Strong Light of Day (36 page)

Caitlin tried not to smile. “Paz…”

“I can't see him, either.”

“You will when we need him. Time to move.”

Cort Wesley had moved the binoculars to the left, looking toward the wild horses. “Something's wrong about this.”

“Where'd you like to start on that note, cowboy?” Jones asked him.

Cort Wesley lowered the binoculars. “There are no wild horses in these parts.”

*   *   *

The three of them moved straight across the sprawling field, keeping to the thickest patches of scrub for cover, on the unlikely chance that Paz had somehow missed one or more of the guards. Caitlin figured there'd be three or four more inside the barn. No way to take them by surprise the way Paz had dropped the perimeter guards in a matter of a few short minutes. And as far as she knew, the barn had only a single entrance. How to storm it, how to gain entry and secure the hostages without bullets starting to fly their way through the kids …

“I've got an idea,” said Cort Wesley, as if reading her mind.

 

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The guards Paz had killed were dressed uniformly in black commando gear courtesy of 5.11 Tactical, the best such outfitter short of the military. Cort Wesley and Jones stripped off the black pullover tops and flak jackets of guards Paz had dropped in his tracks, and pressed on toward the barn together, still hunched low. Caitlin clung to the best cover she could find, maybe thirty feet behind them.

When they drew within sight of the barn—and a watcher likely stationed in the hayloft—Cort Wesley wrapped an arm around Jones's shoulder, pretending to drag him desperately forward as Jones limped and sputtered along. Both kept their eyes down, clearly much the worse for wear as they approached the closed barn door, feigning having been the victims of some kind of attack.

They didn't have to knock or cry out. The big barn door opened with a creak when they drew close, flickers of lantern and generator light emerging, along with a pair of similarly dressed men wielding M16s.

The light didn't strike Jones and Cort Wesley until it was too late, until each had his pistol palmed and steadied. They could have tried to face the guards down. But with no idea how many other gunmen they were facing, and the hostages to think about, they couldn't risk giving any quarter at all.

So they fired, and kept firing, as Caitlin surged past them into the barn and the elongated circle in which the captive kids and their chaperones had been arranged. She sighted in on two additional guards, SIG churning and spitting before she'd zeroed them firmly, locking them down and aiming in the same thought merging into action. The gunmen were standing and then they weren't. The echo of her gunshots was lost in the screams and wails of the terrified students of the Village School, who hadn't yet processed that they were being rescued.

Even then it wasn't over. The thump of footsteps pounded in the hayloft overhead, and Caitlin trained her aim on the ladder, waiting for the shape of a man to emerge.

But Cort Wesley and Jones weren't nearly as patient. They opened up with pistols, dual streams fired upward to pulverize the dried wood into sawdust, which sprayed from the holes their bullets punched in the hayloft floor. There was a thud, and then the footsteps stopped.

Caitlin spun, eyes running over the hostages who, but for a strange quirk of fate, would've included Luke Torres. She again found herself wondering what had moved Dane to take such a risk. Linking him to an attack on these kids, or any of the others, by the marauding hordes of beetles would've been damn-near impossible. Yet he'd still risked everything to get the students from the Village School out of Armand Bayou before the swarm descended upon them.

Sobs and whimpers replaced the screams as the hostages clutched and held each other, a few emerging from behind positions of cover they'd managed to find. Caitlin wanted to tell them it was all right, they were fine and going home, except that she knew it wasn't true. The experience itself, and then the violence that had finally ended it, would leave an indelible mark for the rest of their lives. More nights than they could count would see them lurching up from the bedcovers, drenched in sweat from a nightmare they couldn't remember and never would, because nothing could best the reality of what they'd just witnessed.

“I'm a Texas Ranger!” she called anyway. “And all of you are going home!”

Something changed in that instant, the heaviness in the barn's air receding in favor of what felt like a soft breeze. She smelled the stink of fear and stale sweat for the first time, glad for the scents her revived senses conjured, since it spared her the coppery odor of blood from the men she, Cort Wesley, and Jones had just killed. Her eyes recorded cans of gasoline that had been fueling the generators, along with a pair of tractors, attached to industrial-size sprayers, which the previous owners of the cotton farm had used to fertilize their crops, backed up against a rear corner of the barn.

Caitlin felt her breathing even out, her lungs and heart steadying, as it always was in the aftermath of a gunfight. She'd been in far tougher ones than this, though the stakes involved—thirty-four high-school kids—were unparalleled.

“Let's get a move on,” she said through the silence that had settled around her. She was preparing to lead the kids from the barn when she saw Guillermo Paz standing a few feet in front of the open barn doors, board stiff, his gaze focused straight ahead into the black ribbon of night beyond. “Hold on a sec,” she corrected, hand held in the air to keep the former hostages in their tracks.

Caitlin slid past Cort Wesley and Jones, who had stayed on their guards, with guns ready. She could feel the heat radiating off Paz as she drew closer, was almost able to actually see the hackles rising on his neck.

“What's wrong, Colonel?”

“Trouble, Ranger,” he said, without turning toward her, gaze fixed on the fields beyond. “Just like my psychic warned. I can see it now, even though there's no strong light.”

And that's when one of the horses grazing before them started whinnying, an instant before it went down, disappearing into the scrub as if its legs had been yanked out from beneath it.

Followed by a second horse.

Then a third.

 

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There are no wild horses in this area,
Cort Wesley had said. These must have come from a nearby farm, spooked by the advance of the deadly colony of beetles. They'd ended up here, taking comfort in some brush to eat, with the false security of the night around them.

Paz backpedaled with her and slammed the barn doors behind him so none of the kids would be able to see what was coming. Cort Wesley couldn't see it either, but one look at Caitlin was all he needed.

“You've gotta be kidding.”

“Coming straight toward us, Cort Wesley.”

Jones holstered his pistol, getting the gist of what was happening. Paz just stood before the now-barred barn door, seeming as big and broad as it was.

“What'd you see, Ranger?”

Cort Wesley had reached her side without Caitlin realizing his presence; she could only look at him and speak in a voice that sounded like someone else's.

“A black wave, Cort Wesley, darker than the night.”

“How big?”

“Everywhere.”

Someone else's voice again.

“Let's move now,” Jones put forth. “Take our chances out the rear.”

“We'll never make it. They'll chase us down.”

Jones's gaze fixed on the ladder leading to the hayloft. “Up there, then. Take our chances up there.”

“I don't like those chances.”

“What,” he shot back at her, “these bugs can climb?”

“We're food, Jones. They'll do whatever they have to.”

“Hold on a sec,” Cort Wesley said, his gaze fixed in another direction.

*   *   *

“This is crazy!” Jones said, trailing Cort Wesley to the tractors tucked into the barn's rear corner.

“Just shut up and follow the plan,” Caitlin told him, toting a pair of the gas cans that had been used to fuel the generators.

“Plan? You call this a plan?”

“Colonel,” she started, Paz picking up from there.

“He says another word, and I'll cut his tongue out,” Paz said, looking toward Jones.

“Close enough,” said Caitlin. She turned her gaze on the twin dark SUVs parked alongside the tractors. “Make yourself useful, Jones, and check the navigation devices in those. Let's see if we can figure out exactly where they came from.”

*   *   *

“We don't have much time,” she said to Cort Wesley as they each poured gasoline into the tank that fed the tractor attachment's fertilizer sprayers.

Outside, the sound of the horses' wailing had stopped. Another sound, though, filled the air beyond the barn, something like a million fingernails clacking together. A fecal smell seemed to trail it, permeating the barn with an odor so sharp it had some of the kids, bundled together in the center of the barn by their chaperones, retching or vomiting.

“Whatever it is, we'll make it enough,” Cort Wesley replied. He watched Guillermo Paz finish tightening the works of one tractor engine and move on to the next. “Hope you know what you're doing there, Colonel.”

“So do I, outlaw,” he said, head buried in the second tractor's engine.

“It's an address in Midland,” Caitlin heard Jones call out, as he slammed the SUV's door. “South Country Road.”

“That's just off Interstate twenty,” she noted, fixing the placement in her brain. “Not much in the area besides warehouses and fulfillment centers.”

“Well, that's where the gunmen we shot drove here from. By the way, Homeland was able to find facial recognition matches on a couple of those guys you shot up on the four-ten outside San Antonio. Ex-Russian special ops.”

“Mobbed up?”

“Available for hire, but no organized crime associations in their files.”

“And you're just telling me this now?”

“I only got the news on the plane while you and the cowboy were reminiscing.”

Caitlin looked past him, at the SUVs he was standing between. “How many can those carry?”

“As many as eight, maybe ten passengers, Ranger.”

“I wasn't talking about just passengers inside.”

 

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The stench, Caitlin figured, must have something to do with the frass Doc Whatley and Young Roger had explained the beetles smeared over themselves. It grew overpowering while she supervised the effort of squeezing as many kids into the SUVs as humanly possible. Jones climbed in behind the wheel of the lead SUV, and a chaperone took the wheel of the trailing one. The remaining chaperones and the oldest and most athletic kids would ride the roof of the trailing SUV, saving the roof of the lead one for Guillermo Paz alone.

Since his role was the centerpiece of the plan they'd desperately hatched.

All told, there were thirty-nine hostages, literally squeezed into place by the time they were ready to roll. The sounds of the approaching horde of insects had grown into an all-out rattling din, like teeth chattering together times a billion, evidence the first wave of the beetles was almost to the barn. By that point, Caitlin and Cort Wesley sat in the driver's seats of the old tractors currently parked side by side, their engines rumbling and black smoke belching from their tailpipes at the front of the convoy. After initially sputtering, those engines had caught, then rattled for a time, before settling into uneasy idles.

The loudening clacks of the beetles, combined with the twin racing engines, would've made being heard difficult, had there been anything to say. As it was, Caitlin and Cort Wesley tensed as Paz yanked off the plywood stretched across the barn door and pushed the door open to the night and the endless black wave, darker than the night sky beyond.

Cort Wesley threw his tractor into gear, first, and felt it lurch forward before its tires found reasonable purchase on the barn floor. It rolled on, Caitlin working hers into gear immediately behind it, while Paz took his place atop the roof of the lead SUV, still in the process of fastening a plastic shoulder tank into place and testing the heft of a six-foot spraying wand.

Caitlin turned her gaze from him and started rolling too, staying back about ten feet from Cort Wesley. Ready with the hand controls to work the attached sprayer, having already familiarized herself with them, gasoline poured in the rusted steel drum, instead of fertilizer.

She surged from the fetid, rank conditions of the barn into the cool of a night braced with a powerful, spoiled stench that hung over it like a cloud. The entire landscape before and around her for as far as she could see was nothing but black. But it was a peculiar black, shifting in apparently uniform fashion, as if the ground itself was moving en masse. Caitlin found herself wondering how many beetles this colony actually numbered and how many layers of them had piled atop each other, sniffing out their next meal.

She didn't have time to wonder long, though, because she saw Cort Wesley activate his sprayer and did the same with hers. Instantly, the acrid scent of gasoline claimed her nostrils, battling the frass stench shed by the beetles for control of the air. Her stream fired to the right, covering a fifty-foot swatch of land, while Cort Wesley sprayed to the left. The result was to inundate the dried scrub, weeds, and overgrown brush where cotton fields had once flourished with gas, forging a makeshift path through which to escape.

Caitlin stole one last look at Paz standing atop the roof of the lead SUV as Jones revved the engine almost directly beneath him, inside the cab. The colonel also had filled a portable pesticide tank with kerosene siphoned from a fifty-five gallon drum used to refill the lanterns supplying the barn's light, and she watched him touch a flaming lighter to the tip of the spraying wand attached to the tank by a flexible hose connection. Fire sparked at the wand's tip, creating what was essentially a jerry-rigged flamethrower. She had no idea how Paz could possibly manage the task while standing unsupported atop the SUV's roof, but she had stopped questioning his capabilities, along with his intentions, long ago, about the same time she began wondering if he was even human.