Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  With that, he gestured toward Caitlin and the two of them set off along Camino Pass’s central square, checking the buildings from the outside in search of the missing soldiers.

  “You sure about these boys?” she asked him.

  “Right now, I’m not sure of anything.”

  They both, at the same time, caught sight of a screen door flapping in the wind. Over the door was a sign that looked something like the symbol of the Red Cross.

  “Local clinic?” Teavens wondered.

  Caitlin kept her eyes glued in that direction. “Seems to be. And that door wasn’t open when we pulled into town.”

  Teavens glanced back toward the RV, just as the four men he’d sent back there were climbing inside. Caitlin thought the colonel looked like he wanted to join them. Then she fell into step behind him, moving toward the clinic. They were six feet from the door when a shadow swallowed the light.

  And a dark, formless shape burst through the door.

  8

  HOUSTON

  The hospital let Cort Wesley sign Luke out six hours later.

  “I need to go back to school,” Luke said, not looking across the seat after settling himself in Cort Wesley’s truck.

  “I was thinking home would be a better idea,” Cort Wesley said, as patiently as he could manage.

  “Sure,” Luke nodded, still not regarding him, “as soon as I pick up some stuff. Books, my computer—you know.”

  Cort Wesley gunned the engine but didn’t drive off. “What I don’t know is who sold you those drugs, because you still haven’t told me.”

  “Dad…”

  “What?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we bought them from some street pusher.”

  “We,” Cort Wesley repeated.

  “Kids steal the pills from their parents, sometimes get scrips themselves.”

  “‘Kids’ meaning your friends. Are they soccer players too? Would I know them?”

  “Dad…” Rolling his eyes this time, just like his brother, Dylan.

  “Don’t do that, son.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make me feel like I’m in the wrong here.” Cort Wesley finally eased his truck from the no parking zone, realizing only then that there was a ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper. “You talk about snorting oxy like it’s no worse than draining a six-pack.”

  “I don’t drink, Dad.”

  “Right now, I wish you did. I mean, you pretty much grew up in the company of a Texas Ranger. Didn’t that teach you anything?”

  Luke finally swung his way, fear brimming in his eyes. “We have to tell Caitlin about this?”

  “Oh, ashamed now all of a sudden?”

  The boy frowned and brushed the long hair from his face with a swipe of his hand, in contrast with his brother, who was more prone to blowing it off. “More like embarrassed.”

  “You want to add ‘stupid’ to that, given that you almost died?”

  “It won’t happen again, I promise.”

  “You won’t snort oxy again or won’t OD again—which is it?”

  Luke turned back toward the windshield, his reflection elongated like in a funhouse mirror.

  “You know I can’t let this go,” Cort Wesley told him.

  “What?”

  “I need to find out where those drugs came from.”

  “I already told you that.”

  “Doctors aren’t prone to prescribing oxy to teenagers. And those friends of yours don’t go home often enough to replenish their snorting supply. That means they’re buying from somebody local.”

  Cort Wesley went silent, staring at Luke until the boy turned his way again, then resuming when the boy didn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to find out who that is.”

  “Then what?” his son asked, his voice sounding piqued in frustration, eyes aimed straight ahead now.

  “I’ll find out where he got his supply.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll ask real nicely.” Cort Wesley could see Luke’s eyes flash in the reflection off the windshield glass, as if he were considering that very scene. “And I’m going to keep climbing the ladder until I’m at the top rung.”

  “You’re not a cop.”

  “No, but I happen to know a Texas Ranger.”

  “But you’re not going to tell her because you want to handle this yourself.”

  “Now you’re telling me my business?”

  Luke swung his way again, as Cort Wesley snailed the truck to a halt at a red light. “I’m telling you Caitlin’s business. You want to handle this yourself but you know she’ll take over if you tell her.”

  “The Seventh Cavalry wouldn’t be able to hold her off, and God help whoever’s behind selling drugs to kids.”

  “They’ll need God’s help if you find them, too. Just as much.”

  Cort Wesley looked across the seat, and this time Luke held his gaze. “Maybe I’ll ask Colonel Paz to ride shotgun on this. Would you prefer that?”

  That eye roll again. “He drowned two men in my fish tank a couple years back.”

  “They had it coming, just like anyone who sells oxy in schools.”

  “So now he’s going to drown my friends in a fish tank?”

  Cort Wesley shook his head. “No, only whoever sold them the drugs to spread around campus.”

  A horn honking alerted him to the fact that the light was green. It stopped, then started in again.

  “Dad?”

  Cort Wesley didn’t drive forward, on principle. A part of him wanted whoever was honking to climb out and confront him. Pictured what his fist would do on impact with the asshole’s face.

  More honking followed and he checked the side mirror to see an old lady blaring her horn. Seventy maybe, or eighty. Even a hundred, for all he knew.

  “Dad,” Luke uttered.

  And Cort Wesley screeched through the intersection just as the light turned yellow, stranding the old lady behind him, her car shrinking in the rearview mirror.

  9

  CAMINO PASS, TEXAS

  The shape had what looked like a pair of scissors in his grasp, whirling in a blur toward Teavens with the twin blades slicing toward him on a downward angle.

  Caitlin angled her left hip in between them, first deflecting the strike and then trying to work her grasp on the shape’s wrist to wrest the weapon away. She forgot about the bulky hazmat gloves in that moment, unable to gain firm purchase on the wrist, which left the scissors squarely in the shape’s control.

  She recorded the fact it was a man, his expression locked somewhere between fury and terror, wearing wrinkled clothes dappled with sweat. He wheeled toward her, seeming to record through her faceplate the fact that she was a woman, which created just enough hesitation for Caitlin to slam a knee into the man’s midsection. Then she used a different hold to take control of his scissors, jerking down and to the side to strip the man’s feet out from under him and drop him to the street’s hot asphalt. She tore the scissors from his grasp on impact and pressed a forearm against his windpipe to discourage any further attacks.

  He thrashed for a few moments, then settled as his face reddened, his eyes still gaping with terror.

  “Who are you people?” he gasped. “What the hell happened here? Why’s everybody dead?”

  Caitlin eased up on the pressure but left her forearm in place.

  “That’s what we’re hoping you can tell us,” she said, as the missing soldiers burst breathlessly through the screen door in the man’s wake.

  * * *

  It turned out the national guardsmen had entered the building after spotting motion flitting by a window. Caitlin left the man in their charge and watched the soldiers jerk him to his feet by either arm.

  “What’s your name, sir?” she asked him.

  “Who wants to know?” he snapped.

  “Caitlin Strong. I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  “Bullshit,�
� the man squawked.

  He had rheumy eyes and a bird’s nest of hair that was thinning in patches. Caitlin guessed his age as somewhere between fifty and sixty. He had a lived-in face lined by deep furrows and eyes drooping toward bags that looked like overinflated tires. The work clothes swam over his gaunt frame and, from experience, Caitlin made him as a heavy drinker.

  “That I’m a Texas Ranger?”

  “You’re a skirt, ain’t you? Skirts don’t make Ranger.”

  “They do now,” Caitlin said, still uncomfortable with the tinny echo of her own voice banging around the inside of her helmet. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Lennox Scully. This here’s my home—what’s left of it anyway.” He glanced back toward the clinic. “They’re all dead inside there, and everywhere else, I’m guessing. When I run out, I figured you people were the devil come to get me.”

  “You a resident of Camino Pass?”

  Scully nodded. “Rent me a room in a house back that way,” he said, casting his gaze toward the outskirts of town, one of the houses the other group had been checking. “When I don’t sleep it off here in this here clinic, that is.”

  A drinker all right, Caitlin thought, exchanging a glance with Teavens.

  “What do you remember about last night, Mr. Scully?”

  “‘Mister’? Nobody done calls me mister no more. You can call me what most others folks do: Scull.”

  “Same question, Scull.”

  “Don’t remember nothing, on account of I was sleeping one off. Last thing I recall before the spins got me was being tucked away in my home away from home inside the clinic there. Had a dream they was space aliens come to kidnap me. Was it them that did this?”

  “Sir?”

  “Space aliens,” Scully said, aiming his words at Teavens this time. “We at war with a foreign race? And I don’t mean Mexicans, neither.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Teavens told him.

  10

  CAMINO PASS, TEXAS

  Caitlin would have been more comfortable restraining Lennox Scully, but she had left her handcuffs inside the RV when pulling her hazmat gear on. The presence of Teavens’s handpicked national guardsmen comforted her somewhat, though she had no way of telling for sure whether they’d ever fired their M4 assault rifles in a combat situation or, more to the point, had ever seen combat at all. Gun carriers’ bravado, as she called it, rose to the most extreme levels in people who’d never been in an actual gunfight.

  None of the preliminary DHS security threat assessments pertaining to Camino Pass had accounted for the possibility of survivors, so no isolation procedures had been prepped or readied. The best their ad hoc team could do was discard Scully’s clothes into a contamination pack and help him climb into a spare hazmat suit, which would keep him from infecting anyone with some germ or microbe he might have picked up that had spared him while wiping out the rest of the town.

  In Caitlin’s experience and training, this scenario didn’t fit the classic biowarfare incident at all. The initial analyses of the town’s air composition suggested no contaminants or toxins present. That indicated that whatever had killed all but one of the residents of Camino Pass was no longer a danger.

  For Caitlin, that changed this from a containment issue to more of an investigative one. Something had killed nearly three hundred people, by all indications, in a matter of minutes. Virulence levels aside, whatever it was needed to be isolated and identified ASAP.

  Toward that end, the soldiers remained in the RV with Lennox Scully while the rest of the team continued its sweep of the town. Most of the doors were either unlocked or easily pried open. A few required an air gun contraption that Teavens used to effectively blow the whole latch assembly from the door, which was still rattling around the floor when they entered.

  The high-tech respirators attached to their three-hour supplies of oxygen blocked all odors, but Caitlin had the odd sense the homes smelled of nothing anyway. No lingering odors of the last cooked meal, stale aftershave or perfume, or human waste. She passed this off as a product of her imagination conjuring the notion that whatever had wiped out the residents of Camino Pass had wiped out anything they’d left behind as well. No residue to suggest the enormity of what had transpired here.

  She made it a point to avoid looking at photos collected on tables, shelves, even walls. So too did she ignore small touches like reading glasses left by the side of a chair or glasses still half full of soda in the sink. The last thing she wanted, or needed, was the distraction of her mind dredging up mental pictures of whoever owned the glasses or hadn’t finished their soft drinks.

  The hardest houses to enter were the ones with bicycles strewn in the driveway; some combination of baseball mitts and bats, basketballs or footballs littering the lawn. In one house, a video game was frozen on a flat-screen television, a dead teenage boy still clutching the controller in his grasp. She found televisions humming or music playing in a few homes, unwelcome in the sense that they suggested life when nothing could be further from the truth.

  With sunset fast approaching, they completed their inspection of the homes and outlying buildings, confirming that no one else was alive. The final home Caitlin checked contained a pair of cribs in a corner bedroom. Though she couldn’t bring herself to look inside them, the sight conjured by her imagination would stay with her forever.

  She stopped halfway back to the RV, alone in very center of the town’s main drag. Something had scratched at her spine, like an itch she couldn’t quite reach. She swept her gaze about Camino Pass, then toward its outskirts, and finally beyond them, unable to shake the distinct feeling of unease that had set her hackles rising like a dog getting ready to fight.

  “Something wrong, Ranger?”

  Colonel Teavens’s voice shook Caitlin from her trance.

  “After what we just saw,” she said through that tinny echo of her own voice, “tell me something that’s right, sir.”

  * * *

  “Your captain’s been calling,” Hargraves told her, after she’d shed the bulky and stifling hazmat gear back at the makeshift command center. Her shirt and jeans were soaked through with sweat.

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That you hadn’t shot anybody yet.”

  “I’m sure he was pleased to hear that.” She fixed her gaze on Hargraves. “You notice anything while we were gone?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure. Anything that stood out, I guess. Something that made you look or listen twice.”

  Hargraves shook his head, clearly not grasping what had gotten her dander up. “No. Why?”

  Caitlin fixed her gaze back on him. “Because I think somebody was watching us.”

  11

  WASHINGTON, DC

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Roland Fass said from the head of the conference table. “But I guess that’s not exactly accurate, is it?”

  “We can see you just fine, Mr. Fass,” intoned a voice that sounded like it was rattling around an empty tin can, from in front of one of the table’s chairs, all of which were empty except for his. “What we’d like to hear is that the situation in Camino Pass is under control.”

  When Roland Fass got called to a meeting in Washington, he figured there’d be other people in the room, or at least their representatives. Instead, what he got were four talking snow globes, except they lacked the fake, powdery stuff encased in fluid and glowed only when the individual on the other end was talking.

  Fass knew each of the snowless globes represented one of the true power brokers he’d partnered with on the project they’d managed to find plenty of money for, measuring into the hundreds of millions. That sum had gone to construct the interior of the facility he’d painstakingly designed, the proposal they’d chartered leaving nothing to chance. He’d developed an actual three-dimensional schematic, complete with every machine and covering the entire manufacturing assembly line. Most of it had been automated from the start, and now, j
ust about a year in, virtually all of it was.

  He’d arrived at the office building that sat in the shadow of the Capitol, expecting to be ushered into an ornate, wood-paneled room with a lavish conference table made of mahogany—or a suitable replacement. What he got instead was a barren, windowless square with the feel of an oversize closet. The walls were stark white and bare, the table formed of cheap laminate and the black chairs looking like they were picked up at a flea market.

  “The situation has been contained,” Fass tried to assure them all.

  “We found the video feed of those folks in the Halloween costumes disturbing, son,” a thick southern accent crackled through another of the snow globes. “We also got word that the Texas Rangers are involved now, and when they strap on their guns, no one in their right mind can call anything contained.”

  “Just one Texas Ranger,” Fass reminded.

  “You ever hear the motto ‘One riot, one Ranger,’ son? ’Cause it’s damn near true.”

  “Senator—” Fass started, but the first speaker swiftly cut him off.

  “You know the rules, Mr. Fass: no names, no titles. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course,” Fass agreed, when what he really understood was that two of the snow globes had no names or titles, not as far as he could tell. They were the ones he’d expected to meet in person, as opposed to this vapid conference call he could just as easily have conducted from back home in Texas.

  But that wasn’t the way these people worked. This was the way power spoke—literally, in this case. Multiple layers of it, of which the participants in this meeting only cracked the surface. Huge sums of money drew a crowd, and the sums involved here involved more zeros than he could count. Money wasn’t a function of power; money was power. And Fass knew his work would likely elect a president someday. The massive slush fund his efforts had produced for the power represented in the four snow globes before him held the means to topple and install governments the world over. It could finance wars, outfit armies, determine the winners in age-old conflicts. It was a grand plan to remake the world in the image fostered by the faces behind the voices emanating through the snow globe–like speakers.