Strong Light of Day

by Jon Land

  “I’m a Texas Ranger!” she called anyway. “And all of you are going home!”

  Something changed in that instant, the heaviness in the barn’s air receding in favor of what felt like a soft breeze. She smelled the stink of fear and stale sweat for the first time, glad for the scents her revived senses conjured, since it spared her the coppery odor of blood from the men she, Cort Wesley, and Jones had just killed. Her eyes recorded cans of gasoline that had been fueling the generators, along with a pair of tractors, attached to industrial-size sprayers, which the previous owners of the cotton farm had used to fertilize their crops, backed up against a rear corner of the barn.

  Caitlin felt her breathing even out, her lungs and heart steadying, as it always was in the aftermath of a gunfight. She’d been in far tougher ones than this, though the stakes involved—thirty-four high-school kids—were unparalleled.

  “Let’s get a move on,” she said through the silence that had settled around her. She was preparing to lead the kids from the barn when she saw Guillermo Paz standing a few feet in front of the open barn doors, board stiff, his gaze focused straight ahead into the black ribbon of night beyond. “Hold on a sec,” she corrected, hand held in the air to keep the former hostages in their tracks.

  Caitlin slid past Cort Wesley and Jones, who had stayed on their guards, with guns ready. She could feel the heat radiating off Paz as she drew closer, was almost able to actually see the hackles rising on his neck.

  “What’s wrong, Colonel?”

  “Trouble, Ranger,” he said, without turning toward her, gaze fixed on the fields beyond. “Just like my psychic warned. I can see it now, even though there’s no strong light.”

  And that’s when one of the horses grazing before them started whinnying, an instant before it went down, disappearing into the scrub as if its legs had been yanked out from beneath it.

  Followed by a second horse.

  Then a third.

  86

  GLASSCOCK COUNTY, TEXAS

  There are no wild horses in this area, Cort Wesley had said. These must have come from a nearby farm, spooked by the advance of the deadly colony of beetles. They’d ended up here, taking comfort in some brush to eat, with the false security of the night around them.

  Paz backpedaled with her and slammed the barn doors behind him so none of the kids would be able to see what was coming. Cort Wesley couldn’t see it either, but one look at Caitlin was all he needed.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “Coming straight toward us, Cort Wesley.”

  Jones holstered his pistol, getting the gist of what was happening. Paz just stood before the now-barred barn door, seeming as big and broad as it was.

  “What’d you see, Ranger?”

  Cort Wesley had reached her side without Caitlin realizing his presence; she could only look at him and speak in a voice that sounded like someone else’s.

  “A black wave, Cort Wesley, darker than the night.”

  “How big?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Someone else’s voice again.

  “Let’s move now,” Jones put forth. “Take our chances out the rear.”

  “We’ll never make it. They’ll chase us down.”

  Jones’s gaze fixed on the ladder leading to the hayloft. “Up there, then. Take our chances up there.”

  “I don’t like those chances.”

  “What,” he shot back at her, “these bugs can climb?”

  “We’re food, Jones. They’ll do whatever they have to.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Cort Wesley said, his gaze fixed in another direction.

  * * *

  “This is crazy!” Jones said, trailing Cort Wesley to the tractors tucked into the barn’s rear corner.

  “Just shut up and follow the plan,” Caitlin told him, toting a pair of the gas cans that had been used to fuel the generators.

  “Plan? You call this a plan?”

  “Colonel,” she started, Paz picking up from there.

  “He says another word, and I’ll cut his tongue out,” Paz said, looking toward Jones.

  “Close enough,” said Caitlin. She turned her gaze on the twin dark SUVs parked alongside the tractors. “Make yourself useful, Jones, and check the navigation devices in those. Let’s see if we can figure out exactly where they came from.”

  * * *

  “We don’t have much time,” she said to Cort Wesley as they each poured gasoline into the tank that fed the tractor attachment’s fertilizer sprayers.

  Outside, the sound of the horses’ wailing had stopped. Another sound, though, filled the air beyond the barn, something like a million fingernails clacking together. A fecal smell seemed to trail it, permeating the barn with an odor so sharp it had some of the kids, bundled together in the center of the barn by their chaperones, retching or vomiting.

  “Whatever it is, we’ll make it enough,” Cort Wesley replied. He watched Guillermo Paz finish tightening the works of one tractor engine and move on to the next. “Hope you know what you’re doing there, Colonel.”

  “So do I, outlaw,” he said, head buried in the second tractor’s engine.

  “It’s an address in Midland,” Caitlin heard Jones call out, as he slammed the SUV’s door. “South Country Road.”

  “That’s just off Interstate twenty,” she noted, fixing the placement in her brain. “Not much in the area besides warehouses and fulfillment centers.”

  “Well, that’s where the gunmen we shot drove here from. By the way, Homeland was able to find facial recognition matches on a couple of those guys you shot up on the four-ten outside San Antonio. Ex-Russian special ops.”

  “Mobbed up?”

  “Available for hire, but no organized crime associations in their files.”

  “And you’re just telling me this now?”

  “I only got the news on the plane while you and the cowboy were reminiscing.”

  Caitlin looked past him, at the SUVs he was standing between. “How many can those carry?”

  “As many as eight, maybe ten passengers, Ranger.”

  “I wasn’t talking about just passengers inside.”

  87

  GLASSCOCK COUNTY, TEXAS

  The stench, Caitlin figured, must have something to do with the frass Doc Whatley and Young Roger had explained the beetles smeared over themselves. It grew overpowering while she supervised the effort of squeezing as many kids into the SUVs as humanly possible. Jones climbed in behind the wheel of the lead SUV, and a chaperone took the wheel of the trailing one. The remaining chaperones and the oldest and most athletic kids would ride the roof of the trailing SUV, saving the roof of the lead one for Guillermo Paz alone.

  Since his role was the centerpiece of the plan they’d desperately hatched.

  All told, there were thirty-nine hostages, literally squeezed into place by the time they were ready to roll. The sounds of the approaching horde of insects had grown into an all-out rattling din, like teeth chattering together times a billion, evidence the first wave of the beetles was almost to the barn. By that point, Caitlin and Cort Wesley sat in the driver’s seats of the old tractors currently parked side by side, their engines rumbling and black smoke belching from their tailpipes at the front of the convoy. After initially sputtering, those engines had caught, then rattled for a time, before settling into uneasy idles.

  The loudening clacks of the beetles, combined with the twin racing engines, would’ve made being heard difficult, had there been anything to say. As it was, Caitlin and Cort Wesley tensed as Paz yanked off the plywood stretched across the barn door and pushed the door open to the night and the endless black wave, darker than the night sky beyond.

  Cort Wesley threw his tractor into gear, first, and felt it lurch forward before its tires found reasonable purchase on the barn floor. It rolled on, Caitlin working hers into gear immediately behind it, while Paz took his place atop the roof of the lead SUV, still in the process of fastening a plastic shoulder tank into pla
ce and testing the heft of a six-foot spraying wand.

  Caitlin turned her gaze from him and started rolling too, staying back about ten feet from Cort Wesley. Ready with the hand controls to work the attached sprayer, having already familiarized herself with them, gasoline poured in the rusted steel drum, instead of fertilizer.

  She surged from the fetid, rank conditions of the barn into the cool of a night braced with a powerful, spoiled stench that hung over it like a cloud. The entire landscape before and around her for as far as she could see was nothing but black. But it was a peculiar black, shifting in apparently uniform fashion, as if the ground itself was moving en masse. Caitlin found herself wondering how many beetles this colony actually numbered and how many layers of them had piled atop each other, sniffing out their next meal.

  She didn’t have time to wonder long, though, because she saw Cort Wesley activate his sprayer and did the same with hers. Instantly, the acrid scent of gasoline claimed her nostrils, battling the frass stench shed by the beetles for control of the air. Her stream fired to the right, covering a fifty-foot swatch of land, while Cort Wesley sprayed to the left. The result was to inundate the dried scrub, weeds, and overgrown brush where cotton fields had once flourished with gas, forging a makeshift path through which to escape.

  Caitlin stole one last look at Paz standing atop the roof of the lead SUV as Jones revved the engine almost directly beneath him, inside the cab. The colonel also had filled a portable pesticide tank with kerosene siphoned from a fifty-five gallon drum used to refill the lanterns supplying the barn’s light, and she watched him touch a flaming lighter to the tip of the spraying wand attached to the tank by a flexible hose connection. Fire sparked at the wand’s tip, creating what was essentially a jerry-rigged flamethrower. She had no idea how Paz could possibly manage the task while standing unsupported atop the SUV’s roof, but she had stopped questioning his capabilities, along with his intentions, long ago, about the same time she began wondering if he was even human.

  Her senses contorted, each engaged in a battle for supremacy of her attention. There were smells, sounds, and sights all fighting for control, but Caitlin let instinct guide her to better focus on the task at hand. She was just starting to record the click-clacking clatter of her tractor’s tires crushing the hordes of beetles she was driving over, the chattering of the remaining bugs seeming to intensify, as if they were enraged by her actions.

  She’d drawn fifty feet from the barn when fresh revving of the SUVs’ engines told her they’d emerged to follow the path carved by the gasoline. She heard a loud poof as Guillermo Paz squeezed the activator on his wand, shooting a line of fire left, right, and back again, igniting the vibrating black mass on either side of the makeshift road they were forging through the swarm.

  A much louder poof sounded, followed by another. And then the night was aglow with an almost day glow brightness.

  * * *

  Paz felt as if he was experiencing a rare moment of crystal clarity as the flames burst into the air like a vast curtain spreading out, drawing all around him. He realized the point of the message the psychic Madam Caterina had relayed to him, all the messages gleaned from the tarot cards as well as in his other sessions. And if she’d been right, if there really was a great beyond out there, if Paz’s mother really did listen when he spoke, then all he held dear toward the purpose that drove him was vindicated. He was vindicated, along with that purpose that defined his very reason for being.

  The Chariot is one of the most complex cards to define, Paz remembered Madam Caterina saying. It implies war, a struggle, and an eventual, hard-won victory over enemies, obstacles, nature, the uncertainties inside you. But there is a great deal more to it. The charioteer wears emblems of the sun, yet the sign behind this card is Cancer, the moon. The moon suggests it will shine somehow at night. That’s symbolic of an enemy that can’t be seen.

  As in invisible? he had asked.

  More like out of sight. Hiding from view. Does that mean anything to you?

  It will, Paz had said, assuredly.

  And now it did, all of it, every bit. The invisible enemy had been revealed and, in this wondrous moment of clarity, he came to understand the true meaning of the psychic’s most vital message to him.

  There’s a light, a strong light, a blinding light. Everywhere at once, swallowing everything.

  Fire was that very light, slaying and swallowing the evil around him. Or maybe he needed to tweak that thinking a bit. Maybe he was the light, hope against the great evil, the ridding of which he’d claimed as his purpose. It wasn’t just about his Texas Ranger, it was about the threats to her that needed to be vanquished before those threats could turn the strong light of day dark.

  In an endless black wave of insects that seemed to have no beginning and no end. A circle as opposed to a square, Paz standing at the center point to provide balance.

  Madam Caterina had been right. Darkness was everywhere. But Paz’s light shined through it, melting it away, returning the darkness to the depths of hell from which it came.

  * * *

  Caitlin’s breath caught in her throat as she got her closest, clearest look yet at just one of the insect colonies marauding through the state of Texas, ingesting whatever crops and livestock showed up in it’s path. She recalled the picture of one from Doc Whatley’s ancient encyclopedia, magnifying the creature in her mind while reducing the horde to that single image of a shiny black creature, encased in rough armor that left only its legs and mandibles protruding. A still shot multiplied a million times to form the single, unbroken wave that stretched before her in a dark ribbon that looked like mud churning over the countryside. The horde seemed to move as one, and Caitlin half expected its shapeless composite to form into some kind of massive creature the size of an aircraft carrier, intent on swallowing anything that got in its way.

  She shook the illusion aside and focused on the actual nature of the enemy engaged against her in a battle to the death. Their advance was terrifying in its simplicity and perfection of movement, each individual pest seeming to act as part of a greater whole, moving in eerie synchronization, ready to devour anything in it’s path. She imagined what the scene might look like if it were fertile crops before them instead of land already dead from disuse and age and unprotected against the relentless elements. There was no trace of the horse herd ahead, not even their skeletal remains visible from this angle and distance.

  Accident or design, plot or fortune, the origins of this colony and the others, along with the part Calum Dane had played in this, mattered not at all now. The night brightened further under the growing shroud of orange light shed by the flames blossoming on both sides of her, as Paz continued to rotate his flamethrower from left to right and back again. Caitlin heard a constant clatter of crackling and rippling sounds, like popcorn roasting in a microwave, as the fire consumed the bugs, devoured them just as they would’ve sought to devour whatever lay before them. The odor of the beetle frass merged with the smoke, wafting through the air and seeming to intensify it to a stench so powerful that each breath sent ripples of nausea through her stomach. The scene before her was like some cosmic battle, something you read about in the Bible and were never sure had really happened.

  But this was really happening.

  And they were winning.

  Until Caitlin saw the tractor Cort Wesley was driving seem to drop into a pit on its right side. It corkscrewed one way, then the other, and Caitlin realized the old thing had thrown a wheel, grinding on an axle as it fishtailed across the field and came to a halt, blocking the route out.

  88

  GLASSCOCK COUNTY, TEXAS

  Caitlin hadn’t thought much about her tractor’s brakes until that very moment. They didn’t seem to engage at first, so she pumped the pedal in rapid motions in the hope they’d catch. They finally did, and she felt the tractor’s tires sinking into the soft ground when it ground to a halt. Only it wasn’t ground it had sunk into, it was a fluid black wave
that looked like liquefied tar pooling beneath her. The bright orange glow of the flames belching huge black plumes of smoke and stench into the air left her with the feeling she was trapped in the midst of some biblical apocalypse. The endless black wave of beetles looked shiny in their glow, in contrast to a starless, empty sky that made her think, almost whimsically, that heaven had shut down for the night.

  If she dropped down now she had no idea how deep she’d sink. Up to a foot, maybe, judging by what she could glimpse of the tractor’s tires. She was trying not to picture how easily a wave of these bugs could bring a person down, based on what they had done to those horses.

  And Karl Dakota’s cattle.

  Caitlin rose in her seat, careful to keep her boots firmly planted in the tractor’s rubber footrests.

  “Cort Wesley!” she yelled to him, listening to the SUVs braking to a halt behind her.

  He was balanced precariously on the tow assembly, between the tractor and the tank of gasoline it was hauling, trying to adjust the nozzle of the sprayer to continue holding the bugs at bay on his designated side.

  “Just keep firing, Ranger!” he yelled back, without looking her way.

  Caitlin realized she’d disengaged her sprayer when she braked her tractor to a halt. “These aren’t bullets!”

  “They are tonight!”

  Caitlin looked down and saw the swarm had now climbed past the halfway point of the tires. She reengaged her sprayer a moment after Cort Wesley did his, Guillermo Paz hitting both mists of fluid from left to right and back again, making it seem the air itself had caught fire. The flames dropped with the dewlike mist, turning fresh waves of the swarm ablaze and filling the air with a rancid stench worse than a week-old corpse left smoldering in the heat. The clacking of the bugs continuing to push forward into the flames, without pause. It had grown loud enough to bubble her ears and drown out whatever sounds or pleas might have been coming from the SUVs behind them.

  This wasn’t going to work. They weren’t getting out of here.