The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story (2 page)

“How do you know someone didn’t just douse him with gasoline?”

“Nope. Just like this one. No bomb, no gunpowder, no gasoline.”

“You said that usually there’s no outside damage,” Zach said.

“I’m glad to see you’re listening, Mr. Barrows. That’s correct. Usually there’s only one victim. And the burning is nowhere near this violent. The belief is that something called ‘the wick effect’ takes place. High body heat or maybe a lit cigarette dropped on the floor or clothing starts the process, and then the subject’s melting body fat pools and continues to fuel the blaze. It’s supposed to be slow and relatively contained. But in this case, all of the potential energy from the burning body was released in one violent, exothermic reaction.”

“You’re saying this guy’s body caused the explosion?” Zach asked.

“No,” Ramos said. “He
was
the explosion.”

Cade nodded, as if this only confirmed what he already knew. “He intended to burn, and to take as many people as he could with him.”

Ramos hesitated a moment. “I can’t tell you what his intention was. But this isn’t just a freak occurrence. I mean, yes, obviously, freak occurrence. That’s what we do here. But I suspect that someone has figured out a way to weaponize the human body.”

“Terrific,” Zach said. He was trying to figure out a way to tell the president that someone had invented a way for suicide bombers to walk past any detection system in the world. How the hell was the TSA supposed to search for this?

“Well, the good news is that this has to be extremely difficult. And incredibly painful,” Ramos said.

“That’s an interesting definition of good news,” Zach said. He leaned in to take a closer look. The corpse was still frozen in its pose from the theater. His arm brushed against the box.

The corpse’s left arm snapped and fell off. The broken ends revealing nothing but carbonized meat and bone all the way through. There was nothing remotely human left.

“All that work to get it here without a bump, and you broke it on the table.”

“Sorry,” Zach said.

She waved it off. “No big. I had to split him open eventually. I’m going to figure out how he did this. It is very intriguing.”

“‘How’ is irrelevant,” Cade said. “I already know how. This was supernatural.”

Ramos’ sunny disposition finally dimmed a little. “Well, yeah, but there’s got to be some kind of explanation behind it.”

“It’s sorcery,” Cade said, as if explaining things to a slow child. “That’s the explanation.”

“I’m a scientist,” she said. “I need a little more than ‘a wizard did it.’”

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.