Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  She crashed into a station on the line dispensing cherry-colored liquid into unmarked bottles of what could only be cough syrup, upending the spigots. The thick, sweet, gooey fluid sprayed in fountain-like fashion in all directions, turning the floor shiny. She went to reload her nearly empty SIG, only to realize she’d lost her last magazine somewhere and scrambled about in search of it, sweeping a hand through the sticky ooze.

  Caitlin saw tiny light dancing about her midsection and looked up to see a scowling David Skoll aiming the laser pointer straight her way.

  “Kill her!” he cried out, as two more robots surged forward, converging on her from opposite aisles.

  Caitlin thought she glimpsed Skoll grinning again, imagining the smell of that familiar aftershave rising off him. Looking younger than Dylan, his soft, almost feminine features making it easy to see how Kelly Ann Beasley mistook her attacker for a woman.

  Then Caitlin was in motion, her boots skidding through the collected pools of syrupy liquid, the robots angling her way. She leaped atop the feed sending cough syrup bottles down the line. Caitlin heard glass shattering as she pushed off the bottle dispenser, and projected herself up and over the converging robots.

  Charging straight for David Skoll, the path to him free and clear.

  104

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Men he’d known for years, decades even, men beholden to him, whose service to his cause defined their very lives and livelihoods, were running away. He screamed after them, cursing at the top of his lungs, even though he knew they’d never hear him through the gunfire still reverberating around him.

  Fisker had his own M16 unslung from his shoulder in the ready position, exchanging sporadic fire with the forces inside the APCs while trying to herd those of his men who hadn’t fled to him. Some of them were ex-military, but only a sparse few had experienced a true firefight. Fisker himself had been in a few gunfights, but nothing that even approached the fury of this one. The debris clouds still cloaked the bodies of his men who’d fallen, too many to count, the rising stench of their blood adding to the other scents permeating the scene through the night.

  The collapse of the buildings had taken the floodlights with them. Now there were only the moon’s rays barely penetrating the rolling blanket of smoke concentrated over the street, and the light from the flames blowing out of the ruined structures all around him to break the darkness.

  His remaining men fired on the APCs from positions of cover they’d managed to claim for themselves. Not very maneuverable, those APCs spun to screeching halts in the town square he’d claimed for his own until just moments before. Men seemed to flood from them into the night, a stream of specters melting into the darkness.

  Fisker refused to accept that his entire world, the empire he’d built, had fallen to so small a force. He didn’t care about the bulk of them, just Cort Wesley Masters himself. Fitting comeuppance for him, given that Masters’ father had been the one who shanked his. Killing Masters, and orphaning his sons, could still salvage this night, provide solace that seemed unthinkable under the circumstances.

  Secondary explosions began to ripple against the debris-riddled landscape, the propane tanks powering the once-revitalized town erupting in blast after blast that left the refuse charred and the air rank with a chemical smell. Fisker moved through the clouds of mist now rich with floating embers and black curtains amid the gray, sweeping his M16 from side to side, ready to fire at the slightest hint of motion.

  He had the sense he was walking a tightrope on the edge of a volcano, dodging the pockets of flame that had sprung up everywhere. The latest series of explosions had carved fresh chasms in the hard-paved dirt street, jagged fissures that looked carved by an earthquake measuring ten on the Richter scale, some of them seeming to extend down into the bowels of the Earth itself.

  Motion flared amid the shroud before him, vanishing too fast to sight in on. It returned long enough for Fisker to let loose with a spray, then dissolved into the thick, dark air fanning the flames that cast an eerie glow in the pockets open to the night.

  Was it Masters? Did I get him?

  When no grunt of pain, or thud of a body falling, followed, Fisker rotated the barrel again, fixing on the shape of a man silhouetted against the swirling debris, backlit by the flames churning through the street. The figure was standing stark still, reloading or maybe wounded.

  Fisker drew back on his trigger and emptied the rest of his magazine. Certain it was Masters and that if he wasn’t dead already, he soon would be.

  105

  WACO, TEXAS

  Another of the robots rolled out into her path when she was almost to Skoll. It lashed its arm out in the semblance of a roundhouse blow, which Caitlin ducked under, knowing she was down to her last few bullets and had to make every one count. The robot tightened its pincer assembly into what looked like a dull tip and jabbed down at her. Caitlin managed to deflect one blow, and another, and finally a third before dropping all the way to the floor and firing her last three bullets into the machine’s rolling tread assembly.

  The move sent the thing spinning wildly, trying to rebalance itself, only to be betrayed by the tear in the housing and ruined tread on that side. It was still whirling about, a robotic pirouette, when Caitlin surged past it, leaping from one assembly to another, until David Skoll came within range.

  She aimed herself at him and projected herself through the air, crashing into Skoll and taking him with her to the floor. Caitlin felt his ribs contract and breath flood from his lungs with a whoooooshhhhh on impact. She was vaguely conscious of the remaining reprogrammed robots rolling forward, from the now familiar whirring sound, as she lifted Skoll up and slammed him against the housing of a massive machine that apportioned fully packed plastic bottles of pills into crates for shipping. A repetitive thwacking sound of the boxes being stapled shut hammered her ears, but her eyes suffered no such distraction.

  The man who’d haunted her dreams and spun her from sleep with nightmares she could never remember stood teetering before her, hers to control this time. Her faceless attacker looked like a cherub with long hair bunched over his face, covering his eyes but leaving enough so she could see the fear filling them.

  “I’ll never do a day in prison!” he raged at her, spittle flying from his mouth. “So take your best shot, bitch!”

  Caitlin punched Skoll hard in the midsection, feeling the breath rush out of him like air from a blown tire. She was about to hit him again, when he sank to his knees. Skoll’s face was scarlet, catching what breath he could in gasping heaves.

  “A waste of a condom,” he managed between wheezes, still gloating, “that’s all you were to me.…”

  Caitlin heard the robots whirring closer, their wheels scraping over debris from her various brushes with the contents of the line, slowing the machines slightly. She realized Skoll had lost his grasp on the pen-like laser in the fracas, and leaned over to snatch it from the floor.

  “Industrial accidents happen all the time, Skoll,” Caitlin said, aiming the laser down at him.

  She pressed the plunger and hit him with the light, letting it linger long enough to leave whatever digital imprint the robots had been reprogrammed to home in on.

  “Hey!” he raged, trying to reclaim his feet only to have the slick floor betray him. “Hey!”

  Caitlin could feel the heat radiating off the final two robots, the whirring sounds ebbing and then winding down as they slowed. Skoll was still trying to pull himself back up when their shadows swallowed him.

  “Jesus!” he cried out, as she eased past him. “Jesus!”

  Caitlin never even glanced back when his screams began.

  106

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker let loose with another spray, even though a heavy swath of smoke had swallowed Masters’ figure for the moment. He wanted the man to suffer worse than his son had. He wanted Masters to bleed out while he hovered
over him, the last words the man would ever hear being Fisker’s promise that his sons would be joining him in hell soon.

  He moved through the soupy, foul-smelling clouds riddled with the refuse of Elk Grove, narrowly avoiding a yard-wide chasm that had opened in the street belching smoke and flames from what might’ve been the center of the Earth. The world cleared again before him to reveal a dark tactical jacket, now riddled with bullet holes, hanging on part of a collapsed building’s framing.

  What the—

  Before Fisker could complete the thought, he felt a swoosh of air behind him and heard a whistling sound before the night exploded with daylight brilliance an instant before he hit the ground.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley dropped the splintered hunk of two-by-four he’d smashed into Armand Fisker’s head and stood over him. The man’s face was aglow in the flames sprouting from a propane fire burning up through one of the chasms Paz’s explosions had carved in the ground.

  “You think killing me ends this?” he rasped, spitting blood, his eyes starting to glaze. “There’s a place in hell for you, too. I’m just gonna get there first.”

  Cort Wesley wanted to gloat and tell him that his great-grandfather was Adolf Hitler, that he owed his nature to his blood and that he was going to die in flames, too. But he said none of this, just moved closer to Fisker and looked down at the blood leaking from his ears and nose courtesy of the blow that had nearly split the two-by-four in half.

  “Say hello to your son for me,” Cort Wesley told him, through the smoke clouding before his eyes.

  Then he kicked Fisker over the edge of the chasm and felt the flames take him with a burst of heat that sprayed upward, lifted by the embers.

  “I’m sure he’s waiting for you down there.”

  EPILOGUE

  He may not win the laurel

  Nor trumpet tongue of fame;

  But beauty smiles upon him,

  And ranchmen bless his name.

  Then here’s to the Texas Ranger,

  Past, present and to come!

  The guardian of our home.

  —From Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, collected by

  John A. Lomax, The Macmillan Company, 1922

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Caitlin stood next to Cort Wesley, matching ladles in hand at the Catholic Worker House, where they were serving lunch to the endless procession of those grateful for just a warm meal.

  “I don’t feel bad about it at all,” Cort Wesley said to her, watching Dylan and Luke passing out brownies and cookies at the dessert station. “I don’t punch Armand Fisker’s ticket, he comes after the boys. Plain and simple.”

  “Nothing’s ever plain and simple, Cort Wesley. You know that.”

  “You mean like you and David Skoll, Ranger?”

  “He didn’t deserve a day in court. He didn’t deserve another day on Earth. He’d had more than he deserved already.”

  Cort Wesley held the ladle overfilled with mixed vegetables still for a moment. “You sound like you feel about as guilty as I do.”

  “You want to hear the strangest part? That last moment, when I hit Skoll with that laser, I remembered him … raping me,” Caitlin told him, making herself say the word. “I had no memory of it for all these years, even in my nightmares, but in that moment I saw it all.”

  “Maybe it was that aftershave you told me about. I’ve read that smells can trigger memories.”

  “I’ve heard that, too. But it was more than just a smell, like I was being shown something, so I’d know what I was about to do was okay.”

  “You don’t look all that happy about it, though.”

  “I thought I’d feel better, Cort Wesley, finally be able to put it all behind me. But I don’t feel better at all; I don’t even feel different.”

  He nodded, seeming to understand. “What you did can’t change the past, never mind erase it. That impression’s already bored into who you are, what it helped make you.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting I still want to hold on to that pain and misery.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Cort Wesley told her, holding up on dispensing more mashed potatoes. “You are who you are and you don’t want to change that. You may not feel better about this as time goes by, but you’ll feel different, like you’re being haunted by a ghost instead of a person.”

  Caitlin spotted a familiar figure join the line at the back and stripped off her apron. “I’m going on break.”

  * * *

  Caitlin faced Jones from across a table in the courtyard, the two of them sharing the sunlight.

  “You should think about making this gig with Homeland permanent,” Jones told her, flashing his customary smirk.

  “I think I’ll pass on that.”

  Jones squinted into the sun toward the gleaming badge both her grandfather and father had worn before her. “You could get used to not wearing that, you know.”

  “Maybe so. But I don’t think I could get used to working for someone I can’t trust.”

  “I hope you’re talking about the president, and not me.”

  “The president isn’t the one who set me up.”

  “Come again?”

  Caitlin scolded him with her eyes. “You trying to tell me you didn’t know about the link between David Skoll and Armand Fisker? You trying to tell me you had no active surveillance on Fisker that put the two of them together?” She shook her head. “You flat-out wound Cort Wesley and me up, and just let us go.”

  “Freed you to do your thing, in other words, what you’re best at,” Jones said, not bothering to deny her assertion.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That the two of you are like something out of Greek mythology, a pair of goddamn Gorgons, since anyone you come up against turns to stone. I just want to make better use of your talents. You should be thanking me.”

  “You make us sound like a lounge act at Esther’s Follies.”

  Jones looked around him, taking in their surroundings melodramatically. “Keep wearing that badge and that’s all you’ll ever be. Cross state lines over to my side and you’ll be playing Radio City.”

  “I think I’m doing just fine letting Radio City come to me.”

  Jones stood up, nodding as if he wasn’t convinced. “Suit yourself, Ranger. Somehow I’ve got a feeling we haven’t seen the last of each other.”

  “Well, Texas is the center of the universe.”

  “I was thinking hell.”

  “Same thing, Jones, in case you didn’t notice.”

  * * *

  “What’s wrong, Colonel?” Caitlin asked, as they wiped down the tables following the luncheon rush of homeless and others in need through the food line.

  Paz kept wiping, pushing so hard on the tabletop it seemed his massive hand was about to go right through. “Something I never told you, Ranger. Just before I left Venezuela for the last time, I was rousting some rebels from the forest. Many of them died fighting for their lives. When I walked through all the carnage, all the blood, I looked down into the dead eyes of a young boy holding a machine gun.”

  “Killing him changed you?”

  “No, the fact that I bothered to look showed me I’d already changed. It wasn’t long after that I came up here to find myself, I thought. It turned out I didn’t like what I found and it’s still the same reflection that looks back at me from the mirror. There are moments where I think I’ve changed, but there are more moments like Elk Grove, where my true nature shows itself again.”

  Caitlin nodded. “You ever read Edmund Burke, Colonel?”

  “Of course.”

  “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Ring any bells for you?” Caitlin asked, stealing a glance at Dylan and Luke throwing wet rags at each other, while Cort Wesley looked on.

  Paz’s expression brightened, Caitlin resuming quickly.

  “We don’t get to choose the evil we fight,” she told him. “You migh
t even say it chooses us.”

  He almost smiled. “I wish you had met my priest before his stroke.”

  “Because I would’ve benefitted from his wisdom?”

  “Because you sound just like him, Ranger.”

  Caitlin went back to wiping down her table, then stopped just as fast. “Do you believe Armand Fisker was Adolf Hitler’s great-grandson?”

  “I believe Fisker was evil, and all evil is somehow related. It’s what I often brought up with my priest, though not in those words.”

  “That’s not what I asked you, Colonel.”

  “Yes, it is. We put names and labels on evil because that makes its existence easier to bear for us. But the fact is it’s all the same, no matter the face it wears. And that’s why no matter how much of it we vanquish, there will always be more.”

  Caitlin smiled and this time Paz joined her. “Good to know our place in the world is secure, Colonel.” She looked back toward Cort Wesley, who’d joined his sons in a pitched battle of rag tossing, the boys ganging up on him by the look of things. “But once in a while, it’s nice to do some good in a place like this, too, where we don’t have to use our guns to make a difference.”

  “Accidents happen, Ranger,” Paz told her.

  “Yes, they do,” Caitlin said, her grin broadening. “All the time.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Those familiar with this page, where I provide some insight into how I came to write the book you’ve just finished, are used to me pointing to something like a newspaper article or 60 Minutes segment as the genesis for the story. It was different in this case, because Strong to the Bone started with me wanting to challenge Caitlin as I’d never challenged her before. Provide a deep look into a part of her psyche I’d never previously explored.

  Sexual assault is a scourge, leaving its mark on hundreds of thousands of women in the United States every year. Giving Caitlin such a cross to bear after eight books seemed like a great challenge for her character, as well as a way for me to weave something emotionally vital and visceral into the context of the story. Challenging yourself as a writer means challenging your characters. Not letting you, nor them, get lackadaisical, especially after eight books when many series like this have long since tired.