The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story Read online

  Cade’s mouth twisted again. “You’re talking to a vampire, but you don’t believe in magic?”

  “Everything has a scientific explanation,” Ramos said. “Eventually. We just have to look hard enough for it.”

  “Then you’re wasting my time,” Cade said, and turned and walked out of the morgue.

  Zach took a moment to smile at Ramos. “Still think he’s charming?”

  She shrugged. “He’s an alpha-level predator. I don’t expect manners.”

  “He’s already got a girlfriend. Believe me, you do not want to get in her way.”

  “She’s a vampire as well?”

  “Yes.”

  Ramos looked thoughtful. “Interesting. I wonder what their mating rituals are like.”

  “In my experience? Loud and scary. Is there anything you can do to help us with an ID on this guy? Cade’s right. We need a name.”

  “You don’t think this was an isolated incident?”

  “He’s pretty sure it’s going to happen again. And I’ve learned that he’s usually right.”

  Ramos frowned. “Maybe there’s some DNA I can still harvest down in there, but it’s probably cooked. And that’s only useful if his sample is on file anywhere. Let me try something else.”

  Ramos took out her own version of a spy-phone like Zach’s. She snapped a picture of the burned man’s skull, then another, and then another, until she had almost every angle.

  “I’ve got some modeling software that should be able to put together a picture with skin and hair. As soon as that’s done, we can run it through our facial recognition programs. Maybe you can get a lead that way.”

  Zach knew it would take hours, even with the resources at their disposal, to come up with a face and a name for the burned man. Still, it was better than nothing. “Email me the images as soon as you have them,” he said.

  Ramos nodded, already engrossed in the burned man’s corpse. Zach hurried to catch up with Cade.

  

  Cade wanted to find the bus.

  They’d already determined that the bomber didn’t drive to the theater. There was no car left behind in the parking lot that couldn’t be matched to a victim or a bystander. So that meant he was either dropped off by an accomplice, or he took public transit.

  If he was dropped off, they were out of options. No way to find that car. No security cameras in the parking lot.

  So they looked for the bus.

  Zach and Cade found the city depot and showed the security guard their fake badges. He took them to the bus that ran the line nearest the theater that night.

  Cade stood in the aisle. He concentrated, letting the silence gather around him.

  “Anything I can do to help?” the security guard asked.

  “Go away,” Cade said.

  The man grumbled, and Zach left the bus with him, to soothe him or lie or whatever else Zach did. Cade didn’t care.

  He concentrated again. Then he took a deep breath.

  Trapped in the air, billions of tiny odorants, molecular remnants of the scents and smells carried by the hundreds of people who’d shuffled and coughed and farted their way through this vehicle over the days and months.

  He sifted through all of them, hoping for something different. Something unusual enough to stand out of the ordinary human stink of tooth decay, halitosis, bacteria squirming their way through sweat, and all the other things that humans had clinging to them, like food, cigarettes, prescription drugs, perfume, antiperspirants, hair gel, dry cleaning fluid, semen, dogshit stuck to shoes.

  Cade had not exactly been lying to Zach when he said he had never seen anything like this before. He’d seen burned bodies. That smell was all to familiar to him. But there was one time, when he was in Vietnam, cleaning up a mess left by the CIA, that he’d once encountered something similar.

  There were Buddhist monks who protested their treatment by the U.S.-sponsored government the only way their religion allowed: they destroyed themselves. In public, they would pour gasoline over their bodies, and then light a match.

  Cade saw that happen in Saigon once. Near the presidential palace, which was the target of their efforts, a monk in his saffron robes took a seat on the sidewalk. The he began chanting. A few moments later, flames consumed him. But the monk had not used any gasoline. Cade had heard there were men who could control their bodies with the power of their will alone: monks who could live naked in caves in Tibet even in deepest winter by mastering their own body temperatures. Others who could survive being pierced with swords, and heal their own wounds instantly with no loss of blood or scarring. Vietnam was the only time Cade ever saw anything like that himself. He had never seen this ability turned against anyone else.

  Until now.

  Cade took another deep breath. He found it. Sharp and powerful, a scalding hot breath above everything else.

  He opened his eyes, walked forward a few steps, and found the seat.

  Zach stepped back into the bus. Cade looked over his head, and saw the security camera that came standard on all city buses now, in almost every city.

  “Get the guard back. We need a map for the route of this bus.”

  “You find something?” Zach asked.

  “Yes,” Cade said, standing over the seat. “He was right here.”

  “How do you know?”

  Cade took another deep breath, just to make certain he had the scent. “He reeked of it. Even before he burned.”

  “Reeked of what?”

  “Sulfur,” Cade said. “Brimstone.”

  

  They drove the streets along the route, helpfully marked in highlighter by the security guard. They stopped at each bench and shelter, where Cade stood in the night air, trying to catch the scent again.

  He and Zach were in a residential neighborhood, solidly lower middle-class, when he succeeded.

  Like a bloodhound, he turned and began tracking, walking down the sidewalk, Zach following slowly in the car.

  They went a dozen blocks and three turns, the neighborhood getting worse all the time, trash and grime rising like high-water marks from a flood. White picket fences gave way to chain-link. Cars went from new and clean, to old and reliable, to sitting on blocks in the front yard.

  Cade stopped in front of a house that was smack at the corner of Yard Sale and Meth Lab.

  “Here,” he said.

  Zach checked his watch against the night sky, which grew lighter all the time.

  “Maybe an hour to sunrise.”

  “Forty-eight minutes,” Cade said.

  “You want to call in local back-up?”

  Cade gave Zach the look again. Zach sighed.

  “Fine. What’s the plan?”

  Which is how Zach found himself knocking on the door of a suspected bomber at six o’clock in the morning.

  Zach didn’t expect anyone to answer so quickly. But the young man who opened the door looked wide awake. In fact, he seemed as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  Zach said the first thing that popped inside his head. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “Do you have a moment to talk about the Lord?”

  The young man didn’t slam the door in Zach’s face or spit out an obscenity. Instead, he pulled out a gun, and grabbed Zach’s jacket, and dragged him inside.

  “Who are you working for?” the man screamed, putting the gun in Zach’s face.

  For a moment, Zach was overpowered. Not by the gun. He’d been in worse situations in the past couple of years. After facing down reanimated corpses and lizard creatures, a gun in the face was almost quaint.

  But the man’s stink was eye-watering. Cade had mentioned sulfur. The young man smelled like he’d been bathing in a vat of rotten eggs.

  “I’m with the Church of — ”

  “Don’t lie to me,” the man screamed again, and dragged Zach further into the main room off the entry.

  Zach had a few seconds to clock his surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. Cheap, assemble-
it-yourself furniture, a few grades below IKEA. A duffel bag, half-full of clothes. A laptop, closed and charging from a cord in the wall. And, weirdly enough, what looked like a giant puppet.

  Then the man hit Zach with the gun, and the pain snapped him into a realization that he was facing someone unbalanced and armed. “Tell me who you are,” the man demanded.

  “Tom. My name is Tom.” Zach didn’t have to search too hard for the motivation to put fear into his voice. Method acting 101.

  “Tom? Tom what?”

  “Tom Blake.” That was the name on the creds Zach carried in his wallet. Unfortunately, if this guy checked them, he’d also see that Zach was a government agent, and that would probably be enough to get Zach a bullet in the face. Still. Best to stay in character until Cade finally showed up. “Look, man, whatever you’re into, I promise, the Lord can help you.”

  That got him an odd look from the man, who stepped away from Zach, and leveled the gun at him carefully. He was barely out of college, Zach realized. Dark hair, glasses with hipster frames. Some kind of fake tribal tats showing under the sleeves of his American Apparel T-shirt.

  “The Lord? Really? You believe that?”

  Zach gulped. “I do.”

  He laughed. He was really enjoying being smarter, knowing things that Zach didn’t. “So let me ask you this: between you and me, who needs more help?”

  Honesty is the best policy, Zach decided. “That would be you,” he said.

  That made the man laugh again. “No. Sorry. You knocked on the wrong door, that’s for sure. You’d been an hour later, I would have been gone. If only Marcus hadn’t pulled this shit...”

  He trailed off. His gun wavered a bit. Zach considered jumping him. Then the man’s focus returned, and he glared at Zach again.

  “Who’s Marcus?” Zach asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the man said. “He’s dead. And so are you. Sorry, dude. Guess you get to find out if there’s a God for real.”

  The young man began to squeeze the trigger. Zach prepared to rush him. Cade wasn’t here yet. He had to try something.

  Then, from directly behind them, came the sound of wood cracking.

  The young man turned his head as two hands broke through the wall. In a flurry of dust and cracked drywall, they grabbed him, and without hesitation, pulled him off his feet.

  The gun went flying across the room. Zach saw the young man drop to his knees, clutching his mangled hand. Cade stepped through the hole in the wall as if stepping through a cobweb.

  The young man looked up at Cade, his face contorted with pain and rage. “You broke my fucking hand,” he screeched. “That’s torture!”

  Cade reached out, viper-quick, and grabbed the man by the wrist. Then he bent it at an angle that was too sharp.

  Cade spoke quietly, directly into the man’s face. “This is not torture,” he said.

  The man started to squall again, but Cade increased the pressure on the man’s arm. The bones under the skin began to make noises a lot like the last kernels of popcorn in a microwave.

  “Torture is watching your skin bubble and slough off after it’s been touched by the flames,” Cade said. “Torture is struggling to breathe and choking on smoke. Torture is the fear you feel as you run for your life, not knowing if you will ever see your children again.”

  The man’s forearm was bent almost in half now. Tears streamed from his eyes, his face a mask of fear.

  Cade dropped him.

  “This is not torture,” Cade said again. “But I can start any time.”

  The young man looked up. He was panting and sweating, but he was tougher than Zach thought. He’d managed to stay conscious. And his pain was nothing compared to the hatred in his eyes.

  Hatred, and something else.

  “I knew you jackbooted thugs would come. Well, we’re ready for you. You’re already too late.”

  Zach noticed the air in the room had suddenly grown heavy and still. He was sweating. It was very, very warm.

  The stink of sulfur was overpowering now.

  The young man’s eyes locked with Zach’s. They glowed.

  “You’re both going to burn,” the man hissed.

  Something gathered in the room with them. Something coiled inside the man. That was the only way Zach could describe it. A keening rose from somewhere in him, a song that was ragged and painful and somehow too big for his body.

  The walls began to smoke.

  Fire erupted from the man’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

  And then, abruptly, it went out, as Cade crushed his throat.

  His lifeless body hit the carpet. Smoke poured from his skull. But the heat was gone. The sound was gone.

  Zach finally found his voice again. “Took you long enough.”

  “I’d hoped we could question him.”

  “You let him point a gun at me.” Zach tried not to make that sound like he was whining. Gave himself maybe a B-minus for the effort.

  “We are dealing with men who apparently know how to explode into flame. I wanted to secure any evidence before it went up in smoke.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Apart from a few domestic items, the rest of the house is empty.”

  “Well, at least it was worth risking my life.”

  “I was never more than a few dozen feet away,” Cade said. Zach had to admit, that was no distance at all to someone with Cade’s speed. He was almost mollified, but Cade kept talking. “And honestly, I was hoping you would annoy him enough to keep him busy. Perhaps we could learn something that way.”

  “That was your plan?”

  “You do seem to bring it out in people.”

  “Jesus, Cade — ”

  “Don’t blaspheme.”

  “ — It didn’t even work! We’ve got nothing. All he said was something about some guy Marcus...”

  “Marcus?”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “More than we had before.”

  Zach really hated it when Cade was right. He considered a few replies, thought better of them, then pulled out his phone and called Ramos. Maybe she could make something out of the Heat Miser here.

  

  They loaded the corpse into the trunk of the car and took it back to the morgue themselves. There was no sense in involving the locals now. That would only mean more loose ends to snip later.

  Ramos was so interested in the body she barely even took the time to eyeball Cade. She prodded the burned-out skull with a steel probe, listening to the crunch. “And he did this to himself?” she asked, fascination creeping into her tone.

  Zach nodded. “He would have gone up in smoke and taken us with him in another moment.”

  “So cool,” Ramos said, and began stripping the body for autopsy without another word.

  Zach looked away. He started working on his earlier data searches on his spy phone.

  Cade, meanwhile, looked a bit unsteady on his feet. Zach checked the time. Sunrise outside. The morgue was cool and dark, but Cade had been awake for a long time.

  “When did you last get any coffin-time?”

  “I’m fine,” Cade said.

  Ramos didn’t look up from the body on the slab, but she pointed at the wall, lined with refrigerated cabinets for corpses. “Most of those are empty,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Cade said again.

  “Get in,” Zach said. “We’re not going anywhere for a few hours, at least.”

  Cade didn’t argue, at least. He walked to the wall, opened one of the doors, pulled out the long steel drawer, and inserted himself neatly in with the other dead bodies. He even managed to slam the door behind him without sounding too much like a sulky teenager.

  “So who was he?” Ramos asked as she began to make the Y-shaped incision in the corpse’s chest.

  “Guy named Julius Knapp.”

  “Julius?”

  “Right? Who does that to a kid? Probably drove him straight to terrorism. I’ve already run him through
our databases. He’s been off the grid for a couple weeks. No recent credit card payments, no rent, last known address was a house near the college he graduated from last year. I’ve got a few hits on him from FBI surveillance. He was an Occupier. But nothing serious. He used to do puppet shows.”

  That got Ramos to look up from the chest cavity. “He did what?”

  “Puppet shows. Giant puppets. Of world leaders, politicians. He would do little shows at demonstrations, making fun of them. Here’s a video. Undercover cop in the crowd shot it.”

  Zach’s screen lit up with Julius, and three other people, waving large, papier-mâché dolls on sticks around, as they yelled largely incomprehensible dialogue and slogans at each other. Then the wind picked up, and tore Julius’ puppet out of his hands. It fell on another protester, and they began arguing. End of the clip.

  Ramos looked back down at Julius’ body. “That seems a long way from turning yourself into a bomb.”

  “Anything inside him so far?”

  “Not much,” she said. “But I’ve barely gotten started.”

  Zach frowned. “I was hoping for an internal gas tank. Something obvious. Even a real bomb. Anything beats the alternative.”

  “I’ll figure it out. There’s got to be some kind of rational explanation. I mean, you don’t really think this was magic, do you?”

  Zach didn’t like to sound like Griff, his immediate predecessor in this job. But sometimes it was hard to avoid. “I’ve seen stranger things.”

  “What do you think he was doing here?”

  “Hell if I know,” Zach said. He felt better about cursing when Cade was asleep and inside a steel box. “So let’s try to find out.”

  They worked steadily, not talking much more after that. Zach gleaned what he could from his databases, and then turned to the laptop they’d taken from the house.

  It was password-protected and encrypted. Fortunately, like most amateurs, Julius Wilkes had downloaded all his spy software from the Internet. The encryption program he used was readily available from a number of public sites, and it had been cracked in half by the NSA’s super-computers a year earlier. That’s why the intelligence agencies left it out there. In fact, Zach had learned that about a quarter of the programs out there were created by the government and released into the wild. People locked up their secrets without realizing someone else already had the keys.