“I know a good man died delivering the U.S. Mail. A tragedy. A tragedy for his wife and children. And a tragedy for the community whose mail he faithfully delivered. But, to be honest, no worse than all the other tragedies that await the rest of us in these latter days. No one will escape untouched. Not you. Not me. Because men like you, marked with the sign of the Beast, will line up behind the Antichrist on his blood-drenched march across the sands of Israel. And across our own nation, butchering the faithful as you go, ripping babies from the womb and putting innocents to the sword.
“I bet you feel right proud of yourself, Mr. Agent Man. Don’t you? Don’t it give you a little thrill just to contemplate it? It’s your kind of business.”
Nabor threw up his hands. “Have it your way, Johnson.” To the ranger he said, “Watch those men while we take the preacher farther in.”
“You got it,” Masterson said. He used his shotgun to nudge the Prophecy boys to the bench under the coat pegs. Adam and Hosea complied, but Corny held back and challenged the ranger’s authority.
Nabor and Bertolli exchanged a glance, and Bertolli came over, producing plastic handcuffs from a pouch on his belt. “Let’s make things easier,” he said and cuffed the three men’s hands behind their backs.
At the mouth of the dark tunnel, Nabor said to Poppy, “I don’t suppose you’ll be our tour guide.” Before Poppy had a chance to refuse, he added, “Never mind. We’ll just use this.” He pulled an iPad from a pocket and brought up a diagram. It was a highly detailed floor plan of the mine. It laid out the tunnels, shafts, spurs, and ore chambers of the Stubborn Mountain Mine, circa 1929. It was from an insurance policy rider by a Boston underwriting firm and was dated 1973, a year when Beehymer was actively working the site. Satan’s researchers were nothing if not thorough.
“I guess you don’t need me then,” Poppy said. “Why don’t I just stay here with my boys.”
Nabor said, “You’d give us free range of this place.”
“I got nothing to hide.”
“Ha ha,” Bertolli said. “We still need you to show us where the booby traps are.”
Nabor said, “We won’t cuff you unless you give us reason to.”
The agents put Poppy between them and let him lead the way. They had high-tech flashlights that were impressively brilliant. They could focus the beam of light in or out and illuminate whole sections of the tunnel at once.
“That third son of yours,” Bertolli said as they went, “the hot-headed one. Is he in here too?”
“No,” Poppy said. “I tole you he’s on an errand into town.”
“If he is in here, you’d best call out to him to give himself up, or I swear to you, if he pops up from behind some rock, we’ll open fire on him. I promise you we will.”
“I said he’s not here. We’re all alone except for the angels.”
RANGER MASTERSON TURNED on all of the LED lanterns he could find in the entrance area, eight in all.
Sitting on the bench with his brothers, their hands bound behind their backs, Adam said, “You’re wasting our supplies, ranger.”
“The better to see you with, my dears.”
IN THE FIRST chamber they explored, the machine room, the agents confronted the immensity of their task. With the piles, rows, shelves, and bins of obsolete equipment and supplies, and all of the possible hiding places they afforded, it was clear that a thorough search would take more time and manpower than they had available. No wonder the old coot seemed so smug.
The empty break room, with its overburden of dust, did not impress the agents, but the food slot, recently cut into the stout powder room door, did. Sawdust from the cut still lay on the stone floor beneath it. They opened the door and flooded the cell with light.
“Looks like you got yourselves your own little black site,” Nabor said. “Recent too. Tell us who your guest was.”
Poppy ignored the question. Nor did he speak when they asked what lay in the tunnel beyond the powder room. Their floor-plan map simply labeled it a closed area. They followed the tunnel until they were forced to crouch to proceed and decided to leave it till later. It was the second level tunnel that seemed to be calling them.
And it was on the second level that they witnessed the true scope of the Prophecy plan. Agent Bertolli whistled in admiration as they entered the storeroom chamber. The enormous space was a Sam’s Club for preppers. There were aisles and shelves and bins all crammed with housewares, clothes, cleaning supplies, building material, tools, paints, fuel, and lubricants. The largest department, by far, was devoted to food: aisles of canned goods; pallets of grains, beans, rice, powdered milk, and sugar; drums of cooking oil. There were towers of green tubs containing staples sealed in nitrogen gas for long-term storage. There were walls of home-canned vegetables, jams, salmon, and moose.
While Nabor guarded Poppy, Bertolli made a quick pass up and down the aisles searching for the missing weapon.
“Looks like you got a lot invested in this,” Nabor said to Poppy, but Poppy merely yawned.
“Over here,” Bertolli called.
They joined him at the far side of the chamber where a side room was shut behind a solid, padlocked door.
Nabor said, “What’s in here.”
Poppy shrugged his shoulders.
“Open it.”
“You’re the dick with the warrant. You open it.”
Nabor nodded to Bertolli, who pulled a pair of wire snips from a pouch on his belt. He turned a knob on one of the handles, and the tool emitted a high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill. Then he wrapped the jaws around the padlock hook and clipped it as easily as trimming a fingernail. The ruined padlock fell to the floor, and Bertolli opened the hasp and pulled the door open.
It was the armory. The agents rummaged through the Prophecy collection of small arms and cartons of ammunition, but everything looked legal, and there was no sign of a trumpet, tulip, or glass bazooka.
In the next chamber, the agents laughed when they stumbled upon the windowless house. Spooky, they said. Hitchcockian. But it was the chamber itself that impressed them. The cottage chamber was so voluminous it swallowed up even their hi-tech searchlights. In a space so huge, the ten-foot-long weapon they sought might be lying openly on the ground several football-field lengths away and they’d never see it.
On their way out of the chamber, the agents found a water line near the tunnel opening. A garden spigot attached it to the chamber wall. There was a puddle of water under the spigot, and when Bertolli turned the valve, a torrent of water gushed out. He cupped his hand to capture some and taste it.
“Neat,” he said, turning off the flow. “Appears you all solved your potable water problem. You tap into a spring or something?”
The sight of that man lapping that water from his hand and commenting on it like it was ordinary tap water, like you’d find in Detroit or Dallas, so disgusted Poppy that for a moment he felt too tired to go on, let alone follow the angel’s instructions.
The agents had missed the black water pipe on the way in, but now they followed it down the tunnel past the ramp. They found dead-end spurs, open pits, loose rocks, and narrow passages. The tubular weapon might be anywhere. When they came upon a second ramp, this one leading to a third level, they consulted their floor plan again.
“Another closed area,” Bertolli said.
The black PVC pipe continued upward, and so did they. The third level tunnel was clearly less developed than the lower two. There were few, small excavations along it and only one set of ore cart rails. The floor was wet. They continued following the PVC line until it terminated in a small collection basin chipped out of the rock and dammed with wooden planks.
“Neat,” Bertolli said again.
The collection basin was fed by a small trickle of water that ran in a shallow stone channel along the base of one wall. They followed the channel to the only sizable chamber on that level. Even the air was moist.
“Nice. Very nice,” Bertolli said when
they entered the cistern chamber.
They stood on the edge and played their lights across the subterranean lake. Bertolli tossed a stone into the crystalline liquid and watched it flutter as it fell out of sight. It didn’t seem to ever hit bottom. Again, Poppy felt violated by their attention to his water, as if they were fouling it.
“Seen enough yet?” he said, maybe a little too impatiently.
Nabor was watching him, had been watching him the whole time, and he, for one, wanted to see more. He gathered a handful of stones from the shore and began skipping them across the water’s surface. In a little while, both agents were skipping stones. Each stone was another tiny insult. But that was their plan, to provoke him, so Poppy sucked in his breath and prayed for strength and forbearance.
“How long,” Nabor asked his partner, “do you figure this water will last them.”
“Assuming they don’t exceed its refresh rate, I’d say it’ll last indefinitely.”
“So if their food supply holds out, they have it made in the shade.”
“I’d say so. In medieval castles under siege, they sometimes drank their wells dry and lost the castle.”
“But these folks won’t have to worry about drinking this dry, will they?”
“I’d say they’re pretty well covered in the water department.”
Nabor dumped the rest of his stones into the water and brushed his hands on his pants. “Then it’d be a crying shame if something happened to this water so they couldn’t drink it.”
“That would suck,” Bertolli agreed. “Like a plague right out of the Bible.”
“Exactly. A disaster of biblical proportions.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing, except how when natural waterways get accidentally polluted with industrial waste and shit how everyone downstream suffers.”
Bertolli shook his head. “It’s a shame, but it happens all the time.”
“I know. Coal ash spills, tanker cars, pipelines — You read about it all the time in the paper. Or actually, online. I get most of my news online these days.”
“I still enjoy watching the CBS Evening News,” Bertolli admitted. “I guess that dates me.”
“Yeah. All those geriatric ads.”
“I know. And boner ads.”
“I was just wondering,” Nabor said, circling back to his original threat, “how long this reservoir of spring water would take to clear itself if it got, you know, accidentally polluted.”
“Polluted like how?” Bertolli obligingly asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. You remember those storage batteries we saw in that machine shop down on the main level?”
“You mean the lead-acid ones? Nasty stuff — sulfuric acid. Probably take years to work that crap out of the water.”
“Not to mention the lead.”
“Lead, right. Bad stuff for growing children.”
“Makes them retarded.”
“Or that barrel of cleaning detergent we saw in the supply room.”
“You wouldn’t want the kiddies drinking crap like that. That’s for sure.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Or those sacks of fertilizer.”
“That would be totally fucked up.”
The agents were on a roll, naming all of the possible polluting compounds they had noticed on their sweep of the keep. Finally, when they ran out of examples, Nabor said to Poppy, “It doesn’t have to end that way, Mr. Johnson. We’re not necessarily after you. We don’t even know if it was you or somebody else who’s responsible. Hell, we’re not even sure what this is all about. But let me recap for you what we do know.
“We know that three weeks ago yesterday, something weird happened on the river near here. Big, bright light comes out of the sky. Ring a bell.”
Poppy shrugged. He wasn’t surprised they knew. The light was so intense he had wondered why everyone hadn’t seen it.
“Whatever it was, it left behind an implement ten feet long like a glass trumpet. One of the rangers saw it, said that you stole it off park land. That’s a federal offense all by itself, by the way.
“The next thing we know, you and your sons are in Anchorage spending wheelbarrows of cash. Most of which were marked bills, I might add, that ties you to some pretty nasty business down south.”
“Nasty business,” Bertolli agreed.
“As part of this shopping spree, you were observed meeting with Governor Tetlin, the sore loser rabble-rouser.”
“Not a popular lady in DC right now, let me tell you,” Bertolli added.
“Then, four days ago, there’s a terrorist strike that disrupts our nation’s eyes in the sky. Civilian and military satellites alike. And not only ours but China’s too, and the Russians’ — everybody’s. It temporarily blinded the whole world and no one knows who did it, how they did it, or why.”
“It’s a mystery.”
“And it gets even more mysterious because then two days later someone slices the wing off an airplane in mid-flight, and it crashes into your backyard. Hits the bullseye in a bald parcel of dirt that’s miles in diameter where just last week there were trees and snowpack and all sorts of natural shit. Now there’s nothing there but sterile sand. What causes that.”
“Nobody knows,” Bertolli said.
“Nobody knows. Not even our top scientists can explain it.”
“Another mystery.”
Nabor pulled the tablet out of his pocket again, not to check the map of the mine but to show Poppy a satellite image. “And this here’s where the mystery comes crashing down on you, Mr. Marvin Johnson. There’s a fresh snowmobile track that ties you to all of it.”
In one corner of the satellite image was the large, bald crash area. In the opposite corner was the Prophecy compound. Someone had highlighted in yellow a snowmobile trail that connected the two locations.
“Take a look at the date in the margin,” Nabor suggested, pointing to it. “December 23. That was the day before the crash. That puts you, or someone from this household, at the crime scene before it happened. There are no other tracks coming or going to this spot except yours, till later. We may not know what happened out there, but we do know that you’re in the middle of it. Now, you may not have intended to take part in an attempt to overthrow our democracy. All you wanted to do was drop off the grid with your family and let the rest of the world go fuck itself. We can respect that, and you’re off to a good start here. If that’s the case, you need to get in front of this before it’s too late. Things’ll go a lot easier on you if you do. Who knows, your family might still be able to salvage this prepper’s paradise of yours.”
Nabor paused for Poppy to take it all in, but the old man remained resolutely silent.
“I see,” Nabor continued. “You probably think you hid the weapon pretty good so we’ll never find it. It could be here in the mine, in your house, in one of the outbuildings, or maybe you stashed it in the woods miles away. You’re probably thinking to yourself it’ll take a small army to turn over every rock. But guess what. We have the authority to call in a small army.”
“I got the army on speed dial,” Bertolli said.
“See. Men and dogs and special equipment are only a sat phone call away. Meanwhile, we award you and your adult children a free trip to a holding facility in Seattle while we tear this place apart. It could take months, years. So do yourself a solid, Marvin. Just show us where it is, and your family’s life can go back to normal, however it is you define normal.”
FD8 1.0
THERE WERE TWO strange sno-gos in the yard when they returned, a Kawasaki they’d never seen before, and a Ski-Doo with the satanic NPS arrowhead logo on its side. When Deut saw the logo she prayed it wasn’t her ranger’s ride. When Ginger saw the logo, she jumped out of the sled before it had come to a full stop and ran for the front door. When Proverbs saw it, he opened his parka and unsnapped his holster guard.
The children were sitting in a circle on the floor in the warm corner. They looked frightened. Sue a
nd Sarai had been leading them in prayer, and when Ginger burst through the front door, they scurried into a knot and held each other tight. Sarai dashed to the stove and snatched up the fire poker.
“Where are they?” Ginger demanded.
“Stay away from us!” Sarai shouted. The poker was made from a length of iron rebar and had a wicked barb at the end. She waved it in front of her in a threatening manner.
“Are they up in the mine?”
“Begone unclean spirits. Leave this place. I command thee in Elder Brother Jesus name. Amen.”
“Amen!” answered the children. “Amen!”
When Deut came in, she looked all around. Finding none of the visitors, she said, “Which one?”
“Which one what?” her twin replied.
“Which ranger?”
“Danger.”
Deut collapsed into a chair. Thank You, Elder Brother Jesus. Thank You, thank You, thank You.
When Proverbs came in, the house fell silent. The older ones remembered what that face meant, and the little ones needed no explanation.
“Where?” he said.
“Up in the keep,” Sue replied.
“How many?”
“Three. And they’re heavily armed.”
Proverbs left without another word, leaving the door hanging open behind him. He returned a moment later for the Winchester carbine mounted above the door.
Ginger went to the door and watched as he crossed the yard to the keep trail. Then she hurried out to the two snowmachines, praying that the rangers had left their keys in the ignition. No such luck. She looked around the yard for an idea, an answer, a miracle. She ran to the prayer cabin. Maybe it was open. Maybe the safe was open. Maybe there was a spark plug for one of the older machines. She prayed that it was so.
The door was padlocked.
Ginger hadn’t eaten in days. She was still weak from her confinement. She was cold. There was nothing more she could do but wait for the rangers’ return. They had to return eventually, didn’t they? And when they did, she would be safe. They would take her back to town with them. They would call the Troopers. People would pay for their crimes. All of them. She would be safe.
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