Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  “Which Taylor Junior sniffed out somehow.”

  “True. But still, you can’t spot this passage from the valley floor?”

  “Not easily. The pass drops out where Witch’s Warts abuts the Ghost Cliffs. It’s the deepest, least accessible part of the entire labyrinth. You stand at the bottom and you see a crack in the cliffs, that’s all.”

  “I’m skeptical.”

  “Because of the messenger?” she asked.

  “Yes, in part. I wish you’d told me this earlier, when it wasn’t life and death.”

  “You knew he had a way, though. Put it together with the sinkhole where he hid out.”

  “You know about that?” Jacob asked.

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  Jacob had to admit that it formed a complete picture. Suppose Taylor Junior had waited out his pursuers over the course of several weeks, and then, guessing correctly that the first place Jacob and the FBI would relax their vigil would be the outer perimeter of the valley, had escaped up the cliffs.

  “You see?” she said. “It all makes sense.”

  “Could someone climb it in the dark?”

  “Maybe. It’s a steep, treacherous path.”

  “Without a flashlight?” he asked. “So Taylor Junior couldn’t be spotted by someone in the town?”

  “He’d be taking his life into his own hands.”

  “That never stopped him before,” Jacob said. “You’ve seen it where it comes down? Could you tell me how to find where it emerges into Witch’s Warts?”

  “How well do you know the labyrinth?”

  “Better than most. Not as well as our enemy apparently.” While it was true that Jacob had never seen the secret path, he had explored the area where Witch’s Warts met the escarpment. One of the few who had, he guessed.

  “Then I can tell you how to find it.”

  Rebecca explained. He would find a sawlike scar across the cliff, marked at the base with scattered boulders and loose, crumbling schist. Two Joshua trees with their branches almost entwined. The scar wouldn’t look passable, but that was the path down. Jacob listened and repeated everything to keep it fixed in his head.

  Moments after she finished, his radio crackled. He started at the sudden noise, then groped to answer.

  “Our girls called from the road.” It was Stephen Paul, his voice buzzing with excitement. “A military Humvee sped past their position a few seconds ago, heading this way. Mounted gun on the back and everything, like Krantz said.”

  Jacob’s stomach lurched. “How long have we got?”

  “Thirty minutes, tops.”

  “Call reinforcements. I want the road covered from all sides. Let’s finish this thing.” He hung up and turned to Rebecca. “Looks like that won’t be necessary. For once, we guessed right.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about last time. Taylor Junior divided his forces to attack both the hospital and Blister Creek.” She unpacked the box of ammunition for her assault rifle, which suddenly looked like a welcome addition to the coming fight.

  “Krantz said there were only four men.”

  “Only four men last time too.”

  “But we’re ready this time. With any luck, they have no idea how ready, but they’ve got to know we’re a hardened target from last time. We’ve run a continual patrol since last summer—they must know that. Even without the ambush, they’d be sure to run into someone, and then there’d be a fight. You know how to shoot that thing?” he added as she shoved a clip into her gun.

  “I do. If you can get a clean shot, undetected, and take down that .50-cal, I’ll lay down suppressing fire until your reinforcements arrive.”

  But Jacob was thinking about the security footage from the temple. Taylor Junior had infiltrated through Witch’s Warts, walked past the temple, and then returned to the labyrinth using the same path. At the time, the seeming purposelessness of that gesture had bothered Jacob, but now he thought he understood.

  “It was a dry run,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Taylor Junior came into town a few weeks ago. We caught him on camera. He came in via Witch’s Warts. It was a test.” He turned to her and blinked. “You heard the motorcycle? I thought it was Henry Johnson’s ATV, but I think I was wrong. I think that was Taylor Junior on a motorcycle. He must have split off from the others, driven around the far side of the reservoir, and taken his secret path to Witch’s Warts.”

  “Then he’s already on his way down,” she said. “While he sent his men forward with the Humvee and the machine gun.”

  “And what is he trying to do?”

  “The same things he always wants. Kill you and kidnap Eliza.”

  “I know that, but how on earth does this help him do it? One guy on foot, while the whole valley is in an uproar. He has no way to find me or my sister. And even if he can get to my house…” He stopped, more confused than ever. “We’re ready for him. He knows that. What is he thinking?”

  “He’s thinking he has help. He’s not alone. And I’m not talking about the guys in the Humvee.”

  Jacob’s hand went to his scalp and felt the sore spot where he’d bashed his head in the fall. “The evil spirit? You think he’s insane?”

  “Of course he’s insane. But I also believe that thing is real. And what I believe doesn’t matter. What you believe doesn’t matter. What matters is what Taylor Junior believes.”

  He understood now. “He thinks an angel will protect him, he thinks he cannot be killed.” Jacob rose to his feet. “Stop the Humvee. They can’t get to Blister Creek. I don’t care what it takes, you have to stop them here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  He grabbed his rifle. “To find Taylor Junior.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jacob crossed the road and found David crouching in the darkness. The two boys lay still in their sleeping bags a few feet away. Jacob explained where he was going and said he didn’t want to leave Daniel behind.

  His brother frowned. “What are you planning to do, take him with you into Witch’s Warts? Back where he had a psychotic break a few hours ago? That’s insane.”

  “Of course not. I’ll drop him off at the house with Fernie and the others. They could use another gun. Even if there’s a boy holding it.”

  “We can use another gun here too,” David said. “Besides, it’s not going to be any safer at the house. Not if that woman is right and Taylor Junior is already climbing down the cliff. What if Taylor Junior gets past you? Where’s the first place he’ll go?”

  “I know that, David,” Jacob said. “You think I wanted to leave my paralyzed wife with that monster out there? Of course he’s not safe there, but I can’t take him with me into Witch’s Warts either.”

  “You have to leave him here.”

  “Right, so he can wait for a bunch of fanatics to show up with heavy machine guns. They’ll kill you all.” Jacob caught the grimace on his brother’s face. “Sorry.”

  David put a hand on his arm. “You picked a good spot. They’re not expecting us. And reinforcements are already on the way. We’ll keep the boys to the rear.”

  Stephen Paul’s radio crackled to their right. He emerged from the darkness, said something to someone on the other end, then clipped the radio to his belt. “Ten minutes until our reinforcements arrive. It will be close.”

  “You’ve got to go,” David said. “You can’t let Taylor Junior get through.”

  Jacob hesitated one last time, and then nodded. “Keep Daniel safe. And for God’s sake, don’t let him out of your sight.”

  “I’m not taking chances. Don’t forget, my son is here too. Go!”

  As Jacob hurried back toward the trucks, he heard Stephen Paul on the radio, warning people with itchy fingers not to shoot at Jacob’s vehicle as he drove past them in the dark.

  Jacob tossed his rifle in on the passenger side, then got behind the wheel, pulled back, and turned around.
An aching loneliness filled his gut, and he longed for someone else sitting next to him. David, maybe, or Miriam—he could use her ruthless attitude. No, the person he really wanted was his sister, Eliza. Her clear head and determination when facing the Kimballs would clear his muddled thoughts and the creeping sense of dread that he felt when imagining himself alone in Witch’s Warts, hunting for and being hunted by Taylor Junior. The final showdown between Kimball and Christianson.

  He was almost to the switchbacks that led into the valley when a rifle crack sounded from the road to his rear. Suddenly the night lit up in his rearview mirror and his vehicle seemed to shudder with gunfire. A stream of tracer bullets sliced back and forth across the road. Something flared through the darkness and exploded with a flash of light and a rattling boom.

  The battle had begun.

  Jacob passed three vehicles on his way down. He flashed his lights as they edged by and then continued past him with engines revving, taking the switchbacks with dangerous speed. He tried to get Stephen Paul on the radio. These newcomers needed a warning. The .50-cal would slice through their vehicles like they were rusty tin cans on a fence post. But Stephen Paul didn’t pick up. Probably the man couldn’t hear over the shooting.

  Two more vehicles raced past him as he got to the valley floor. He pulled onto a ranch road that branched east not far from Grandma Cowley’s cabin on Yellow Flats. A wind blew off the cliffs and sent dust devils scurrying like spiders across the road in front of his headlights. A tumbleweed slammed into his windshield and clung there, shuddering, until it broke apart and flew away in pieces. He drove into a second, stronger dust devil that sent sand pinging like rain against the roof. It grew so bad as he approached the narrow tip of Witch’s Warts on the north side that he slowed to a crawl and cut to parking lights only. The beams only made it harder to see.

  But the wind faded and died as he parked the truck. He climbed out to find a fine haze of dust hanging in the air, the lighter particles suspended like mud dissolved in water. They coated his mouth and nose until they too began to fall out of the air.

  The strange shift in the wind left Jacob grasping for explanations. He’d seen his share of weird weather, but nothing like this. Perhaps it was only in this exact spot next to the cliffs, where a sudden drop in elevation and air pressure combined with the approaching cold front to churn up random eddies of air.

  He doesn’t want you here.

  Jacob tried to dismiss the thought, but it lingered, unwelcome and malignant.

  He went around to the passenger side to grab his rifle and a box of shells, then fished out a Beretta and a pencil-beamed flashlight from the glove compartment. He tucked the light, the pistol, and the ammunition into a pocket in his jacket, slung the rifle over his shoulder, shut the door as quietly as he could manage, and slipped away from the truck. The wind picked up again, but it was a lower, moaning current, more from the northwest this time. It brought the sounds of battle, the distant chatter of a machine gun, the snap of rifle fire. A moment later the wind shifted and he heard nothing.

  Directly in front of him lay the dark shadows of Witch’s Warts, the looming stones like sentinels against the star-studded sky. As he picked his way by moonlight across the sand toward the labyrinth, the oppressive feeling grew, together with the sense that he was unwanted.

  Jacob didn’t fish out the flashlight until he got within the inky blackness of the maze itself, when the moon hid behind the sandstone fins. He flipped it on, picked his path, and then turned it off again. His feet crunched on the soil, and then he crossed a stretch of loose, deep sand that sank beneath his boots. At last he came to the point Rebecca had mentioned, where the final, thrusting sandstone fins mingled with the rocks and crumbled schist broken from the cliff.

  He scanned the cliff above him. It was exactly as she’d described. A jagged scar sliced its way down, back and forth like the warped edge of a saw. The moonlight highlighted the black edge of the scar but didn’t penetrate it. No light or movement between the valley floor and the upper reaches of the Ghost Cliffs.

  A nervous tickle moved through his gut at the thought that he might be too late—that, as impossible as it seemed, Taylor Junior had scurried down the cliff edge like a human spider and arrived before Jacob, and was already deep in Witch’s Warts. But maybe Taylor Junior didn’t have a flashlight—maybe he was groping his way down like a blind insect in a cave.

  Jacob turned his back to shield his own light, flipped it on, and searched for footprints along the sand at the cliff base. There was only one way out of that fissure and into Witch’s Warts, here between a large, broken boulder and past the two Joshua trees. No tracks. The wind might have scoured them clean, but he didn’t think so. Only thirty or forty minutes had passed since Jacob heard the motorcycle whining around the edge of the reservoir.

  He turned the light off and walked back and forth along the base of the cliff until he found the spot where he was sure Taylor Junior would emerge. He turned his attention to the broken boulder, mostly likely shaken free by whatever cataclysm tore the fissure in the cliff wall and then split in two when it slammed into the valley floor. It was the shape of a broken molar and the size of a small house. Jacob spent a few minutes gathering tumbleweed, which he piled up against the rock where it met the hillside, as if the brush had been driven there by the wind. If Taylor Junior came down in the darkness, Jacob would still see and hear him clearing the tumbleweed out of the way.

  Jacob wedged himself between the broken pieces of the boulder, carefully considering the angle of the moon to make sure it left most of his body in shadow even as it bathed the cliff in moonlight. He settled down to wait.

  Cold seeped from the sandstone into his back, and he buttoned his jacket. As he got to the final button, his wrist brushed a hard lump in his right jacket pocket. The box of rifle shells and the nine-millimeter pistol sat in the opposite pocket, and for a moment Jacob couldn’t remember what he’d stuck in this side. He slipped his hand in with a frown. His fingers closed around Grandma Cowley’s diary. Before he knew what he was doing, he had it out and on his lap.

  Not now. Remain alert.

  It was quiet, though, and there was no way he would miss the sound of Taylor Junior scraping the last few feet down the fissure in the cliff and then pushing through the pile of tumbleweeds. And then there was the flashlight the man would need to navigate that last, treacherous part. Surely he couldn’t cross that stretch by feel.

  Jacob propped the rifle next to him and laid the pistol across his lap. He opened Grandma Cowley’s diary and turned it until he caught enough moonlight to render legible the fine, neat cursive.

  May 29, 1893

  I met my coconspirators in Witch’s Warts after midnight. Sister Nannie arrived first, nervously wringing her hands. She had shed her baby fat over the past two years, and her face was tan and lean, her hair bleached silk-white by the sun. She was developing into a real beauty, I thought, the kind who would have turned heads in Salt Lake. If only she hadn’t married so young.

  Laura and Maude came together. Each woman held a lamp, one with her left hand and the other with her right. They moved apart as they came around the sandstone fin. A look passed between them as they stopped in the clearing.

  “You have to stop that,” I said.

  “Stop what?” Maude asked.

  “Holding hands.”

  “What? We weren’t—”

  “Annabelle isn’t here yet,” I said, “and Nannie knows to keep her mouth shut, don’t you, Nannie?”

  The girl nodded.

  “What you do is your own business,” I continued, “but if you aren’t more careful, the men will see. Hyrum would be furious, but that wouldn’t be the worst of it. Imagine if Jedediah finds out.”

  The lamp trembled in Maude’s hands. I took it away and set it next to my own lantern, then took the woman by the shoulders. “You have to end it now.”

  Maude looked me in the eyes. “I don’t want to end it. Laura, she’s
different. Her husband isn’t—well, he’s not Jedediah Kimball.”

  I said, “Hyrum has limitations too—he’s far from perfect.”

  “I’m not asking for perfect. But it’s not too much to expect a decent human being.”

  “I’ll go to the prophet when he comes to dedicate the temple. He won’t make you stay with a monster.” I glanced at Nannie. “Either of you.”

  “Wait until the temple is built?” Maude said. “That could be years. And anyway, I’ve decided. I don’t want any man.”

  What was she saying? I’d never heard of such a thing, and I doubted Laura felt the same way. I’d heard her in the next room with Hyrum that first night, and she had been taking pleasure.

  “We don’t have time to work it out, not now. But whatever you do, you must be more discreet. So discreet that you fool not only your own husbands but your own sister wives. And me. If I see it, others will too.”

  Both women nodded.

  “Good,” I continued. I looked into the darkness beyond our lanterns. “Now, where the devil is Annabelle?”

  “She is coming,” Nannie said, her Swedish accent thicker than usual. “But she is sleeping with Jedediah tonight, yes? She must be careful.”

  I didn’t want to wait. It was a hot night, with a low, oppressive cloud cover that left the air unusually humid. I guessed that a summer storm was on its way and I didn’t want to be caught in the labyrinth if it started pouring rain.

  “What are we going to do?” Laura asked.

  “I won’t be a slave to men,” I said. “That’s my starting point. We built this town, we cleared the land, we laid the foundations, we dug ditches and dammed the creek for irrigation. Thirty-four months of backbreaking labor, with no men and few animals. And now what do they want? They’ve seen what we’ve built, and now they want to seize the lot of it.”

  “Do you remember that week we spent measuring fields with a wagon wheel?” Laura asked. “And another week putting together the map, with all the grazing land, farms, and building lots sketched out? Jason Pratt tore up the map. Said it was the work of amateurs, and who needed so much community garden space anyway? A park by the creek? Waste of good farmland.”