Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(70)
“Right around the time Jack Strong was working that murder case here on the rez.”
Paz led the way inside to the chamber revealed beyond, shining his flashlight ahead of him. The addition of Caitlin’s and Cort Wesley’s beams revealed the chamber to be about twelve feet square. The continued push of cold air told them that this part of the cave came complete with a venting passage to the outside, likely cut out of the ceiling. They were about to turn their attention there, when Paz’s beam illuminated something dangling from the back wall.
“Looks like a manacle,” Cort Wesley noted, holding his beam upon it.
Caitlin added her flashlight to reveal a rusted hunk of matching chain alongside it. Two more chains had been driven into the rock face, lower, at around knee level.
“What is this,” she heard Cort Wesley say, “some kind of jail cell?”
Paz’s beam crossed over four more sets of manacles. “Not likely, outlaw. Indian tribes were known for holding prisoners in chambers dug underground, not camouflaged in caves.”
Caitlin pulled on a manacle, rattling the chain attaching it to the stone face. “What if they weren’t prisoners? What if this was about something else entirely?”
“You’ve got that look, Ranger.”
“You can’t see me, Cort Wesley.”
“I don’t have to, to know you’ve got that look, the one that says you’re about to bite into something.”
Caitlin released the dangling manacle and it banged against the rock with a slight clang. “That’s because—”
She stopped when the chamber seemed to rumble, shift. Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Paz all shined their flashlights upward, illuminating a dark river that seemed to be flowing overhead.
“Uh-oh,” Cort Wesley muttered, in the last moment before the river came raining down upon them.
67
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
One of the figures, painted in alternating strips of black and white, shoved a mouthful of dirt into Dylan’s mouth. He recognized the taste immediately, registering it was pure peyote, and refused to swallow. He tried to spit it out, but the figure shoved it farther down his throat. Dylan gagged, coughing some of the clump up but feeling the rest drop down his throat. He retched, struggling to breathe. He realized he was choking, in the last moment before he coughed up a black wad that looked like a fur ball. Then he was being half dragged, half carried from the shed.
“What are you doing? Leave me alone.”
Dylan hated the lameness of the words he heard himself utter, listening as if it were someone else’s voice. The peyote was already taking effect, the ground beneath him turning pillowy soft. He thought he was sinking in, the world and the night receding before his eyes. Was he even breathing? Had he really coughed up the peyote they’d forced down his throat?
“I’m gonna fucking kill you…”
The threat he managed to utter sounded no less lame. Dylan felt moments dominated by a thick haze wrapped around his consciousness, alternating with moments of intense clarity, which he seized upon to size up his situation. Six Comanche, whom he recognized as some of Ela’s cousins, the Lost Boys, had painted their entire faces and exposed parts of their bodies in alternating streaks of black and white, their eyes wildly intense as they dragged him off. They were shirtless, and Dylan noticed that sweat had caked up the paint, jumbling the colors together in portions of their upper arms and torso.
“Let me go,” he heard himself say again, or maybe for the first time.
Dylan wasn’t sure. He knew there was something he desperately needed to tell his dad, tell Caitlin. But now he couldn’t remember what it was, and he couldn’t remember where his phone was, either.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, found he was somewhere else entirely. His boots were sliding across the leaf-dampened ground now, his feet entirely numb. He couldn’t feel his arms, either, and when he tried to wiggle his fingers it seemed they weren’t attached to his hands anymore. The sky above had become a vast open mouth framed between the clouds, lowering to swallow him.
“Make it stop!” he thought he cried out, and then realized that something that tasted grimy and grubby, like a sweaty sock, had been stuffed into his mouth.
Dylan heard himself mutter. There was a pressure building behind his eyes, like a vacuum cleaner was pulling air from his skull in a constant hiss, which left him with a fluttery sensation in his ears.
“You have no place here,” said the Lost Boy who’d wedged the dirt-like clump of peyote into Dylan’s mouth. “You should’ve stuck to your own. Now, you go to your grave.”
Fuck you, Dylan thought, but he couldn’t say it.
More time and space had passed than he found himself able to calculate, the world changing entirely in what felt like the length of a breath. Every time he blinked, the world seemed to stay dark longer. And the next time he pried his eyes open, the Lost Boys were lashing him to a tree with what felt like baling wire.
“Now, it comes for you,” the Lost Boy told him.
It, Dylan repeated in his mind.
The tree bark scratched against his flesh, through his shirt, and each breath exaggerated the bonds of the wire further. For a few moments, Dylan actually had to remind himself to breathe. Once, he felt his chin thump to his chest.
Regaining consciousness after however long he’d been out, he saw that the Lost Boys were gone, the oily odor of the paint with which they’d streaked themselves hanging in the stagnant air like a dust cloud. Dylan heard himself breathing, inside his head. His eyes wanted to close again, but he stopped them, keeping his focus straight ahead until he heard something approaching from behind.