Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(68)
He had hoped his mind might clear a bit by now, but everything from that night remained shrouded in fog. If anything, his memory had turned to even more of a muddle. All Dylan could find in his grasp was a leftover nightmare of rushing through a field someplace, being chased by vast winged creatures that swooped down on their prey like osprey in the Gulf. Except they were human, at least humanoid, and the wings were attached to their backs with hammocks of tight, dried-out-looking flesh. They had claws for feet, teeth that protruded over their lower lips, and tawny flesh that looked like a combination of burlap and leather.
Dylan half expected the creatures to swoop down on him between the trees as he made his way to White Eagle’s land. Ever since Ela had taken him to meet her grandfather, Dylan hadn’t been able to get out of his mind the sounds he was sure he had heard coming from inside that shack. He’d taken it for an old-fashioned outhouse at first, but its size and design were more consistent with a storage shed of some kind, built without windows and constructed of logs heavy and thick enough to withstand a hurricane.
Dylan continued along the circuitous route through the brambles and brush to White Eagle’s patch of land, set against the sparkling waterfall that drained into the pristine stream. The last thing he wanted was to alert the old man to his presence. The shack-like structure was located close enough to the woods for Dylan to investigate and be gone before White Eagle was any the wiser.
The problem was that the night, coupled with the lingering effects of the slight dose of peyote he’d ingested, had stolen his bearings. The woods were suddenly a deep, dark place swimming with branches that looked like tentacles and tree roots that slithered about the ground like snakes.
Dylan passed it all off as his imagination, until he heard the crackle of a branch crunching underfoot behind him. Then he wasn’t so sure anymore.
64
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
At night, Caitlin realized, the waters of the stream dividing the Comanche reservation from the rest of the nature preserve looked green. A slight mist hung over the surface, seeming to vibrate in rhythm with the endless flow of the waterfall draining downward. When those waters had run stronger and deeper, their currents had forged a winding path that now snaked along the hillside.
Guillermo Paz steered ahead of her and Cort Wesley as they drew closer to the mouth of the cave formations, which were dug out of the hillside along the narrow path. “These openings look man-made, used for shelter probably hundreds—even thousands—of years ago,” he said, as the three of them readied their flashlights and tested the beams.
True to his impression, the six caves they examined, as they wound their way down the path from the higher reaches of the hillside, were small, with nothing of note in particular. More likely, Caitlin reasoned, Native Americans of old had cleared existing breaches to take advantage of natural shelters, explaining why archaeologists had been uncovering great finds in caves like this for decades. She figured there were probably plenty of similar finds in these as well, likely buried under layers and centuries of earth, stone, and sediment.
The next and most jagged of the cave mouths opened into more of a passageway, which followed the flow of the stream waters, along a trench that wound its way farther underground. The walls glowed in dappled fashion with some sort of phosphorus extract the color of moss. In patches, it looked as if it was growing out of the walls, almost like tumors, or blights, on the landscape by the spill of their flashlight beams.
“I recognize the smell from when we paid that visit to White Eagle,” Cort Wesley noted. “Air’s full of it. I also smelled it at the rez entrance, strong when the wind was blowing right.”
The waters looked greener as they drew deeper into the cave. The widening path was taking them along a winding route that descended so gradually they didn’t even realize they were now venturing underground. The greenish water had lost its sheen; it was cloudy and murky toward the top, with patches of a dark, goo-like residue splotching the surface.
“Looks like John D. Rockefeller was right, Ranger,” Cort Wesley noted. “That’s oil seep, from reserves flowing all the way up from the earth’s core, for all we know, dragging some methane with it for good measure.”
“What about the deposits on the wall?”
“That, I can’t explain,” Cort Wesley said, sweeping his gaze about the cave, “and I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“We’re missing something here,” Caitlin said suddenly, frustration getting the better of her.
“Like what?”
“Like this, maybe,” Paz called from ahead of them.
Caitlin and Cort Wesley caught up to find the colonel pinning a Hershey’s bar wrapper to the ground under his boot.
“A candy wrapper?”
Both of them could see his eyes glowing like a cat’s.
“A Hershey bar,” said Paz. “Daniel Cross’s apartment was covered in wrappers just like it.”
“They were his favorite when he was a kid, too,” Caitlin said, as she tucked the candy wrapper inside the plastic evidence pouch she carried with her at all times. The partially crumpled foil was smeared with melted chocolate, reminding her of how Cross always needed to wipe his mouth with a towel after eating one, ten years ago. She’d forgotten how much time she’d actually devoted to the effort to redeem him, apparently having accomplished absolutely nothing. “So maybe it was Cross that Dylan saw lurking about the night before last, the night before Hoover’s Cooking.”