The Wicked (The Righteous)

by Michael Wallace

  Burning tires spilled from the roof. One of the mountains of tires behind them started to break apart. A helicopter thumped overhead, but the smoke was too thick to see it. The smoke was choking now and the heat so intense it felt like Eliza’s shirt would catch fire. The need to escape the heat and smoke overwhelmed everything else.

  “We’ve got to go,” Jacob cried. “Now, before it’s too late.”

  Part of the roof of the trailer collapsed and then Eliza heard a horrible new sound over the roaring fire. Screams. The sound was like an animal, screaming in pain and terror, a rising, wailing shriek. For those inside the trailer, Wormwood had fallen.

  #

  Jacob led them through the smoke. Eliza’s eyes were a mass of stinging tears and her lungs burned. A foul, chemical taste filled her mouth. She let her feet carry her numbly away from the spreading fire. The screams continued at her back. At last, they were safely away from the fire and could no longer hear the cries of the dying over the roar of the fire. They spent a few moments bent over, coughing, spitting the bitter taste from their mouths.

  “Eliza,” Jacob said. “Where are you hurt?”

  She looked down, saw what a mess she was. “Most of it is someone else’s blood. He’s dead now.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Jacob said. A defeated tone clouded his voice. “We did what we could, now we have to keep from getting tangled up in all this.”

  The helicopter circled around the fire to the east. How long before police and fire trucks found their way down the old road to the illegal dump? It was early morning and news would just be reaching the authorities, but they clearly didn’t have much time.

  “They’ll figure out what happened,” Miriam said. “Some of those bodies were in the clearing, they won’t be totally consumed. You can’t burn away the evidence so easily.”

  Madeline said, “There are other Chosen Ones, some who were in the city and survived. They know the Disciple was planning for the end of the world. Nobody will come looking for you.”

  “Only if we get out of here,” Jacob said. “We can’t do anything more. We got who we came for, that’s what matters.”

  Eliza could tell by his anguished tone that he didn’t mean it. He wanted to win, Jacob always needed a complete victory and both as a doctor and a human being, he would be tormenting himself for months about the people who had died, who might have been saved if things had gone differently. And maybe if Jacob had come instead of Eliza, that would have happened. But she didn’t think so. She guessed they’d all be dead, anyway. And Madeline, too.

  The fire continued to spread through the dump. There had to be fifty thousand tires here, if not a hundred, and Eliza had seen a tire fire in Alberta, knew how hard they were to extinguish.

  Jacob led them toward the car. They squeezed into the vehicle and Jacob tore down the dirt road, hammering at every pothole. Eliza sat in front with Jacob, turned occasionally to study his grim expression or glance over her shoulder at the fires of hell raging at their backs. Gradually, the air cleared.

  But Eliza couldn’t get the stench out of her mouth. It would stay there through the long drive back to Blister Creek and later, when she stood under the shower, scrubbing her body with soap until it ached, she could still smell it in her hair and skin, still taste it even after she’d brushed her teeth three times. She heard the screams and the awful cracking of the chunk of concrete against the bones in Caleb Kimball’s face.

  Only after she threw up twice in the shower, then came out, cleaner but drained and shaken, did she start to feel better. Jacob found her later the next evening, sitting on a bench on the porch, listening to crickets in the night air. She cried in his arms as she shared the horror of her ordeals, while he told her how proud he was of what she’d done.

  When she finished crying, she was strong again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven:

  Jacob had underestimated law enforcement. He’d seen so many cases where people had pulled off crimes while the authorities remained oblivious, that it had been a shock the first time he’d realized that law enforcement was not a single, monolithic entity, but a collection of thousands of individuals with varying intelligence, organization, and resources. He got a reminder of that lesson when they found him in Blister Creek less than twenty-four hours after the escape from the burning cult compound.

  Sitting on his father’s porch, debriefing Eliza about the horrors she’d survived, he’d felt a cold lump settle into his stomach when the black Lincoln Towncar pulled up to the curb. Eliza glanced at Jacob, then went into the house to warn the others.

  Jacob rose. The driver was a woman, the passenger a huge, muscular man. Both wore dark suits. They carried themselves with confidence, but moved with a certain wariness as they studied their surroundings from behind sunglasses. Jacob felt a surge of relief. FBI agents Krantz and Fayer.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say they were friends. They’d worked together to uproot the conspiracy at the heart of Zarahemla, but the agents had disappeared once the investigation concluded. Just as well; Jacob had plenty of work and he didn’t need the distraction. But during the investigation, they’d come to rely on, even trust, each other. He wondered if that would hold up now.

  Agent Fayer came up the porch first, and held out her hand. “Jacob, you look well.”

  He took her hand. “Thank you. You, too.”

  “I’ve never been here. The red cliffs are stunning. No wonder nobody wants to leave.”

  “Thank you. You’re in. . .well, a good mood.”

  “Not so hostile, you mean?” Krantz said in his distinctive rumble, shaking Jacob’s hand as well.

  Fayer smiled. “I’ve undergone sensitivity training. Glad to hear it’s had some effect. I’m going for the kinder, gentler approach these days.”

  Krantz snorted. “Kinder and gentler? Two weeks ago some slimeball tried to cop a feel and Fayer gave him a knee to the groin. I think one of his testicles actually popped out his left nostril.”

  Jacob laughed, as much in relief as at the joke. Their demeanor was friendly, and some of his worry evaporated.

  Eliza returned to the porch and Agent Krantz stood a little straighter. “Hello, Eliza. How are you?”

  She beamed. “I’m fine, how about you?”

  “Doing great.”

  “How are those coffin nails?”

  “Uhm, still working on that.” He looked sheepish. “But only eight cigarettes so far this month. My goal for next month is five. After that. . .well, we’ll see.”

  “Give me a call when you’ve smoked your last and we’ll celebrate.” She touched a hand to his arm. “Good to see you, Steve.”

  Jacob raised an eyebrow. Steve? He was not surprised to see that Krantz still had his eye on Eliza, but hadn’t expected that goofy expression on his sister’s face. Good thing Father wasn’t out here, or Abraham Christianson might find himself under charges for assaulting an officer of the law.

  Agent Krantz turned to Jacob after they’d finished pleasantries and taken seats on the veranda with a pitcher of lemonade and the overhead fans turned on. “As big of a mess as Zarahemla turned out to be, someone decided we weren’t screw-ups after all. We’ve been assigned to a special cult investigation team.”

  “Is that a promotion?”

  “I guess, if by promotion you mean we have new, more powerful people to suck up to, longer hours, and the same old pay.”

  “In that case, congratulations!”

  Krantz smiled, then his face turned businesslike. “So you know what this is about. I trust you’ll help in any way you can.”

  Jacob considered. Maybe it was a trick from the FBI’s bag, but he felt relaxed by their friendly approach. They trusted him after their work at Zarahemla, but he could easily take the approach his people usually took toward law enforcement: stonewalling, lying, and denying. He was not proud of the small ways in which he’d engaged in this tactic in the past. Or, he could trust that they’d done nothing wrong, that cooper
ating could help dozens of people gain closure about the deaths of their family and friends.

  He gave a nod to Eliza to indicate his intentions. “We’ll help in any way we can. My only hope is that you can minimize our role to the public. We just can’t take another media swarm. It’s corrosive.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Krantz said. “But you know how things get. They reach a tipping point and then it goes nuts. Maybe nobody will make the connection.”

  “Here’s the first big piece of information, if you don’t have it already. The guy who ordered the suicide pact was a Lost Boy, one of Elder Kimball’s sons.”

  Krantz whistled. “That’s one fu—I mean messed up—family.”

  “The family is full of bad seeds,” Jacob said, “and Eliza seems to be on a mission to crush their skulls in, one at a time.”

  Fayer whipped out a digital recorder. “Whoa, you’d better back up.”

  “Sorry, Liz,” Jacob said. His sister had winced at this last part. “Are you good, do you want to wait?”

  Her mouth formed a thin line. “I’m good. Let’s do it now, get it over with.”

  The other three stayed silent while Eliza related her story. She left nothing out and Jacob got an even more complete picture than he had earlier. The details were beyond ugly and his throat constricted when she described how they’d tried to “sanctify” her in the back room. And the horror of the pit in the desert was almost worse. He had a mild claustrophobia, nothing serious, but enough that the thought of lying in his own filth, naked in the darkness terrified him. And yet his sister had immediately set about trying to escape. Had actually done so.

  Eliza continued to the horrific conclusion, when she’d crushed the Disciple’s head with a chunk of concrete. For the most part, she relayed the details in a calm, almost detached manner, but during this last part her voice tightened and she had to stop. Jacob refilled her lemonade glass. She took a long drink and then filled in the part about the people willingly entering the trailer to wait for Wormwood to fall.

  Jacob closed his eyes. Those screams, those people he couldn’t save. One voice haunted him, a young man’s voice, calm above the chaos. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. And then a woman screaming, screaming, and he couldn’t hear the young man for a long moment. When she stopped, Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies, thou annointest my head with oil. And then the fire, the screams, the collapsing building, and the voice was silenced.

  Where’s your priesthood power now? Jacob thought. If you’re so good, if you can heal a man with a blessing, why couldn’t you stand like Alma and Amulek, command the prison walls to fall around you?

  Or were the miracles of the Book of Mormon and the Bible from a closed book? Were the only miracles left the quiet ones, the unprovable?

  He was still reliving the horror at the trailer and thinking about that blessing of David on the porch when his sister finished.

  There was a long moment of silence and then Fayer cleared her throat. “That’s one heck of a story.”

  “It’s not a story,” Eliza said.

  “That’s not what I mean. It fits what we’ve been able to piece together from the crime scene. And I’m sure the other details that come out will corroborate. But that you survived all that, got Miss Caliari out. . .I’m impressed. If you ever want to leave all this—” She gestured at the polygamist compound and the desert around them, “—you’ve got a future in the FBI.”

  Jacob said, “That’s what Sister Miriam already told her.”

  “We could use someone else on our team,” Krantz said. “Someone with an inside knowledge of religious cults.”

  “I’m flattered,” Eliza said. “Don’t think now is the time, but I’ll file that away. You never know.”

  “We need more details, of course,” Fayer said, “but that’s a start and we appreciate your cooperation. Is Agent Kite around?”

  “Sister Miriam?” Jacob shook his head. “She went into St. George to meet Madeline Caliari’s mom at the airport.”

  “I want to hear her side, as soon as she gets back. There are more layers to this story, and we won’t stop until we peel them all back.”

  #

  The real Allison Caliari was nothing like the woman who had approached them at Zarahemla. She got out of the car after Miriam parked in front of the Christianson ranch and looked around with a wary expression. Allison was short, with a dark bob, not unattractive, but more of a soccer mom than the glamorous woman who had appeared at the Zarahemla compound. Not the same woman at all. Madeline had called her mother the moment they’d arrived in Blister Creek after fleeing Las Vegas.

  Eliza watched the woman staring at two of her father’s wives in prairie dresses, pushing double strollers toward the park, before she caught sight of her daughter coming down the steps from the porch. Both mother and daughter let out a cry and ran toward each other. There were tears, embraces, chatter from both of them.

  “What do you think?” Eliza asked Jacob.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Jacob said.

  Agents Krantz and Fayer had gone inside to interview Father. Near as Eliza could tell, Abraham Christianson didn’t know anything, but that wouldn’t stop him. He’d be blustering, denying, arguing for the sake of arguing. It would take two hours to extract two minutes of information.

  “I spent more time digging around the internet and most of it is true,” Jacob continued. “Allison Caliari really is the head of an online group searching for children lost to cults. Madeline really had been sucked into their group and Allison really had been desperate to find her. Except the real Allison Caliari thought her daughter was still in the Northwest, or maybe California. She hadn’t figured out the Las Vegas connection, or realized that the Disciple was a Lost Boy or connected in any way to Father’s church.

  “That’s weird enough,” Jacob continued, “but think about this. Here is the head of an online group dedicated to tracking and following Chosen Ones. They have the advantage of pooled knowledge, they’ve listed their attempts to follow cult members around, discovering how they would eat garbage, sleep in dumpsters or under freeway overpasses. They hire people to track and kidnap their children in order to reverse brainwash them out of the cult. And they still never find the Las Vegas compound.”

  “Which means,” Eliza said, “That whoever the imposter is, she knew more about the Chosen Ones than a group dedicated to studying and exposing the cult. How is that possible?”

  “An ex-member of the group?”

  Eliza considered, then shook her head. “That woman is too old. Not one of the Chosen Ones was older than twenty-five, near as I could tell. She really did look like someone’s mother.”

  “I don’t like it. It’s too slick. Someone maneuvered us into this position, tricked us into sending you off to Las Vegas. Whoever it was knew so much she probably knew about the cleansing, the sanctifying, the purifying. And didn’t care if she sacrificed you to the cult. For what?” His face turned grim. “Whoever it is, she’s no friend of ours.”

  “It was worth it,” Eliza said. “I saved Madeline Caliari. I’d do it again.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I do. If I didn’t, the things I saw would make me go insane.” She forced a smile. “The last thing we need around here is another religious nutcase.”

  “Hmm, what’s the female version of the Disciple in King James English?”

  “I don’t think the Bible gives us a word for that. Women are either daughters, wives, or whores.”

  “Come on, is that all? Surely the language allows the gentler sex to be possessed by demons.”

  “That’s true, I’d forgotten. We can be witches, after all.”

  His voice turned more serious. “There’s something else that’s bothering me, Liz. Did you realize you’ve killed two sons from the Kimball clan now, and in much the same way?”

 
; “Bashed in their psychotic brains with rocks, you mean. Yes, I’m aware.”

  A raised eyebrow. “You’re taking this awfully well. No post-traumatic whatever-you-want-to-call-it?”

  “Not yet. I’m trying to keep it light or we’re back to crazy and possessed by demons. But no, I won’t take it well, not when I get a chance to chew it over. But what’s this about Gideon and Caleb? Can it wait, do we need to talk about it now?”

  “I don’t think it can. The problem is, there’s a third brother out there, if you haven’t forgotten. Where is he, what’s he doing?”

  Eliza felt her mouth go dry. Taylor Junior. Her would-be husband, the survivor of the Lost Boy conspiracy, who’d disappeared after Gideon’s death and Elder Kimball’s arrest.

  Jacob nodded. “Fernie will be here in a couple of hours. We need to talk to her. And Miriam, probably David, too. And have a serious discussion about Taylor Junior.”

  #

  “And you’re clean?” Miriam asked as she and David walked with Diego around the side of the ranch house. Jacob and Eliza stood on the porch, having an animated chat about something. David drew up short.

  “Where would I get stuff around here? You haven’t been giving me anything.”

  “A junkie has a way of sniffing out drugs, David. If you don’t want to be clean, you’ll find something, somewhere. You’ll steal from the medicine cabinet, you’ll dig around in the household cleaners until you find a way to mix up something nasty. You’ll do something.” She looked him in the eye. “Can you promise you’re clean?”

  “I’m clean. It’s hard as hell, but I’ve done it so far. Haven’t smoked, snorted, swallowed, or injected a thing since Jacob’s blessing.”

  “Good. I have faith in Jacob’s priesthood power, but you still have to do everything you can. That’s the way the Lord works.”

  Was it the Lord? He could see Miriam’s whole plan laid out. She’d conspired with his father to bring him to Blister Creek, feed him drugs and then bring Jacob down to cast out his demons with a blessing. Could that possibly be the Lord’s work? And yet here he was, making a valiant fight against the demon that entrenched itself in his soul.