Free Hell's Fortress by Daniel Wallace, Michael Wallace Page A

can.”
    “What would your father say?” Eliza asked.
    He sighed. “He’d grab his bullwhip and start cracking. That old man would chase me across the desert until I collapsed from exhaustion. Then he’d toss me over his shoulder and tell me I was worse than a girl as he carried me the rest of the way.”
    “Is he as bad as all that?”
    “You should have heard what he said when he found out Lillian was teaching me the piano.”
    Poor Grover. A gentle boy in a world of men. Where was the place for a boy like that in a family like the Smoots? What if you didn’t want the man stuff: branding cattle, hunting, hauling wood, and eventually collecting a harem of wives?
    “Come on, already,” Miriam said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet. How the devil did she have so much energy?
    “Brother Trost?” Eliza said to the police officer. “You okay?”
    The older man put on his shirt and fixed his cowboy hat back on his head. “I’ll manage.”
    The four of them broke into a trot. Within minutes, Miriam had pushed far into the lead.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    It was dusk before the Humvee reached its destination, a spooky abandoned town on the Utah/Arizona border named Colorado City. Kemp knew without being told that it had been another polygamist enclave. The houses were massive compounds with multiple wings, like in Blister Creek, and the chapel had a distinctly Mormon look about it: squat and brick, with no cross on the steeple. But most of the buildings had burned down, gutted vehicles blockaded all but the central streets, and coyotes trotted through brown, weedy yards. Bodies swung by ropes from utility poles. Their clothing hung in tatters, and their bodies were so picked over by crows that it was impossible to tell age or gender.
    “Every once in a while some fundy creeps into town from the hills to do some looting,” Shepherd explained when he saw Kemp staring.
    “Isn’t this their town? How do they loot their own homes?”
    “Got to stop thinking like that. That world is gone.”
    Kemp was alone with the irregulars. The school bus had run out of gas some thirty miles to the north, and there it would remain. Kapowski and Tippetts had stayed behind, together with the second Humvee. Shepherd didn’t want the refugees coming into town. Not yet.
    The Humvee turned down a street, passed two armed men in fatigues, then stopped in front of one of the remaining houses. An M1-A1 tank squatted in the yard. Grass grew around the treads and extra armor had been welded onto the front. A monster like this got what, half a mile to the gallon? Took ten gallons just to get the gas turbine engine up and running. It wasn’t going anywhere. But the 120 mm cannon could blow the hell out of anything that came rolling down the road.
    The house itself was two stories, with wings attached here and there and barely matching the original structure except in the olive-green siding. As Kemp climbed out of the Humvee, one of Shepherd’s men yanked the garage door open and he and two others unloaded crates from the back of the vehicle. They stacked them together with crates and drums of various sizes that already packed the interior of the monster-size garage.
    Across the street, a fuel or ammo dump sat beneath camouflaged netting in the space between a house and a cottonwood tree. Two men guarded it from behind sandbags. Based on vehicles and movement, it seemed that most of the houses along this street billeted troops. Still, it couldn’t be a large force. Maybe a hundred and fifty men, from what Kemp could see.
    He helped Shepherd carry the final crate into the garage. “Food, fuel, and weapons. That’s what’s going to win the war. Isn’t that what you said in Iran?”
    Shepherd grunted as they maneuvered it into position. “Some things change. Others don’t. We’ve got plenty of weapons. It’s food and fuel that’s the devil to find. Good thing nobody else has them either.”
    “Except Blister Creek.”
    Shepherd’s face