The Gates of Babylon (34 page)

Jackson got the tire loose. He tossed it to one side then moved ahead of her, kicking and dragging aside pallets and hunks of scrap metal, broken chairs, and soggy sofa cushions. He led her into the alley.

It was barely wide enough to hold her wheelchair, and as Fernie crunched over snow, voices penetrated the thin walls on either side: a couple arguing about someone named Benny or Betty, a child crying for her mother, the drone of a radio, and then, something that congealed the blood in her veins.

“… in a wheelchair,” a man’s voice said. “With two kids.”

“I told you already,” a woman answered. Her articulation was clear, her tone disdainful, like someone educated who was not used to submitting to authority and was irritated at being awakened. “I haven’t seen anyone, and I wouldn’t tell you if I had.”

“Five thousand dollars reward. And your name at the top of preferential housing.”

“And I told you—” the woman began again, sounding even more irritated, before her voice faded, replaced by the sound of snoring to Fernie’s right as she continued.

Fernie would have expected the man to sound more demanding, like an agent from a police state. She imagined the government
maintained its grip by controlling food, power, even housing if they decided people should move for a new military base. But maybe they were intimidated by the mass of hungry, desperate people already on edge after—what was the general’s name? La Crow?—had shot several people in a riot, according to Jackson and Snod.

And she was heartened by the woman’s resistance. Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to find Fernie after all. Except for that reward. And preferential housing, which must mean one of the trailers on the edge of camp. Money and warm housing would sound pretty good to these people.

Jackson stopped at the end of the alley. It opened onto a narrow street. He leaned out, looked both ways, and then beckoned her forward. He held a finger to his lips. She nodded, passed the sign to both of her boys, then held out the blankets with a question on her face.

Jackson gave a dismissive wave of the hand.
Take them,
he was saying.

Grateful, and trying to show thanks with her eyes, Fernie wrapped one blanket around Daniel and tucked the other around her shoulders and her hips, enclosing Jake on her lap with only his head poking out the top. Jackson squeezed past and continued in brisk footsteps back up the alley toward his home. Fernie was alone with her children.

She poked her head out of the alley and froze when lights swept past the mouth of the lane. The car continued but stopped before it was out of earshot, where it sat idling. A man shouted somewhere, and all around people were moving, talking, arguing behind walls. The whole neighborhood was awake. Good heavens, she had to get out of here.

“What should I do?” she whispered.

But the voice that had pushed her out into the snowy night had fallen silent as the stones of the desert. No going back now, and the lane in front of her was a dead end as well. That left going out into the main road. Where they’d catch her at once.

Unless…
there!
On the opposite side of the lane she spotted a darker shadow on an otherwise unbroken wall of plywood sheets covered in plastic and tar paper. Another alley? It couldn’t be very wide. Would it hold the wheelchair?

Fernie crossed the lane. The snow was thicker now, sticky, and her wheels caught in ruts, hit hidden rocks. She brought the chair up to the entrance of the alley, glanced into the darkness, then beckoned for Daniel to follow. He ran across.

The new alley was no wider than the hallway from Fernie and Jacob’s bedroom to the bathroom, and not much longer, either. She’d hoped to find more back doors, like the one leading out of Jackson’s house, but was dismayed to discover that it ended in piles of plastic garbage bags, stacked precariously to the roofs of the surrounding houses, twelve, fifteen feet high. There was no way through, unless she could sprout wings and fly out with a boy under each arm.

“What do we do?” Daniel asked.

“Shh.”

Could they hide in here? No, not really. The alley was so shallow that a flashlight would catch them. And she didn’t dare touch or move those garbage sacks. They were stacked so high they’d likely come crashing down with enough noise to alert half the camp, if not smother the three fugitives in a garbage landslide.

Fernie turned around, praying feverishly for help, anything. A prompting, a plan.

Tell me what to do!

No answer. Not a whisper, not a hint. It was a horrible, lonely feeling, and as her confusion spread she wondered if this hollow sensation was what Jacob faced on a daily basis when he needed help. If so, who could blame him for his doubts?

Fernie returned to the lane. And froze. Men’s voices. Shadows in front of her, a flashlight sweeping back and forth.

“Look, Governor,” the man with the flashlight said. He squatted to the ground.

Governor? Of Utah? Was this Governor Jim McKay? Who, together with his brother, the attorney general, had run Fernie and her children from their home in Salt Lake, and Jacob from his job at the hospital? She’d expected the army, or maybe even the USDA, under Malloy or whoever had replaced him. But the governor himself?

The first man ran his flashlight down the length of parallel lines in the snow to show them to the second man, who bent to look. The tracks crossed the lane at an angle.

Fernie caught her breath. It was the double track of her wheelchair, clear as a flashing neon arrow from one alley to the next. All they had to do was look up, turn the light against the gap in the wall, and they’d have her.

“That’s a wheelchair all right,” the second man said. It
was
Governor McKay.

Slowly, the two men lifted their gaze toward the alley. Toward Fernie and her boys.

She closed her eyes. A prayer from Psalms came to her mind.

Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies. I flee unto thee to hide me. For thy righteousness’ sake, bring my soul out of trouble.

A shout sounded from the street. She opened her eyes.

“There he is!” someone cried.

The flashlight crossed Fernie’s face, but it was on its way to the front of the lane and didn’t pause. Several men gathered where the alley met the road.

A miracle! By the mercy of the Lord, they had not spotted her.

“Go home,” an angry voice shouted, “before you get what’s coming to you.”

More people gathered behind the angry man, some in jackets, others with blankets around their shoulders. Men, women, teenagers.

“Now listen, you people,” McKay said.

His voice wavered. The sound of a frightened man.

Something pricked Fernie’s conscience. The answer to her prayer had brought danger to someone else. But she only managed a twinge of worry for the two men now facing down an angry, shouting mob. What little she felt was overpowered by a wave of relief as she pushed Daniel aside and wheeled her chair back into the shadows to hide until it played out.

Another prayer formed in her mind. One filled with gratitude.

But this time, an answer came at once. It was not “you’re welcome.” It was another call to action.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I’m going to die,
Jim thought as he faced down the mob pressing into the narrow lane.

It was in their eyes. Education, class, civilization itself stripped away. Any and all restraint, gone. All that was left was rage, frustration, and hatred. One man waved a bloody shirt. A woman screamed with spittle flying from her lips. A teenage boy let out an incoherent, feral scream, while girls on either side of him bared their teeth like animals.

The man at Jim’s side, a state police officer named Killicut who’d grown up in Green River, the son of watermelon farmers, with a wife and child still living in town, drew his gun and waved it at the menacing figures in front of them. The officer’s hand shook, and his voice came out in a squeak, like that of a boy going through puberty. The crowd kept growing. Pushing closer.

How had this happened? Five minutes earlier Jim had felt a sense of invulnerability. At the gates, the MPs gave him twenty men and four cars for the search. Green River sent eight highway patrol officers and the entire police force of eleven men. Word went out to seal the camp, to find the missing USDA car, and to arrest the occupants.

As the search spread from the warehouses, clues came in. Most people questioned were sullen, even hostile when roused from their ramshackle homes or refugee tents, but others spoke up, especially when offered increased rations or other rewards for their cooperation. The car had been spotted going down a certain street. A man said he’d seen a woman with two children—yes, she may have been in a wheelchair—going into a certain house.

The people in the home acted suspicious, and an officer spotted disturbances in the snow leading out the back entrance. Jim was heading a group of seven men at the time and split them up to seal off adjacent alleys and streets. Ten minutes later he was alone with Killicut searching this lane, listening to the man babble on about his daughter’s teething problems, when Jim spotted the wheelchair tracks himself.

There was shouting in the street, and Jim had been dimly aware that the neighborhood was rousing itself in anger at the late-night search. And several people they’d questioned already knew about Lacroix’s men shooting the unarmed protesters earlier that evening. Add hunger, cold, poverty. The army’s abusive attitude. The camp was a lit fuse at the end of a very large stick of dynamite. And maybe if Jim had spent five minutes in the camp before this evening he’d have seen it.

But he had a dozen men within two hundred yards. Surely they’d come together if things got ugly. And the moment he saw Fernie Christianson’s wheelchair tracks furrowing the snow across the lane, the feeling of triumph swept away all other concerns.

Fernie was a slippery one. Wheelchair or no, she’d led them on a hell of a chase. But now they had her. Now…

And then the mob appeared. One man was armed with a length of stiff hose and two others carried broken pieces of construction debris. Others clutched hunks of asphalt or muddy stones.

“Back off!” Killicut cried. “I’m warning you!”

He swung his gun from side to side, but his posture was not of a man about to fire and the mob seemed to sense it. Instead, Killicut looked ready to throw down his gun and make a run for it while the refugees directed their wrath at the governor.

A woman made the first move. She stepped forward, swinging a sign that read
BREAD NOT BULLETS
. The same sign carried by the hippie Lacroix shot. Jim was about to be bludgeoned to death by peace activists. A hysterical laugh rose in his throat, even as his lips were begging them not to do anything hasty. Or trying to, anyway. He couldn’t seem to get the words out.

The woman closed the last few feet and brought the sign around from her shoulder. Jim lifted his arm to block the blow. It landed harmlessly against his forearm, the sign dragging too much air and too flimsy to hurt.

But now the crowd came in with a vengeance. Voices snarled like wolves attacking a wounded, cornered steer. Forty, maybe fifty people now. More joined every moment from the head of the lane. They kicked, punched. Something whistled past his head.

Jim looked for Killicut, but the man was backing away, gun lowered to point at the ground. A few people circled the officer but most directed their rage at the governor.

A rock struck him on the forehead. He fell hard. Pain shot up his wrist when he landed. Blows to his ribs. He rolled over to protect his head and caught a glimpse of his death. A man straddled his body with a twisted piece of rebar held over his head like an iron club. Strong enough to crush a man’s skull.

This is it,
Jim thought.
I always wondered how it would come. Now I know.

His attacker’s lips turned back in a sneer. His muscles tightened as he began his swing.

“No!” a voice cried. “Leave him alone.”

It was one woman’s voice. Yet somehow it was so strong, so penetrating that it cut through the heart of the racket. The man hesitated in his swing.

Jim turned toward the voice and was stunned at what he saw. There was Fernie Christianson in her wheelchair, right next to him, as if she’d materialized. She held a young boy on her lap, no older than a toddler, while a second boy of ten or eleven stood behind her chair, pushing.

The mob was too far gone to welcome this intrusion into their lynching party. But Fernie was hard to ignore in her wheelchair, and some of them looked suddenly troubled or even shrank back.

Fernie spoke directly to the man with the rebar. “If you kill this man it’s murder.”

“Do you know what they did to my brother?” the man shouted. “Do you?”

“I don’t. I’m sure it was awful. But will killing the governor help that?”

Jim struggled to a sitting position. The bones in his wrist felt wrong. Blood streamed down his forehead.

“If you kill this man they will retaliate,” Fernie said. “Whatever happened earlier tonight will be nothing compared to the revenge they’ll take.”

By now the mob crowded shoulder to shoulder all the way to the street, double the size of moments earlier. But this woman in the wheelchair had calmed them, and as her voice quieted, so did the noise. They leaned forward to listen, and the feral looks disappeared as quickly as they’d come.

“They’ll be forced to, don’t you see?” she continued. “That’s what happens when you kill a high government official. The army will come in with tanks and bulldozers. They’ll level these neighborhoods, and when they’re done and many more people have died, there will be twice as many soldiers and police officers as before. This place will be a concentration camp.”

“It already is,” someone said.

But the speaker’s voice was a complaint, not a call to violence, and even before Jim saw the police officers arriving, backed up by MPs with truncheons and assault rifles, he knew that he would live through this. When his official rescuers arrived, stones and sticks dropped and the crowd melted away. It happened so quickly that he didn’t see what became of the man who’d stood above him, ready to club him to death. The twisted end of the rebar jutted from the snow where it lay. Killicut—that coward—reappeared to help Jim to his feet.