The Wicked (The Righteous)

by Michael Wallace

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Maybe that’s normal with you people, but not with Madeline.”

  “You people?” Jacob asked.

  “Sorry, that came out wrong. What I mean is that Madeline was into Facebook and texting her friends about their favorite bands, or the latest episode of Glee. She wasn’t into the Bible and she didn’t talk about it all the time.”

  “Maybe not,” Eliza said, “But people get caught up in things they’re studying. It could have just as easily been nineteenth century French poetry.”

  “Sure, but she was using lots of thees and thous and tossing random scriptures into everything. We were Presbyterian, not Bible thumpers. And she started to talk about some group called the Chosen Ones. There were enough red flags that I got online and did a little searching. Took me ten seconds with Google before I was freaking out.”

  “Back up a second. Who are these people?”

  Allison explained. The Chosen Ones, it turned out, was a small cult that recruited on college campuses, in youth rehab centers, and even at rock concerts. California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona. They would form study groups, pick out a few susceptible individuals and then move on, taking the new recruits with them, generally after writing a farewell letter to parents, indicating their desire to permanently severe ties. Nearest anyone could tell, they lived on the streets and in abandoned buildings, eating garbage and refusing any outside contact except with those they were trying to recruit. She believed they had a headquarters, but nobody had found it.

  “So one day I get a letter in the mail. Madeline only lived an hour away and I don’t think she’d ever sent a snail mail in her life. I had a sick feeling when I opened it. There was some weird language about making this decision of her own free will and choice and that she was an adult and I shouldn’t look for her or try to contact her in any way. I took it to the police, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

  “That’s what the weird language was about,” Jacob broke in. “So the police wouldn’t think she was kidnapped.”

  “But obviously she was kidnapped. I don’t mean they tied her up screaming and shoved her in the trunk of the car, but there’s not much difference. She’s eating garbage and living on the street. Cut off from her family.”

  “Any idea where to find her?” Eliza asked.

  “She was in Portland for a while, recruiting, living on the street. But after I found her, they took her away. It could be that she’s in Seattle or L.A., but if they’re trying to isolate her, they’ve probably taken her to their headquarters.” Her voice caught and she was quiet for a moment, as if trying to regain control. “I’ve got to get her out of there. Three kids have already died in the past year. Two froze to death—they found their half-starved bodies wrapped in a thin blanket in an alley in Spokane. The third fell to her death from the bridge across the Hoover Dam. Either jumped or was pushed. Nobody saw it.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They investigated. Death by exposure in the first case. Suicide in the second. That was it. Pretty pathetic.” She took a deep breath. “There’s more. Their leader is a man the others call the Disciple. Original name Caleb Kimball.”

  Eliza’s mouth felt suddenly dry. “Caleb Kimball? He’s not. . .is that. . .?”

  Jacob wore a grim expression. “Gideon and Taylor Junior have a younger brother named Caleb. I haven’t heard about him in years. If he’s going by the Disciple, that would be why.”

  “Yes, he’s from a polygamist background. I don’t know anything more than that. That’s why I think you can help.”

  Eliza didn’t know Caleb, but she knew his older brothers, Gideon and Taylor Junior. The two older brothers had been struggling over Eliza, as if she wanted anything to do with either of them. And she knew their father, manipulating both of them while he was making a play to take over the church. Taylor Junior had sexually assaulted her, and Gideon tried to force her into marriage in the temple, then kidnapped her into Witch’s Warts.

  Eliza explained some of this to Allison Caliari, but not the uglier details of the ordeal, and certainly not the part where she’d crushed Gideon’s head with a stone to escape. She turned to her brother. “What’s he like?”

  Jacob looked thoughtful. “A quiet kid, troubled. No doubt bullied by Gideon and Taylor Junior. All those younger kids were.”

  Allison Caliari said, “I don’t know everything the Disciple believes, but I don’t think he’s teaching polygamy. His soapbox speeches are more like hard-core pentecostal tracts, but with a dose of crazy. He thinks the world is coming to an end—I’m fuzzy as to the details. These doomsday cults don’t keep blogs and send tweets. And I’m probably the biggest expert on this group, so if I don’t know, nobody does.”

  “And what is it you want us to do, exactly?” Eliza asked.

  Allison reached across the table and took her hand. “I need you to help me find my daughter before they find her dead in an alley somewhere. She’s not safe, none of them are. Please, for god’s sake, help me.”

  Eliza was opening her mouth to ask what exactly Allison wanted her to do, but Jacob spoke first. “You mentioned a headquarters. Any idea where?”

  Allison leaned back and the worried look eased, replaced by determination. “Again, nobody has seen it, but I think in Nevada. After I lost my daughter, I spent three weeks searching through Las Vegas, followed one group for a while, but they spotted me again and disappeared. They might be living in the desert. I overheard one of them talking about eating grasshoppers.”

  Las Vegas. Eliza thought of David and his comments about the religious sects in the area, and how the Lost Boys were involved in most of them.

  She glanced at Jacob and they passed a knowing look. “I think we should show her,” Eliza said.

  “Show me what?” Allison asked.

  “The Book of the Lost,” Jacob said.

  #

  David Christianson came out of the house to discover thieves had broken into his truck. He was groggy and his head felt stuffed with rocks and he didn’t recognize at first what was happening. It was only April, but already in the 80s, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep, only that he’d gone inside with a throbbing headache and crashed on the couch and that he had three more deliveries to make before five. A girl stood by the rear bumper and when he stepped onto the porch, she banged the side of the truck with the palm of her hand.

  David lived in a deserted subdivision on the outskirts of Vegas. For decades, developers had scooped up thousands of acres of worthless sagebrush, thrown up tens of thousands of crappy stucco split-levels and ranches, landscaped them with thirsty lawns and a few token shrubs. Crappy construction was the richest game in a city full of games, but sooner or later the house always collects, and dozens of developers fled town after the real estate crash.

  David stayed rent free in one of these houses in return for keeping an eye on the whole subdivision, to keep crackheads from camping out in basements or thieves from stripping the houses of copper pipes to sell for scrap. His nearest neighbors were a bunch of unemployed drywall hangers from Guadalajara two blocks over, waiting for work to come back. One of them had told David he was going back to Mexico if he couldn’t find work by summer.

  The rest of the neighborhood was row after row of empty homes on packed earth, surrounded by brown lawns and the skeletons of trees and bushes. Two streets over lay the bulldozed wreck of a crack house burned to the ground last summer. Nothing left but the foundation. A management firm had hired David shortly after the fire.

  What the company didn’t know was that David was one of the addicts he’d been hired to guard against. Not crack, thankfully, not yet. Not heroin, either. Well, only once or twice and he didn’t plan to go back. Those two were the worst. But since New Year’s Eve he’d moved from the comforting little devil of marijuana to the hulking demon known as crystal meth. He’d already been smoking pot at a party the first time he’d done meth and even stoned, he knew it
was an asinine move. He met some chick on the balcony overlooking the strip and she gave him a smoke off a piece of tinfoil, while rubbing her hand on his crotch. Again, a week later, and then two days after that. Same girl, same sort of situation. After that, she’d been his almost-girlfriend for a few weeks before disappearing with some dealer. What was her name again?

  Oh yeah, Benita Johnson. “Ya know, like BJ.” And she had lived up to her name. She also had an endless supply of what all the people at the party called “Tina.” He remembered her rasping laugh, the time she’d flapped her arms on the top of the high-rise apartment building as if she planned to fly off the edge and swoop over The Strip.

  By then, he was smoking meth three, four times a week. He felt like crap every time it wore off, but even though he always swore he’d never do it again, he’d taken a four-day weekend just after seeing his sister Eliza.

  What the hell are you doing, Liz? Can’t you leave me alone? You pushed me into this. I was fine before.

  Except that excuse didn’t wash, did it? Eliza hadn’t given him meth. He couldn’t legitimately blame Benita, for that matter.

  Whoever was to blame, four days of meth left him a wreck. And now it was Monday and he had to go back to work. He’d dragged himself out that morning, picked up his shipment at the farm, made his first delivery, then come back to the house to crash. As he stepped onto the porch, feeling ready to puke, and knowing the best way to knock that feeling down was to tweak himself out again, he remembered the guy at the party last night. Some blonde kid with a surfer accent who went by the name of Pedro, maybe ironically. What about that house at the end of the cul-de-sac? Nobody will know if I set up a little workshop, right? And all the free Tina you want. Things are getting too hot in this neighborhood, know what I mean?

  Maybe he’d have done it, too, but he couldn’t get Eliza’s visit out of his head. And now, dragging himself from the house to get his deliveries done in time, he couldn’t forget the look in his sister’s eyes. There was nothing calculating there, only concern and—he was almost too cynical to think the word—love. She’d entered the strip club, a place she would have found repellant, because she thought she could save him.

  Oh hell, what am I doing?

  He stared at the girl next to the truck, without realizing at first that there was something wrong. Slowly, it came. There shouldn’t have been anyone on the deserted cul-de-sac. The back door of the truck was open, and he was sure he’d locked it. And who the hell was banging around inside the truck?

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Get away from there.”

  The girl smiled at him and didn’t move as he ran over. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her away from the truck and still she didn’t resist.

  And then three young men poured out of the back. They wore untrimmed beards and his first thought was polygamists, someone from Blister Creek or Zarahemla come to cut his throat from ear to ear. But their long-sleeved shirts were open at the collar and he could see bony shoulder blades. No undergarments.

  The men fixed him with hard looks and he let go and stepped back, lifting his hands. “I don’t want trouble, just take what you want and go. There’s no money in there or drugs. It’s a CSA truck, there’s only cabbage and carrots and other boring stuff.”

  The three men came at him. The first blow caught him on the jaw and his head exploded with pain. They hit him with fists and elbows, and when they had him lying on the hot pavement, kicked him in the face and ribs. David curled into a ball, tried to protect his head, but still the blows rained down. They said nothing. There was no sound but his own grunts and feet connecting with ribs. Through the watering eyes he saw others, standing in a half circle around him, silent, watching. Maybe a dozen in all, mute witnesses to the beating.

  Then he recognized a face. One of the girls, staring. She was thinner than when he’d seen her before, but her dark eyes were the same. They stared at him, her irises oversized and a look of profound sorrow reaching out to him.

  Benita. David lifted his hand to beg her to help, to stop these people, but a kick landed on the side of his head and he flipped over.

  Blackness crowded his vision. And then, by some wordless signal, the beating stopped. The whole incident had lasted seconds. He lay there, groaning, eyes clenched shut, and when he finally opened them, his attackers were gone. He spit blood, rolled over and threw up. There was a ringing in his ears. His left eye was already closing, the same one that had swollen shut after the assault.

  But that one had been a mugging. He’d met some guy at the bus depot to buy drugs and as soon as he flashed his money, three more guys materialized, took his money and beat him up for the twenty and two fives in his wallet. They’d laughed and jeered while they did it and a dozen passersby stopped and watched without comment. An elderly black woman had finally helped him to a bench while her grandson called the police. While waiting for them to arrive, she’d wagged her finger at him and told him to stop consorting with “bad sorts.” The police had said pretty much the same thing when he’d claimed it was a random attack.

  But this was different. Ruthless, calculating, brutal. And for no apparent purpose. The pain in his gut was like fire and he knew he had to make it inside and call an ambulance. He lifted himself to a sitting position.

  Where had they gone? He could see the end of the vacant cul-de-sac. Nothing but an empty street and empty houses, tumbleweeds piled against front doors. He turned, the best he could, but saw nothing in the desert behind the house, either. But there was a dry wash fifty feet beyond the dead grass behind the house, and it cut a jagged scar, fifteen feet deep, up into the foothills.

  David rose shakily to his feet, gripped the edge of the bumper so tightly that it cut his hand. When the wave of nausea passed he took a glance into the truck. Boxes of produce lay overturned throughout the interior, with broken carrots and crushed avocados. They’d knocked over crates of CSA produce and scattered it about. For what? Looking for drugs? That didn’t make any sense. There was nothing to steal.

  And then he saw it. They’d taken several crates of iceberg lettuce. Not romaine, not arugula, just the bland, tasteless stuff with almost zero nutritional value. He didn’t know why the CSA grew it. Most customers on the route didn’t care for iceberg lettuce, except for the nursing home. Apparently there were some older people who complained that the other types tasted bitter.

  A wave of dizziness washed over him. More nausea. He bent and threw up again and there were bloody specks on the few drops that came out.

  He’d lose his job over this. And if he called the cops, he could lose both jobs. What if they searched the truck, would they find anything? And if they searched the weeds and sagebrush behind the house, would they find signs of pot and meth? He was in trouble if they got a warrant for the house. That would be the end of his house-sitting gig.

  He leaned against the bumper for a long minute, doubled over again, fighting another wave of nausea. This time, dry heaves. He wiped his hand and saw more blood. He had to get inside and call an ambulance.

  David saw the letters as he edged around the truck. They’d scrawled something across the side panel. Bits of charcoal lay on the pavement below. He focused slowly and any hope that he’d been targeted a second time by random thieves now disappeared.

  Rev. 8:10.

  It had been years since he’d done his memorization exercises and he’d always known the Book of Mormon better than the Bible. But the mnemonic came back to him and his mind raced through Revelation 8, starting from verse one: seventh seal. . .seven angels. . .seven trumpets. . .first, second, third angel. . .

  He stopped and thought through the tenth verse, then whispered it aloud.

  “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.” He stopped, and then thought of the next line, but didn’t speak it.

  And the name of the star is called Wormwood.<
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  Chapter Four:

  “The thing about most Lost Boys is that they can’t leave religion alone,” Jacob told Allison Caliari. “It’s drilled too deep into their heads and after they leave the church—”

  “After they’re kicked out, you mean,” Eliza interrupted as she set two photo albums on the picnic table.

  Jacob’s wife Fernie helped Eliza carry Jacob’s so-called Book of the Lost—a misnomer, since it had grown into several photo albums—from the shelves in their quarters into the open air of the courtyard. Eliza was confused about the order, except that there was a difference between the brown jackets and black jackets, so she set these in two separate piles on the table.

  It was still sunny, but chillier than it had been that morning. Covered arcades surrounded the small courtyard on this edge of the compound. Bullet holes pockmarked the wall on the far side. Jacob had ordered them left unfilled to remind people of the horrific FBI raid last summer. A reminder to the people of Zarahemla, he’d told Eliza in private, that fanaticism always brought misery.

  “After they’ve been kicked out,” Jacob said, with a nod, “they usually take up with some other sect or cult. Or start their own in the case of Caleb Kimball—your so-called Disciple. Others slip into a nihilistic tailspin, so convinced they’re going to hell that they do their best to get there as soon as possible.”

  “Why are they kicked out?” Allison asked.

  “The official answer is sin, rebellion, pride, apostasy. The real reason is that there are never enough women to go around, so they get forced out. I’m working to change that. It’s a long-term project.”

  Eliza caught a frown on Fernie’s face and she wondered if Fernie was still worried about Jacob taking a second wife. She didn’t think Fernie wanted it—she knew Jacob didn’t—but the difference between the two was that Fernie tried to do what God wanted, and Jacob tried to bend God’s will to his own. And Fernie believed that plural marriage came from the Lord, so what choice did she have?