Hell's Fortress

by Michael Wallace

  Miriam walked up to Eliza and shone her flashlight through the glass. “I don’t believe it. It’s Chambers.”

  Chambers was a tall man, almost Steve’s height, but so thin and lanky, he looked like a child’s drawing of a stick figure with clothes draped over him. After losing his job with the FBI, Steve had developed a cool relationship with his former partners—including Chambers—but there was none of that now as Eliza’s fiancé led the man into the back of the armored car.

  “Go figure,” Chambers said. He sounded gruff, but was grinning wide enough to split his face. Already he was reaching for a water bottle and tearing open one of the boxes with vacuum-sealed beef jerky. “You bozos almost left me, didn’t you?”

  “What? We’d never do that,” Steve said. “We were going to drive around the city hanging lost FBI agent fliers.”

  Chambers snorted.

  “What took you so long?” Miriam asked.

  “The usual. Gunfire, missile strikes.” His eyes fell on Fayer. “Oh, crap.”

  Fayer looked up at him through bleary, sunken eyes, her face shrouded monk-like by the blanket. “Crap. Yes, you could say that.”

  “What happened?”

  Eliza didn’t wait for the explanations, but returned to her seat and shifted into gear. All her attention fixed on the view through that three-inch-by-twenty-inch portal of bulletproof glass, she pulled onto the road. Steve came up front.

  “Chambers has the other machine gun. I thought I’d help you navigate.”

  “Left here? Then what was it again?”

  “Drive to Palms Boulevard and take another left,” he said.

  “Wish I could risk the headlights. I can’t see a blasted thing.”

  The light was marginally better when she got to Palms. A row of glass offices to her left reflected enough of the burning city to illuminate her path. Palms was a divided, two-lane road with a xeriscaped median, now overgrown with cactus thickets and desert weeds. Most of the palm trees had died, some torn up by gunfire. Abandoned, gutted cars littered their way, and the pavement glittered with thousands of spent casings.

  Eliza made it two more blocks before she reached a blocked intersection, so strewn with rubble and wrecked vehicles that she had to go up on the sidewalk and then shove aside an overturned sedan with the machine’s nose. This bought her another block, when she came upon a looming black shape in her path. There would be no pushing this aside. It was a battered tank with its treads blown off, surrounded by other dead and smoldering military vehicles, and several wrecked field guns. Dead soldiers littered the ground. Another man lay draped over the tank turret.

  “Turn back,” Steve said. “We’ll cut around that last block.”

  She didn’t like the idea of backtracking, in case they’d been spotted. And when she got there, she liked even less the narrow, apartment-lined street that would get them around the blocked intersection. It was the perfect place for snipers. There were more cars, some of them inconveniently placed. She got around the first several, but had to push aside a little Hyundai that was perfectly positioned to block the entire street. It groaned with metal on metal.

  Something clanged against the side of the truck like the sound of a ball-peen hammer striking a metal drum. Then two more shots pinged against the right side. Tentative, probing. Chambers answered with three short bursts through his side gun port. Suddenly, a hailstorm opened up. Small-arms fire rattled them from every side.

  Eliza turned on the lights and rumbled to the end of the block. She rounded the corner to get them parallel with Palms Boulevard, then killed the headlights when she got back to Palms and slowed to a crawl.

  It was a narrow escape and nobody spoke for several seconds.

  Steve turned on a penlight and studied a map. “Get us onto Dwight Eisenhower and then find a place to pull over. I want to ask Chambers about the map. He knows Vegas better than I do.”

  That was five more blocks. Once onto Dwight Eisenhower, Eliza maneuvered to a place of shelter between a city bus with missing tires and a concrete retaining wall painted over with graffiti. More drainage canals like the ones that had carried them from the hotel lay on the other side of the retaining wall. She killed the engine.

  Steve went back to talk to Chambers. Miriam also wanted to know about changing ammo. They had a can of incendiaries that might be useful as they faced vehicles on the highways.

  Grover picked his way forward while the others were talking. “The lady agent isn’t doing very well.”

  “Worse than before?” Eliza asked.

  “She wouldn’t drink any water. I’m not sure she’s fully conscious.”

  Eliza rubbed at her temples. She’d dozed in the stifling heat of the warehouse the previous afternoon, but was now on her second full night without a good, unbroken stretch of sleep. Her mind was too fuzzy to deal with this new information.

  “Are all the diarrhea pills gone?”

  “There’s one left. I don’t think they’re helping.”

  “I don’t know what else to do. Grind it up and dissolve it in one of the water bottles. See if you can get her to drink a little. Also, while we’re stopped, empty her bucket. It stinks, and we don’t want it sloshing out and getting the rest of us sick.”

  “All right.” As he rose from the passenger seat, he winced and rubbed at his left arm.

  “Are you okay?”

  “That stupid poker chip shrapnel. It’s nothing—I don’t have the right to complain, given the circumstances.”

  She glanced back at the three agents—former and current—still arguing about the guns. What was taking them so long? And why hadn’t they settled it before leaving the factory?

  “Here, let me take a look.”

  Grover wasn’t as shy this time. He rolled up his sleeve and she unwound the bandage. It had absorbed a little blood, but not too much. Grover was right; he should count himself lucky. However, the wound itself looked worse than it should. She grabbed the penlight Steve had placed in the coin holder and examined his arm more carefully.

  The wound oozed pus and had a sour smell. She chewed her lip.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s infected.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing, but it’s moving pretty quickly. Like Fayer’s cholera. There’s a risk of gangrene, of sepsis—I don’t want to mess around. Get me iodine from the first aid kit. And some matches. Also, cotton gauze.”

  He made a sound in the back of his throat. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad,” she lied. “Go on, hurry. Unless you want to lose your arm.”

  Grover pushed past Steve as the man came back up front.

  “Chambers says the 95 is crawling with Bear Republic troops,” Steve said. “He thinks they’re preparing a push into downtown.”

  “We don’t have a choice—we have to go north. If we can get past that military base, Highway 93 is clear all the way up the east side of Nevada.”

  “At least it was a couple days ago,” Miriam said, also making her way up from the back. “For all we know, the federal troops have sealed the road.”

  “Why would they bother?” Eliza asked. “There’s nothing in that part of the state. Badlands. A few abandoned towns. Any troop movement is flowing east-west. Maybe up from Arizona.”

  “Chambers thinks there’s a gap directly north of the city,” Steve said. “A no-man’s-land between the two armies. Nothing big—maybe a few hundred yards wide.”

  “If we find it,” Eliza said, “we can shoot the gap.”

  “That’s one heck of a gamble. We could just as well be volunteering for bombardment from both sides.” He let out his breath. “But, okay. I don’t see much choice. Miriam?”

  “I say we go for it.”

  G
rover arrived with the gauze, the matches, and the iodine. Eliza took them and gently tugged him forward. He flinched, like a kid being pushed into the dentist chair. When he was past Miriam and next to Steve, she took his wrist.

  “Hold him,” she told them.

  They grabbed Grover before he could jerk back.

  “Listen to me,” she said in a firm voice. “This is deadly serious.”

  Grover trembled. “What are you going to do?”

  “What would you do if your lamb had an infected wound and you didn’t have any access to antibiotics?”

  Eliza rolled up his shirt while Steve held his arm still. Miriam held his other arm behind his back.

  “You’re going to cauterize it.”

  “A lamb will kick and scream,” Eliza said, “because it doesn’t understand. You understand. You won’t do that, right?”

  “Can’t you pour iodine on it and see how it looks in the morning?” Grover’s trembling grew more violent, but to his credit, he didn’t cry or try to fight free.

  “No, Grover. I’m sorry, but it’s moving too quickly. I’m not a doctor, but I’ve learned enough to know there’s a better than even chance that if we don’t stop this, by tomorrow my brother will be breaking out the bone saw. You’ll have a stub instead of an arm.”

  Eliza tore off a strip of gauze. She struck a match and held it against the cotton. It caught slowly, the flames licking up the sides. Grover watched with his eyes bulging. The firelight reflected off his boyish face. She twisted the gauze to keep the fire from consuming it all at once. Then, when the flames had grown to the point where she only held the bottom part with pinched fingers, she slapped it onto Grover’s wound.

  He bucked and screamed. The others held him fast. When the burning gauze nipped at her fingers, she used the butt of the penlight to hold it in place. The fire smothered between the end of the flashlight and the flesh of the young man’s arm.

  When it was out, Steve opened the door and tossed the still-smoking gauze onto the pavement, then waved the door open and closed to get the smoke out of the cabin.

  Grover wept silently. “I’m sorry. I tried not to scream.”

  Steve patted his shoulder. “No worries, man. Any one of us would have done the same thing.”

  Eliza shone the light on the blackened flesh of the wound. She took some cotton balls and dabbed at it with some iodine. When she had it cleaned off, she took another look, intending to wrap it up and be done with him. What she saw was a job half-finished.

  “Grover,” she said slowly, reluctantly.

  He whipped his head up from the wound to stare at her through watering eyes.

  “I’m afraid I have to do it one more time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A caravan of trucks waited for Jacob on the shoulder of the highway near the base of the Ghost Cliffs. The final vehicle was the military Humvee. Jacob hopped down and approached it slowly, dreading what lay ahead.

  This was the same vehicle and weapon used against Blister Creek two summers ago when Taylor Kimball Junior and his cult made one final assault to take over the church. Even with advance notice, the FBI hadn’t managed to get field agents in to stop the attack. That had been Jacob’s first warning that something was seriously wrong in the outside world.

  David was up top with the machine gun. He rose from behind the gun shield and gave Jacob a curt nod. The darkness hid his expression. Was it anxious? Eager? Jacob returned the nod. He climbed in the driver side.

  Smoot rode shotgun—quite literally, in this case, with his twelve-gauge across his lap. Two of his sons sat in the back, together with the Hawthorne brothers. The Hawthornes were sober, middle-aged men, several years older than Jacob, each with two wives and numerous children. Their beards showed the first hints of gray. All four men in the back carried assault rifles and were surrounded by ammo cans.

  Jacob pulled into the road. As he did, headlights kicked on all around. Dozens of vehicles pulled in behind him. They carried more than two hundred armed men. Fathers with their sons. Brothers, cousins. White-bearded patriarchs who remembered when Blister Creek lay off the electric grid and who had lived to see those days return. Teenage boys who had been handling firearms since they were five years old, but had never before been asked to gun down a fellow human being.

  Jacob feared that many of them would not return.

  “We have a lot of trucks,” Smoot said. “Plenty of light and noise to warn our enemies.”

  “It’s still faster and safer than attacking on horse,” Jacob said. “Anyway, that’s part of the plan. A noisy assault up the highway with the main force, while we sneak the Humvee around the reservoir to attack from the rear.”

  “And a lot of fuel to burn.” A note of suspicion tinged Smoot’s voice.

  “This is what we’ve been saving it for.”

  “I counted sixty-two vehicles.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “They all gassed up at your place, from what I hear. Filled the tanks. That’s got to be better than a thousand gallons of fuel.”

  “Do you want to get up there and run out of fuel?”

  “But only diesel, that’s the funny thing. I’ve got a good truck I’ve been working on to make it battle worthy, but it takes ethanol. We distilled some, but you wouldn’t let me take ethanol from the bishop’s storehouse.”

  “We need it for other purposes.”

  “But you can spare diesel?” Smoot pressed. “Why is it so plentiful?”

  “Leave it alone, Elder. We have other worries.”

  “Are you the only one who knows?”

  Knows what? Jacob started to ask. He stayed silent instead. His fiction was unraveling.

  “Because if something happens to you,” Smoot continued, “I don’t want the secret to be lost.”

  Jacob decided to come clean. “Others know.”

  “Who?”

  “David, Miriam, Eliza, and Stephen Paul.”

  “How much fuel are we talking about?”

  “A lot. My father was stockpiling diesel in his last few years.”

  Smoot nodded. “He was a true prophet. He knew what was coming.”

  “He also bought a million dollars in U.S. savings bonds six months before his death. That was less prescient. Those bonds are worth nothing.”

  “No, no, it makes perfect sense. Abraham was preparing for contingencies. He understood when, but only the Lord knew the how. Where is the diesel stored, Brother?”

  “I’d rather not say. The fewer people who know, the better.”

  “But you trust the others. Why not me? I am one of the senior members of the quorum.”

  Jacob turned from peering out the windshield. “Do I need to answer that?”

  Smoot narrowed his lips until they disappeared behind his mustache and beard. “I made mistakes. I learned my lesson.”

  “Did you?”

  “I sustain you as prophet, seer, and revelator. I didn’t always trust you—I thought you were young and soft. Weak in testimony, and not worthy to wear your father’s boots. And what a time to have a weak leader. That’s why I did what I did. That’s why I didn’t trust the Lord or His prophet. But I have seen you move, Brother Jacob. Cautiously, sometimes too gently, yes. But with conviction. And so I will stand by your side as the mouth of hell yawns before us.”

  “If that’s true, why do you push me so hard?” Jacob asked.

  “Do you want a man who bows his head at every word out of your mouth? Is that what you’re looking for?”

  Of course it wasn’t. Jacob didn’t want that from his wife, his sister, his brother. And what about Miriam, or Rebecca? Even Stephen Paul could push him back. But it was different coming out of Smoot’s mouth.

  The elder reminded Jacob of his father. Of an earlier, harder generation. One of Smoot’s sons had died in the
drone attack, another had gone missing, yet the man didn’t complain or carry on. Instead, here he was, ready to sacrifice himself and two more of his boys for Blister Creek.

  Meanwhile, Jacob’s own family was safe at home. Yes, his children were young, but in three more years Daniel would be as old as some of the kids in this caravan. When that day came, would Jacob shove a rifle into Daniel’s hands and drive him into the desert to battle with squatters and bandits?

  “No,” he said at last. “I’m not looking for blind obedience. Tomorrow—assuming we get out of this thing unscathed—I’ll share the details of my father’s diesel storage.”

  The caravan snaked its way up to the cliffs with the Humvee in the lead. Jacob fell under attack the instant he rounded the final turn. Muzzle flashes came from the left and right, with even fiercer fire from the road ahead, where someone had dragged a downed tree across the road. Men stood from behind the tree to shoot. Bullets ricocheted off the Humvee.

  From above, David squeezed off bursts from the machine gun. Tracer bullets guided his fire. Smoot and the men in the back stuck their guns out of gun ports and added their fire. In less than a minute they had suppressed the enemy attack and driven the survivors from the road.

  Jacob pulled forward to let the rest of the caravan catch up. He hit the floodlight and turned it into the partially hacked-down woods to the left and along the shore of the reservoir. Two bodies lay in the road, and another stretched over the downed tree trunk, almost cut in two. The violence was sickening.

  “Easy as shearing sheep,” Smoot said. “We get that tree off the road and we could roll straight into camp and end it before dawn.”

  “No, it could be a trap to lure us in. We stick with the plan.”

  “All right, then let’s go.”

  Jacob checked his watch. It was now 5:18 a.m. He lifted the CB radio. “Five thirty-five. Over.”

  Other radios in other trucks would be picking up his message and spreading it. Jacob and the others in the Humvee would split right to creep around the reservoir. In seventeen minutes they would rejoin the battle on the far side of the reservoir. The others had better be ready to move.