Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(47)
“You pray to a God who does not hear you,” he said, his voice rising above their desperate cries. “He does not hear you because He is not here to listen. Only I am here. And when you pray, it should be to me, for the power of the one true God I serve as proxy for.”
Al-Aziz stopped again to better enjoy the sounds of his majesty. A teenage boy, brandishing a knife he’d hidden under his shirt, tried to rush him, only to be snatched from the ground by Seyyef and held dangling in the air until the giant crushed the boy’s throat and discarded his limp form back to the dusty ground.
“A village must pay for the indiscretions of each part as if he was acting for the whole. Because no one stopped the charge of this one, my terms have changed: each family will take the lives of their two oldest children, instead of one. Dishonor me again and it becomes three. We will begin now, one family at a time, so others may watch and heed the lessons of the indiscretions that necessitated me coming back here today. I trust I shall not have to come back a third time.”
Seyyef approached and handed al-Aziz the satellite phone he’d left with the giant for safekeeping.
“Yes?” the ISIS commander greeted, listening to the report from Syria, feeling his spirits perk up even more. “And this has been confirmed?… No, I’ll want to handle it personally. Initiate the travel protocols for my men and I, and alert the proper contacts in the United States to prepare. Where again, exactly?… “Texas,” al-Aziz repeated, after the voice told him.
41
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Caitlin had suited up in full hazmat gear for drills but never for real, and she was amazed at how different everything felt. The suit was bulkier, hotter. The helmet tended to fog up worse than she recalled, and the portable oxygen supply was heavier. As soon as she stepped outside the command and control tent, the sun, which had chased off that lone dark cloud, felt like it was melting the suit’s space-age material into her skin. Approaching the wobbly tube attached to the covered entrance of Hoover’s Cooking felt like scuba diving on land, right down to the peculiar buzz she felt in her ear from the air pushing through the tank into her lungs.
“Can you hear me?” she heard Jones ask through her helmet’s built-in microphone.
“Loud and clear.”
“I’ve been inside already, Ranger, so I can give you the lay of the land and the chronology, as best as we’ve been able to reconstruct. Zero hour was right around one hundred and sixty-seven minutes ago and counting. We know that because that’s when a regular who’d come in for lunch rushed outside, puking his guts out, after finding what you’re about to see.”
She looked at him through her mask. His face was absent of smirk and snarl for the first time she could remember.
“Austin authorities pushed the appropriate panic button,” Jones continued. “Most of the cavalry’s still en route, but they got the containment procedures enacted faster than any drill ever conducted for a city this size, including getting the man who dialed nine-one-one into isolation. I’m starting to love Texas almost as much as I hate it.”
“We’re real good with disasters, Jones,” Caitlin told him, nodding inside her helmet. “Far too much practice, unfortunately.”
“Nothing that prepared you for what you’re about to see, Ranger. You can count on that.”
Passing through the tube en route to the thick plastic sheeting separating Hoover’s Cooking from the outside world was like some crazy Disney World ride played out for real. Caitlin half expected mechanical or animated creatures to jump out or launch an attack on her from outside the tube.
“The victims were all eating lunch,” she heard Jones say in her helmet. “Various stages of their meals.”
“So they didn’t die at the same time, in the same moment?” Caitlin asked, her voice echoing in her ears.
“Pretty damn close. Within seconds of each other, as near as we can tell. Suggests something airborne, doesn’t it, Ranger?”
“I don’t know.”
“Despite all that annual training you receive at Quantico?” Jones chided. “Come on.”
“It just doesn’t feel like a pathogen to me.”
“Something else?”
“Something worse,” Caitlin told him, not yet sure why.
42
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Caitlin followed Jones through the remainder of the tube, parting the last dangling sheets of heavy plastic to enter the normally down-home confines of Hoover’s Cooking. She imagined she could smell eggs frying, bacon cooking, and coffee lifted off BUNN warmers to be poured into the restaurant’s bountiful cups. But all that slipped away, along with her breath, when the sight beyond her helmet’s faceplate was revealed.
Several of the bodies were lying frozen on the floor, arms extended as if to claw forward along the tile toward the entrance now encased in biohazard plastic. Others sat straight up, only the dead sightlessness of their frozen eyes giving away the fact they weren’t waiting for their meals to be served. Still more were facedown on tabletops or booths strewn with spilled liquids and food. A few were slumped in their chairs, their limbs canted at odd angles, as if they had been trying to rise when whatever had happened in here struck them. It was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting drawn by the devil, amid the pie cases and walls covered with fifteen years of pictures from the history of Hoover’s Cooking.