The Gates of Babylon Read Online Free PDF Page B

time, legs entwined, hands roaming next to every danger spot on the body, but never quite crossing the lines. At last he pulled away.
    “Don’t stop now,” she said.
    “Eliza.” He was breathing heavily and his voice was even more husky than usual. “They’ll be here soon.”
    She plunged her fingers into his hair and pulled in tighter, until her lips brushed his. “A few more minutes.”
    “The clock is ticking. If we don’t—”
    He stopped as her mouth found his, but a few moments later she drew back with a sigh. He was right. They couldn’t risk it; he needed time to get to the other side of the lot and double check equipment.
    And now, two days later, sitting on the porch, imagining his hand running up her thigh, she was grateful there had been a ticking clock, or she might have lost her virtue right then and there.
    Lost.
Wasn’t that a funny word for it? Like virtue was a diamond that would slip through your fingers into the reservoir if you weren’t careful, fall careening and glittering to the bottom, and then sink into the mud, never to be seen again.
    What was it Father used to say? A girl unmarried by twenty-one was an overripe peach. Prone to masturbation and lesbianism, or cursed with hysteria and spinsterhood. Rotting fruit, sitting on the counter, less appealing with every passing day. Eliza wastwenty-four now, and sometimes she could hear the fruit flies buzzing around her head.
    A few more minutes the other night, and that peach would have been fully consumed. If only she were there now, in that chilly hotel room, warmed by Steve’s body, his hands roaming over her body. But this time he would touch her everywhere. He would—
    Next to her on the porch, Rebecca bent to pick up the rifle and place it on her lap, and Eliza snapped out of her misty fantasies. She realized that the other women and girls had stopped talking several seconds earlier. Miriam and Lillian were frozen at a card table with an army ordinance explosives manual open in front of them, and several electronic geegaws that Miriam had been explaining. Jacob’s wife, Fernie, rolled her wheelchair out of Rebecca’s cabin and up to the porch rail. The girls assembling the beehives and loading fruit into the dryers stood and looked in the same direction as the women on the porch. All stared across the sagebrush-strewn valley, toward the highway.
    A man rode toward them on horseback. He was clean-shaven, with a wide cowboy hat and a rifle in a holster. With the sun rising behind the rider—warm today, thank goodness—Eliza had a hard time picking out his features.
    At first she guessed Elder Smoot from size and gait of the horse, come out to look for his daughter Lillian, but as the man drew closer, she saw his bare arms. Church undergarments went all the way to the wrist. The rider wasn’t a member of the church.
    The horse crossed the stream, kicking up stones and then heaving as it climbed the bank on the other side. As the man came intoRebecca’s field, plowed under and planted with winter wheat, the rider seemed to notice that the women were armed and watching him warily, and slowed. His horse, Eliza noticed, had large saddlebags, a bedroll, and a rolled-up mummy bag. This man had ridden in from the desert.
    “I don’t mean any trouble. I’m looking for Jacob Christianson.”
    “He’s not here,” Fernie said, voice tight. “What do you want with him?”
    “He told me to meet him here.”
    “Here?” she said. “You can find him in town. Why don’t you look there?”
    “Because I’m trying to avoid the Feds. Dr. Christianson said it would be safer outside town.”
    Fernie gave a quarter turn to her wheelchair and gave a questioning look to the other women, who shook their heads. Eliza rose from her seat and set down the handbook. She hated this feeling of suspicion, but nothing good came these days when strangers wandered into the valley unannounced. And after the incidents two nights earlier, she was doubly