Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Still, he couldn’t help brushing his left ear and shoulder. He kept seeing the black things, and every time it felt like an earwig looking for a way to burrow into his skin.

  He thought about getting his eyes checked, but if that ever got out, he’d be taken right off the job and that would be it. Besides, he was just tired. He knew it. He’d been working triple shifts. Cutbacks had reduced the ranks and everyone had to pitch in and work harder. That’s what they said. Nobody complained. There was always another round of cutbacks coming, and whiners were the first ones out the door.

  He sighed and adjusted his collar. It itched. He barely had time to get his uniforms dry-cleaned anymore. This thing was supposed to bring him respect, money and women. Now he didn’t even get an allowance to buy new shirts. That was all out-of-pocket these days. Cutbacks. And as everyone kept telling him, he was lucky just to have the job. He’d need to hang on to it for a good long time, too. Social Security and Medicare were so deep in the red he’d never retire.

  It probably didn’t help that he spent so much time on the Internet once he was home. But he felt like it was his duty to stay informed. And then he’d get so furious, reading about all the crap the government kept pulling these days. One outrage after the next. Total surveillance of all cell phone traffic, with key words like “terrorist” ensuring a visit from FBI goons. Kids kicked off school lunch programs while the president dropped two million bucks a day to go on vacation. Illegal immigrants flooding across the border to sign up for welfare benefits. United Nations troops stationed in the United States like an occupying army.

  Before he knew it, it was almost dawn again, his eyes bleary and red from staring at the computer monitor all night. His few hours of sleep were filled with more of the black bugs, crawling all over his skin, into his eyes and ears. He woke up twitching.

  Every time he opened his eyes, slapping at the insects that weren’t there, the feeling kept growing inside him. He was more certain of it every day: this wasn’t supposed to be his life.

  He was pissed off all the time. He was supposed to get respect. “Captain.” Even the title sounded like a joke to him now. Spread his annual salary across the hours he was working, deduct taxes—Jesus Christ, taxes—and all the other ways he got screwed out of every little penny, and he was making less than minimum wage.

  And he still had to wait at this goddamned light every morning.

  He was sick of it. Sick of it all. Looking at the red light, he felt his rage build, and build, and build. The black bugs seemed to dance at the edge of his vision, crawling all over him, swarming, itching, pricking.

  Let go, a voice told him. Just give in. Give yourself over to the rage.

  And why the hell not? Why should he be the one who got screwed when everyone else did whatever the hell they wanted? What was he hanging on for? Why should he follow the rules?

  Enough. He’d had enough. Something tore loose deep inside him. Some piece of him gave up its hold and fell away forever.

  He closed his eyes, and the black bugs swarmed in. They poured in through his ears, his mouth, his nose. They filled him up and the itching finally stopped, replaced with a dark certainty. He didn’t have to play by their rules anymore. He could do whatever he wanted.

  His skin stopped itching for the first time in months.

  At the same moment, eyes still closed, he stood on the gas pedal and his car peeled through the intersection under the taunting red light.

  He heard the screech of brakes and a crumpling noise as two cars collided behind him, but he didn’t even slow down.

  He opened his eyes and everything felt better.

  He felt like a new man.

  At approximately 0805 hrs my partner OFFICER R. RESSLER and myself received a call from dispatch regarding a possible injury or disturbance and an unattended child in an apartment in the Hilltop area. Upon arrival, we knocked and asked for entry. With no response, we called upon the apartment manager, ALFREDO GUTIERREZ, to open the door for us. Once inside, we found the 911 caller, CASSIE REYNOLDS, age 6, still on the phone with DISPATCH. Officer Ressler sought to calm her while I cleared the apartment. Inside the master bedroom, signs and obscenities had been painted in the walls with what appeared to be human blood and feces. On the bed, I discovered the body of the occupant of the apartment and mother to Cassie, CHARLENE REYNOLDS. Her head had been severed from her body at the neck and placed so that it balanced on the chest of her body. At that point, I called for backup.

  —Fort Collins (Colorado) Police Department Report,

  November 11, 2010

  Zach put the file down. He was done. Not with the file’s contents, which contained many hundreds more pages. But he was done enduring it. He often had to witness inhuman horror. It never got easier, but at least he knew never to expect mercy or compassion from creatures that fed on human blood and misery.

  But the scale the Boogeyman worked on was simply too small, too human. It somehow inversely magnified the tragedy of each life lost. He—or it, as Cade insisted—worked on an extremely personal level.

  There were photos from crime scenes included. But it wasn’t the gory ones that turned Zach’s stomach. It was the ones with the seemingly inconsequential details: a framed family picture knocked askew; a laundry basket left on a couch in front of a TV; a child’s stuffed bunny tossed upside down in a corner.

  The Boogeyman extinguished people in the places where they most expected safety. He tainted the concepts of security and comfort. It was the skull beneath the skin. And it never stopped grinning.

  They were flying in a military transport, riding on benches in the back of a C-130 cargo plane next to the specially modified government sedan they used. Cade could function during the day, though at about half strength, as long as he was indoors and out of direct sunlight. So the car had windows tinted to block the UVA and UVB radiation that would cook Cade in his own skin. Even with that protection, the daylight would hurt him like hell. Just not enough to incapacitate him.

  “Questions?” Cade asked, pointing at the file where Zach had stuffed it into his messenger bag.

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “Any chance I can go back to D.C.?”

  “Any useful questions?”

  “Do you think it’s really the Boogeyman that killed Brent? You think it’s back?”

  “I sincerely hope not.”

  “When you say things like that, I start to cry a little on the inside. If you can’t kill him—”

  “It. Not him.”

  “Right. It. So how do we stop it if it just keeps coming back?”

  Cade gave him the nanosecond smile. “I just keep killing it.”

  Ask a stupid question… “Have you ever tried putting him—sorry, it—in prison?”

  “Yes. Nineteen seventy-one. The results were disappointing.”

  “Define ‘disappointing.’”

  “Thirty-nine dead. We had to engineer a riot to cover the casualties.”

  “Solitary confinement?”

  “Suicide. Every time. It will restart the cycle itself if necessary.”

  “Insane asylum? Or do I not want to know how that ended up?”

  “You probably do not.”

  “There’s got to be some way to stop him.”

  “It,” Cade said. “I’ve been trying for some time. If I’ve missed anything, I would appreciate you letting me know.”

  “But in the meantime, people die.”

  “People die all the time,” Cade said. “It won’t stop until people stop killing one another.”

  “Yeah, yeah. The world’s a cruel place, man is inhumane to man, we should all be united in peace and harmony and all that. Surprised to hear it from you, though.”

  “You misunderstand me. People kill for the Boogeyman. That’s how it exists, how it’s summoned.”

  “I have a bad feeling you’re going to explain that.”

  “Blood sacrifice. The oldest and most powerful of rituals. There is a group that continually makes offe
rings. The Boogeyman is a creature of fear and pain. Before it can manifest in a human host, it needs to be fed. It requires sacrifices to gain strength between appearances. Breaching this world from the Other Side is not easy. It costs. There are people willing to pay the price for the Boogeyman’s passage.”

  “Jesus Christ.” It slipped out before Zach thought about it.

  “Don’t blaspheme,” Cade said. The cross was not just an affectation or a hedge against his thirst. Cade was a believer. He took his faith seriously.

  “I think this time it qualifies as a prayer.” Zach wasn’t joking. Some of the killings in the file had been gruesome but seemed unrelated to the Boogeyman. Some were well-known, even famous, victims of serial killers. Now he understood. Another conspiracy. Only, this one was truly occult: dedicated to the care and feeding of an inhuman entity that did nothing but slaughter people.

  “You’re afraid,” Cade said.

  Can’t hide a thing from someone who can smell fear, Zach was reminded. He’d admit it to Cade, if no one else.

  “Yes. This scares me,” he said. “It seems to go deeper than just another monster, you know? Monsters I’m beginning to understand. I mean, you don’t expect a werewolf to have table manners when he’s chewing on human flesh.”

  “Some do,” Cade reminded him.

  Zach ignored that. “But how can people go to the store, go to a family picnic, and then carve up their kids and neighbors in the name of a patron saint of serial killers?”

  “Not all humans side with the human race. You know this.”

  “Makes me wonder sometimes who we’re saving.”

  “Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to do and die.”

  “Once again, you are a huge comfort. It’s like being wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket.”

  “You want comfort? All I can offer you is this: I know all this entity’s patterns. If this really is the Boogeyman, this is an old fight. It will follow a predictable pattern. We go out there and put the kibosh on this and we’re done.”

  “The kibosh?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Zach did; he was quite used to Cade’s weird habit of occasionally allowing slang from a previous decade to seep into his current vocabulary. It was an inevitable side effect of Cade’s perfect memory and the effort required to slow down his thinking to the speed of a normal conversation. However, among the few small joys Zach had in this life were the moments he could feel a bit superior to the ruthlessly competent, human-shaped killing machine.

  “Does that help?” Cade asked.

  Actually, it did. “We’re cool,” Zach said.

  “Straight from the fridge, Dad,” Cade replied.

  The Minot Police Department addressed rumors of a Satanic cult connection to the homicide of a young hitchhiker in an interview with the News on Monday.

  “We’ve seen no evidence of any conspiracy or any kind of occult motivation for this crime,” Detective Lee Newton said.

  Newton did confirm rumors that the deceased, found near an overpass on State Highway 83, had the number “666” carved into one hand. However, Newton said this wound was self-inflicted and probably unrelated to the multiple stab wounds that were the cause of death.

  In occult lore and Hollywood horror films, 666 is allegedly the number of the Beast of the Apocalypse or Satan.

  Newton said the victim, who remains unidentified, appears to have scratched the number into his own hand for reasons unknown.

  Police have not yet named any suspects or motives in the murder.

  —“Police Dismiss ‘Satanic’ Motive in Recent Killing,”

  Minot Daily News, January 19, 2011

  JANUARY 19, 2011, OMAHA, NEBRASKA

  The blackouts were getting worse. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep. He had to admit that, if only to himself. He couldn’t account for whole nights now. Once, it had even happened on the job. He felt like he was waking up but realized he’d been functioning for hours without any memory of what he’d been doing.

  It should have troubled him more than it did.

  But there were benefits. The rage that coiled in his gut seemed to subside, as if it was going someplace when his body walked around without his conscious thought. The little black things at the edge of his vision—the ones that seemed to crowd inside him—weren’t as frightening. They felt almost friendly and sympathetic.

  And physically? Physically he’d never felt better in his life. Despite no sleep and his constant junk-food diet, he was getting stronger every day. He could feel it. He rarely looked at himself in the mirror anymore, but he caught a glimpse one morning on his way out of the shower: his body was covered with new, sharply defined muscle, as if he’d put on a suit of armor under his skin. He stared at himself, fascinated, until he noticed again how his eyes didn’t move the way he thought they should anymore, how his own face seemed unfamiliar. Then he looked away and got dressed quickly.

  His online activities seemed to decline as the blackouts got more frequent. When he checked his accounts, he found he hadn’t posted anything in weeks. Nobody missed him. The high-pitched chatter of the message boards just went on and on. There was still plenty to be outraged about, of course. But it felt more distant.

  His real-life friends were already on their way out of his life. He had a buddy from work over for a beer on a rare night that he felt social. It did not go well. The man left early with an excuse about going to the gym in the morning. Later, he realized that he’d scared the man away. He remembered how the man had looked at his house, with its piles of laundry and garbage scattered in random heaps. He’d been too quiet, he knew. He spent most of the evening staring at a blood vessel that pulsed just under the skin at the man’s temple. He found himself thinking of hammers, saws and other tools in the garage.

  And the really weird part? None of this scared him.

  In fact, down deep, he knew he should be scared. But he wasn’t.

  Whatever he was becoming, he liked it.

  You don’t understand these things because you’re not under the influence of Factor X. The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, Harvey Glatman, Boston Strangler, Dr. H. H. Holmes, Panty Hose Strangler of Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of the West Coast and many more infamous characters kill. Which seems senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure, except death or being caught and put away. It is a terrible nightmare but, you see, I don’t lose any sleep over it. After a thing like Fox I come home and go about life like anyone else. And I will be like that until the urge hits me again.

  —Letter from the BTK Killer to TV station KAKE, February 10, 1978

  MANSFIELD, OHIO

  It was just before dawn when they arrived at Mansfield-Lahm Regional Airport. They decided they had enough time. Cade drove to the crime scene, a surprisingly modern glass-and-stone building in the middle of the small town, where a young cop from the local PD waited.

  “I’m Agent Barnes and that’s Agent Rogers,” Zach said, flipping his phony creds. “FBI.”

  The cop, a kid named Baker, walked them back to the janitor’s closet near the auditorium. It had been sealed and guarded since the bodies were discovered. He kept telling them nobody had been in there but police. Nobody, he insisted.

  He unlocked the door and stepped back behind it, as if afraid of what was inside.

  Zach didn’t blame him.

  The blood had gone brown, but it was somehow worse that way. There was a stink of decay and metal. Zach stepped back involuntarily.

  Cade stepped forward.

  Without bothering to put on gloves, he clicked on the light.

  The drawings came out in sharp relief.

  A circle with a cross through it, like a rifle sight. 666. A pentagram. DEVIL. KILL. And at the center of it all, in the biggest letters, IT’S NICE TO BE BACK.

  Cade took a deep breath, scenting the air. Underneath the blood, the gas and shit of ruptured bowels and the small bits of flesh left in the grooves of the til
es, but above the chemical tang of cleaning products and ammonia, he detected a note of corruption. It was unique in this world.

  Like all members of his kind, Cade’s memory was perfect, the neurons of his brain adapted to maximize storage and recall where humans favored narrative and association. From this perfect hard drive, he matched the odor immediately.

  The scent was like a scream from tortured cells forced to accommodate the demands of a new and wholly inhuman metabolism. It was a human body’s cellular engines running too fast, forced to rebuild itself even while running at top capacity.

  Cade had smelled it before, several times. The Boogeyman, making its host into a home.

  October 31, 1919

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  The sounds of jazz played from every window in every building, merging into an indistinct yowl that rose over the French Quarter like an audible fog.

  Cade paid little attention to it as he ducked under the long blade of the ax. The madman spun past him, carried by the weight of his swing.

  No one was on the streets tonight. The Axman, as he was called, had just claimed another victim two nights before. Now everyone in the city was playing music as loudly as they could. It was supposedly the only way to ward off his attacks. Locked doors didn’t stop him. He seemed to glide right through them, leaving them undisturbed and only dead bodies as evidence he’d ever been inside.

  The Axman came up again, too fast, pivoting directly into Cade’s path. Cade barely dodged the ax’s blade this time.

  The Axman looked human. He was unremarkable, physically. A brown-haired, brown-eyed, white-skinned man wearing clothes that were disheveled but clean. On his head was a crude hood made of burlap with two holes for eyes. He’d bathed recently, was well-fed and appeared free of disease or injury. Cade had thought he was just another lunatic—a waste of his time and talents.