Chapter 1

"Will you do this for me, Brother David?"

I looked at my certifiably insane uncle and wondered what would happen if I said no. The problem with that was my mother had told me from the time I was small that my uncle was a holy man, especially beloved of God, a prophet and a saint, not to mention the only person who had helped her when she was in dire straits.

"Please," she'd told me just before the cancer finally ran berserk through her body, "if Brother Jerome ever asks you for help, no matter what, help him. Please, David! Promise me!"

He was Brother Jerome to my mother and the rest of his followers. To the rest of the world Jerome Wilson was a crazed polygamist, child rapist, a cultist of the worst sort and undoubtedly at some point in time, would have his followers drink the Kool-Aid or try their luck with a shootout with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When I'd first heard that, I didn't have a clue why anyone would want any of those for friends. By the time I was twenty-four, I had a clue, but it still didn't make sense to me.

My Uncle Jerome had scripture on his side, or at least so he said. There were certainly enough of the Old and New Testament characters that had more than one wife, and as he was fond of repeating, scripture did say to be fruitful and go forth and multiply. In his church a woman wasn't fit to be married to a "real man" until she'd had a child by Uncle Jerome, and best by her sixteenth birthday. Almost all women in the church had been "brought to the faith" by Uncle Jerome -- that meant they'd had sex with him on or about their twelfth birthday.

He spoke to me simply. "Brother David, all you have to do is drive a school bus from Texas to Arizona; it's not even a full-size bus -- it's more like a large van, Brother David. You will have to stop for gas three times -- you'll have a debit card and the Maidens of the Faith can get things from the mini-marts at each stop. It won't be a problem, Brother David."

"And how many maidens will there be on the bus?" I tried not to gag on the word "maidens."

"Fourteen, Brother David. They are all very good, humble and obedient young women, the best of those in the Faith."

"Why?"

"The statists are coming in two days to remove all of the young women from the Hope in Zion Temple. If they hear that we are moving some of our young women, they will surely intervene. You must tell no one, Brother David."

"All right." I owed my mother everything in the universe. There was no way I could say no to her dying request. Even so, I had no intention of giving my uncle a blanket pass.

Taking fourteen teenage girls through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona -- that was a Mann Act violation for sure, I thought. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that I might be charged with kidnapping.

"Uncle Jerome, my mother told me that I owed you big time. This is it, Uncle Jerome. After this, I'm finished, done, through. I will owe you nothing and you'll owe me nothing and I'd be pleased never to see you again."

"Brother David, that you do this means God will find a special place in his heart for you. It's his mercy that you will find at the end of the road, not mine. All I ask of you is that you do your best to deliver the young women of the Faith safe to their destination -- and keep an open mind while doing it."

To be honest, I thought from that comment that he was getting me ready to accept the fact that everyone else at "The Hope in Zion Temple" really were going to drink the Kool-Aid. In which case I was saving more than a dozen lives. What's bad about that?

Something, I was sure.

He beamed at me, and then handed me a manila folder with instructions, cash, two debit cards, and the church records for the girls. After that it was entirely too easy and too smooth to be comforting. Murphy tends to visit desperate enterprises with greater than usual force. I knew just how quickly Murphy could get up to his mischief -- and just how large that mischief could be.

The young women were lined up and ready to go, each with identical wheelie bags, each wearing nearly the same pattern of slightly-longer than ankle-length pastel-colored gingham dresses, the same small scarf wrapped over their hair, done up in a bun, with a short braid extending down from the top of their heads.

They were tall and short and in the middle. They were fair-haired or had raven tresses. Fiery redheads or mundane brown hair. They all had the same placid, content look on their faces.

Silently they handed up their suitcases and Uncle Jerome helped me stow them on the roof of the bus. Then we stretched a rubberized fabric tarp over everything and lashed it down tightly.

"Sixty-five miles an hour, Brother David," Uncle Jerome told me as we stood next to the bus as the young women filed inside. It was nearly dark, as everyone climbed aboard.

"It's 1122 miles from here to there; the bus gets eighteen miles to the gallon and has a thirty gallon tank. You will need to get gas in Sierra Blanca, Texas, Benson, Arizona and Camp Verde, Arizona. The directions and maps to each station are in the folder. Brothers and sisters of the faith will be at the stations, waiting for you. They will make sure everything is fine, Brother David. All you have to do is drive."

"What if I'm stopped?"

"You are taking a group of young women to visit with their families for the Christmas holidays. At Camp Verde, a sister there will give you a map for the last segment of the journey, but it will be up 89 towards Colorado City and Hilldale."

Oh, that was even better! Yet another state! Never mind that it wouldn't take the smartest cop on the block to take one look at my passengers and realize who the girls were. He'd have to be a rather dim bulb, in fact, not to recognize who they were with a single glance.

"Go with God, Brother David." He solemnly shook my hand, then hugged me and then kissed me on each cheek.

I climbed up and sat down in the driver's seat of the bus and looked at the mirror that showed me fourteen faces, all watching me intently. Maidens of the Faith didn't mean virgins -- at least so I'd heard. It meant that they hadn't had a baby yet. I closed the door and started the engine, and then waited, making sure everything was running smoothly.

Five minutes later I pulled forward and started what I was very sure was going to be an epic journey. I wasn't sure about much else just then, but I was sure that it wasn't going to be the piece of cake my uncle expected.

My route wasn't the usual one off the Temple grounds. The Temple had once been a large ranch in West Texas, bought by my uncle based on its twin virtues of being isolated and far from Colorado City and Hilldale, the two centers of the whack Mormons who believed that every man should have twenty-seven sixteen year old wives.

We went on a back road as the light faded but I didn't have to turn on the headlights until just after we went through the last gate. I got out, opened the gate, went through, got back out and closed the gate, and then got back in. Instead of taking off right away, I stood in the front of the bus and spoke to the girls.

"I'm David Strom, my mother was Victoria Wilson Strom, Brother Jerome's older sister. Neither my mother nor I belong to Brother Jerome's church, although my mother felt about Brother Jerome a lot like the rest of you do. My job is to see you all safely to your destination. Just be patient and eventually we will get there.

"It is important that if you have to go to the bathroom, that you try to hold it until one of the planned stops, roughly four and a half hours apart. In theory I'm well rested and can drive the twenty hours without a problem. If you must stop, let me know, but you have to be aware that this is the southwest and there aren't rest rooms every mile or so.

"Are there any questions?"

They looked at me, all with the same placid expressions; I hoped that this wasn't the Stepford Wives group. I sat down in the driver's seat, turned on the lights and drove the twenty miles to I-10 without incident. I set the cruise control for 65, but mostly I left it off, preferring to actually drive.

The bus was quiet and I looked back and saw that most of them were already asleep, and the few that were awake were staring out the windows at the vastness of West Texas -- a great huge lot of nothing. If you've ever seen a scrap of West Texas, you've seen all of it.

Nothing happened. Miles passed under the wheels and before I knew it, it was almost midnight and I was in Sierra Blanca, Texas, about a hundred miles east of El Paso. As soon as I'd pulled the bus up to the pump, a woman of about fifty came out of the store and gathered the three girls who were awake and took them inside.

I pumped gas and contemplated the desert sky. There was no city sky-glow like I was used to, and even though my eyes weren't really adjusted to the darkness, it sure seemed like there were a lot of stars up there.

The woman came back and the girls climbed into the bus. She handed me a large thermos. "This is orange juice, young man."

I contemplated making sure it got dumped right away and she laughed. "Young man, before you go getting exercised about what other poor souls have done in the past, know that scripture takes a very dim view of killing yourself -- or anyone else for that matter. If what you think was true, they'd have died in the comfort of their homes, surrounded by their families, in the umbrella of Brother Jerome's arms.

"However, God does work in mysterious ways. There may be a problem tomorrow."

"What sort of a problem?" I asked warily.

"It's mid-December, and while we've had an unseasonably mild winter so far, a Pacific storm is hitting the southern California coast as we speak with flurries of snow down to the valley floors, with up to three feet forecast in the higher elevations. You may have an interesting drive tomorrow. Do you know where the chains are?"

I allowed that I did not, so she showed me. Why someone hundreds of miles away from the Temple knew so much about the bus, I had no idea. My uncle, as my mother used to tell me, only seems crazy -- he was actually clever as a fox. I could never reconcile her comments with the news reports about what he and his church did.

Before long I was back on the road and a short time later we were into New Mexico. Geography isn't the long suit of most Americans and Texas geography is a subject that even most Texans don't learn that well, at least insofar as where they are in relation to everyone else.

Everyone knows about the Texas Panhandle -- the bit that sticks up into Oklahoma. There's another one as well, just southwest of that one, that undercuts New Mexico, so that El Paso is almost due south of Albuquerque, which is about three-fifths of the distance between New Mexico's eastern and western borders. So, while New Mexico is nearly 400 miles across, it's only 120 miles from Las Cruces -- near the Texas border and El Paso -- to Lordsburg, near the Arizona border.

I was feeling good when I pulled into Benson, Arizona well before dawn. This time a half dozen girls went inside for the bathrooms, and several took cups of orange juice. None of them choked and died, which I thought was a pleasant surprise -- I didn't trust any of my uncle's people and I didn't trust him.

The brother in Benson was a man in his mid-twenties and I wasn't at all happy with how he looked at the girls. My uncle's church was perv heaven -- all the young teenage girls had been raised since birth to obey their husbands, respect their church and above all have lots of babies. A year and a half before, right after my mother died, Uncle Jerome had spoken to me, giving me a hard sell on joining his church. My mother taught me that ignorance of what life was like wasn't an excuse to take advantage of young women. I'd accepted that and had refused his entreaties.

I never understood why she placed so much faith in her brother. Moreover, I'd been taught to honor and respect women, and to never, ever coerce someone of any gender -- which seemed to condemn her brother's methods. Yet, never once had she condemned what her brother did in the name of religion.

I had asked him straight out just how many children he'd fathered -- was it really more than a hundred? He laughed at that. "More than twice that, Brother David -- more than two hundred. It would be more, but we are careful of consanguinity, so if the young woman is one of my true daughters by blood, one of the other Fathers of the Faith leads her to the Light. Currently, Brother David, there are eight hundred young people in the church older than twelve and younger than fifteen and only a few more than a quarter of them are of my blood."

He'd grinned at that and I'd shaken my head. Not my cup of tea!

Just before I re-boarded the bus I asked the fellow what the weather ahead was like. He shrugged. "The Lord will provide. Right now it looks like he's going to provide a lot of snow."

At six in the morning we were just south of Phoenix and I stopped at a rest area because several of the girls who'd slept the night through needed a bathroom break. I didn't have a problem with that, and they headed off as a group to the restrooms.

I looked at the sky and while there wasn't much light yet, it was getting darker instead of lighter -- the western half of the sky showed no signs of stars, while there were still some to the east.