Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  He found a young man he first took to be a girl, thanks to hair clubbed back in a ponytail. The kid was pretending to push a broom, which he’d probably lifted from some maintenance closet. Cort Wesley headed in the kid’s general direction, appearing to look past him.

  Cort Wesley’s eyes held there a moment too long, and the terrorist’s eyes met his, thoughts and intentions freezing as the kid reached into his pocket. Maybe for a phone, maybe for a detonator, maybe for a weapon.

  Cort Wesley wasn’t about to wait any longer to find out. Before the kid’s hand had cleared his pocket, Cort Wesley was on him, slamming the kid’s head backwards until his skull cracked against one of the location markers. The glass lining it shattered, the impact strong enough to knock off all the interior lighting. The kid hung frozen there for an instant while Cort Wesley backed off as if nothing had happened. Then the kid slumped downward, leaving a wake of blood and glass above him.

  Cort Wesley pretended to rush to his aid, perfect cover to check the kid’s pockets for a phone, something he would use to communicate and perhaps to set off the explosives. His hand closed around a smart phone and pulled it out. The home screen was dominated by a timer, just ticking down below the twenty-minute mark.

  Cort Wesley clicked off the timer, watching it reset and freeze at 00:00. He hoped that meant this particular batch of the deadly cuitlacoche had been deactivated, hoped he could get to the rest of the terrorists before those twenty minutes clicked down, hoped ISIS didn’t have a backup plan in the form of a single operative who could trigger all the explosives at once.

  Giving no further thought to the first man he’d downed, Cort Wesley moved on to the next red X on his map.

  * * *

  Dylan reached the food court, the tunnel widening to the size of a city block with restaurants crammed on both sides. He spotted a Wendy’s, a Whataburger, a Salata, a Subway, and Beck’s Prime, along with barbecue and sushi places he’d never heard of. Several jutted out at strange angles to conform to the spherical shape of this section of the tunnels. A collection of tables, benches, and thick plants lined the concourse before them. He figured the plants must be fake, given the soft, refractive hue of the lighting that made it seem somebody had turned the dimmer switch too far down. Various food smells flooded his nostrils, making him realize that the long, runway-like tunnel he’d taken here smelled of nothing at all, except for an industrial solvent in one patch where a slick spot and caution cones indicated a recent cleanup. He kept checking his watch as five o’clock approached, hoping to spot his father coming, as opposed to mass hysteria breaking out, in the upcoming minutes.

  His dad had figured he’d be safe here, but that was wrong; he wouldn’t be safe anywhere—no one would. Those days were gone, especially for him, as long as he kept putting himself in situations like this. Ela Nocona wasn’t the first girl who’d manipulated him, but she had to be the last. Dylan promised himself that much, kind of a trade for him and his father getting out of this alive, along with everyone else currently occupying the tunnels of the Downtown Loop.

  What was I thinking?

  Walking away from school without a plan, missing spring football practice … for what exactly?

  What was I thinking?

  The more times Dylan asked himself that, the further he got from an answer. So he kept walking about the retail area, trying to sort it all out in his mind while he waited for his father.

  Then Dylan spotted a bearded figure with a backpack slung over his shoulder, meandering around a concrete trash receptacle out in the open between a takeout sushi establishment and a Starbucks.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley had left four downed ISIS fighters in his wake, their cell phone timers now deactivated. The second fighter had been even easier to spot than the first, their eyes meeting briefly before Cort Wesley pounced, shoving him through a nearby stairwell door, where he launched a series of blows that dropped the kid in a heap. The few witnesses about kept their distance, and Cort Wesley didn’t care whether they called the cops, response time being what it was. He’d be long gone from this area before anyone in uniform showed up.

  A third fighter was huddled in a shadowy corner, and the fourth was close enough to a men’s room to force him through the door and smash his head against a wall with enough force to drive fracture lines through the tile.

  That man’s timer had ticked below the five-minute mark, leaving him that long to reach the remaining six terrorists.

  “Hey, you!” a voice blared, when Cort Wesley emerged from the men’s room. “Stop right there!”

  A beat cop assigned to the tunnels, Cort Wesley saw; no, two of them. Both coming his way, giving chase when he ran.

  * * *

  Dylan approached the bearded man, pretending to be checking his cell phone, although never really taking his eyes off the man’s backpack. At that point he was unsure of his own intentions, was still unsure when the man unslung the backpack from his shoulder and brought it around before him.

  The man seemed ready to deposit the backpack in the nearest concrete trash container, when Dylan pounced. Dylan slammed into the guy as if he were a tackling dummy back at the football practice Dylan should’ve been attending right now. The impact drove both of them into a logjam of pedestrian traffic, Dylan using his shoulder to ram the man against the concrete wall.

  He could feel the guy’s bones crackle, seeming to recede and bounce back. The man’s air escaped him in a thick whoosh as his backpack went flying. Hit the ground and scattered college textbooks in all directions.

  The man’s terrified eyes met Dylan’s as he struggled for breath. Dylan backed off, hands in the air.

  “Sorry, man. Sorry.”

  Plenty of people watching him, trying to ascertain what had just happened, though keeping their distance. Among them, Dylan spotted a kid about his age silhouetted against the glow off a Wendy’s sign, clutching a backpack before him as if it were a baby.

  * * *

  Getting away from the cops in the tunnels was easy; Cort Wesley ducked into a stairwell that led up into a big office tower and let them slip right past him The problem was the last terrorist he’d taken out, slammed into a bathroom wall, had seen Cort Wesley coming in time to backpedal for that door. Plenty of time to trigger his explosives, but he hadn’t.

  Because he couldn’t.

  Because there must be a single trigger man, the others remaining in place until the very last possible moment to insure the bomb-laden backpacks they’d hidden remained undetected. Or maybe their intention was to all die down here, become martyrs to their cause.

  Then his cell phone rang and he realized he’d neglected to silence it.

  “We’ve got clearance to land in Sam Houston Park, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin informed him over a helicopter’s engine and rotor sounds.

  “How long?”

  “We’ll be on the ground in five.”

  “Not soon enough. I’m in the tunnels. This is going down now.”

  “Dylan with you?” she asked, after a pause.

  “Somewhere.”

  “Then get out of there, both of you.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Ranger,” he said, and ended the call.

  Then he spun through the door back into the tunnels, heading for the location of the next red X on the map.

  * * *

  Dylan had his father’s Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter drawn, steadied on the kid cradling his backpack, before he could rethink the action.

  “Drop it!” Dylan said to him, the gun held in a trembling hand by his hip now. “Drop it now!”

  The kid looked at him as people backed off, the bustling food court gone eerily quiet. It felt as if they were the only two people there, centered amid the benches and tables, the leaves of a pair of big plants shifting, as if brushed by the breeze.

  “He’s got a bomb!” Dylan yelled to all of them. “Everybody, run!” All his focus trained back on the kid now, imagining what his father or Caitlin woul
d do or say, as a flood of commuters stampeded from the retail area. “Drop it! You hear me? Drop the backpack or I’ll drop you!”

  Much to Dylan’s surprise, the kid before him let the backpack fall and raised his hands in the air. He was surprised, because it couldn’t be this easy.

  And it wasn’t.

  Because the kid was holding something black and flat in his hand. A smartphone.

  The trigger. Why else would he be down here, so far away from the others standing in the shadow of an exit?

  Shoot him! Dylan heard in his head.

  But could he shoot a kid no older than him, no older than Ela? And could he really be sure—like, a hundred percent?

  That thought formed just as the kid was maneuvering the phone in his grasp, getting his thumb into position. A single tap of a key was all it would take to trigger the explosives.

  Dylan fired the Smith & Wesson, and kept firing. Not at the kid but above him. Into the big-ass sprinkler head, cream-colored to render it all but indistinguishable from the ceiling dotted with recessed fixtures spilling dim light downward. The sprinkler featured a closed head, with water in the pipe held back by a fusible link that would be triggered at maybe 150 or so degrees.

  The bullets ruptured the head and punctured the link, releasing a steady stream of water directly over the kid maneuvering the phone in his hand. It slipped from his grasp and clacked to the floor, the kid lurching to retrieve it, when Dylan launched himself into motion.

  He crashed into the kid, tackling him to the floor and preventing him from reaching the phone. A nearby table toppled over, spilling food to the polished floor. Dylan felt the air forced out of the kid, his whole sternum rattling on impact. He was still groping and flailing for the phone, Dylan watching big red letters counting down below the one-minute mark. He jammed his left elbow under the kid’s chin to hold him in place and stretched his own right hand for the phone.

  49, 48, 47 …

  Almost there, the kid flailing at him, thrashing with his legs to no avail. Dylan grazed the phone casing with one finger, then another, feeling for the screen.

  37, 36, 35 …

  The kid was biting his other hand now, sinking his teeth in deep. Dylan gutted through the pain, kept stretching his fingers outward, aiming for the PAUSE button on the screen.

  30, 29, 28 …

  The kid kept biting. Dylan kept stretching, jerking himself sideways as the kid bit down harder. His index finger was over the glass now and lowering, finding PAUSE. Watching the screen freeze at 22 after he touched it with his finger. Then he managed to get the whole phone in his grasp and slammed it again and again into the floor, spitting pies of glass and metal in all directions until the thing was barely recognizable as a phone at all.

  Dylan stayed on top of the kid, pinning him, until a pair of cops yanked him off. As two more Houston officers stood with guns drawn, one of those cops pressed Dylan down right next to the kid and started to slap the handcuffs on.

  The kid wasn’t much older than him—the homegrown version, for sure, who’d probably spent the past few years waging make-believe war on shooting ranges and meeting in dark, dingy basements with the windows blacked out. Dylan met his hate-filled eyes, returning a glare the kid probably practiced in the mirror.

  “That was for Ela,” Dylan managed, with half his face still pressed hard against the tile, “you piece of shit.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Rangers were here before there was a Texas, and we have survived all that time. Now, we didn’t survive because we were good at riding horses. We didn’t survive because we can hunt or camp out on the prairie. We survived by being able to change with the times. When Texas needed Indian fighters, we were Indian fighters. When Texas needed border war fighters, we were that. When Texas needed someone to quell oil boom riots, we did that. When Texas needed detectives, we became that. When DNA became the mainstay of law enforcement work, we got good at that. We’ve had to change, and there have been some growing pains along the way. We have tripped and stumbled, and we’ve had times that were not our finest hours. But by and large we’ve had more successes than we’ve had misses. And we’re going to keep changing and evolving so we’re still here a hundred years from now.

  —Ranger Matt Cawthon, in Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013)

  HOUSTON, TEXAS; SIX WEEKS LATER

  “I’m really proud to be addressing you today,” Caitlin said to the students and families gathered on the football field of the Village School, which was adorned with the Vikings logo and the school color, navy blue. “I’d like to talk to you about a lot of things, but mostly I’d like to talk about bravery.”

  She focused on Dylan, Cort Wesley, and Luke, who were seated in the front row with the other dignitaries at the graduation ceremony. Beyond them was a sea of gowns, caps, and tassels, soon to be flipped from one side to the other before the caps were launched airborne. The warm air smelled fresh and clean, almost like incense. The scent of hope, Caitlin thought to herself, in stark contrast to skunk oil or, worse, the deadly cuitlacoche that had come ever so close to killing thousands, just a few miles away, beneath downtown Houston.

  “There’s a boy who goes to this school who’s about the bravest person I know, because he’s not afraid to be who he is. Folks like to think that gets easier as you get older, but it’s really not true. It only seems that way because, by then, most have given up trying. The difference between someone special and someone ordinary is that the one who’s special never gives up, no matter the odds. And the young man I’m talking about had the odds stacked against him, and it’s a credit to you folks out there that he’s been accepted here for who he is and has found a home.”

  Cheers and applause interrupted her remarks. Caitlin was glad for that and, even more, for Luke’s smile. She had no speech, just a few notes scribbled on some composition paper torn from a pad she’d bought at a drug store, the fringe fluttering atop the podium before her on the stage. She wore the clothes she always wore, because she figured that’s what people expected from her and would feel most comfortable with. Jeans and a light-blue shirt, Texas Ranger badge pinned to her chest, holstered SIG Sauer clipped to her belt.

  As the applause started to die down, she focused on Dylan and Cort Wesley, who were still clapping the hardest of anyone.

  * * *

  “I haven’t decided if I’m going back to school,” Dylan had told Caitlin and Cort Wesley the week before, out of nowhere, while they sat on the front porch. “I’m going to need some more time.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a difficult decision to me,” Cort Wesley said.

  “I’ve got some stuff I need to sort out, Dad.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stuff. I’m tired of getting involved with people who change me.”

  “Ela?” Caitlin said to him.

  “I go back there, she’s all I’ll think of. What’s the point?”

  Cort Wesley remained restrained. “Getting past it, son.”

  “That’s easy for you—for both of you—isn’t it? But I’m not like that. I want to be, but I’m not.” Dylan swept the hair from his face and swallowed hard. “Why do you figure she changed her mind?”

  “Because somebody finally changed her,” Caitlin told him.

  * * *

  “Texas is full of brave folks, now and in the past,” Caitlin resumed, after checking her notes, finally used to the garbled feedback of her own voice from the speakers. “I’m the fifth in my family to become a Texas Ranger. The first was named Steeldust Jack Strong, and he fought for anyone who was in the right, out of a sense of duty. The Comanche, for example, against none other than John D. Rockefeller. He witnessed the Comanche burn their own land to deny it to Standard Oil. Most figure that was the end of the story, but it wasn’t. Rockefeller had a hatred for Texas that knew no bounds, and he saw his opportunity to get his revenge, once the firs
t oil boom hit, with that strike in Corsicana in 1894. Figured he could move in and pretty much buy up the state. Turned out he didn’t know Texas and he didn’t know Texans, especially one named Steeldust Jack Strong.”

  NEW YORK; 1895

  John D. Rockefeller was almost always the first one into Standard Oil headquarters on 26 Broadway, where it had moved from Cleveland a decade before. He liked nothing better than to see the sunrise from his office window. But, on this morning, he entered to see his chair already occupied by a grizzled, unshaven man smoking one of his cigars.

  “’Morning, Mr. Rockefeller,” Jack Strong greeted him, lifting his boots up atop the man’s desk. “I hope you don’t mind me making myself comfortable while I was waiting for you.”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  “Why, I took the train, of course. My first time out of Texas since the Civil War.”

  Recognition flashed in Rockefeller’s eyes, along with the loathing stirred by the memories of their previous encounters. “Then you’ve never seen a Northern jail.”

  “No, sir, I have not. Just like you’ve never seen the inside of a Texas jail—or any cell, for that matter. I don’t do much rangering no more. Figure it’s better left to younger folk like my own son, William Ray, who made this here trip with me, on account of he didn’t want to miss the fun.”

  “There’s laws against carrying guns in New York, Ranger.”

  Steeldust Jack lowered his boots from the desk, the effort clearly paining him, the years having treated his bad leg unkindly. “That’s fine, ’cause I didn’t bring one. Did bring this, though,” he said, sliding a set of trifold pages from his pants pocket.

  Rockefeller took the document in hand tentatively, almost as if he expected it to burn his fingers. “What’s this?”

  “A writ signed by Texas governor Jim Hogg, serving notice of suspension of Standard Oil’s business licenses in the State of Texas, subject to investigation for violations of the Sherman Antitrust statutes.”

  “You have any idea what you just said, Ranger?”