Hell's Fortress by Daniel Wallace, Michael Wallace

over. As he fiddled with it, the other three kept busy. Grover dug up the yard looking for worms, then took the poles down to the lake. Miriam and Eliza changed out the Dodge’s bald, rotting tires for better ones off the other vehicles.
    It was late afternoon before they were gassed up, loaded, and ready to set out. Grover had caught three trout, which he’d cooked as fast as he caught them. As the pickup rattled up the mountain road, they shared out the fish. It was just enough to leave Eliza hungrier than when she’d started. But she felt stronger, and was relieved she wouldn’t have to spend the night in the house.
    Trost drove. “With any luck,” he said, “we’ll be down in Cedar City in time for supper.”
    “Which is what these days?” Miriam said. “Boot leather and toasted grasshoppers?”
    “The fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who prepared for the end, you know,” Trost said. He sounded testy. Like the majority of Utahns, he was part of the mainstream LDS church that had given up polygamy over a hundred years earlier. “Our prophets have been warning us about a year’s supply of food forever.”
    “They aren’t real prophets,” Miriam said. “They’re a bureaucratic gerontocracy, but fine, whatever.”
    “What do you know about it?”
    “Don’t we have enough worries without starting a religious war?” Eliza said. “Miriam, when we get to Cedar City, act civilized, will you?”
    “I know what I’m doing. I grew up among gentiles, remember?”
    “Starting with calling other Mormons saints, not gentiles, for one. For that matter, don’t call gentiles ‘gentiles,’ either.”
    “Sure, why not? Anything else?”
    “Just . . . good manners, right? And if that means you keep your mouth shut, then do that.”
    They zipped along for the next ten minutes, making excellent time as the road snaked higher and higher. They passed through gorgeous meadows dotted with wildflowers and thick stands of aspen with their leaves quaking in the breeze. The higher they got, the more snow remained, until soon only the road itself wasn’t covered with a blanket of white.
    Then they were passing through a slushy film, then shifting to fuel-burning four-wheel-drive to climb through several inches of snow, then a wet, icy foot of snow that remained. They had to get out several times to push when the pickup got stuck. Another time Trost lost traction and nearly drove them off the road while the others braced themselves to go crashing over the hill and into the forest. He fought it under control at the last moment. When they reached the summit—9,900 feet, according to a roadside sign—the needle was nudging at empty.
    They stopped to refill their canteens from a mountain stream and to shake off some of the motion sickness from the long, winding drive.
    “That was a good day’s hike right there,” Eliza said. “If we’d come up on foot, we’d have been spending a night up here any way you looked at it.”
    “Not only that,” Trost said, “we were lucky there weren’t any more washouts. I hope our luck holds.”
    They coasted down the mountain where possible, even when it meant creeping at five or six miles an hour until they reached the next dip. Trost only nudged the gas when the road made a temporary climb. Even so, they’d only reached the foothills above Cedar City before the engine died altogether. He managed to coax out another half mile or so by coasting before the road rose a little too high to the next crest and they couldn’t make it any farther. They parked the truck and got out.
    The Great Basin stretched beneath a bruised sky. The opposite mountain range lay shrouded in smoke or a fine haze of dust, but the view was wide open both south and north, where the freeway sliced across the western edge of Utah. Fields shimmered green, though whether from the heavy spring rains or because people were actively planting them, it was hard to say.
    Cedar City itself sat below them like a