Strong Light of Day (37 page)

Her senses contorted, each engaged in a battle for supremacy of her attention. There were smells, sounds, and sights all fighting for control, but Caitlin let instinct guide her to better focus on the task at hand. She was just starting to record the click-clacking clatter of her tractor's tires crushing the hordes of beetles she was driving over, the chattering of the remaining bugs seeming to intensify, as if they were enraged by her actions.

She'd drawn fifty feet from the barn when fresh revving of the SUVs' engines told her they'd emerged to follow the path carved by the gasoline. She heard a loud
poof
as Guillermo Paz squeezed the activator on his wand, shooting a line of fire left, right, and back again, igniting the vibrating black mass on either side of the makeshift road they were forging through the swarm.

A much louder
poof
sounded, followed by another. And then the night was aglow with an almost day glow brightness.

*   *   *

Paz felt as if he was experiencing a rare moment of crystal clarity as the flames burst into the air like a vast curtain spreading out, drawing all around him. He realized the point of the message the psychic Madam Caterina had relayed to him, all the messages gleaned from the tarot cards as well as in his other sessions. And if she'd been right, if there really was a great beyond out there, if Paz's mother really did listen when he spoke, then all he held dear toward the purpose that drove him was vindicated.
He
was vindicated, along with that purpose that defined his very reason for being.

The Chariot is one of the most complex cards to define,
Paz remembered Madam Caterina saying.
It implies war, a struggle, and an eventual, hard-won victory over enemies, obstacles, nature, the uncertainties inside you. But there is a great deal more to it. The charioteer wears emblems of the sun, yet the sign behind this card is Cancer, the moon. The moon suggests it will shine somehow at night. That's symbolic of an enemy that can't be seen.

As in invisible?
he had asked.

More like out of sight. Hiding from view. Does that mean anything to you?

It will,
Paz had said, assuredly.

And now it did, all of it, every bit. The invisible enemy had been revealed and, in this wondrous moment of clarity, he came to understand the true meaning of the psychic's most vital message to him.

There's a light, a strong light, a blinding light. Everywhere at once, swallowing everything.

Fire was that very light, slaying and swallowing the evil around him. Or maybe he needed to tweak that thinking a bit. Maybe
he
was the light, hope against the great evil, the ridding of which he'd claimed as his purpose. It wasn't just about his Texas Ranger, it was about the threats to her that needed to be vanquished before those threats could turn the strong light of day dark.

In an endless black wave of insects that seemed to have no beginning and no end. A circle as opposed to a square, Paz standing at the center point to provide balance.

Madam Caterina had been right. Darkness
was
everywhere. But Paz's light shined through it, melting it away, returning the darkness to the depths of hell from which it came.

*   *   *

Caitlin's breath caught in her throat as she got her closest, clearest look yet at just one of the insect colonies marauding through the state of Texas, ingesting whatever crops and livestock showed up in it's path. She recalled the picture of one from Doc Whatley's ancient encyclopedia, magnifying the creature in her mind while reducing the horde to that single image of a shiny black creature, encased in rough armor that left only its legs and mandibles protruding. A still shot multiplied a million times to form the single, unbroken wave that stretched before her in a dark ribbon that looked like mud churning over the countryside. The horde seemed to move as one, and Caitlin half expected its shapeless composite to form into some kind of massive creature the size of an aircraft carrier, intent on swallowing anything that got in its way.

She shook the illusion aside and focused on the actual nature of the enemy engaged against her in a battle to the death. Their advance was terrifying in its simplicity and perfection of movement, each individual pest seeming to act as part of a greater whole, moving in eerie synchronization, ready to devour anything in it's path. She imagined what the scene might look like if it were fertile crops before them instead of land already dead from disuse and age and unprotected against the relentless elements. There was no trace of the horse herd ahead, not even their skeletal remains visible from this angle and distance.

Accident or design, plot or fortune, the origins of this colony and the others, along with the part Calum Dane had played in this, mattered not at all now. The night brightened further under the growing shroud of orange light shed by the flames blossoming on both sides of her, as Paz continued to rotate his flamethrower from left to right and back again. Caitlin heard a constant clatter of crackling and rippling sounds, like popcorn roasting in a microwave, as the fire consumed the bugs, devoured them just as they would've sought to devour whatever lay before them. The odor of the beetle frass merged with the smoke, wafting through the air and seeming to intensify it to a stench so powerful that each breath sent ripples of nausea through her stomach. The scene before her was like some cosmic battle, something you read about in the Bible and were never sure had really happened.

But this was really happening.

And they were winning.

Until Caitlin saw the tractor Cort Wesley was driving seem to drop into a pit on its right side. It corkscrewed one way, then the other, and Caitlin realized the old thing had thrown a wheel, grinding on an axle as it fishtailed across the field and came to a halt, blocking the route out.

 

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Caitlin hadn't thought much about her tractor's brakes until that very moment. They didn't seem to engage at first, so she pumped the pedal in rapid motions in the hope they'd catch. They finally did, and she felt the tractor's tires sinking into the soft ground when it ground to a halt. Only it wasn't ground it had sunk into, it was a fluid black wave that looked like liquefied tar pooling beneath her. The bright orange glow of the flames belching huge black plumes of smoke and stench into the air left her with the feeling she was trapped in the midst of some biblical apocalypse. The endless black wave of beetles looked shiny in their glow, in contrast to a starless, empty sky that made her think, almost whimsically, that heaven had shut down for the night.

If she dropped down now she had no idea how deep she'd sink. Up to a foot, maybe, judging by what she could glimpse of the tractor's tires. She was trying not to picture how easily a wave of these bugs could bring a person down, based on what they had done to those horses.

And Karl Dakota's cattle.

Caitlin rose in her seat, careful to keep her boots firmly planted in the tractor's rubber footrests.

“Cort Wesley!” she yelled to him, listening to the SUVs braking to a halt behind her.

He was balanced precariously on the tow assembly, between the tractor and the tank of gasoline it was hauling, trying to adjust the nozzle of the sprayer to continue holding the bugs at bay on his designated side.

“Just keep firing, Ranger!” he yelled back, without looking her way.

Caitlin realized she'd disengaged her sprayer when she braked her tractor to a halt. “These aren't bullets!”

“They are tonight!”

Caitlin looked down and saw the swarm had now climbed past the halfway point of the tires. She reengaged her sprayer a moment after Cort Wesley did his, Guillermo Paz hitting both mists of fluid from left to right and back again, making it seem the air itself had caught fire. The flames dropped with the dewlike mist, turning fresh waves of the swarm ablaze and filling the air with a rancid stench worse than a week-old corpse left smoldering in the heat. The clacking of the bugs continuing to push forward into the flames, without pause. It had grown loud enough to bubble her ears and drown out whatever sounds or pleas might have been coming from the SUVs behind them.

This wasn't going to work. They weren't getting out of here.

Pictures flared through her mind of the swarm swallowing the SUVs in their spread, shutting off all light and air. Only a matter of time before Luke's classmates suffocated or tried desperately to escape, opening a door to let the deadly horde in. There was no safe quarter here, no alternative to escape.

Caitlin had never run from a fight in her life; neither had her dad or granddad. The three of them were used to going all in, against any and all odds. But that was against men—humans, anyway—and not some genetic nightmare spawned in a science lab. She stood no more chance of winning here and now than she did of besting a Texas funnel cloud as it churned over the countryside, sucking up everything in its path. She was hardly arrogant and brash enough to believe she could escape its fury, any more than she could escape the marauding menace intent on turning her and those kids into their next meal.

And that was the thing: those kids. Fail and they were dead, whatever she'd accomplished in her life and career paling by comparison with a defeat that would come to define her legacy. The last of the Strong line, five generations of Texas Rangers for a lineage, done in by a swarm of bugs capable of leaving nothing but bone behind.

No.

That's what she thought.

No.

A blast of heat shook Caitlin, the back of her neck singed by a gush of what felt like hot breath against the back of her shirt, which was already stuck to her skin by sweat.

“Get the vehicles ready to move, Ranger,” Guillermo Paz called to her, drawing even with her tractor as fire spit in all directions from his jerry-rigged flamethrower, holding the swarm at bay.

*   *   *

It was the only chance, Paz reasoned, at least for the kids, and that was enough to satisfy him. Because it wasn't the flames that formed the strong light Madam Caterina had seen in her vision.

It was Paz himself.

The fire of his own passion, illuminating his soul with purpose and direction. He had faced his own mortality more times than he could possibly count, but had never accepted it before. Doing so was like holding his breath until he passed out. Normally, instinct seized the moment, eliminating the need for thought, rational or otherwise.

Not tonight. Tonight was about facing an enemy with no emotion or purpose beyond the perpetuation of its own existence. No ulterior motives, no careful planning, no government to seize or protect. Survival and nothing more. Life at its most primal.

Paz almost envied the swarm's simplicity of purpose, its mindless pursuit of what lay directly ahead, without need of peripheral vision or any quarter given to what lay behind. A perfect existence, in many ways, dominated by the most base desires and breeding and nothing more.

He felt his combat boots crunching over the charred, still-smoking piles of darkness his flames had already fried in their sweep. He thought the vast black wave might be receding in his path, learned behavior teaching it in some primitive collective sense that death awaited its continued push forward.

Paz stopped just in front of the outlaw's tractor, continuing to rotate his flames as a cry from his Ranger burned his own ears.

“Cort Wesley!”

*   *   *

“I'm a little busy here, Ranger!” Cort Wesley yelled back to her.

“I can see that! Are you crazy?”

Still balanced precariously, Cort Wesley worked to free the fittings attaching the tank, to dislodge it from its bonds.

“No choice I can see.”

He started to rock the tank to spill it over. Caitlin realized she'd misjudged his original intention and crawled back along the length of the tractor to do the very same thing.

 

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“You know what to do, Colonel!” she yelled to Paz over the swarm's incessant clacking, which had deafened her to everything else.

Caitlin had forgotten about the older kids clinging to the roof of the trailing SUV, couldn't imagine the panic and terror compounding the plight of so many squeezed into such tight spaces for the journey that had now stalled. Their screams and cries pierced her ears, rising over the clacking of the horde, now that the tractor engines had quieted. She heard sobs and pleas, too, and only wished she could answer them. Because how long would it be before the swarm climbed past even the windows and reached the roof, if they tried to hold out here?

But Paz was in motion by then, backpedaling while firing off his flames more deliberately and judiciously, to clear his own path and save whatever fuel he could for the final rush. Caitlin watched him signaling the plan's intentions to Jones behind the wheel of the lead vehicle. Then, though, instead of climbing back to his perch on the roof, he jogged forward through the slog of darkness that moved and grew as more of the swarm rolled over the corpses Paz had fried.

“Colonel!” Caitlin cried out to him, as he passed.

“It's the only way, Ranger!”

His words reached her softly and calmly, maybe transferred by thought instead of voice—who could say anymore? Paz moved ahead of Cort Wesley's stalled tractor to take point, just as Cort Wesley managed to tip his tank over and spill the remains of his tank over the advancing storm. The land's natural grade left the fuel running downhill, spreading outward on one angle, while hers, once tipped, would spread in the other.

But the old metal tank proved too heavy for her to do much more than budge. She heard a
thump,
felt the frame of her tractor rock, and saw Cort Wesley's shape bent at the knees, rising to join her at the assembly's rear.