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

giant map. It was a Mormon pioneer town with wide, leafy streets laid out on a grid in the downtown, sprawling from there into the surrounding farm and grazing land. Or that’s what it had been two years earlier. Now, block after block of the newer subdivisions to the south and west lay in blackened ruins. Houses gone, fields turned to ash. No trees. Essentially, anything that touched or drew near I-15 was gone. Nearly two-thirds of the city of thirty thousand people, obliterated.
    “Good lord,” Trost said. “What the devil happened down there?”
    “It wasn’t that way last fall?” Eliza asked.
    “No, it wasn’t like this at all. We were holding on—by the tips of our fingers, but managing. And look, there’s not a single car on the freeway, or any of the side roads. Is there no fuel? None at all?”
    “There’s more traffic in Blister Creek,” Grover said.
    “Look, there’s a rider,” Miriam said. “No, two.”
    About a mile away and several hundred feet below, two men on horseback trotted down the road before disappearing beneath the trees that still grew on the east side of town.
    “There had better be cops,” Trost said with a grumble. “If I get down there and find my officers have deserted the force, I’m going to crack some skulls.”
    They pushed the truck to the side of the road, where they unloaded the tools salvaged from the house. These they hid in the scrub oak that lined the road.
    From there, they descended into town on foot. The air smelled of a distant brush fire. It was quiet. No chainsaws, lawnmowers, trucks, or any of the other sounds you’d associate with a small town on a summer day. The houses in the uppermost foothills were abandoned, yards overgrown with weeds. Front doors hung open, with the contents of the homes salvaged—or looted, depending on your point of view. Several had burned down.
    Lower still, they came upon a farmer’s wide field, now given over to hand-carved wooden grave markers. Hundreds and hundreds of them marched across the field. The upper part of the makeshift cemetery showed signs of fresh digging, while below, grass had grown up around the markers. They came upon another field of fresh graves around the next bend, this one even larger.
    Four men were digging graves at the end of the field, while a fifth stood at watch, armed with a rifle. Three bodies lay side by side next to the first grave, wrapped in sheets. One of the men stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand. He leaned against his shovel and happened to glance up the road. He spotted the newcomers and dove for the ground with a shout.
    The man with the rifle swung it around and aimed it at the four companions. He screamed for them to freeze. They raised their hands.
    The man with the rifle started to come forward, then stopped after several paces. “Dale Trost? That you?”
    “Hank Gibson?” Trost said. “What the devil is going on here?”
    “TB. More victims.”
    “What’s with the chain gang?”
    “Looters.”
    The scene shifted in Eliza’s mind as they followed Trost’s lead and cautiously approached the others. It wasn’t a man protecting workers. It was a man standing guard over four prisoners. Chains and manacles linked them together; she hadn’t noticed that at first. Their heads were shaved and they wore gaunt, hungry expressions. Two of them were kids, no older than sixteen. One of these was missing an ear. An angry gash, poorly stitched, marked its absence.
    Gibson was a tall, wiry man with an iron-gray mustache. He was missing two fingers on his left hand.
    He turned to the men. “Get to work, you dogs.”
    The prisoners returned to their labors. Picks clanked stones. Shovels tossed dirt out of the hole.
    Trost gestured at the boy with the missing ear. “Who did that?”
    “You steal a man’s food, you join the work crew. You break into his house to do it, you lose an ear. Second time, it’s a hand. Hard cases, we fit ’em with a necktie.” He