Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned
Read Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned Online
Authors: Michael Wallace
Tags: #Adult, #Thriller, #Spirituality
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2012 by Michael Wallace
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612182216
ISBN-10: 1612182216
I would like to thank my agent, Katherine Boyle, for her support this past year, and my team at Thomas & Mercer: Rory, Megan, Jacque, and David. I’m grateful to my parents for encouraging me over the years, and to my brother Daniel and my sister Wendy for celebrating my successes and for encouraging me when I struggle. Special thanks go to Grant Morgan for providing valuable feedback of an early draft of
The Blessed and the Damned,
and to Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, who serves as my sounding board when I need help with medical details.
And finally, I’m grateful to Melinda for supporting me for so many years while I pursued my dream.
Two men stepped out of a pickup truck in the desert northeast of Las Vegas. The older man, Elder Kimball, lifted the bloodstained tarp in the truck bed. The man underneath groaned. His hands and feet were bound, and his mouth and eyes wrapped in duct tape.
“Forget him for now,” Taylor Junior said.
“He needs help.”
“He’ll get it later.”
“But he can’t walk,” Kimball protested. “Look at his leg.”
Taylor Junior glanced down. There was no concern on his face. “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s see if we can find it ourselves.”
The bound man had lost a good deal of blood already, and the gunshot wound on his upper thigh was still oozing. His face was gray, and he barely struggled now. They should get him back
to the city and look for a hospital. But Taylor Junior was already walking into the burned-out dump.
Kimball reluctantly followed. He felt what could almost be described as a horizontal vertigo, a need to get back inside, behind a door or a wall. It had been strange enough driving across the empty stretches of desert after staring at it for so many years from behind chain link topped with razor wire. This was worse.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Eliza was here,” Taylor Junior said.
“We already knew that. She died in the fire.”
“That’s what they say.”
“But that man told us—” Kimball turned, beginning to point back at the truck, but a hard look on his son’s face stopped him. “Okay then, what proof do you want? They held a funeral. There’s a gravestone in Blister Creek with her name on it. That’s not good enough for you?”
“Were you at the funeral?”
“You know I wasn’t. I was still behind bars.”
“I wasn’t either,” Taylor Junior said. “And I didn’t send anyone. I knew they’d be watching for me. Abraham Christianson, maybe, or the FBI. But I hear there was no casket. They never found her body, or so they claim. So how are they so sure she died?”
“She wasn’t the only one they couldn’t find,” Kimball said. “You know how hot those tire fires get. And they pushed the wreckage around with bulldozers to finally put it out. They almost couldn’t find your brother, and he was the one they were most desperate to identify. All they found was a single tooth and a couple of bone chips. Just because they didn’t find Eliza doesn’t mean she’s alive.”
But Taylor Junior wasn’t listening to him. Instead, he moved methodically across the burned-out dump.
What does it matter anyway?
Elder Kimball wondered.
She’s either dead or she’s not. What is Eliza Christianson to us?
He covered his mouth and nose with his hands and followed Taylor Junior. The air smelled like vulcanized hell—burned rubber and smoldering fires that had wormed their way below the surface to gnaw at rotting furniture, plastic jugs, and broken toys. And tires. There must be some still burning underground, and that was the smell that trickled up through wisps of smoke here and there. The smoke burned his throat and made his eyes water.
Taylor Junior searched for several minutes, then straightened his back and took a wider look across the desert. Kimball watched, impatient and anxious to get back to the truck.
“It’s no good,” his son said at last. “I can’t see it. I don’t even know where the trailers were. Come on.”
As they returned to the truck, Kimball hoped they would get back in and drive away. Take the injured man to the hospital and forget the whole thing. But Taylor Junior lowered the tailgate and dragged the bound man from the truck bed.
“Get his hands and feet,” Taylor Junior said.
Elder Kimball untied the ropes while Taylor Junior peeled off the duct tape. The injured man looked at them, his expression surprisingly defiant. The color began to return.
“I just want out, man. I don’t care about the Disciple, I—”
“Shut up.” Taylor Junior hit him across the face with an open palm. The man’s head rocked back.
The injured man looked around him, seemed to notice the dump for the first time. His legs trembled, and he would have
fallen if the other two men hadn’t held him up. He swallowed hard and nodded.
“Good,” Taylor Junior said. “Listen to me. Your so-called prophet is dead, and all his followers, too. The only ones left are weasels like you who ran away. We have nothing to do with the Disciple, and we don’t care about your cult or why you left. Do you understand?”
The injured man nodded.
“Good. All we care about is what you told us about the pit.”
“I already told you everything I know…” His voice trailed off as Taylor Junior’s expression turned mean. The man looked at the older man with a pleading look, but Kimball turned away, afraid to intervene.
“You have a chance,” Taylor Junior said. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed the same gun he’d used when the man tried to flee his apartment. “Only a chance. Find the trailers and you live. If you can’t find the spot, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” The insolent look was gone now.
“Good. Take a look around. Don’t rush. Find us the spot.”
Taylor Junior gave a push and the injured man staggered away. He shot one final look at the other two men, then began his search, head bent to the ground. His feet stirred up ash, which the wind lifted and whisked away in swirling gray eddies. After a minute, he stopped, looked off at the distant mountains, then back toward the ranch road, as if trying to get his bearings.
“Caleb could have been a great man,” Taylor Junior said to his father. “Now he’s ash.”
“Great? Maybe. I’m not so sure.”
“He couldn’t sort out the voice of the Lord from the voice of Lucifer. Someone whispered in Caleb’s ear, flattered him, told him he was God’s chosen disciple. He wasn’t the first of my brothers to follow that path.”
“You mean Gideon,” Kimball said, thinking about his older son, dead at Eliza Christianson’s hand. Gideon had dragged her into Witch’s Warts as he’d fled the temple, but she’d escaped and dropped a chunk of sandstone on his head.
“Many are called, but few are chosen,” Taylor Junior said. “The key is to know what to listen for. It’s clear enough to me now. I was blind, but now I can see.”
And how did that happen?
Kimball thought.
Did something change you?
He didn’t know this man who had picked him up at the rest stop forty miles north of the Federal Correctional Institute in Safford, Arizona. No longer a weak, sniveling narcissist. His son’s skin was sunburn over tan over sunburn, skin peeling around the ears and neck. He’d spent a lot of time in the desert, maybe even done manual labor outside, if that were possible. The muscles in his forearms and shoulders said he had. The boy Kimball had known worked only under duress.
Ahead of them, the injured third man stopped his limping shuffle and looked around. “Here. This place.”
Taylor Junior approached, then paced back and forth across the space three times before nodding his own confirmation. “Yes, exactly. This is where Caleb kept his double-wide trailer.” He pointed. “And there and there, two teardrop trailers. He slept in the smallest one, sometimes with one of the women.”
“I don’t see anything,” Kimball said. “Are you sure?”
“I remember the spot.”
“You’ve been here before?”
A look of irritation flashed over his son’s face. “I came to tell Caleb to join me. He was too far gone, so I shook the dust off my feet and condemned him to destruction. You see what happened. The Lord burned him alive a few months later.”
“That’s not what the news said. They said Caleb’s followers killed him. Isn’t that right?” Kimball asked their prisoner for confirmation, but the man shook his head and shrugged.
Taylor Junior said, “Don’t believe what you see on TV.”
“It was a newspaper, actually. There was a library in prison. It said someone bashed in his skull with a piece of concrete.”
Taylor Junior walked away. “What was he up to out here? Was he planning an attack on Blister Creek, or was Lucifer using him to get at me? And why Eliza?” He moved in a direct line deeper into the bulldozed dump. He waved his gun for the other two men to follow.
“He didn’t say anything about Blister Creek,” their captive said. “I don’t even know what that means. We were waiting for Wormwood to fall from the sky. I couldn’t take the abuse anymore—I had to get away.”
“Nobody cares,” Taylor Junior said. “So stop talking.”
Kimball still couldn’t piece together what Taylor Junior was looking for, and he was reluctant to move farther away from the truck. The Nevada sun burned down like fire from the sky and sweat trickled down his neck. He’d lost weight in prison, and in the glare, the skin on the back of his hands looked like an old man’s. He felt like a pale thing dug out of the ground and now writhing in the sunlight.
