Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(106)

Seyyef was crushed between them, his bones sounding like wood snapping when they broke, and Paz felt himself launched upward, breathing in the warm air as he went flying.

*

The final section of the Chamber of Horrors featured a swerving obstacle course through various monsters lunging for the cars as they passed. Caitlin drew close enough to them to smell the fake fur and what she now realized was foam, rubber, and latex. She wasn’t dizzy anymore, but her footing still didn’t feel steady and she didn’t trust her aim.

She knew al-Aziz would use the lunging, lurching creatures for cover, would launch himself on her from behind them, with whatever bullets he had left.

Caitlin pushed herself the final stretch of the way, through the slog of her thoughts, which felt rich with slurry, time moving in jumps instead of a smooth sweep of a second hand. Almost to the final stretch of the Chamber of Horrors, the mechanical monsters that had haunted her youth poised to pounce from the shadows.

Caitlin almost tripped on a knee-high boulder made of papier-maché. An idea struck her and she shoved it along, propelling it like a soccer ball to follow the general line of the track the cars rode along. Triggered into action, the monsters lunged out, one after another, claws and talons stretching over the reach of the rails.

A shape trailed them, removed from the camouflage they provided, a shape that merged with their collective menace as Caitlin opened up with her SIG. She fired until the slide locked open, her ears burning from the percussion inside the close quarters.

A mixture of fur, rubber, and plastic fluttered through the air, which was rich with the scent of glue instead of blood. Her bullets had tumbled the monsters of her youth from their perches, left them in a heap on the floor.

Along with a monster from her present.

Hatim Abd al-Aziz, supreme military commander of ISIS, lay on his back with his eyes open and glazed, amid the marble spheres loosed from the heads of the stitched-together skulls, which weren’t nearly as terrifying as she recalled, after all.

Caitlin made sure he was dead and sank to her knees, conscious suddenly of a buzzing in her jeans pocket. She remembered she’d silenced her phone, and she drew it out to find a call coming in from Cort Wesley.

*

Daniel Cross hit St. Paul Street, following the flow of the crowd before him and looping around to head toward the entrance to the DART station, which was clearly visible across the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. His breath was already heaving, and his legs felt like deadweights. People were shoving their way past him like he wasn’t even there. He turned back to check for possible pursuit, someone with a gun following him from the park.

So he never saw the old, scuffed boot that tripped him up. His face hit the pavement with a thud, scattering a bunch of people fleeing the park. Then he felt his head jerked up by the hair until he was facing an old man who looked like somebody had sucked the life from his face with a vacuum cleaner.

“Bet that hurt, son, didn’t it?” said Captain D. W. Tepper, crouching to slap a pair of handcuffs in place as Pierre Beauchamp of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police watched, gun drawn, for anyone else who might be coming.





104

HOUSTON, TEXAS

“Where the hell you been, Ranger?” Cort Wesley said, Caitlin finally answering her phone when he pulled into the McKinney Garage in downtown Houston and squeezed into a space meant for a compact car on the second level.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Cort Wesley.”

“Yeah? Well, you need to get the team to Houston.”

“Houston?” she asked, the world seeming to be angled sharply to one side. “I’m all the way up in Dallas. Al-Aziz is dead. We got this licked.”

“No we don’t. Not even close.”

*

“No way we’re gonna get there in time, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin told him, after he’d quickly sketched out what they were facing. “No way.”

“Then tell me what I’m dealing with,” he said, bypassing the elevator for the stairwell that descended into the swirling length of tunnels that ran beneath the city. “Tell me about this shit that ISIS is going to blow up.”

“Did you say blow up?”

“I did.”

“Then, as bad as you thought things were,” Caitlin said, thinking of what she now knew about the weapon bred from waters deep beneath the Comanche reservation, “they just got a whole lot worse…”

*

Caitlin’s head was throbbing even more by the time she finished explaining to Cort Wesley what he was up against—a mutant strain of corn fungus turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

“The Comanche have hundreds of pounds of the stuff stored away, Ranger,” he said, when she’d finished.

“Did you say hundreds?”

“Close, anyway. I saw it for myself. Minus maybe ten backpacks’ worth that’s currently in the hands of ISIS. Enough to kill a whole lot of people in the tunnels beneath Houston. Confined space, poor ventilation … A smell could last a good long while, at least ’til everyone down there’s dead.”

“How’d they put something like that together so fast?”

“They didn’t; Ela and her cousins did. It’s their plan, their backpacks. And they’re all dead now, Ela included.”

“Dylan?” Caitlin posed fearfully.