He continued on his way, mind still turning over the strange vision of the angel with the sword. He was no longer armed, but he remembered how Eliza killed Gideon Kimball in Witch’s Warts with a broken chunk of sandstone, and later finished Caleb Kimball in the dump outside Las Vegas in much the same way. He picked up a fist-size rock.
Now it’s my turn.
The sky was graying now. It would soon be daylight, even here in the shadows of Witch’s Warts. The stones stood as witnesses, dark and solemn, watching the violence play out at their feet. Jacob scanned the ground, looking for evidence that Taylor Junior was collapsing from his wound and searching for a place to hide.
Clumps of rice grass swished back and forth under the breeze, brushing the sand with concentric circles. Tracks crisscrossed the sand—the pinprick rows left by stink beetles, the twin crescent moons of a mule deer, the staggered track of a jackrabbit, a snake’s graceful cursive, even oversize lizard prints with a trailing tail like a thumb dragged through the sand, marking the rare passage of a Gila monster. Given the breeze, all these animals must have passed within the past half hour. The prints would be gone by full daylight, with no record these creatures existed.
Jacob stopped when he spotted something dark and gleaming against the stone. A drop of blood. A few seconds later, another drop. Taylor Junior was continuing toward Blister Creek, but he was still trying to keep off the sand, where he would leave prints. Jacob followed the blood trail over a hump of sandstone that brought him to another view of the labyrinth, which glowed pink in the light of early dawn.
But the sinister feeling persisted. He thought about the bodies dumped in the labyrinth: Frederick van Slooten, Amanda Kimball, Grandpa Griggs. Others killed—Maude Kimball, Isaac Young, Gideon Kimball. Children had become lost inside while exploring or hunting lizards. They were usually found, dehydrated and confused, after a few hours, but once, back in the 1930s, a child had died inside. Perhaps he’d been climbing a sandstone fin to get his bearings and then fallen to his death—it was hard to say, because animals had eaten half the body by the time a search party found him a full week later. Most people didn’t venture more than a few hundred feet into Witch’s Warts, but over the years hundreds of people had carved their names in the sandstone near the fringes. Erosion had rendered most of the names and dates illegible, the wind scrubbed marks from the stone as thoroughly as from the sand, except over decades instead of hours.
Jacob caught a glimpse of the temple spire and quickened his pace. He picked his way between the last two sandstone fins. He was going to come out between the chapel and the temple. Taylor Junior had covered more ground than Jacob imagined possible, given his wound.
Something moved on the edge of his vision. He lifted his head to see Taylor Junior hurtling toward him from the sandstone fin above him. He must have come out the far side, then turned around and scrambled up the rock to wait for Jacob to pass below. A hunting knife glinted in his hand.
Jacob lifted his arm as Taylor Junior smashed into him. The blow knocked him back against the opposite wall, and the rock fell out of his hands, but the blade caught harmlessly in his shirt. The two men rolled on the ground, flailing. A moment later they were on their feet again, facing each other in the narrow passageway between the two sandstone fins. Jacob found the hunk of sandstone and scooped it up.
“That was clever,” Jacob said when he’d recovered his breath. “You waited in the only place where my attention was distracted. I was looking at the temple spire.”
He kept his voice calm, but inside he boiled with anger. This man had murdered dozens, left Fernie paralyzed, sent Jacob’s father to the grave. But he eyed Taylor Junior’s knife and knew he had to control his temper.
Taylor Junior’s face showed no emotion either. Blood streamed from the gunshot wound in the left side of his rib cage. The pain would be excruciating, not to mention the blood loss, and every minute increased Jacob’s advantage.
Taylor Junior feinted with the knife. “I know this place better than you.”
“So why did you wait for me?” Jacob asked. “You’ve got a knife. You might have killed someone or taken a hostage before some old woman blew out your brains.”
“I have bigger aspirations than that. You understand.”
“Tell me. What exactly do you want?”
“I think you know,” Taylor Junior said. “Because we want the same thing.”
“I doubt it.”
“Power over the souls of men. The keys to the kingdom. To be the One Mighty and Strong.”
“Is that what the evil spirit promised you? Where is he? Shouldn’t he be at your side in your hour of need?”
Taylor Junior winced, lifted the hand with the knife blade toward his injured ribs, and looked about to stagger. Suspicious, Jacob made a false lunge forward, and suddenly Taylor Junior moved to a crouch, with the knife held out and ready for an upward thrust. Jacob pulled back, the hunk of sandstone still at the ready, as both men resumed their cautious stance.
“No?” Taylor Junior said. “Then whenever you’re ready.”
“After your trick with the artillery shells in Dark Canyon, I don’t take things at face value.” Jacob shifted the stone in his hand. “But that’s an ugly wound. You can’t even move that shoulder, can you? And you’re pale from loss of blood. You were right on top of me with your knife, and you couldn’t finish it.”
Jacob opened his mouth as if to say something else, but this time he really did charge. He had been tensing his muscles even as he acted as though he’d relaxed his arm. Taylor Junior ducked backward, but not in time.
Jacob landed a solid blow directly against Taylor Junior’s injured ribs, but the rock in his hand was old, flaking sandstone that crumbled on impact. Jacob punched at the man’s face with the fragment still in his fist, and then they were going down again. Jacob grabbed for Taylor Junior’s knife hand as he fell. They rolled on the sand as they fought for the weapon, and then the two men came to another impasse, wedged against a sandstone wall, limbs tangled. All four hands gripped either a knife hilt or a hand holding a knife hilt.
“You can’t defeat me, Jacob,” Taylor Junior wheezed. “You’ve been living soft while I gained strength in the desert. I’ve survived starvation and snakebite. Frostbite and heatstroke. Chemical burns. Even injured, I’m stronger than you.”
They resumed their wrestling. Jacob wanted to get a hand free and dig at Taylor Junior’s injured ribs again, but his muscles trembled with exhaustion and he was afraid that if he let go, the man would free the knife and gut him. Taylor Junior tried to bite his face, but Jacob got his elbow under the man’s chin. A moment later they were locked again, both gasping.
“I’ll kill you,” Taylor Junior said, “and then I’ll kill them one by one. Stephen Paul. Miriam. David. Fernie. They’ll get weaker and weaker until they have no choice and join me. Eliza will be my wife.”
“All by yourself? Because we destroyed your cult. Your men walked into an ambush at the reservoir. We killed one and the others surrendered. And we overran your base in the middle of the night.”
“You’re lying.”
“An underground military base?” Jacob forced a laugh. “You came out in a Humvee. The place was unguarded.” It was a mixture of guesses and bluff, but a sudden change in Taylor Junior’s breathing told Jacob he was close. “They didn’t even fight. Just threw down their weapons and begged for mercy, said they’d help us catch you. How do you think I found you? You were betrayed.”
Jacob summoned the last of his strength and launched himself into motion. He tightened his grip with his right hand and slammed his left into the wound on Taylor Junior’s ribs. He thrust in with his thumb, caught a fragment of bone, loose and jagged, and dug and pried as if trying to tear it free from the muscle and cartilage. Taylor Junior screamed and bucked. He let go with one hand and tried to get Jacob’s hand away from his ribs.
Jacob almost got the knife free with his other hand, but then Taylor Junior flung
it out of reach. The man now fought him with both hands, and he was still too strong to subdue. Somehow he got to his feet. Jacob tried to pull him back down and, failing that, dragged himself up instead. He pinned the man against the wall, the hand still groping at the broken ribs.
And then, at last—at last—Taylor Junior went limp, perhaps surrendering, perhaps trying one last trick.
“Mercy!” he screamed.
“Like the mercy you showed at Zarahemla? Like you showed my brother Enoch? Or my father? Like you showed my wife? That kind of mercy?”
Jacob grabbed Taylor Junior’s hair at the temples on either side of the head and forced him against the stone fin at the man’s back.
“The angel! He lied to me! They all lied to me!”
“Yes, it’s all lies, isn’t it?”
Jacob yanked the man’s head forward and slammed it back against the stone. Taylor Junior cried out and made a final lunge, but Jacob held him up with his knee and hip. He slammed the man’s head back again. And again. After a moment Taylor Junior stopped struggling, but Jacob didn’t stop bashing his skull against the rock until he was sure. At last he let the man go. Taylor Junior slid to the ground and slumped facedown in the sand. The back of his head was a ruin.
Jacob staggered a few feet and then dropped to the ground. He crawled forward, needing to put distance between himself and the body. Every muscle felt like rubber, but he didn’t stop until he was at least twenty feet away, and then he rolled onto his back and put his hands over his face.
“It is over.” He took down his hands and opened his eyes. “Please, God, let it be over.”
The sun was up now, peeking over the sandstones. The sky was a clear, brilliant blue, but there was no warmth in it yet.
Jacob climbed unsteadily to his feet. He gave one backward glance at Taylor Junior’s body, needing to be sure, needing to verify the man was dead.
And then he staggered from Witch’s Warts and back into Blister Creek.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The first outside authorities to arrive in Blister Creek came in a pair of police cruisers from Cedar City at midmorning. They pulled up in front of the temple with lights flashing. Jacob and David had laid out the bodies on the lawn and were covering the last one with a sheet, weighing it down with rocks. There were seven dead here in all. The four conspirators—Taylor Junior, Elmo Griggs, Levi Cobb, and Jason Johnson—and three people killed by gunfire in the battle at the reservoir, two women and a boy of twelve. Two more dead at the abandoned missile silos, 150 miles to the east. They would need to be recovered later.
Four officers climbed out of the police cars, led by the chief, a big man named Trost whom Jacob had met after last year’s attack. He had a big gut that overhung a narrow waist, and he hoisted his pants as he stepped up onto the curb. He took in the scene in front of the temple with a grim expression and a long, heavy sigh.
“Thought you guys would never come,” Jacob said.
Trost said, “Dispatch didn’t get me the message until a couple of hours ago. We’ve got flooding all through town, and it’s all hands on deck. The power plant got flooded, and half the town lost electricity. There’s something wrong with the grid. I…” He stopped and looked around. “Where is everyone?”
By everyone, Jacob assumed Trost meant law enforcement. Half the town—mostly children and women—milled around the temple grounds, looking at the bodies, and the other half were either at the Christianson house or patrolling the valley, in case there was a final, undiscovered gunman on the loose.
But as for the authorities, there were no FBI agents and no Highway Patrol. Carol Young had called from Panguitch to warn Jacob that the hospital staff had called the Garfield County sheriff when she brought Stephen Paul in with a gunshot wound to the leg, but they hadn’t sent anyone to the hospital to investigate yet, last Jacob had heard. They certainly hadn’t sent anyone to Blister Creek.
“The FBI said they’d send someone,” Jacob said, “but couldn’t say when.”
Trost snorted. “After last year, I’d expect the feds to have a permanent headquarters in Blister Creek, what with that bastard still on the loose.”
“He’s not on the loose anymore.” Jacob peeled back the tarp to show Taylor Junior’s face. The dead man’s eyes stared dully skyward.
“Good. I hope he gets what he deserves on the other side.” During their conversations last year, Trost had revealed that he was a mainstream Mormon, but he didn’t seem hostile to fundamentalists.
David had been talking with one of the deputies, but now he came over. “Maybe the FBI figured we’re more trouble than we’re worth and decided to let us fight it out this time.”
“I don’t think so,” Trost said. “They spent six months riding my butt about this Kimball guy. Weekly calls, visits once a month to make sure we were still searching. If you only knew how much time I spent hiking around the hills, looking at old hunting camps and following up on crackpot phone calls and e-mails.” He tugged at his pants again. “Lost ten pounds last year.” A shrug. “Guess it didn’t kill me. Anyway, what about that lady agent?”
“Agent Fayer?” Jacob said.
“Right, Fayer. She was a good one. And tougher than Aunt Tillie’s titty. Where’s she?”
“Fayer’s not in charge anymore,” Jacob said. “And the FBI has bigger fish to fry these days.”
“Figures. Blasted country is falling apart at the seams. Literally. You feel that earthquake last night?” He turned back to the bodies, apparently unconcerned with the answer, and gave Taylor Junior’s corpse a nudge with his toe. “Tell me what happened.”
Jacob gave Trost an overview of the night’s events, starting with the warning from Krantz about armed men leaving the abandoned missile base, and ending with the battle at the reservoir and the chase through Witch’s Warts. He left out the part about the evil spirit.
When Jacob finished, the officers looked over the rest of the bodies. Trost and his deputies turned away with sickly expressions when they got to the women and the child. The boy, especially, was in a gruesome state, nearly cut in two by machine gun fire. Jacob pulled the tarp back up over the child. The poor kid was only two years older than Jacob’s son.
“I’ve seen enough,” Trost said, his voice strained. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, but stared at the row of bodies beneath their tarps. When he spoke again, his tone was all business. “If the FBI ever bothers to show up, it’s pretty obvious that your story holds up. We’ll take pictures, but the bodies have been moved already, and you’ve got a zillion witnesses, so I don’t see any reason to leave them out here. Do you have someplace air-conditioned? Let’s get these bodies out of the sun.”
The next day, Jacob stood on his porch, chatting with Eliza on the cordless, but her words turned into a drone when a white sedan with government plates pulled up to the curb, followed by a troop transport truck that came to a stop with a squeal of air brakes. Giant windshield wipers swished lazily back and forth to clear the cold drizzle, and for a time it sat there, lights blinking and diesel engine rumbling.
He thought at first it was the National Guard, which he could have used a couple of nights earlier, but then he spotted the blue-and-green logo of the US Department of Agriculture on the side of the truck. Eight men with M16 assault rifles poured out of the truck, and two men in suits climbed out of the car. Even these two wore sidearms. The men in suits pulled out umbrellas and huddled in consultation. One of them gestured at the Christianson house. The other man punched something into a smartphone or PDA.
Eliza said something on the other end of the line, and he belatedly realized she was asking him a question.
“Jacob?”
“What? Sorry, I missed all that.”
“I said, should we come back?” Eliza, Miriam, and Krantz were still in Green River with Lillian and the survivors.
“They don’t need you anymore?”
“Lillian is in charge, and she’s bringing the whole crew to Bl
ister Creek as soon as the police lets them go. Miriam, Steve, and I are good though. At least, nobody is telling us no, and I’m not going to bother asking permission.”
Jacob was still staring at the government officials. He recognized Chip Malloy, the man Jacob and Stephen Paul had dragged all over the valley, showing him herds and silos. Malloy had a brusque, businesslike appearance now, mustache shaved, and was in a suit instead of a shirt with bolo tie. He’d lost the cowboy boots too. Malloy gave orders to the soldiers, and two of them set off on foot toward the temple. Two more moved across the street toward the edge of Witch’s Warts, and the last four flanked the vehicles and fanned along the sidewalk. Rainwater dripped off the brims of their hats and the tips of their rifles.
What the devil?
“Are you still there?” Eliza asked.
“That guy from the Department of Agriculture is back, and he looks serious.” Jacob stared at Malloy as the two men in suits came up the sidewalk. “Come back as soon as possible. I’m going to need help.”
He hung up and turned to see his daughter Leah and one of his younger half sisters playing at some sort of paper craft on the covered porch. “Go inside, girls. Leah, tell Mom to keep everyone inside. Quickly, now.” The girls gave a quick glance at the street, jumped up, and banged the screen door on the way in.
Malloy left the second man midway up the walk and stepped up to the porch. “Crazy weather, huh?” He shook the water from his umbrella, folded it, and propped it against a railing. “How is the reservoir holding up?” He held out his hand.
Jacob took the man’s short-fingered hand. “Not as full as a couple of weeks ago. We enjoyed a dry stretch, which sure helped.” He glanced at the truck. “I had no idea the Department of Agriculture had its own ground forces. That must be useful when the grain silos offer resistance.”
Destroying Angel Page 26
