Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  “Why are you doing this?” Cade asked.

  “Don’t pretend your feelings are hurt,” Zach said. “We both know that’s not possible.”

  “You’re right,” Cade said.

  “Why are you even here?” Zach said, suddenly, incredibly, volcanically angry. At Cade. At the whole insane nightmare his life had become over the past three years. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Only to tell you that I will kill it. I thought you would find some comfort in that.”

  For a moment, Zach was so angry he wished he had a stake he could ram through Cade’s chest, to watch him choke and die on his own black blood… and then the anger vanished, like the air from a popped balloon.

  “At this point, I’ll take what I can get,” he said.

  Cade gave him the nanosecond smile. “Who’s got your back, homeslice?”

  Zach coughed out a laugh. He staggered toward the door.

  When he looked back, Cade was gone.

  CANDACE CAME AND COLLECTED HIM. He didn’t know when.

  He was facedown at a table. He opened his eyes and managed to focus on her face before the room spun away from him again.

  “You here for the pity lay?” he said.

  He could just make out a sardonic grin on her face. “Would you turn it down?”

  “I seem to be saying this a lot, but I’ll take what I can get.”

  She helped him up and poured him into a car. In the morning, he found himself in the bed in the back of the staff’s campaign bus, far away from Lanford.

  He showered in the closet-sized stall of the bus. He found his suit, dry-cleaned and crisp, under a plastic wrapper and hanging from the door. He took a wash-and-wear shirt out of a box. He drank many, many cups of coffee.

  Then he went through the door into the main cabin of the bus and went back to work.

  FADE IN: A montage of video clips of Governor Skip Seabrook: talking at Town Hall meetings; shaking hands with passersby on a sidewalk on a sunny day; listening intently as an elderly man in a military uniform talks to him.

  VOICE-OVER: You know, it seems like there are a lot of people who want to tear this country down. There are a lot of people who will say we should worry about what’s coming. That we can’t trust anyone. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think the real strength of our nation is in its people. I am not afraid of America. I am willing to tell the public what I believe, face-to-face. I believe in democracy. I believe in giving the voters a chance to be heard. And I believe our greatest days are yet to come.

  (Montage fades into SEABROOK 2012 title card.)

  VOICE-OVER: My name is Skip Seabrook. And I’m running for president.

  CAPTION: PAID FOR BY THE SEABROOK FOR AMERICA CAMPAIGN

  VOICE-OVER: I’m Skip Seabrook, and I approve this message.

  —Seabrook Campaign Ad

  The morning press briefing started out normally. Lanning was feeding the maggot farm today, so it promised to be a little more entertaining than usual. Zach hoped it would distract him from his hangover. He felt like someone had dumped toxic waste into his skull.

  “Hey, Lanning! Any comment on Seabrook’s latest campaign ad?”

  “The one where he says he’s not afraid of America? He might reconsider if he took a walk on Chicago’s South Side at night.”

  Laughter.

  A hard-eyed little man shouted, “What about the latest job numbers? When do we see someone actually get hired as a result of all this spending?”

  “Well, I’m working again,” Lanning said. “But no, this is a serious issue, and the president—”

  Then there was a slight commotion as Megan Roark shoved her way to the front of the pack. The other members of the media gaggle looked mildly annoyed, but they’d learned to expect a little crazy behavior from Megan.

  Nobody was expecting what came next, however.

  “I have a question,” she said. Her voice was trembling. But she didn’t look afraid. If Zach had to name what he saw on her face, he’d have to say it was elation.

  He got a sinking feeling. This wasn’t going to be good.

  “I’ve been doing a little research,” she began. “I’ve found proof that over the past three years, there has been a White House employee connected to a dozen different killings that have resulted in at least nineteen people dead.”

  Zach could practically see the ears of the other reporters pricking up. Megan was obnoxious, but she delivered the red meat. They were willing to listen.

  “I have photos of this employee placing him conclusively at the scene of murders in Los Angeles, Mexico, Virginia, Iowa—”

  Oh shit, Zach thought. That was a highlight reel of Cade’s itinerary over the past few years. Roark might have stumbled onto the biggest secret in White House history.

  He shot a glance at Lanning up at the podium. Lanning didn’t have to feign his expression of boredom and bafflement. He didn’t know what she might have blundered into. Zach tried to think of a way to shut this down.

  But Roark was really in a groove now. “—And there are even reports of this staffer being on-site during the attack on the White House. I have reason to believe that the White House is shielding this man from inquiries and criminal prosecution related to these killings. And I believe this man is also involved in the deaths that have been following the president on the campaign trail. He has been at every location. He has worked with local police to cover up details. And he was seen arguing with the most recent victim on the day of the killing.”

  Oh boy. This was bad. He should have ordered Cade to stay away from his father. This was a textbook example of unintended consequences. Roark could make a pretty strong case against Cade just from the circumstances. She didn’t even have to know his name. But wherever he was, there were plenty of bodies.

  Lanning shook his head. “I believe you said you had a question, Megan?”

  The other members of the press weren’t impatient, though. They were intrigued. They wanted to hear the rest.

  Roark smiled, vicious and triumphant. She turned and pointed right at Zach. “What I want to know is, where was Zachary Barrows on the night his father was murdered?”

  Wait—what?

  Zach, standing to one side of the stage, looked so poleaxed that most of the press burst out laughing.

  They didn’t stop. The smile began to ebb from Roark’s face as she realized: they were laughing at her.

  “This isn’t a joke,” she said, suddenly nowhere near as sure of herself. “I have photos, dates, times—” She waved a sheaf of papers at the people closest to her.

  Lanning, leaning down over his podium, wasn’t laughing. His look was one of barely contained rage.

  “Ms. Roark,” he said quietly. The chatter of the press died down. They leaned in to hear. “You’ve suggested that a campaign consultant—who has not been employed by the White House in three years, I might add—has a record as a serial killer that would rival Ted Bundy’s. You’ve suggested he’s had the assistance of the office of the President of the United States in these crimes, which only you, out of all your slow, benighted colleagues, have been able to uncover. And now you’ve accused him of killing his own father. So I thought you might, if you’d be so kind, allow me to answer your deeply insulting and slanderous question.”

  Roark just blinked. Everything had flipped on her, but she still didn’t know why. Zach knew it was small of him, but he really enjoyed the look of utter confusion and fear on her face. She wasn’t that wrong, if you looked at it through her distorted lens. She’d missed only one detail.

  “Zach Barrows was on the press bus all night, answering questions after the rally and then riding with the other members of the media to the next campaign stop,” Lanning said.

  One really important detail, as it turned out.

  Just like that, Megan Roark was finished. The other reporters moved back from her. She couldn’t have been more alone if she was on an ice floe cast off into an arctic sea.

  S
he opened her mouth to speak. Lanning cut her off.

  “You were out gathering this evidence, I assume. Too bad you didn’t ride the bus that night. Why, you might have caught him in the act.”

  His tone was withering. Zach didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Many of the members of the press knew him from the old days. They would have found it inconceivable that Zach could throw a punch, let alone carve up his own dad. Even if Zach hadn’t been doing background briefings all night with the media, they probably wouldn’t have believed Roark. It was very hard to get a reporter to admit his first impression might not be accurate. The media had a lot invested in their ability to make snap judgments. Zach was a soft, political flack. That’s all they saw when they looked at him.

  Roark didn’t help her case just then. She began shrieking like a banshee: “Oh no. I know what I’ve found. You can’t explain all this away. I have proof! I have—”

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” Lanning said. “You’ve gone too far this time.” He nodded. Two large, black-suited men from the Secret Service slid through the crowd as if greased. They gently but firmly lifted Megan Roark off her feet and escorted her away. She didn’t stop screaming. “You can’t silence the truth! You can’t silence the truth! You assholes, let me go—”

  The hole where she’d been was neatly filled by the other members of the media. They looked expectantly at Lanning.

  “Any other questions?” he asked.

  That got the laugh he wanted, a release of nervous tension, and it was as if Roark had never been there. If anyone saw the relief on Zach’s face, they probably assumed it was because he’d just barely escaped an encounter with a crazy woman and national disgrace.

  That was fine by Zach. What the press didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  A month after his transfer to [the Federal Reformatory at] Chillicothe [Ohio], Manson suddenly became a model inmate… It is a mystery. What happened to Manson in Chillicothe, that he suddenly became studious (he was still illiterate when he was transferred there), learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic, mellowed out and became a star “prisoner”?… Manson became a different person and maintained that identity for over a year and a half, until his release. That degree of conscious control—especially in a disturbed, uneducated, illiterate, violent, sodomitic bastard child of an unmarried, alcoholic mother—is suspicious, if not alarming… Chillicothe is, of course, the center of the American Mound culture… the remains of our Old Ones, the original people, the deep ancestors of our forgotten history, the history before Columbus that is never taught in the schools because we don’t know it ourselves…

  —Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces

  MIDNIGHT, OCTOBER 22, 2012, CHILLICOTHE, OHIO

  After Megan Roark’s spectacular public meltdown, the campaign seemed to gain a little breathing room. The press was not eager to roll around in the same muck as she did. And no one on Curtis’s staff had died in several days.

  The Boogeyman watched the buses leave the rally outside Chillicothe, Ohio. He turned on his cell phone and dialed the only number it contained.

  Holt answered on the first ring.

  “Now?” he asked.

  “Now,” she said.

  He hung up. It was about time. The relief he felt was as close as the entity would ever get to sex.

  He went to find a car.

  ZACH FELT ALMOST NORMAL AGAIN. They’d had a good couple of days. No more deaths. The press had backed off. The rally in Chillicothe had been full of warm and responsive supporters. They got great footage of small-town America cheering for Curtis to use in the next round of campaign ads.

  He supposed he was still numb about Frank’s death. He never really believed he’d outlive his father. The man seemed impervious to everything but nuclear radiation. But he was handling it. He supposed it helped that he and Candace, throwing caution to the wind, spent every minute they could in bed together. He knew it was tempting fate and the Boogeyman, but he wasn’t about to stop.

  Cade had withdrawn to the fringes of the campaign. They hadn’t spoken much, although Zach suspected Cade guarded him and Candace when they went back to her hotel rooms at night, which was somehow creepy and reassuring at the same time. Zach went about his fake job on the campaign as if it was his real job. It felt surprisingly good.

  He heard a grunt of surprise from the driver right before the bus seemed to crank on its own axis. He was flung into the air and then the floor came up and met him again. He blinked and saw a discarded candy wrapper under one of the seats. It was over that fast.

  He got to his feet. He didn’t feel anything broken. The inside of the bus looked like a landslide made of paper and coffee cups. Laptops were tossed like glowing dice. Zach found Candace and helped her up. The bus was off kilter, the floor at an angle. She didn’t seem hurt. Her eyes focused on him.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Think so. What happened?”

  “Stay put. I’ll be back.”

  Zach hopped up and walked over the mess, using the seat backs as stepping-stones. He ignored the calls from the other campaign staffers. Nobody looked seriously hurt. He got to the driver. There was blood down the man’s shirt. He sat in front of a deflated air bag, yellow powder over his hands and arms.

  “Da’d t’ing broke by node,” he told Zach, holding his face.

  “Anything else? You feel any other pain?”

  The driver shook his head.

  “What happened?”

  The driver gestured with his elbow toward the windshield. The bus was sideways, its front half in a ditch alongside the road. Only the rear end of the car that had hit them was visible—the rest appeared to be under the bus’s front grille, which poured out steam from its shattered radiator. The driver had managed to turn, but the car still hit hard.

  “He swer’bed right into be,” the driver said, still blocking the nosebleed.

  Zach realized what was missing.

  No one’s phone was ringing. After something like this, every ringtone in the bus should be blaring with calls from the other vehicles in the convoy.

  Instead, there was just the hiss of the radiator and the wind yowling like a cat caught out in the rain.

  Zach checked his own phone—another piece of spy tech, linked to secret satellites and black-ops networks hidden across the nation. Ordinarily, it could place calls from the inside of a coffin six feet under.

  No signal.

  He suddenly felt like he had ice cubes in his guts. He hit the lever to open the door.

  “Zach, wait.” He looked back and saw Candace struggling to climb the seats after him. Her skirt was making things difficult.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. He went out into the cold. The driver closed the door behind him without being told.

  ZACH LOOKED BACK at the other cars. The road was hopelessly jammed. The other vehicles in the motorcade had only managed to avoid a massive pileup by swerving wildly. Now they were all spun around at odd angles, parked like they’d been left by drunks at a Fourth of July picnic. Exhaust vapor rolled over the ground, forming a thick gray fog. In the glare of the headlights, Zach could see tiny single flakes of snow, whipped around by the sharp winds.

  Then Cade was standing beside him. Zach jumped, then cursed. He was going to have a heart attack by the time he was forty, he just knew it.

  “Get back,” Cade told him.

  Zach saw Butler running through the dark, gun out, his silhouette briefly appearing through the headlights.

  Cade moved past Zach like silk, around to the front of the bus.

  Butler didn’t stop to talk. He ran after Cade.

  Zach came around the side of the bus a step behind. They both found Cade standing alone, staring at the wrecked car. The smaller car, a Honda, had been jammed under the fender and above the bus’s axle by the crash. They were stuck together like puzzle pieces forced to fit in the wrong slots.

  The driver was halfway out the shattered windshield, far beyond ca
ring about the wiper blade that kept swiping up and into his face. His neck was twisted so that his chin touched the back of his own shoulder. His eyes stared blankly at the sky, mouth open.

  The engine of the Honda was still racing, as if the car itself was trying to keep moving through the bus.

  “Must have been drunk,” Butler said.

  “He was dead,” Cade said.

  Butler stepped back. “What?”

  “Almost no blood,” Cade said.

  He was right. Trust a vampire when it comes to that, Zach thought. Despite all the tears and cuts in the driver’s flesh, there was barely any bleeding.

  “His neck was broken before he was put behind the wheel,” Cade said.

  Butler leaned in the open driver’s door and swept it with his Maglite. “Cinder block on the gas pedal,” he told them.

  Zach finally noticed the bumper sticker. Cade kept staring at it. It was in the rear window of the Honda. The lights from the bus lit it up.

  It was a simple message: HAVE A NICE DAY. Punctuated by a smiley face.

  “It’s him,” Cade said.

  Something under the hood began to shriek, blotting out all other sounds. A metallic clank cut it off at the top of its scream. The Honda bucked and shuddered, and the wiper finally stopped its arc into the corpse.

  Silence.

  Then Butler swore. He pressed a finger to his earpiece, then pulled it out and put it back again.

  “Coms are down,” he said.

  “Of course they are,” Cade said.

  Zach checked his phone again. “No signal.”

  The lead bus’s door opened again and Candace got out. She hugged herself against the cold.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Get back in the bus.” The three men said it almost simultaneously.

  She ignored them and walked closer.

  “Agent Butler—” Cade began.

  Butler turned to Candace. “Ms. Curtis. Please. We’ve got a situation.”

  “And I want to know what it is,” she snapped back. “I’m not the damsel in distress, guys. My father is.”