His smile never faded.
Cade walked after him.
Zach and the ERT commander stood in the office, watching Cade on one of the monitors. Zach had, with a few moments’ fiddling, learned how to force one of the screens to stick to one perspective.
“What’s he waiting for?” the ERT leader asked. Zach didn’t know if the man meant Cade or Novak.
Then Zach saw something out of the corner of his eye, in another screen.
He turned his full attention, but the image was gone. He began pressing buttons, to see if he could get it back. Predictably, the cameras began showing him everything except the view he wanted.
“What is it?”
“I thought I saw something,” Zach said, and then ignored the man as he got back to work. It might have been a figment — a case of seeing something he wanted to see instead of what was there — but he had to be sure.
He could have sworn he glimpsed Adam Thompson heading into the airport.
Cade was right behind Novak now. He winced as they passed by a large window, looking out over the tarmac, but the sun was still safely low enough to be obscured by the other airport buildings and the fog.
It would take him only a second to reach out and crush Novak’s windpipe. He was still fast enough and strong enough for that.
He quickened his step, was almost the heel of Novak’s Converse All-Stars.
Then Novak pulled out his phone and made a call. “Adam?” he said. “You there?”
Zach clicked through dozens of cameras, trying to track down the face he was less and less sure he’d actually seen. He went backward in the system’s internal memory, trying to get that same image back again.
Then, from a hidden camera behind one of the American ticket counters, he found him.
Adam Thompson. Walking right past everyone dropping off their luggage, on his way to security.
Zach checked the timestamp on the screen. Less than five minutes earlier.
Thompson was a whole terminal away from Cade and Novak.
He keyed his phone to Cade’s earpiece.
“Cade,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”
Cade focused his hearing on Novak’s phone, straining out all the ambient noise, trying to narrow down his perception to just the voice coming through the tiny speaker at Novak’s ear.
Then his earpiece spat to life and Zach’s voice blared at him: “Cade. We’ve got a problem.”
Novak kept walking in front of Cade, his step almost jaunty. He was practically vibrating with excitement. They were getting close.
“Thompson is here,” Zach said, stating the obvious. “He’s in Terminal B, he’s stuck in a long line right now, but he’s here — ”
“I am aware,” Cade said as quietly as he could, hoping the throat-mike under his collar would pick it up.
“What was that? Say again?”
“Shut up,” Cade hissed, a little louder this time.
Two things happened, almost at once.
Novak stopped in his tracks, right in front of a Cinnabon kiosk.
Cade nearly walked into him. They stood for a moment, face-to-face.
There was a weird moment of what was not recognition, but something quite like it, as the strangeness, the inhuman thing that squatted in both Cade and Novak, resonated.
Novak’s idiotic smile dimmed a little.
Then someone shouted at them both.
“Excuse me! You, right there! Hold it!”
It was a TSA agent, half-jogging toward them from the checkpoint, his belt and badge rattling on his uniform.
Cade realized instantly what had happened. The TSA agent had a wallet in one hand. Her face was open and friendly. Novak had left it behind, and she was trying to return it.
But that’s not what Novak saw.
He saw the iron fist of the fascist technocracy coming to grab him, to ruin his plans, wrapped in the disguise of a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting uniform.
His eyes went wide with fright. And then, Cade saw the fire begin to build in them.
“Cade, what? What was that?” Cade wasn’t responding now.
The camera feed from Terminal B showed Thompson waiting patiently, even happily, in the security line. Zach turned to the ERT leader.
“Get your men. Get them on the other side of that line. Go. Now.”
The man was speaking into his radio already, a steady but insistent buzz of orders.
Zach tried desperately to find Cade again on the monitors.
He saw them. Cade standing too close to Novak. Novak looking past Cade at a TSA agent moving quickly toward them both.
And Novak about to raise his hands, mimicking the position of the first burned man in the theater.
Cade had no time and no choices.
He made his hand into a knife, his fingers straight, his palm flat.
And drove it into Novak’s chest as hard as he could.
There was a pop as his sternum gave way, barely audible in the noise of the airport. There was a flash of light as his skin split, and Cade’s hand was suddenly blistered by fire and heat. It blackened and peeled in a jet of flame that spit from Novak’s chest cavity, like a crack in the door of a blast furnace.
For a second, Cade thought he was already too late.
Then the fire in Novak’s eyes went out, replaced by surprise, and then, by emptiness.
The flame sputtered out, and became smoke. The smell of burned meat was overwhelmed by the grease from a nearby Burger King.
Novak’s body sagged forward onto Cade. He supported the corpse, his burned hand still halfway in the young man’s chest. He pulled it out and quickly scanned the damage. It was black and blistered and peeling; charred flakes of skin shed from his hand as he flexed and dark blood oozed from the cracks. It hurt, but he’d fed recently. It would heal before nightfall.
He remembered the TSA agent behind them, coming up fast.
He quickly hugged Novak’s corpse like he was greeting an old friend.
And then, before the TSA agent reached them, Cade hustled the dead body into the men’s restroom immediately to his left.
The female agent stopped suddenly, unsure of what to do.
Nobody paid much attention as Cade walked the still-cooling body into the restroom. They were nursing their own hangovers, trying to get to their flights on time.
Cade found an empty toilet stall and sat the dead man down. Then he spoke into his throat-mike again.
“Adam Thompson,” he said. “Where?”
Adam passed through the full-body scanner without so much as a blip. He’d heard those things gave you cancer over the long run, but that wasn’t his worry now.
Nobody anywhere near him was going to be dying of cancer.
He felt it building, a pleasant singing at the back of his skull. He picked up his phone from the tray on the belt of the X-Ray machine. He’d been forced to drop the call with Ty when his turn came up in line, but it wasn’t like they needed a phone to coordinate.
He’d see the explosion from here, or Ty would see him.
Either way, they were almost done.
He walked toward the gates, not really in a hurry, just enjoying the sensation as the heat and light grew inside him.
He watched a family, exhausted and sleepless and irritable, pass by. The little girl was holding her mother’s hand, the father was carrying a crying baby while simultaneously pushing a stroller and trying to wipe spit-up from his shirt.
Adam smiled at the little girl, and she smiled back.
It came to him now: this was the right thing to do. It didn’t have to be world leaders, or the banksters, or the high-tech overlords. These people were all just as guilty. They were the demand, the engine behind the economy, the ones driving it all into ruin. There would be no factories in China if th
ese people didn’t buy all that toxic crap that spewed from them. There would be no cows grazing on clear-cut rainforest if these people didn’t gobble their burgers. There would be no islands of plastic in the ocean, no sewers choking on their shit, no diapers being filled and bulldozed into mountains of landfill. They clogged the world, and they needed to be burned out. And it would begin here, with him.
He’d be the trigger. He’d be the catalyst. He’d be the spark that ignited the real fire. People would run and scream and they would be afraid, and the world would change because of him.
He wouldn’t see any of it. But that was all right. That was just fine.
He saw something else.
A group of cops. All in their taxpayer-funded body armor, guns out, looking like an invading army. They came through a side door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
They were alert, and moving fast, looking for something in the crowd.
Looking for him, he realized.
Too late. They were too late.
It was time. Everyone would burn.
He felt it rise inside him, filling him, and he wondered how something so filled with light and heat could be so cold and dark at the same time.
He prepared to let it loose. It was almost time. He opened his mouth to breathe fire, to burn it all down to the ground.
The little girl was still looking at him. But she was no longer smiling.
He smiled big enough for them both.
Then Cade stepped from the crowd, and with his good hand, grabbed Adam by the neck and squeezed.
His fingers met and Thompson’s spine turned to bonemeal and pulp.
There wasn’t even a flash of fire this time. It had nowhere to go, no way to get out.
Zach watched the whole thing on the screen. From his vantage point, it looked as if Cade had simply yanked the young man out of the crowd and then hustled him over to the waiting squad of police. If anyone else noticed, they quickly looked away. None of their business. Everyone kept going on with their days and their lives, either going places or coming home.
Zach sagged into his chair, the tension draining from him.
That was how it ended. Without so much as a whimper.
Acknowledgements
For Lucas Foster, Greg Veeser, and Jesse Alexander, who co-created Carolina Ramos.
And with thanks to Robert “Rev. Bob” Hood, who got me thinking in this direction with a conversation on Twitter.
About the author
Christopher Farnsworth is the author of three previous novels about Nathaniel Cade: Blood Oath, The President’s Vampire, and Red, White, and Blood, all available from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. His next novel, about the Fountain of Youth, will be released in 2015 by William Morrow. A former journalist and screenwriter, he lives in Los Angeles with his family. You can find out more at www.chrisfarnsworth.com or follow him on Twitter: @chrisfarnsworth.
Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Farnsworth
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The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story Page 5