Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

Jacob stopped reading. He put down the diary and blinked. What did she call herself?

  He flipped back the page to make sure. He had turned the page expecting to hear how Grandma Cowley defeated the angel. It was her style to say a thing bluntly and then backtrack and fill in the details.

  Except there were no details. Instead the diary skipped from December 1890 to May 1893. Twenty-nine months. There were no pages cut from the diary, nothing but a huge gap from one period to the next.

  Turn around, Rebecca Cowley, and run for your life.

  Rebecca? Grandma Cowley’s name was Henrietta, wasn’t it? He flipped open the diary and read the woman’s fine cursive: Henrietta Rebecca Cowley. He hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t realized that they called her Rebecca and not Henrietta. And what was that about the prophetess?

  His thoughts turned from Grandma Cowley—Rebecca Cowley—to the squatter with the same first name, now living at Yellow Flats.

  “Rebecca,” he whispered. “If that’s your real name. You have ambition, don’t you?”

  He was almost there. Beyond the mystery of the missing years in the diary, beyond Grandma’s battle with the dark angel in Witch’s Warts, told in vague, spiritual terms after a lead-up full of specific detail. Grandma Cowley called herself a prophetess.

  It was after midnight, and the house lay still all around him. This could wait until morning, but he had to talk it out with someone. He’d wake up Fernie. She’d understand. She’d help him puzzle it out.

  But before he could nudge her awake, the front door banged shut downstairs. Jacob froze, heart pounding. Every night he locked the doors, drew dead bolts and bars across the windows until the house was a fortress. Even if their enemies penetrated the sentry points that guarded the valley, they wouldn’t find the Christianson house an easy target. Yet someone had just entered the front door.

  His ears strained for any sound, for a voice or a footstep creaking on the stairs. He heard nothing. And then he noticed that his own bedroom door was open. His son’s sleeping bag lay empty on the floor. He hadn’t heard someone entering, he’d heard someone leaving.

  Jacob threw off the bedding and ran to the window even as Fernie stirred in the bed. He yanked open the curtains and looked down as she called his name in a concerned voice.

  A slender figure in pajamas walked barefoot down the front walk. As Jacob watched, he faded from the cone of light above the porch and disappeared into the darkness.

  Daniel.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The moon was so full and bright overhead that Eliza scarcely needed the flashlight, but she liked the solid metal weight of the Maglite in her hand. If someone came up behind her, she could bash him over the head and then grab for her gun. But the three flashlight beams knifing across the plain sent shadows dancing and contorting over the horror show that lay all around them.

  “Good Lord,” Krantz said. “This is creepy as hell. If anyone smells sulfur or anything funny, get those masks on ASAP.”

  “How the hell can I tell the difference?” Miriam said. “It’s all I can do to keep from putting it on now. Or vomiting.”

  Eliza considered Miriam relentless and without fear, but there was a queasy tone in her sister-in-law’s voice. David hadn’t wanted her to go, and Eliza had overheard them arguing from a back room of the half-built house while she waited awkwardly out front. Miriam had won the argument, but Eliza, looking at her sister-in-law with her hand over her mouth, wondered if she regretted that now.

  As for Eliza, she’d seen (and smelled) worse, but the sheer number of rotting carcasses, desiccated hides, and bleached skulls, along with the pervading stench, was enough to make her second-guess their timing. They should have waited until morning, for daylight and hopefully a cleansing breeze.

  Eliza turned her flashlight on a sheep skull, then a dead horse, or maybe a donkey—hard to say, since the body had dried to a husk. “Whatever happened here happened more than once. What did Agent Fayer say again? She’s sure it’s not chemical or radiological?”

  “I don’t think she was sure of anything,” Krantz said. “She couldn’t get straight answers from the Pentagon. But her hunch is that it’s environmental.”

  “Hope she’s right,” Miriam said. “If this ground is hot and that’s what killed these animals, we’ve already taken a lethal dose of radiation.”

  “Or what if Taylor Junior’s chemical weapons killed all these animals?” Eliza said. “Maybe this is where he got the lewisite.”

  “Fayer doesn’t think so,” Krantz said.

  Krantz had phoned Fayer again before they left Blister Creek to tell her of their plans and ask about the cryptic note at the bottom of her e-mail: IMPORTANT—site may be contaminated. If you check it out, call me FIRST. Fayer shared what she knew about the contaminated site and then made a few phone calls. By the time they got to Green River, she had SCBA gear waiting for them at the fire station, together with rebreathers and oxygen tanks. No questions asked.

  They stashed the ATVs and hiked the last few miles, each carrying a mask, regulator, and frame. Krantz also hauled the pressure tanks in an oversize duffel bag, which he hefted by the straps in one massive hand as if it weighed little more than a bag of Styrofoam peanuts.

  “What exactly did she say?” Eliza asked, hoping to parse Fayer’s words for something new.

  “Just what I said. Some environmental contaminant kept making the base workers sick. It was abandoned in the mid-eighties.”

  “Let’s keep going,” Miriam said. She swept her flashlight beam across the plain of dead animals. “I don’t know about you, but this rotting smell is making my stomach churn.”

  It smelled to Eliza as if they were a few miles downwind of a rendering plant. It was the kind of odor that coats the tongue and clogs in the nostrils—awful, but nothing bitter or cloying that would suggest poison.

  They continued on foot.

  After leaving Blister Creek, they’d driven north through Panguitch and along Highway 89 until they connected with I-70 East toward Green River. For a time Eliza had almost forgotten the grim purpose of their trip. There was little traffic on the roads, except for one curiously long stretch of Utah National Guard trucks that clogged the freeway for several miles. The weather was clear, and the horizons wide and beautiful as they sliced through central Utah with snowcapped mountains and stunning sandstone reefs always in sight. Miriam sat in the back of the extended cab truck, like a chaperone, while Eliza and Krantz joked and flirted up front. He was in a good mood, full of corny jokes and amusing anecdotes about his time throwing the hammer at USC. He told one story about sewage backing into the locker room and his best friend wearing a jockstrap like a gas mask that had both women laughing until they cried.

  They stopped at a rest area east of Salina, and Eliza met Miriam outside the bathroom, plunking quarters into a vending machine. Miriam glanced at Krantz, who had spread the map across a picnic table about thirty feet away. “He’s crazy about you, you know.”

  “Maybe. Sometimes I think he’s just flirting. Whenever I try to encourage him, he backs off.”

  “Didn’t look like he was backing off to me. When we saw that dead crow on the side of the road and he made that pun…”

  “We never did figure out the caws of death,” Eliza said with a smile.

  Miriam groaned. “Yeah, that one.”

  “It was funny.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was painful. He turns into a big goof ball when he sees you, and you laugh your head off at all his dumb jokes. And you left your hand on his knee.”

  “For two seconds,” Eliza said.

  “It was at least five. And he was blushing like crazy. He’s in love, Liz. Face it.”

  “Maybe. I kind of hope you’re right.”

  “That’s what I thought. So what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been almost a year since he moved to town. He’s terrified that this is the rest of his life. Blister Creek, Utah. Forever.”
<
br />   “You could leave,” Miriam said. “Both of you, together.”

  “You think we should?” she asked, surprised.

  “No, you should both get with the program before it’s too late. But you could, that’s my point.”

  Eliza didn’t know what to say. She’d tried leaving, but it wasn’t so easy to make your way in the real world, and if she moved away, she’d drift. These people she loved—Jacob, Fernie, David, Miriam—would turn into strangers. Forget whether or not she believed in the church, she believed in them. But was it fair to Steve to ask him to stay too?

  And now, searching in the dark through the bones and hides of dead animals, Eliza thought about the warm, pleasant drive, and it felt like a dream, her memory hazy and with the edges buffed off. Instead, she focused on Miriam’s instructions. The woman had taught Eliza how to use the SCBA gear as Krantz took them south from Green River through an ever-deteriorating network of paved, gravel, and rutted dirt roads that snaked deeper into the desert. Eliza hoped she wouldn’t need it now, in this awful, deadly landscape.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said. “Let’s call it a night and pick up the search in the morning.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Krantz said. “I’ve been thinking that since we parked the ATVs, but I didn’t want to be the first to call it quits.” He glanced down the slope at Miriam, who kept moving, her light sweeping back and forth. “You want to tell her?” he added.

  “I heard you,” Miriam said. “We can stop, but I’m not sleeping here. The smell is getting to me.” She started to say something else and then stopped. “Oh, that’s not good. You guys better check this out.”

  Eliza’s pulse quickened as she followed Krantz down the hillside, picking her way among the skeletons and rotting hides. Miriam stood in front of a scum-covered pond, her light shining on something dead, white, and bloated. It took Eliza a moment to realize what she was looking at. When she did, she took a step back, alarmed and disgusted.

  “And look over here,” Miriam said. She lifted up a set of white underwear. It was a single piece with the marks of the compass and square stitched over the breast, the horizontal navel mark over the belly, and another line over the right knee. And long underwear, not the shorter versions that the Salt Lake Mormons wore these days.

  “That means polygamists, right?” Krantz asked. “Then we’re close. But I don’t see any sort of military base.”

  “Good thing too, the way we’re waving these flashlights around,” Miriam said. “All the more reason to make camp and look in the morning. Let’s find high ground, away from the stench, where we can survey the area with binoculars as soon as it’s light.”

  “Are we sure there’s still a base standing?” Eliza said. “Why haven’t we stumbled over any outbuildings? Maybe they tore it down years ago, after the Cold War.”

  Krantz flashed the light on the dead man in the pool. “That tells me they didn’t.”

  “Then where is it? Underground?”

  “I’m calling Fayer,” Krantz said. He shrugged off his backpack and took out a satellite phone. He’d picked it up after the debacle in Dark Canyon, where they’d lost cell coverage for hours. You still couldn’t get a signal in a canyon or a place like Witch’s Warts. The satellite phone vastly increased their reach in the cell phone dead zones that blackened most of southern Utah.

  Krantz stepped away. “Give me a minute, will you?”

  As he walked away from Miriam and Eliza, it took Krantz a moment to realize why he wanted privacy. You’re embarrassed, that’s why.

  Look how far he’d fallen. Reduced to begging, and it was worse than the local badge flashers the FBI agents always mocked, because Krantz wasn’t just a small-town cop, he was a small-town cop in a fundy enclave, a broken-down ex-athlete, his instincts dulled, his judgment suspect.

  My god, you’re only thirty. Don’t get carried away.

  Still, he knew most of the guys in the agency lost all respect for him when he took the fall for the Kimball murders last year. Fayer claimed her share of the blame—she wasn’t the sort to weasel out of responsibility—but the agency threw the disaster on his shoulders, letting the media savage him like a terrier with a diseased rat. And plenty of people in the agency bought the official story too.

  It was just his luck that Agent Sullivan picked up instead of Fayer, his voice crackly and delayed on the other end of the satellite call. “Hey, Sully, it’s Krantz. Fayer there?”

  “Krantz? What the hell? We’re on stakeout, man. Who gave you this number?”

  Fayer, he wanted to say, but that might get her in trouble. “Buddy in Washington,” he lied. “Put her on. It’s important.”

  “How’s the desert? Chambers says you’ve gone Lawrence of Arabia.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve gone native. You’ve moved in with the tribe, learned the language, eaten their magic mushrooms, joined in their sacred dances. Forgot you’re an anthropologist, not a member of the tribe. So when the chief offers up his sweet, virginal, bare-breasted daughter, marrying her sounds like the most logical thing in the world. What’s the chick’s name? Is she a Kimball or a Christianson?”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Sully. Is Fayer there or not?”

  He laughed. “Don’t get your magic undies in a bunch. They got you wearing that stuff yet? Oh, calm down,” Sullivan added, this time not to the phone. Krantz heard Fayer snarling something about the magic underwear. “He doesn’t care, do you, buddy?”

  “Look, I only need her for a minute. Put her on the phone, will you? It’s an emergency.”

  “Need to run a plate on some joyriders? Bust an underage kegger?”

  “Sully…”

  “Just yanking your chain, dude. Here she is.”

  “Fayer here.”

  “Sorry to interrupt the stakeout, but—”

  She snorted. “We’re staking out Sully’s favorite pizza joint. Forget him, he’s being a jerk is all.”

  Yeah, Sully was a jerk. Didn’t mean the guy wasn’t right. Was Krantz ready to spend his life in Blister Creek as a small-town cop? Besides, giving up cigarettes was one thing, but coffee? And some days he wanted to finish the day by tossing back a cold beer. What was wrong with that?

  “Krantz?” Fayer said. “You’re not letting him get to you, are you?”

  “Sully? Nah, who cares? He’s probably right, anyway.”

  “No, he’s not, so quit apologizing for nothing. And if he mentions magic underwear one more time, I’m going to yank his tighty-whities so hard his nuts will explode.”

  Krantz laughed. “Can Mormons say that? Nuts?”

  “I just did. Now what’s up?”

  He told her where he was and what they’d discovered. She listened in silence. When he finished she said in a flat voice, “Sounds like you’ve found them, all right. Or close enough.”

  “So I’ll sit tight and wait for you to fly in with the cavalry?” Only silence on the other end. “Fayer? Dammit,” he said, assuming he’d lost the call.

  “No, I’m still here.”

  He shifted the phone to his other ear. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  “You’re on the sat phone? I’ll call you back.”

  The line went dead and he sat staring at the phone, confused and frustrated. A full minute went by, with Miriam and Eliza occasionally shining their beams in his direction, then continuing with an animated conversation—something about how many men Taylor Junior still had in his cult.

  The phone rang.

  “I’m on my cell,” Fayer said in a low voice. “Hope this doesn’t come back and bite me. Line might not be clean.”

  “Who the hell is tapping your phone?”

  “Probably nobody. But things are…weird. Never mind that. Look, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I don’t think they’ll give me resources for this.”

  “What? Why not? You pulled strings to get us into the prison. Now we’ve found the main guy. Is it the military
? Is this place a secret or something?”

  “Yeah, some kind of secret. Or it was. It’s bloody hard to get any info. My hunch is old ICBM silos, big stuff in the Cold War, abandoned about twenty years ago. The stuff is secret because nobody bothered to declassify the place. That’s my guess.”

  “So why would that stop anything? This jerk killed forty-two people. It was a goddamn slaughter.”

  “The military is not stopping anything. The problem is, nobody cares anymore.”

  “You’re not making any sense. Nobody cares about the forty-two murders?”

  “Krantz, I’m dead if this gets out. Literally dead. Executed.” She hesitated. “I am on stakeout. We’re following the governor of California.”

  “The what? Governor Jimenez? He’s dirty? The same guy whose campaign was basically ‘I am an Eagle Scout who helps old ladies cross the street and once hitchhiked across America to return a dollar bill to its rightful owner’? That governor?”

  “His problem isn’t corruption,” she said. “His problem is that he’s threatening to suspend agricultural exports from California.”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “No, he can’t. And he won’t.” A grim note entered her voice. “But he’s trying. The Department of Agriculture set up regional food-control boards. Jimenez is making noise about having them arrested if they enter the state. Says Californians are going to starve this year unless they feed their own state first. An unholy alliance of right-wing anti-federalists and Bay Area leftists in the legislature is goading him on.”

  “Wow, that’s…I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t you watch the news?” she asked.

  “Nobody has TV down here. Most people don’t have Internet either.” He hesitated. “So, you’re going after the governor of California. Who authorized that, the president?”

  “It’s not just the principle of the thing,” she said, ignoring the question, “and the fact that what Jimenez wants is illegal. Imagine if the other agricultural states follow suit. Where does that leave Arizona? Nevada? New York? Starving to death, that’s where. We’ve got to worry about the whole country, not one state.”