by Jon Land
“What do you say, Mr. Dakota? How about you let me help you out here?”
More silence, and Caitlin had started to figure the rancher was done talking, when his voice returned.
“You got handcuffs?”
Caitlin yanked them from her belt. “Right here, sir.”
“Snap them on. In front of you, so I can see.”
Caitlin did as she was told, imagining D. W. Tepper cursing her out for it, back behind the perimeter.
“Now come forward,” Dakota’s voice cracked. “But keep your hands where I can see them.”
She started walking.
* * *
Caitlin sized up the scene as soon as Dakota kicked the door closed behind her, shoulders pressed against a slab of wall between the door and the window opened just a crack. He came around in front of her, lugging a .30-06 hunting rifle with sight, careful to avoid the drawn drapes. A dog, some pit bull mix, rode his right side like an extra appendage, baring its teeth at Caitlin and growling in a low rumble that seemed to come from deep inside it.
“Easy, boy,” Dakota said, in a tone more fit for a lover than a dog.
The dog closed its mouth, but Caitlin continued to hear the low rattle of its growl, which sounded a bit like a car caught in first gear. By that time, she’d accounted for the man’s wife and all his kids. It wasn’t hard, given that they were huddled together on the plank floor, hands and feet both bound, the youngest kids sobbing. Her problem was she now had a dog and a rifle to contend with while she was handcuffed and weaponless. Not a good scenario if Caitlin couldn’t talk Karl Dakota back off the ledge.
“It’s for their own good, me tying them up, so they stay put,” he explained to her. “What those aliens did to my cows, they could just as easily do to my kids if they catch ’em.”
“I’d like to see those cows, Mr. Dakota.”
He looked beyond her toward the covered windows, seeming to measure up the light beyond them. “Gonna be dark soon. That’s when they come, after dark.”
“Then we better hurry.”
“Even the Texas Rangers can’t win this one.”
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s lots of Indians and Mexicans in the old days who fully believed that and went to their graves for it.”
“What ate my cattle ain’t Mexicans or Indians.”
Caitlin kept her eyes off Karl Dakota’s terrified wife and kids, nothing that might draw his attention to them as well. Instead, she eased her hands out straight before her.
“Mr. Dakota, the key to these cuffs is in my back pocket. Now why don’t you take these off me so we can see about doing ourselves some good?”
“They’ll shoot me.”
“Not if I tell them not to.”
“I grew up with that damn Sheriff Lee. He was born an asshole and his crack’s only got wider with age. And we can’t even be sure that really is Sheriff Lee.”
“Sir?”
“I think maybe these aliens walk among us. I believe they’re able to replace human beings and pretend to be just like us. Sheriff Lee wants me dead because I’ve figured that out.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You could be one of them too. That’s why I had you cuff your wrists.” He cocked a gaze back toward his wife and kids sitting on the kitchen floor, terrified. “I believe it may be too late for them, too. I need to do what I gotta do.”
“Take off these cuffs and let me help you, sir,” Caitlin said, and took a step closer to him, only to be chased back by the dog baring its teeth again.
“No way, no how,” Dakota told her, holding the rifle between her and his family now. “Can’t take that chance. If you seen what’s left of my cattle, you’d know why.”
“Then show me.”
“Nope. Could be a trap.”
Caitlin shook her head. “They’ve got you where they want you, sir. Not trusting anyone else to help, not even your own family.”
But Dakota didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes fixed on nothing and his head canted oddly to the side as if he were hearing other voices.
“I need to do this,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Do what, sir?”
“What I gotta do. It’s for their own good, so they can be at peace. Save their souls from the aliens, even if I can’t save their bodies.”
He twisted toward his family, the dog backing up alongside him to keep Caitlin in its sights. Caitlin watched Dakota take a big step that placed him within a yard or so of his wife, as he steadied his rifle. He angled the barrel down toward her, seeming to have forgotten Caitlin was even there.
“I gotta do this,” he said to his wife, starting to sob. “For your own good. To save you all that pain later and save your soul while I still can. You and the kids. I got no choice. You may not feel it, but one of them’s inside you, taking you over.”
Caitlin watched his finger paw the trigger. “Mr. Dakota? Karl? Look at me, Karl.”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Close your eyes,” Dakota told his wife.
His oldest son and daughter began to beg and plead, wailing loud enough to batter Caitlin’s eardrums. All the commotion had the dog swinging around that way as if to seek out the source, neglecting Caitlin in that moment, just as his master was.
So she sprang.
Caitlin lurched into a dash, with no idea exactly what she was going to do. But Dakota’s trembling finger was curling inward on the trigger and his whimpering wife had ducked her head to stare at the floor.
The dog turned at the last moment before Caitlin slammed into its master. She looped the center of the chain cuffing her wrists together around the man’s throat, twisting him before her as protective cover from the dog.
The hunting rifle roared, further bubbling her eardrums in the tight confines, the bullet blowing out a back window and taking some of the old wood frame with it. Caitlin jerked Karl Dakota backwards, the pit bull mix whipped into a frenzy, trying to reach her, with its master still pinned between them. She kept using Dakota as a shield and realized she was choking off his air at the same time. Her shoulders smacked the wall and she pulled tighter, certain the gunfire would have the deputies storming the farmhouse at any moment.
Might as well have taken forever under the circumstances.
Caitlin felt Dakota stiffen and start to slump in her grasp from having his oxygen shut off. The rifle finally slipped from his grasp and clattered to the tile floor below, his kids screeching loud enough to make Caitlin flinch, while his wife remained still and silent, frozen in shock.
The dog was snapping and barking up a storm as it tried to reach Caitlin. Drool flew from its muzzle in thick, frothy clumps, its sights set on Caitlin and nothing more.
Including an old kitchen hutch, dragged awkwardly against a big bay window so no one could see through it from the outside.
Caitlin jerked Dakota that way, sliding back into the open, which meant jerking the man from side to side to shield herself, and dancing from the path of the dog’s snapping jaws when it ventured too close. Dakota’s legs gave out under him just as she drew even with the hutch. Caitlin felt herself dragged downward by his weight, the dog readying another charge before her. She imagined the inviting target she must make, glimpsed the dog launch itself airborne, straight for her.
In the same moment, she snapped her cuffed hands from Karl Dakota, sideward, tucking both behind the already teetering hutch and pushing. It toppled much faster than she’d expected, directly into the path of the dog, when it was close enough for Caitlin to see its browning teeth and feel its hot breath upon her.
Then the dog was gone, vanished beneath the tumbled hutch with a single yelp.
24
AUSTIN COUNTY, TEXAS
“I don’t know what pisses me off more,” said D. W. Tepper, as he used his own key on the cuffs still fastened to Caitlin’s wrists, “you using your gun or dropping it.” He shook his head and handed them back to her. “Doesn’t seem to matter which way those hurricane force winds
blow for my acid reflux to kick up a meal or two.”
The sheriff’s deputies had crashed through the front door while dust and splintered flecks of wood from the toppled hutch were still staining the air. Paramedics summoned to the scene as a precaution were still tending to Karl Dakota, who’d just regained consciousness, while more of the deputies worked first to untie and then to comfort Dakota’s wife and children. A few others, meanwhile, started to lift the hutch off whatever was left of the dog.
“You may want to hold off on that, boys,” Caitlin signaled, gesturing toward the Dakota children.
The deputies got her point and eased it back down.
“Well, I am amazed at one thing,” Tepper said to her.
“What’s that?”
“You getting through a whole week’s duties without shooting anybody.”
“Don’t jinx me, Captain. We’re not done here yet.”
“How’s that, Ranger?’
“We need to take a look at Karl Dakota’s cattle.”
* * *
They borrowed flashlights from the sheriff’s deputies, to cut through the first of the night, walking off alone toward the grazing fields that rimmed the rear of the Dakota property.
“What time was it when I picked you up outside Christoph Ilg’s ranch?”
“I don’t remember for sure,” Caitlin told Tepper. “Around eleven maybe?”
“What a day.…” Tepper took off his hat and mopped his brow with a shirtsleeve. “You hear that buzzing sound?”
“Yes, I do. Can’t tell you what it is, though, sir.”
“Well, can you tell me why you figure the Torres boy went missing for so long, Ranger?”
“No, I can’t—at least not right now.”
“But you don’t believe he and his friend were lost, do you? Woods on that nature preserve aren’t very thick and don’t extend very far. They might well have been in somebody’s backyard.”
“You hear anything, Captain?” Caitlin asked him, instead of trying to explain what she’d gleaned from Luke’s gaze.
“Just that buzzing. Why?”
“Because where exactly are Karl Dakota’s cattle?”
The next sweep of their flashlights illuminated a series of clumps that looked like swollen mounds of dirt or field grass at first glance, but at second were something else entirely.
“Is that…”
“Holy shit,” Captain Tepper finished for her.
25
AUSTIN COUNTY, TEXAS
The buzzing, it turned out, was flies, swarms and swarms of them, looking like patches of ink in the air of the night’s thickening darkness. Caitlin and Tepper froze in their tracks, aware immediately this was some kind of crime scene into which they didn’t dare wade for fear of disturbing any evidence.
“Get Doc Whatley on the line,” Tepper instructed. “My hands are shaking too much to press out the keys.”
Caitlin followed the now-shuddery ribbon of light cast by his flashlight into the grazing fields, trying to make sense of what she saw beneath the multitude of swarms as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
“Are those…”
“Yup,” Tepper affirmed, after her voice tailed off without completing the question. “Karl Dakota’s cattle—what’s left of them anyway. Maybe he’s not as crazy as we thought.”
* * *
As luck would have it, Bexar County Medical Examiner Frank Dean Whatley was in Houston for a forensics conference for the week, none too happy to be roused from a dinner by Caitlin’s call.
“Why can’t you just call the locals? Houston had a police department of their own last time I checked.”
“Because this is a Ranger case now.”
“It wasn’t before?”
“How fast can you get out here?”
It turned out to be just over an hour before Whatley arrived on the scene. By that time, Sheriff Lee’s deputies had secured the area and ordered up outdoor construction lighting powered by generators from a local contractor well versed in providing them. They had just been switched on when Doc Whatley was escorted onto the scene beyond the fence line from where he’d parked his car.
He carried an ancient forensics case in hand, the leather worn and discolored in stray patches. Caitlin could only imagine what the original contents of that case must’ve looked at when Whatley began carrying it. Frank Dean Whatley had been Bexar County’s medical examiner since the time Caitlin was in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley’s teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, he’d harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H-E-B to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife first lost in life and then death to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and remained exceptionally good at performing the rigors of his job.
Whatley had seemed to resent Caitlin in her first years on the job, warming up to her only after they’d worked closely on a few cases together. Caitlin always let him know how much she appreciated his persistence and professionalism, inevitably treating the victims of violence with a dignity that belied the coldness of his office. He’d purchased floral bed linens with his own money to better dress the steel slabs on which he performed his autopsies, because he believed those with the misfortune of ending up there deserved at least that much comfort and respect.
“Your description didn’t do this justice, Ranger,” he told her, swallowing hard. “The scene’s even worse than what you indicated.”
He pulled three pairs of pull-on plastic booties from his case and passed sets to both Caitlin and D. W. Tepper, the three of them leaning up against the wobbly fence to put them on. Caitlin held Whatley’s stare through much of that process. The man’s eyes looked much too big for his face from this angle, and she could read what was in them as well.
Because something had ravaged Karl Dakota’s entire herd, eaten each and every animal down to the bone.
* * *
Caitlin and Captain Tepper didn’t say a word while Doc Whatley slipped into his medical examiner’s role, first extracting fluids, sprays, and tools neither of them could identify. They looked on as he disappeared into the task of studying what remained of the animals scattered through the field, in positions identifiable by the swarms of flies dotting the air above them.
Even what her visual inspection told her seemed impossible: Each head of cattle had been picked clean to the bone with not the slightest bit of flesh remaining. Made it look like the animals had been dropped into a tank of piranha fish that left only their skeletons behind. Whatley took dozens of samples, allocated into individual plastic bags or tubes for further scrutiny later. Kept shaking his head through the process, obviously having a difficult time remaining detached from findings he’d yet to verbalize.
“Okay, Doc,” Tepper started finally, “what do you make of all this?”
“I don’t. I don’t make anything out of it. At least not yet.” He started to dip down again, then looked up and found Caitlin in his gaze instead. “How long is stuff like this gonna follow you around?”
“I wasn’t aware it had been.”
“Check the record, Ranger. Chances are the bulk of your cases are filed under either the impossible or the apocalypse.”
“That what you think we’re facing here, Doc?” Tepper asked him. “The apocalypse? Because if we are, I wanna get in a whole lot of smoking ’fore the end times arrive. And you just try stopping me, Hurricane.”
“Give us something, Doc,” Caitlin urged.
“In this case, Ranger,” he said, continuing the process of running a portable UV light in a crisscrossing grid around one of the stripped carcasses, “nothing is something.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Figure of speech,” he said, with grass, dirt, and de
ad flies staining the knees of his trousers. “Accurate in this case, nonetheless.”
“Accurate how?” Tepper asked him.
“Tell me what you see, Ranger,” Whatley said to Caitlin, shining the brightest flashlight she’d ever seen down on one of the carcasses.
“Bones.”
“How about what you don’t see?”
“Skin, blood, hair, grizzle, sinew—how long you want me to go on?”
“That was long enough,” Whatley told her, moving the sweep of his beam off what was left of the animal. “Your turn, Captain. Tell me what you see now.”
“Gravel and grass.”
“Anything else?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Whatley held both of them in his gaze. “That’s what I meant by the impossible.”
“You said the apocalypse, too,” Tepper reminded.
“True enough, and still as good an explanation as any I can give you right now. I’m guessing your first thought when you saw the flies and bones were animals got these things. Wolves, cougars, bears—something like that.”
“Actually,” said Caitlin, “I was thinking T. rexes or velociraptors.”
“Well, even they would’ve left something behind—plenty in fact. Look, I can’t tell you what happened in this field, but I can tell you what didn’t. You see how the remains are spaced?” Whatley raised and swept his flashlight about to highlight the dark mounds with fly swarms buzzing over them. “Normally, animals—even cattle—cluster defensively when attacked. Not these. They look to have been standing there eating up grass, blissfully unaware that they were about to get eaten down to the bone.”
Caitlin considered that in the context of what was already on her mind. “And if they’d been attacked from the outside in, normal practice, the animals away from the perimeter would’ve had some time to back off and cluster.”
“What’s that suggest to you?”
“The impossible, just like you said.”
“Besides that, Ranger.”
Caitlin let her eyes roam the field as she responded. “They were all attacked at once, by something they never heard, saw, or smelled.”