Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  Orange flashes burst from the muzzles, followed by a constant stream of color burning through the sun-drenched air. The men moved as they kept shooting, no quarter or square inch of space spared. Their bullets tore into the SUV, Caitlin following the three figures inside jumping and jerking about as the bullets pulverized them.

  “Now, you are alone,” Li Zhen taunted. “How does it feel, Ranger?”

  She drew her own pistol and leveled it straight at him. “We’re leaving, sir, with you under arrest.”

  Zhen didn’t move, his gaze still focused downward through the window, not even bothering to regard her as if unaffected by her intention.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he told her.

  “You just murdered three Texas Rangers. You just declared war on the state of Texas.”

  Zhen finally turned her way again, his expression flat and smug. “I will never see the inside of a jail or a court, and you know it. It will be reported that you and the other three Rangers died in a traffic accident, something like that. Your vehicle exploded, leaving no remains at all.”

  Caitlin held her SIG Sauer steady on him. “How’s that exactly, sir?”

  “Turn around, Ranger.”

  Caitlin did, found herself facing two average-sized men flanking a giant bald figure in the middle. All three had guns trained her way, their thick swatches of Triad tattoos visible in exposed patches of their skin.

  “The big guy’s name is Qiang, I believe, Mr. Zhen,” Caitlin said, holding her gun just as steady. “There’s an international warrant out for him for the bombing of a government building in Taiwan. I guess I’ll just have to arrest him too.”

  “Arrogance inevitably destroys those who let it consume them.”

  “You should know, I suppose. Not that it matters, because you’re always going to be the man who took his own daughter to bed and fathered a second one. No amount of money or power can ever change that. And you know what’s worse? Given the chance, you’d do it all over again, without any hesitation at all. Have I got that right, sir? Look at me and tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You think you’re any different, hiding your weakness behind your gun? Shooting anyone who opposes you so you need not face the truth.”

  “You’re talking about self-loathing, Mr. Zhen, and the truth is I’ve known my share of it. And by acknowledging that, you learn to stop hating yourself. You should really try it sometime.”

  The two smaller Triad gunmen were approaching now, while Qiang hung back. Caitlin eased her hands into the air, SIG dangling from a single figure looped through its trigger guard. She felt one man take it from her grasp while the other jerked her arms down behind her back, quickly fastening her own set of plastic wrist cuffs in place.

  “There is no dam to bring down on me, Cat-lan Strong,” Zhen said, taking the SIG in a swollen hand that seemed to have trouble holding it. His porcelain expression bent into a snarl that morphed into a tight, toothless grin.

  The two Triad soldiers dragged Caitlin between a set of display cases toward the elevator.

  “Take another look out that window, Mr. Zhen,” she said, twisting toward him.

  Zhen turned his gaze back out through the glass just as the Triad gunmen outside down below jerked open the pockmarked, bullet-riddled doors of Caitlin’s SUV to inspect their handiwork. They froze, backing off with guns lowered, gazing at one another in befuddlement at the sight revealed before them.

  Zhen squinted, seeing what they had seen but still not believing it. He twisted round, the elevator door sliding open even though none of his men had pushed the button. He was still searching for words when Guillermo Paz burst from the elevator cab, submachine guns held in either hand spitting bullets.

  104

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  Paz had entered the parking garage through a storm drain built under it that connected a catch basin to a nearby river for run-off to avoid flooding. He’d found the elevator just about where the architectural plans for the complex revealed it to be, following it to the floor where tracking software installed on his smartphone indicated his Texas Ranger was located. The phone and software had been provided by Homeland Security, and Paz never bothered himself about how it worked exactly.

  He only cared that it did.

  His initial bursts took out the men on either side of Caitlin Strong, Paz swinging toward the massive shape recorded at the edge of his consciousness in the same moment pistol fire opened up his way. He launched himself airborne to avoid it, hitting the floor still in motion, sliding across the tile toward the cover of the larger display cases holding various kinds of insects and reptiles.

  Paz heard glass shattering, display cases ruptured by his fire, the big man’s, or both. The rupture of the case had freed thousands of fire ants to scurry across the floor, the pack seeming to move as one, converging on him. Paz swept wave after wave of them aside as he positioned himself to return the big man’s fire.

  But that fire, he realized, was trained not on him, but on the case behind which he rested. More glass shattered, freeing a trio of snakes Paz recognized as black mambas, infused with venom that could kill a man within seconds, two of them with just-swallowed mice bulging from their skin, and a third with a mouse still inside its open mouth. They slithered across the floor, riding atop the fire ants with tongues sweeping the air.

  Other shapes seemed to dance before him, skirting his line of vision. The man Paz recognized from pictures as Li Zhen glided past him and took Caitlin Strong by her cuffed wrists, dragging her with him into the elevator with the Ranger’s own pistol pressed against her skull.

  Before Paz could react, the door started to close and the giant he now recognized as an extremely well-regarded assassin and killer named Qiang opened fire, blowing apart the glass of an aquarium filled with fat-faced fish that paralyzed larger prey so they could enter and eat them from the inside out. The jets of water from the tank propelled the fish across the floor, turning it slick and murky with the fire ants swept away while the fish flopped, clinging desperately to life. A similar variety native to South America were known to kill a few fishermen every year for doing no more than trying to extract the hook from their mouths. More seasoned men of the sea had learned never to dump the product of their nets without wearing gloves thick enough to resist such toxic bites.

  Paz remained pinned to the floor, below the next line of the big man’s fire. But he stayed in motion, sliding through the water, his clothes soaking up fire ants while he was careful to avoid touching the fat-faced smiley fish whose grins promised death. He rammed into another display case, toppling it over backward and freeing what looked like some kind of toads with horns rising over their faces to hop across the floor, drawn to the thickest pools of water.

  Paz steadied one of his submachine guns on Qiang’s position, opening fire to find the big shape nowhere to be seen an instant before two terrariums standing side by side were spilled over in unison. Paz pushed himself backward across the floor, his palms torn bloody by shards of shattered glass, leaving a splotchy trail in his path as the enraged black mambas slithered across the floor toward him.

  105

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  The three gunmen were backing up toward the FedEx truck when Cort Wesley burst out the rear doors, flak jacket buried beneath his blue uniform top and assault rifle clacking away. He saw enough of them to know they were Chinese, Triad soldiers in all probability, but not enough to tell anything else.

  But he could feel their shock, the very thing that had helped render them vulnerable to his surprise attack. Shock at what they had viewed inside Caitlin’s SUV after shooting the hell out of it:

  Mannequins, seated inside in place of men. Decoys.

  Cort Wesley had wielded an M16 more times than he could count, had killed with the deadly rifle pretty much every time he’d fired it. Today that fire had a hollow ring to it, drowned out in large measure by the protest that had shut down the road directly in front of Yuyuan. He kept t
he trigger working until the magazine emptied, slapping a fresh one home just in case before starting forward.

  The three Triad soldiers lay in blood pools so thick, the coppery stench almost made him gag. It was a smell Cort Wesley had never gotten used to. That was the thing about gunfights; everything in life seemed to change, evolve, except them. They were always the same, as far back as Cort Wesley’s experience allowed him to recall. The sense of the assault rifle jerking slightly in his grasp, its weight much heavier than anyone who’d never wielded one could possibly imagine. The feel of super-heated air from the expended bullets pushed back at him by the forward gravity created by the expended shells.

  Cort Wesley wanted to smell the flowering dogwood trees and the fresh scents cast by the elms and oaks layered into the ground around the complex. He wanted to suck that into his nostrils to replace the blood stench taking root there now. But it wouldn’t go away, lingering and loitering in his nose as well as consciousness as if to remind him he’d just snuffed out three lives. He wished it hadn’t been necessary. He wished somewhere down deep it bothered him more.

  In the road fronting Yuyuan, meanwhile, as many as five thousand protesters had gathered for a rally against Zhen’s company. Cort Wesley realized the police detail assigned to secure the area was understaffed and woefully unprepared to deal with such numbers and ferocity. Barely a thousand were expected to show up and the additional four thousand left the participants pressed shoulder to shoulder, all facing a stage that was currently empty.

  Cort Wesley reached the SUV’s shot-out windows to find the stench of burned plastic replacing that of spilled blood. The three mannequins dressed as Texas Rangers right down to the Stetsons and badges had taken so many bullets, parts of them had practically melted. Charred holes marked bullet entries in dangling plastic limbs. Two of the mannequins’ heads were missing and the torso of a third had taken so much fire that it was mostly just a jagged hole where its chest and much of its stomach should have been.

  Li Zhen had taken the bait just as hoped for and expected. Caitlin was right; the man’s weakness lay in his arrogance, his sense of invincibility and entitlement. Cort Wesley figured there must be some Chinese proverb counseling against just that. But he wasn’t much for quotes and proverbs, much more comfortable with a rifle than a moral and, with that, he swung back around and charged toward the building’s entrance.

  106

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  Zhen slammed Caitlin’s head against the elevator cab wall once and then again, as it bottomed out like a Disney ride, zooming downward. His breathing had picked up, turning rapid and shallow, noisy through his mouth. His eyes continued to glow hatefully, wide with indecision and uncertainty over encountering the utterly unexpected.

  “I want you to see!” he hissed into her ear. “To bear witness!”

  The plastic ties binding her wrists together from behind left her unable to deflect or counter his blows.

  “Where we going?” she asked, finding her voice. “Hell?”

  “No,” Li said, as the elevator door slid open. “The future.”

  * * *

  Paz and Qiang continued to exchange fire, the motion of both constant, each managing to stay just ahead of the other’s bullets. A final volley from Paz shattered yet another display case and freed desert scorpions to scurry across the floor. Their stingers were raised ominously as they advanced like an army, the clacking sound they made as they moved en masse sounding oddly like the crackling of fires burning in the hillside slum Paz remembered from cold nights in his youth.

  Qiang’s final stitch of fire, meanwhile, obliterated the glass of a case holding what Paz recognized as African drum ivy, the deadliest plant known to man. It was more of a vine really, with thick, full leaves that looked like pincers and extracted a noxious white vapor known to cause almost instant death. The drum ivy’s deadly defenses were activated by proximity; Paz heard what sounded like a hiss and just managed to evade the escaping vapors that fluttered through the air in a thin cloud, dissipating.

  Then he glimpsed Qiang storming across the floor, seeming to soar through the air, the two of them meeting in the room’s center atop crackling glass with creatures scampering or buzzing all around them.

  * * *

  The lobby doors forming the entrance to Yuyuan had been locked down, so Cort Wesley shot out the glass with a fusillade that cost him his second magazine. Then he crashed through the solid panes fractured along spiderweb-like lines into the sprawling reception area. Soft music formed an insane background to the sounds of gunfire when he opened up on more Triad soldiers who seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

  And that’s when time froze, nothing but the staccato bursts of sound and glimpses of movement registering with him at all.

  Time changed. Places changed.

  But not battle, one exactly like the last and the next. Context, location, and purpose always distinct, while sense and mind-set remained the same.

  And Cort Wesley took to this one, just as he’d taken to all the others. Nothing was forgotten, each piece of every other battle he’d ever fought leaving an indelible mark. There was the sense of the assault rifle vibrating slightly as it clacked off rounds, warm against his hands, steady in his grasp. The sight of the muzzle flash, strange metallic smell of air baked by the heat of the expended shells, and his own kinetic energy. The world reduced to its most basic and simple. There was the gun, his targets, the glass and wall between them, and nothing else. Welcome and comfortable in its familiarity with all thinking suspended and instinct left to command him.

  “Dad!” Cort Wesley heard Dylan say in his tiny earpiece. “Dad!”

  His son’s call from outside on the outskirts of the massive crowd gathered to protest Yuyuan sounded more like an echo in Cort Wesley’s ravaged ears. The boy was here because he was best able to identify the big wild card in all this:

  Kai.

  “She’s here, Dad, she’s here!”

  Cort Wesley heard his son’s words with an illusionary beat between each of them, making it feel as if his brain and body were detached from each other. “Keep her out of the building!” he ordered, picking up only splotches of his own words. “You hear me, son?”

  * * *

  Dylan slid down a slight rise just over a man-made arroyo used to collect rainwater washed off the nearby four-lane. The tree cover obscured whatever was happening at Yuyuan from him, but he was pretty sure he’d detected the clack of gunfire, light and tinny from this distance with so much additional noise around him. He lost Kai amid the slog briefly, than spotted her again as she moved in lithe, supple fashion through the tightly packed crowd, seeming to glide.

  He started toward her through the clutter of humanity, not sure exactly what would happen when he got there; what exactly he’d say or do. Dylan knew she’d used him to get her out of New York, but didn’t much care right now. His head was pounding again. His mouth had gone bone dry. He was sweating like crazy even though he didn’t feel warm and all he wanted to do was get the girl aside and talk her down.

  The crowd thickened the closer Dylan drew to Kai, approaching from her rear flank so she wouldn’t spot him before he reached her. She was so beautiful even amid these conditions, the focused intensity he’d glimpsed in her expression, resolve coupled with self-assurance, only adding to the infatuation that had almost gotten him killed.

  Dylan was still eight feet away when a fissure opened in the crowd, a clear path between him and Kai when he saw the lighter flash in her hand.

  * * *

  Caitlin felt Zhen drag her from the elevator by her cuffed hands. Banks of dull overhead lights snapped on, illuminating a sprawling floor of computer terminals, servers, and mainframes. She recognized what looked to be routers and relays nestled on a floor dominated by a long series of wall-sized monitors broadcasting the constant scrawl of ten-digit combinations that could only be phone numbers across the nation being stored by Yuyuan satellites orbiting hundreds of mi
les overhead. The room was utterly devoid of humidity, feeling chilly and airless to her.

  “This is where the end of your country begins,” Zhen clamored, dragging her across the floor by her hair. He plopped her down in the first chair they came to and jerked her head backward with a final tug of her black locks, his dry odorless breath pouring into her. “This is where my family gets even! My destiny, my fate.”

  “Murdering tens of millions of innocent people?”

  “It would have been hundreds of millions if your interference hadn’t forced me to activate my plan ahead of schedule,” Zhen corrected and pressed the SIG against her temple, the muzzle of the barrel feeling like ice. “The signal will go out over the four G network, not nearly as effective but a satisfying result just the same.”

  “Why not just kill yourself, Mr. Zhen? It’s what you really want, probably since the first time you slept with Jiao. You want to blame America for you being reared in poverty, go ahead. But this country had nothing to do with you raping your daughter. She was only thirteen when Kai was born. Tell me, did you ever rape her too?”

  But Zhen’s mind was somewhere else, not seeming to have registered her words at all. “Just a few strikes on the keyboard and it begins,” he said. “My satellites waiting to receive the data in order to transmit a signal that will automatically dial those cell phone numbers ringing right here in your country at a hundred thousand per second. You are about to bear witness to the end of life in the United States as you know it.”

  “Only until you’re dead, Mr. Zhen,” Caitlin said, trying to remain composed, not ready to concede anything, keenly aware Zhen was having trouble keeping the pistol steady in his arthritic hands, which grew shakier with each passing second.

  He moved his face closer to hers. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, for the simplicity it suggests? The way it was in the time of our grandfathers. But those times are long past. The satellites operate remotely. Once the operation is triggered, your country’s fate becomes inevitable. My death will mean no more than your life, Cat-lan Strong. You will witness me bringing that to be, witness me—”