Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  After lunch, Cameron sashayed into town in his pilgrim clothes, covering two blocks on foot before drifting into a maintenance shed on a potato field facing the prophet’s main gate. The rifle drew no attention, since every male carried one just like it. Cameron could hang out in the dim shed and make sure the prophet was in-residence before making his move.

  The tall wooden gates of the prophet’s home opened six times that day, with only a white sedan and an Econoline van passing through, both filled with pilgrim women on their way to work or school. The Escalade remained parked inside all day.

  The new community defense plan, it seemed, was to station small teams of young men inside the gated compounds, protecting the old men and their harems. Anthropologically speaking, it sounded like the young guys were doing all the work and getting none of the reward. Why would they let themselves be used like that? Cameron didn’t understand. Stranger things had happened when it came to religion, he supposed.

  Phase Two of Cameron’s mission relied upon an odd piece of ammunition he had stolen from the horseback riders.

  Other than the occasional shooting trip to the desert to fling lead with his brother, Cameron didn’t know much about guns. Wracking his brain, Cameron swore that green-tipped ammunition meant the bullets were steel-core, armor-piercing. Orange-tipped bullets were tracer rounds; they would light up the night with a blur of burning metal. Regular bullets without any markings were copper-jacketed lead-core ammunition—the most common “dumb” bullet.

  Cameron found two Mosin-Nagant stripper clips in the backpacks, and every other bullet was painted orange. If memory served, that meant the stripper clips were set for night shooting, permitting the shooter to see where the rounds were striking in the dark. Cameron assumed it meant that one of the horseback riders had worked the barricade on Highway 89, where his 4Runner had been shot to bits. It made him feel a little better about killing those particular men.

  Again relying on Hollywood for inspiration, Cameron’s plan for sneaking into the prophet’s compound depended on a diversion. The community utilized a system of propane tanks mounted outside each home for heating gas, as in many rural towns. A truck normally refilled the tank every month or two. In the Apocalypse, the truck would never come again, but the big tanks would last months, maybe even years, with rationing.

  On the Mythbusters television show, Cameron had seen a propane tank explode. The “myth” they were attempting to bust was whether or not a bullet going through a propane tank would spark and cause an explosion. A regular, lead-core bullet failed to cause an explosion because it passed straight through without spark, but an incendiary bullet did the trick nicely. On TV, a twenty-pound barbecue tank made an impressive fireball. One of these huge, thousand-gallon propane tanks in the polygamists’ yard should go up in a massive mushroom cloud, an ideal diversion to cover Cameron’s move.

  The only piece that wasn’t clear to Cameron had been whether the orange-painted tracer rounds were the same as incendiary rounds. The tracers definitely burned orange, so they must be magnesium-tipped or something similar.

  He needed the explosion to cover him walking into the prophet’s home. Even then, he couldn’t just walk through the gates. At least six young men stood guard inside the prophet’s compound. Cameron had seen them peacocking with their rifles, looking tough for the women when the gates opened to let the van out. He couldn’t count on all the guards leaving their posts to respond to a fireball. Cameron would have to go in a different way if he didn’t want to face any young guards still in the compound.

  With all day to examine the situation, Cameron deduced that the fencing around the compound had been built for privacy instead of security. The fence wasn’t designed to prevent law enforcement from breaking into the prophet’s home, like federal troops had done at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. These polygamists weren’t spoiling for a stand-off with law enforcement. The fence had prevented prying eyes from seeing the prophet cavorting with his child brides and multiple wives, denying authorities the ability to build a criminal case. The prophet’s fence wasn’t ballistic concrete or even cinder block. It was stained cedar slats, probably screwed to cross-supports, vulnerable to being kicked to splinters. Cameron knew about privacy fences from his experience as a teen hoodlum in southern California. Residential fences were zero-percent effective against a good boot.

  Once he got into the prophet’s compound, Cameron would have to improvise. He couldn’t see the exterior doors because of the privacy fence, and he wouldn’t know where the prophet resided inside the house. Hopefully, aside from the young guards, it would be a house full of women, children, plus one wrinkly, old prophet. Once he had broken in and blasted the prophet with a couple of rounds of 7.62 to the face, Cameron would improvise his escape. Admittedly, that part of his plan was a little fuzzy.

  He sat back from his surveillance in the equipment shed, surrounded by shovels, pesticides, and spray backpacks. He considered using one of the spray backpacks as a flame thrower, filling the tank with gas instead of pesticide, then gunning his way around the prophet’s compound, lighting everything and everyone on fire.

  As he had learned the night before, things didn’t always go the way he planned. Without a chance to test his flamethrower idea, he could picture the gasoline eating up the plastic parts in the nozzle, causing it to gum up and fail. Or, maybe the flame would whip back inside the plastic tank, exploding gasoline all over his back and head.

  Since leaving southern California, he had gained a master’s degree in the fragility of order and the strength of chaos. What can go wrong, will go wrong. Things in life seemed to want to break and go crazy. If he were being totally honest, the same could probably be said of his mind.

  Open disclosure to himself: this was a suicide mission.

  He had probably been on a suicide mission since he beaned that pilgrim in the head with a rock.

  Quixotically, when a suicide mission goes south, the protagonist survives. When he thought about it that way, Cameron had been mind-fucking the universe for a week or so. If the universe wanted chaos, then Cameron had been its huckleberry. He had delivered a heaping pile of chaos to this town of doomsday polygamists.

  Neat trick. He patted himself on the back, realizing his mental stability might not be what it once was. Loneliness wasn’t a great condition for a guy like Cameron. Loneliness, anger, and serial murder in combination… that probably wasn’t going to end well for anyone.

  Some part of his mind tried to talk him out of his plan to kill the FLDS prophet. Part of his mind argued for him to turn west and walk away from this whole, sordid affair. He remembered the technical term for that part of a person’s mind that reminded the person not to do stupid shit: the pre-frontal cortex.

  He smiled, pleased with his community college education being applied to a practical life situation. It was his pre-frontal cortex telling him that it would be stupid-beyond-stupid to assault the prophet’s compound.

  The thing that kept him pinned to the ground in the maintenance shed, gearing up to attack against ridiculous odds, was a vestigial piece of the family man he once was. His woman could lose her mind and join a cult if she wanted.

  Fuck women and their unreliable affections anyway.

  But Cameron wouldn’t leave his boys behind. He would rather die killing pilgrims than wake up next week alone and safe. At least killing polygamists, he wouldn’t die feeling like a shitbag, the kind of asshole father who bailed on his sons. He could live with many failures, and he had done exactly that. Failing his boys was not a fuck-up he could survive. His father hadn’t raised that kind of man. In this one thing, his dad would be proud.

  He could see the dusk shadow of the Utah Mountains lengthening over the town, and he knew his time to die grew near. He planned to attack in the failing light, increasing the chaos bearing down on the town. After all, chaos had become his compadre. His amigo. His dark companion and confidant.

  Cameron belly-crawled out from t
he maintenance shed and back into the dry wash, using the shed as a visual screen between himself and the prophet’s compound. Once under cover of the desert swale, he scampered south on foot, cutting around a ramshackle compound that must have belonged to a lesser polygamist. Other than the prophet and a half-dozen others, most of the priesthood men lived like trailer trash in oversized double-wides. Their homes resembled the beat-down trailer hovels Cameron passed in the middle of the Mojave Desert in his flight from southern California. One of the trailer homes near the prophet’s house hadn’t completed its privacy fence, and Cameron planned to use its propane tank as his diversion.

  Taking up a new position in the dry wash, Cameron perched his Mosin-Nagant between the limbs of a dead sage bush and sighted in on the propane tank—just a hundred yards away. He shucked the backpack, dug out his water bottle and drank the last of it. He checked the rifle’s chamber for the third time and confirmed the orange-painted bullet in the breach.

  Go time.

  As the light faded, Cameron pressed the trigger.

  BOOM!

  The Mosin-Nagant bucked in his hands and then… nothing.

  No doubt he had hit the propane tank, but there was no explosion. He switched his view to the movement of the family’s mongrel dogs mucking about in the yard. A couple raised their heads, curious about the shot. He shifted his view to the shimmering dusk wind in the tops of the cottonwood trees. Cameron searched for clues, still confused at the lack of an explosion, noticing the family barbecue merrily smoking near the back door of the trailer.

  With a massive ka-wump, the propane tank finally exploded in a giant fireball that churned over and over as it rolled into the orange sky above the town. A wave of heat hit Cameron, even a hundred yards distant. Screams shattered the evening as people ran toward the source of the fireball. Cameron racked the bolt of his rifle, flicked the safety on and stood up, jogging toward the explosion like everyone else.

  As he ran in the direction of the burning double-wide trailer, now caught up in the flames, Cameron deviated slightly left, angling toward his true destination, the prophet’s compound. He scanned the fire as he loped past. The windows of the trailer were blown in and the curtains inside were burning. Tongues of fire rose out of holes where the windows had once been and they lapped greedily at the roof. The cheap trailer door burst open and a woman in a prairie dress rushed into the dirt yard carrying a little girl, the girl’s dress on fire. The mother dropped to the ground and rolled the girl in the dirt, extinguishing the flame. Other women and children poured out of the trailer like a clown car full of burning pioneers, some dancing with flame and others helping swat them out.

  “God dammit!” Cameron swore. He had no intention of setting children on fire, but his bedfellow, Chaos, had other ideas. Cameron faced forward, resisting the urge to run to their aid. Townspeople came from every direction, buckets and fire extinguishers in hand.

  Cameron’s irritation boiled; he hated himself for causing this torment. He hated his wife for betraying him. He hated the prophet for setting this whole cocked-up situation in motion in the first place. Cameron would kill that bastard, and hopefully kill himself in the process. Two assholes for the price of one.

  The townspeople didn’t notice the stranger among them and, frankly, Cameron didn’t care. He reached the back of the prophet’s compound and kicked viciously at the cedar planks, blowing them inward and making a hole big enough to slip through. He found himself inside the privacy barrier, hidden behind a storage shed. He slid around the corner and watched as the last of the armed guards headed out the gate toward the fire, eager to accomplish some act of priesthood heroism.

  Scanning for a back way into the prophet’s home, Cameron spied a young girl peering out a door opposite the storage shed, curious as to the commotion. He jogged across the little strip of lawn and up to the girl, lowering himself to her level. She considered him without a shred of distrust.

  “Hello, sweetheart.” Cameron smiled. “Where’s the prophet?” The girl pointed inside and up. Cameron quietly side-stepped the girl, moving into the house, and confronted a staircase heading upward. He calmed his pounding heart as he ascended, trying to convince his adrenal system that he belonged in the house, just another young guard looking after the prophet. The odds of running into one of the sixty wives was probably a foregone conclusion.

  Strangely, the upper floor seemed empty, with all the sounds of commotion concentrated on ground level. Cameron began opening doors and peeking into rooms. One after another, he found small rooms dominated by queen-sized beds, fluffy comforters and an astounding array of home crafts nailed to the walls, proclaiming pithy and wholesome messages like “Choose the Right” and “Love Begins at Home.” Cameron imagined this strange bed warren as an old man’s sex palace and it made perverse sense—the confluence of innocence and sexuality, a modern variant of Old Testament depravity.

  After five empty rooms, Cameron opened a door to find an elderly man gazing outside through a set of French doors, regarding the fire on the next block. The old man turned toward the creak of the door and appraised Cameron with fatherly eyes.

  “Yes, my son?”

  “Um. Are you the prophet?” was all Cameron could think to ask.

  “I am,” the old man said with gravity. “Who are you?”

  Cameron stepped inside, locking the door behind him. He physically shook off the creepy charisma exuded by the man.

  “I’m the guy who’s come to kill you,” Cameron explained as he locked eyes, now prepared for the man’s solemn gaze.

  “Ah. You are whom the Lord hath sent.” The man stated it as a fact and clasped his hands behind his back. “Please sit.”

  An invisible tractor beam pulled Cameron into a white upholstered chair. The FLDS prophet lowered himself into the chair’s mate. Cameron swung the gun barrel toward the old man and he suppressed the urge to shake his head like a dog, hungry to clear the spell being cast over him.

  “Yes. I’m going to shoot you,” Cameron proclaimed, as much as a reminder to himself as a threat to the old man.

  “I see. Well, I’ve been waiting a long time for you to come,” the prophet announced in his freaky monotone. Cameron began to understand the scam now—this old man played the role of a prophet of old—unflappable, trusting in God, everything a part of his grand plan.

  “Drop the act, old timer. You nut jobs shot at my family. You took my wife and boys. Now I’m going to shoot you and you’re going to shit yourself on this white carpet as you die. No more porking your sixty wives. No more driving around in your Escalade. No more glossy-eyed maniacs worshipping at your feet. It’ll just be you, your brains, and your shit splattered on this ugly-ass carpet.”

  The profligate swearing seemed to shock the old man, interrupting his schtick. Still, he tried again.

  “I see. I see. Perhaps you’d like to confess your sins before we both perish because when you fire that rifle, the servants of the Lord will rush in here to take your life, too.”

  “Jesus,” Cameron smiled an impish grin, “it just never ends with you, does it? You’re going to keep up the ‘prophet’ routine right until the bitter end. Okay. Suit yourself.” Cameron raised the rifle to the man’s face and flicked off the safety.

  “Wait,” the prophet begged, his voice jumping two octaves. “Just wait. Wait. I don’t want to die yet. I need to say something first. Just wait.” The monotone was gone.

  Surprised by the shift in demeanor, Cameron lowered the rifle a few inches. “Talk, you horny old fool. I’ll give you ten seconds.”

  The man blinked away the last of his affectation and sighed hard, closing his eyes and breathing deeply, spending his ten seconds in thought. Cameron waited, curious what the old man would say.

  “I lost my priesthood thirty-one years ago. I behaved immorally with my sister and then my daughter.” The old man opened his eyes and looked at Cameron with a ghostly expression. “I am not the prophet. I never was the prophet, and I have been
deceived by the powers of evil. Brother Thomas R. Jessop has been the true prophet since my Father’s passing…”

  Holy shit, thought, Cameron. This old fucker’s really confessing. “Go on.” He waved the rifle barrel, pressing the man to continue.

  “…I have been the most wicked man in this dispensation and in the eyes of God. And I took charge of my father’s wives when the Lord God told me not to because I could not hear him, could not hear his voice, because I did not hold the priesthood. As far as I possibly can be, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. Please tell them all.” The old “prophet” deflated in his white, upholstered chair, now a fraction of the pompous being he had been just five minutes earlier.

  Cameron hadn’t understood half of what the old codger said, but he knew he had heard some shit that would blow this place apart, bringing Cameron back to his earlier scheme to break up the cult. Maybe Cameron was “he whom the Lord hath sent” after all. The idea made Cameron chuckle.

  “I’m not telling your people shit. You tell them.” Cameron gestured at the French doors and the balcony beyond. “Confess your sorry ass to them. And, while you’re at it, order them to bring me my wife and boys. If you try and go back on anything you just said, the last thing you’ll see will be your brains flying onto your driveway, you perverted old fuck. Get up. Go on. Tell them what you told me.” Cameron waved the rifle barrel at the doors.

  The prophet rose out of his chair, now just a tired old man. He opened the French doors and stepped out on the balcony. Cameron scooted his chair up so he could cover the old man with his rifle. Nobody below could see Cameron inside the room.