“That stuff is normal,” Jacob said. “I had bad dreams as a kid. Eliza too, all the way up until she was a teenager. Unless you’re talking about something besides the usual kid stuff.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Get it out. What are you thinking?”
“You know what I’m thinking.”
“That dark-angel stuff is Kimball family superstition,” he said.
To explain paranoid schizophrenia, he thought, but didn’t say.
“Maybe, but how can you be sure?”
“Children have nightmares. They’re scared of the dark. They cry out, and we calmly look under the bed and shut the closet door and then tuck them back in. Kids see monsters, and it’s our job to tell them there’s no such thing.”
Fernie started to say something else, but Jake began fussing in his crib and Jacob brought him to the bed for her to nurse. In a few minutes, both mother and child were asleep. Jacob couldn’t get comfortable. Sleet pinged against the window. The wind howled off the Ghost Cliffs and tried to force its way into the house, rattling the bedroom door in its frame.
What was wrong with this weather? He walked to the window and saw that it was changing to snow, as predicted. They were saying four to six inches by morning. The kids would love it, but it filled Jacob with dread. If there was a hard frost, they’d lose the wheat crop. The peach and cherry crops were already ruined from the hailstorm at the end of May. There would be farmers worrying about this cold front from the Central Valley of California all the way to Missouri. It was the third time in the past three weeks that unseasonably cold weather had dipped from the Arctic, and wheat futures were through the roof. If they could get a crop this year they’d make a killing, but at this point they’d be lucky to replenish their own food stocks.
Did it matter if the meteorologists could point to natural explanations for the crazy weather? The end result was the same. Today was the twelfth of June, and it was snowing in the desert Southwest. When was the last time that had happened?
“They’re always predicting the end of the world,” he whispered. “And it never comes.”
Until it does.
CHAPTER TWO
Taylor Junior crossed the last ten miles on foot. It was a bare plain with little shelter, speckled with black volcanic rock, covered in rabbit brush and half-dead juniper bushes. Dry water holes pockmarked the flat stretches, and he was so tired that in the fading light of late afternoon, they seemed to sprout beneath him and sent him sprawling. He came up once with hands bloodied from the jagged rock.
A helicopter buzzed in the distance, barely audible over the moaning shrieks of the wind. Had they found his abandoned motorcycle? His feet ached with cold and the pounding of worn boots, but he didn’t dare slow down. It wasn’t the searchers in the sky that terrified him.
Don’t let it catch you, don’t let it find you out here.
He had to reach the sanctuary tonight. But then what? It had been a year. Would his people still be there? What would they say when they saw him after all this time? He hadn’t led them to the promised land, he’d only sent them deeper into the wilderness, to live as fugitives, hated and hunted.
But that wasn’t his fear either.
Something crunched like breaking twigs. He looked down to see bones, bleached and desiccated, so brittle that they crumbled into shards beneath his feet. He had stepped on a cow’s skull, its eye sockets filled with dry snow that was lighter than flour.
A boneyard stretched ahead of him for a hundred yards. Cattle, sheep, goats. A coyote, then a dead vulture with feathers that still fluttered in the breeze. Sheep skulls grinned up from skeletons long since picked over by vultures and crows. In one place, two cows had lain down during their last moments and crossed their necks as they died. Creatures had gnawed away the flesh and picked the skulls clean, but the hides had hardened and drawn tight over empty rib cages.
This tableau of death horrified and repulsed him, but he couldn’t look away. He stood staring and licking his dry lips while the buzzing grew louder in his ears. What had caused it? Poison? Like Eric Froud, his body covered in blisters. Blowback from the detonated chemical warhead. It had eaten his skin, burned his lungs and eyes.
“I had no choice. We had to shoot him. We had to kill them all.”
Exactly why he’d had no choice was a problem he didn’t want to visit. That would open uncomfortable questions, remind him what he had learned in the sinkhole in Witch’s Warts.
The buzzing roared in his ears.
Instinct took over. He threw himself to the ground. A black shape swept across the desert like an enormous, hovering bat. A helicopter, black and sleek, military-style. Almost a year now, and still the pursuit was relentless. They’d almost caught him twice, not counting those first few weeks of terror.
It roared by, and already he could see it turning for another pass. They would come back around and this time fly right over his location. They must have seen his motorcycle and guessed he was out here somewhere. Had they spotted him already?
He had to find cover, but there was nothing. No ravine, no boulders, nothing but a few clumps of sagebrush that wouldn’t hide a jackrabbit, let alone a man. A fine, dry snow fell on the high plateau, but the relentless wind whipped it to drifts while leaving most of the ground scoured clean. He fought the urge to make a run for it, but then they’d see him and swoop down for the kill.
He was face-to-face with the dead cattle. Their leering skulls taunted him. This is the end of the line. They’ll shoot you dead, and crows will pick out your eyeballs. Your bones will lie bleaching in the sun.
The dead cows.
He grabbed the hide of the nearest animal, expecting it to weigh no more than a canvas tent flap. But the skin clung to the bones and hooves and he had to lift it all. He heaved and grunted at the weight. The neck of one cow hooked the neck of the other, and he had to lift some of that too. The buzz grew to a steady thump. In a moment they’d spot him, in a moment—
And then he lifted it enough to get his shoulder beneath the carcass. He ducked his head under, then thrust his whole body forward. The weight bore down on him and pressed him to the ground. His backpack caught. He slipped out of it, then squirmed and writhed forward on his belly as rocks dug into his hands and face, but at last he got his boots under. With Taylor Junior underneath, the cow didn’t settle all the way down—light streamed in where the neck and skull lifted off the ground.
He’d caught a whiff of rotten flesh when he lifted the hide and bones, but now that he was underneath, the stench of the dead animal filled his mouth and nose. It coated his tongue. When he swallowed, he tasted it in the back of his throat. His empty stomach flip-flopped. He pressed his face into the cold, hard ground to get away, but the dead thing had lain in one spot for so long that even the rock smelled awful. Instead he tucked his face under his armpit.
“You don’t like well-aged beef?” someone asked. “Or maybe you’re not hungry.”
Taylor Junior whipped his head up to see another man beneath the carcass of the dead cow, snugged against him, grinning. The man wore a white robe with a black apron. It was the angel.
Terror swept over Taylor Junior. He screamed and tried to writhe free, but the angel grabbed him by the throat. “Oh no you don’t. Go out there and you die.”
“I don’t care. Let me go.”
The helicopter roared overhead. It seemed to hover over his position for a moment, and then it was gone, heading south in a fading, falling drone. But the angel didn’t let him go.
“Please, I’m going to die. The smell.”
“Does it smell worse than the sinkhole? Is it worse than sleeping in your own filth? Worse than the smell of your open sores?”
“I had to stay there! They were looking for me.”
“I told you to find the other sanctuary. You didn’t obey.”
“They would have killed me!”
The grip tightened on Taylor Junior’s throat. He gasped for air, but none c
ame. “And perhaps I’ll kill you now. Fool. Did you think you could hide from me?”
Spots danced at the edge of Taylor Junior’s vision. He was confused, unable to remember where he was, thinking he was back in his hidden spot after the attack on the chapel in Blister Creek. There was Eliza, right there, taunting him. He could have taken her, he could have killed her.
But in that moment, staring at her, listening to the screaming people flee the burning chapel, burning with lewisite, he felt something. Doubt and fear, and some other emotion that he didn’t identify, not at first.
After the attack, he had hunkered down to wait. They would never find him. Nobody knew the valley like he did. Nobody knew its secrets: its false walls, its secret cellars, the abandoned Cold War bunkers, and the walled-in attics, the places both natural and man-made to hide supplies, weapons, even a pair of motorcycles for future use. He’d stashed one motorcycle in a collapsed barn east of the Phipps ranch, and the other in the Ghost Cliffs, north of the reservoir, wrapped in a pair of tarps and covered with brush. Maybe the time would come to make a run for one of the motorcycles and then flee the valley at top speed. But not yet. It was too risky.
The searchers came by his spot again and again. Once, he heard Jacob and Eliza speaking a few feet away—or thought he did, but he was sick at the time and hallucinating—and if he hadn’t been so weak he could have sprung out and finished them both. But he knew that if he tried to escape the valley too soon, they’d catch him and kill him.
Then a funny thing happened. The days after the attack stretched into weeks. He didn’t hear the helicopters anymore, or the voices outside his hiding spot. His food supply dwindled and he had to go out to replenish it, and he could tell they’d relaxed their vigil. Of course they would—nobody could stay on high alert forever. But Taylor Junior didn’t leave the valley.
Because he’d recognized the unfamiliar emotion. It was regret. And when he gave that emotion a name, it hit him full force. He thought about the angel on the salt flats and the black apron. What kind of monster would murder women and children? The angel made him do it—it wasn’t his doing.
“Yes,” the angel said, relaxing his grip. “You did.” Still lying beneath the dead cow, locked in an embrace with Taylor Junior, he spoke in a whisper in Taylor Junior’s ear. The helicopter still roared overhead, passing back and forth over a stretch of a few hundred yards, searching. “It was you. You killed those people. You carried out the will of the Lord.”
“Who are you?”
“A destroying angel. I obey my master.”
“No,” Taylor Junior said. “No, I understand now. You’re an evil spirit. Leave me alone!” He tried to pry free, but his limbs had turned to stone.
“It is too late for that.”
“I won’t do it.”
All those people, dead. Screaming women, children covered in chemical burns. Eric Froud, his body a blistered monstrosity. And Taylor Junior, under the spell of this evil thing, had ordered his death. Had ordered all of their deaths. Only in the dark, roasting, freezing months of hiding had that realization finally seeped in. He was the murderer, he was the one following an evil master, not Jacob Christianson. Nobody but him.
“You will do it. Your chains are thick now, you cannot break free.”
“But I won’t.”
“Then we’ll never be separated.” The grip tightened again. “You shall feel my presence every moment until you die. And then we’ll be together throughout the eternities. Constant companions.”
It was too much, this terror. It devoured him from the inside, made him want to throw himself from the edge of a cliff or put a bullet in his brain, but that wouldn’t be a release either, would it? He couldn’t speak, but his mind cried out, No more! I’ll do it!
“Good. Now return to Blister Creek. Cleanse the town of apostates.”
Taylor Junior blacked out. Some time passed. Maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. The buzzing was gone, had been for some time, and there was only the wind and the cold. He squirmed out from his hiding place and gasped in the cold air. It was dry and sucked the moisture from his mouth and lungs, but he didn’t care. The stench…
It was only then that he realized the angel was gone. One moment he had been there, pressed against Taylor Junior, hand on his throat. But then he was gone, and Taylor Junior couldn’t remember when, exactly, that had happened.
Only another mile or so to hike, and then he could get out of the cold. It was June, when sweltering heat typically settled over the desert, but in the previous week it had turned cold again, and he wasn’t prepared for it. His feet ached, and he moved with a limp.
Would they still be there? And would they let him in? A year since he’d sent them to the second sanctuary. He’d taken three other men with him, husbands and fathers. He returned alone.
“I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to.” He tasted the dead cow in his mouth and tried to summon saliva to spit it out.
He had no choice. The angel had seen to that. Taylor Junior knew his mission. Regroup. Return with his followers to Blister Creek. The angel had told him, Cleanse the town. But why?
“Because Jacob Christianson is a minion of Satan,” he said out loud. “He has taken an oath with the devil. He is an enemy of God and stands in the way of the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. That is why I must kill Jacob and all his followers.”
But inside, a different, darker thought took hold.
I’m the minion. I have given myself to Lucifer.
CHAPTER THREE
Steve Krantz handed Jacob and Eliza surgical masks a few minutes after they entered Witch’s Warts. “You’ll want these.”
Eliza looked queasy and put the mask on right away, but Jacob tucked his into his pocket for the moment. “I once dissected a body that had been improperly embalmed. Once you’ve breathed formaldehyde and putrefaction for three hours, you can handle almost anything.”
“Agent Fayer and I once found the bodies of three prostitutes rotting in a storage unit in Texas,” Krantz said as he fit his own mask into place. “In August. This is worse. Trust me, put it on.”
Jacob obeyed. He followed as Krantz and Eliza scrambled up the sandstone. It rose like the back of a tortoise, a large hump that was easily scaled until the final, horny top. From the top they could see a bristling labyrinth of spires and fins that stretched for miles in all directions. The sun was warm and bright in a clear sky. Rivulets of melting snow wept down the sandstone, while drifts clung to the shadows at their bases. Jacob lifted the mask and gave a tentative sniff. It was hard to believe that he would smell anything in this beautiful setting but the clean desert air, the sage, and the sand. Instead he caught a whiff of something awful.
“Smell it?” Krantz asked.
“Yeah. Body waste, mostly. Something dead too.”
“That’s how I found the place. I climbed up here to get a good look around, maybe spot something. And then I smelled it. After that, it was a matter of following my nose.”
Eliza lifted her mask and sniffed. “Reminds me of Caleb Kimball’s sanctifying pit.”
Jacob remembered the hell his sister had gone through in the dump outside Las Vegas. “Are you good?”
“Good enough. Don’t try to stop me.” Her voice was muffled but defiant through the mask.
Toward the top the sandstone hump grew knotty and treacherous. Fissures opened in the rock where one could turn an ankle, and sinkholes pocked the surface, their sandy bottoms damp with melted snow. The three companions hugged an outcrop above one of these sinkholes and came out the other side to a flat, smooth stretch about ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, before the hump dropped sharply on the far side.
The breeze turned, and the smell of feces and rot grew stronger. It wasn’t enough to turn Jacob’s stomach, not yet. But Eliza winced. He was about to ignore her determined words and suggest that she wait down below, then thought better of it. She wasn’t a child anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. And if
she was serious about being Krantz’s deputy, she couldn’t avoid the unpleasant tasks.
“Here it is,” Krantz said.
Jacob leaned over the edge. The smell hit him like a fist.
The sinkhole was oddly shaped. Usually these things widened as they grew deeper, forming a bowl-like hollow in the stone. This one dove down like a well, three, maybe four feet across at the top, but narrow and dark all the way down, as if the water and ice had found a soft spot in the sandstone and eaten deeper and deeper, like a cavity in a molar. It was at least fifteen feet deep but no more than six feet wide at the bottom.
His eyes had adjusted to the bright sun, and he struggled to see into the gloom. There were blankets, and he caught the glint of a tin can. But he couldn’t distinguish most of what he was seeing. Flies zoomed in and out of the sinkhole, and dozens more buzzed at the bottom.
“How did he…” Jacob started to ask, but then he saw the knotted cord that emerged from the far side to wrap around a knob of stone. It didn’t look strong enough to hold a man’s weight, but he supposed Taylor Junior had been half-starved from his ordeal.
“I need to go down.”
“Already done it,” Krantz said.
Jacob eyed the cord, then glanced up at the former college hammer thrower, who was six feet four and weighed at least 240 pounds. “You did?”
“Not like that, of course. I went back for my own rope. But I don’t have it with me, and I wouldn’t trust myself to that flimsy thing if I were you. Besides, everything you need to know you can see from here.”
“Still, I have to see it for myself.”
“I could do it,” Eliza said.
Jacob turned, surprised. “Come on, Liz, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“You don’t need to do it yourself,” she said. “But you want a second opinion, right? And you probably outweigh me by fifty pounds.”
“The rope is strong enough for Jacob,” Krantz said. “Let him do it.”
“Oh, now you want him to go down,” she said. “Is the rope stronger all of a sudden? I’ll be fine. It’s safe enough, right? There’s nothing down there that can hurt me, is there?”
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