They slowed to maneuver around the burned-out wreckage of a helicopter that had fallen or been shot down over the freeway. Eliza stared out the window, and could see only devastation: a swath of burned, destroyed buildings, entire blocks where it was impossible to tell street from house. Not a tree to be seen.
“It’s worse than Las Vegas,” Steve said. “What the hell were they fighting over?”
They continued into the northern part of the county, where one town after the next lay devastated: Pleasant Grove, American Fork, Lehi. Tens of thousands had made these cities their homes, but now there was nothing. Not a single person, not a sign of life. Most of the buildings had burned, leaving behind only billboards, an entire forest of them lining the freeway like metal trees, advertising long-dead businesses.
It took an hour to cross the next stretch of ten miles. Wrecked vehicles, both civilian and military, clogged the lanes in both directions, and bomb craters had rendered other portions of the road hazardous. Weeds and brush were already growing up through the gaps left by the battle.
They weaved back and forth, pushing aside smaller vehicles, running onto the shoulder, or crossing to the other side to get around the biggest craters. The dead traffic cleared out when they reached the Point of the Mountain, the freeway pass that led up and out of Utah Valley and down into Salt Lake Valley.
When they reached the top of the pass, with its view over Salt Lake and its suburbs, Steve pulled to a stop. They got out and stared, neither speaking for a long moment.
A million people had lived in the valley before the collapse. Now it was a wasteland.
“And the city shall lie in dust,” Eliza said.
“What?”
“Something Fernie said to me, once. When she and Jacob lived in the Avenues above Temple Square during his residency, she had a dream, a vision, really, that Salt Lake would be destroyed. In the dream, Fernie was walking the streets of the city and all the buildings were burning. Ash was falling from the sky.”
“Is there any point?” he said. “Should we turn around?”
She sighed. “I was hoping . . .”
“Yeah, me too.” He squeezed her hand. “It will be okay.”
“I hope so.”
“It will be,” Steve said, more insistently this time. “We’re not alone. Our people are still alive and fighting.”
Eliza smiled at this. Our people. Not your people.
“We’ll go home,” he added, “tell them what we found, and make the most of it. At the end of the day, we’re still the lucky ones, right?”
“Let’s be sure,” she said.
Eliza grabbed the binoculars and an assault rifle from the truck. She didn’t see the slightest risk of attack, but it seemed like a wise precaution, anyway. She handed Steve the gun and lifted the binoculars to study the scene.
She started with the south end of the valley. Ruins and destruction everywhere. More towns completely annihilated. Farther north and west, the towns were in somewhat better condition, with several vast subdivisions seemingly untouched except for their missing trees. But there was nobody on the streets, no movement that she could spot. Tumbleweeds had blown out of the western deserts and piled into house-size mounds in driveways and parking lots. Continuing north, she saw abandoned shopping centers. The LDS temple at Daybreak was a gaunt skeleton on its hill, the spire toppled. Then there was a stretched of burned, emptied land for several miles. East of the freeway was more of the same.
There were still buildings standing in downtown Salt Lake, and she could even spot the main temple at Temple Square, but that was so far to the north that it was impossible to pick out details, even with the binoculars at their highest magnification. No doubt downtown had been gutted by war and fire as well.
“Hey, what’s that?” Steve asked. “See that big line?”
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Here, let me have a look.”
She handed him the binoculars. He lifted them, lowered them again as if to pick out landmarks, then held them steady. He let out a low whistle.
“Check it out. About 1300 South, follow the freeway exit east toward the university. Yep, it’s definitely something.”
She was squinting, unable to see what had caught his eye. She could see all the way to downtown, but couldn’t pick out anything in particular from this distance except for the larger buildings.
Until Steve handed her the binoculars. Then she found it at once.
It was a wall. A berm of dirt and rubble ran in a straight line from the freeway along the southern edge of downtown, then all the way up to the foothills and the University of Utah, where she lost track of the wall around the football stadium. She’d missed the wall the first time; perhaps sweeping over the berm she’d dismissed it as more bombed-out rubble.
“That’s not following 1300 South,” she said. “More like Ninth. It climbs the hill and hooks toward the football stadium at the U.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“A wall.” Eliza shifted the binoculars back down toward the freeway and found where the berm cut north. “A two-story wall of dirt and pavement and wrecked buildings. That took an awful lot of manpower to build.”
“Must have been vicious fighting to force that. And at the end of the day, that’s all they saved? That little square downtown?”
“You save what you can,” she said. “Toss it up, protect a few square miles. The rest of the city is lost—hold on to what you can.”
“It’s like the Dark Ages all over again,” Steve said.
The thought was chilling. It had only been a few years since the supervolcano exploded and the crops failed. Already the center had collapsed out of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. There was no government left, no civilization—not in this part of the country, at least. Only a few frightened, huddled communities fighting off the wandering, starving survivors.
They passed the binoculars back and forth. Eliza wondered if there was someone on the wall looking back at them. Perhaps the alarm had already been raised, and the battle-hardened survivors of Salt Lake City were scrambling to prepare a defense against this strange armored car lingering on the outskirts of the valley.
“What now?” Steve asked.
“Somehow, we’ve got to approach the wall, indicate we’re peaceful, and see if they’ll let us in.” Eliza nodded. “And we find out who is in charge.”
Eliza and Steve rolled up from the southern half of the valley, approaching the city itself at a creeping, unthreatening pace. Before leaving the Point of the Mountain, they’d stuck a pair of rifle butts out the gun ports on either side and tied a white sheet around either one. By the time they reached the 4500 South off-ramp, they were driving slowly enough that any watchers would have time to study the sheets and determine the vehicle didn’t pose a threat.
But that didn’t mean Eliza wasn’t bracing for attack. The world may have lost its governments, its farmland, its networks of trade, but it was awash in weapons and ammunition. Any survivors must by definition have enough firepower to defend themselves. With the National Guard armories in Salt Lake, plus Hill Air Force Base up in Ogden, the survivors would surely have heavy weaponry as well.
And the closer they got to the center of town, the more evidence they saw of a major battle: wrecked tanks, a downed helicopter, gutted Humvees, and armored personnel carriers. There were a few dead, withered bodies, and animal-gnawed bones jutting from khaki pants.
They stopped the vehicle at the 900 South off-ramp. The wind blew from the west, sending plastic bags and tumbleweeds across the roadbed. The off-ramp continued until the curve, where it had been torn up to prevent passage.
“We found them,” Steve said, his gravelly voice turning grim. “Look.”
What she’d taken for a series of bomb craters between the exit lane and the freeway were really fo
xholes. Camouflage netting covered a dug-in artillery piece, and the tips of two antitank guns jutted out from behind sandbags, aiming in their direction.
“I don’t see people, though,” she said. “You’re sure they’re manned?”
“I saw movement. Stay here.”
Steve opened the door and waved his arm before she could ask him what he meant. When that failed to draw a response, he emerged slowly from the truck, leaving the door open. He stepped back and grabbed the white sheet from the rifle butt on his side of the vehicle, then walked in front of the truck with the sheet outstretched.
“Hello? Is anyone there? We come in peace.”
This last bit sounded clichéd, but seemed to have the desired effect. Two men with assault rifles climbed out of one of the holes. They wore uniforms, which made Eliza nervous. The men approached warily, while behind them, one of the antitank guns moved back and forth, as if to inform the strangers that they were one ill-advised move from annihilation.
There was no way Eliza would leave Steve alone to face whatever awaited him, so she opened her door slowly and waved her hands before coming out. She put her hands on her head and waited for the men to approach. They crossed the stretch of broken-up pavement and stopped some twenty feet away.
“Who are you?” one of the men asked. “And what do you want?”
He had a Utah accent. Young guy, maybe twenty. Blond, wholesome look, like the families from old-time pioneer stock. The same pioneer stock that had sired Eliza. The other man was Hispanic, but he too, seemed like a young, frightened kid. She could imagine the horrors these two had seen.
When Eliza spotted the uniforms, she’d been afraid this was an army base. Fernie had come back from the Green River refugee camp to tell Eliza that Salt Lake was under partial Federal control. Maybe there was no one left up here but military.
But the appearance of these kids, plus the one boy’s Utah accent, gave her renewed hope. She decided to take a chance.
“We’re citizens of Utah,” Eliza said, “looking to make contact with the state government. Does it still exist?”
The young men looked back and forth between each other. The blond kid shrugged and his companion glanced back toward the foxhole, as if seeking instructions from a superior.
“Is there a government?” Eliza pressed. “Is there a mayor of Salt Lake? A city council? Who is in charge?”
“The governor runs things,” the blond kid said. “Jim McKay.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The soldiers didn’t abuse the newcomers, but Eliza and Jim were treated like prisoners. After cuffing their hands behind their back, a pair of soldiers led them down the off-ramp and up to 900 South and the outer edge of the wall of rubble and dirt. Behind them, more men inspected the Methuselah tank.
Steve cast a worried glance over his shoulder at her. “Jim McKay,” he muttered to Eliza. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
The McKays were their old nemeses in the state government. The brothers were cousins of Eliza’s father, Abraham Christianson. When he was senator, Jim McKay had instructed his brother Parley, the attorney general, to go after the polygamists to demonstrate to the evangelicals in the Republican Party that he had severed all ties to his fundamentalist relatives. Later, as governor, Jim McKay had been involved in that business stealing Blister Creek’s grain to ship it to the Green River refugee camp.
Eliza had hoped to come into the city, tell the government about Blister Creek, report what they’d seen along the road from Southern Utah, and see if they could establish a connection between her hometown and the government. But McKay was their enemy. And he apparently ruled over a walled city like some sort of medieval fortress.
A few blocks later, the wall jogged across the street to enclose a squat brick building that still carried the sign of the credit union it had once housed. Men sat at machine guns on the roof, while others squatted in bunkers on either side of the front doors. There was some discussion between their guards and a uniformed woman who seemed to be in charge here, before the guards led Steve and Eliza into the credit union lobby and through the building.
Eliza blinked in surprise when they emerged on the inside of the city wall. Most of the buildings on the interior were gone: the chain restaurants, motels, condos, and working-class houses that had lined the streets on this side of town.
The ground had been meticulously cleared of rubble, the foundations filled in. In the place of buildings was what appeared to be the world’s largest community garden—raised beds and fields and even new vines and tiny fruit trees, crisscrossed by the gridded streets of pioneer-era Utah. Men, women, and children worked by hand weeding and pruning. Irrigation ditches passed through culverts beneath the streets to emerge in fields and gardens.
“Mormons,” Steve said, admiringly. “You’ve got to hand it to them. They know how to organize.”
Eliza felt a glow of pride at this, even though these people were mainstream LDS, who had been hostile to the polygamist sects for a hundred years now. But they were cousins of her church, born of the same heritage.
And it wasn’t just Mormons who had survived. Modern Salt Lake had been a large, diverse city, and she caught glimpses of people from different ethnicities: Hispanics, Asians, and even a few Polynesians and African Americans. Some of the workers wore tank tops and shorts, which meant they weren’t even LDS, since they couldn’t be wearing LDS undergarments beneath their clothes.
While most of the land had been cleared for gardens, many of the larger office buildings or apartments remained, and it was here that people lived. Clotheslines hung out laundry to dry, with large, multifamily outhouses out back, together with pens for pigs and chickens. No cattle that she could see, but they would be difficult to care for without fodder or grazing land.
“Where are we going, the Capitol Building?” Eliza asked the guards.
The blond kid gave her a look. “That was destroyed last year in an airstrike. The governor rules from Temple Square.”
“Sorry about the cuffs,” McKay said. “People these days can be . . . zealous.” He nodded at the two young men who’d brought in Eliza and Steve. “You can leave us.”
Eliza rubbed her wrists and watched the departing soldiers as they shut the door to the office behind them. The only light inside the office was sunlight streaming through the windows. McKay had a big map of Utah on one wall, marked with hundreds of pins of various colors. What they meant, she couldn’t guess.
McKay himself looked older, thinner, and more careworn than she remembered from seeing him on TV. His hair had gone gray, and worry lines spread from the corners of his mouth. But far from looking beaten down, there was something hard and determined in his expression.
“You know who we are, right?” Eliza asked, surprised that they’d been left alone with the governor.
“Of course,” McKay said. “You’re my first cousin, once removed. One of Abraham’s daughters. This is Steve . . . um, Kravitz? FBI.”
“Krantz,” Steve said.
“Right. How is your partner? I can’t remember her name, but she was LDS, I remember.”
“Agent Fayer died last year,” Steve said. “Picked up cholera in Las Vegas and we didn’t get her to Dr. Christianson in time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How is Dr. Christianson? And his wife, Fernie. How is she?”
Eliza frowned, her suspicion growing. McKay had seemed momentarily surprised when the guards appeared at his door with the prisoners, but had recovered quickly. Too quickly. He seemed pleased—no doubt he was delighted to have his old enemies fall into his hands.
Eliza had once served as a sister missionary in this very building during her ill-advised attempt to leave Blister Creek and join the mainstream church. All of the old missionary stuff was gone, and it seemed to serve as offices for what remained of the state government, the state itself now reduced to a few square miles a
nd the survivors hiding within the city walls.
“They’re good,” she said cautiously.
“I’m glad to hear it. I want to thank Fernie someday.”
“Hmm.”
“I’ve been inside all morning,” the governor said. “Would you two come outside and walk around the square with me?”
Eliza glanced at Steve, who nodded. They followed the governor outside.
She was surprised at how little Temple Square had changed. The temple and its spires still dominated one end, with the rest of the block taken up by the turtle-shaped tabernacle, the visitors’ centers, and the outdoor gardens. Miraculously, gardeners were still caring for the flower beds. And there were still trees, their leafy branches spreading welcome shade. The entire scene provided a haven of unexpected and welcome beauty. With the walls of the square itself encircling the block, it was easy to pretend that nothing had changed.
McKay took a deep breath. He led the two newcomers toward the temple. It loomed cathedral-like over them, much larger than Blister Creek’s smaller temple. The three of them took a seat on a bench in the sunlight.
“What happened here, Mr. McKay?” Eliza asked. “Who attacked you?”
“Federal troops. The government declared Utah in a state of rebellion.”
After the Battle of Las Vegas, the governor explained, the army had withdrawn from Nevada. Technically, the Federal government had won the battle, having thrashed the rebellious Californians and driven them from Vegas. But the army had been unable to mount an offensive to reclaim the Pacific states. Stretched supply lines collapsed, leaving them without food. They’d rolled into northern Utah to scavenge. Civilians who had been living on their food storage found their pantries raided, their gardens picked over by thousands of troops.
People resisted. There were incidents. Martial law was declared. An army general hanged dozens, including mayors, Mormon bishops, and even the president of BYU when he refused to allow the military to turn the campus into a military encampment. Soon, the region was in full rebellion.
Blood of the Faithful Page 26
