Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  How wrong he turned out to be.

  Somehow Steeldust Jack was certain he felt, actually felt, the hot gush of air blowing past his ear an instant before the flames erupted. He wasn’t sure where the fire actually started—everywhere at once, it seemed. One minute the dusk air was cool and crisp, and the next it was superheated amid the blinding glow of an inferno that swept across the land like a blanket being draped on a body. It was dark and then it was bright, with seemingly no transition, as if he’d blinked the flames to life between breaths.

  The smell he’d detected on the air before blew into him with a force that nearly toppled Jack Strong from his feet. The noxious scent of oil, he realized, now aflame with burned pine, grass, and oak added to the mixture. Steeldust Jack wasn’t thinking right then about how the Comanche had managed to light the whole of the oil nearest the ground on fire. Most likely, they’d figured out some way to force it up to the surface, if it wasn’t there already, and then let it spread in pools, following the natural grade of the land. But Steeldust Jack wasn’t thinking of that.

  He was thinking of the screams. Just a few to start with, but increasing by the second as the flame burst fed by the oil captured more and more of Rockefeller’s men in its grasp. The worst of the screams came when those who escaped the initial burst realized they were trapped by walls of flames on all sides of them. Jack Strong thought he saw men, some with their clothes flaming, tearing out for the stream that supplied the reservation with its water. And when they got close, a fresh wall of flames spurted upward, yet another trap sprung.

  The screams only got worse from there.

  And kept coming.

  Steeldust Jack thought he’d never lose sleep over anything but memories of the Civil War again, only he was wrong. The awful screaming and stench of burning flesh and hair, pushing through the oil-rich air, was worse than any battle he’d fought in or any carnage he’d seen.

  Nature takes care of its own, Isa-tai had told him.

  He’d been a fool not to listen, not to realize that damn kid had something deadly up his sleeve—carried out in concert, no doubt, with the tribal elders holding his leash. Steeldust Jack had tried to warn off John D. Rockefeller, but the man wasn’t hearing it, convinced that his wealth and power, rising behind the guise of Standard Oil, insulated him from the kind of violent opposition he was hardly averse to dispensing himself. The Comanche likely would have accepted the men killed in the hotel as trade for the three boys dragged to death the day before, but once Rockefeller wouldn’t back down, all bets were off.

  Jack Strong cursed himself for not recognizing the pungent scent of oil on the air, for not figuring the reservation’s abandonment had to have some deadly plan behind it. Now dozens of men were being roasted alive, their plight worsened by the secondary explosions that came when the oily flames found boxes of dynamite loaded onto wagons. Huge curtains of flame exploded both out and up; the hot gush of wind blown into him was comparable to a cannon’s backdraft.

  Steeldust Jack made himself stay on the hilltop until the echoes of the final screams had faded into the descending night. He’d never get that sound from his ears, or the smell from his nostrils. Nor had he ever felt more helpless. The Indians may have prevailed in this battle, but the war against the likes of John D. Rockefeller was one they were destined to lose.

  The flames were still raging when Jack Strong finally walked his horse down the hillside. He wasn’t sure if Rockefeller was among the survivors who’d managed to flee. But before he could give the matter more thought, his eyes settled on one of the strangest sights he’d ever seen.

  The flames had all spread downwind from the Comanche corn crops, miraculously sparing them. Stalks blew in the smoke-rich air, seeming to dodge the floating embers that disappeared into the fall of night before Steeldust Jack’s eyes.

  91

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Opinions vary as to how many of Rockefeller’s men died that day,” D.W. Tepper finished. “I’ve heard as many as fifty to as few as a dozen. You won’t find any of that written up in any Texas history book, but it’s supposed to be the God’s honest truth of what happened.”

  “But you don’t think so,” said Caitlin.

  “In spite of all the money he spread around, I think there were plenty in Austin back then who wanted John D. Rockefeller, and everything he represented, out of the state. He was a Northerner, and I doubt the folks in Austin fancied him any more than the Comanche did. Who knows, maybe they were in it together, since where else did the money come from to help the Indians rebuild the reservation? They reclaimed the land sometime in the next decade, led by a leader who called himself White Eagle.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was, Ranger.”

  “If it’s not the whole truth, it’s something close. All that’s missing is the part about what killed those gunmen in the hotel. We found a hidden chamber in that cave just off White Eagle’s land that looked like something out of the Inquisition. I think they chained Comanche warriors inside there after pumping them full of peyote and unleashing them to kill. I think they used a version of this neurotoxin ISIS is after to incapacitate their victims first, so they couldn’t fight back. Create the illusion it was monsters, not men, who did it. Nature taking care of its own,” Caitlin said, repeating the words of both White Eagle and Isa-tai. “Just like that work foreman found torn apart a couple nights ago, and Rockefeller’s hired guns in 1874. History repeating itself, the Comanche making the same point now they made back then.”

  Caitlin stopped short of mentioning Dylan’s Miraculous Medal being found in the vicinity of the construction foreman’s body, the boy being set up as the killer by the same girl who’d rescued him from the woods last night—a contradiction she still couldn’t make sense of.

  Caitlin watched Tepper fan a Marlboro from his pack and then press it back downward when he caught her disapproving stare. “Does this story belong in the fact or fiction section of the library, Ranger?”

  “You tell me, D.W., because I believe there’s one chapter still missing.”

  This time, Tepper finished the process of knocking his Marlboro from the pack. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and raised his lighter, Caitlin’s glare stopping him.

  “We’re about to take on ISIS, Ranger. I believe I’m entitled to a smoke. Now, if you want to know how things finished up for Steeldust Jack Strong and John D. Rockefeller, I need to hear what Cray Rawls told you, first.”

  “He believes he’s found the cure for cancer on that reservation, Captain.”

  “And what’s that got to do with whatever ISIS is after?” Tepper asked her, finally lighting his cigarette.

  “I think they’re one and the same. What survived the fire back in Steeldust Jack’s time? What was it the Comanche needed to preserve?”

  “Their corn.”

  “Not just the corn,” Caitlin told him. “Something that was growing on it. Something that lengthened the life span of the Comanche, just like it lengthened the lives of the giant bats that attacked us the other night.”

  “You can explain how that pertains to ISIS on the way,” Jones said, stepping back into the office and leaving the door open behind him. “I’ve got choppers prepping now. We need to get a move on.”

  “Choppers, plural?”

  “Looks like we’re going to war up in Dallas,” Jones said, turning all his focus on Caitlin. “Speaking of which, where’s your boyfriend?”

  Tepper dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it with his boot. “I must’ve forgot to mention that apparently he’s left the building with Elvis. Your friend King Kong says he got a text message and tore off.”

  “A text message from who?”

  “I’ll give you two guesses, Ranger.”

  92

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Dylan was still alive.

  That was something, anyway, Cort Wesley figured. He clutched his cell phone in his grasp as he drove, to mak
e sure he’d feel the buzz of his son’s next text message coming through. He hadn’t recognized the phone number, then saw DYLAN in the first text and knew his son must be using a burner phone and, against everything that made any sense at all, had returned to the Comanche reservation where he could easily have died the night before.

  HURRY! the next message had pleaded, after explaining where he was, and that’s what Cort Wesley had been doing ever since, driving into the sun until it burned his eyes. For some reason, he didn’t put on his sunglasses or lower the visor, maybe to make it so he couldn’t see things clearly, since, when it came to Dylan, he might as well be seeing nothing.

  “Well, bubba,” Leroy Epps started, from the passenger seat.

  “I don’t want to hear it, champ.”

  “You ain’t even got a notion of what I was gonna say.”

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Never had kids of my own,” the ghost said, settling back in the seat. “Never going to now, circumstances being what they is.” Epps regarded Cort Wesley closer. “That makes yours as close as I’m gonna come, but I’m in no particular rush to see one of them on my side instead of yours.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  For some reason, he had the sense that Dylan had uncovered whatever Daniel Cross had found on the Comanche reservation while working for Sam Bob Jackson, whatever it was he’d used to kill two dozen people in an Austin diner and now intended to hand over to ISIS.

  It was a beautiful day, the afternoon heat beginning to build outside his truck, just making its presence felt inside the cab. Cort Wesley realized he was sweating up a storm and that he’d neglected to turn on the air-conditioning after closing the truck’s windows. He slid them open again, needing to feel the real air and hear the sounds of the outside.

  “’ Bout time, bubba,” the ghost of Leroy Epps told him. “I didn’t think I could sweat no more, but at two hundred degrees, I guess anything’s possible.”

  “Why don’t you hitch a ride with somebody else, then?”

  “And miss out on such wonderful company and conversation? You out of your mind?”

  “I’m talking to a goddamn ghost.”

  Cort Wesley could have sworn he heard the leather crackle as old Leroy leaned back in his seat and stuck his right hand out the window. “Your boy’s always one to finish what he starts, bubba.”

  “The problem being, champ, maybe this is the time it finishes him instead.”

  93

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Jones had arranged for a pair of Black Hawk UH-60 helicopters out of Martindale, a Texas Army National Guard airfield in eastern San Antonio, ten miles from Texas Ranger Company F headquarters. Guillermo Paz’s seven men, along with their weapons, were squeezed into the trailing Black Hawk, while Jones’s chopper was running in the lead.

  Caitlin had never ridden in a Black Hawk before, but her unhinged nerves settled a few minutes after takeoff. Across from her, Young Roger looked much the worse for wear, doing his best to compose himself with deep breath after deep breath. Guillermo Paz sat on the other side of her, with Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Pierre Beauchamp seated next to Young Roger. Captain Tepper was along for the ride, too, just as Cort Wesley should have been, if he weren’t off somewhere else, not answering her calls.

  Dylan …

  Caitlin didn’t need Cort Wesley to call to tell her that much. The boy had an uncanny nose for trouble, but this time he may have finally found a Goliath he couldn’t drop with a slingshot. Something was going on for sure on that Indian reservation, and Dylan was right in the middle of all of it. Apple of his father’s eye, sticking that nose of his where it didn’t belong.

  “We got twenty-seven minutes until we land at the Grand Prairie base on Mountain Creek Lake, Ranger,” Tepper said over his headset, which was just loud enough to be heard over the engine and rotor sounds. “That’s how long you got to tell us less fortunate souls what you figured out.”

  “Comes down to fungus, Captain.”

  “Fungus?”

  “Corn fungus, specifically,” Caitlin told them all, recalling Cray Rawls’s revelations and ready to gauge Young Roger’s milk-white face for a reaction. “Also known by its Aztec name of cuitlacoche. Looks like a gray, stone-shaped growth when the corn’s picked, and turns into a gunky, tar-like mush when cooked.”

  “Did I pass out from exhaustion, or did you just call a fungus the weapon of mass destruction that ISIS is after?” Tepper groused, shaking his head.

  Young Roger answered him before Caitlin had the chance. “Mexican farmers also call it el oro negro, or black gold.”

  “Thanks, son, I truly appreciate the agricultural perspective here.”

  But Young Roger wasn’t finished yet. “The fungus grows inside corn husks. Cuitlacoche flourishes when droplets of rain seep into a stalk of corn and the kernels begin to rot. The fungus can grow over, or side by side with, the kernels themselves.”

  “So just how,” Jones chimed in, “do we go from there to a genuine weapon of mass destruction?”

  “I’d be guessing, without an actual specimen to analyze.”

  “So guess, son.”

  “A catalyst.” Young Roger shrugged, as if he wasn’t totally convinced himself. “Something that altered the genetic structure of the fungus to create a mutation that can be weaponized.”

  “Forget can be,” Jones said. “Try has been and will be.”

  “Not if we can help it,” Caitlin reminded him.

  “Figure of speech, Ranger.”

  “And you’re forgetting something, Jones, the wild card in all this: Cray Rawls wasn’t after what created that fungus because it’s a weapon; he was after it in the belief he’d found the cure for cancer.”

  “So how can something be deadly and medicinal at the same time?” Jones wondered.

  “Because plenty of the most effective drug therapies are, at their core, toxic,” Young Roger told him. “And the likelihood is that the Comanche developed a natural immunity and resistance to the toxic effects of this particular cuitlacoche. While this strain might kill anyone exposed to it in concentrated forms, like the people in that Austin diner, it extended the lives of these Comanche to a dramatically quantitative degree and basically eliminated cancer from their existence.”

  “So Native peoples have been eating this shit since the time of the Aztecs.” Jones nodded. “Only, not all of them lived forever and, last time I checked, they never created a weapon of mass destruction. One of you want to try telling me what’s different here?”

  “I believe I may have an idea,” said Pierre Beauchamp of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  94

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Dylan stroked Ela’s hair, continuing to say anything that came to his mind, in the hope she’d open her eyes again. When she didn’t, he just kept stroking, speaking, and hoping.

  He wished he’d never taken that damn Native American studies class, wished he’d never met her or got involved in all this.

  What was I thinking?

  He wasn’t. Again. Dropping out of school, temporarily or not, to take part in an adventure for a greater cause that had turned out to be a crock of shit. He was only here because he was part of a grand scheme that Ela had ultimately abandoned. But for some reason that didn’t bother him, beyond the fact that he’d let himself be played for a fool.

  Again.

  It was like he had “Sucker for Love” tattooed across his forehead. Was it really that obvious?

  Dylan was a prisoner of his emotions, just as Ela was of her beliefs. In both cases, their vision had ended up skewed; they had seen what they wanted to be before them, instead of what was really there.

  “We’re going to stop this,” he heard himself saying. “No one else is going to get hurt.”

  He had no idea how the shit piled in that limestone storage chamber worked, only that it had to be the source of whatever Ela and the Lost Boys had reall
y been up to—whatever the schematic, kind of a map, of some area of Houston was really about.

  Dylan …

  He heard his father’s voice in his head, wanted to tell Cort Wesley that he had been right all along and that Dylan only wished he could do it all over again.

  “Dylan.”

  This time the voice was accompanied by a gentle but strong grasp of his shoulder. He looked up to see Cort Wesley Masters leaning over him, eyeing Ela sadly.

  “She’s dead, son.”

  “I … think I knew that.”

  Dylan retrieved the schematic, map, or whatever it was from the ground and extended it upward.

  “What’s this?” his father asked him.

  “You tell me, Dad,” he said, feeling the tears welling in his eyes. “But whatever it is, it’s not good.”

  95

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “Rawls pretty much confirmed my thinking when he finally came clean about the fact he’s there for water and not oil,” Pierre Beauchamp continued, inside the Black Hawk cabin, as they streaked through the sky toward Dallas. “That Inuit village where the residents all died was located on a volcanic plain, directly over a fault line, accounting for high acid levels from time to time in the river they drew their water from. Before I came down here, I did some checking and learned there’s a similarly ancient volcanic plane located in the general area beneath that Indian reservation as well.”

  Probably right in the area of White Eagle’s patch of land, Caitlin thought, as Young Roger leaned forward.

  “So you figure some portion of the aquifer feeding the reservation its water has levels of acidity comparable to this river,” he presumed.

  Beauchamp nodded. “Corn wasn’t a staple of the Inuit diet; fish was. So, yes, I think the fish was contaminated with the very same toxin that killed all those people in that Austin diner. And since that area has been abandoned ever since, we have no way of knowing how often the toxicity has returned.”

  “But like you said,” started Caitlin, “fish was as much a part of the Inuit diet as corn is for the Comanche on that reservation. But I’m guessing only a small portion of the cuitlacoche is affected when the contaminated water leaches upward. And that’s the portion that can be weaponized.”