common to remark on.

  The moon rose above the mountains behind the house. It was a deep, ruddy color, full and huge.

  “And the moon became as blood,” Trost said.

  Words from the scripture came to Eliza’s lips before she could hold them back. “For the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”

  “Enough of that,” Gibson said. “You’re creeping me out.”