The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story (6 page)

Cade gave the man his full attention. “I will handle it,” he said, biting off each word. The ERT commander, wisely, stepped back.

But Zach put a hand on Cade’s arm, very carefully. “You sure? The sun is coming up.”

Cade looked down at Zach’s hand. Zach removed it, but didn’t get out of the vampire’s path.

“No one else dies because of these men,” Cade said. “No one.”

Zach felt a flash of anger. “You’re aware that they burst into flame? You do remember that you’re not fireproof, right?”

“I stopped one before.”

“At night. In daylight, you might — ”

“Be a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest?”

Zach nearly guffawed. Cade’s brain included over a century of slang, but never the knowledge of when it was appropriate. “Something like that.”

“I promise you, Zach: he will never see me coming.”

“What about Adam Thompson?”

“We have to deal with the threat we can see,” Cade said.

Zach couldn’t argue with that. He stood aside. “At least put in your earpiece. Maintain contact.”

“Of course,” Cade said. He turned to the ERT commander. “Be ready to lock down the terminal if I fail.”

The ERT commander looked unhappy, but nodded. He was a good soldier. He followed orders.

Cade left the room. In a moment, Zach saw him on the monitors, which had resumed their scanning. He was out among the crowds, cutting effortlessly through them. People got out of his way, some deep
instinct telling them not to approach the young man in the black suit.

A wolf among the sheep.



Adam Thompson watched Ty head to the doors marked DELTA from the shuttle bus. He was going to the next stop. They would try to time it as closely as possi
ble. Get past the TSA checkpoints, and then trigger the big bang.

Adam had to admit none of this was anything like he planned
. He wanted to go to Washington, and blow themselves up on the floor of the House of the Representatives, or during a White House tour. But those things were too hard to get into now. They all had arrest records from several demonstrations, and there was no way they’d get anywhere really important.

Besides, he told himself, this was better. The leaders only lead when the people force them to follow. They had to put the fear back into the general population. Get people to stop buying, stop consuming, stop blindly eating the shit that the government fed them.

And the best way to do that was fear.

If the people realized the government couldn’t protect them, then they’d start to doubt the whole system. They’d pull it down eventually.

The few deaths they caused now would save billions of lives eventually.

At least, that’s what Adam told himself.

But in the night, when he couldn’t sleep, he felt a growing suspicion that it wasn’t anything like that at all. Like the fire the old man had taught him to bring inside, he was anxious to get out, to do something, to do some damage. He just wanted a target, and he found he was less inclined to wait for the right one. The thing inside him was always pushing, always testing his resolve. While waiting in line at the shuttle bus stop this morning, he felt a sudden, crazy impulse to just let it go, right then and there. All those people standing around, all those mouth-breathing morons, with no idea that they were about to suck down oxygen for the very last time.

He looked at Ty, who seemed to feel it, too. And they’d smiled at each other, and tamped it down.

Marc had pushed them into this. He had forced them by going off-script and blowing up too soon, but now, Adam realized, he couldn’t really blame him.

He could hardly wait. He wanted to see everything burn.

The airport would have to be enough.



Cade saw the young man, Novak, in the middle of the security line. He removed his shoes and belt, took his wallet and phone from his pockets, and showed his boarding pass to the man standing in front of the wavefront scanner.

Then Novak raised his arm
s and stood still.

He would have looked like any one of a few hundred students traveling that day, except for one thing: he was smiling brightly, as if hearing a joke only he understood. He was the only person in the entire security line who actually looked happy to be there.

Cade forced himself to wait. He was certain that Novak would wait until he was through security.

What he didn’t know was how much control Novak had over the demon he’d invited inside.

Novak recovered his shoes, his phone, and his belt, and tucked his boarding pass into a pocket. He got himself back in order, and began walking away from the security point.

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 a
nd 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 h
is 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 these 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.