BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“What do you see, Ranger?” Paz asked Caitlin, when they reached the rear of the cave.
Caitlin and Cort Wesley both shined their flashlights across the jagged rock formation. “Rocks.”
“So do I. But the rocks I see are more weathered than those forming the other walls. More weathered and also lighter, from exposure to the sun.”
Paz eased his shoulder against the wall and began to push.
“In ancient times, the Mayans would build false cave walls, meticulously matched to the faces around them. The Comanche, apparently, were more ambitious.”
With that, the wall began to give under Paz’s steady thrust, breaking from the seam first in a sliver, then a crack, and finally in a chasm that allowed a noxious odor to flood outward on a surge of chilly air.
“Any idea how old this is?” Caitlin asked, as the opening continued to widen.
“Hard to say,” Paz told her, as she and Cort Wesley added their force to the task. “Hinged structures like this date back far longer than history tells us. But the ground clearance and attention to expansion suggests mid-to late nineteenth century.”
“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.