Righteous03 - The Wicked by Michael Wallace Page A

the land of Zion. Did you hear that? I’m fine.”
    “Great, but…” His voice broke up again and then she lost the call entirely.
    She found a sofa on its side, cushions missing, the stuffing torn out by animals, turned her phone off, and tucked it inside a torn flap of fabric, among the springs. She didn’t want to be caught with it on her person. She tossed the empty backpack. The voices continued somewhere in front of her.
    “Hello!” she cried. “Is anyone here?”
    The voices stopped at once, like crickets going silent when they hear footsteps. Eliza came around the corner of the nearest stack of tires to discover a double-wide trailer and two of the old-style, silver-colored campers. There were so many tires stacked on and around them that she might have passed right by if she hadn’t heard the voices, at least this close to dusk.
    “Hello?” She came to a stop fifteen feet from the front door of the trailer. A thin, flickering light—like a Coleman lantern—seeped through one of the trailer windows, then went dark. In that brief glance she’d seen bars over the windows. Someone had been paranoid enough to fortify the trailer as if it were a house at the edge of the slums, instead of an abandoned trailer in the desert.
    Still no answer, so Eliza sat down on an overturned refrigerator and waited. After a few minutes, she tried again. “Hello? Can someone come out and talk to me?”
    “Who are you, and what do you want?” a man’s voice asked. Movement behind one of the open windows.
    “My name is Eliza, I just want to talk.”
    “About what? Are you looking for someone?”
    “Not someone, but something, yes.”
    “Well?”
    “Are you the ones who were talking to people at UNLV last week?” she asked. “I talked to a man about the Book of Revelation, but then I never saw him again.”
    A long, quiet moment, and she could sense the wheels of suspicion turning in his mind.
    “I’m looking for Caleb Kimball,” she said.
    The door opened. A young man stepped down the makeshift cinder block steps to the ground. He was about six feet tall, thin but wiry, with a dirty, unwashed look. He was dressed in a robe, tied off with a cord, wore a beard and sandals. Apart from looking like John the Baptist, there was a glint in his eyes that Eliza had seen a hundred times before. A true believer. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t cynical about his claims. But was it Caleb Kimball? In this light, behind the beard, it was hard to tell if he looked like Gideon and Taylor Junior.
    He frowned. “What are you sitting on that for? Get off there.”
    She stood up, looked around in confusion. “Off what, the fridge?”
    He shook his head. “No, never mind. You look too comfortable, considering.”
    “Considering what?”
    “Considering how much danger you’re in.”
    Her mouth felt dry. They’d almost killed David, and that was just to rob his produce truck. She couldn’t afford to make a mistake; she needed the same kind of confidence her brother Jacob could wield.
    “Of course I’m in danger, the world is coming to an end. I need to make sure I’m on the right side of the Lord. Are you the Disciple?”
    “Who told you about us?” he demanded.
    “I talked to you, don’t you remember? I was reading my Bible on campus and you started a conversation.”
    His eyes narrowed. “I don’t remember you.”
    “I remember you. I couldn’t stop thinking about what you told me about the world coming to an end. And when I prayed that night to the Lord, I knew I should find you and talk to you some more. I’ve been asking everywhere.”
    “And how did you do that? Nobody else has ever found us.”
    “But people talk,” Eliza said. “You didn’t just get here and you need to go into town to get food and water. Once I figured out where you were, I had a taxi drive me as far as he’d go on this road, then I walked the rest of the way.”
    “I don’t believe it. Did someone send you? Where did you hear that