The Gates of Babylon

by Michael Wallace

  She didn’t answer. They would come on horse, she thought.

  But Fernie looked in vain for riders as they left the center of Blister Creek and turned north. She waited for the gunfire to come at them from the last few houses on the north edge of town, for men to sweep in from the desert. But nothing happened.

  Minutes later, midway to the Ghost Cliffs, they approached the spot where Fernie’s car had gone off the road fifteen months earlier, when she was pregnant with Jake. Where she’d suffered her broken back that left her paralyzed. The irrigation canal where the car had rolled would be a good place for an ambush. But again, nothing. Ahead, then. At the base of the cliffs.

  “I asked you a question,” Malloy said, interrupting her thoughts.

  “What question?”

  “Are you expecting an ambush?”

  “Mr. Malloy, do you know what you’re doing?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You don’t, do you? If you did, you wouldn’t be coming out here at night.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I never asked for this. My job was weighing cattle and analyzing the health of BLM grazing lands. Do you think I want to be here? Hell, no. I want to be home in Sacramento with my wife and kid.”

  “Then why aren’t you?”

  “Mrs. Christianson, if I run from my job—if everyone runs from their jobs—what do you think is going to happen to this country?”

  There was anguish in his tone and Fernie studied him with fresh sympathy. Malloy had been camping in their chapel for three months, his men strutting around town, padlocking grain silos, and snooping in cellars and barns, and when she’d thought about him at all she’d considered him a two-bit military dictator. It had never occurred to her that he had no desire to hold the position. That he had a family. That he was terrified.

  “I took a call,” he continued. “They told me to load the trucks and drive to Green River. That’s what I’ll do. And now you’re telling me someone might try to kill me on the way.”

  “If someone tries to stop us,” she said, “don’t shoot your way through. People will die.”

  “I have my orders. I have to get the grain out.”

  “And you might not have enough men, not if they’re prepared.”

  “Who is it?” he asked. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing, I promise. But you know what happened here before. You know what Blister Creek will do when pushed to the edge. Earlier this evening, some of the men were… stirring. And my husband isn’t here to calm the hotheads. That’s why I’m afraid.”

  They hit the switchbacks that led into the Ghost Cliffs. The grain trucks ahead of them, with their heavy loads, slowed to a crawl in low gear, and at one point Fernie leaned forward to see that they’d nudged down to eight miles per hour. Malloy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and muttered curses loud enough for her children to hear.

  Here, she thought. This is where it comes.

  But they kept climbing and climbing, until they emerged next to the reservoir. It finally occurred to her that they might escape without incident.

  “That was easy,” she said.

  “Looks like your sect leaders kept their heads.” Malloy sounded relieved, almost giddy. “Good for them.”

  But Fernie remembered Elder Smoot at dinner. Willing to take both Jacob’s wife and his favorite sister hostage. It was a terrible risk. One he wouldn’t have taken it if he wasn’t trying to hide something even riskier.

  So what was it?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Searchlights caught the governor’s helicopter as it swept over the outskirts of the Green River Federal Refugee Center. The pilot cast his own light downward as he searched for a place to land.

  Below, a sea of green tents spread across the desert in orderly rows, punctuated here and there by larger white tents marked by red crosses. Sprouting closer to the old town of Green River sat a shantytown of plywood and corrugated metal that crowded along narrow alleys. Cook fires glowed by the hundreds in the open air, filling the sky with a haze that turned the lights from the helicopter into a physical, shimmering thing thrusting back and forth.

  “This is America?” Jim said, more to himself than to the pilot on his left.

  “Hell of a sight, ain’t it?” the pilot said. They wore headphones equipped with microphones so they could be heard over the rotors. The pilot was a young guy named Rockwell, back from the Gulf with a plate in his head courtesy of an Iranian mortar round. “You are looking at the fifth largest city in the state of Utah. And wait until the Vegas evacuation gets into full swing, then you’ll see some numbers.”

  Rockwell had done this run before and shortly found the cement landing pad at the army bunker near the new rail depot. Hundreds of faces looked up at them outside the bunker’s enclosure, hands shielding eyes against the light. Rockwell brought it down, killed the engine, and the rotor slowed with a whirr.

  The two men climbed out of the helicopter into the cool night air. People surrounded the base, looking through the fence at the newcomers. Women, men, children. Dirty, thin, and cold.

  “These people can’t spend the winter here,” Jim said.

  “Better here than Salt Lake,” Rockwell said.

  Jim’s brother had answered in much the same way when dropping the governor off at the airport at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, now mostly given over to military flights. When Jim asked why not move the camp somewhere warm, like Texas or southern Arizona instead of the middle of the godforsaken Colorado Plateau, Parley told him to think of it as an opportunity.

  Sure, Jim thought, looking at the faces staring back through the fence. An opportunity for lawlessness, riots, and disease. An opportunity and excuse for the Feds to impose a military regime on the entire state.

  Parley would say that was exactly the point. Utahns would be terrified of the massive camp on their doorstep. Afraid of the refugees, afraid the people of Salt Lake and Provo would be next. Jim could protect them, feed them. They’d give him anything he wanted.

  “They say the camp is moving to Denver in the spring,” Rockwell said as he grabbed his bag from the seat and shut the door.

  “I don’t believe that. Do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Never mind.”

  Jim waved the pilot off toward the barracks then scanned the crowd of soldiers in combat fatigues who milled near the gates, around the trailers and cinderblock huts that served as military barracks, or up by the train station. Where the devil was General Lacroix, anyway?

  Even as he thought this, the door swung open on the nearest of the buildings, a doublewide trailer near the fence. Lacroix came out, pulling on and buttoning a jacket over his short-sleeved khaki. Men snapped to attention and saluted. He stepped toward them with a young adjutant at his shoulder. Jim met the general halfway across the packed earth from the helipad.

  “Has Malloy left Blister Creek yet?” Lacroix asked.

  “Better have,” Jim said. “I gave him the grain trucks and sent him official orders from the Department of Agriculture.”

  Lacroix raised an eyebrow. “How did you manage that?”

  “You’ll have to ask my brother. He arranges that sort of thing. Some sort of contact in the USDA.”

  “Naturally. The place is a nest of spies and traitors.”

  “We don’t deal with traitors,” Jim said, irritated by the insinuation.

  “No? We’ll see.” Lacroix turned to his lieutenant. “Get me Jones and Inez. I want an escort.”

  As the young man hustled off toward the trailers, a train whistled. Moments later, it huffed into the station, screeched to a stop, and disgorged dozens of fresh refugees on the other side of the fence. They held suitcases and duffel bags and looked bewildered as soldiers pushed them away from the gates of the base.

  “Unfortunately, the road depot and warehouse are on the other side of the camp,” Lacroix said, “so we’ll have to venture through the cesspool.”

  “An
d that’s where Malloy is delivering the grain?”

  “He’s sure as hell not dumping it here.”

  Jones and Inez were two stiff, grim-faced staff officers, armed with M6s and wearing Kevlar vests, plus sidearms and what looked like Tasers. Each man was as tall as the thin-faced Lacroix himself, but more powerfully built.

  Together with the general and his lieutenant, they walked through the double gates that led from the base, through sandbag bunkers, and to a pair of waiting Jeeps driven by a pair of staff sergeants. With the group now numbering seven, Jim felt more comfortable about his safety.

  A bulldozed dirt road bisected the camp between two rows of tents that sat shoulder to shoulder. People looked up from cookfires or stuck their heads out of tents to stare as the Jeeps approached. A thin, middle-aged man with a buzzed head who was wrapped in a blanket, looking for all the world like a concentration camp survivor, shouted something at them when they passed, but Jim didn’t pick it up. Others muttered or stood sullenly with hands on hips.

  Jim took it all in. “Security looks… lax.”

  “It’s terrible,” Lacroix admitted. “But we don’t have enough diesel to run the tractors, and we’re short on fencing, barbed wire—you name it. And they keep dumping refugees. About five hundred a day at the moment. Stupid, hungry people. Bunch of animals.”

  The tent city continued for block after block, broken here and there by semipermanent clusters of trailers and motor homes, often ringed with shacks made of plywood and sheet metal. They didn’t enter the filthy, dangerous-looking shantytown Jim had spotted from the air, and he was grateful for that.

  Huge lines formed wherever there were services—whether they were porta-potties, medical tents, or food centers. The bigger lines grew so large as to clog the road itself. Lacroix’s men honked and shouted and edged forward until they’d muscled through.

  The general said they were on their way to an army-run supply depot, but before they arrived, they drove into the middle of a protest. It looked at first like another food line, and they were in the midst of it before Jim sensed the pulsing anger from the crowd. Unlike most of the camp, which seemed to have segregated along social and ethnic lines, even down to a group of Navajo in campers the Jeeps had passed moments earlier, this was an equal opportunity expression of rage. Whites with ponytails protested next to darker-skinned people carrying signs in Spanish, and others who looked like ranchers and farmers from the Southwest, people with tattoos, and even two elderly men in dirty jackets and fez caps with signs reading SHRINERS AGAINST FASCISM.

  The crowd stared at them with hostile expressions, and no amount of honking or yelling could move them out of the way.

  The general picked up the radio and called the other Jeep. “Clear the road.”

  Inez and Jones jumped out of the other vehicle and pushed through the crowd with their rifle butts. It parted with grunts and protests and sullen stares. Lacroix rolled down the window and the noise swelled in volume.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Jim said.

  A man holding a handmade sign that read BREAD NOT BULLETS in block letters, artfully drawn to look as though they’d been perforated with bullet holes, glared at them as the vehicles forced their way through. Tattoos climbed his neck, and he had piercings in his nose, eyebrows, and cheek, together with plugs in his earlobes.

  “Why look, it’s the governor of our fine state,” the man said in a loud voice. “Together with our resident dictator, General La Crow. How long till you swing, General? Your time is coming, Crow.”

  Lacroix, who had passed through the camp without expression or comment to this point, turned with a frown, as if only now noticing the protest. He pointed. “You, come here.”

  The restless anger of the crowd was growing and Jim licked his lips, becoming increasingly anxious about the vibe. “Forget it,” he said. “Keep going.”

  “I said come here!”

  The man edged backward. “I’m exercising free speech, dude. You can’t stop me.”

  “Damn your free speech,” Lacroix said. “It ends the moment you accept my food.”

  “Your food? Who the hell are you now, the pharaoh?”

  “Come here!”

  “The hell I will.”

  The general pointed. “Get that man.”

  Inez and Jones sprang after the protestor, who dropped his sign and fled. When someone reached out a hand to slow the soldiers, Inez swung his rifle butt and drove the man back. Before the agitator could escape into the crowd, the two soldiers collared him and dragged him back to the Jeep. Angry shouts followed and the crowd closed around the vehicles. One of the drivers reached beneath the dash and pulled out a black military-grade shotgun.

  Jim drew in his breath. “General…”

  Lacroix hopped out of the Jeep, grabbed the man by the hair, and dragged him up to the vehicle.

  “Ow! Let go of me, you fascist. Get him off me!”

  “People like you make me sick,” Lacroix said. “I ought to throw you naked into the desert and see how you like it.”

  “Let me go!”

  “Not a chance. You’re spending the next month on work duty. Earning your keep, you ungrateful sonofabitch.”

  “General!” Jim said in a sharper tone.

  The crowd was surging now, throwing down signs and punching their fists in the air. The women had faded from the group, as had the older men and adolescent children. It was all men now—young men—like a vision from some violent protest in the Middle East. Jim had seen it so many times on TV, that a part of his mind tried to pick words from the mob and half expected to hear cries of “Allahu Akbar!”

  What is happening? This is America.

  Lacroix threw the man to the ground, drew his sidearm, and pointed it at the crowd. Inez and Jones leveled their assault rifles, and both drivers and the general’s adjutant had either shotguns or sidearms. Inez pointed his gun into the air and fired a warning shot, but the mass of people edged closer. Couldn’t they see the hard expressions on the soldiers’ faces? Or maybe they were too caught up in the frustration of the crowd, under scalding pressure like a boiler about to explode.

  The soldiers were screaming now, the crowd closing to ten feet, then five, then reaching out with grabbing hands. More warning shots in the air. The general steadied his sidearm, and something changed in his posture. Lacroix’s pistol barked twice. A man fell.

  Shouts turned to screams. The people at the front tried to retreat, even as the crowd shoved them forward, and then people were falling, there were more gunshots, and within seconds hundreds of people scattered, throwing signs, falling, trampling those who fell.

  It was over in seconds. The street was clear. Three civilians lay in the road, caught in the lights of the lead Jeep, and bleeding into the dirt.

  General Lacroix calmly flipped the safety and holstered his gun.

  “Jesus,” Inez said. “That was just like Yemen.”

  Jones still held his rifle at his shoulder, but his arms were trembling. One of the drivers looked stunned, and the other had already put away his gun and was scrambling into the Jeep, making urgent pleas for the others to get in.

  Jim stared at the three men on the ground. One of them was still moving, but blood bubbles formed at his lips and his eyes rolled back to show whites.

  Moments later they were rolling back down a road suddenly empty of civilians.

  “Damn troublemakers,” Lacroix muttered.

  “How are you going to handle this?” Jim asked. “There will be an investigation.”

  “You believe that? With open rebellion on the Great Plains? With our artillery leveling Tehran, and Japan and China firing rockets across the Sea of Japan? Do I need to go on?” The general grunted. “Nothing we do tonight will make the news.”

  Jim rubbed his eyes, trying to erase the afterimage of men dying. Bloody bubbles at that man’s lips.

  The worst part was that Lacroix was probably right. In a few short months, the world had come to the p
oint where you could gun down American refugees and face no consequences.

  Survive. That’s all you have to do. Survive the winter.

  And to do that, he needed that grain from Blister Creek to keep Salt Lake fed, which meant an unholy alliance with this mad general, the head of a criminal gang, and his own power-hungry brother.

  “God help me,” he muttered under his breath as they pulled into the warehouse compound.

  And it would only get worse before the night ended. Soon, Chip Malloy would arrive, and the true crimes of the evening would begin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sister Miriam didn’t show her inner turmoil as she stuffed spare clips and boxes of ammunition into her pockets. She never did, not even to her husband. She could barely admit her weakness to herself, let alone to David or anyone else. If they found out, they’d have never let her come on this mission.

  If anyone could see it, it was Jacob, and he had been eyeing her suspiciously since the four of them—Miriam, Krantz, Jacob, and Alfred Christianson—climbed out of the basement with flashlights to rummage through supplies in the truck. David and Officer Trost stayed behind. The Lord had anointed Jacob prophet, and he was blessed with the gift of discernment. He had the power to see directly into her heart, if he would ever trust the Lord enough to use it.

  This was one time when she was glad he didn’t.

  “Miriam, Steve, what’s the plan?” Jacob asked.

  She looked at her watch. How long did they need? An hour to get out, maybe half an hour to set up. “We’ll aim for eleven thirty. You listen. As soon as you hear gunfire, come roaring up the road. We’ll clear the bridge for you.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “Nothing too crazy,” Miriam said as she strapped a KA-BAR knife and sheath to her thigh. “Go out there and start killing. Quietly if we can. With a bit of noise if we can’t. Krantz, you got the grenades?”

  “Yeah, I got ’em.” He didn’t sound pleased. He slung the vinyl bag holding his rifle over one shoulder.

  “You’re not out there to rack up a body count,” Jacob said. “There are no points assigned for extra kills.”