Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  They all drove back to town together. Jenny kept Cade’s coat, and the cop—he said his name was Griff—found a dusty blanket in the trunk for Tom.

  They dropped the teenagers off at the local hospital with a good-enough cover story: Tom and Jenny had parked on the overlook without setting the brake. They got out just before the car went over, taking their clothes with it. People would laugh at them and their parents would be furious. But that all seemed very small to Tom now. They were alive. His perspective had just grown much wider, if a little darker.

  The cop, Griff, whatever he was, warned them never to tell anyone the truth. People would think they were crazy. This was better left forgotten.

  Jenny looked at Tom like he should say something. But Tom only watched as the cop left them behind.

  Jenny never really forgave him for staying quiet, even if they did end up having sex—indoors only—all summer long. That small betrayal, that tiny bit of cowardice, was enough to drive a wedge between them that would lead to Jenny dumping him before she went to college.

  Tom didn’t care.

  Cade, for his part, didn’t say another word to them. And Tom was grateful.

  Tom married someone other than Jenny, did well in real estate, had two kids, divorced, and married again. He grew into a prosperous middle age, gained twenty more pounds and learned to golf.

  Most days he could almost believe it was something that happened to someone else, like a ghost story or a UFO sighting.

  But he could never forget the sound he heard when he saw Cade’s smile, right after he’d impaled the Char-Man.

  Cade was laughing. He sounded happy.

  The Char-Man had nearly killed Tom. But it was that laughter that echoed in Tom’s nightmares for the rest of his life.

  Bogeyman. The word comes from the Russian, bog, meaning “god.”

  —Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2012, THE OVAL OFFICE,

  WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The President of the United States was afraid.

  Zach Barrows had worked personally with President Samuel Curtis for eight years, starting as a campaign volunteer in high school. He’d seen Curtis at the end of twenty-four-hour campaign marathons, in the small hours of the morning weighing a missile strike, playing ball with his son, and dealing with dangers that staggered the imagination. It was safe to say Zach knew the president as well as anyone in the White House, with the possible exception of his wife. Curtis regarded an emotional display the same way he’d look at grime on the cuff of one of his immaculately cut suits: he didn’t put up with it. But Zach could see the fear.

  And when the man who commanded a nuclear arsenal and the greatest military in history was frightened, it meant that something other than human intervention was required.

  That, unfortunately, was part of Zach’s job every day now. That was where Nathaniel Cade came in.

  Cade stood next to Zach on the Oval Office carpet. Cade was a vampire.

  Zach remembered how he’d laughed when he first heard that.

  Then he actually met Cade. Although Cade looked like a fairly normal guy in his twenties—maybe a little pale—he exuded an aura of menace. People had been known to start gibbering uncontrollably just by standing near him. Zach figured this was an inborn survival mechanism in humans; the fight-or-flight response telling the brain to get the hell away from this thing before it turns you into lunch. In response, Zach had wet his pants.

  The laughs were few and far between after that.

  Zach once thought he’d be the president’s chief of staff—the youngest in history—but instead found himself shanghaied into a world that, for most people, simply didn’t exist. The conspiracy theorists had it all wrong, he’d been told. Werewolves, zombies, demons, witches, and various other creatures had all been on this planet for a long time, waiting in the dark for their chances to feast on human blood and souls. The United States had been fighting a holding action against these horrors almost since it was founded. The entire secret history of America was a record of this war. Like an infectious disease, every time there was an outbreak, the government did its best to contain it quietly and quickly.

  In 1867, the country found the right weapon for the fight. Cade was discovered on a ship that ran aground outside Boston Harbor. At some point in the long journey, he killed and fed on the other members of the crew. He had chewed through their flesh and sucked the meat dry of all blood. A half-dozen soldiers shot him at point-blank range without killing him when he was found.

  For the first time in its history, the United States government had captured a vampire.

  But rather than destroy him, then-President Andrew Johnson bound him to serve the United States with a blood oath administered by the voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Cade was sworn to follow all lawful orders of the president and his appointed representatives, then turned against the other creatures of the night.

  Cade was stronger, faster and tougher than anything human. And in almost one hundred fifty years, there wasn’t a monster in the world he hadn’t killed at one time or another.

  President Curtis selected Zach to serve as a liaison to Cade when Cade’s previous handler, William H. Griffin, was due to retire. Zach was the first political operative to fill a job that ordinarily went to ex-FBI, ex-CIA, and ex–Special Ops. Zach still wondered occasionally if he was being punished for a one-time fling with the First Daughter in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  After three years, Zach had to admit the job was interesting. At the very least, Cade hadn’t tried to eat him yet.

  “We have a problem,” the president said. “Earlier tonight, Brent Kirkman—one of the advance staffers on my campaign—was killed along with a local volunteer.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Zach said.

  Cade gave Zach a look. The vampire wore a cross around his neck, using the pain as a tool to combat his thirst. He was still a believer, even if he knew he’d never get to Heaven himself. “Someone has to protect the meek until they can inherit the earth” was his only explanation. Zach still didn’t understand how that worked, but he usually knew not to take the name of the Lord in vain. Cade hated that.

  But Brent—Brent had been a friend.

  “You knew him?” Curtis asked.

  Zach nodded. “We were both on the Illinois staff when we started.”

  The president nodded. “You may not want to look at this, then.”

  He lifted a folder and handed it to Cade. Cade flipped through it in seconds, his face never changing expression.

  Zach took it. He swallowed hard to keep his lunch. Despite all he’d seen on the job—and it was a lot—he never got accustomed to all the ways a human body could be degraded and ruined in death.

  It was hard to tell where one corpse ended and the other began. They were carved up, skin and organs and bones sheared clean through, the torsos laid open like a biology experiment. Muscle and fat were sliced cleanly off their frames. Blood stained the walls of the tight, confined space around the bodies.

  Zach figured out why he was having such a hard time understanding the pictures. Suddenly, the images made sense, like a vase resolving itself out of the silhouette of two faces. The woman had been on the man’s lap when they were killed. They were intertwined with each other when someone had hacked them to bits.

  “What did that to them?” he asked.

  “We had the FBI do a rush analysis. Fortunately, it was a very distinctive weapon,” the president said. “Blade was too thin to be a standard ax or hatchet, but too thick to be a machete. The blade got stuck in the bone at one point. He was able to match the metal traces with a military survival ax. Used to clear brush from World War Two to Vietnam. Also slices through people pretty good, as you can see.”

  A picture was helpfully included in the folder. The tool had a handle like a pirate sword’s grip and ended in a wicked hook at the end of a curved blade. It looked mean.

  “I didn’t see anything about this on the news,” Zach
said.

  “And you won’t,” the president said. “We’ve got the crime scene locked down and we’re invoking the Patriot Act to keep the murder of Mr. Kirkman and the volunteer out of the public record. You should understand better than anyone, Zach.”

  He did, all too well; Zach still watched the polls between zombie outbreaks. The president’s reelection campaign was in trouble.

  Curtis had been riding a wave of high ratings after the attempt on his life in the White House three years earlier. For an all-too-brief time, insulting him was like burning the American flag. Even the commentators at Fox had to smile when they said his name. At that point, reelection looked like a walk.

  Unfortunately, the president and his advisers underestimated the rage. People wanted to blame someone—anyone—for the economy’s ongoing death march, and Curtis was the man behind the big desk. People wanted to see some return on the billions of dollars funneled to the banks and financial giants in the bailouts, and all they got were foreclosure notices and pink slips. The end result was record profits for the people who’d blown a hole beneath the waterline of the U.S. economy. As far as the electorate was concerned, Curtis might as well have signed the multimillion-dollar bonus checks to the bankers personally.

  Still, it was more than just the issues. The fury running across America was almost visible, a red mist that burned like tear gas in the eyes, sending regular people into frothing, teeth-gnashing tantrums on TV every night. It didn’t matter what the topic was; there was always someone ready to howl with outrage over it.

  Curtis had the massive advantages of incumbency, not to mention an unprecedented billion-dollar campaign war chest, in his favor. But his party got stomped hard in the midterms—“a real pasting” is how Curtis put it the morning after the results—and he’d been playing a defensive game ever since.

  He was battered daily by attacks that shouldn’t have made the back page of the supermarket tabloids: he was secretly a Satan worshipper; no, worse, he was an atheist; he’d sold the national park system to Saudi Arabia; he had given the codes to the nuclear arsenal to the United Nations; and the old reliable from the 2008 election, that Samuel Curtis was the Antichrist himself. Zach sometimes wondered how an admittedly rather half-assed attempt to give health care to poor people ignited such raw hatred, but hey, that was politics.

  Campaigns were stories more than anything else, and Zach could feel the narrative thickening like quicksand around Curtis’s feet: Jimmy Carter. High gas prices, the economy flatlining, wars and tension in the Middle East—it all added up to the same ending: loser.

  If the media heard about Kirkman getting murdered while screwing a volunteer, that would become the whole story: a president so unpopular anyone connected to him was actually in danger. It had just the right elements to appeal to the 24/7 noise machine: plenty of sex and danger, with zero issues to get in the way. The pundits could regurgitate something like this for months. Curtis’s chances of winning in November would go subterranean.

  Zach realized now why President Curtis was afraid. He was scared to lose.

  Cade turned to the president. The slight movement made Zach twitch involuntarily. As a rule, Cade didn’t move much. But when he did, things usually died. They’d been working together almost three years, but that didn’t mean Zach was done being afraid of him.

  Zach once visited an exotic animal sanctuary where the owner kept big cats—lions and tigers—he’d raised from cubs. Zach watched as he tossed a steak to one tiger for a snack. The tiger began eating. The owner took a step in its direction. The tiger gave a murmur and flicked its tail—barely a sign of annoyance. But the guy who had literally fed this animal by hand for its entire life backed away like he had touched a hot stove. “It’s still a wild animal,” he said when he saw the look on Zach’s face. “You can’t change nature.”

  Zach always tried to keep that in mind about Cade.

  “Why am I here?” Cade asked the president.

  Vampires are not big on social graces, Zach reminded himself.

  But Cade had a point. This was a murder. Awful, yes, and ugly, no question. But hardly in the same league as the things he and Cade dealt with on a daily basis. Only a week ago, they had dealt with a squad of men who’d learned to use Spontaneous Human Combustion to make themselves into living bombs; they could walk through any kind of security and simply will themselves to explode. Like all of the threats Cade dealt with, they had tapped into the occult to make themselves into something inhuman that required an inhuman response.

  Only two of the SHCide bombers managed to reach their targets; the other four were easy prey for Cade.

  Curtis didn’t mind Cade’s question, or didn’t show it if he did.

  “This is why,” he said. He passed a single photo across the desk to Cade. “I’d like you and Zach there in person before sunrise.”

  Cade scanned it. His mouth curled in a frown.

  Zach felt his stomach sink again, and it wasn’t the pictures in the folder now. Cade never showed emotion. A slight frown from him was like a scream from a human. Zach was instantly on alert.

  Cade spoke directly to the president. “This is not good.”

  Oh shit, man the lifeboats, Zach thought. Cade says it’s bad.

  Regretting it even as it came out of his mouth, Zach asked, “Somebody mind telling me exactly what we’re talking about here?”

  Cade handed the photo to him.

  The killer had used his victim’s blood to draw and write all over the walls. Zach had seen that already in the other crime-scene photos. But this was a close-up of one line in particular, written directly above the bodies.

  It said, IT’S NICE TO BE BACK.

  Zach couldn’t see why it made Cade react the way he did.

  “All right,” Zach said. “I hate to admit it, but I’m lost. What makes this so terrible?”

  The president looked to Cade to answer. Cade said, “Because I’ve seen it before.”

  “You know who this is? Great. So we’ll pick him up—”

  “As I said, it’s not that simple,” Cade said. “It’s the Boogeyman.”

  Zach waited a full five seconds. Nobody laughed. If anything, the tension in the room only increased.

  “The Boogeyman,” he said, just to be sure. “The Boogeyman killed an employee of the President of the United States.”

  The president nodded.

  Some days, Zach thought, I really hate this job.

  Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.… You can forget about me if you like because I don’t care for publicity. However you must not forget Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people forget her either. She was a very, very sweet girl but Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood. Mr. Breslin, sir, don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work.

  —“Son of Sam” letter to Jimmy Breslin, May 30, 1977

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2012, MANSFIELD, OHIO

  The crime scene was a mess. Like everyone else, patrol officer Fred Baker stood around, unsure of what to do. Nobody on the force was used to this sort of thing. They were a small-town department. They didn’t get many homicides. Baker had only been close to dead bodies once before in his three years on the force. He’d been the first to respond when a couple cars met in a head-on near the interstate. One driver wasn’t wearing a seat belt and had been splattered all over the road. Baker took one look at the man’s skull and tossed his cookies.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t throw up when he saw the carnage in the
utility closet. Maybe it was because it didn’t look like anything human, at least not from the waist up. Waist down, it was easy to see what had been going on—and he wasn’t sure how they were going to handle that, either—but above, it just looked like something from a slaughterhouse.

  It was too surreal for him to be sick. Like everyone else, he stood around, waiting for the state police. It wasn’t even a close call. Let them handle it. This was a nightmare.

  Baker realized someone was talking to him. Her voice snapped him out of his daze. He remembered he was supposed to be keeping a perimeter.

  “Move along, ma’am,” he said automatically to the woman. “This is a crime scene.”

  Only then did he really see whom he was talking to. She was a gorgeous blonde—she looked like someone he’d see in a magazine. But when she spoke again, he saw what was wrong with her, as half her face turned down in an ugly sneer.

  “I know it’s a crime scene, dipshit,” she snapped. “That’s why we’re here.”

  Baker didn’t reply. He was staring. He knew it was rude, but he couldn’t stop himself. Half of the beautiful face simply didn’t move. It was frozen perfectly in place, as if preserved under a thick coat of shellac. The other side looked tired and angry, but the frozen part was fresh and perfectly calm.

  Then she brought her creds right up to his nose, breaking his stare. He managed to read the letters “FBI” before his eyes crossed and blurred.

  She pulled the badge and ID away and half-glared at him again. He felt mortified and stupid. His uncle had had a stroke, and half of his face didn’t work, either. She probably hated it when people stared, too.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t, uh, I didn’t know we’d called in any federal assistance yet.”

  She was already moving past him, pulling one leg along with her in a kind of shuffle, on the same side as her immobile face. An older Latino man moved with her, lifting the crime-scene tape to allow her to get under it without stooping.