by Jon Land
Pictures flared through her mind of the swarm swallowing the SUVs in their spread, shutting off all light and air. Only a matter of time before Luke’s classmates suffocated or tried desperately to escape, opening a door to let the deadly horde in. There was no safe quarter here, no alternative to escape.
Caitlin had never run from a fight in her life; neither had her dad or granddad. The three of them were used to going all in, against any and all odds. But that was against men—humans, anyway—and not some genetic nightmare spawned in a science lab. She stood no more chance of winning here and now than she did of besting a Texas funnel cloud as it churned over the countryside, sucking up everything in its path. She was hardly arrogant and brash enough to believe she could escape its fury, any more than she could escape the marauding menace intent on turning her and those kids into their next meal.
And that was the thing: those kids. Fail and they were dead, whatever she’d accomplished in her life and career paling by comparison with a defeat that would come to define her legacy. The last of the Strong line, five generations of Texas Rangers for a lineage, done in by a swarm of bugs capable of leaving nothing but bone behind.
No.
That’s what she thought.
No.
A blast of heat shook Caitlin, the back of her neck singed by a gush of what felt like hot breath against the back of her shirt, which was already stuck to her skin by sweat.
“Get the vehicles ready to move, Ranger,” Guillermo Paz called to her, drawing even with her tractor as fire spit in all directions from his jerry-rigged flamethrower, holding the swarm at bay.
* * *
It was the only chance, Paz reasoned, at least for the kids, and that was enough to satisfy him. Because it wasn’t the flames that formed the strong light Madam Caterina had seen in her vision.
It was Paz himself.
The fire of his own passion, illuminating his soul with purpose and direction. He had faced his own mortality more times than he could possibly count, but had never accepted it before. Doing so was like holding his breath until he passed out. Normally, instinct seized the moment, eliminating the need for thought, rational or otherwise.
Not tonight. Tonight was about facing an enemy with no emotion or purpose beyond the perpetuation of its own existence. No ulterior motives, no careful planning, no government to seize or protect. Survival and nothing more. Life at its most primal.
Paz almost envied the swarm’s simplicity of purpose, its mindless pursuit of what lay directly ahead, without need of peripheral vision or any quarter given to what lay behind. A perfect existence, in many ways, dominated by the most base desires and breeding and nothing more.
He felt his combat boots crunching over the charred, still-smoking piles of darkness his flames had already fried in their sweep. He thought the vast black wave might be receding in his path, learned behavior teaching it in some primitive collective sense that death awaited its continued push forward.
Paz stopped just in front of the outlaw’s tractor, continuing to rotate his flames as a cry from his Ranger burned his own ears.
“Cort Wesley!”
* * *
“I’m a little busy here, Ranger!” Cort Wesley yelled back to her.
“I can see that! Are you crazy?”
Still balanced precariously, Cort Wesley worked to free the fittings attaching the tank, to dislodge it from its bonds.
“No choice I can see.”
He started to rock the tank to spill it over. Caitlin realized she’d misjudged his original intention and crawled back along the length of the tractor to do the very same thing.
89
GLASSCOCK COUNTY, TEXAS
“You know what to do, Colonel!” she yelled to Paz over the swarm’s incessant clacking, which had deafened her to everything else.
Caitlin had forgotten about the older kids clinging to the roof of the trailing SUV, couldn’t imagine the panic and terror compounding the plight of so many squeezed into such tight spaces for the journey that had now stalled. Their screams and cries pierced her ears, rising over the clacking of the horde, now that the tractor engines had quieted. She heard sobs and pleas, too, and only wished she could answer them. Because how long would it be before the swarm climbed past even the windows and reached the roof, if they tried to hold out here?
But Paz was in motion by then, backpedaling while firing off his flames more deliberately and judiciously, to clear his own path and save whatever fuel he could for the final rush. Caitlin watched him signaling the plan’s intentions to Jones behind the wheel of the lead vehicle. Then, though, instead of climbing back to his perch on the roof, he jogged forward through the slog of darkness that moved and grew as more of the swarm rolled over the corpses Paz had fried.
“Colonel!” Caitlin cried out to him, as he passed.
“It’s the only way, Ranger!”
His words reached her softly and calmly, maybe transferred by thought instead of voice—who could say anymore? Paz moved ahead of Cort Wesley’s stalled tractor to take point, just as Cort Wesley managed to tip his tank over and spill the remains of his tank over the advancing storm. The land’s natural grade left the fuel running downhill, spreading outward on one angle, while hers, once tipped, would spread in the other.
But the old metal tank proved too heavy for her to do much more than budge. She heard a thump, felt the frame of her tractor rock, and saw Cort Wesley’s shape bent at the knees, rising to join her at the assembly’s rear.
“On three, Ranger!”
And on three, together, they managed to tip her tank over, barely hearing the slosh of gasoline hitting the ground to begin its spread along the land’s natural grade forward. Then the two of them slid along the rusted steel frame, reached the tip of her tractor, and jumped together back onto Cort Wesley’s, before which Paz continued his fiery stand.
The colonel looked back at them long enough to acknowledge their presence, then swung again to the front, without seeing Caitlin whip her hands around in the air to signal the SUVs on. The wave of bugs had almost entombed the entirety of their tires, stretching over the wheel wells in patches, and Caitlin wondered if they’d even be able to find traction. But there was a lot to be said for having four thousand pounds under you and, after an initial bout of fits and starts, both SUVs started rolling, sweeping around the stalled tractors.
Jones and the other driver both accelerated through the flames, Caitlin jumping onto the running board of one and Cort Wesley the other, both holding to the luggage rack while pinning their feet higher against the frame to stay above the beetles. That left Paz to continue clearing a path for them, black waves parting for the route of his flames like the Red Sea did for Moses. No way their SUVs would have any more chance than the horses, if it weren’t for him. And Caitlin had to shake off the illusion that thinner waves of the black swarm scurried from his own path blazed through them, as if frightened and intimidated by Paz’s mere presence.
Caitlin felt heat that reminded her of dipping her hand into scalding water, as the flames clawed at her hair and grazed the fabric of her clothes. She sucked in her breath to make herself as small as possible, trying not to think about the possibility of the fire stealing her in its grasp. Pressed up tight against the SUV, she watched the world through the flame-shrouded reflection in the vehicle’s windows.
Guillermo Paz shrank in that reflection, his huge shape dwindling from sight when she turned to look directly toward him, while still clinging to the roof rack for dear life. She stole a moment to glimpse Cort Wesley doing the same, the incessant clacking chatter of the beetles starting to lower in volume the closer they drew to the road.
Caitlin looked back toward Guillermo Paz again to find nothing but a shifting darkness and shroud of flames within the reach of her vision, no sign of him anywhere among them. The SUVs thumped and bucked past a trio of mailboxes, the sound and smell of the swarm decreasing until only the night itself lay before them.
90
“The address in question is a warehouse, and it belongs to Dane Corp, all right,” Captain Tepper told Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Jones over the speaker of her cell phone.
They were riding in one of the SUVs after a brief stop at a service station five miles up the road from the farm, where authorities were already en route to meet them. The first order of business was to get the kids reunited with their families. Everything else, all the explanations and such, could be sorted out later.
For her part, Caitlin needed to get to that address in Midland, where, hopefully, she’d find Calum Dane himself.
“Wish I could tell you more,” Tepper continued. “What’s the play here, Ranger?”
“Let you know when we make it, D.W.”
“For once, just for once, can you let me send in the cavalry before you storm the place?”
“No, sir, because it could risk squandering the advantage we have on Calum Dane right now. He’s the key to all this, Captain—everything, including those goddamn bugs. We’re thirty minutes away. You tell me you can get the cavalry ready to charge by then and we’ll talk.”
“Well, you’re going to do whatever you want, no matter what I say, so I’m just going to tell you to have at it and don’t shoot any more men than you have to.”
“You can tell Cort Wesley and me something else, sir. The rest of the story about what happened to our fathers.”
91
LOLO, TEXAS; 1983
“Is this the way you do business, comrade?”
Boone Masters swung with Jim Strong to find Anton Kasputin standing twenty feet away, a trio of thugs flanking him on either side with guns drawn.
“Call the play, Ranger,” Boone said, just loud enough for Jim to hear.
“You’re all under arrest,” Jim Strong said, hand over his still-holstered .45.
Kasputin grinned and broadly waved his finger in Jim’s direction. “I’ve seen cowboy movies about men like you. They shoot and never miss. That gun fires eight bullets. There are seven of us. I like our odds.”
“All the same,” Jim said, not even flinching, “you’re still under arrest, sir.”
“What’s the charge, exactly?”
“I’ll throw a whole bunch in a hat and pick one out. Let’s start with receiving stolen goods and move all the way up to possession of a deadly weapon.”
“And what weapon would that be?”
“Whatever’s in all those tanks, Sergei.”
“That’s not my name.”
“But you look like a Sergei to me,” Jim told him, fingers still dancing over the butt of his holstered .45. “And, you’re right, maybe I won’t be able to get all your men with my eight bullets, but I’ll get you for sure.”
Kasputin’s gaze moved from side to side, then forward again, assessing his prospects. “You could just walk out of here, and we go about our separate ways.”
“That the way it’s done back home in Russki land? Not so here in Texas. When I walk out of here, it’ll be with you in cuffs.”
The smile slipped from Kasputin’s expression. “Take your best shot, Ranger.”
“Exactly my intention.”
But it was D. W. Tepper who opened fire first, his presence catching the Russians utterly by surprise. He pushed all eight shots from his .45, diving to the floor behind a column of packing crates to snap home a fresh magazine. He was pretty sure he’d dropped two of the Russians with those shells, though it was hard to tell.
Because Jim Strong used his initial shots to take out the overhead lighting, plunging the warehouse into darkness.
“Kill them! Shoot them!” Kasputin cried out to his still standing thugs. “Don’t let them get away!”
By then, Boone Masters had unslung the tank labeled Propane from his shoulder and sent it rolling down the aisle, straight at the Russians. He had his .357 Magnum out in the next instant, firing toward the sound of the thing’s roll and the slight gleam its shiny steel made in the darkness. If the contents had really been propane, a boom and accompanying flame burst would’ve followed. Instead, there was a hiss of something contained under pressure escaping, something that felt like a liquid and a gas at the same time, bringing a harsh chemical odor with it.
The light sneaking in through the hold door Kasputin had left open was enough for Boone to spot him and his men scurrying away, still with superior numbers and firepower, even with the addition of a second Ranger’s gun.
“Ranger!” Boone yelled out to Jim Strong.
“We need to waste those tanks!” Strong’s voice chimed back through the darkness.
“I got a better idea.”
Boone’s shape flitted through the darkness, illuminated in splotchy fashion by muzzle flashes trained his way. The darkness of the warehouse swallowed him, as the two Rangers kept Kasputin and his thugs at bay in a crossfire that would last only as long as their bullets.
“Masters!” Jim cried out.
When no response followed, he slid sideways, ducking down one aisle, between stacked major appliances, and then up another. It was like being trapped in a maze, his ears burned by the constant din of the Russians returning their fire on D. W. Tepper. Jim was down to his last magazine, eight bullets, with the pounding steps of Russian gunmen tracing him through the dark. He couldn’t see them, meaning they couldn’t see him, meaning …
Thought and action merged, Jim leaping up onto the irregularly stacked crates and firing down on a trio of thugs who’d been converging upon him. They dropped like ducks in a shooting gallery, not about to rise again, when Jim’s .45 locked open and empty. In the same moment a torrent of machine-gun fire flared his way. The shells penetrated the crates and clanged against the metal of the appliances inside. The sound puffed out his ears, Jim recognizing the distinctive din as coming from a Thompson, of all things, drum-fed .45-caliber shells turning fridges and ranges, washers and dryers, to paste.
The fire of a second Thompson blared his way from another angle, the tinny, echoing blare reaching him in stereo now. All he wanted to do was drop and cover his ears. Instead, he kept darting and weaving atop the crates, twin streams of fire blistering the air around him. He thought he might have been screaming, was conscious, too, of the barrage aimed well in front of him, around where D. W. Tepper must’ve made his stand. He thought there must be gunmen who escaped his original count, wielders of the Thompsons, held back by Kasputin to slice him down once he’d risked exposure.
Man was smarter than he thought. KGB for sure, and Jim cursed himself for underestimating his opponent, not putting enough stock in the brutal, merciless manner in which his men had gunned down Stanko and his gang in a park fronting the MacArthur-Rain building in Houston as he and Boone Masters had looked on from the rooftop level of the parking garage.
Along with his daughter, Caitlin, who’d hidden under a tarp in the bed of his truck.
Thinking of her recharged Jim’s batteries but left him assessing the dire nature of his plight, the reality that he was never going to see her again. There were just too many Russians, and they were too well armed, to expect he and D. W. Tepper would be able to take them alone.
Only they weren’t alone.
Jim Strong heard an engine grinding an instant before Boone Masters burst through a stack of appliances, piloting a massive, large-capacity pneumatic forklift running on four truck-size tires. Its scaffold was piled high with tanks balanced precariously upon its lift forks, looking ready to tumble off at any moment. Jim wasn’t sure of Boone’s intentions, until he spotted the lit cigarette in the man’s mouth. Only one hand was on the wheel, while the other clung fast to what looked like the wand of an acetylene torch. Jim watched him jam it forward, toward the tanks that he now realized were shiny and wet with something Boone Masters must’ve sprayed or doused them with.
Jim had just recalled that the inventory of one of Masters’s more recent heists included a bevy of remanufactured kerosene stoves, when the forklift smashed through the
crates on which he was perched, sending him flying. His last thought before he hit one toppled box and rolled down onto another was of the rich scent of something like lighter fluid hanging in the air. He’d lost sight of Boone Masters by then, but pictured him touching his cigarette to some makeshift fuse soaked in kerosene, then watching it flare and burn down toward the similarly soaked tanks.
The flame burst that blinded him on the floor was more like a flash, the tanks rupturing in a series of rumbles instead of a single explosion. The entire front section of the warehouse was awash in white-hot flame that spread like a curtain over the floor, blocking the path to the hold door through which they’d entered. There were exits behind them as well, but Jim Strong didn’t even look toward them, charging into the heat and flames, dancing past the fire pooling on the floor and setting the stolen merchandise ablaze.
He found D. W. Tepper first, aiming his empty .45 at nothing, his eyes glazed beneath eyebrows that had been burned from his face. Jim got a shoulder under Tepper and dragged him along until he spotted Boone Masters lying half on and half off a stack of appliances tumbled by the blast, his clothes and hair soaked by whatever had sprayed out of those tanks marked Propane. It had a bitter, corrosive, chemical stench to it, something like a mix of turpentine and motor oil that rode Jim, too, all the way to a rear exit that he burst through with both Tepper and Masters in tow.
“Neither of you is gonna die on me tonight, hear? Neither one!”
He dropped them down in the cool of the night to catch his breath, then resumed dragging them far as he could from the warehouse before the blast he was anticipating came. Fortunately, the back portion was spared the initial inferno that spread in rippling fashion from the front, the roof seeming to peel away and the walls blown both out and up. Jim dropped over both Tepper and Masters to shield them, woozy from breathing in whatever had soaked Boone to the gills from those tanks, now gone forever.
Jim watched Masters’s eyes flicker, fixed on him when they finally opened. “Well, this oughta keep my boy Cort Wesley out of jail, anyway.”