The Gates of Babylon Read Online Free PDF

knowledge.
    “Miriam!”
    She punched something in her cell phone as he reached her in quick strides. He pried the device out of her hand. And then a flash of blinding light flared west along the highway, a few seconds of silence, followed by a roaring boom that rolled across the high plateau. A fireball curled into the sky, eight thousand gallons of diesel going up at once. The others came up to stand in silence and watch the column of fire.
    “Miriam, damn you,” Krantz said.
    Stephen Paul watched the fireball with something that looked like admiration on his face. David stared at his wife with awe and not a little fear. Eliza’s face mirrored the horror that Jacob felt himself.
    “Mo Strafford was in that truck,” Jacob said at last. “And you just killed him. Maybe the others, too.”
    Miriam said, “When you live on the frontier, you hang horse thieves. When martial law is declared, you shoot looters.” Shetook back the control device and met his gaze. “Sometimes the Lord requires hard measures to protect His people.”
    Jacob stared back, jaw clenched. “I have heard that before. The men who said it to me are all dead.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Eliza Christianson was so busy daydreaming about sex that she didn’t immediately notice when the other women on the porch fell silent and reached for their rifles. Eliza’s students were busy feeding apples into the corers and carrying trays to the dryers, and she had been thumbing through an old USDA handbook about meat preservation, but reading every paragraph twice as her mind wandered.
    Two nights earlier, before the disastrous failed trade, she and Steve Krantz had arrived at the Bryce Canyon village two hours before the others to scout out places to set up their sniper rifles. Steve had been all business at first, but Eliza was so aroused by the danger and the proximity of their upcoming wedding that when they finished setting up the second gun, in a hotel room on the third floor of the main building, she had set the LED lantern on the nightstand and sprawled across the bed.
    “Maybe we should come back to Ruby’s for our honeymoon.”
    Steve looked up from fiddling with the scope and raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t prefer a place with heat? Maybe room service? A toilet that flushes?”
    “It will be like camping. And we’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”
    “A little too spooky for my tastes. Like the abandoned hotel in
The Shining
, where that dead woman comes out of the tub and… you haven’t seen that movie, have you?”
    She smiled and shook her head.
    Eliza patted the bed and gave what she hoped was a fetching smile. She couldn’t tell from his grin if he found it enticing or silly, but he came and lay next to her. She stroked his face and ran her finger along his lips.
    “Unmarried and lying on a bed next to a man,” she said. “Five generations of Christianson women just rolled over in their graves and groped for their chastity belts.”
    “If their ghosts materialize in this room this very minute,” Steve said, “I’ll tell them I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself. Eliza Christianson is too sexy to resist.”
    “Really? Let’s see if that’s true.”
    She swung her leg over him and brought her mouth down. He lifted his head to meet her and they kissed hungrily. Steve’s hand crept under her shirt to stroke his thumb along her belly and she gasped and shivered at the contact with her skin.
    “My hands are cold,” he murmured.
    “I like them there.”
    And she liked them higher. That’s what she wanted, his fingers exploring up under her undergarments, beneath her bra, his fingers brushing against her aching nipples, and his other handlower, slipping into her pants. She wanted it so badly. If he had done it then, she wouldn’t have resisted. She would have given herself to him.
    But he didn’t. He respected her wishes to wait. Only three weeks until the wedding. She could make it.
    They lay on the bed kissing for some