Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(71)
Whatever was coming seemed to glide across the brush and earth, rustling them no more than the wind. Dylan tried to turn his head, but his neck wouldn’t budge. Then he realized the footsteps were upon him, in the same moment he heard himself screaming through his gagged mouth.
68
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
The wave of bats descended on them like an unbroken black blanket. Suddenly jittery flashlight beams caught spokes of big eyes and flashing teeth, much bigger than they should have been, in Caitlin’s experience. First backpedaling and then turning to dash out of the chamber, she thought this, too, was an illusion, until one of the bats latched onto her hair with claws that felt more like a raptor’s. And, as she yanked it off, taking a chunk of her scalp with it, Caitlin saw why.
The bat was massive, huge, its wingspan expanding to more than five feet when it came at her again with teeth bared.
Caitlin was going for her gun when Guillermo Paz swatted the bat out of the air with an arm that looked to her like a baseball bat. He whirled and swept another swooping trio aside, muzzle fire from Cort Wesley illuminating the darkness, which was broken only by the flashlight that Paz had managed to hold on to. His beam retraced their route through the cave, heading back to the main chamber and the night beyond.
Afraid to stop moving, Caitlin heard light splashes as the downed bats dropped into the underground river, her eyes adjusting enough now for the luminescent glow off the cave walls to reveal the flight of the bats crisscrossing in the air. They were dive-bombing them, the bats’ collective squeals becoming deafening, all but drowning out the flutter of their wings, which made it seem as if the entire cave was vibrating.
Back in the main chamber of the cave, Caitlin lent her fire to Cort Wesley’s, careful to keep her aim concentrated upward. Instead of spooking the bats, the assault seemed to further enrage them. They renewed their attack, reformed to concentrate from the cave mouth, as if to deny exit to their captives. She had happened upon bats before, but never any this big or violent. Bats were easily spooked, for sure, but they also were shy creatures that normally backed off after making their point.
But this swarm showed no such inclination. The noxious odor she’d detected as soon as Paz had cracked open the secret chamber was clearly bat guano, but even that was different from what she recalled from past experiences. Sharper and more rancid. Maybe it had been creatures like these that had killed John D. Rockefeller’s gunman back in 1874 and had done the same to the work foreman just the other night. Or—
Click.
Before Caitlin could finish that thought, the slide of her SIG locked open and the blanket of black, broken only by glowing eyes and flashing teeth, swept toward her anew in dark waves. She thought about taking refuge in the shallow greenish waters of the underground stream, then recalled the goo-like residue collected on the surface and—
Caitlin’s thinking froze there. “Cort Wesley, your lighter!”
It was his late father, Boone’s, cigarette lighter actually, tucked in a drawer and forgotten until Cort Wesley had learned the truth about his father’s nature and his heroism. Now he carried it with him all the time, the last thing he had to remember his father by, a man he’d once done his best to forget.
Caitlin snatched the lighter out of the air when he tossed it, and yanked a can of mace-like repellent from its clasp on her belt. She’d never used it on a suspect, not even once, and she hoped the pressurized contents hadn’t degraded over however many years she’d been carrying it.
She popped the top off and pressed down on the tiny nozzle at the same time that she flicked Boone Masters’s cigarette lighter, embossed with an eagle, to life. The aerosol stream touched the flame and ignited in a ribbon of fire, stretching a yard forward, aimed downward toward the surface of the water.
Poof!
The flame burst blew upward, climbing for the swarming bats, who fled from its path, their collective squeals turning deafening. In that moment, the bright glow captured their gaping mouths and enraged eyes, extended snouts making them look like monsters lifted from some horror movie. Their wings flapped so hard, as they sought escape from the fiery air, that they actually fanned the flames further. They moved in what looked like a circle, then a figure eight, before speeding out of the cave in a vast, unbroken mass, into the night beyond.
Caitlin found herself sitting on the cave floor with no memory of dropping down. She kicked at the body of one of the bats, felled by a bullet, maintaining the presence of mind to put her plastic evidence gloves back on before reaching for it.
Cort Wesley brushed off his clothes. The battle they’d just fought and the heat of the flames had left a sheen of perspiration over his features. “You want to venture a guess as to what all this is about, Ranger?”
“What Steeldust Jack faced here in 1874, same thing we’re facing now, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin told him. “Monsters.”
PART SEVEN
Prohibition passed in 1918. The Texas oil boom exploded two years later. Rangers spent a lot of time smashing stills, intercepting bootleg liquor from Mexico, and handcuffing criminals to telephone poles when the jails were too full. It was during this time that Ranger Captain Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas cemented his legend as a one-man law enforcement agency along the Texas border. In the 1950s, he became an advisor for the TV show Tales of the Texas Rangers.