The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  “No. Each of you take your shell and store it in your backpack. I’ve lined the packs with gauze soaked in bleach. Unless the shell actually breaks open, you’ll be fine.” He gestured to the backpacks. “Load them up now. It’s time to get out of here.”

  Taylor Junior’s father waited until the others were outside, then put a hand on his son’s arm. “There’s one thing that concerns me.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re supposed to pull the pin, and then the grenade goes off, right? And that will explode the artillery shell and send out the poison gas.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But when you pull the pin on a grenade, you have to throw it. These shells are too heavy to throw. And you can’t just run away. You’d only have, what? Four or five seconds?”

  “These grenades detonate in seven seconds.”

  “Seven seconds, then,” Father said. “How far can we run in seven seconds? Not far enough, I’d think.”

  “No, not far enough,” Taylor Junior agreed. “I don’t suggest you try.” He put his hand on his father’s shoulder and smiled. “But this isn’t a suicide mission—the Lord will provide a way. Trust me.”

  “Trust you? After the last couple of days, you expect that? How many people do you plan to kill?”

  “I don’t know. That’s for the Lord to decide. Maybe a handful. Maybe none. Maybe all of them.”

  “All of them? There will be nobody left to lead.”

  “The apostates who don’t repent will die.” He allowed himself to smile. “And there’s always your spawn, remember? How many children do you have? The Lord can create a new people, if he needs them.”

  Father stared. “Is it power you want? Do you think you’re really a prophet?”

  “Why don’t you answer that question? You’re the one who showed me the angel. You’re the one who gave me life. I’m only following the path that you set me on.”

  “You’re no better than Gideon. And you’re crazy, like Caleb.”

  “If there’s one thing I’m not, Father, it’s crazy.” Taylor Junior shook his head. “That’s what makes me different from my brothers. That’s why I’m going to do what they couldn’t manage. That’s why I’m going to win.”

  Father must have noticed Taylor Junior looking at the final shell, still sitting at the bottom of the chest. “What is that? Backup?”

  “Not a backup,” Taylor Junior said. He pulled on his gloves. “Not exactly. More like completing the circle. There’s one thing missing in our plan to attack the enemy. If Abraham, Jacob, and the others come looking for us here, they’ll still be around after we finish our attack. They’ll come after us, and there won’t be any women or children or anything else to hold them back.”

  “That seems like a fatal flaw.”

  “Tell me, Father. How smart is Jacob Christianson?”

  “Brilliant.”

  “I’m brilliant, Father. So was Gideon. Eliza too, for that matter, and you always told me that Abraham was a cunning son of Satan. Blister Creek is full of intelligent people. Is Jacob smart like that, or smarter?”

  “I don’t know. What are you getting at?”

  “Will he find this place on his own, do you think?”

  “How would he?” Elder Kimball asked. “Nobody else did.”

  “That’s exactly my point. Does he need a clue, or is he smarter than the rest of you? One way or another, we need to be sure he finds this place.”

  “We do? Why?” his father asked, proving that he wasn’t, in fact, particularly brilliant, no matter the intelligence of any of the other interested parties.

  Taylor Junior lifted the last shell. “Because we’re going to close the circle. We’re going to leave Jacob Christianson a welcome gift.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At one time in Jacob’s life, a rifle had felt like an extension of his own arm. But given how he’d avoided firearms for the last dozen years, it surprised him how comfortable he felt with the .30-06 tied to his backpack.

  As a child, he’d hunted everything from small game like rabbits and quail, to deer. He remembered the day he’d lost his enthusiasm for hunting. He’d been seventeen and with his brother Enoch and his Grandpa Griggs hunting deep in the Ghost Cliffs. It was a cold day in mid-November. They’d been out for twenty-four hours before they spotted any does, let alone a buck. It was late afternoon when they found the tracks in the snow.

  Grandpa was the best tracker of the three, but his eyes couldn’t see well in dim light and there was a thick, oppressive cloud cover threatening more snow, so Jacob did the tracking. They’d been following several sets of tracks with droppings for about an hour when he differentiated a more promising set of prints among the group. They were bigger, with a more pronounced dew claw. When the larger tracks veered from the others, he was sure they had a buck. Better still, the trail didn’t move in a straight line as it crossed a meadow, but meandered, meaning the animal was moving at a slow pace. Periodically, they came across a place where the deer had cleared away snow to get at the grass.

  A familiar excitement pulled at Jacob’s gut. The thrill of the hunt, maybe even bloodlust, the urge to bring down a big, powerful animal. It was something primitive, leaping out of his hindbrain.

  “Slow down, son,” Grandpa said.

  “We have an hour, hour and a half before dusk,” Jacob said. “We slow down we’ll lose it.”

  They did lose the trail briefly as it crossed a windswept stretch of bare rock, but picked it up on the other side. It had started to snow, but only the finest flakes, which settled like dust onto the harder, crustier snow from a few days earlier. It made the tracking more difficult.

  The tracks climbed a rocky ridge and then descended into a narrow, brush-filled valley, maybe two hundred yards across. They scanned the valley with binoculars.

  “There he is,” Enoch said. “Two o’clock, patch of scrub oak.”

  Jacob spotted it, about eighty yards away, antlers moving among the brush. It was a good-sized animal, large, 4x4 rack. The deer lifted its head and looked around. Grandpa and the two boys dropped to their bellies.

  “Good eye,” Jacob said to his younger brother. “Whose shot?”

  “You tracked it,” Grandpa said. “You take it down.”

  Jacob felt a tug of guilt. He’d tracked it, but Enoch had spotted the deer. And Enoch was always carrying the gun, never getting the shot. Not at the big game, anyway. But Jacob’s hunting instinct was aroused, and he wanted to feel that punch in the shoulder, hear the whip-crack echo across the valley and watch the deer fall.

  He looked down the scope of his .30-06. The buck started to move. In a moment it would be clear of the brush. He’d have a clean shot. Jacob estimated the range at seventy-five yards. As the animal emerged from the scrub oak, it lifted its head and turned its wary attention toward the hillside. Snowflakes landed on its long, black eyelashes and melted in its hot breath.

  Jacob felt a strange stirring, a connection with the animal. It was nothing more than any hunter felt with his prey, he supposed, but at that moment all he could think about was how he’d tracked the animal through the mountains, across the snow, and down into this gully, sensing its will and feeling every wary step. To hunt it was to see into its mind.

  His finger felt cold on the trigger.

  “What are you waiting for?” Grandpa asked.

  “It’s too beautiful,” he said. “I don’t want to kill it.”

  “Heavens, boy,” Grandpa whispered. “We’re not writing a nature book. There’s two hundred fifty pounds on the hoof there. That’s a hundred twenty, hundred thirty pounds of venison.”

  Jacob wasn’t about to do something childish like purposefully miss and scare off the buck, although the thought did occur to him. It was late enough in the evening that if the animal escaped, it could be twenty miles away by morning. He wasn’t going to do that, but the bloodlust was gone. Someone else would have to pull the trigger.

  He handed the rifle to his
brother. Enoch took it with an eager look. He sighted down the gun as Grandpa sighed and said, “Just don’t miss, boy.”

  Enoch had better aim than Grandpa Griggs gave him credit for, and knocked the buck over with the first shot. It struggled to its feet and staggered for several yards before it went down a second time. Grandpa and the two boys picked their way down the hillside. A crimson smear stretched across the snow, ending in a larger red splotch surrounding the animal. The buck was still alive.

  It looked up at Jacob as he approached, and he could see the fear and pain in its eyes. He felt the urge to bend and do something for the animal. To heal it, set it off on its way to live its nomadic life in the mountains.

  Grandpa pulled out his hunting knife to finish the job.

  “No, let me do it,” Jacob said. He took the knife and approached cautiously to make sure the deer didn’t have a final lunge in it. Then, with a silent prayer, he drew the knife across its throat. Blood gushed. Jacob looked away.

  Father had looked disgusted when Grandpa Griggs relayed the story later of how Jacob had refused to take the shot. “Damn fool attitude.”

  “I didn’t want to kill it. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with that? We’re ranchers and farmers, Jacob. Are you going to get a weird feeling next time you slaughter a pig? Is it going to turn your stomach to chop the head off a chicken?”

  It had, as it turned out. He no longer had any stomach for killing. Still did it, of course, when it was necessary, but he did what he could to turn that task over to other people. Not long after that, he told his father that he didn’t want to study agricultural science when he left for college next fall, but wanted to study premed. He’d expected Father to launch into a rant about living off the land, preparing for the last days, or some other nonsense, but Abraham Christianson had simply sighed and said, “I saw this coming. Ah, well, I guess we need doctors, too.”

  Jacob had done some target shooting after that, but had no urge to hunt or fish. But years later, a rifle slung over his shoulder and tracking prey again, Jacob felt that familiar excitement pulling at his gut. His eyes caught every movement of the wind in the branches, noted every moving bird. His sense of smell was heightened, and he caught the scent of pine, the bright flavor of summer wildflowers in the high meadows, the smell of sweat as they hiked through the heat of the day. He heard the others’ footsteps kicking up gravel, their heavy breathing.

  The rifle’s weight felt comfortable across his shoulder. It would feel equally comfortable in his hands. He remembered the kick against his shoulder, could almost smell the powder. He imagined Taylor Junior as seen through the scope, imagined himself pulling the trigger. It would be easy. And satisfying.

  Jacob took the lead while Abraham Christianson and Stephen Paul Young followed his path. The other two men kept up a grim conversation, talking about what to do if the enemy had rifles, what to do if they had heavier weapons. How would they flank the enemy camp? And what if women and children started shooting?

  The trail climbed above the slickrock, and they were crossing the stretch among the boulders and Douglas fir where he, Miriam, and David had met Rebecca and her armed guard coming down the mountain. Jacob glanced back. His father and Stephen Paul rounded the bend behind him. He found himself wondering about the woman and wishing she’d come along so he could interrogate her further.

  She had some personal history with the church, no question. Probably some cousin of his somewhere, from a family driven off by scandal. He didn’t have to dig into the history of the church to know there were skeletons. He’d seen plenty himself, and for every one he knew about there were probably twenty buried in shallow graves, waiting to be discovered.

  What was that comment she’d made to his father when he’d whistled at the kids? Wonder what your grannie would say about that.

  The only grandmother his father ever called Grannie had been his great-grandmother Cowley. But how would Rebecca know about that?

  There was a lot Jacob didn’t know about the history of Blister Creek. It was mostly the story of men—at least the history the current generation of men talked about—but Grandma Cowley’s story was an exception. She’d been born in a covered wagon, raised in a polygamist family. As a woman she’d clawed a home from the wilderness, stood up to prophets and patriarchs, mothered numerous children, and lived to be almost a hundred years old. She’d spent her last two decades living alone on the far edge of the valley. Jacob’s mother once told him that his father and Grandma Cowley had been close, even though they were separated in age by three-quarters of a century. Mother said that Abraham had sung at her funeral and had broken down in the last verse, unable to continue. Jacob couldn’t imagine his father crying in public.

  When Jacob, David, Enoch, and Eliza had discovered the cellar that time at Grandma Cowley’s cabin on Yellow Flats, he’d been fascinated by the shelves full of bottled peaches with rusting lids, the handwritten cookbooks, and the books with brown covers and yellowed pages. It felt like stepping out of a time machine. He left most of it undisturbed, but had tucked a strange little reader called The Good Scholar into his pocket to study when he got home. It was full of instructions for children about right and moral behavior. A fine, cursive hand—he supposed Grandma Cowley’s—had underlined and written notes throughout the book. He stopped at one marked-up section, which read:

  Julia was a fine scholar—the best in her class. Her reputation was so well known that a slight mistake or two at examination would scarcely affect her standing. And yet, so anxious was she not to fail in any thing, that she very foolishly concealed written answers in her book. Here was a temptation to dishonesty. And the consciousness of it seemed to weaken her self-possession and confidence, and she yielded. The committee saw it, and the cheeks of the poor girl were crimsoned with shame at the detection. Better have failed in every answer, than exposed herself to such mortification, and done herself such an injury. Besides, such conduct was morally wrong—it was deception.

  And Grandma Cowley had written in the margin, in tiny, immaculate cursive, Was the child’s crime the deception itself, or did it emerge from the detection of the deception? I should like to put that question to certain elders of the tribes of Kimballs, Cowleys, Youngs, Christiansons, Griggs, &c.

  Toward the end of the book Jacob came across something even stranger. It was a temperance song, warning about the dangers of drink. Grandma Cowley had crossed out most of the lyrics with a light pencil, then double-underlined the following lines:

  There’s a monster at first seems an angel of light

  And he flies on beautiful wings

  Grandma Cowley had written in the margin, in her beautiful hand, Angel of Light = Monster!

  Jacob had puzzled over several things she’d written in the book, but kept returning to that final passage. What had she meant? And why did her underlining seem particularly firm in that spot? He’d felt as if she were trying to tell him something, that he was having a conversation with the woman, already dead for decades, and this particular passage, perhaps written eighty, ninety years ago, had been meant for him. But he couldn’t quite grasp the meaning.

  And was it possible to miss someone, feel lonely for someone you’d never met? He felt cheated.

  He glanced back at his father no more than twenty feet back. Father had kept up with Jacob and Stephen Paul, and though he looked tired, his face drawn, Jacob suspected it wouldn’t be the older man calling for a rest from the forced march.

  Grandma Cowley’s death had made his father cry in public. How was that possible? Father must have been a different sort of person back then, he decided at last.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jacob was no longer in front when they reached David and Miriam’s camp, and it almost ended in disaster. Stephen Paul, who had the most stamina of the group, was in the lead, urging them to keep going when the others were ready to collapse from exhaustion. He stumbled into their camp without seeing their lean-to hidden
in the copse of juniper trees.

  Jacob heard shouting and threats and came around the corner to see Stephen Paul with his rifle and Miriam aiming a gun at the man’s chest and ordering him to stand down. Jacob ran ahead of his father, shouting and waving his arms. But fortunately, the two had belatedly recognized each other and were already lowering their respective weapons.

  After things settled down, Miriam took Jacob away from the others and to the ridge that overlooked the canyon, where she told him what she’d discovered. Even through the binoculars, it took a minute before he could see the remains of the campfire. “And they’re all gone? Every one of them?”

  “There was a fight last night. We didn’t see the first half of it, just heard gunshots. Later, there was a big bonfire. They were pushing some guy around. We couldn’t see who. An older man, but not Kimball, I don’t think. Another gunshot. I think they killed him, but it was too dark to see for sure. They were all gone by morning. Men, women, children. We were debating whether to go down to investigate.”

  She told him about how Taylor Junior had disappeared earlier, even though there had been no obvious escape from the box canyon. He used the binoculars to search the canyon, but saw no way out from this vantage point.

  Jacob lowered the binoculars to see Miriam looking back toward the three men who sat among the trees about fifty feet distant. David sat by himself and cast irritated looks in Father’s direction while the other two ate from a can of beans they’d heated over a propane cookstove.

  Miriam turned to him. “What’s with your father and his henchman?”

  “We’re going after Taylor Junior. We’re ending it here and now.” He caught a sharp look. “We have to take him out, you know we do.”

  “Of course we do, that’s not my issue.” She hooked a thumb toward Jacob’s father. “But what about them?”

  “We need people who aren’t afraid to take brutal action.”