Strong Cold Dead (28 page)

Paz eased his shoulder against the wall and began to push.

“In ancient times, the Mayans would build false cave walls, meticulously matched to the faces around them. The Comanche, apparently, were more ambitious.”

With that, the wall began to give under Paz's steady thrust, breaking from the seam first in a sliver, then a crack, and finally in a chasm that allowed a noxious odor to flood outward on a surge of chilly air.

“Any idea how old this is?” Caitlin asked, as the opening continued to widen.

“Hard to say,” Paz told her, as she and Cort Wesley added their force to the task. “Hinged structures like this date back far longer than history tells us. But the ground clearance and attention to expansion suggests mid- to late nineteenth century.”

“Right around the time Jack Strong was working that murder case here on the rez.”

Paz led the way inside to the chamber revealed beyond, shining his flashlight ahead of him. The addition of Caitlin's and Cort Wesley's beams revealed the chamber to be about twelve feet square. The continued push of cold air told them that this part of the cave came complete with a venting passage to the outside, likely cut out of the ceiling. They were about to turn their attention there, when Paz's beam illuminated something dangling from the back wall.

“Looks like a manacle,” Cort Wesley noted, holding his beam upon it.

Caitlin added her flashlight to reveal a rusted hunk of matching chain alongside it. Two more chains had been driven into the rock face, lower, at around knee level.

“What is this,” she heard Cort Wesley say, “some kind of jail cell?”

Paz's beam crossed over four more sets of manacles. “Not likely, outlaw. Indian tribes were known for holding prisoners in chambers dug underground, not camouflaged in caves.”

Caitlin pulled on a manacle, rattling the chain attaching it to the stone face. “What if they weren't prisoners? What if this was about something else entirely?”

“You've got that look, Ranger.”

“You can't see me, Cort Wesley.”

“I don't have to, to know you've got that look, the one that says you're about to bite into something.”

Caitlin released the dangling manacle and it banged against the rock with a slight clang. “That's because—”

She stopped when the chamber seemed to rumble, shift. Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Paz all shined their flashlights upward, illuminating a dark river that seemed to be flowing overhead.

“Uh-oh,” Cort Wesley muttered, in the last moment before the river came raining down upon them.

 

67

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

One of the figures, painted in alternating strips of black and white, shoved a mouthful of dirt into Dylan's mouth. He recognized the taste immediately, registering it was pure peyote, and refused to swallow. He tried to spit it out, but the figure shoved it farther down his throat. Dylan gagged, coughing some of the clump up but feeling the rest drop down his throat. He retched, struggling to breathe. He realized he was choking, in the last moment before he coughed up a black wad that looked like a fur ball. Then he was being half dragged, half carried from the shed.

“What are you doing? Leave me alone.”

Dylan hated the lameness of the words he heard himself utter, listening as if it were someone else's voice. The peyote was already taking effect, the ground beneath him turning pillowy soft. He thought he was sinking in, the world and the night receding before his eyes. Was he even breathing? Had he really coughed up the peyote they'd forced down his throat?

“I'm gonna fucking kill you…”

The threat he managed to utter sounded no less lame. Dylan felt moments dominated by a thick haze wrapped around his consciousness, alternating with moments of intense clarity, which he seized upon to size up his situation. Six Comanche, whom he recognized as some of Ela's cousins, the Lost Boys, had painted their entire faces and exposed parts of their bodies in alternating streaks of black and white, their eyes wildly intense as they dragged him off. They were shirtless, and Dylan noticed that sweat had caked up the paint, jumbling the colors together in portions of their upper arms and torso.

“Let me go,” he heard himself say again, or maybe for the first time.

Dylan wasn't sure. He knew there was something he desperately needed to tell his dad, tell Caitlin. But now he couldn't remember what it was, and he couldn't remember where his phone was, either.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, found he was somewhere else entirely. His boots were sliding across the leaf-dampened ground now, his feet entirely numb. He couldn't feel his arms, either, and when he tried to wiggle his fingers it seemed they weren't attached to his hands anymore. The sky above had become a vast open mouth framed between the clouds, lowering to swallow him.

“Make it stop!” he thought he cried out, and then realized that something that tasted grimy and grubby, like a sweaty sock, had been stuffed into his mouth.

Dylan heard himself mutter. There was a pressure building behind his eyes, like a vacuum cleaner was pulling air from his skull in a constant hiss, which left him with a fluttery sensation in his ears.

“You have no place here,” said the Lost Boy who'd wedged the dirt-like clump of peyote into Dylan's mouth. “You should've stuck to your own. Now, you go to your grave.”

Fuck you,
Dylan thought, but he couldn't say it.

More time and space had passed than he found himself able to calculate, the world changing entirely in what felt like the length of a breath. Every time he blinked, the world seemed to stay dark longer. And the next time he pried his eyes open, the Lost Boys were lashing him to a tree with what felt like baling wire.

“Now, it comes for you,” the Lost Boy told him.

It,
Dylan repeated in his mind.

The tree bark scratched against his flesh, through his shirt, and each breath exaggerated the bonds of the wire further. For a few moments, Dylan actually had to remind himself to breathe. Once, he felt his chin thump to his chest.

Regaining consciousness after however long he'd been out, he saw that the Lost Boys were gone, the oily odor of the paint with which they'd streaked themselves hanging in the stagnant air like a dust cloud. Dylan heard himself breathing, inside his head. His eyes wanted to close again, but he stopped them, keeping his focus straight ahead until he heard something approaching from behind.

Whatever was coming seemed to glide across the brush and earth, rustling them no more than the wind. Dylan tried to turn his head, but his neck wouldn't budge. Then he realized the footsteps were upon him, in the same moment he heard himself screaming through his gagged mouth.

 

68

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

The wave of bats descended on them like an unbroken black blanket. Suddenly jittery flashlight beams caught spokes of big eyes and flashing teeth, much bigger than they should have been, in Caitlin's experience. First backpedaling and then turning to dash out of the chamber, she thought this, too, was an illusion, until one of the bats latched onto her hair with claws that felt more like a raptor's. And, as she yanked it off, taking a chunk of her scalp with it, Caitlin saw why.

The bat was massive, huge, its wingspan expanding to more than five feet when it came at her again with teeth bared.

Caitlin was going for her gun when Guillermo Paz swatted the bat out of the air with an arm that looked to her like a baseball bat. He whirled and swept another swooping trio aside, muzzle fire from Cort Wesley illuminating the darkness, which was broken only by the flashlight that Paz had managed to hold on to. His beam retraced their route through the cave, heading back to the main chamber and the night beyond.

Afraid to stop moving, Caitlin heard light splashes as the downed bats dropped into the underground river, her eyes adjusting enough now for the luminescent glow off the cave walls to reveal the flight of the bats crisscrossing in the air. They were dive-bombing them, the bats' collective squeals becoming deafening, all but drowning out the flutter of their wings, which made it seem as if the entire cave was vibrating.

Back in the main chamber of the cave, Caitlin lent her fire to Cort Wesley's, careful to keep her aim concentrated upward. Instead of spooking the bats, the assault seemed to further enrage them. They renewed their attack, reformed to concentrate from the cave mouth, as if to deny exit to their captives. She had happened upon bats before, but never any this big or violent. Bats were easily spooked, for sure, but they also were shy creatures that normally backed off after making their point.

But this swarm showed no such inclination. The noxious odor she'd detected as soon as Paz had cracked open the secret chamber was clearly bat guano, but even that was different from what she recalled from past experiences. Sharper and more rancid. Maybe it had been creatures like these that had killed John D. Rockefeller's gunman back in 1874 and had done the same to the work foreman just the other night. Or—

Click.

Before Caitlin could finish that thought, the slide of her SIG locked open and the blanket of black, broken only by glowing eyes and flashing teeth, swept toward her anew in dark waves. She thought about taking refuge in the shallow greenish waters of the underground stream, then recalled the goo-like residue collected on the surface and—

Caitlin's thinking froze there. “Cort Wesley, your lighter!”

It was his late father, Boone's, cigarette lighter actually, tucked in a drawer and forgotten until Cort Wesley had learned the truth about his father's nature and his heroism. Now he carried it with him all the time, the last thing he had to remember his father by, a man he'd once done his best to forget.

Caitlin snatched the lighter out of the air when he tossed it, and yanked a can of mace-like repellent from its clasp on her belt. She'd never used it on a suspect, not even once, and she hoped the pressurized contents hadn't degraded over however many years she'd been carrying it.

She popped the top off and pressed down on the tiny nozzle at the same time that she flicked Boone Masters's cigarette lighter, embossed with an eagle, to life. The aerosol stream touched the flame and ignited in a ribbon of fire, stretching a yard forward, aimed downward toward the surface of the water.

Poof!

The flame burst blew upward, climbing for the swarming bats, who fled from its path, their collective squeals turning deafening. In that moment, the bright glow captured their gaping mouths and enraged eyes, extended snouts making them look like monsters lifted from some horror movie. Their wings flapped so hard, as they sought escape from the fiery air, that they actually fanned the flames further. They moved in what looked like a circle, then a figure eight, before speeding out of the cave in a vast, unbroken mass, into the night beyond.

Caitlin found herself sitting on the cave floor with no memory of dropping down. She kicked at the body of one of the bats, felled by a bullet, maintaining the presence of mind to put her plastic evidence gloves back on before reaching for it.

Cort Wesley brushed off his clothes. The battle they'd just fought and the heat of the flames had left a sheen of perspiration over his features. “You want to venture a guess as to what all this is about, Ranger?”

“What Steeldust Jack faced here in 1874, same thing we're facing now, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin told him. “Monsters.”

 

P
ART
S
EVEN

Prohibition passed in 1918. The Texas oil boom exploded two years later. Rangers spent a lot of time smashing stills, intercepting bootleg liquor from Mexico, and handcuffing criminals to telephone poles when the jails were too full. It was during this time that Ranger Captain Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas cemented his legend as a one-man law enforcement agency along the Texas border. In the 1950s, he became an advisor for the TV show
Tales of the Texas Rangers
.

—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”

 

69

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

“Is there anyone you ever listen to, Ranger? 'Cause if there is, I'd like to meet them.”

Caitlin squeezed her cell phone tighter. “Maybe you didn't hear what I just said, Jones.”

“Oh, I heard you just fine, especially the part about you disobeying a direct order from me.”

“I don't work for you. I work for the state of Texas.”

“Well, last time I checked anyway, Texas was still part of the United States. Maybe you haven't heard of Homeland Security?”

Caitlin spoke with her eyes on Cort Wesley, while rain from a fresh storm dappled the windshield of his truck, where he'd left it, just off the Comanche reservation. “Why don't I just let you know when I've got a better idea of what we're facing here?”

“Hold on, I want to hear more about what you found in that cave.”

“Sorry, Jones. I never listen to anybody, remember?”

*   *   *

After dropping off the bat carcass with Doc Whatley at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's office, Caitlin and Cort Wesley continued back to Cort Wesley's home in Shavano Park. They sat on the front porch swing, the night quiet and still around them. Nothing seemed to be moving at all, not even the air.

“Something I didn't tell you about Daniel Cross, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said suddenly. “Ten years ago, he didn't go to court or jail, because of my intervention. Hell, I even made sure the arrest report went away, all on my say-so.”

“Let it go, Ranger.”

“I really did believe I could save him. I believed he was
worth
saving.”