Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  * * *

  Caitlin followed al-Aziz through the lingering chaos to the Chamber of Horrors, laggardly at first, forcing the light-headedness from her consciousness and summoning whatever it took to gather herself and beat back the pounding that felt like a knife poking around inside her skull.

  She fired when al-Aziz neared the flat-roofed modular building, but her shots flew wildly askew. He spun and returned her fire with his own, just before disappearing into the structure.

  Caitlin stayed on his tail, charging toward the same double doors al-Aziz had used, into a black void. Suddenly she was a little girl again, struck by the memory of her father forcing her to board a similar ride with him when she was a kid.

  I’m too scared!

  That’s why you have to do this, little girl.

  Her father had dragged her on and lifted her into the lead car, next to him. She was still crying when the car crashed through a pair of double doors painted to look like the devil’s mouth.

  Now Caitlin found herself charging through a set of double doors made up to look like … the devil’s mouth. The warped wood and fading colors made Satan’s teeth seem chipped.

  Because this was the very same Chamber of Horrors, the same ride that had terrified her as a child, around thirty years ago. Time circled about, catching up, and Caitlin half expected to see her father in the next car as dangling skeletons dropped down before her.

  * * *

  Paz’s face was jammed close enough to the track to smell the grease lubricant. He was helpless to do anything but force his neck and shoulder muscles up against Seyyef’s desperately determined thrust downward. Paz, who had once pushed a man’s face against a churning fan belt, wondered if this was payback for that. His entire life experience was on rewind, seeming to go only as far back as the first time he’d met the gaze of his Texas Ranger, Caitlin Strong. Wanting the glare that looked back at him to be his. To feel what she did, behind those steely eyes that had changed his life even as he was trying to take hers.

  Paz felt the heat of the tracks, imagined the sparks generated by the friction flying upward when his skin met steel. And then he saw Caitlin Strong’s eyes in his mind. It was enough to launch him backwards, feeling the sinews tearing in his neck muscles as he twisted around. Facing Seyyef, the brute’s breath blowing a stench like roadkill into him, Paz smashed his ridged knuckles into a neck wrapped in layers of muscle. Felt them crunch into the softer cartilage, and the cartilage giving way in their path.

  Coming apart, shattering. The man’s breath bottlenecking in his throat, his face reddening, only forty-five seconds to a minute at most before he lost consciousness. Paz felt his balance waver as the coaster dropped into its final dip, sweeping round the perimeter of Klyde Warren Park, over Olive Street, in the same moment that Seyyef sank his hands into Paz’s throat.

  * * *

  The past and present swirled together, merging, and Caitlin was a little girl, terrified of the dark once again. Monsters jumping out at her everywhere, even though she was on foot instead of huddled against her father in the lead car. Same monsters then as now, with some tweaking and touch-up. The ride had seemed so big and long then, so short and confined now, the real monster she sought lost to her somewhere in the darkness.

  A shot rang out and a squiggly, slimy, insect-like thing dropped from the ceiling, severed from its guide wire. The only light came from the face of a clown with red bulbs for eyes, the constant din of laughter emanating from its mouth forming the only sound breaking the silence, except for the stray echoes of al-Aziz’s gunshot, which left her hugging the floor.

  She felt something cool, smelled something sweet, watched a faux ground mist formed of some dry ice concoction waft over a tombstone-rich fake ground, ghostlike beings lurching out of coffins rising from open graves. Caitlin almost shot two of them, then crawled on with the SIG Sauer extended before her, into the thickest reaches of the mist. Like she’d just dropped out of sight.

  Then the graveyard was gone and she found herself in the tight, twisting confines of what looked like a cave, with snapping teeth attached to alien heads shooting out at her, one after the other, triggered by proximity sensors.

  You have to do this, little girl.

  Why, Daddy? Why?

  Because fear ain’t got no place in your life. I don’t ever want you to be scared of anything, not a single thing.

  And it had worked. After that first ride through this very Chamber of Horrors, Caitlin was never scared of anything again. Frightened maybe, but never scared. And only in later years, when the truth that she had suppressed the memory of witnessing her mother’s murder was revealed, did she realize why: because after that, whether she remembered it or not, her father had known he had to make her confront her fears to the point of becoming inoculated against them.

  Caitlin found herself in a fake, fog-drenched bog. She remembered how creatures sprang up through trapdoors in the floor. Banshees or something, she thought, all dressed in shapeless black rags. She found herself shooting them as they burst upward, figuring al-Aziz might be among them.

  More gunshots rang out from beyond the bog section of the Chamber of Horrors, and Caitlin fired back in their general direction, no worries about hitting innocent bystanders. Her memory of this place sharpened, time rewinding inside her throbbing head, which felt stuffed with cotton. It was like she was six years old again, wishing only that the ride would end. And it would, soon. Just one more section to traverse before she spilled out a set of double exit doors that matched the entrance.

  Caitlin raced that way, more of al-Aziz’s bullets pinging the darkness, past and present melting together.

  * * *

  Guillermo Paz felt the blood bubbling in his brain, his breath all backed up and his lungs ready to burst, the slowly dying Seyyef squeezing the life out of him as well. Paz realized their car was roaring toward the gravity-fed ride’s end, back at the children’s park, barreling along into the final straightaway, where the attendant would brake the line of attached cars to a stop.

  Except there was no attendant present anymore.

  Which meant nobody was present to slow the cars’ pace, meaning a violent collision with a standing set of identical cars currently occupying the rearmost section of the track. Meaning …

  Feeling his thoughts beginning to slow, Paz worked his hands up between him and Seyyef, under the massive shape that seemed to be crushing his chest. He found a place deep inside himself where a reserve of strength had been building, from the time when he was a boy in his native Venezuela and a priest had died in his arms to the day a glimpse of his Texas Ranger’s eyes had changed his life forever. Then Paz was hoisting Seyyef from him, the man’s massive shape seeming to float before coming back down on the track, an instant before the two sets of cars rammed together.

  Seyyef was crushed between them, his bones sounding like wood snapping when they broke, and Paz felt himself launched upward, breathing in the warm air as he went flying.

  * * *

  The final section of the Chamber of Horrors featured a swerving obstacle course through various monsters lunging for the cars as they passed. Caitlin drew close enough to them to smell the fake fur and what she now realized was foam, rubber, and latex. She wasn’t dizzy anymore, but her footing still didn’t feel steady and she didn’t trust her aim.

  She knew al-Aziz would use the lunging, lurching creatures for cover, would launch himself on her from behind them, with whatever bullets he had left.

  Caitlin pushed herself the final stretch of the way, through the slog of her thoughts, which felt rich with slurry, time moving in jumps instead of a smooth sweep of a second hand. Almost to the final stretch of the Chamber of Horrors, the mechanical monsters that had haunted her youth poised to pounce from the shadows.

  Caitlin almost tripped on a knee-high boulder made of papier-mâché. An idea struck her and she shoved it along, propelling it like a soccer ball to follow the general line of the track the cars rode alon
g. Triggered into action, the monsters lunged out, one after another, claws and talons stretching over the reach of the rails.

  A shape trailed them, removed from the camouflage they provided, a shape that merged with their collective menace as Caitlin opened up with her SIG. She fired until the slide locked open, her ears burning from the percussion inside the close quarters.

  A mixture of fur, rubber, and plastic fluttered through the air, which was rich with the scent of glue instead of blood. Her bullets had tumbled the monsters of her youth from their perches, left them in a heap on the floor.

  Along with a monster from her present.

  Hatim Abd al-Aziz, supreme military commander of ISIS, lay on his back with his eyes open and glazed, amid the marble spheres loosed from the heads of the stitched-together skulls, which weren’t nearly as terrifying as she recalled, after all.

  Caitlin made sure he was dead and sank to her knees, conscious suddenly of a buzzing in her jeans pocket. She remembered she’d silenced her phone, and she drew it out to find a call coming in from Cort Wesley.

  * * *

  Daniel Cross hit St. Paul Street, following the flow of the crowd before him and looping around to head toward the entrance to the DART station, which was clearly visible across the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. His breath was already heaving, and his legs felt like deadweights. People were shoving their way past him like he wasn’t even there. He turned back to check for possible pursuit, someone with a gun following him from the park.

  So he never saw the old, scuffed boot that tripped him up. His face hit the pavement with a thud, scattering a bunch of people fleeing the park. Then he felt his head jerked up by the hair until he was facing an old man who looked like somebody had sucked the life from his face with a vacuum cleaner.

  “Bet that hurt, son, didn’t it?” said Captain D. W. Tepper, crouching to slap a pair of handcuffs in place as Pierre Beauchamp of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police watched, gun drawn, for anyone else who might be coming.

  104

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “Where the hell you been, Ranger?” Cort Wesley said, Caitlin finally answering her phone when he pulled into the McKinney Garage in downtown Houston and squeezed into a space meant for a compact car on the second level.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Cort Wesley.”

  “Yeah? Well, you need to get the team to Houston.”

  “Houston?” she asked, the world seeming to be angled sharply to one side. “I’m all the way up in Dallas. Al-Aziz is dead. We got this licked.”

  “No we don’t. Not even close.”

  * * *

  “No way we’re gonna get there in time, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin told him, after he’d quickly sketched out what they were facing. “No way.”

  “Then tell me what I’m dealing with,” he said, bypassing the elevator for the stairwell that descended into the swirling length of tunnels that ran beneath the city. “Tell me about this shit that ISIS is going to blow up.”

  “Did you say blow up?”

  “I did.”

  “Then, as bad as you thought things were,” Caitlin said, thinking of what she now knew about the weapon bred from waters deep beneath the Comanche reservation, “they just got a whole lot worse…”

  * * *

  Caitlin’s head was throbbing even more by the time she finished explaining to Cort Wesley what he was up against—a mutant strain of corn fungus turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

  “The Comanche have hundreds of pounds of the stuff stored away, Ranger,” he said, when she’d finished.

  “Did you say hundreds?”

  “Close, anyway. I saw it for myself. Minus maybe ten backpacks’ worth that’s currently in the hands of ISIS. Enough to kill a whole lot of people in the tunnels beneath Houston. Confined space, poor ventilation … A smell could last a good long while, at least ’til everyone down there’s dead.”

  “How’d they put something like that together so fast?”

  “They didn’t; Ela and her cousins did. It’s their plan, their backpacks. And they’re all dead now, Ela included.”

  “Dylan?” Caitlin posed fearfully.

  “With me, though I wouldn’t say safe and sound, exactly.”

  Caitlin was running it all through her mind: how Dylan had been set up; where the Lost Boys fit into the picture; the mixed-up motivations of Ela Nocona, no doubt influenced by her grandfather, who was still fighting the wars of the nineteenth century; ISIS showing up on the Comanche Indian reservation, thanks to Daniel Cross.

  “Ranger?”

  “I’m here, Cort Wesley.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Closing on five o’clock.”

  “Rush hour,” Caitlin told him, the words echoing painfully in her head. “That’s when the ISIS fighters will set off these bombs. There’ll be thousands of people down there then, tens of thousands. What about turning the Houston police into the cavalry?”

  “Only if you want to guarantee that ISIS sets the bombs off at the first sight of cops supervising a mass evacuation.”

  Caitlin tried to do some calculations in her head, but it was like drawing on a blackboard without chalk, so she started for the Chamber of Horrors exit instead, the world gone all wobbly again. “I can round up Jones, Paz, and whoever else I can rope in. Get back to our Black Hawks.”

  “Black Hawks or not, there’s no way you can get here in time. Leave this up to me.”

  “Against, what, maybe ten ISIS fighters?”

  “I’ve got Dylan with me.”

  “He’s still just a kid, Cort Wesley.”

  Cort Wesley glanced at his oldest son, remembered him looking up from the body of Ela Nocona.

  She’s dead, son.

  I think I knew that.

  “But he’s got this coming to him. And I can hardly hear what you’re saying. Where the hell are you, Ranger?”

  Caitlin realized her speech was slurred. “A Chamber of Horrors, at a carnival.”

  “No, really.”

  105

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  The tunnels felt like an airport concourse to Cort Wesley, this section of the Downtown Loop crammed with shops and stores layered amid winding stretches of tiled walls, with lighting perched on either side of the ceilings forming a ribbon of brightness stretching as far ahead as he could see. The pedestrian thoroughfares featured backlit signage tracing the entire sprawling, checkerboard length of the tunnels. Symbols and signs clearly denoted where an observer was standing in relation to where he might want to go. The immediate neighborhood above was highlighted as a yellow outline traced over royal-blue markings. Ideal refuge from the heat, bad weather, and cluttered streets above.

  It wasn’t nearly as crowded as Cort Wesley had feared, but rush hour hadn’t officially started yet. That thought made him wonder whether the deadly aroma concentrated down here might leak out to the streets above and claim victims there as well. The mere possibility was too awful to even contemplate.

  “Jesus,” Dylan said, scratching at his scalp. “How far did you say this goes?”

  “A hundred city blocks, give or take a few, this section maybe the most congested of all.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel a lot better.” Now Dylan still had his father’s Smith & Wesson. It was the first time he’d actually carried a gun, and the possibility that he was going to need to use it was suddenly very real. “So here we are. What’s the plan, Dad?”

  From his pocket, Cort Wesley took Ela’s bloodstained map that featured ten red Xs designating those choke points along the Downtown Loop handling the spill of pedestrians from Houston’s most congested business area. Soon to be packed with mothers and fathers heading home to their families, having no idea what awaited them. He figured all the bombs would be triggered together. And, given the fluctuating signal strength down here, the ISIS fighters would likely remain close to wherever they’d planted their respective backpacks, right up unt
il the last moment. Dial the triggering number and then dash up the nearest exit stairs before the deadly aroma began to spread. Or hold their positions until the last moments before Zero Hour on the chance plans changed at the last minute.

  “So what do we do?” Dylan said, gazing at the map. “Divide them up or something?”

  Cort Wesley shook his head. “Sorry, son.”

  “About what?”

  “Caitlin’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “I’d like you to sit this one out.”

  Dylan’s eyes widened. “You said I had this coming to me. I heard you.”

  “I know, and you do. This is just the way it has to be.”

  “Because you say so.”

  “Because I say so. Wait for me at the food court down that way,” Cort Wesley said, pointing east. “Things go bad, get your ass out of there. And hold your breath.”

  106

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley moved toward the closest X on his Ela’s map covering the Downtown Loop, pondering exactly how the ISIS fighters, and the young Comanche before them, intended to pull this off, as he weaved his way past a collection of retail stores, the names of which blurred into each other. There were covered concrete planters every few hundred feet or so, ornately concealing trash receptacles within. He quickly checked a few out and found them surprisingly free of refuse and thus perfect to plant the deadly bioweapon. Wouldn’t even need much explosive to ignite the blasts and spread a mist in all directions, carrying the deadly aroma and rising and clinging to the walls and ceiling within such a confined space. Doubtful it would even dissipate, in that scenario, until everyone within its reach was dead.

  Cort Wesley reached the first concrete planter marked with an X on the map Ela had given Dylan. He held back, inspecting the area for the right face, the right bent of eyes, a still figure among all the moving ones.