Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels)
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For the brothers of Delta Phi Fraternity of Brown University,
past, present, and future.
As the song says, “Long life to Delta Phi!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Must be that time of year again, and I promise you a great ride this time. Before we start, though, I need to give some much-deserved shout-outs.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but let’s start at the top with my publisher, Tom Doherty, and Forge’s associate publisher, Linda Quinton, dear friends who publish books “the way they should be published,” to quote my late agent, the legendary Toni Mendez. Paul Stevens, Karen Lovell, Patty Garcia, and especially Natalia Aponte are there for me at every turn. Natalia’s a brilliant editor and friend who never ceases to amaze me with her sensitivity and genius. Editing may be a lost art, but not here, and I think you’ll enjoy all of my books, including this one, much more as a result.
Some new names to thank this time out, starting with Mireya Starkenberg, a loyal reader who now suffers through my butchering the Spanish language in order to correct it. My friend Mike Blakely, a terrific writer and musician, taught me Texas firsthand and helped me think like a native of that great state. And Larry Thompson, a terrific writer in his own right, has joined the team as well to make sure I do justice to his home state.
SPOILER ALERT! I’d be very remiss if I didn’t mention a pair of terrific books that were crucial to my research on this one. They are noted below next to the * but you may want to ignore them until you finish so as not to give anything away. A major thank-you also to Professor John Savage of Brown University, a true expert on the book’s subject who offered his two cents that were worth a million to me.
Check back at www.jonlandbooks.com for updates or to drop me a line. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you who’ve already written or e-mailed me about how much you enjoyed the first four tales in the Caitlin Strong series. There may be big news to report soon on the Hollywood front (knock wood!), so rest assured that your opinions are being echoed and I never would’ve gotten even that far if not for your support. Rest assured you will be even more pleased with this latest adventure. To find out if I’m as good a prophet as I am a storyteller, just turn the page and begin.
P.S. For those interested in more information about the history of the Texas Rangers, I recommend The Texas Rangers and Time of the Rangers, a pair of superb books by Mike Cox, also published by Forge.
*Clarke, Richard A., and Robert K. Knake. Cyber War. New York: Ecco, 2010.
*Mark Bowden. Worm: The First Digital World War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Four
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Five
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Part Six
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Part Seven
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Part Eight
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Part Nine
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Part Ten
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Other Books by Jon Land
About the Author
Copyright
The world to me is like a lasting storm.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Pericles
PROLOGUE
Then mount and away! Give the fleet steed the rein—
The Ranger’s at home on the prairies again;
Spur! Spur in the chase—dash on to the fight
Cry Vengeance for Texas! And God speed the right!
James T. Lytle, “The Ranger’s Song”
SMOKEVILLE, TEXAS; 1919
The boy walked out of the desert, the late-afternoon sun in his face, his skin burned red, parched lips marred by jagged cracks. His tattered clothes carried the thick, smoky scent of mesquite mixed with the acrid stench of burned wood, as if his journey had taken him through a brush fire burning to the southwest.
But it was the flecks of blood staining his face, shirt, and sweat-soaked hair, tangled with wisps of tumbleweed, that caught John Rob Salise’s eye more than anything.
“You
all right, son?” Salise, a town selectman and constable, asked with hands laid on the boy’s shoulders to hold him in place. “What’s your name?”
The boy continued to gaze straight ahead without regarding him, his shock-glazed eyes barely blinking. His breaths came in rapid heaves, his exhaustion showing in knees that had begun to buckle with the burden of his weight, and Salise thought the boy might keel over if he lifted his hands from his shoulders. Salise noted the boy’s boots were badly scuffed and sun-bleached, making him wonder how long exactly the boy had been walking, how far he’d come.
And whose blood had showered him as if it were the product of a spring downpour.
Salise handed the boy a small canteen he always wore clipped to his belt during his rounds. The kid snapped it up, peeled back the cap, and guzzled the water so fast twin streams ran down both sides of his mouth, the drops drying almost as soon as they touched the ground.
“Where’d you come from, son?” Salise asked, figuring him for ten or eleven, although his wan appearance made it difficult to tell.
The boy drained the rest of the water, still ignoring him.
Salise snatched the canteen from his grasp. “I’m trying to help you out here.”
When the boy remained unresponsive, hands dangling limply once more by his sides, Salise turned his own gaze down Smokeville’s single commercial thoroughfare. The street featured a strange combination of horses hitched to posts and motorcars parked awkwardly against a raised wooden walkway near a saloon, where legend had it Wild Bill Hickok had shot a man intending to do the same to him.
“Well, then it’s a good thing for you we got a Texas Ranger in town. What do you say we go find him?”
* * *
Ranger William Ray Strong sat across the table from his son, Earl, the boy having followed him into the Texas Rangers just short of his nineteenth birthday. A bottle of whiskey rose between them, two full shot glasses accounting for what was missing from it so far.
William Ray raised his glass in the semblance of a toast, eyeing the cinco pesos badge pinned to his son’s chest. “Here’s to you, Earl, on following me and your granddad into the Ranger service. ‘No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.’”
And upon finishing the quote from the great Ranger captain Bill McDonald, William Ray downed his whiskey in a single gulp, leaving Earl to sip at his glass, wrinkling his nose the whole time.
“I’ll tell you, boy, it’s a good thing you shoot a hell of a lot better than you drink, though I suspect such things have a way of catching up with each other over time.”
That’s when a man William Ray recognized as a town constable entered the bar with a boy in tow. He’d met the man a couple times but couldn’t for the life of him remember his name.
“Constable Salise,” his son, Earl, greeted, rising to his feet and brushing the holstered Colt further back on his hip, “what have we here?”
Salise noticed the badge originally worn by Earl’s grandfather who’d been killed in the Civil War not long after William Ray was born. The new Ranger looked like a younger version of his famed father, albeit thinner with sinewy bands of muscle instead of bulk and without the sun-dug furrows lining his face.
“I come in here expecting to find one Ranger,” Salise said, “and here there are two.”
“Believe you know my father, sir.”
“’Course I do. The great William Ray Strong, late of the Frontier Battalion.”
“Just for the final days, sir,” William Ray said, his eyes falling on the boy. “And if this is your son, I’d recommend a bath as opposed to a shooting lesson or an autograph.”
“He’s not my son, Ranger. I found him wandering in the street. Looked like he came plain out of the desert.”
“Is that a fact?” William Ray said, coming out of his chair to draw closer to the boy. “You got a name, son?”
The boy didn’t say a word, not even tilting his gaze to acknowledge the Rangers’ presence.
Salise laid a dust-covered hand atop the boy’s shoulder. “I can’t get a word out of him crossways.”
Earl gave the boy a better look, dabbing his kerchief in his mostly full glass of whiskey before patting it against some of the blood matted on the boy’s shirt. “Day old at most,” he reported to his father.
“How you figure that?”
“Whiskey got it off quick. Any more than a day, it would have taken some wiping or swabbing.”
“Is that a fact? ’Course, I didn’t need to know that to see that the soles of his boots got close to a full day’s worth of red sand stuck in their grids. Any more than a day, and it would’ve turned a brownish shade by now. Any less, it’d be more orange.”
“Is that a fact?” Earl echoed, drawing a smile from his father.
William Ray returned his attention to Constable Salise. “We can’t get a name out of the boy, let’s see if we can get a rise. Earl, what towns be a fair day’s walk here through the desert?”
Earl Strong aimed his answer at the boy. “There’s Franklin Notch, Bald Pass, Willow Creek—”
Earl stopped when the boy’s eyes narrowed in fear at the mention of Willow Creek. He shuddered just once and then lapsed back into whatever trance had overtaken him.
Earl crouched his gaunt six-foot frame down so he was eye to eye with the boy. “That where you’re from, son, Willow Creek?” he posed as gently and reassuringly as he could manage.
The boy rubbed his nose with a pair of fingers that were black at the tips, leaving a smudge that looked like soot.
“You got nothing to fear. You’re safe now.”
“No,” the boy rasped, eyes swinging for the doors as if expecting someone to burst through in the next moment. “They’ll be…”
“Yeah?”
“They’ll be…”
“What, boy, what?” William Ray asked, his own gaze and Earl’s cheating toward the saloon doors now too.
“… coming.”
“Who?” Earl Strong asked this time.
The boy didn’t look at him, didn’t seem to be looking at anything when he drew a tattered piece of thick paper, folded in quarters, from his pants pocket. He started to extend it forward, but stopped halfway to Earl, who plucked it from his grasp. Earl laid the piece of paper atop the bar table and smoothed it out.
“What the hell?” William Ray said, squinting at the sight of its contents.
It was a drawing rendered in the same black ink that stained the boy’s fingers, a drawing of man-sized skeleton figures wearing pistol belts and bandoliers. Some of the skeletons in the drawing wore sombreros over their exposed skulls and some didn’t.
Now it was William Ray who knelt down in front of the boy, holding the drawing close for him to see.
“What’s this exactly, son?”
No response.
“You see something that looked like this back home in Willow Creek?”
The boy muttered something.
“What was that, son?”
“Night,” the boy rasped.
“How’s that?”
“They come at night.”
William Ray looked up toward Earl. “How far a ride you figure it is to Willow Creek?”
“Six hours if we push things, eight if we don’t.”
William Ray held his son’s stare as he stood back up. “Then we better get a move on if we wanna get there ’fore nightfall, Ranger Earl.”
WILLOW CREEK, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“You have no reason to be scared, muchachos and muchachas.”
But the woman’s assurances did nothing to soothe the fears of the five children huddled before her, tear-streaked grime from the dusty air coating their faces.
“Do you know why you’re here today?” Ana Callas Guajardo asked them.
The children shrugged, shook their heads. They’d been taken from their schools back in Mexico without explanation and driven to what had once been a town over the Texas border, where the
woman was waiting, introducing herself simply as “Ana.” She was in her early forties, boasting the tight lines and features of a younger woman at ease in the white silk blouse and snug-fitting jeans aged off the rack. The boots she wore looked comfortably worn, new soles belying their true age. Her raven black hair was streaked with gray and bound up in an elegant chignon.
“Because this is where it all began … and now, where it will begin again. Do you know what Steve Jobs once said? ‘Have the courage to follow your heart.’ It was one of his primary lessons of business, one I follow religiously. That is why I had you brought here. This way, muchachos and muchachas.”
The children trailed her down what was little more than an outline of what had been the central thoroughfare of a town long dead. Three boys and two girls ranging in age from nine to thirteen from four different schools. Their dark hair and full, deep-set eyes of an identical shade made them look like siblings, cousins at the very least, when in fact none save for one brother and sister were even related. Their young faces glistened under the sun, their school uniforms marred by wrinkles from the trip there and the dust sprayed through the dry desert air. The ground roasted beneath their feet in the merciless afternoon sun, fluttery heat waves rising where the town’s residents had once traipsed.
“Your lives all share a legacy that calls Willow Creek home,” Guajardo continued, her tone flat and firm. “Ever since hell rose to take the town in its grasp. Willow Creek died that day at the hands of creatures known as esos Demonios. Now you will learn of that day, and your place in it.”
Moving through the center of what had been a town, the children could see debris in the form of rotted, dried-out wood collected in areas where buildings once stood. The ground was darker in these spots, looking sallow and dead, unable to reclaim the life the structures had once stolen from it. Besides the stray patches of debris, the only evidence of civilization ever having been there was a set of train tracks lost to moss and blown gravel. Those tracks remained unfinished, unconnected; no train had ever touched them, making them seem even more ghostly, as if the brambles and brush were actually trying to draw the rails and ties into the earth to bury them forever. And yet over this scene of decay rose the sweet scents of juniper and piñon wafting in from a desert watched over by sentinel-like mesas that gleamed beneath the white puffy clouds floating across the sky. The sun cast those mesas a soothing shade of red that would darken further as evening bled the heat from the air.