Strong Cold Dead Read online

  “Drink your tea,” Ela said, sipping from her own steaming cup.

  Dylan took one sip, and then another, wrinkling his nose at the effort.

  “You ever hear of sugar?” He realized he couldn’t find his phone. He ruffled the blanket in search of it, coming up with Ela’s iPhone 6s instead. “I should’ve gotten you a different case, so we could tell them apart.”

  She gave him the smile she’d first flashed upon taking the seat next to him in their Native American studies class at Brown. Dylan hadn’t even been sure it was aimed at him, to the point where he looked around to see if there was another guy in the area, and he still hadn’t known how to respond when he discovered there wasn’t.

  What am I, like, in middle school?

  That’s what it had felt like then, and it didn’t feel all that much different now. Sure, he believed in the cause Ela was fighting for on her native land and all. But dropping everything and coming home to Texas with her was all about Ela holding him by a string, making him dance on command.

  “Sugaring the tea would spoil the effect.” She winked at him, the steam from her cup rising between them and seeming to stain the lantern light.

  Dylan took a bigger sip this time, starting to detect a slightly acrid odor to go with a bitter undertaste that left his tongue feeling dry. They were seated in the long-abandoned root cellar beneath Ela’s family’s ancestral home, once used to store perishables for the long winter, and later appropriated by Ela as her personal hideaway. She’d spent lots of time shoring up and beautifying the fifteen-foot-square chamber as much as she could. Then college had brought new interests and demands on her time, her personal hideaway deteriorating back to its original damp and musty form. The furniture Ela brought down here from storage was rotting, and the planks she’d laid over the earthen walls had warped and puckered. The old-fashioned kerosene lantern they were using had once hung from the ceiling, but the hook that had held it there was gone.

  “Peyote?” Dylan asked, the cup still touching his lips.

  She flashed that smile again. “Uh-huh.”

  Dylan wanted to stop drinking the tea, should have stopped, but didn’t let himself.

  “You’re not scared, are you, boy?”

  “Do I look scared … girl?”

  He tried to chuckle, but his mouth was too dry. He managed a smile that seemed to freeze in place, to the point where he had to make his mind pry it free.

  “If you only knew,” Dylan said, taking sip after sip now, feeling the liquid cool, or maybe not feeling it at all.

  “Knew what?”

  Dylan didn’t want to tell her, to risk spoiling the moment. “Let’s just say there’s lots of assholes in the world and I seem to have gone up against most of them.”

  In the now quivering light, Ela’s eyes looked like molten lava. “You sound like a Comanche, like my Lost Boys.”

  “Lost Boys?”

  “What I call the young Comanche I practically grew up with. They’re all cousins of mine. Even more radical about our land and heritage than me; you can tell, because I don’t paint my face.”

  “Or draw a red X on your chest.”

  Ela smiled at him playfully. “You sure about that, boy?”

  Dylan realized he’d finished his cup. “I didn’t know you could make tea out of it,” he said, his voice sounding like somebody else’s, like he was hearing it from outside his body.

  “Only for a few thousand years. Especially in these parts, since the buttons harvested from the roots of West Texas cacti are unusually high in mescaline sulfate.”

  “So now you’re a chemist, as well as an activist.”

  “You can take the girl out of the school, but not the school out of the girl.”

  Dylan felt her sliding close to him, nearly tipping the kerosene lantern over as she shifted on the blanket warming them atop the root cellar’s cold, flattened ground.

  “The Native American Church believes peyote to be crucial to obtaining spiritual guidance, so long as it’s ingested in the proper environment.”

  Dylan looked about dramatically. “A root cellar?”

  Ela laughed. Their eyes met and locked, and Dylan could see a light sheen on her flesh, her face seeming to glow in the twinkling lantern light. The world before him was shifting and shaking slightly, though not in the way that left him dizzy. It was more like the effects of the IV anesthesia he’d gotten before a stomach test he’d needed, a few years back.

  If anything, Dylan felt more alert, more aware, hyperfocused on his surroundings, with Ela shining as the only light amid the darkness. He couldn’t see the lantern anymore; there was only her. And then they were kissing, without Dylan realizing their faces and mouths had come together.

  Even though the tea tasted sour, her breath was sweet, reminding him of sunflowers, for some reason. Then he seemed to be with her in a field of them, green and yellow and bright, their hands sweeping about each other. Dylan’s arms felt disconnected from his body, like snakes pulling free of his shoulders, acting independently of his own thoughts. It felt like a dream he could control, all of this happening according to his own direction as he stood outside himself and watched it all transpire. He heard a baby crying, and then his mother was somewhere else in the field, picking flowers with his younger brother. Then something was crawling into the jeans his dad hated because they were too skinny to suit his tastes and cost too much, and Dylan realized it hadn’t crawled in at all, just morphed into something altogether different, over which he had no more control than he had over his arms or his thoughts.

  The lantern tipping over burned his eyes with a splash of light that brought Dylan back to where he was. Except his shirt was off and the wool of the blanket was scratching at him. Or maybe it was Ela scratching at him. Didn’t matter, because there was no way this was really happening, no way. It was just a dream or an illusion he’d lost hold of, and soon he’d wake up with his underwear soaked, the way it had happened when he was, like, twelve.

  The raw newness of his feelings then was what he felt now, but it was a newness heightened by an awareness, in the recesses of his mind, that he had gone back to that time with all his knowledge and experience retained. Then Ela was wrestling him, pounding him, it seemed, until he realized it wasn’t her at all but his own heart, thudding up a storm, his naked rib cage seeming to expand more with each beat, threatening to explode.

  And then he did explode.

  But not there.

  Somewhere else.

  Everywhere at once.

  He thought he heard Ela gasping, screaming, glimpsed grayish shapes like the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies, slithering through the air, enveloping both of them in their dark shroud.

  “Ela!” he cried out.

  Or thought he did.

  “Ela!”

  Didn’t she see them closing in? Didn’t she know?

  Gotta stop, gotta stop, gotta stop …

  Words spoken or merely formed, it didn’t matter anymore, the difference reduced to nothing. Action and thought became indistinguishable from each other, to the point where Dylan could no longer tell which was which. Or what was really happening from what his mind conjured.

  The Dementors …

  Everywhere. And nowhere.

  Just like him, just like them—him and Ela.

  Together. Separate. Here. Gone.

  And then it was happening again, inside him, only different this time. Because the Dementors were gone, replaced by ghostly specters watching him from afar and from up close at the same time. Dylan saw his mother smiling down at him, and he hugged Ela even closer, for reasons he didn’t understand.

  But then his mother was gone, replaced by a series of spectral images drawn from among the monsters who had visited him in the past. Dylan had learned much too young that there were things that really did go bump in the night, that monsters were real. But they didn’t seem real now, making him question the integrity of his own memory and whether these beings were the pr
oducts of comparable delusions, which attacked him only in his mind.

  The faceless thugs who’d nearly beaten him to death just outside the Brown University campus, still faceless now.

  The white slavers who’d kidnapped him in Mexico.

  The serial killer with hundreds of victims to his credit.

  Girls had been part of his crossing paths with all of them. And now they were watching him with Ela, as if to decide which would get another go at him.

  You can’t. You’re dead.

  “Don’t speak,” he thought he heard Ela say, atop him now.

  Maybe it didn’t matter whether they were dead or not. His father thought he saw ghosts, at least one, so why not Dylan, too? Maybe the lines between the two worlds weren’t as well constructed as everyone thought. The right person, at the right time and place, might be capable of bulldozing right through them.

  Leave me alone.

  “Quiet,” Ela was saying, pressing a hand against his mouth.

  Dylan realized he couldn’t breathe, that she was smothering him with a palm that tasted like the peyote tea, which was driving bile up his throat. He still couldn’t breathe, but her hand was gone, and then the spectral images were dissolving around him and the lantern light was fading to a soft blur. Then he saw only darkness, even though his eyes were open.

  * * *

  Dylan awoke in the root cellar, Ela pressed against him, their clothes shed in unkempt piles about the mossy earth. The blanket had bunched up, conforming to their dual shapes and no longer spreading any farther.

  He had no idea where his phone was, to check the time, and the next time he opened his eyes Ela was gone, and he was terrified, until he slipped off again. But, the next time, her naked form was still there and his wasn’t, making him wonder whether he’d ever been there at all. If what had happened was real, if anything was real …

  His head pounded like a jackhammer was working between his ears; his mouth and throat were so dry that he couldn’t swallow. He tried to open his eyes again, only to realize that they already were open but that there was nothing to see except the empty darkness, broken only by a sliver of light still shed by the fading lantern. The dark scared him, the night scared him, left visions of scurrying through the woods and brush on four legs instead of two, his nails turned to talon-like claws raking at the ground and air. Empty of thought, with the world his to embrace. Grasping at the air and seeking Ela amid the mist-shrouded night alive with the sounds of crickets and night birds. Calling out for Ela, except he had no voice. Hypersensitive to the world around him, every smell, sound, and sight.

  Everything magnified until it all washed away in a splash of water that turned to blood, the light appearing from slivers cut out of the world above, just in time to remind him to breathe.

  26

  BOERNE, TEXAS

  Guillermo Paz sat at his priest’s bedside, the side rail lowered so he could feed the man his dinner, which was watered-down oatmeal with the texture of drilling mud, to make it easier for him to swallow. Paz was the only one who could get him to eat anything at all, which convinced the colonel that his priest could grasp the meaning of his words, even if he could no longer respond to them.

  “I’ll tell you, Padre,” Paz said, as the old man worked his mouth feebly and then managed a swallow, “I really miss our talks. Remember the first time you heard my confession? I know I threw you for a loop with that one, but you never shied away from telling me the God’s honest truth, if you’ll pardon my choice of words.”

  Paz dabbed the spoon into the bowl of soupy oatmeal and eased it forward. His priest opened his mouth a crack and sucked up the meager contents with a slurping sound.

  “I know you can’t talk to me anymore, Padre, but you can still listen, and that’s almost as important. I got back too late to call tonight’s bingo game. I know somebody from the home was there to fill in, but I still feel I let people down. I don’t like letting people down.”

  The old priest finished working that spoonful down his throat and opened his mouth for the next. His once-bright eyes were dull and lifeless, his thinning white hair flattened to his scalp in some places and sticking up askew in others. The room was laced with deodorizing spray to hide the stale scents of bodily waste and dried, scaly skin racked by bedsores. Paz detested injustice of all kinds, but this seemed like the ultimate one, for a man who’d given his life to others to have his own snatched from him this way. Feeding the man was the least he could do, but it always left him wishing he could do more. It had made Paz feel good at first, but now the whole process left him empty and drained. Powerless, too.

  “I’ve got that feeling again, that something bad’s coming. I got it in this apartment I raided today that belonged to some pissant who normally wouldn’t amount to a speck of dust in the great chain of the universe. Problem is, all that’s changed now. Pissants like him have become as dangerous as assassination squads. They’re walking nuclear bombs, Padre, able to do a lot more damage with a keyboard or a test tube than men like me could ever do with a rifle. When I killed the man who killed my priest back home in the slums, I did it up close and personal, just him and me. I even used the same knife he did. But those days are gone. Now the worst danger, the biggest threat, comes from people you can’t even see, who don’t have the cajones to do face-to-face what they thrive on from a distance.”

  Paz watched his priest swallow the latest spoonful and readied another.

  “The philosopher Rousseau wrote that ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.’ Now those chains are power cords, and they have the potential to strangle everything good people hold dear. Your favorite philosopher, Aristotle, bucked the system by believing in free will over determinism. But it’s the free will of people like that pissant whose apartment I raided that’s bringing us all to the edge.”

  Paz realized his priest’s lips were trembling in anticipation of more oatmeal, and he quickly readied the next spoon, scooping too much up for the old man to manage and needing to shake some of it back into the bowl.

  “I know what you’d say, if you could still speak, Padre,” Paz told him, gently dabbing up the stray oatmeal with a napkin. “You’d tell me that was my job, that my lot in his life is to tighten a noose on the necks of all the pissants before they can do the same to the world. Problem is, there’s just too many of them for me, my Texas Ranger, and her outlaw to contend with now.”

  Paz’s words froze there. He was thinking of the apartment he’d raided this morning and the kid who lived there. The spoon froze, too, suspended in the air halfway between Paz and his priest, the excess oatmeal concoction dribbling down to the bedsheet. Paz thought of the cold feeling that had enveloped him as soon as he crashed through the apartment door, a vague sense of discomfort, coupled with a certainty that something very, very bad was coming—a product of this kid now gone missing. The ratty apartment stank of body odor and unwashed clothes. It was infested with ants, thanks to the stray candy wrappers strewn about. But it was the residue of something else that plagued Paz the most.

  The kid’s thoughts.

  They seemed to hang in the air, and now they clung to Paz’s consciousness the way the stench had clung to his clothes.

  “Yup, there’s more pissants than ever looking to do damage. And you know what, Padre?” Paz resumed, starting the spoon toward his priest’s waiting mouth again. “I’ve got this feeling the worst is yet come.”

  27

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Love the new digs, Ranger,” Jones greeted her, the next morning, when Caitlin reached the back corner of the open first-floor office space of Texas Ranger Company F headquarters. His shiny new cowboy boots were propped up on the still drying varnish coating her desk.

  “Glad you approve,” she said, twisting the back of his chair around so his feet flopped back to the floor. “Nice boots, by the way.”

  “Had some business up in Austin, so I picked them up at Allen’s, just like you recommended.”
/>   “I recommended you buy them a size too small.”

  “The sales clerk frowned on the notion. He said it would make my feet go numb. Cause a fall maybe.”

  “A girl can hope.”

  “Homeland Security is no longer investigating your use of an alleged weapon of mass destruction.”

  “Should I say thank you?”

  “Not to the people whose houses still smell like roadkill. Next time you unleash a stink bomb, you may want to advise people to close their windows.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. And I appreciate you making this go away.”

  “Speaking of which…”

  Jones popped up out of his chair, reaching for something inside his jacket. He looked to be in better shape than the last time Caitlin had seen him. She couldn’t say exactly what Jones did with Homeland Security, especially these days, and she doubted that anybody else could, either. He operated in the muck, among the dregs of society plotting to harm the country from the inside. Caitlin doubted he’d ever written a report or detailed the specifics of his operations in any way. He lived in the dark, calling on the likes of Guillermo Paz and the colonel’s henchmen to deal with matters, always out of view of the light. When those matters brought him to Texas, which seemed to be every other day, Jones would seek out Caitlin the way he might a former classmate.

  She’d first met him when his name was still “Smith” and he was attached to the American embassy in Bahrain. Enough of a relationship had formed for the two of them to remain in contact and to have actually worked together on several more occasions. Sometimes Jones surprised her, but mostly he could be relied upon to live down to Caitlin’s expectations.

  This morning, the thin light kept Jones’s face cloaked in the shadows, where he was most comfortable. Caitlin tried to remember the color of his eyes but couldn’t, as if he’d been trained to never look at anyone long enough for anything to register. He was wearing a sport jacket over a button-down shirt, and pressed trousers, making him seem like a high school teacher, save for the tightly cropped military-style haircut.