Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Camden Butler, head of the president’s personal detail, already knew about Cade. A couple of his most trusted agents were in on the secret as well. It would have made all their jobs impossible otherwise. But even these agents looked nervous. Not even the head of the Treasury Department or the director of the Secret Service knew what they were about to reveal.

  Butler cleared his throat and began speaking.

  “Let’s get started,” he said. “I’m only going to say this once. This is no joke. Your job just got significantly more difficult today. Your supervisors and I chose you because we believe you can handle it. This is above classified. What you’re going to hear is a national security secret far bigger than anything you’ve ever dealt with before.”

  None of the agents spoke, but a few of them smirked quietly. They were responsible for protecting the most powerful people in the world day and night. That meant they got to see things the public never would; they knew everything from the location of nuclear codes to how long it took for the president and the First Lady to reach orgasm. It was not easy to impress them.

  “I mean it,” Butler said. “Anyone who thinks they’re going to have a great new chapter in their memoirs or something to tell the grandkids, you need to realize we are talking about charges of treason, a military tribunal and execution.”

  Now there were a few scowls from the agents. They were the gatekeepers. They were never supposed to be on the wrong side of a secret.

  One agent raised his hand. “If this is so secret, why do we have so many people here? Basic operational security: the fewer people who know, the better. So why tell us?”

  Butler opened his mouth to reply, but he was cut off.

  “Because I don’t expect most of you to live through this,” Cade said.

  He simply appeared at the head of the table, moving quietly from the hidden entrance. Irrational panic seized the agents’ hearts. Some jumped. One or two swept their jackets back to reach for their guns.

  They were feeling the fear that Cade evoked. The fact that the man triggering this response was dressed just like them, in dark suit and white shirt, only made it worse.

  “Easy,” Butler said. “This is special operative Nathaniel Cade. He might be familiar to a few of you.”

  Zach saw some slow nods around the room. Cade was often at the edges of the Secret Service’s professional turf.

  Butler looked at Cade and nodded. His part was done.

  Cade spoke again. “The President of the United States is under a threat that none of you are capable of handling.”

  There was some more murmuring and scoffing at that. Zach distinctly heard someone cough out the word “Bullshit.” Cade zeroed in on the man. The agent shrank in his chair and silence filled the room again.

  “This is not a reflection on your abilities. It is simply because the threat is not human.”

  Now there was open snickering. The cougher got his courage back. “What, is this where you tell us about the aliens?” he said. Nervous laughter.

  Cade glanced at Zach, his eyebrow rising only a tiny fraction of an inch, as if to say, They always need to see it for themselves…

  “The threat is not human. Neither am I.”

  Cade opened his mouth. His jaw seemed to hang far too low as his fangs jutted out, gleaming white in the light from the overhead lamps.

  The laughter stopped. The agents froze in place. For a moment, Zach thought he could hear them sweating.

  Cade closed his mouth.

  There was a long moment of silence. Finally, a male agent stood. “This isn’t funny.”

  Cade cocked his head slightly at the agent.

  “Sit down, Thomason,” Butler said.

  The agent called Thomason wheeled on him. “Fire me if you want, but fuck this. It’s too late for April Fools’ and too early for Halloween. I don’t know why you’re doing this, but I can think of a lot better ways to spend my evening. If you need me, I’ll be back in the real world.”

  Thomason turned to go.

  And nearly bumped into Cade.

  Thomason stumbled backward, eyes wild. He looked at the head of the table where Cade had been a second before. The space was empty. The other agents were now completely spooked. The room erupted in competing voices and noise.

  “You’re not in the real world anymore,” Cade said. “You’re in mine. If you want to survive the experience, you’ll sit down and listen.”

  Just like that, he was back where he started as if he’d never moved at all. His voice didn’t seem any louder than the agents’, but somehow it cut through their babble like a knife. They all complied—even Thomason.

  Cade looked over every one of them, met all of their eyes without blinking.

  “I am a vampire,” he said. “Whatever you’ve believed in the daylight, I exist. I protect the president and this country. I have done so for over a hundred and forty years. When this is done, if you are lucky, you can go back to not believing in me. Until then, we don’t have time to waste on pointless denial.”

  One young female agent raised her hand timidly. Cade nodded to her.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why would you protect us?”

  “That’s classified,” Cade said. “And it’s not why you’re here.”

  Zach lit up the conference room video screen: a newspaper clipping from New Orleans about the Axman; a bloody hook stuck in the door handle of a late-1970s Camaro; a discarded clown costume behind crime-scene tape.

  “Code name: BOOGEYMAN,” Cade said. Nobody laughed. Zach figured they were afraid to see Cade’s fangs again.

  “This is an entity that emerges periodically to slaughter innocents. It has also shown a remarkable adaptability and a wide variety of physical and preternatural abilities.”

  Zach flipped to the e-mail he and Cade had shown Curtis.

  “And now it wants to kill the president.”

  Zach sensed something then. The agents sat up a little straighter. They focused. A monster had crossed the threshold into their world, but it was still their world. As strange as their lives had just become, they understood now what they were being asked. They would do their best to be ready.

  Zach moved on to the next slide, a list of confirmed and suspected encounters with the Boogeyman: FAIRVALE, CA; CAMP CRYSTAL LAKE, NJ; OJAI, CA; SPRINGWOOD, IL; SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA; NEW ORLEANS, LA; ASHLAND, KY; WICHITA, KS; LAKE HAVASU, AZ; TEXARKANA, TX.

  “These are some of the known encounters with the Boogeyman. Sometimes I was able to stop him. Other times, I wasn’t.”

  “Can we get any of this material?” the female agent asked.

  Butler answered for Cade. “No, Dunn, you cannot. No paper. No notes. Everything is memorization only. We will not have any leaks. Period.”

  The agents stared harder at the list and its accompanying map, trying to burn it into their brains.

  The cougher raised his hand now. Butler called on him. “Yeah. Latham.”

  “It’s been around for almost a hundred years,” Latham said. He looked at Cade. “Is it like you? A vampire?”

  “No,” Cade said. “It’s worse.”

  “Awesome,” Latham muttered.

  “The best term for it might be a psychic parasite. It generally manifests in a human host until it consumes all traces of the original personality.”

  Cade got nothing but blank looks. “It takes over a human body,” he explained. “It will drive that body until it breaks. Then it will find a new host and begin in a new incarnation.”

  “Do we know who he—I mean, who it—becomes?” Agent Dunn asked. “I’m not sure how to say this, but what kind of person does it—?”

  Cade cut her off. “It could be anyone. It generally prefers white males; loners, alienated from society and lacking in ties to family or community. It looks for a weak spirit who wants to be more powerful, someone enraged at the world, nursing a grudge.”

  “Well, we got no shortage of guys like that in our files,” Latham said. A few people ev
en laughed.

  Zach could see the microscopic shifts in Cade’s demeanor that signaled anger. He clicked the remote and a new scene came up. The laughter stopped.

  “This is what it does,” Zach said. “It’s claimed victims across the United States, sometimes within twenty-four hours of one another.”

  Many of the agents grew pale in the reflected light of the images on the screen. Zach couldn’t blame them. Some of the victims’ bodies would not have looked out of place in a surrealist painting.

  “How the hell can anything do that?” Dunn asked, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Each time it’s different,” Cade said. “Different weapons, different methods. But two things are always the same. It makes its host body inhumanly strong and resistant to damage. And it creates a kind of reality-distortion field whenever it is on the hunt.”

  “A what?” Dunn asked.

  “Phones stop working. Cars won’t start. Locked doors open,” Cade said. “Even the weather changes. Rain- and snowstorms appear in midsummer. Then it vanishes into thin air.”

  “You sure there’s only one of them?” Thomason asked, pointing at the screen. “I see some overlap with established serial killers. BTK. Zodiac.”

  “Not all humans side with the human race,” Cade said.

  Zach saw the looks of confusion at that. He jumped in.

  “Uh, what Cade is trying to say is that there are people who basically worship the things that go bump in the night. Some of these Jeopardy! champs think it’s their job to feed the Boogeyman blood and victims while he’s between manifestations.”

  “Then why aren’t we starting with them?” Thomason said. He found it easier to challenge Zach.

  “Not really how it works,” Zach said. “Even the higher-ups in the cult don’t know who it will become, any more than we do. All we’d get from them are some chants that sound like bad heavy-metal lyrics.”

  Zach clicked through another series of crime-scene photos. Some were famous—HEALTER SKELTER in blood on a refrigerator door in Los Feliz—and others sealed forever from public view by federal mandate.

  Thomason didn’t back down. “I don’t buy it,” he said. “For all we know, this guy is working with them. One man couldn’t pull off that kind of carnage and—”

  Cade growled slightly in frustration. It had the effect of causing the five agents nearest him to push their chairs farther away. Thomason immediately shut up.

  “This is not a man,” Cade said, his voice like a crypt door slamming. “In almost a hundred years, I have seen it shot, stabbed, drowned, burned, decapitated, dismembered and buried. And in almost a hundred years, there’s only been one thing that’s ever been able to kill it.”

  “What?” Latham asked, his voice squeaking.

  Cade’s eyes speared every agent in the room as he answered:

  “Me.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE someone with Zach’s experience to see Cade wasn’t thrilled.

  “I don’t need instructions,” Cade said. “I think a hundred forty-five years of experience should be enough.”

  Butler looked at Zach, who shrugged. He’d promised to bring Cade in for a briefing on how to prepare to act like a Secret Service agent. He hadn’t offered anything more.

  They were in the West Wing of the White House in the Secret Service’s offices a floor below the Oval. It was past 3 a.m. and the place was clear of people. Even the most devout members of Curtis’s staff had to sleep sometime.

  Cade stood rigid, his usual air of menace sharpened even further by irritation.

  But Agent Dunn seemed to take his attitude as a challenge.

  “Really? You think we all wear heavy metal jewelry around our necks?”

  She pointed at Cade’s cross. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Dunn radiated a contained energy from her compact, athletic frame. She no longer seemed at all scared of Cade. Maybe that’s why Butler brought her.

  Cade touched the cross lightly. “This is necessary,” he said.

  “Then at least wear a tie and keep it under your shirt.”

  “I have,” Cade said. “It’s too often become a noose.”

  Dunn rolled her eyes. She reached over to Butler and popped his tie from his collar with a quick jerk. “Yeah. That’s why we wear clip-ons. A hundred and forty-five years and you never heard of one?”

  She threw it over to Cade.

  “Thank you,” Cade said flatly. “That’s a great help.”

  Zach had to hide a smirk as Cade buttoned his collar and attached the tie.

  “Better,” Dunn said. “Now these.”

  She reached into a pocket and withdrew a pair of cheap imitation Wayfarers.

  Cade put them on.

  They looked at him. Something still wasn’t right. Butler saw it first.

  “Wristwatch,” he said. “Yours is way too expensive.”

  Cade’s watch was atomic-clock synched to sunrise and sunset in whatever time zone he was in. It was also as tough as a tank and cost more than a small car. He hadn’t always worn it. Zach figured out, from the way Cade studiously failed to mention it, that it was a gift from Tania.

  Tania was Cade’s—well, the term “girlfriend” didn’t really apply to a sixty-six-year-old vampire who regularly murdered people and ate them. When she was human, Cade had once promised to save her from being turned into a vampire. He’d failed. And she was, frankly, overjoyed. She’d flitted in and out of Cade’s life ever since. Zach had tried to rope her into working for the U.S. government on an occasional basis. She’d saved Cade several times. They also had ear-shattering vampire sex in the Reliquary, as Zach had witnessed firsthand, despite his best efforts to avoid it. Unlike Cade, however, Tania was not bound by any oath—or any sense of morality, for that matter. She killed when she wanted and drank human blood. Perhaps out of guilt or loneliness, Cade hadn’t yet destroyed her. Tania, for her part, seemed to view Cade as her property. And she refused to allow anyone or anything else to kill him, if only because it would be trespassing on her turf.

  However, Cade took the watch off and dropped it to the floor without a word. Dunn rummaged in a desk and found a cheap but sturdy Timex.

  Cade took the Secret Service’s standard-issue radio and equipment as they were handed to him. He might have smirked for an instant when Butler handed him the SIG Sauer pistol in its holster, but he added that as well.

  “So why doesn’t the Boogeyman just use a rifle in broad daylight?” Dunn asked. “Seems like a much easier way to kill someone. And you certainly couldn’t stop him then.”

  “What it does is what it is,” Cade said.

  Dunn waited. Cade didn’t elaborate. “I’m going to need a little more than that,” she said.

  “The Boogeyman can’t change its nature any more than I can,” Cade said. “It’s a thing like me. It needs to kill by hand or with a blade, up close and personal. It cannot get any sustenance without personally experiencing the pain and terror as a human being dies. It has to see the light of the soul wink out, to see the utter humiliation as a human spirit is reduced to nothing more than bloody meat.”

  “And he can’t do that during the day?”

  “As I said, it’s a thing like me. We all hate the daylight. We work at night. Your world fades a little in the dark. My world starts to intrude. During the day, it will be weakened as well. Its host will appear almost human again. At night, the Boogeyman comes out.”

  “So there really are monsters in the dark,” Dunn said. “I feel sort of like calling my mom and saying she shouldn’t have given me so much crap about the night-light.”

  Cade had a question for her now. “Why aren’t you as frightened as the others?”

  “Would it do any good?” she asked. “Fear’s just an alarm clock. It wakes you up to the danger. Then you turn off the alarm, get out of bed and get to work.”

  “That’s a rare attitude,” Cade said.

  Zach looked offended. “Is that a dig at me? I’m standing right here, you know.”

>   “I know.”

  Cade finished strapping on his holster, his belt, his tactical baton, his radio, and his spare ammo clips. He stood there, on display again. This time, he looked the part.

  Dunn had one last touch, however.

  She went to her own desk and opened a drawer. She took out a half-dozen aerosol spray cans.

  “Strip,” she said to Cade. “Down to your boxers or whatever.”

  Cade didn’t ask why. He was out of his suit in a moment.

  Dunn had two of the cans, one in each hand, then caught her breath when she looked up.

  Butler and Zach were both looking elsewhere. Cade was an elegantly carved statue of pale skin and muscle.

  “I don’t wear boxers,” he said.

  Dunn blinked. “Right. Hold still.”

  Within a few moments, the tanning spray had covered most of Cade’s body. Dunn emptied one can after another, applying multiple coats, working without haste, covering every square inch.

  She looked Cade over with a critical eye and nodded.

  Zach and Butler finally looked directly at Cade again. The bright orange of the tanning spray was muted somewhat by Cade’s bloodless pallor. He still looked a little like a fresh Cheeto. But in a lineup of agents, especially at night, he wouldn’t stand out.

  Dunn looked Cade up and down one more time.

  “Good enough,” she said. “Welcome to the Secret Service, Cade.”

  He stood there, coat of paint still wet, arms away from his sides. “I wonder if you couldn’t have done this first,” he said.

  Dunn flashed him a sudden, radiant smile. “Now, where’s the fun in that?”

  March 18, 2003

  Lake Havasu, Arizona

  God damn it, God damn it, shut it down. I said, shut it down. That’s enough!” Kevin Lane hit the cameraman on the back of the head to get him to stop recording. The girl on the deck of the boat stretched the frat boy’s penis like Silly Putty—with about the same response. Lane yelled at her again, and she shrugged and quit.