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

which they used to make a bed.
    “Lillian and David, ride in the back. Keep him from moving. Elder Smoot, come up front with me.”
    Jacob hesitated next to the driver’s side door and stared south. How far had the bus gone? Should he go after them? What if that invited another attack?
    Would Eliza come back? Not with the continued threat of a drone strike on the highway. Not when she’d waited months for just this opportunity. She’d forge west, going alone if she had to. But he guessed Miriam would relish the chance to accompany Eliza, baby at home or not. Miriam would try to talk Trost into joining them. Jacob had brought Trost’s daughter out of Las Vegas; the man would feel obligated. That left Grover, but would the boy risk venturing back on his own with drones in the sky? No, Jacob thought not.
    Eliza. Miriam. Officer Trost. Grover Smoot.
    Not the group he would have sent to cross the desert and the war zones, bandits, starvation, and disease they would encounter along the way.
    Let Eliza go. Trust her. You’ve got plenty to worry about here.
    First, he had to remove the splinter from Stephen Paul’s back. Then the dead animals and broken carts needed cleaning up. Then there was the recovery of Bill Smoot’s charred body. What an awful task that would be.
    “Are we going?” David asked.
    “One second.”
    Something about the scene still bothered him. If the drone quarantine wasn’t broken, how had the refugees approached in the first place? A momentary lapse of vigilance?
    Or something more sinister?

CHAPTER SIX
    Joe Kemp meant to keep driving down the highway until the school bus ran out of gas. Roll to a stop and get out. Set off across the desert. No food, no water. A day or two, then his pain would be over. His dead buddies in Iran, his dead family: all forgotten.
    What about the other refugees? They could go to hell. He’d carried them too long.
    His brother, Teddy, had fallen in a riot before they could escape Vegas. Trampled to death when the aid truck ran out of bread before it ran out of starving people. A week later, Teddy’s wife was kidnapped and raped by roving teenagers on the outskirts of the city, then left for dead. She shot herself, leaving two kids. Then, a few days outside the city, Kemp’s two nephews—ages six and eight—caught some sort of intestinal bug. The boys died three days later, literally crapping themselves to death. The bug took five other children from the caravan, plus one elderly black lady by the name of Janine.
    A few days of quiet followed that before bandits attacked the caravan near the Nevada/Utah border. That’s when his mother had taken the shotgun pellets that Kemp tried to pry out of her belly.
    His heart was a black pit as he barreled south after kicking the four cult members out of the bus. The refugees cried for him to slow down. He ignored them and kept his foot mashed to the pedal. Mostly women and children back there. Couple of Hispanic teenagers, an old Asian dude from Santa Monica. Two vets from the Iran war, not much different from Kemp except one wheezed like an emphysema patient, his lungs burned out by mustard gas, and the other had one leg. There had been stronger men in the caravan, but they had died. Two of bronchitis. Three others in a firefight.
    The refugees could make their own way now. He was done. Run the bus till it wouldn’t run anymore, then he was gone. Walk across the bloody desert until he could walk no more.
    Sorry, Mama. I tried.
    What would she say? Don’t give up, Chipper —that was her nickname for him. Always “don’t give up,” and “only quitters quit.”
    Guess I’m a quitter, then.
    What was his alternative? Take these people to Lake Powell, like that polygamist dude said? Make some mythical Shangri-la where they could hunt and fish and grow sweet peas and tomatoes while the world burned around them?
    Kemp still had an eighth of a tank of gas when he couldn’t take it anymore. He pulled the bus onto the