The President's Vampire (14 page)

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Authors: Farnsworth| Christopher

BOOK: The President's Vampire
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Cade crossed half the camp in three seconds when he heard the hissing.
Buried amid the piles of dead bodies, he found one Snakehead, disoriented, newly transformed. It still wore some of its human clothing—remnants of a Marine uniform.
Everyone nearby turned and stared as it kicked and tore its way out of the corpses. It was looking for fresher meat.
It turned to see Cade coming, but was in no way ready. It almost split open on impact. He didn’t allow that to stop him from beating it down into the dirt.
He didn’t care about the witnesses. They were military, and they could be shut up later. Most would want to forget what they’d seen. Others simply wouldn’t believe it, would rather disavow the knowledge from their own eyes than live in a world where things like this were real.
None of that mattered to Cade.
All that mattered to him, at that moment, was that he was too late.
GRAVES WALKED THROUGH the camp’s medical center, surveying the wounded—the ones who had not been bitten or clawed, the ones suffering from merely human injuries.
Graves moved with authority, as if he belonged, so people assumed he must belong. No one stopped him or even questioned him. It was as if the entire camp was still in shock, stunned into a kind of mute acceptance. Many soldiers and sailors hadn’t even seen the Snakeheads. There were rumors, but they were muted by the threat of court-martial or worse. Anyone who had actually seen the creatures didn’t want to talk about it. They were too busy with grief or struggling to hold on to their sanity.
The only certain thing was that whatever had happened tonight
didn’t happen
.
In this kind of atmosphere, Graves might as well have been invisible.
The critically wounded had already been moved to the nearby French army hospital, which had better facilities for the men hit by shrapnel or caught in the cross fire of their own forces. But a few dozen were still on the base, recovering from minor injuries.
In one of the patient areas, Graves found a young Marine sleeping. The young man had a clean bullet wound through the meat of his right leg. He was on IV fluids, and according to his chart, would be up and walking in days.
Perfect.
Graves took a small hypo from a pocket of his vest. It contained a clear solution, indistinguishable from the saline and plasma the Marine was already receiving.
He poked the needle into the tube, emptying the fluid into it. It flowed into the young man’s IV, and from there, slid into his veins.
He didn’t even shift in his sleep. Graves noted the time, then walked out.
On his way to the front door, he put the needle into a sharps container marked CAUTION—BIOHAZARD.
 
 
CADE FOUND GRAVES overseeing the extraction of a young Marine at the helipad. An Archer/Andrews transport chopper idled, its rotors starting to spin.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
Graves looked up. “Kid needs medical attention.”
“Then take him to the hospital. Or bring the doctors here.”
Graves shook his head. “Nothing they can do for him here. There’s a carrier out in the gulf, on its way to Kuwait. They’re better equipped.”
Cade turned away from him. The Marine was about to be lifted onto the chopper. He didn’t look good. His skin was flushed and sweat poured out of him. Dark rings circled his eyes. He certainly looked as if he was about to die.
Cade didn’t care.
“Stop,” Cade barked at the men holding the stretcher. There was no reason they should have listened to someone in civilian clothes. But they heard something in Cade’s voice, and they froze in their tracks.
“Belay that,” Graves shouted angrily. “Get him out of here!”
Cade spun on him. “You know why we can’t allow him to leave here.”
Graves eyed him coolly. “I won’t let a good young man die. Not if I can help it.”
“If he’s infected—”
“He’s not. He’s shown no symptoms. I’ll take responsibility.”
Cade looked at Graves, who held his stare. “You can’t.”
He turned back to the crew and the stretcher. The blades were spinning up now. He had no choice. He’d stop this himself.
“Cade, don’t interfere! That’s an order!” Graves shouted above the rotors.
Cade froze. He felt the oath, like chains across his mind, holding him fast. A lawful order, given by a designated representative of the president. He could try to resist, but bad things would happen. Seizures. And then worse.
Reluctantly, he watched the crew back away from the helicopter, the Marine strapped inside. It lifted off like a fat, ungainly seabird, and then churned its way out toward the gulf.
Graves watched it leave as well.
“You did the wrong thing,” Cade said.
“Sorry, Cade,” Graves said. “Did you want to drink his blood yourself?”
Cade didn’t reply. Graves stomped away from him.
“Come on,” Graves called over his shoulder. He almost sounded apologetic. “Let’s try to keep this from happening again.”
Cade kept watching the copter until it dwindled to a small dot in the sky.
 
 
REAR ADMIRAL VERNON PARRISH, the base CO, had a great don’t-fuck-with-me stare. It had probably helped him get to his rank, commander of the Horn of Africa Joint Task Force. He was anxious to reassert his authority over these two interlopers who’d shown up with demands but no answers.
But when he turned his stare on Cade, Cade had simply invoked priority code RED RUM. Parrish blanched and left without another word. A few moments later, an aide returned to tell them they had full access to everything on the base.
Now the sun was an hour from rising. Cade and Graves sat in the camp CO’s office, looking at a speakerphone.
Cade stood, his clothes still stiff with the blood of the Snakehead he’d killed. Graves sat behind the desk.
They had all the data on the incident—no one was sure what else to call it right now—laid out in front of them.
One hundred fifty-seven personnel dead. Most of them in the first twenty minutes, due to sheer surprise, not any numerical advantage. Eyewitness reports put the number of “unknown creatures” at less than a dozen. Small-arms fire was useless. Unlike the creatures Cade had faced just twenty-four hours earlier, these Snakeheads were impervious to anything less than .50 cal rounds. It required either a grenade launcher or mounted machine gun to kill them.
Then there were the infections. Another forty-three were killed by their own comrades in arms. As soon as the first symptoms appeared, the military personnel had responded quickly, despite their shock, and turned their weapons on the wounded. Some small amount of good news there: no one froze up. These were kids raised with zombie movies after all, although some would probably need counseling for the rest of their lives after killing their friends, bunkmates and officers.
The Snakeheads went on the run as soon as the heavy artillery was unleashed. They scurried toward the coastline with a strange, froglike gait, the surviving witnesses reported. It made sense to Cade; they were still enough like the Innsmouth breed in that way.
The military had learned the first rule of dealing with monsters: if it’s trying to kill you, it doesn’t matter if it’s impossible.
As a result, they shot first and saved their nightmares for later. Many people survived. You could almost call it a victory.
But all Cade could think was: it never should have come to this.
“So, angels,” Graves said to the speakerphone. “Anyone want to explain to me how this happened?”
Nothing but static on the line.
“Anyone? Don’t be shy, kids.”
Book tried to mount a defense. “Look, how were we supposed to know the same alias was used elsewhere in the system?”
“Yes,” Graves said. “That was pretty damned stupid. Someone who did that, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t walk around with his dick hanging out because he’s too dumb to zip up.”
“Come on, Colonel.” It was Candle. “You know the problem here. We’re stuck with these hitchhikers. Sorry, but someone’s got to say it. Barrows and Cade are only in the way.”
“Yeah,” Zach snorted. “
I’m
the one who missed the clues here.”
“If we didn’t have to explain everything to you every five minutes—”
“Let me explain something to you—”
There was the sound of a chair sliding back, a mumble of raised voices and shoving.
“Enough,” Cade shouted. Even across an ocean, it stopped all movement on the other end.
“We failed,” he said. “Every one of us. And people died.”
A moment of embarrassed silence. Then, Bell: “You’re right, Mr. Cade. I apologize. It was our screwup. Zach came in and found the link. If we’d shared info earlier . . .”
“I don’t care,” Cade said. “The attacks are escalating. Clearly, there will be another, and soon. Find out why. Find out where. Above all, stop wasting my time.”
He left to search for a place to go to ground for the day.
Graves waited until the door had swung shut. “All of you clear enough now?” he said to the speaker. “Need any more motivation? Because I’m pretty sure you don’t want Mr. Cade coming back to provide it. Get your goddamn heads in the game.”
He hit a button, ending the call.
CADE WENT OUTSIDE. He walked to the grave site, not far from the airport, just outside the camp’s official borders. The cover story had already been decided. These men and women would not get the honor of a military burial. As far as the outside world was concerned, they had all been blown to pieces by a truck bomb. Their relatives back home would receive only ceremonial flags.
Their remains were to be buried here in the soft African soil, where quicklime and the wet earth, rich with insects, would turn them into unidentifiable mulch.
Morning was just below the horizon, but Cade still picked up a shovel. The burial detail watched in openmouthed horror as he completed the pit single-handedly.
As they began loading bodies, and pieces of bodies, Cade dug another hole, a short distance off, for himself.
He lay down and burrowed into the soil. He would sleep here for the day, alongside the victims he had failed, and try to guard them, in some hopeless way, on the first of all the days they had lost because of him.
Because he was too late.
ELEVEN
The CIA’s most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.
 
—Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen,
The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

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