Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(105)

Because this was the very same Chamber of Horrors, the same ride that had terrified her as a child, around thirty years ago. Time circled about, catching up, and Caitlin half expected to see her father in the next car as dangling skeletons dropped down before her.

*

Paz’s face was jammed close enough to the track to smell the grease lubricant. He was helpless to do anything but force his neck and shoulder muscles up against Seyyef’s desperately determined thrust downward. Paz, who had once pushed a man’s face against a churning fan belt, wondered if this was payback for that. His entire life experience was on rewind, seeming to go only as far back as the first time he’d met the gaze of his Texas Ranger, Caitlin Strong. Wanting the glare that looked back at him to be his. To feel what she did, behind those steely eyes that had changed his life even as he was trying to take hers.

Paz felt the heat of the tracks, imagined the sparks generated by the friction flying upward when his skin met steel. And then he saw Caitlin Strong’s eyes in his mind. It was enough to launch him backwards, feeling the sinews tearing in his neck muscles as he twisted around. Facing Seyyef, the brute’s breath blowing a stench like roadkill into him, Paz smashed his ridged knuckles into a neck wrapped in layers of muscle. Felt them crunch into the softer cartilage, and the cartilage giving way in their path.

Coming apart, shattering. The man’s breath bottlenecking in his throat, his face reddening, only forty-five seconds to a minute at most before he lost consciousness. Paz felt his balance waver as the coaster dropped into its final dip, sweeping round the perimeter of Klyde Warren Park, over Olive Street, in the same moment that Seyyef sank his hands into Paz’s throat.

*

The past and present swirled together, merging, and Caitlin was a little girl, terrified of the dark once again. Monsters jumping out at her everywhere, even though she was on foot instead of huddled against her father in the lead car. Same monsters then as now, with some tweaking and touch-up. The ride had seemed so big and long then, so short and confined now, the real monster she sought lost to her somewhere in the darkness.

A shot rang out and a squiggly, slimy, insect-like thing dropped from the ceiling, severed from its guide wire. The only light came from the face of a clown with red bulbs for eyes, the constant din of laughter emanating from its mouth forming the only sound breaking the silence, except for the stray echoes of al-Aziz’s gunshot, which left her hugging the floor.

She felt something cool, smelled something sweet, watched a faux ground mist formed of some dry ice concoction waft over a tombstone-rich fake ground, ghostlike beings lurching out of coffins rising from open graves. Caitlin almost shot two of them, then crawled on with the SIG Sauer extended before her, into the thickest reaches of the mist. Like she’d just dropped out of sight.

Then the graveyard was gone and she found herself in the tight, twisting confines of what looked like a cave, with snapping teeth attached to alien heads shooting out at her, one after the other, triggered by proximity sensors.

You have to do this, little girl.

Why, Daddy? Why?

Because fear ain’t got no place in your life. I don’t ever want you to be scared of anything, not a single thing.

And it had worked. After that first ride through this very Chamber of Horrors, Caitlin was never scared of anything again. Frightened maybe, but never scared. And only in later years, when the truth that she had suppressed the memory of witnessing her mother’s murder was revealed, did she realize why: because after that, whether she remembered it or not, her father had known he had to make her confront her fears to the point of becoming inoculated against them.

Caitlin found herself in a fake, fog-drenched bog. She remembered how creatures sprang up through trapdoors in the floor. Banshees or something, she thought, all dressed in shapeless black rags. She found herself shooting them as they burst upward, figuring al-Aziz might be among them.

More gunshots rang out from beyond the bog section of the Chamber of Horrors, and Caitlin fired back in their general direction, no worries about hitting innocent bystanders. Her memory of this place sharpened, time rewinding inside her throbbing head, which felt stuffed with cotton. It was like she was six years old again, wishing only that the ride would end. And it would, soon. Just one more section to traverse before she spilled out a set of double exit doors that matched the entrance.

Caitlin raced that way, more of al-Aziz’s bullets pinging the darkness, past and present melting together.

*

Guillermo Paz felt the blood bubbling in his brain, his breath all backed up and his lungs ready to burst, the slowly dying Seyyef squeezing the life out of him as well. Paz realized their car was roaring toward the gravity-fed ride’s end, back at the children’s park, barreling along into the final straightaway, where the attendant would brake the line of attached cars to a stop.

Except there was no attendant present anymore.

Which meant nobody was present to slow the cars’ pace, meaning a violent collision with a standing set of identical cars currently occupying the rearmost section of the track. Meaning …

Feeling his thoughts beginning to slow, Paz worked his hands up between him and Seyyef, under the massive shape that seemed to be crushing his chest. He found a place deep inside himself where a reserve of strength had been building, from the time when he was a boy in his native Venezuela and a priest had died in his arms to the day a glimpse of his Texas Ranger’s eyes had changed his life forever. Then Paz was hoisting Seyyef from him, the man’s massive shape seeming to float before coming back down on the track, an instant before the two sets of cars rammed together.