The Gates of Babylon

by Michael Wallace

  She shot the gunner twice. He fell away, arms flying skyward, and bent backward nearly double over the bunker wall. The other man grabbed for her arm, but she kicked his chest and knocked him back. Her gun barked two more times. He fell at her feet.

  Miriam holstered the pistol and knelt in the mud and slush and empty casings behind the machine gun. Her leg throbbed, but she could still feel her muscles. Not a serious wound. Not like the poor fools lying dead next to her.

  Half a belt of ammo left before she had to reload. She aimed down the road. No more need for night vision. The pickup truck was still burning to her left, and there were so many vehicle lights, flares on the road, and muzzle flashes that it wasn’t difficult to pick targets. She aimed the gun across the bridge at the back of the van, adjusted her aim with the first few tracer bullets, and then attacked. Two men threw themselves from the front passenger side door, but she ignored them and emptied the belt into the van. It spun out on the road.

  Miriam’s hands were numb, and it took several seconds to load more ammo and pull back the breech bolt. By the time she was ready to shoot again, she was taking fire from assault rifles and pistols to her left. She kept her head down, ignored them—hoping that Krantz had figured out where she was and was sniping her enemies from his blind—and focused her firepower at the remaining vehicles. By now the caravan from Colorado City had closed, and the two sides sat some hundred yards apart, blasting away at each other.

  She ended the fight.

  Rounds poured from the end of the .50-cal, and by the time she’d chewed through the belt, the enemy trucks were shredded and burning. Guns silent. No survivors fleeing onto the road.

  Jacob’s group jerked forward. The flatbed truck rammed through the burning vehicles to shove them out of the way, and then the Ford 250 and the Winnebago rolled through the gap and toward the ravine. They paused in front of the bridge, Miriam thought with some uncertainty, but then she saw a large figure swing onto the back of the flatbed truck, carrying a heavy bag. Krantz.

  Miriam fed a new ammo belt into the gun, but there was no need. Most of the gunfire was coming from the back of the trucks or out the window of the motor home, with sporadic return flashes answering from across the desert. But before the convoy pulled up to Miriam’s position even this failed. Krantz’s sniping and Miriam’s murderous fire into the heart of their defense had decimated their ranks. Whoever was left had abandoned the fight.

  Her adrenaline was gone, and she was shaking with cold and exhaustion. Fear mixed with relief. Miriam crawled over the top of the bunker. Her injured leg gave out and she nearly fell before she regained her feet and limped toward the road, waving her hands.

  The pickup truck was pulling ahead of the flatbed truck as they occupied both lanes, with the Winnebago still behind on the bridge. The pickup slowed as she approached and flashed its lights. The window rolled down. A flashlight caught her face, then blinked off.

  “Hurry!” It was Jacob.

  “I’m trying!” she shouted back through clenched teeth.

  Her leg was really hurting now and refused to cooperate. It had carried her through the battle and now had decided that enough was enough.

  The motor home, the rearmost of the three vehicles, and still with its back half on the bridge, honked its horn. The driver apparently didn’t see or understand why Jacob had stopped. The pickup edged forward to let the motor home off the bridge, which added another twenty feet to the distance Miriam had to cross.

  When the motor home cleared the bridge it stopped and two men climbed out, scrambled up a ladder on the back, and knelt on the roof. The action confused her at first, but then the motor home stopped beneath the bodies of the two women still dangling from the utility pole. They cut the bodies free and eased them down. The taller of the two men let out a wail that sounded more like a wounded animal than a human. Alfred Christianson, the poor devil.

  Hearing Alfred’s cry distracted Miriam from her own pain. She made it to the road. The last gunfire had died off, and the stench of burning fuel and plastic came in whiffs as the wind first brought it her direction and then swept it away.

  The back door of the pickup swung open and David leaned out and gestured. “Come on. You’re almost here.”

  He was trying to get out, but there were too many children and women crammed in.

  That didn’t matter. When she saw that door swing open and her husband gesturing for her, Miriam felt a flood of relief. It was over, she thought, she had escaped from the carnage and bloodshed. Escaped her fear. It hadn’t been premonition, simply a bad case of the nerves.

  A gunshot.

  Somebody hadn’t heard. Didn’t know the battle was over. Maybe a bandit, dying on the ground, with a final shot at his enemy. Or maybe some kid from Miriam’s own side, leaning out the back window of the Winnebago. He couldn’t hear over crying children and excited voices from the refugees, and so he thought the road was blocked by enemies and that’s why they weren’t moving. He saw a figure crossing the road and fired.

  Maybe.

  Miriam didn’t see the shot when it came, didn’t see the flash of light. But she heard a rifle crack. A fist punched her in the chest and she fell. David screamed.

  She came to a rest on her back. Her body was heavy and wouldn’t move. Heavy flakes mixed with the last of the sleet to coat her lips and eyelashes.

  David loomed over her. “Miriam!” It wasn’t a plea or a command, but a howl of anguish.

  Jacob was there, too, and they were grabbing her arms.

  No pain. In fact, she felt almost peaceful, even as her breathing whistled and she tasted something metallic on her lips. She coughed, and a fine spray came out of her mouth. Blood.

  It’s okay, she thought. I will reach the other side and the Lord will understand why I did what I did. He will forgive my sins because He knows that I tried.

  But penetrating this somnolent haze was something else. Fear. For her child, Diego, who had suffered so much and would now be motherless. For the fetus growing inside her, what had once felt like an unwelcome intrusion, an alien life form that stole its nourishment from her blood, messed with her hormones, and weakened her body. It was now a child, and she owed it life. If she died, it would die with her.

  David’s face was up to hers, his hand on her cheek. She didn’t remember moving, but she was in the backseat of the pickup truck now. Someone was driving down the road, but it wasn’t Jacob, who knelt sideways in the space between the front and back seats, and was pawing through a plastic box. She lay on her back with her head in David’s lap.

  “Miriam,” he said, stroking her hair.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed.

  “You can’t leave us. I love you. Please.”

  I love you too. I love you so much.

  But the words wouldn’t come out through her wheezing breath. She felt like she was breathing through a straw, and now the pain came, like a clawed hand, reaching into her chest and squeezing.

  Something black crowded at the edge of her vision and when David kept speaking, it was as if she was behind a thick wall and could hear voices on the other side, but muffled and indistinct. And growing fainter with every sentence.

  Miriam lost her hold on consciousness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Eliza urged her horse forward along the darkened highway. Lillian rode to her left, a solid presence that Eliza heard and felt but couldn’t see. She was counting on the horses to find their way, but they were cautious, anxious at the speed and the darkness, not trusting their own footing. The sleet came down hard and icy.

  After about ten minutes a light winked to the left. That would be the cabin at Yellow Flats. It had to be well after eleven by now, but Rebecca was still up. Eliza pulled up short and turned toward Lillian.

  “I’m going out to Yellow Flats. Ride into town. I want everyone awake, every woman and teenage girl.”

  “What do I tell them?”

  “I want them heading out to the cliffs—horses,
trucks, whatever they’ve got. We have to stop Smoot before Malloy gets back or there will be bloodshed.”

  “What about the grain?”

  “We’ll do what we can to stop the shipments. But we’ll be talking, not fighting. I want the women armed, but make it crystal clear. No shooting unless they hear it from my mouth.”

  “Okay, I understand.”

  “Start on the east side—Mattie McBride,” Eliza said. “Then Gillian Potts, Elianor Griggs. Unless Fernie has them moving already. Then Carol Young. Once I’m done here, I’ll come through on the west side of town. Meet me back at the cliffs as soon as you can.”

  “Got it!”

  Eliza slowed to search out the ranch road and Lillian clomped past her. When she found it, she urged the skittish horse off the highway and let it slow to a walk. She was careful to avoid the cattle guard where her mount might break a leg in the dark, but when she was around that trotted as fast as she dared along the rutted dirt track.

  When Eliza arrived, she jumped from the saddle and scrambled to the porch. The door was locked, so she pounded with the palm of her hand and called out for Rebecca to open up. The woman came out with an alarmed expression. In the front room behind her sat the loom she’d been working on the past few days. A single electric lamp sat at the window.

  “Get your guns and grab your boots and coat,” Eliza said. “I’ll saddle up your horse.”

  Five minutes later and they were riding back up the ranch road. Eliza explained their purpose, and when they reached the main road, the women urged the horses into a canter, fast enough that it approached a gallop, dangerous as that was down the darkened highway. Rebecca peeled away before they reached town, to hit the ranch compounds owned by the Whites, Robertsons, and Smiths, while Eliza continued toward home. She stopped at three different houses before she arrived and each time set more women in motion.

  Eliza arrived at the Christianson house expecting that Fernie would have it in an uproar. It was hours now since Fernie escaped the Smoots with her sons. How much did she know already? Was there enough gas in the car for Eliza to drive out to the cliffs where Fernie might defuse the situation?

  To Eliza’s surprise and alarm, the house was dark and the inhabitants asleep. No sign of Fernie, or Daniel and Jake for that matter. Eliza tore through the house, waking women, and looking anxiously for her sister.

  She made her way back to Elder Smoot’s house, more alarmed than ever. The Smoot women had been roused already. The younger, braver women were out waking other people in town, while the older women filled thermoses with hot soup and set their daughters to making sandwiches.

  Nobody had seen Fernie. They thought, in fact, that she was upstairs asleep. She wasn’t. Neither were the boys.

  Eliza tried not to worry and continued through town, raising women, horses, trucks when she could find someone with fuel in the tank. She ordered the owners to fill the vehicles with food, ammunition and weapons, lanterns, flares, and anything else she could think of to send toward the Ghost Cliffs. The women without horses or vehicles she moved to houses lining Main Street. Others she sent to break into the chapel to take control of the abandoned USDA headquarters. She wasn’t entirely sure why. To show Smoot she was serious about protecting the town? A contingency against violence from the Feds? By the time Eliza returned to the Ghost Cliffs at the head of three dozen horses, every house and every woman was on the move from one end of the valley to the other.

  Elder Smoot had taken her advice and barricaded the highway with Jacob’s utility poles, choosing two separate places where the canal bordered the road on one side and sandstone ledges lined the other. That left just enough room on the shoulder for horses to thread their way through, but unless the invaders came with tanks they would need to clear the road before their vehicles could pass.

  Eliza grabbed Lillian and they sought out Smoot near the front where several men milled around on foot. Elder Smoot’s son Bill studied a map, shielded by one man holding an umbrella while another held a flashlight. The elder Smoot was talking on a radio. It was noisy on the road with all the clomping hooves, snorting, and people yelling back and forth, and Smoot shouted to be heard.

  He gave Eliza a look as she slid from the saddle. “Is this the prairie-dress army you promised? I expected more.”

  “They’re on their way.”

  There were a good hundred people here already, most on horses. How many could they raise in total?

  In September, when Jacob began to wonder out loud if they could survive on nineteenth-century technology, he sent Eliza and Steve on an animal census of the valley. They’d come back with the pitiful number of 6 mules, 5 draft horses, and 11 donkeys, plus 182 riding horses. Most of these horses were now jostling and snorting and pulling at the reins at the base of the Ghost Cliffs and the rest would be on their way.

  “It might be enough,” Smoot said. “For a good show, at least. So long as it’s dark and nobody sees they’re all women. If they get past… ”

  “I’ll have two hundred more in town, organizing the defense.”

  Smoot gave a grunt that sounded almost satisfied.

  “Has anyone seen Fernie?” she asked.

  Nobody had, so Eliza climbed back in the saddle and went to search the vehicles pulling up the road, to see if her sister was arriving that way. She asked everyone she passed.

  One of Father’s widows, a woman in her early thirties named Sister Nell, said she’d also asked around town after Eliza came to the house. Nobody had seen her there, either.

  Nell pulled back on the reins to calm her skittish mare. The woman wore black riding boots beneath her dress and one of Father’s tan Stetsons with a leather band, too large for her head.

  “Maybe she stopped at the Smarts,” Nell said.

  But Eliza had already questioned both Grace and Eleanor Smart, who rode up with Rebecca’s group from Yellow Flats. They hadn’t seen Fernie either.

  What could have happened? Had Fernie tried to ride in her modified saddle? If her horse stumbled and she fell, she might be lying in a ditch somewhere.

  But that wouldn’t explain the missing boys. They hadn’t turned up either.

  Elder Smoot had a radio. If Eliza could pry it loose for a minute she could call around. She approached the clump of men, who gathered on foot, arguing strategy.

  A sound like distant thunder caught her ear. With the sleet turning gradually to snow, thunder would be strange, but there had been so much odd weather these past few months that almost nothing would surprise her.

  The sheer noise of the makeshift army made it hard to figure out the sound, but it was growing so loud by the time she reached Smoot that it became clear it wasn’t thunder. Something mechanical.

  “Elder Smoot, what is that?”

  His radio was squawking, and a voice shouted incomprehensibly on the other end when he answered. He yelled back in an irritated tone, telling the man to speak up and articulate his damn words. Smoot’s eyes lifted skyward. She followed his gaze.

  Eight black shapes flew over the cliffs in a long line, one after the other. They swooped down from the bluffs to the valley floor and then swept over the highway a hundred feet off the ground. Military helicopters. The roar shook the road. Horses reared and whinnied in terror. One tossed its rider and another galloped away. Shouts of fear and surprise rolled up and down the lines.

  The helicopters roared past. Six continued toward Blister Creek, but two broke off and curved around in a wide arc to fly over the highway a second time, this time approaching from the other direction. Men and women drew rifles and handguns. Nobody had given any sort of order, and nobody had fired. But that first shot would set off a firestorm.

  Eliza was suddenly terrified. They had a nineteenth-century cavalry unit, unorganized and under armed, while a modern military force flew above them with the ability to rain down death and hell upon their heads. And her people were going to fire shots to provoke the attack.

  Don’t shoot! Dear Lord, stop
them!

  She was shouting these things as she thought them, but there was too much noise. Nobody could hear her, nobody was watching or listening.

  A rocket roared from the belly of the lead helicopter. It raced toward her, directly at the front of the column, where Eliza and Elder Smoot and the rest waited, helpless. She barely flinched before it arrived.

  But it didn’t hit her, continuing instead another thirty, forty yards, and then slamming into the ground. It detonated with a flash of light. An ear-shattering explosion, a concussion of heat that momentarily turned the wintery night to summer. Pebble-sized chunks of asphalt rained down on her head, followed by a shower of sandy road base. The helicopters thundered past.

  They missed? How did they miss?

  Because they weren’t trying to hit them, that’s why. If they had, that rocket would have exploded in the middle of their ranks. It would have torn apart people and horses and replaced the confused shouts with screams of pain. Instead of asphalt, body parts would have been thrown into the air.

  A warning. A provocation.

  Nobody shot back, thank heavens for that. Instead they watched the sky, aimed their guns, and waited until the helicopters peeled away again. This time they continued south, following the others toward the center of the town, where some of the helicopters turned on floodlights and came down for a landing, while others circled above. Again, no shooting. That, in itself, was a small miracle.

  Elder Smoot came up to Eliza moments later. “I was right. You see, I was absolutely right.”

  “Oh, really?” she said. “If you were so right, why are we all standing around like idiots while they occupy the town?”

  “But they came, and tonight, like I thought. And anyway, there are only a few helicopters. We can handle them.”

  “Handle them? Are you insane?”

  It wasn’t a few helicopters. It was eight of them, heavily armed, each one no doubt crammed with soldiers. Forget Chip Malloy and his handful of guards; these looked like regular army.