Blood of the Faithful Read Online Free PDF

man the .50-cal behind the gun shield, but Jacob told him to keep the gun pointed away from the camp and into the hillside as they approached, so as not to look threatening.
    “Pass up that white sheet,” Jacob told Miriam. Then, when Eliza had it, he told his sister to hang it out the window.
    Moments later Jacob slowed as they reached the outskirts of the camp. The squatters had dragged more logs across the road and down the shoulder toward the reservoir, with two battered cars without tires pushed up behind to reinforce them. It wasn’t a serious barrier—the Humvee could winch it all out of the way—but it might stop them for thirty minutes or more, plus force them to leave the protection of the vehicle and expose themselves to gunfire while hooking up the winch.
    The refugees in the camp must have heard the engine, because several hundred came up to line the road behind the barrier, staring toward the approaching vehicle. Plenty of rifles and shotguns in evidence, but no hostile moves. Not yet, anyway.
    A year had passed since the battle up here, and little had changed with the camp’s outward appearance. There were tents and camper trailers and wagons overturned and converted into dugouts. Nobody had bothered to build anything so substantial as a log cabin or a shack with a corrugated metal roof.
    But as Jacob stopped the Humvee in front of the barrier and studied the camp more closely, he noticed a few important differences. First, no latrines near the reservoir. After last fall’s bloody battle, precipitated in part because the refugees were polluting Blister Creek’s water supply, Jacob had broken the subsequent standoff a few months later to send in another armed excursion. Not to attack, but to deliver demands. Stop fishing with poison. Shift the camp two hundred yards from the water’s edge. And move the latrines to the other side of the highway.
    The moment someone in Blister Creek sickened from cholera, Jacob warned, he would send his forces into the hills and wipe the camp off the face of the earth. But if the squatters respected the town’s water supply, he would leave them be.
    The other obvious thing that had changed was the surrounding landscape. Pine and aspen forests had once covered the hillsides above the reservoir. Before the collapse, when the summer sun blasted the valley floor, half of Blister Creek would decamp for the reservoir. They boated and fished and swam, while the cool mountain breeze washed down through the trees, shaking the leaves of the aspens and making the pines sway. They picnicked in the cool shade of the cottonwood trees that grew up to the water’s edge.
    But the downside of the extra elevation was the bitter cold and snow that pounded the mountains during the winter. It wasn’t easy to stay warm up here. By last spring, the refugees had already burned up the picnic tables and cottonwood trees from the park, then moved across the road to attack the woods that grew up the mountainside. Now it looked as though some brutal logging operation had attacked the surrounding hills, leaving thousands of naked stumps. There wasn’t so much as a sapling left standing.
    “Like goats in a pea patch,” Eliza said, taking it in beside him. “It’ll be fifty years before this grows back.”
    Jacob was so shocked by the destruction of their beautiful mountain sanctuary that he was out of the truck before he noticed the other surprising change to the refugee camp.
    He was a doctor. His eye naturally went to the children wearing dirty rags for bandages, the old woman bent nearly double by scoliosis, using a ski pole as a cane. A man had a forearm poorly splinted between two flimsy pieces of particleboard. A couple of people were missing limbs. Probably had them sawed off nineteenth-century-style after last year’s firefight. But what Jacob didn’t see was obvious malnutrition.
    These people should be starving. They had been starving. He’d seen them last spring, hungry and lean and