“We don’t have time for this,” Cade barked. They all looked at him. His tone meant the screwing-around portion of the evening was over. “Butler. Get the president into the limo. Lock the doors. Do not open them for anyone but me. Have the other agents set up a perimeter. Guns out. Shoot anything that approaches. Anything at all.”
Candace tried to object. “Wait—”
But Butler wasn’t about to argue. He simply ran back toward the motorcade.
“What are you going to do?” Candace asked.
This time Cade deigned to answer. “I’m going to find him and stop him.”
“What about the press?” Zach asked.
Cade nodded. “Good point. You and Ms. Curtis go to the press bus. Tell them we are waiting for assistance. Hand out drinks.”
“I’m not a damned waitress,” Candace protested again.
Cade looked directly at her. She shut up. “Make sure you use the drinks from the blue cooler. Only the blue cooler. Do not drink anything yourself.”
Zach and Candace exchanged glances. “Are you telling me we’re going to drug the press corps?” Zach asked.
“It’s hardly the first time.”
“Is that a good idea?” Candace asked. “I mean, if the Boogeyman gets past you. What then?”
“At least they’ll die in their sleep,” Cade said.
Then he was gone.
THE MEDIA WERE GETTING RESTLESS. They quickly discovered nobody had any coverage out here. None of them had very long attention spans to start, and the thought of being stuck in the middle of Ohio in a snowstorm without wireless access didn’t help.
One of the reporters looked out the window. He saw one of the Secret Service agents pass by. He did a double take. The agent was definitely carrying her weapon in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Hey,” he called to the others. “Hey. The Secret Service is out there. I think they’ve got their guns out.”
There was a general groan of disbelief. “Oh, shut the fuck up, Taibbi,” one of the anchorbabes said. “Nobody wants to hear your conspiracy theories.”
The reporter started to protest, but then Candace Curtis showed up with free drinks as an apology for the delay. The lead bus had been hit by a drunk driver. Nobody was injured. Everything would be cleared up as soon as the tow trucks arrived.
The members of the media accepted this and settled into their seats to wait. The one reporter who’d noticed the gun kept looking out the window, trying to find anything new as the glass fogged over.
A few minutes later, Candace Curtis and another couple of attractive young campaign staffers showed up in the aisle of the bus, wheeling a big cooler of drinks behind them.
“On the house, everyone,” Candace said. “Just our way of saying sorry for the delay.”
“You gals should work for the airlines,” the reporter from Fox barked. “You’re a lot better-looking than most stewardesses.”
Candace laughed and gave him a mock slap on the shoulder. Pretty soon every reporter on the bus had a drink in hand. Even the guy looking for the gun took a Heineken. What the hell, he figured. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere.
CADE FOUND HIM IN MINUTES. It wasn’t hard. He wasn’t hiding.
The Boogeyman was out in the fields on the side of the highway, walking across the frozen ground as if simply out for a stroll. He wore civilian clothes and a yellow latex mask.
They faced each other like gunslingers, a dozen feet or so separating them, their hands loosely at their sides.
Cade felt his fangs emerge and his lips peel back in imitation of a smile.
It’s about time, he thought.
MEGAN ROARK WAS happier this way. She really was.
Sure, she’d been forced to follow along behind the buses since Lanning had banned her from the campaign press. Fucker. She was almost certain he’d set her up deliberately. But it didn’t mean that she was wrong. There was something very weird about Zach Barrows, and she was sure it tied in to the Campaign Carver. She was going to prove it.
If that meant dogging after the campaign in her own rental car, so be it. Maybe the Secret Service wouldn’t let her into the private events, but they couldn’t keep her out of the public spaces. She would find the connection between Barrows and the killer. No matter what.
And she preferred to drive herself anyway.
Roark suddenly slammed on her brakes and skidded to a halt on the shoulder, tires spitting up gravel.
The bus caravan had come to a dead stop in the middle of the road and the Secret Service had set up barricades and road flares.
For a second, Roark just sucked in deep breaths. She tried not to see herself mangled in the wreckage of her rental Hyundai.
She rolled down her window as an agent jogged to her car.
“What the hell?” she screamed as the wind blew snow and road grit into her eyes.
“Mechanical trouble, ma’am,” the agent said. “You’re going to have to stay in your car or turn back around.”
This was the last fucking straw, Megan thought. She flipped out her press ID—the one she’d made herself, with the logo of her Internet channel laser-printed in full color.
“Do you know who I am?”
The agent looked at her badge, then back at her. “Yes,” he said. “You’re not going any further. It’s for your own safety.”
Roark had heard that line before. It screamed “cover-up” to her.
“What are you going to do if I try to get past? Shoot me?”
Then she looked down and realized the agent already had his service weapon out of its holster.
“I’d rather not,” he said. He turned and started walking away.
He was serious. Her hands still shook from the near-accident, and now another wave of fear and nausea washed over her. In all her time revealing the truth—in dealing with the shadowy machinations of the Curtis administration, which she knew was trying to destroy the nation she loved—this was the first time she’d ever felt the presence of real danger. They had actually threatened her. She must be closer than she even dreamed.
At that moment, her car sputtered and died.
Roark looked at the barricades. The buses were farther down the road. She couldn’t see anything. But with the flares, the agents and their guns, it all reminded her of scenes she knew from TV.
Crime scenes.
The Campaign Carver. It had to be. They were trying to hide it. My God, wait until her followers heard about this.
Before she knew it, she’d popped the door of the car and was following the agent, recording everything with the video function on her phone.
“Hey! HEY! I don’t know what kind of shit you’re trying to pull, but you can tell Curtis for me that he’s not going to get away with this! The truth will come out!”
He turned back to her. The wind whipped his tie up over his shoulder. It was too dark for him to wear his standard-issue sunglasses. His eyes seemed very, very tired.
“Look,” he said. “If you can get out of here, do it. Believe me. I would if I could.”
The other agent at the barricades yelled something at him, and he jogged away, leaving her there.
Roark stood there in the biting cold. The agents had their backs to her. She knew this was her only chance to get proof. She had to act fast, before they got the cover-up in place.
She walked back to her car and opened the door. The agent with the tired eyes looked over his shoulder at her. She waved. He turned away.
She slammed her door hard and immediately ducked down by the side of the car. She hoped that would be enough to convince him she’d chosen to sit quietly and wait. As quickly as she could, she slid down the side of the embankment beside the highway.
As soon as she was at the bottom, she was swallowed by the dark. She didn’t think the Secret Service would spot her. She could barely see her own hands.
The cold began to bite its way through her clothes. She wished she’d grabbed her coat before coming up
with this plan. But it was too late now.
She moved carefully over the rough, frozen ground. She had her phone in one hand, ready to take pics before Curtis’s goons could hide the bodies. She was going to blow this story wide open.
THEY PAUSED, watching each other. Cade could hear the heavy breathing behind the smiley-face mask.
The Boogeyman’s weight shifted back to its right.
Cade took a step in that direction.
It shifted its left foot a fraction of an inch.
Cade pivoted slightly in response.
They knew each other. Each knew the other had the raw power to hurt him badly. They knew the first steps in any of their dances were crucial.
Cade began to feel something was wrong with this. He had always been a little stronger and a few seconds faster. But if anything, he was at a disadvantage here. Since Cade had not encountered the Boogeyman in this incarnation, he didn’t know exactly how strong it was or how it would react.
On the other hand, Cade had won every previous match-up. That had to factor into its considerations as well.
As if it could sense what he was thinking, the Boogeyman stopped circling and put its hands up.
It couldn’t possibly be surrendering, could it?
Cade remained where he was, watching carefully.
But the Boogeyman still didn’t move.
Now Cade’s instincts were fairly screaming at him.
The Boogeyman dropped his hands. Cade heard muffled laughter under the mask.
It wasn’t a surrender. It was a signal.
By the time Cade heard the shot, it was already too late.
CADE REALIZED HE’D MADE a mistake as he stepped out of the way of the sniper’s bullet, fired from nearly a thousand yards. At that distance, anything less than a .50-caliber cartridge was not a threat to him, and anyway, he could simply move before the bullet hit him.
That was what they were counting on.
The fibers of Cade’s skin, when he was fully fed, swelled with blood and interlocked to form a kind of weave as tough as Kevlar. These unnaturally dense layers could stop a bullet with little more than a bruise. But even Kevlar has its weaknesses. An ice pick can pop through a Kevlar vest by focusing all its energy on one tiny spot, robbing the netting of its ability to spread and deflect the impact. So can knives, arrows, crossbow bolts and very sharp wooden stakes.
The Boogeyman used something like an ice pick. He took full advantage of the distraction of the sniper’s shot, moving with inhuman speed and strength to slam a narrow steel rod through Cade’s skin, his ribs, and his lung. Only a last-second twitch kept him from piercing Cade’s heart.
Cade backhanded him away and plucked the weapon out of his body. It was not an ice pick. If Cade had to describe it, he’d have to call it a combat syringe: a specially designed chemical delivery system with a reservoir in the handle behind a hollow, surgically sharp needle.
And then Cade started dying.
At first, he couldn’t understand. Poison meant nothing to him. His hyperactive immune system had dismissed Ebola variants like a slight cold.
Then he realized: the Boogeyman hadn’t injected him with poison. He’d been hit with something that was already in his blood.
In humans, blood clotting is activated when damage to the tissues prompts the release of proteins that causes the platelets to stick to one another and to the damaged area. One of these proteins is fibrin, which essentially turns blood from a liquid into a solid, causing a scab or clot to form.
Cade’s blood-clotting response was inhumanly fast and effective. The proteins in his blood that activated fibrin were already hypersensitive. A vampire, after all, doesn’t want to lose so much as a drop.
The Boogeyman had flooded his system with the activating proteins for fibrin, sending his clotting factors into overdrive. It spread throughout every vein and artery like a chemical drought. His blood thickened to cake batter, then wet cement, then sand. He was being petrified from the inside out.
His heart stuttered, desperately trying to churn sludge. A series of strokes popped like bubble wrap in his brain, blacking out details as his body seized underneath him. He bit through his lips, spilled rust instead of blood. The world flickered in and out as he thrashed on the ground, learning an entirely new vocabulary of pain.
Cade’s head flopped to the left. He caught a glimpse of the Boogeyman, strolling as if he didn’t have a care in the world, moving toward the bright lights of the buses trapped on the road.
FROM THE SMALL RISE BEHIND the farmhouse where they’d camped, Helen watched Cade through her night-vision optics. He was still squirming in pain as she took off the lenses. Reyes was fumbling on the ground, trying to get the sniper rifle into his gear bag, his fingers clumsy with fear.
“No rush,” she told him. “He’s not going anywhere.”
Reyes muttered something in Spanish without looking at her. She put the optics back up to her eyes. The Boogeyman moved toward the buses. Part of the deal. He wanted to kill the president. Helen had tried to argue, but it was worse than the time she tried to talk to Cade. Cade at least responded with anger or contempt. The Boogeyman simply sat like a tree stump until she agreed.
It wasn’t that Helen gave a damn about the president. She even held a slight hope that Barrows would get in the Boogeyman’s way before Curtis was killed. But this was all a distraction from her main goal, now that Cade had been dealt with. She wanted to begin using her new ally against the Shadow Company as soon as possible.
Still, she respected his need to finish what he started. It showed a certain bloody-minded stubbornness, an inability to let go of a grudge. It was a quality she could use if they were going to work together in the future.
Reyes was packed and ready. “We going over there?” he asked, shrugging toward the place where Cade had fallen. He looked into the darkness. Helen turned and followed his gaze. Cade was barely visible, but they could see him, crawling slowly toward the highway.
She checked him through the night-vision again. He’d made the edge of a stand of trees just below the highway. He kept trying to rise. Kept falling.
She lowered the goggles again. “Either he dies now or the sun will get him,” she told Reyes. “Come on. I’m freezing.”
She walked across the field toward their car, dragging her dead left foot along with her. Reyes followed.
Inside the car, Reyes hesitated. He made a noise in the back of his throat.
“What?”
“Maybe we should go look at him. To be sure.”
Helen smirked with one side of her face. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Check his pulse?”
Reyes didn’t say anything. He stared at the trees, even though Cade’s shadow was no longer visible.
Helen sighed heavily and checked her watch. Reyes put the car into gear. They drove away.
CODY FELLOWS WALKED along the old ruts in the field. Frost and dead weeds crunched under his feet, and the furrows were frozen as solid as concrete. It had been years since anyone plowed this land, even longer since anyone had grown crops here. Like most of the farms around town, this one had been foreclosed or abandoned.
Cody watched his steps carefully in the dark, the toes of his sneakers dancing in and out of the small circle of light from his Special Forces flashlight ($7.99 at the local Gas N’ Go, free with a five-finger discount). If he twisted his ankle in a rut, no one would come looking, maybe not for days. His mom and Carl did not want him in the trailer when they were cooking. Said it wasn’t good for him to breathe in the fumes. Mom’s final, eroded effort to be a parent. Cody didn’t need the warning; he saw the results: his mom’s face looked like a skull eating its way out of her skin, chewing relentlessly at her chapped and bleeding lips. But if Cody were ever to say that, his mom would smack him, then cry, then complain again about Cody’s dad, and where the hell was she supposed to get any money from anyway. Then she’d start using the stuff again.
Cody spent a lot of time
in the fields. He was eleven years old.
He suspected he’d start using meth, too—maybe not anytime soon, but before too long. His school attendance had dropped down to seldom at best, and he was smart enough to recognize that his options had narrowed to the same tunnel his mother had crawled inside. Some of the girls in his class were already hooking up with guys from high school, the ones who had cars and clothes they bought with what they made from dealing or delivering. Cody was small for his age, so he’d managed to avoid any offers to make extra cash. But he knew it was coming. Sooner or later, someone was going to put him to work or offer him the drug. And Cody knew that if the offer came in the right way, couched in friendship or as a demand from his mom, he would say yes and his life would pretty much be over.
It occurred to him that maybe what he was looking for, out on these late-night walks, was his own death. People succumbed to hypothermia every winter. He’d heard it was like falling asleep.
There were worse ways to go. Home-brew meth operations were not exactly designed for safety. Mom’s previous boyfriend, Jerry, had blown a hole in their old house and run outside, his skin on fire. Cody had been over at a friend’s, but he’d run home when he heard the explosion. By then, Jerry was dancing on the remains of the front lawn, firemen and police looking at one another, unsure of what to do. Everyone knew you couldn’t pour water on a chemical fire. Jerry tried to hold on to his skin as it melted off his body, falling in great sizzling drops like grease on a skillet.
Someone turned Cody away before he saw how it ended. He didn’t miss Jerry—he was the guy who first introduced his mom to meth—but he still couldn’t hear bacon fry without starting to shake.
His flashlight caught a burst of color on the gray dirt.
Red. Blood.
It didn’t look fresh—it seemed to be turning the color of a scab—but he cast his flashlight around to see where it came from.
The blood traced a path in a long line from out of the field back toward the highway.
Unsure of exactly why he did it, Cody began to follow. He went toward the road, although he supposed the trail could just as easily have been made by someone going the other way. If it was a wounded animal, he thought maybe he could nurse it back to health. Maybe it was a dog. He’d always wanted a dog. He had vague, warm memories of his father’s hunting dogs in the time his folks were still together.
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