Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

Collins’s knees buckled. He only stopped himself from hitting the floor by grabbing the nearby stripper pole. He howled in pain as he slid down to the platform.

  “As I said. He can walk. In fact, he can even run. All he has to do is make it to the door.”

  Collins looked stricken as Cade’s meaning became clear.

  “You said—”

  “I wouldn’t waste your breath arguing if I were you,” Cade said. “The door’s right there. Go.”

  Zach decided to leave after a few minutes. Collins’s screams and sobs were making it difficult to talk to Butler. He tried to stumble across the floor, falling every couple of feet. His strength gave out barely halfway across the room. Zach stepped over his prone body on his way out.

  “I’ll be in the car,” he said, pitching his voice over Collins’s wails. “The plane is already waiting.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cade replied. “This won’t take long.”

  The conspiracy nuts have found their latest mystery. (Or lost it. We’re not sure how it works, to be honest.) Now, after political blogger and alleged journalist Megan Roark had her second epic career-ending meltdown a few days ago, we wouldn’t be surprised if she took a little time off. To regroup. Or possibly fill out some job applications. (We hear Hooters is hiring.)

  But no, there are apparently some out there who see a much more sinister cause for her lack of posts or updates. “Isn’t it convenient that the Curtis Administration’s biggest enemy has gone missing right before Election Day?” wonders the leading light over at something called Real America Today, which we assume is a blog. Another guy, who claims to have an actual Ph.D., says, “Watch what you say. Curtis’s goons might disappear you like they did Megan Roark.”

  I guess if they want to make Mad Megan their martyr—she is way hotter than Saint Gundenis, for what it’s worth—well, whatever keeps them off the streets. To us, though, it’s far more suspicious that anyone actually misses her.

  —Mudslinger, a political blog

  4:03 A.M., OCTOBER 26, 2012, YMCA INTERNATIONAL HOTEL, ST. THOMAS PLACE,

  NEW ORLEANS

  The Secret Service Counter-Assault Team was flying in from D.C. Backup from the local SWAT team and FBI field office were on the way as well. But until they arrived, it was just Butler and his ten remaining agents.

  Butler stood on the street, pulling on his vest from the trunk of his car. Behind him, Latham and Thomason and the others were getting into their tactical gear as well, then putting on jackets that read SECRET SERVICE in big letters on the back.

  Butler tried to figure the odds of going in without waiting for help. Sure, the would-be assassins were probably asleep. There was almost no chance they knew anyone was onto them. But every moment Butler and his agents sat here was another moment the skinheads could use to take hostages or barricade themselves inside their rooms. If they moved fast enough, the agents might be able to overwhelm any resistance and short-circuit any chance of a standoff.

  The problem was, their intel was spotty at best. The YMCA in New Orleans was a throwback to an earlier time. It still offered cheap rooms for transients and refugees from the streets. Butler and his agents didn’t have a clue where the skinheads were inside the crumbling old building. And because of the debate, a lot of young Curtis and Seabrook supporters, mainly college students, were staying inside as well. The Y’s old plaster walls would barely stop a sneeze, let alone a stray bullet. One bad ricochet and some rich kid’s parents would be spending next year’s tuition on funeral services. The press would dance on the victims’ graves until Election Day.

  In his head, Butler went through the list of weapons that Zach had provided. The skinheads had enough firepower to take on a small Army unit.

  There was no good way out of this. No matter what he did, a lot of people would end up dead.

  And if the Boogeyman was actually inside the hotel with them, then the number of body bags was going to be higher than he wanted to count.

  JERICHO WHITE (formerly Jerome Gayle) picked up his cell phone on the first ring. He was wound tight. Too much was riding on this mission to sleep.

  “Hello, Jerome,” a voice said. “You should get dressed. You’re about to have some visitors from the federal government.”

  Jericho didn’t bother to ask how she knew. He had no intention of squandering the gift he’d just been given.

  He hit the number in his contacts file on the phone while he yanked a Kevlar vest and a shotgun from the duffel by the bed.

  All over the hotel, other cell phones began to ring.

  Despite what people might have thought from the tattoos on his neck or his arrest record, Jericho wasn’t an idiot. He’d planned for things to go bad. It was the way most things ended anyway.

  But this time he was ready. He pressed an icon on the screen of his cell phone. A conference call opened up among all of the skinheads’ phones.

  “You all there?” he asked as he placed his headphone and mike into his ear.

  Most of the replies were affirmative. A couple guys were still trying to get the phones to work. Jericho would be the first to admit not all of his friends were MENSA candidates.

  One in particular.

  Drew was still struggling into his pants after finally getting up from the room’s other bed. “What’s going on? What’s going on, Jer?” he kept saying.

  Jericho felt bad for what he had to do. But he couldn’t wait. The woman had given explicit orders. It was his job to obey.

  He raised the rifle and put it against Drew’s head.

  “See you in Hell, man.”

  Drew opened his mouth. Jericho pulled the trigger and put his brains all over the wall.

  One more thing. The blond woman had given him a yellow latex mask. A smiley face. He scooped up what was left of Drew’s head and put the mask over it.

  Then he ran out into the hallway, into the stairwell, and smashed open the skinny window looking down on the street.

  He saw feds. Their dark jackets and bright yellow letters made perfect targets.

  He brought the assault rifle to his cheek, aimed and fired.

  THE RAPID pop-pop-pop sound told Butler he was out of time. He ducked for cover. Latham was still standing in the open, trying to find the source of the gunshots.

  Butler ducked out again and dragged him behind the car just as bullets powdered the curb by his feet.

  Latham shook him off and stood, firing at the lobby.

  Butler brought him down to the ground again with a hard chop to the backs of his knees.

  “Stay the fuck down!” he shouted as the car’s windshield exploded under a new barrage from above.

  “They’re barricading the lobby,” Latham screamed back.

  We’re screwed, Butler thought.

  And then a shadow passed overhead. Someone was running toward the lobby. He’d hurdled over their car without slowing down.

  Butler knew who it was, but he risked a look anyway.

  Cade.

  He moved so fast it was like watching someone caught in a strobe light, afterimages of him stretching out against the frozen background of street and buildings.

  Butler wasn’t sure there was a name for the mixed set of emotions he was feeling. What do you call it when you’re actually happy that vampires are real?

  CADE DIDN’T SLOW DOWN for the Y’s glass doors. He ran through them as if they were no more than gauzy curtains.

  Two of the skinheads were in the lobby, still shoving old couches and chairs toward the doors. They ducked from the spray of glass. The furniture skidded across the room as Cade hit it. It slowed him down not at all.

  Butler saw Cade rip through the men just as easily. One second they were on their feet, turning their guns toward the door. The next there were two corpses on the tiled floor.

  Cade was a disappearing shadow moving up the stairs to the rooms.

  “I never get used to that, either,” Zach said from Butler’s left.

  He turned, surprised. Between
the gunshots and watching Cade, he hadn’t heard the younger man approach.

  Butler had to admit it: he had no idea what to do next. “What now?”

  “Give him a few minutes,” Zach said. “This is what he’s for.”

  CADE WALKED AT A RAPID CLIP through the hallway, knocking each room’s door open as he went. Some of the faces were young. Most were old. All were terrified. He told them all the same thing. “Get out,” he said. “Down to the lobby and wait there. The men below will tell you when it’s safe to leave the building.”

  Some doors opened on different scenes, however. In one room, a burly young man with the SS symbol inked over his heart struggled with a cell-phone headset and a rifle at the same time. His eyes went wide and the barrel came up. Cade yanked it from his grasp and punched the man right at the spot where he’d had the tattoo. His ribs punctured his heart and he dropped.

  “I’ve got their communications,” Thomason said. He had a portable radio rig from his and Latham’s car and was adjusting knobs, scanning for frequencies. “They’re using cell phones. Conference call. Strictly amateur stuff.”

  Thomason listened on his headphones. “The leader seems to be the guy shooting up top. He’s yelling for the guys on the first floor.”

  From above, they heard another crash. They all looked up and saw a man’s body hurled through the narrow window of the first-floor stairwell. It looked like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.

  “I think Cade’s got the first floor covered,” Zach said.

  THE SECOND FLOOR was already in chaos. The people there had come out of their rooms in response to the noise.

  This gave the man with the gun a wide selection of hostages.

  Shaved-headed, wearing a goatee and a leather jacket, Cade turned the corner in time to see him yank a young woman wearing a Seabrook Stalwart! sweatshirt and panties into one of the rooms.

  Cade headed for the end of the hall.

  Another skinhead waited behind a door, watching through a crack, holding a handgun ready. Cade passed.

  The skinhead expected more: a whole army of black-helicopter UN commandos. But there was just this one guy.

  One dead guy.

  He stepped out, pistol head-high, prepared to put a bullet into the back of Cade’s skull.

  He was unprepared for the speed with which Cade turned, latched onto his wrist and yanked him forward. He hit Cade’s other fist with his throat.

  Cade left him on the floor to choke to death.

  He reached the doorway where the bearded skinhead had dragged the screaming woman. He stopped on one side of the doorjamb and listened.

  “Get away!” the skinhead screamed. “You get away from me!” The woman simply wept quietly.

  Cade couldn’t see through walls. It would have come in handy. He didn’t know where the man was pointing his gun.

  So he gave him a target.

  He stepped in front of the door.

  The piggy little eyes above the goatee went wide. The skinhead tried to fire his rifle one-handed. The bullets stitched up the side of the wall, far to the left of Cade.

  Cade separated the man from his rifle, his hostage and his life, in that order.

  The woman he’d deposited on the bed. He told her about the lobby. She was up and running before he’d finished the sentence.

  _____

  “HE JUST CLEARED the second floor,” Thomason said, still listening. “No response from the phones there.”

  “We got civilians in the lobby,” Latham said.

  Butler looked up. There were college kids and transients rapidly filling the small space. They saw the bodies. Panic was going to push them out onto the street any moment. And the guy at the third-floor stairwell was still shooting.

  “All right,” he yelled at the other agents. “I want suppressive fire. Cover me and Latham. We’re bringing them over here two at a time. Someone give me their vest.”

  Latham got an extra vest as well. Together they sprinted toward the crowd inside. They caught the first two people at the door, draped the vests over them as best they could, and ran back to the line of agents at the cars.

  No gunfire from above.

  Butler and Latham exchanged puzzled glances. Then Butler figured it out. The shooter was busy with problems of his own.

  THE SKINHEADS on the third floor were screaming at each other. Cade found the one guarding the entry door and sent his mangled corpse flying down the hallway. In response, they’d formed a crude firing line, their guns aimed in the direction of the door.

  Cade waited. The other guests on this floor seemed to have barricaded themselves inside their rooms. If Cade showed himself, one of them was sure to be hit when the skinheads opened fire.

  There was a long moment of silence as the three remaining skinheads in the corridor waited for the corridor door to open again. Their earpieces were all full of Jericho’s voice screaming for an update. “What the fuck are you doing in there? Report! Report!”

  One of the three, who’d renamed himself Anders because he thought it sounded German, found his voice. “There’s—there’s something in the hallway.”

  “No shit,” Jericho snarled back, the volume hurting Anders’s ear. “It’s the feds! Start shooting! Why don’t I hear any shooting?”

  “I don’t think it’s the feds,” Anders said. “I think—”

  Then the ceiling collapsed above him as Cade tore through the cheap acoustic tiling.

  He landed on Anders, snapping his spine. The other two put their hands up to surrender. Cade was in no mood. He whipped his hand back and forth, breaking their necks.

  He paused to check the rooms. Empty. Nothing there. He caught a familiar scent. It was very faint, and the odors of decades of unwashed residents blotted out almost everything else. He didn’t have time to puzzle it out. The skinheads must have forced the other people to move. But why? And where was the Boogeyman?

  He moved toward the stairwell door.

  Just one left.

  JERICHO COULDN’T BELIEVE how fucking frustrating this was.

  The assault rifle ran out of ammo as soon as he pulled the trigger. He’d read that it fired 700 rounds a minute. Why, then, did the magazines carry only forty rounds? And nobody was answering their communications. They should have had the whole building locked down with hostages by now. Where the fuck were those guys?

  It all looked so easy when the terrorists did this in Die Hard.

  When the stairwell door opened, he was almost gleeful for the chance to vent his anger.

  Cade moved over the distance between them in the time it took Jericho to blink. Before he knew what was happening, Cade folded him in half as neatly and effortlessly as a piece of paper. There was a muffled pop as his shoes touched the back of his head. He was too stunned to shriek until Cade dropped him on the floor. Then he began making up for lost time.

  Cade dragged him inside the hallway. He brought the trembling skinhead up close, staring into his face, their noses almost touching, as if Cade were trying to sniff something out of the man.

  “No,” Cade said. “Not you, either.”

  Jericho just kept screaming, even though he couldn’t feel anything below his chest. The lack of pain was somehow worse than anything else. He knew he was badly broken. He heard the questions, but all his mind could process was the deadness that filled most of his body.

  Cade dropped him again. Useless, Cade thought. He’d been through every floor. Where was the Boogeyman?

  He kicked the door to the hallway open and went back inside. He checked every room. No one hiding. Nothing but dirty laundry and mildew. He caught that familiar whiff again. Rot. Corruption. It was almost impossible to separate from all the other human odors. But he knew it now: the Boogeyman had been here.

  Cade clicked his teeth in frustration and grabbed the wailing skinhead again. He went down the stairs, dragging the man along behind.

  Then, at the second-floor stairwell, he stopped as his mistake occurred to him. H
e’d checked every floor. But the space between the floors—he’d hidden there. Why couldn’t someone else? Why couldn’t something else?

  He looked up the ceiling and saw the air vent. He breathed deep. There it was.

  Without warning, he leaped, dropping the skinhead and reaching through the ceiling tile in one sudden move.

  His fingers caught cheap cotton and skin. As the ceiling collapsed around him, Cade heard a bellow of rage.

  The Boogeyman.

  BUTLER AND THE OTHER AGENTS got the last of the civilians out. There had been no return fire from the third floor for at least a minute.

  “I’m thinking we go in,” he said. It wasn’t like he was asking Zach’s permission, or even his approval of the idea. But he had to admit, he wasn’t as confident in his choices as he was a week ago. And he knew that by saying it out loud, he’d hear Zach’s opinion. Zach always had an opinion.

  “I wouldn’t,” Zach said.

  “No?”

  “If the Boogeyman really is in there, you won’t help Cade. You’ll just get in his way. Trust me. I’ve been there.”

  “Yeah,” Butler said. He sagged against the hood of his car, coming down off the adrenaline now. Every human instinct he had, all of his training—it all jammed up when he had to operate under the parameters of Cade’s world. It had gotten his people killed. He honestly didn’t know how Zach dealt with it. Maybe I didn’t watch enough horror movies as a kid, Butler thought.

  “How did you find them?” Zach asked.

  “Got a phone tip right after you called. Anonymous. Said there was no time to waste.”

  Zach found the timing interesting but didn’t say anything.

  “So what now?” Butler asked.

  “I’d go with drunken redneck shoot-out as my cover story,” Zach said. He nodded toward the Y guests, standing in a clump on the vacant lot across the street from the building. “You tell them what happened now and that’s what they’ll repeat over and over. Pretty soon it becomes their story, too.”

  “You’re a little too good at this,” Butler said.