Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  He allowed himself to imagine it. The dog—it would be a male—would be nervous and snappish at first. That’s how these things went. But he’d let it sniff his hand and it would see that he meant no harm. Then he’d tear a piece off his T-shirt to wrap like a bandage around its wound, which was going to be on his front leg, he decided. He would bring it to the trailer and give it a blanket and let it sleep in a crate out back and smuggle some food from inside. Probably beef jerky, that’s all Mom and Carl seemed to eat when they were tweaking, anyway—

  He heard a growl and stopped short. He was almost at the grove of small cottonwoods that grew like weeds in the gully by the highway. Inside the stand of trees, he could see a dark, hunched shape.

  It was a very big dog.

  But he was determined. He put his hand out, palm down, for the dog to sniff.

  “It’s all right,” Cody said, his breath steaming in the air. “I won’t hurt you. Here, boy. I’m here to help.”

  The hunched shape moved, lurching toward him with a sudden and awful speed.

  Cody only caught a glimpse before he dropped his flashlight.

  He saw teeth. Fangs.

  But it wasn’t a dog.

  CADE WAS HALF MAD with thirst and pain now. His heart and veins were clotted nearly shut. Blackness danced around the edges of his vision. His thoughts came in clusters while his body moved on instinct.

  The vampire side of him was forced to the surface—there was very little of him human enough to disguise it now. He could feel the sludge inside him, curling and shrinking him like a spider caught in a candle’s flame. In another few minutes, he knew his muscles would crack as his veins and capillaries contracted and then sealed. His bones would split under the pressure. Whatever was left would be a dried-out husk until the sun rose to finish him.

  But even through the pain, Cade felt the oath tugging at him.

  The president is in danger. The president will die. You must protect the president.

  He struggled to his feet. Fell again. Impossible. They had killed him. He had failed. The one coherent thought that came to him: he needed fresh blood. But Zach, and the containers he kept, were back on the bus, and Cade could not move any closer.

  And then he’d heard the boy.

  Something inside him recoiled, even as he stopped moving, stopped doing anything that might spook the prey. His fangs emerged. He could smell him now. Small, but filled with enough to save him. Enough to heal him so he could fulfill his duty.

  Now he began to fight himself. His oath, which had given certainty and strength in the past, was now working against him. He had the excuse he’d always wanted. He could drink. He could feed. And he had to do it. He had to, or the president would die.

  A dim thought. A memory. Cade had once promised himself, never again.

  He should warn the boy. Tell him to get away. He couldn’t hold out against this kind of hunger. Just one word. Tell him to run. That’s all it would take.

  But he stayed silent. Inside his head, the argument raged.

  You have to live, the vampire and the oath both told him. You have to carry out your duty.

  He’s just a child.

  And what is one small life against all the lives you have saved? Blood is always spilled to protect the nation.

  No. I won’t. I can’t.

  The boy stepped closer. Cade realized he was already losing. Every step the boy took, every inch he moved nearer, the decision was being made. If he was close enough, the bloodlust would overpower Cade. He would devour him.

  What are you protecting? Your vanity? You are a monster. You think anything will change that? You have to give up the pretense now. You are a monster. And a monster is what is needed.

  I can’t. Not like this.

  It is a necessary sacrifice.

  The boy was only a few feet away now. All the blood he needed. He heard a small voice. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you. Here, boy. I’m here to help.”

  You must.

  I can’t, Cade thought. But he knew that was a lie.

  THE BOY SCREAMED as Cade knocked him to the ground. Part of Cade wanted to laugh. There was something thrilling about the terror, the sheer helplessness. He stared right at the boy’s face, and his scream died. He was frightened beyond any sound now. The boy couldn’t even move except to tremble in his grip. He wet himself. Cade could smell it. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Cade could almost taste their salt.

  The boy wasn’t dead yet, however. He thrashed and punched. His fingers clawed at Cade’s throat. Cade’s absurd clip-on tie popped off. Cade almost smiled. Butler was right about one thing, at least.

  He slapped away the boy’s hands, opened his mouth and leaned over the boy’s throat, the sound of his pulse like a roaring ocean in Cade’s ears—

  Cade felt a mild sting against his chin.

  He tried to shake it off. It stung him again.

  He knew he should feed. But the irritation wouldn’t go away.

  He reared back, clawed at the tiny thing under his neck. His hand burned as he yanked it from his skin. It glinted slightly, a reflection from the boy’s dropped flashlight.

  It was his cross. When the boy tore off his tie, he’d opened Cade’s collar. And the cross had come loose again.

  Cade looked at the boy. He sat only a foot away, eyes wide, still frozen with fear. Cade could recapture him without any effort at all.

  And he knew he’d do it if he waited another second.

  A single word escaped his throat before he could think of anything else. It sounded like a stone dredged from under miles of earth and gravel.

  “Run,” he screamed.

  The boy broke from his stupor. He scrambled with his hands and feet like a sprinter on the blocks. A dozen feet away within seconds. Still too close.

  Get up. Get him.

  Cade forced himself to watch until the boy was well out of range.

  He fell back, curling in on himself like a pill bug. The oath tried to prod him up. The vampire in him howled with rage and need and fear.

  He’d failed utterly. He would die. The president would die.

  His last act was that of a traitor.

  The pain of the oath washed over him, the seizures blotting out everything else.

  Except the cross. He felt it burning in his hand, a tiny star in an endless black night of pain.

  _____

  ROARK KEPT TRIPPING as she tried to run, certain she heard someone scream in this direction. She didn’t for a second consider calling 911. That was the quickest way to blow a scoop, and she’d never want to alert the rest of the jackals to her story. They had laughed at her, shunned her and mocked her. She was looking forward to all of them having to beg for scraps after she broke this open.

  She slipped and fell flat on her ass. She let out a loud curse, then clapped a hand over her mouth. She waited for a few precious seconds, expecting the Secret Service to pounce on her at any moment and drag her away.

  In Roark’s mind, there was an infinite number of enemies lined up against her. She knew the president was covering for a murderer. She knew her competition would undercut her at every turn.

  But for all that, she still had faith that the world would have to pay attention when presented with irrefutable proof. Maybe it had ignored all the proof she’d already presented—the truth behind JFK, the New World Order, the Bilderbergs, 9/11—but this was going to be different. This was actual blood and guts. People paid attention to murder even if they didn’t care about politics. For the President of the United States to cover for a killer would be the domino that toppled everything else. And she would be the messenger.

  She composed her Pulitzer acceptance speech twice in her head before she felt safe to stand up again. The lights of the buses were far away. No one had heard her. The wind grabbed any sound out here and smothered it.

  She smiled. She was still safe.

  Roark turned. She heard thrashing in the stand of trees that grew in the ditch, just a few
yards away. They were close and thick enough to obscure whatever was moving. But something shook them hard enough to knock the last dead leaves off their branches.

  He got another one, she thought. A new victim. She kicked herself for leaving her camera in the trunk, but hey, that’s why God invented cell phones. She held it in front of her like a shield.

  She stood at the edge of the trees. The branches were shaking wildly now. Sounds more animal than human were clear to her now. God, whoever it was, they were really going nuts. Bad news for whoever was unlucky enough to get caught by the Presidential Assassin. She decided that’s what she’d rename the Campaign Carver. Just so no one would be confused. She steeled herself for the blood and guts. But they wouldn’t die in vain. They were going to provide the proof Megan needed.

  Her plan was simple. Get in, take the pics, get away. No problem. Piece of cake.

  She took a deep breath and plunged into the dark.

  She saw the killer lit up like a strobe by her cell’s tiny flash. Horrible red eyes glared at her. A scarecrow wearing the suit and earpiece of a Secret Service agent, splashed with blood and gore.

  She couldn’t stop herself from shrieking the most orgasmic phrase of any conspiracy theorist: “I knew it!”

  She meant to turn and run like hell. Instead, she hesitated, only for a second, because something was missing. There was no body. Nobody else there. Where was the victim? How could she catch a murderer without a victim?

  That was the last thing she thought before Cade ripped out her throat.

  THE WRITERS WHO DESCRIBED a vampire’s bite as two neat puncture wounds in the neck were either being polite or had never really looked at their own teeth. A vampire, when he bites, hyperextends his canines, the third tooth on each side from the center. They are necessary for any carnivore, designed by evolution for the express purpose of rending flesh. Canines are used for only one thing, even by humans. Canines tear.

  Megan Roark’s head was attached to her body only by her broken neck and some gristle. Snow fell and melted on her still-open eyes.

  There was blood on her blouse, on her chin.

  Cade restrained himself from lapping it up. His body was working again. And so was his mind.

  He’d been moments—perhaps seconds—from true death when the annoying flash of the camera had fired in his eyes. His body rose by instinct. It wanted blood. And there was a whole bag of it, standing and waiting for him.

  Easy prey.

  The cross had fallen out of his hand. But even if he’d been holding it, Cade doubted he would have stopped. The vampire in him was not about to die. It would not surrender another easy meal.

  The vampire. As if it was something separate. Even as he thought it through, Cade knew he was lying to himself. His body was capable of amazing things, running on instinct buried in a place deeper than he could name, but it was still him. He had been there—small and fragmented, delirious with pain, but he had been a part of it.

  Instead, he guzzled her down. Human blood poured into him. What he was built to consume. It sang in his veins as it remade him, stronger than ever. The brown rust clogging his cells turned fresh and red, a river quenching the drought. His bones and tissues knit their millions of tiny fractures. His skin tightened and stacked into layers of armor plate. His muscles hardened like steel cords. Neurons regenerated and multiplied, filling the dark gaps blown in his brain, and the world danced before his eyes in Technicolor again despite the moonless sky.

  It was all he could do not to leap up and laugh with joy.

  Instead, he fell to his knees. His hand scrabbled through the dead leaves for his cross. A question echoed across the years to him: “This thirst… is it stronger than your faith?”

  He felt the sting of the cross in his palm, but it was nothing compared to the power and the glory thrumming in his heart. He knew the answer. Knew no matter how long he lived, he would never reclaim anything but a pathetic mockery of humanity.

  Over a century of clinging to his promise never to feed again on a human. Gone in an instant.

  He was a monster, playing at being a man. But his body would not let him lie to himself. He felt better than he had in decades.

  He felt whole.

  Then, above it all, he heard the oath pushing him again: “By this blood, you are bound to the President of the United States; and the orders of the officers appointed by him; to support and defend the nation…”

  He didn’t have time for the luxury of guilt. Cade leaped to his feet and aimed himself like a bullet for the buses. Right now, he had a job to do.

  He hesitated only long enough to scoop up Roark’s phone from beside her corpse as he left. Cade knew he was a monster, but that didn’t mean he had to be stupid as well.

  AGENT CAM BUTLER, like every other member of the Secret Service, knew his professional code of ethics. He was prohibited from a number of activities that would have been perfectly normal if he’d worked in an office. For instance, he couldn’t wear a T-shirt with a political slogan on it, even while off duty. He couldn’t have a Facebook page or Twitter account (someone might track his movements). He could not have a beer while on protective detail, even if he was not on duty (the agency was very sensitive about that since JFK).

  And, of course, he was definitely not supposed to be having an affair with a fellow agent. Particularly one who was under his direct supervision.

  Not only was it against the rules, it was really, really stupid, he reminded himself.

  Butler’s job, he knew, was to protect the president. If he was more worried about one of his agents, then he wasn’t doing his job.

  And yet, Butler found himself taking a quick detour on his way to The Beast to check on Alison.

  He didn’t know he’d been clenching his fists until he saw her and something in him relaxed. “Agent Dunn,” he said.

  She turned. She was on the perimeter with Gary Fisk. Fisk was an incredible shot. He could snap off a bullet one-handed and still hit the 10-ring from a hundred yards. It made Butler feel better about having Alison on the outer limits of the caravan. Yes, he knew that was sexist and insulting. He didn’t have to tell her that’s why they were paired so often on the schedules.

  “Chief,” she said. Fisk nodded and turned back to face the dark. In addition to being a good shot, he was smart enough to know they’d want a little privacy. It was impossible to keep secrets in the Secret Service, especially when on protective detail. They were simply stuck together too much, spending far too much time on the road, in the same hotel rooms, awake for days at a time.

  That’s probably why he was with Alison. Or, more accurately, why Alison was with him. She was a knockout, twelve years younger than he was, and funny as well as smart. She could drink beer and dissect the action in a Redskins game better than he could. If she’d been on the market in any kind of a normal way, rather than trapped on the road for months with him, he doubted she would have chosen her slightly over-the-hill supervisor.

  He’d said as much to her once, and she’d hit him in the gut. “Dummy,” she told him. “You think I’m settling? You think there was no one else on the detail I could have gotten? It’s damn lucky you’re so good in bed.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Cade went out hunting,” he said. “We stay alert. Guard the president. Keep the reporters alive. Although I got the impression that’s a lower priority.”

  “You think anyone would miss them?”

  He smiled. “Probably not.”

  They both looked around. The wind seemed to drown their voices. Butler suddenly knew what Cade had meant when he said they were on the Boogeyman’s turf now. Somewhere they’d crossed a border. The whole night felt like a conspiracy against them.

  “Hey,” Alison said. “Get to Sinatra. We’ve got this covered.”

  Butler nodded. His place was with the president. Alison knew that. She was a good agent. She’d be fine.

  “Keep an eye out. Don’t be afraid to yell
if you see anything.”

  “Gary goes a great high-pitched squeal,” she said.

  “Only that time you kneed me in the balls,” Fisk said over his shoulder.

  Alison tipped her head closer. “And yeah, he’s a great shot. But I’ve got a gun, too. Don’t worry.”

  So she knew. Of course she did. No secrets in the Secret Service.

  This was why Alison had handled the revelations about Cade and the Boogeyman better than the others. She was completely pragmatic. She wasn’t about to argue that they shouldn’t be here or this couldn’t be happening. She dealt with the facts on the ground. She was as ready as any of them could be. More ready than he was, in fact.

  Butler didn’t touch her or say goodbye. He had an urge to brush one strand of her hair from her forehead. Instead, he only nodded and then turned and jogged through the intermittent flakes of snow toward the president’s limo.

  Later, he told himself. You’ll see her later. Right now, his responsibility was the president.

  _____

  AGENT ALISON DUNN stamped her feet to get the blood going through them again and kept walking the line she’d drawn in her head. She was glad she’d chosen pants over the skirt tonight. Even with her topcoat, the wind was cutting right through her.

  She and Fisk had each taken a position; she was mobile, he remained still. They worked well together. Butler’s somewhat transparent, somewhat endearing and somewhat chauvinist attempts to keep her safe by pairing her with the best gunman in the detail had given them lots of chances to learn each other’s habits.

  Despite that, if she was in charge of the detail, she never would have done it. They were two of the best agents. Putting them together was focusing too much strength in one area. Better to pair each of them with one of the less experienced agents on the detail, to make up for any hesitancy or indecision that might develop there.