by Jon Land
Only he imagined that people on acid didn’t have to contend with real-life bullets and bad guys.
Stepping over the bodies that his or Caitlin’s fire had downed was the easiest way, in Cort Wesley’s mind, of telling the real from the unreal, even as he began using the projected images and game landscape for cover.
Didn’t have anything like this in Iraq or the other places I served.…
War was war, but this, this—
Cort Wesley’s thinking froze abruptly when actual fire hissed through the air past him, instantly recognizable from the fake forays of fire—thanks to instinct bred of actual combat as opposed to make-believe. Something primal distinguished the real threats for him.
Still, more than once before he emptied the second magazine of his assault rifle, he’d had to remind himself not to fire at the giant insects rampaging his way. Dying in some life-size video game, after all, beat dying for real.
Amazing, though, truly amazing, how the all-too-real-looking depictions of special ops soldiers skirted his position as if aware of and acknowledging his presence. Twice Cort Wesley was sure the figures had actually met his gaze, and one had actually winked at him.
Did the games his son Luke played do that? Did Luke play video games with his …
Oh boy!
… friend Zach?
That wasn’t so hard, was it, Bubba? Fuck it all and let the chips fall where they may!
You’re damn right, champ! thought Cort Wesley.
* * *
Beriya led Zhirnosky through the projected city landscape. They were immersed in it as soldiers as big as him fought a war against giant bugs that seemed to walk upright like men. He had to remind himself they were neither friend nor foe, because they weren’t real, no matter how much to the contrary their life-size projections seemed to indicate.
In his mind, none of this was any different from the barricades in Riga where he’d watched his father die. Everything was coming full circle, one impossible image converging into another. For that moment, memories, visions, and video game landscapes all seemed the same.
His father had failed in Riga. He would not fail here. He’d spirit Zhirnosky away, back home to Russia, where he’d be a much bigger hero than his father when the man’s political party rose to power.
Beriya had an exit door in his sights when the landscape projected over the naked warehouse changed suddenly to a primordial jungle, the soldiers and aliens from the original game still battling each other. Then, massive shadows fell over both him and Zhirnosky.
* * *
Caitlin was thinking of the ambush that had almost punched her ticket, as she stalked the big man, still half expecting Guillermo Paz to drop into the scene when something else did instead.
Dinosaurs, or at least dinosaur-size creatures, which stormed the landscape with roars that bubbled her ears. Sound from whatever crazed video game this was had been blaring all along from unseen speakers. And the cityscape suddenly morphed into the other game’s jungle landscape, before the two of them seemed to merge, one transposed upon the other in rotating fashion, as the figures from the dueling games converged. This was the first time she’d noticed the ferocity and realism of it all. If someone had dropped her in here and told her to open her eyes, Caitlin would’ve thought it was all real, every bit of it.
She lost track of the giant who’d been shepherding the stout Russian figure she took for the leader through the make-believe carnage. Amazing to have been party to such scenes in real life, only to experience one bred of fantasy and reality at the same time, the struggle to discern one from the other playing out in real time, moment by moment.
Caitlin realized her path was blocked, figuratively anyway, by figures converging on each other from both games at once, the landscape flickering, fighting to hold to the primeval landscape while the city backdrop flashed onto the scene like a strobe. The game figures, though, seemed not to care. The soldiers, who looked so real she could practically smell their sweat and feel the heat pouring from their bodies, started shooting at the monster-size creatures, some as tall as the warehouse ceiling—depictions that reminded her of the monsters in pretty much every horror movie she’d glimpsed Luke or Dylan watching.
Real bullets whizzed by her and Caitlin continued on, pistol in hand now, in place of her empty AR-15, wishing she could have grabbed a plasma rifle from one of the pretend shooters, when a hand grasped her from behind and pulled.
* * *
Cort Wesley rushed through the city as it became the jungle and then seemed to switch back again. A few times, absurdly, he had to remind himself not to shoot at images his bullets would’ve passed straight through, no matter how real they looked. For a few moments, he was running in stride with the special ops soldiers forced to battle monsters they hadn’t been programmed for, in a terrain to which their artificial intelligence allowed them to adapt.
Had he been bonked on the head? Was this actually happening?
Combat inevitably created its own skewed version of reality, but all this stretched way beyond that. He wondered if Leroy Epps himself might show up when the game reached the next level, gun in hand, firing away at targets both computer generated and flesh and blood.
How about that, Bubba? I’m pretty good, ain’t I?
He caught a glimpse of two figures of the flesh-and-blood variety darting about amid the clash of games and landscapes and opened up on them. His bullets pushed straight through the scene before him, clanging off the steel warehouse’s walls as a door opened briefly to the night and then closed again.
* * *
Zhirnosky backpedaled through the night, wondering if Calum Dane’s creatures might burst through the warehouse walls to continue their battle in the real world. Beriya had managed to get him out, but then returned to eliminate the threat posed by the female Texas Ranger he’d been warned about. She’d seen him, could identify him—certainly enough to cause more of an inconvenience in the United States, as well as back home, if she survived.
In that moment, the shock of it all spared Zhirnosky awareness of the abject failure into which this had degenerated. Here he was, so close to seeing the dream of a restored Soviet Union rising on the back of a demoralized and dismantled America, only to now find himself wishing that the walls of the warehouse would crumble before an onslaught of pixilated monsters released into the real world. A fantasy, as much as his whole vain attempt to topple America from the pedestal the country occupied, raising the restored Soviet Union up in the process.
Zhirnosky saw that now, in his mind, along with the indelible, grit-smeared face of a woman wearing a badge he’d glimpsed shining against the video projections he only wished were real.
* * *
Caitlin twirled, had her pistol righting on the figure that had grasped her. She recognized Calum Dane just before she fired.
“He was about to shoot you!”
“Who?”
“The big guy. His name’s Beriya. I saved your life.”
“Who was he trying to lead out?”
“Yanko Zhirnosky. This is all on him. You got here just in time.”
“I think you’re full of shit,” Caitlin said, sweeping her gaze about the dueling landscapes and rampaging creatures in search of Cort Wesley.
She’d started to move, when Dane grasped her by the shirt once more. “You’ve got to get me out of here, Ranger!”
“Grab me again and I’ll shoot you, Mr. Dane.”
* * *
Figures drawn from history had joined the mix now as well, Cort Wesley realized. Fugitives from a more urbane game, who had no idea what awaited them here. He watched presidents, a man he thought might be Churchill, and another he recognized as Napoleon scooped up by the monsters’ gaping jaws. The thud and thump of them moving was powerful enough to make the floor feel as if it were shaking.
Well, Bubba, if you can’t beat ’em …
This time, Cort Wesley did swing around, toward where he thought Leroy Epps’s voice w
as coming from, but there was nothing there besides the lesson the ghost had imparted. While bullets passed through the game figures, light didn’t, which meant they could continue serving as camouflage for him, cover.
Cort Wesley had known combat in both jungle and urban environments, but no one knew combat in an ever-shifting depiction of both at once. He treated the scene and everything in it as if it were as real as his weapons, going so far as to tear his shirt down the middle and expose as much of his torso as those of the special ops team.
He began mixing with the troops that had survived both the alien invaders and the dinosaurlike monsters. He flinched and closed his eyes when one that looked like a giant squid balanced on its tentacles thrust its twin whips out for him and then reared up to swallow him.
Cort Wesley surged right through it, pistol coming up when the game thing was behind him, and saw the big man poking a pistol out from a nest of thick greenery superimposed over a smoking city grate.
Their guns came up together, both ready to fire, when a snarling, bloblike creature separated in two, the halves converging on the big man from either side. Not real, but it didn’t matter, because he hesitated, just for an instant.
Cort Wesley didn’t hesitate, but the blob monster had stolen view of his target from him, so all he could do was shoot into the computer-generated, gelatinlike mass. He put his last five bullets into whatever it was concealing, moving in for a better look at the result, when the giant burst out of the projection and slammed him against a wall that wasn’t really there.
The Russian giant, all too real and almost as big as Paz, and Cort Wesley continued to twist about, struggling for purchase on each other, as the background whirled from city to jungle and back again. The man-size alien bugs were now fighting the dinosaur-size monsters, while the gunmen who were no more than products of a video feed from both games seemed to have joined forces against them.
Cort Wesley felt the giant slam him up against a projection pillar that turned out to be real this time. Impact rattled his spine and stole his breath. He felt a blow pound his midsection and just managed to twist aside from a vicious punch to his face.
The giant had a knife out by then, and Cort Wesley actually had to remind himself it was real and not some game-generated prop. The giant lashed it one way and then back the other in expert fashion, his teeth stretched into a grin that shined in the naked light of the multiple projectors. Cort Wesley felt icy-cold streaks that quickly turned red hot where he’d been gashed.
Finally, tearing his belt from his pant loops, he whipped the heavy buckle across the giant’s face, catching him by totally by surprise, feeling something in the man’s cheek or jaw crunch on impact. Then he used the same buckle like a short whip to deflect the next series of knife lashes that followed, more than holding his own, when he had the misfortune of ignoring the downed prop form of one of the projected gunmen.
Because it was a real body, not a prop at all, and Cort Wesley tumbled over it, hitting the floor hard. The giant was tearing a pistol from beneath his jacket and was sweeping it steady when—and Cort Wesley had to blink to make sure this was really happening—the game’s unified teams of gunmen seemed to record the giant as a hostile threat and opened up on him with weapons both traditional and futuristic. He was swallowed in a constant spray of light, splashing and flashing around the entire building. Cort Wesley could see the giant’s steely eyes waver, suddenly trapped in confusion and uncertainty.
Cort Wesley seized the moment to go for the gun pinned beneath the dead man’s body. But the strap caught, and the giant was righting his pistol again, when the biggest shape of any of the projected warriors rushed the giant, certain to go right through him.
But it didn’t.
Instead, the giant was there and then he wasn’t, lost to a massive shape even bigger than him, swathed everywhere in what looked like steaming tar and smelling of something Cort Wesley’s memory told him was that beetle shit.
He couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t real anymore. He half expected Dylan and Luke to join the fun—and Leroy Epps, too, since this whole crazy environment would probably suit him just fine. He tried to remind himself to focus, and managed to lock his gaze on the sight of the giant’s hands and feet twitching, halfway up the pillar directly over Cort Wesley, where the dark figure coated in tar, real or unreal, had impaled him.
He realized the air smelled like an overheating car engine. He heard a poof, after which the creatures and landscapes vanished. The blank warehouse scene returned, with only a whole bunch of bodies littering the floor. Then Caitlin was by his side, still wary and ready with her pistol.
“Paz,” Cort Wesley managed. “I think I saw him.”
“Just settle down, Cort Wesley. You’re bleeding.”
He reached up found the warm blood spilling from the gash on his forehead, more of it leaking out through his midsection, where the giant’s knife had grazed it. Caitlin helped him to his feet and supported him as her eyes swept about the confines of the warehouse, empty save for the eight or so bodies spilled on the floor, testament to the carnage the real bullets had left behind.
“Well, Cort Wesley,” she said, gun still held at the ready, “I know one thing the boys aren’t getting for Christmas.”
PART TEN
I think the reason the Rangers have survived since 1823 is our ability to adapt. The Rangers went from single-shot pistol to the Colt, from the horse to the automobile, and now we’ve grabbed onto the computer age, DNA, and new crime scene technologies. You know, you can move forward or you can stay still and die.
—Former Texas Ranger Tracy Murphree as told to Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr., eds., Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century
96
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“It was Paz, Ranger,” Cort Wesley insisted, “it had to be. He’d smeared that beetle shit all over him to confuse the sons of bitches. I’m telling you, he was in that warehouse.”
Caitlin stood next to him over the grave of Boone Masters, a few days later, after picking him up at the hospital, where he’d been treated for blood loss and a concussion. “If he was, you were the only one who saw him, and I haven’t heard a word from the colonel, not a peep.”
“How many human skeletons did they find at that farm in Glasscock County?”
“Nobody’s talking much.”
“Paz is alive, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said adamantly, “and he saved my life.”
Caitlin gave him a closer look, especially the bandage covering the stitched wound on his forehead and the bulges where similar wraps covered the slash wounds under his shirt. He was moving the slowest she’d ever seen him, each step seeming to bring a grimace.
“You suffered a concussion, Cort Wesley,” she told him. “Why don’t we pass what you think you saw off to that?”
“Then how…”
He let his words trail off when they both spotted Captain Tepper approaching slowly over the grass, smoking a Marlboro, which he discarded and stamped out with a boot as he neared them.
“I tried to switch to those e-cigarettes,” he said, “but I couldn’t find the goddamn switch.” Tepper regarded the small headstone quickly, then looked back at the two of them. “I figured you’d be here. Brings back faded memories of my own dad’s funeral. Son of a bitch was so ornery even the undertaker couldn’t coax a smile out of him.”
Cort Wesley didn’t remember his father’s funeral very well, the memories shrouded in a fog of guilt over not feeling the kind of regret he felt now. Boone Masters hadn’t been the churchgoing type, but it turned out he’d given more than his share to the diocese—enough so a spot was reserved for him here in the Holy Cross Cemetery, located a mile outside Loop 1604, on Nacogdoches Road. It was a beautiful site, the graves taking up only a small portion of the spacious, beautifully landscaped grounds, which looked even more pristine because most of the sites featured ground-level headstones. Somehow, standing here today, the setting seemed
to fit Boone Masters for the first time.
“You didn’t come out here to enjoy a picnic lunch, Captain.”
“Nope,” Tepper told them both. “I’m here ’cause I wanted to hear how your little talk went with Calum Dane, firsthand.”
97
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EARLIER THAT DAY
“It’s good to see you alive, Ranger,” Dane had greeted, when Caitlin caught up with him at an oil well just about to strike, halfway between Midland and Odessa in the Permian Basin. “Good to see both of us alive.”
“That’s why I wanted to thank you in person for your help the other day, sir.”
“Any sign of Zhirnosky?”
“None, I’m afraid. He’s probably back in Russia by now, which makes him their problem.”
“He killed some of my men. He tried to take control of my company. Maybe we should go over there, hunt him down together. He told me something I think might help.”
“What’s that?”
“You think wiping out most of this country’s farmland was all he had in mind? Far from it, Ranger.”
“Can you be a bit more specific, sir?”
Dane spit a half-chewed toothpick to the ground and wedged another between his lips. “Why don’t you tell me about those two men in the car parked next to your truck first.”
“They’re New York City police detectives,” Caitlin told him. “They’ve got a few questions for you. I’d recommend you have a lawyer present.”
“You brought them here.”
“They asked for my help. Professional courtesy.”
“Am I missing something, Ranger?”
“Not here, back in New York,” Caitlin said, reaching out to pluck the fresh toothpick from his mouth. “One of these, sir.”
Dane shook his head. “This about the young man who disappeared after disrupting my shareholders’ conference?”
“It is. Your people did a great job of sanitizing the crime scene. Problem was, they forgot to check the elevator. That’s where the NYPD found one of these,” Caitlin told him, flashing the toothpick she was still holding. “Those detectives are here with a warrant for your DNA. If it matches the toothpick that was found in the elevator, I’d say you’re gonna be in a heap of trouble, Mr. Dane.”