Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  Caitlin nodded. “He let one get away, unfortunately.”

  Aidman’s eyes bulged as Paz unzipped his duffel and began pulling out an assortment of weapons, which made Caitlin think of Santa’s endless sack of gifts.

  “Those crates you took from Bane Sturgess, they’re in the mission chapel, aren’t they?”

  Aidman’s response was to begin leading her in that direction. “Your father warned mine about the bodies he found in that train car. We took precautions. Hazmat suits and respirators.”

  “The box was open when you found it.”

  Aidman nodded. “We sealed and packed it up again, brought it here with the other two until we could figure out what to do next,” he said, yanking open the rickety chapel door.

  “And you neglected to mention that when I was here yesterday?”

  Aidman shrugged. “When it comes to what we thought was inside those crates, nobody’s hands were safe, including yours. I didn’t know who I could trust.”

  Caitlin followed him up to the chapel altar, where he removed the sacraments from their resting place. Stripping the white sheets away revealed a trio of shipping crates, likely the original packaging in which Jim Strong had found them before he’d buried them in the desert.

  “It’s the one in the center,” Aidman said, pointing down at the crate in question as if he were afraid to touch it.

  Caitlin didn’t blame him. “We need to get it out of here while there’s still time,” she said, as the first explosion sounded outside.

  Caitlin charged out of the chapel, SIG Sauer in hand, just as a second explosion roared. She saw a plume of dirt coughed into the air, one squatter down and another rolling in pain, and figured the source to be a grenade tossed over the wall.

  Then she saw the drones.

  95

  SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS

  She knew the Rangers had a few drones of their own for surveillance, and she recognized these as facsimiles of the ones she’d glimpsed in advertisements and electronics store windows. Squat, oblong flying machines, maybe a yard in diameter.

  A swarm of them, in this case.

  The drones filled the air like giant wasps, the buzzing sound they made supporting the illusion, which she quickly shook from her head. More grenade blasts sounded; each of the drones was carrying at least one, and maybe more, of them. The drones were acting like miniature dive bombers, either being driven remotely or homing in on motion or heat signatures below to acquire their targets.

  Caitlin opened up on the swarm randomly, draining her first magazine into a congestion of four of the flying machines, two of which fell and exploded on impact with the ground, downing another pair of squatters.

  Rat-tat-tat … Rat-tat-tat … Rat-tat-tat …

  Cort Wesley and Nola Delgado were firing bursts from their M4s skyward, rotating the barrels back and forth, trying to take drones out by the bushel. Guillermo Paz held matching M4s in both hands, firing upward to the left and right at the same time, blowing drone after drone out of the air.

  Caitlin was into her third mag, unable to shake the sense that she was playing one of Dylan’s or Luke’s video games, the wave of attacking drones seemingly endless. She fired while dragging to cover people struck by shrapnel, brushing up against Daniel Aidman, who was desperately shepherding as many as he could gather through the chapel doors.

  One of the drones, then another, and a third trailed him inside before he could get those doors closed. Caitlin lit out in a dead sprint, straight through the refuse coughed up by one of the explosive charges that forced her to angle sharply to the right. Then she veered back to the left to avoid the debris coughed up by a second charge.

  She felt the sting of steel and stone piercing her clothes and pricking her flesh. Caitlin lurched through the door and dove to the floor beneath a flash that showered husks of the makeshift reconstituted pews into the air.

  Wood splinters pierced her scalp and she felt the warm ooze of blood as she twisted onto her back and shot down one drone, and then another, emptying the rest of her mag into a third before two more soared through the door.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley swept his eyes over the mission courtyard, where pockets of mist, thickened by the constant stream of explosions, mixed with the ever-present wisps of black char smoke wafting in from the trench fire beyond. He fired on the move, resolved to remain a moving target to keep the machines’ targeting mechanisms from getting a firm fix on him. He wielded his assault rifle in his left arm; his right arm was better, but not better enough to trust.

  Before him, in the center of the courtyard, amid the thickest nest of farm plantings, Guillermo Paz moved like a giant gazelle, shooting, stopping to re-aim, and then shooting some more, as if following a choreographed routine, his motions lithe and dance-like, one with the air.

  Nola Delgado, meanwhile, stood off to the right, feet rooted in place, not caring if the drones homed in on her, probably because she wanted them to. She fired burst after burst, grinning the whole time, maybe even laughing, though it was impossible for Cort Wesley to tell, given the cacophony of rival sounds that pushed a flutter through his ears.

  He watched people scampering to and from cover, watched plumes of dark, manure-rich soil coughed into the air by drone blasts that left fallen bodies in their place.

  Then he was shooting again, the M4 feeling like an extension of his hand, like flesh and blood instead of steel, as he eyed the chapel into which Caitlin Strong had just disappeared.

  * * *

  The pair of drones sped over Caitlin’s supine form, speeding for the altar, where the bulk of the mission’s residents, led by Aidman, had been forced to retreat.

  The altar!

  Caitlin tried not to picture the effects if a coming blast blew open the ossuary containing the bones infected with the Black Death. But she couldn’t help but imagine those spores of the bubonic plague showering the air.

  The squatters would die.

  She would die.

  They would all die.

  She was sprinting down the center of the chapel, without memory of reclaiming her feet, draining the rest of this magazine and then starting in on a fresh one, her last. The feeling of a video game was strong with her again, except her breaths were coming in short, quick huffs that left her heaving. A pair of booms sounded, followed by flashes as, under her fire, the drones crashed through the windows on either side of the chapel.

  Caitlin was still heaving for breath when she charged back outside to see Colonel Paz shooting out a final phalanx of the explosives-equipped drones as they dive-bombed him. Cort Wesley and Nola handled the ones that slipped through his line of fire, Nola from right out in the open and Cort Wesley from the cover of his truck. The hood and engine block were a charred mass of shrapnel, and he clutched his assault rifle in his left hand instead of his right.

  The smoke residue continued to cloud the courtyard after the shooting had stopped, and the ground was an obstacle course of smoking remnants of the drones they’d shot out of the air.

  Nola Delgado let the M4 dangle by her side. “Is that the best they can do?”

  “¡Allí afuera! ¡Allí afuera!” Out there! Out there!

  The cry, from a Mexican perched on the mission wall, seemed to come in answer to Nola’s question. The squatter had climbed to that post with only a rake in his hand, to battle the drones by sweeping it through the air, and Caitlin thought she recalled him actually clipping one of them. She scrambled up the ladder, with Cort Wesley just behind her, as the man cried out again.

  “¡Prisa! ¡Prisa!”

  Hurrying, indeed, Caitlin mounted the wall and held the ladder still to ease the last of Cort Wesley’s ascent, and then the two of them moved to the chest-high wall to see what the man had spotted.

  “You gotta be frigging kidding me,” Cort Wesley managed.

  96

  SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS

  Men, as many as three dozen of them, rose from their camouflaged positions on the de
sert floor, led by a massive shape almost as big as Paz.

  “The colonel was right,” Caitlin muttered. “He’s here.” She swung to the side. “He was waiting for us, Cort Wesley. He knew we’d be coming. We walked straight into a trap.”

  “Son of a bitch had been here before, just like you said,” Cort Wesley noted, clenching his teeth. A mixture of soot, grime, and blood streaked his face.

  “My father beat him then, just like we’re going to beat him now.”

  “Used up lots of our ammo on killing those drones, Ranger.”

  Caitlin moved for the ladder again. “And we’ll kill those men with whatever we’ve got left.”

  * * *

  “We can’t let him get that bone box, Ranger,” Paz said, when she reached the bottom.

  “Any ideas, Colonel?”

  He seemed to sniff the char on the air. “Just one.”

  Caitlin met his gaze, getting a notion of what he was thinking. “It’s inside the chapel. Aidman will show you.”

  Paz disappeared and Caitlin swung around to find a grinning Nola Delgado by her side.

  “You’re crazy,” Caitlin said to her. “You know that?”

  “What, because I’d rather kill men than machines?”

  “Because you like killing anything. You said we’re the same, Nola, but that’s where we differ. I do it when I have to. You do it whenever possible.”

  “I don’t get the distinction, Sis.”

  Caitlin again bristled at Nola calling her that. “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “Come on,” Nola said, as she moved to Paz’s duffel bag to get a fresh weapon. “You telling me you don’t enjoy this kind of shit, even a little?”

  “I enjoy staying alive,” Caitlin said, reaching into the bag and grasping the first gun her hand closed around.

  * * *

  Enrico Molinari signaled his troops forward, their ratcheting gunfire instantly breaking the stillness of the morning. He’d donned the form-fitting mask again, to protect his patchwork face from the harshness of the sun as well as to remind himself of the transformation that had brought him to this place on the holiest of missions. It took all his strength to squeeze the mask over his jagged assemblage of flesh, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to peel it off, even as the stench of decay and the oily residue of his own face assaulted him.

  No matter, because very soon the contents of the ossuary would be his, the Order’s. A weapon in their possession to vanquish all the enemies of the Church, the worst of the unbelievers, once and for all.

  With the weapon in the hands of the Order, all who failed to follow the true word of God could be made to perish in a hellfire of their own making. He realized that this moment was what his entire life up until this point had been about. The service, the dedication, the heroism, and, finally, the burning. All leading to now. The purpose of his life was about to be realized with this completed mission in the service of God.

  In the hands of the Order, this weapon that had been delivered unto them from heaven itself would allow the Church to strike fear into those who rebelled with their words and deeds. The heathen swarm could be silenced from continent to continent. Those who blasphemed His word, those who worshipped false gods, those who did not kneel before the Almighty, would be punished for their sins in the most fitting way possible.

  God really did work in mysterious ways.

  * * *

  Paz wrapped the box thought to contain the bones of Christ in the sheet that had been covering it. It weighed too much to conveniently strap it to his frame or to stuff it into something he could sling over his shoulder. But it wasn’t as big as he was expecting, and it fit snugly under his arm.

  He wished his priest were here so he could seek counsel on the ossuary’s very existence, even though its purported contents were in all probability a hoax. Then he wondered if this was some holy mission he was meant to fulfill, one of the true cosmic reasons for his coming to Texas in the first place, all those years before.

  That entire stretch flashed through his consciousness. Paz had been called to a great mission by the very higher power to whom he had been speaking in the hope of gaining a response. Maybe this was it, God entrusting him with a mission to erase forever the fallacy imprinted on the bones contained in this box. Destroy it and he would effectively be destroying doubt, the greatest enemy of faith. Destroy it and Paz would be providing the ultimate service to the Almighty he sought only to serve.

  You’d be proud of me, Padre.…

  There was only one way to complete the task, only one way to be sure.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to think about firing a weapon. The process had become so ingrained, so instinctive, that the gun felt like an extension of himself, of the arms hoisting it. But now one of those arms had trouble managing the weight. The gun was heavy in his grasp and the barrel seemed to rotate in slow motion.

  He fired from the ramparts at the hordes of men laying siege to the mission with all manner of weapon in hand. He was dialing everything back a notch, focusing more on aim and accuracy than on speed of fire. The young woman he knew as Selina Escolante, Nola Delgado, stood on the wall as well, across from him, on the other side of the structure’s gate.

  She fired nonstop, the lag between aiming and firing less than his, less than Caitlin’s. A woman, then, well versed in the use of pretty much any firearm. She might be known in the darkness as a mythical assassin utilizing a signature .22-caliber pistol, but she was clearly much more than that.

  El Barquero.

  Cort Wesley pictured Nola’s mother retaining special ops soldiers and maybe Navy SEALs to teach her daughter the ways of the gun. Train her how to be a killer, not just an assassin—the distinction as vast as between the sun and the moon. Train her to be able to hold her own in any form of gunplay, even under siege, as was the case today.

  He wondered if they taught her how to enjoy it, too, since Cort Wesley had never encountered anyone who seemed to revel as much as she reveled in the simple majesty of working a gun to snuff out lives. Nola cradled the blazing assault rifle in her hand like a child’s doll, lovingly and with purpose, the two of them joined both physically and in the subconscious. The weapon was a living thing in her grasp and her mind.

  Was God trying to do him a favor here, weakening his arm so that he could no longer know the life that pulsed through him as death poured from the muzzle in a gas-fueled stream?

  Cort Wesley’s own bullet stream might not quite match the effectiveness of Nola’s, but men were falling to his bullets as he stood on the wall, tempting the return fire that was closing in on him. As a boy, his favorite story had been of the brave and loyal defenders of the Alamo, and he’d never forget his first visit to the place that had dominated so much of his imagination.

  Never in his thoughts, though, had he ever imagined he’d be fighting his own version of that epic battle, knowing what Lieutenant Colonel William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett must have been feeling in the midst of the final fight that would claim all their lives.

  He felt the ladder leading to the top of the wall shift and wobble, glanced down amid the gunfire pouring in from both directions, and saw six of the Mexican men climbing up with the last of Paz’s weapons dangling behind their backs.

  Reinforcements, Cort Wesley thought, something the fighters at the Alamo had never received.

  * * *

  “Good luck, Colonel,” Caitlin said to Paz, as Daniel Aidman finally got the rear doors of the mission open.

  “You don’t need luck when you have faith, Ranger. I was spared the noose in my home country for this moment. I can feel my mother smiling down on me even now.”

  Caitlin looked out toward the eternal flames spouting from the trench beyond, gray-black smoke dragged up to paint the air in its wake. “A quarter mile, or thereabouts, is still a long way to cover in the open.”

  “I have God to guide me,” Paz assured her. “My priest t
old me so. He passed away as our battle was beginning, his ending at the same time. I felt it. So I have the ultimate backup, Ranger, to complete my mission and the journey that brought me to you.”

  She reached out and squeezed his arm. “The contents of that box, Colonel…”

  “Never to be seen again after today.”

  Caitlin watched him speed into the sun, his motions impossibly quick and agile for a man his size. He was there and then he was gone, his shape shrinking farther into the distance, as she turned back to Aidman.

  “That truck parked alongside the chapel,” Caitlin said. “Don’t tell me: Those tanks labeled ‘Propane’ contain water, just like back in 1994.”

  “Actually,” Aidman told her, brightening, “no, they don’t.”

  97

  SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS

  Molinari worked his way around the side of the mission, taking advantage of the battle raging in the front to seek an angle to better shoot down the enemy defending their ground from atop the wall. The incessant clacking of gunfire soothed his ears. The relentless onslaught waged by the best soldiers the Order had to offer was certain to weaken the resistance enough for him to finish it off in effortless fashion.

  A lot of these soldiers had already perished in their holy mission to provide the Order with the weapon, a price worth paying to render God’s army invincible in dealing with sinners. The search for one thing had led to another, and Molinari felt blessed to be chosen for a mission that had expanded into something far greater than its original mandate.

  The true origin of the bones interred inside that ossuary no longer mattered; what mattered—all that mattered—was the great weapon those bones carried. To be received only by the worthy, one of faith.