Christopher Farnsworth - Nathaniel Cade [01] Read online

  Dylan realized he was in Hell. Roasting in the heat, then freezing in cold storage, surrounded by corpses every day.

  When Khaled finally got back in touch, Dylan was pissed off and ready to go back to the States.

  Khaled tried to soothe him. Dylan didn’t want to listen. He invited Dylan to his apartment. Dylan was hesitant, until Khaled mentioned beer.

  Khaled sent his Bentley for Dylan. At his massive, luxury apartment, they opened a case of contraband Coors Light and drank while Khaled explained what was happening.

  Obviously, he said, things had changed since college.

  Dylan, who’d slammed two beers and was working on his third, said, “No shit. What’s with the outfit?”

  Khaled explained: his father had found out how he was spending his time in America, and pulled him out of college. He was sent to a strict madrassa in Saudi Arabia.

  “Sucks, man,” Dylan said.

  Anger flashed in Khaled’s eyes, but it passed. “At first, I thought so,” he said. “But then I learned the truth.”

  All of the things they’d talked about, all of the problems in the world, all of that had to change. And Khaled and his friends had the answer. They were going to make things right.

  They were part of a group called Zulfiqar. They were a sword of righteousness to cut the evil out of the world.

  But they needed Dylan. They needed him to step up and be a hero.

  And, of course, they were willing to pay for one. Being a hero shouldn’t come without rewards, Khaled said. He offered an even million dollars.

  Dylan passed. A million? That was less than he had in his trust fund. He could survive until forty. Not worth it.

  There was some haggling. Khaled pointed out the benefits of tax-free cash. He eventually offered $3.5 million.

  Dylan said, “Cool.”

  The caskets were in the truck. Dylan started the engine and drove around the corner from the mortuary building.

  He made sure the bitch sergeant wasn’t watching him as he left.

  About halfway to the airfield, Dylan pulled into a parking lot and slid his truck between two personnel carriers. He shut down the engine.

  He took the small toolbox Khaled had given him and hopped out of the cab. He didn’t look around as he got into the back of the truck. He’d learned one thing about the army: look like you knew what you were doing all the time. Do that, and nobody would question you; they had their own problems.

  He’d made sure the casket he wanted was on top of the stacks. PFC MANUEL CASTILLO, THOUSAND PALMS, CALIF. He unstrapped it, quickly pulled the flag off like he was unwrapping a gift and snipped the fastener seal with wire cutters.

  The remains inside were covered in plastic garbage bags full of ice. It didn’t matter much—PFC Castillo was headed to a closed-casket funeral. He’d been thrown from his Humvee by an explosion that tore through the bottom of his seat; they probably shoveled him into the body bag.

  That’s why Dylan had picked him.

  Dylan tossed the ice packs to the floor of the truck and unzipped the bag. Half the poor bastard’s head was sheared off, all the way to the collarbone; he’d been shot straight up, like an ejector seat, into the frame of the vehicle.

  But his right leg was still intact, from the hip down.

  Dylan checked his list, just to be sure. RIGHT LEG—followed by five boxes. Four of them had check marks. He took out a pen, crossed off the last empty spot.

  Then he opened the toolbox and got to work.

  The circular saw was remarkably compact. It was almost smaller than a cordless drill, and when it revved up, it cut through skin and bone like tofu. Dylan was glad, once again, these guys weren’t shipped home in their uniforms. That was all done at the other end, at Dover Air Force Base, after they’d been embalmed. He didn’t think he could handle stripping a corpse down to its underpants.

  He checked the joint where the hip met the leg. He didn’t have to be precise, but Khaled bitched at him when he shaved off too much.

  He leaned back as he pressed the power button on the saw. The first time he did this, he’d gotten a faceful of gore by hunching too close to the cadaver. He only had to learn that lesson once.

  The blade sliced through the dead flesh and bone. A couple strands of skin snapped like rubber bands when he lifted the leg out of the body bag.

  This was the way Khaled explained it to him. Nobody would ever miss a few body parts. The army morticians in the States certainly wouldn’t question it, because it wasn’t like they got an invoice of all the arms and legs a corpse was supposed to have upon delivery. The families back home were told their soldiers had been blown to pieces. They were expecting an incomplete package, if they even bothered to look. With all the car bombs and shrapnel and IEDs in Iraq, there were plenty of guys going home short a few limbs.

  The only downside: Khaled wanted the heads of the soldiers, but Dylan’s best picks were all guys who didn’t have much left above the neck. It was a sore spot. Khaled had finally told Dylan to forget it, he’d make other arrangements.

  Dylan turned off the saw and unfurled his own special plastic sack from the toolbox. There was some kind of chemical coating inside that kept the leg cold; it activated as soon as the sack was peeled open. Cold vapor curled in the air around him.

  He crammed the leg inside, struggling with it like a side of beef.

  Sweating, Dylan zipped up the body bag and repacked the corpse with ice, stuffing the bags around the casket. He latched it shut and used a tiny, battery-powered soldering iron to reseal the fasteners. Then he slung the sack with PFC Castillo’s leg over his shoulder.

  He tossed the leg on the floor of the passenger seat and started the truck. It only took him a short while to clear the gate at the airport. He unloaded the coffins into a hangar, where they waited for the next flight out.

  Nobody wanted to look at the flag-draped boxes. Nobody wanted to think about what was inside. Dylan was grateful for that.

  He took the truck back out the gate. He slowed near the fence line, as he hefted the sack with the leg off the floor of the cab. With one smooth motion, he opened his door and dropped it onto the side of the road.

  One of Khaled’s guys was waiting, as usual. He saw the dark figure scurry out of a ditch and pick up the bag.

  Dylan smiled. He wasn’t sure if he believed everything Khaled was selling. Most of the time, he didn’t care one way or the other. But he definitely liked the idea of getting some payback from the world that had mistreated him. And getting paid at the same time.

  Dylan could handle this shit job for a little while longer. He was undercover. Like James Bond.

  Pretty soon, everyone who underestimated him and disrespected him would get a big lesson. Dylan would be rich, living the good life on a beach somewhere.

  That would show his dad. And everyone else. They could all just blow him.

  FOUR

  Subject: Cade is functionally immortal. That is to say, his cells do not undergo regular cell death, or even aging or degradation, as long as the subject has a regular supply of fresh blood. Cell repairs are nearly perfect—any cells destroyed by an outside force (see Appendix: “Subject’s Resistance to Knife and Bullet Wounds”) are replaced with indistinguishable copies. Subject can heal from any wound short of massive bodily trauma in a matter of minutes, although his rate of recovery will vary depending on the amount of fresh blood in his system.

  —BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET (Eyes Only/Classified/Above Top Secret per Executive Order 13292)

  Something landed near Zach’s head, jarring him awake.

  He was facedown in the briefing book, his cheek resting in a lake of his own drool.

  He looked around blearily, realized he was sitting at one of the tables in the basement of the Smithsonian.

  And he wasn’t wearing his own pants.

  “Oh good,” Zach said. “It wasn’t all just a wonderful dream.”

  He’d fallen asleep reading the briefing book.
It was hundreds of pages, and they were written like the owner’s manual for a microwave. He noticed the volume he’d been given was number five. He had a lot more to look forward to.

  Griff loomed above him, holding the gym bag he’d thumped down on the table a second before.

  “Brought you some clothes. You should move some things here from your apartment.

  Zach yawned and stood, then had to hike up the sweatpants—stenciled PROP. SMITHSONIAN INST.—that Griff had given him after he’d soiled himself last night.

  He checked his watch. Almost noon. “Hey,” he said. “Why am I up? I thought he slept during the day.”

  “It’s only midnight.”

  Zach checked his watch again. It wasn’t noon. There was no natural light down here. He yawned again.

  Griff looked at the drool-soaked page of the book on the table. “How far did you get in that?”

  “I skimmed it.”

  “Right,” Griff said. “Here’s the Cliffs Notes version. Cade can operate during the day, just not in direct sunlight. He’s awake for days at a time. You’ll have to sleep when you can.”

  “What if he gets hungry? Am I a convenient snack-pack?”

  “He doesn’t feed on humans.”

  “Seriously?”

  Griff nodded.

  “Why not?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Terrific.”

  Zach began looking through the gym bag.

  Jeans. T-shirts. Sweatshirt. Cross-trainers. Griff had gone through his bottom drawer, where he kept his rarely used workout gear.

  “What is this?”

  “You’re going out in the field. You need to be able to move.”

  “You’re wearing a suit.”

  “Old habits. I was FBI. We weren’t allowed to wear anything else.”

  “What am I, the gardener? I’ve worn a suit to work every day since my first campaign, when I was fourteen. I’m not about to change that.”

  Griff shrugged. “Fair enough. Your pants ought to be dry by now.”

  He handed Zach a mug of coffee.

  Zach took it, and his sweatpants nearly fell to his knees again.

  He could have sworn Griff was trying not to laugh. Then he was distracted by the mobile phone Griff pulled from his suit jacket.

  It looked like a touch-screen model, only slightly thicker, with a jutting antenna at the top.

  “I know you wanted a decoder ring, but I got you this instead,” Griff said as he handed it to Zach. “Satellite-enabled, GPS tracking system, Internet access, camera, motion detector, emergency beacon, and a few other options you get to use after you’ve got more experience.”

  “Nice,” Zach said. “Who pays for all this stuff? I’ve never seen an appropriation bill for vampires.”

  “The White House dentist’s budget is surprisingly large.”

  “Funny.” Zach kept fiddling with the phone. “Does this play MP3s?”

  “Just learn to use it. It can save your life.”

  “Do I get a gun, too?”

  “Maybe when you hit puberty.”

  Zach hiked up his pants with as much dignity as he could manage. If this was his job now, he was going to make the best showing possible. “Is there someplace I can shower? Or do you expect me to hose off outside?”

  Griff pointed toward a wooden door on the opposite side of the room. “Help yourself.”

  Zach grunted and headed through the door.

  GRIFF CHECKED HIS WATCH and busied himself taking a waxed-paper carton—the size of a half-gallon container of milk—out of a small fridge under the coffeemaker. He shook it, then placed it in the microwave. When the timer beeped, he took it out and placed it on the nearest table.

  Two minutes later, the coffin opened and Cade emerged, completely alert. His eyes made a quick scan of the room, as they did every time he woke up. He saw the carton, but ignored it.

  Instead, he stripped out of his ragged military fatigues and stood on the cold stone floor naked. Griff had gotten used to this: Cade didn’t care about a lot of human niceties anymore.

  Cade changed into a cheap button-down shirt and black suit hanging from a nearby hook. It was the kind of off-the-rack special any bureaucrat would buy on a government salary. The only difference was Cade didn’t wear a tie. Too many times, someone or something tried to use it to pull his head off. So now he looked like an accountant on casual Friday.

  Except for the cross. Made of old, tarnished metal, it rested on a leather cord in the hollow of Cade’s throat. No matter what else Cade wore, he never removed the cross. If it weren’t so rough and weathered, it might be something a rock star would wear. Instead, it looked more like the museum pieces upstairs.

  Once dressed, Cade continued to ignore the carton. He stepped over to a computer terminal, the only concession to the twenty-first century in the entire place.

  Unlike Griff, Cade had no problem with computers. Given time, he could learn to use any tool. He had to, if his kind was going to hunt an endlessly inventive race of tool-using apes. Anything a man could build, he had to be able to master. Anything a man could learn, he had to learn it faster.

  It might surprise some people that Griff looked at Cade as the product of evolution. But he’d watched Cade, and to him, it was obvious: he was looking at an apex predator. He was human once, but that was a long time ago. Now he just carried the shape, which enabled him to move among his prey. Everything else was engineered to make him—and all the creatures like him—the most efficient hunter of Homo sapiens possible. What they called, in a different age, a man-eater.

  But it wasn’t a matter of belief or disbelief for him. Griff had been with Cade as he fought—and killed—demons, vampires, werewolves, invisible men, aliens, creatures that had no names, and even one thing that called itself a god.

  Most of those things had ended up on any number of government autopsy slabs, and he’d seen the results. And whatever else they were, they were solid. They existed in this world. And whatever put them together had to use the same toolbox of physics and biology that governed every other creature on the planet.

  Sure, some of those hard-and-fast rules of science got bent pretty badly. There was a lot Griff didn’t understand, and a lot the government’s teams of eggheads couldn’t explain. Like Cade’s aversion to crosses and other religious symbols. Or the magic that bound Cade as securely as iron to the will of the president.

  But no one had ever been able to explain quantum mechanics to Griff’s satisfaction, either. It didn’t make the science wrong. He just didn’t have the math.

  Some things you just had to take on faith.

  “You send the boy home already?” Cade asked, typing away.

  “He’s in the shower,” Griff said. “Getting ready for his first day on the job.”

  “Did you warn him?” The shower facilities had been built in what was once a lockup for prisoners who needed to be kept in secret. Some of them seemed to like the place enough to remain after their deaths. Occasionally the shower ran red with blood, and skeletal faces appeared in the mirrors, behind the steam.

  “It didn’t come up,” Griff said.

  Cade’s mouth twitched. You had to watch for it; it was usually the only way you knew he was amused. His fingers flew over the keys, entering his report on the Kosovo incident.

  “You locked up the artifact?” he asked.

  “It’s secure,” Griff said. He pointed to the carton. “You should eat something.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “When was the last time you fed?”

  “Few days ago.”

  “Cade. Eat.”

  “Is that an order?” Cade’s tone was sharp.

  Griff sighed. “It’s advice.”

  Cade turned away from the computer, and picked up the container and opened it. It was filled with dark red blood, still steaming from the microwave. A mixture of cow and pig, from livestock kept in a CDC testing facility near McLean, Virginia.

  Cade drained it i
n one long gulp, not spilling a drop.

  The effect was immediate. He stood taller. His muscles corded and flexed, and his pale skin flushed before the blood settled down into him.

  “Thank you,” Cade said, and threw the carton into the trash from across the room, without looking. He went back to the keyboard.

  “So. What do you think of the kid?”

  “Bit of an oilcan,” Cade said.

  Griff waited. Sometimes Cade used expressions long out of date. It was a side effect of fourteen decades of slang crammed into his head, and slowing down his thought processes for normal conversation.

  But it took only a second for him to realize he’d slipped. “A fake. A politician.”

  “Maybe the president figures you need that more than you need a field agent. That’s probably why they sent him over earlier than expected.”

  Then, with a deep breath, Griff decided to tell him.

  “And the cancer’s back.”

  Cade’s fingers hesitated on the keyboard for a fraction of a second.

  “I know,” he said, the clatter of the typing picking up again.

  He knew. Of course he knew. He probably knew before Griff did. But he didn’t say anything; he was waiting for Griff to let him in on the secret. His version of courtesy. Of friendship.

  “What did the doctors say?” Cade asked.

  “Inoperable.”

  Cade looked back down at the computer and finished entering the case into the log. He probably knew that, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Everyone around him dies, Griff thought. Sooner or later. But not him.

  Griff worried what would happen once he was gone.

  Griff was the closest thing Cade had to a friend. Over thirty years, he had only seen the gulf widen between Cade and everyone else. Without some kind of connection, Cade might forget what it meant to be human completely.

  Griff wondered how dangerous that might be.