Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Zach’s vision went briefly red. His hand clenched into a fist, but Cade stepped in before he could move.

  Cade stood a little too close inside the reporters’ personal space. The one who’d insulted Candace swallowed audibly.

  “I’m sure you gentlemen don’t mean to behave in a rude or threatening manner toward Ms. Curtis. I’m sure you would both regret that kind of discourtesy.”

  Cade’s words didn’t constitute any kind of threat on their own. But the way he said them left a definite impression.

  The men nodded.

  “Thank you,” Cade said. “Feel free to have a seat.”

  Both reporters scurried back to their places on the bus.

  Zach had to stifle a smile. He immediately felt a pang of guilt as he remembered Dunn and Fisk.

  But you had to take your laughs where you could get them. He had a feeling nobody would be smiling much after tonight.

  THE SYSTEM—The name given for the loose association of groups and individuals who perform human sacrifice and occult ritual in the United States. Once a splinter group of The Order (SEE: THE SHADOW COMPANY), the System is currently made up of a hard core of individuals “inside the knowledge” and a large group of mostly uniformed followers. It has deep ties within the drug trade as well as fringe elements of some biker groups. (SEE ALSO: BOOGEYMAN.)

  —BRIEFING BOOK: CODE NAME: NIGHTMARE PET (Classified)

  OCTOBER 23, 2012, OUTSIDE FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

  The meeting took place on neutral ground, in public. The bikers chose a McDonald’s near a rest stop on the highway.

  Helen sat under the branches of a fiberglass tree and the watchful eyes of Mayor McCheese with a man who’d killed at least twenty people.

  He sucked on the straw of his milk shake. “Fuck’s wrong with your face?” he asked.

  “I have a condition,” Helen said. “What’s your excuse?”

  He laughed. Actually, Del Collins was quite handsome under the grime and scuzzy beard. He was muscular and lean. If not for the ring of pentagrams and swastikas tattooed around his neck, he would have cleaned up pretty nicely.

  Some of the other men from Satan’s Service were here as well. They were even bigger than Collins. They sat at nearby tables. Helen knew she was supposed to be intimidated.

  But Helen had seen worse. She’d seen it when the Boogeyman came back after failing to kill Cade and the president.

  He’d been furious. At her, at himself. He had done what she’d said, and it didn’t work. Cade had survived. He’d deviated from his usual methods, and he’d failed. He blamed her. She’d genuinely feared he would turn on her then.

  Fortunately, she always had a backup plan. “We’re not done yet,” she’d told him. “There’s more than one way to rip out the president’s heart.”

  At least three or four, in fact, Helen thought. And these morons were going to help her. They just didn’t know it yet.

  “Look, Officer,” Collins began. He’d been certain Helen was a cop since she made first contact with him. “I don’t know what you expect from me. But once again, let me tell you, we are just a law-abiding group of motorcycle enthusiasts. I have no information for you about meth or murder.”

  Helen rolled one eye. “For the last time, I’m not a cop.”

  “Your buddy there sure looks like one,” Collins said. He nodded at Reyes, who sat nearby, working his way through a tray full of Quarter Pounders. Helen sighed inwardly. Her backup. Good thing she wouldn’t need any.

  “He used to be. I used to be CIA, as a matter of fact.”

  “Really? I was U.S. Air Force myself.”

  He turned his arms, displaying a tattoo.

  “I know,” Helen said. “I know all about you. You were discharged fifteen years ago after an investigation into a white supremacist cell within your unit. Then you became involved with the occult after joining the Satan’s Service biker gang—”

  “Club,” Collins said. “We’re a club.”

  “—before becoming a major supplier of meth to the Midwestern corridor. Which led to your eventual rise to the leadership of the club. You’ve sacrificed at least six people I know of, and you’ve got the bones of one of your rivals ground up and in a jar on the shelf in your house. You snort the powder when you feel the need for more virility.”

  Collins drained his shake with a loud sucking noise before he responded. “Now, those are some dangerous accusations to be making. A woman might not make it all the way home at night, she goes around saying things like that.”

  Helen smiled with half her mouth and leaned in to him.

  “I am telling you all of this because I want you to know that I don’t care. I want you to know just how small-time I find the shit you’ve pulled so far.”

  Collins laughed again, surprising her. “All right. What would it take to impress you?”

  “Funny you should ask. I’ve got just the thing. You’re going to recruit some of your younger and stupider skinheads in the area for a suicide mission. And you’re going to supply them with guns and ammo and explosives.”

  “And what’s in it for me?”

  Now it was Helen’s turn to laugh. “I’m going to introduce you to your god.”

  COLLINS DID NOT LOOK IMPRESSED.

  “I sacrificed blood and souls for this?”

  The Boogeyman stood calmly between Helen and Reyes on the sawdust floor of Dewey’s Lounge, just outside Minot. It was the bikers’ home base. This was where Collins had wanted to meet. But now he appeared to have serious doubts about Helen, despite all she seemed to know about his sick little religion. His eyes rolled up and down the Boogeyman, who stood there, breathing evenly under his rubber mask. But it wasn’t the mask that really seemed to bother Collins. It was the poly-blend button-down and the Dockers slacks.

  “He looks like a fucking retard,” Collins said.

  There was no way to know if the Boogeyman registered the insult. Helen did. She was already tired of this. More than that, she was just tired. They had been driving nonstop through the night. They were running out of time if this was going to work.

  Collins was just bright enough to be paranoid but not paranoid enough to be smart. He could imagine someone coming into his bar to rip him off, but he couldn’t believe he’d ever be vulnerable on his home turf.

  Still, Helen felt honor-bound to head this off before anyone would have to change the sawdust on the floor. From the smell, they must have been very attached to it.

  “I promise you. This is him,” she said. “And he’d like to see you can deliver what you promised.”

  Collins looked disgusted. “Jay. Pete,” he called. Two big men in leathers stood in response. “Get this gimp bitch and her kids out of my sight.”

  Gimp? Kids? Helen thought. Fine. She’d given him a chance.

  The big men crossed the floor slowly, working for maximum menace. Reyes flashed a look at Helen, but she shook her head. They both stepped back.

  The bikers seemed to take it as a retreat. They flanked the Boogeyman, malicious grins full of white teeth in the gloom. One raised his hand to start with the bully’s age-old opening move, the hard shove—

  And after the next blur of motion was trying to scream with his own fist jammed in his mouth. His eyes were wide and uncomprehending. His skin mottled to purple quickly as he suffocated, unable to pull his fist free of his shattered palate and jaw.

  The other biker stood in mute shock. He might have wanted to help his friend. But at the moment, he was busy watching his entrails drop out from him onto the floor. The Boogeyman’s other hand had sliced him so fast and so deep with the hidden knife that it was like he’d been unzipped and all his stuffing had spilled free.

  Collins’s face was a mix of horror and rapture and fear and joy; a kid who opens his presents on Christmas morning and finds them full of body parts.

  The Boogeyman took a languid step toward Collins.

  Collins didn’t hesitate. He bowed down, knees to the floor now cover
ed in the muck and gore of his two enforcers.

  “It’s you,” Collins breathed. “The Promised One. The Chosen. Forgive me.”

  The Boogeyman didn’t say anything as every other biker in the place kneeled as well.

  Helen sighed. “Can we please get on with this?”

  Collins took a long, wobbly time standing up. He kept staring at the Boogeyman, mouth open.

  But he finally recovered enough to snap his fingers at another couple of bikers.

  They brought out several metal cases with military stenciling. Collins’s connections with the Air Force apparently hadn’t ended when his career did.

  The cases were placed with great care on the stage by the stripper’s pole. Collins popped them open one by one and stood back.

  The Boogeyman couldn’t have cared less. But Helen wanted to be sure.

  The cases were filled with guns and ammunition. M-16s with thirty-round magazines loaded with NATO cartridges. Standard stuff, available for the right price at any gun show.

  But the last case was filled with the real goodies. Twenty pounds of what looked like white wax bricks: C-4.

  Helen had a fondness for the stuff. It had nearly killed Cade once before, after all.

  “Perfect,” she said. “And you’ve got your boys together?”

  Collins nodded. “They’re on their way. We’ll drive the supplies to them tonight.”

  “See? All you need is a little faith,” Helen said.

  “I have faith,” Collins said. He could not take his eyes off the Boogeyman, even as the other gang members struggled to collect the bodies of Pete and Jay and stuff them into black garbage bags.

  “We have an offering,” Collins said to Helen. “It’s not much. Not for him. But if he would like, in the back, there are two girls.”

  The Boogeyman apparently heard this. He swiveled his head, the mask distorting with the movement, and found the rear door. He walked through the crowd of bikers, which parted like the Red Sea for Moses.

  The door closed solidly behind him. Helen restrained herself from checking her watch. Looks like they’d be here for a while longer.

  Collins’s voice was breathy like a schoolgirl’s when he spoke to her. “Is he—do you think he’s pleased?”

  Helen patted him on the cheek. “Of course he is. Just look at that smile.”

  President Samuel Curtis’s campaign dropped the last of its objections, clearing the way for a last-minute debate against Governor Waverly “Skip” Seabrook. Seabrook’s campaign had accused Curtis of dodging “an honest discussion of the issues” for several weeks.

  The two will take preselected questions both from the audience and a panel of journalists at Tulane University on Saturday night.

  —“Curtis Agrees to Debate Terms at 11th Hour,”

  Associated Press, October 24, 2012

  6:19 p.m., OCTOBER 25, 2012, THE ROOSEVELT HOTEL, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISiANA

  Cade woke to find that he’d been moved during the day.

  He hated when people did that.

  He popped open the lid of his travel coffin and found he was in a hotel room. A quick glance around, plus the noise from outside the window, confirmed the campaign had changed its schedule during the sunlit hours.

  He was in New Orleans.

  He hated New Orleans.

  Zach’s luggage was in the room. Zach was not.

  Cade went to find him. He was tired of playing catch-up. It was now clear the Boogeyman had outside help. Cade had been reacting rather than thinking ahead. It was time to change that.

  First he had to get Zach.

  CADE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR of Candace’s hotel room.

  Zach sighed when he opened the door, wearing only the hotel robe.

  “Cade. Have I mentioned lately how great your timing is?”

  As per usual, Cade ignored his witty banter.

  “We’ve been played for saps since this began. I want to put the heat on for a change,” Cade said. “I want you to find something for me.”

  He told Zach what he wanted. Zach shook his head.

  “That’s like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. And weren’t you the one who said the cult killers didn’t know anything about the Boogeyman? That they just followed the rituals blindly?”

  “Do you have something better to do?”

  “The debate is tomorrow night. We came to terms with Seabrook’s people while we were still on the road. So we dragged the whole campaign here, changed the entire schedule. We’re scrambling to get our supporters in town. It’s all last-minute. I’ve got FedEx bringing a literal ton of campaign signs and banners and T-shirts. And we still need to get Curtis prepped. Also, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to finish—”

  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, back toward the bed in the dark.

  Cade stared at him. “What’s your job, Zach?” he said.

  Zach had the decency to look ashamed. “Right. Sorry. What I meant to say was, what do you need?”

  “Please tell the pilot of the Gulfstream we’ll be at the airport in five minutes. He should be ready to take off.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea? Leaving the president?”

  “You said it yourself: the old plan isn’t working.”

  Something in Cade’s tone told Zach there was no arguing this time. He took his phone out and dialed. “Where are we going?”

  “To get some answers,” Cade said.

  CADE AND ZACH walked through the crowded streets to get to their car. People were already massing for the debate and a festival atmosphere—assisted by a river of alcohol—had taken hold.

  Cade seemed to glide in and out of the crowds. Zach had stepped in slicks of vomit three times already. The crush of tourists made Hurricane Katrina, the levee failures and the days of flooding all seem like something that had happened only on TV.

  “Hard to believe the city was almost wiped from the map,” Zach said to Cade.

  Just then they passed a group of screaming men beneath a hotel balcony. “Eight! That’s eight necklaces we’ve thrown at you! Now show us your tits, you bitch!”

  “Yes,” Cade answered. “That would have been a tragedy.”

  “I’m picking up on some sarcasm there.”

  “I would be surprised if you missed it.”

  “I figured you would have loved this place, Cade. Isn’t it the vampire capital of the world?”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “Yeah, but the reputation. The books. The movies. The TV shows.”

  “Reality is thin here,” Cade admitted. “The Other Side breaks through easier than it does elsewhere. Ever since Mme. Laveau’s time, this city has only had one foot in America. The other is someplace else entirely.”

  “Yeah, but to be fair, you’ve never eaten at any of the restaurants.”

  Cade didn’t reply.

  “Really, the blackened drum at Prudhomme’s? To die for.”

  Looking over the historical record, it seems lucky that the United States has lasted as long as it has on the American continent.

  Despite its vast resources and abundant flora and fauna, this land has never been an easy place for our species. If the paleontologists are to be believed, it was utterly devoid of human life until the first Cro-Magnon ancestors crossed the land-bridge over the Bering Strait. The cultures that established themselves after that had a bad habit of suddenly going extinct: the archaeological record is littered with the detritus of thriving groups that either collapsed into barbarism or simply vanished altogether. The Anasazi abandoned their city of cave dwellings after descending into cannibalism; the Adena/Hopewell culture maintained a near-empire from the lower portions of what is now Canada to Mexico and Central America before deserting their cities in a great migration; and a few centuries later, as the Fort Ancient peoples began to reclaim some of the skills lost by their ancestors, their population suddenly splintered and dropped back into primitivism. It was almost as if there were some force watching
and waiting for these cultures to reach a certain level of advancement. Once they crossed this line, however, that was too far, and it slapped them back to the Stone Age. Without written records, we can’t be sure what happened, but there is none of the evidence we’ve come to expect of wars or disease or famine. Instead, the early Americans just seem to disappear at the height of their achievements.

  These disappearances didn’t end when European settlers began their incursion into the Americas, either. The settlers of the first English colony, Roanoke, disappeared with only the cryptic word CROATOAN carved into a tree left behind. Several Spanish outposts were found abandoned by the conquistadors who returned to them after taking their plunder home. And many of the Plains Indian tribes—who curiously, did not claim any relation to the Adena and Hopewell cultures or their massive earthworks or decaying cities—told Old World explorers to avoid great swathes of the new lands or suffer the consequences.

  Maybe they knew something we didn’t. Maybe when the first human stepped off that land-bridge and onto the half-frozen soil of what we now call Alaska, he was trespassing. And maybe the real owners of America will show up again someday, and serve us all an eviction notice, just like they’ve done before.

  —Journal of Dr. William Kavanagh, Sanction V research group (Classified)

  9:40 P.M., OCTOBER 25, 2012, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The campaign’s private Gulfstream zipped Cade and Zach back to Andrews in a little over an hour. A car and driver waited for them. Cade’s special Secret Service creds got him past the front gate of the White House with a minimum of human contact. Zach stayed in the car, eyes glued to his pad, trying to track down the data Cade had demanded.

  It was already late. If they wanted to get back to the campaign before sunrise, he’d have to be quick.

  But at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom, he still hesitated.

  There were very few things in the world that still frightened Cade.