“I could teach you how to play better,” the boy was telling him, as if he honestly felt bad. “So you could win.”
“I could do the same for you.” Al-Aziz smiled.
Perplexed, the boy looked at the game board, which showed him far ahead. “But I’m already winning.”
“There are other games.”
Al-Aziz gazed across the aisle and pictured this boy slicing off the heads of his parents and siblings as they slept. In his experience, that was a great test, revealing a young warrior’s true mettle and level of loyalty to the caliphate. He must renounce everything in the past so that he might turn toward the future unencumbered. Al-Aziz genuinely believed he was doing these boys a favor. The process had yielded ISIS some of its finest young warriors.
“Mister…,” the kid was saying.
Al-Aziz gazed about the plane. The majority of passengers were sleeping now. He wondered how many heads he could take before anyone stirred. Imagined them cowering before his masked form, his sword splattered with blood, which had splashed the walls and windows of the plane as well.
“Hey, mister.”
They wouldn’t fight back because they were sheep. In killing them, al-Aziz would be performing a service, ridding the world of their burden. They served nothing and no one, did not understand the vision for the world as expressed by the one true God al-Aziz existed merely to serve. Al-Aziz wouldn’t rest until that day had come to pass. The power and efficacy of his beliefs was about to be more righteously rewarded than even the caliphate’s supreme leaders had dared to foresee.
“Mister…”
They would bring their greatest enemy to its knees, al-Aziz himself now responsible for wielding a sword that could slaughter millions instead of one. A great gift, bestowed by Allah Himself, in recognition of al-Aziz’s devotion to the word of the one true God, a devotion that wouldn’t cease or even abate until all the nonbelievers were gone. Nine others were accompanying him on this blessed mission, all taking other flights, on other airlines, to different cities, en route to their rendezvous a day later. Nine others, to bring the total to ten, the same number the prophet Muhammad himself had killed when he conquered Mecca. A holy number.
Ten.
“Mister!”
Al-Aziz finally turned back the boy’s way.
“It’s your move, mister,” he said.
Al-Aziz smiled. “Yes, it is.”
PART SIX
Cattlemen and ranchers went to war over the practice of stringing barbed wire around plots of land. Bands of armed “nippers” worked at night cutting the barbed wire, causing an estimated $20 million in damage. The Texas Rangers were called in on patrol. Ranger Ira Aten proposed arming the fences with bombs triggered to explode when the fence wire was cut. The idea was nixed. (September 1, 1883)
—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”
58
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“I made us a snack,” Ela said, clambering down the plank steps, back into the root cellar.
She sat down on the blanket across from Dylan and laid a plate down between them.
“It’s corn,” she continued, as Dylan peeled the foil off one of the ears, “grown right here on the rez. I cooked it over a fire upstairs.”
Dylan finished peeling, noting a grayish-black patch that swelled out from a patch of kernels. “Looks like you burned it.”
“Nah,” Ela said, working the foil from her own ear of corn, “that’s what makes it a delicacy.”
Dylan gave the discolored growth a closer look. “Fungus? Mold?”
“Just eat it, dumb-ass. It’s a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret. Now, hand me my phone.”
Dylan did, still holding the ear of corn by a section of foil he’d left in place so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. Then he noticed that Ela had driven a roasting stick into one of the ends, so he could eat the corn while holding it, instead.
Ela took the phone and slid the cursor from left to right. “I said my phone.”
“Whoops, sorry.”
Dylan gave Ela her iPhone and took his back, watching her fire off a text as he raised the corn toward his mouth.
“It smells like shit.”
“But it’s good for you, that fungus included.”
He ate around the tarry patch anyway. Once they’d both finished, Ela handed Dylan a cup of the tar-colored tea, playing with the zipper of his jeans under the spill of lantern light.
“Stop,” he said, giving her back the cup and easing her away from him.
She took the cup and laid it aside, then went back to his zipper.
“I said stop.”
“Come on,” Ela said, flashing Dylan the smile that melted his insides, “we won. I want to celebrate.”