Hell's Fortress Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I splatter your brains,” she said.
    Kemp slowly swung his head to look at her. Cold fury raged behind his eyes.
    “She’s former FBI,” Eliza said. “Push it and you’ll be sorry.”
    His gaze swung back to Jacob. He took a step back.
    “I am truly sorry,” Jacob said. “Would you like to take the food with you, and take my sister and her companions? Or will you go alone?”
    “Send the food. Send the people. And bring me my mother’s body. I won’t bury her in this valley. Before the end comes, you’ll be digging up corpses for food. Mark my words.”

    “What do you think he meant by that?” Eliza asked as the two pickups rolled down the highway toward the refugee encampment. She was in the lead pickup with her brothers, Jacob and David, as well as Stephen Paul Young.
    Jacob had been stewing over Kemp’s curse—almost biblical in its flavor and the dread it inspired—since the man muttered it six hours earlier.
    “Absolutely nothing.”
    “You mean that thing about eating corpses?” David asked from the back. “Miriam told me about that. Damn creepy. He’s lucky she didn’t shoot him.”
    Kemp was so unhinged after Jacob’s ill-advised admission that they were escorting him back to the camp with what passed for Blister Creek’s entire police department, now that Steve Krantz was gone. Kemp sat in the backseat of the other pickup truck’s extended cab, flanked by Miriam and Dale Trost, formerly of the Cedar City PD, a refugee himself. Lillian drove. Jacob had radioed ahead to the Moroni checkpoint, where Smoot and his sons were back on the guns, and warned them about the situation.
    “If you ask me,” Stephen Paul said, “we’re too lenient with this ungrateful jerk. Those kids would have died if you hadn’t gifted them our precious medicines.”
    “It was the right thing to do,” Jacob said.
    “Until your own children get sick next winter and you’ve got no way to treat them.”
    “Three months of food is ridiculous,” David added.
    “It’s not a gift,” Jacob said. “We’re asking him to take three people out of the valley.”
    “That covers their medical care,” Stephen Paul said. “And the food you already gave them. If they balk, we force them at gunpoint.”
    “I might have saved his mother. I didn’t. That’s worth something.”
    David started to say something else, but Jacob asked them all to stop arguing. They continued in silence.
    The sun squatted overhead by the time the trucks reached the Moroni checkpoint. A cloudless sky stretched from horizon to horizon, unbroken by cloud or contrail. It wasn’t the brilliant blue of years past, but tinged with slate, with a reddish smear around the horizon. When Jacob’s group stepped out of the truck, he was surprised to discover the air was as hot and dry as over-toasted bread. It tasted chalky. They shuffled out of their jackets and left them in the trucks.
    “Maybe summer is finally here,” David said. “Time to plant the fields?”
    “It’s one day,” Stephen Paul said. “Don’t get too excited.”
    “Go ahead,” Jacob told Lillian as she rolled down the window of the second pickup truck. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
    Smoot came striding over from the pillbox. He eyed Miriam, Trost, and Lillian as they drove off with Joe Kemp toward the refugee encampment.
    Smoot stroked his beard and scowled after his daughter; like the other two women, Lillian wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Over the past six months, the prairie dress had been falling out of fashion with the women of the valley; it was a look now reserved mainly for girls and elderly women. The women of Smoot’s household maintained the older style, and no doubt he would have insisted that his daughter dress appropriately. Jacob enjoyed the discomfort in Smoot’s face; the man wanted to speak up, but couldn’t. Once he’d given her to David for marriage, he’d surrendered that right.
    Smoot turned to Jacob. “Regretting it