Zach took a second to process that. Somehow, he knew the older man was telling the truth. There was a logical part of his brain that didn’t want to accept it, but the things in here didn’t look fake. They had the same undeniable, everyday reality of a chair or table. Looking at them, you just knew.
But he asked the next question anyway, to satisfy that nagging voice of reason.
“So that”—Zach pointed—“is a real alien corpse from Roswell, then?”
Griff looked over. “That one’s from Dulce, actually.”
“Of course it is.”
This wasn’t what Zach expected when the president called him into the Oval Office. Sure, the president probably knew about Zach’s fumbled, drunken encounter with his daughter—but Christ, it’s not like Zach was the first guy there, and she’d barely spoken to him since. Zach was a valuable part of the team. He felt sure he was going to get a promotion, maybe even chief of staff, and get that much closer to his ultimate goal. . . .
Instead, he was told he was getting a transfer. The president said something about trusting him with national security, and shook his hand. Then Griff took him to the limo.
To be perfectly honest, Zach had a little trouble listening after he didn’t hear the words “chief of staff.”
Now he was in a basement, looking at the castoffs from a traveling freak show. Somewhere along the line, he’d screwed up. Big-time.
“What am I doing here?” he asked quietly, mainly to himself.
Griff answered him anyway.
“You’re about to learn one of the nation’s oldest and most important secrets, Zach. There’s no paper trail on this—none that leaves this room anyway,” he said.
“If this is such a big secret, then why would you hold on to all this? First thing I learned in politics: you always shred the documents.”
“It’s more of a trophy room than anything else. He needs to keep trophies. He’s a hunter. You should always remember that.”
Zach gave him a long look.
“You know, just because you put words together in a series doesn’t mean you’re actually explaining anything. I can tell you like playing Yoda to my young Skywalker, but could you just tell me what the shit is going on here?”
Griff nodded, and leaned his bulk against a table.
“What I’m about to tell you is known only to the president, a few members of his cabinet, myself—and now you.”
Zach made a face. “I’m honored.”
Griff sighed heavily and continued.
“In 1867, a young man was found on a whaling vessel that had run aground outside Boston Harbor. He had apparently killed several of his crewmates. The corpses were bloodless, except the one that the young man held in his arms. He was still drinking from that one.
“They called him a vampire. He was convicted, and sentenced to be executed. But President Andrew Johnson pardoned him—spared his life. He lived out the rest of his days in an insane asylum, until 1897, when he died. At least, that was the official story.
“In fact, the young man really was a vampire. And Johnson only pardoned him so he would work for the United States. For the past hundred and forty years, it’s been his job to defend this nation against the threats from the Other Side.”
Zach tried not to laugh. “A presidential vampire, huh? Is he a Democrat or a Republican?”
“That’s a bit like asking a shark if it wants red or white with its meal.”
“Right. So why do you need me?”
“You’re the vampire’s new liaison for the office of the president. You will convey the president’s orders and instructions, provide support and intelligence, and work with the vampire in all aspects of his operations.”
Griff stopped. Zach waited for the punch line. But there wasn’t one.
“Bullshit,” Zach said. “I have White House clearance and I never heard anything about this.”
“That was only for what you needed to know out in the daylight world. This is something else entirely.”
“You really expect me to believe we’ve got a vampire on a leash, and we can just send him after terrorists and spies whenever we want?”
For the first time all night, Griff laughed. He seemed genuinely amused, and that pissed Zach off even more.
“What’s so funny?”
“There are worse things in this world than al-Qaeda and North Korea, Zach. And they are just waiting for their chance at us.”
He gestured at the room, all the objects in it.
“These artifacts—they’re all relics of their attempts to break out of the shadows and into the daylight. Into our lives.
“Humanity will not survive that. They’re an infection, and they spread like Ebola. Whatever it takes, we have to keep that border between light and dark. Or we lose. Everything. Every one of us will die.
“Someone has to be there to hold the line. That’s what we do. We fight every incursion they make. They invade, we repel. Forget the War on Terror, Zach. This is the War on Horror. And you’ve just been drafted.”
The room seemed very quiet now to Zach. He asked the only question that made sense.
“What if I don’t want the job?”
“Not an option, I’m afraid. There’s no quitting, no transfer. You will do this until you retire. Or you get killed. Whichever comes first.”
Zach wasn’t sure which part of the news was making his head spin—the knowledge that vampires were real, or that his career had just come to a screeching halt.
For a moment, Zach was struck with the unfairness of it all. He’d spent his whole life working his way closer to the center of power in America. He’d given up his weekends in high school to hand out flyers and hang campaign signs. Forgot what sleep was like in a half-dozen campaigns. Ate crap food and worked for less than minimum wage, when his college friends were pulling down six figures at investment firms, all so he could get to the White House.
It was all going according to plan. Now this.
“And if I refuse?”
Griff’s expression didn’t change. “You really think you can just walk away? With all you’ve seen? With all you’re going to see?”
“Is that a threat? Are you threatening me? Listen up, old man, because there’s no way in hell—”
“It’s not his job to be threatening, actually.”
For a split second, Zach didn’t know where the words had come from.
Then he turned and faced someone standing directly behind him. As if from nowhere.
“It’s mine,” he said, and smiled.
He was taller than Zach, wearing ragged black fatigues. He looked young. And pale. Very, very pale.
He stood there, perfectly calm.
Too calm, even. Unnaturally still. Almost the kind of stillness you’d only find in a casket. But just standing there.
So Zach couldn’t figure out why his whole mind narrowed down to one thought, burned in capital letters across his brain: RUN.
Zach felt a stirring of instinct honed when humans huddled at the edges of campfires, terrified of the noises in the dark. He suddenly knew he was in the presence of something that stalked his kind, and had for thousands of years. Something inhuman. A predator.
There is a reason humans are genetically programmed to fear the dark. Zach was looking at it.
Then Zach saw the fangs at the edges of the smile.
He began to shake. He couldn’t get his legs to move.
He tried to speak. Nothing came out.
Something warm and wet began running down his thigh.
Both he and the vampire—because that’s what it was, standing right there in front of him, no doubt left anywhere in Zach—looked down.
A small puddle formed around Zach’s shoe as his bladder emptied.
The vampire’s smile vanished. He looked over Zach’s shoulder and spoke to Griff.
“So this is the new boy?”
“Zach Barrows, this is Nathaniel Cade,” Griff said. “The president’s vampire.”
Zach still couldn’t move. Cade looked down at him again.
“Perhaps you should show him where we keep the mop,” Cade said.
He walked around Zach. Zach’s head swiveled to follow.
Cade paused to set a metal case on one of the tables. Then he dropped something that clattered on the wood, next to the case. It looked like the bone from some kind of animal—like a dog. Or a wolf. Lined with teeth and fur, still bloody in some places.
“Take care of that, please,” he said.
Cade headed straight for the coffin and yanked it open.
Griff tried to get the vampire’s attention. “Cade, we should talk about—”
“Later,” Cade said, and slammed the coffin lid shut.
Griff shrugged, in a sort of apology, to Zach.
“He’s been in the cargo hold of a C-130 for the past fourteen hours,” Griff said. “Makes him a little cranky.”
Zach stood there, his pant leg dripping. His mouth was open, but for once in his life, he had nothing to say.
THREE
6—1. General
The Army, Navy, and Air Force have established armed services mortuary facilities outside of the United States. These facilities are established to provide mortuary services for eligible deceased personnel when local commercial mortuary services are not available or cost prohibitive. Establishment or disestablishment of armed services mortuary facilities will be coordinated at the Departmental level.
—Army Regulation 638-2, “Deceased Personnel, Care and Disposition of Remains and Disposition of Personal Effects” (Unclassified)
ONE MONTH EARLIER, MORTUARY SERVICES DIVISION, CAMP WOLF MILITARY BASE, KUWAIT
Dylan Weeks backed the truck as close to the mortuary building as possible.
The sergeant stomped over to him before he was out of the cab, looking pissed. Here we go, Dylan thought.
“I got another complaint about you being late,” she said. “The airfield is right across the damn base. You stopping for a beer on the way?”
Yeah. A beer, in Kuwait. That’d be the day. Out loud, however, all Dylan said was, “I’m going as fast as I can.”
She looked at him for a moment, apparently trying to decide if he was lying or just stupid. “Get your shit together,” she said, and turned away neatly on the heel of one of her combat boots.
“Yes, ma’am.” Bitch, Dylan thought. Put a chick in uniform and she thinks she’s a frigging general or something. She had no idea who she was screwing with. But she’d get a big surprise soon enough.
He started to load the truck.
As he struggled to hoist the transfer cases holding dead U.S. soldiers into the back, he reflected again on how unlucky he was. He never should have been put in this position. It was all going to change, but still, he never should have had to go through any of this shit in the first place.
Dylan was one of hundreds of civilian contractors working at the base in Kuwait. A year before, he was driving a vending machine route, delivering candy and snacks to office parks.
He saw both jobs as beneath him. In fact, he saw most jobs as beneath him. If his father weren’t such a prick . . .
Dylan was supposed to be rich. His father had been a successful singer/songwriter, with a series of minor hits in the ’80s. He was never famous himself, but he wrote and produced for people who were. He made a shitload of money. It kept coming, in the form of residual checks from car commercials and greatest hits compilations.
Dylan’s parents had moved from L.A. to Orange County when he was born, in search of a more wholesome family environment.
They found it. Dylan grew up marinating in wealth and privilege with kids just like him. Vacations in Cabo, private schools, and a Porsche at sixteen.
It was something of a shock when Dylan’s dad sat him down at twenty-three and said it was time to get a life.
This was just after Dylan had been kicked out of the third and last college he would attend. He majored mostly in beer-drinking and hangover recovery. While the first two schools simply flunked him, his academic career ended for good with an unsuccessful date-rape and a faceful of pepper spray.
Criminal charges were avoided with a generous settlement. That’s when Dad decided it was time to talk man-to-man with his son. They sat on the patio of the house in Newport Coast as the sun set into the Pacific. It was beautiful. Father and son cracked open several beers to get over their mutual discomfort, then got down to business.
Dylan’s father admitted he hadn’t been around much. His marriage to Dylan’s mom ended, and a series of increasingly blond, pert and young stepmothers followed. While they talked, Dylan’s dad kept touching his new hair plugs, like a gardener tenderly checking new sprouts.
He asked Dylan what he wanted to do for a living.
Dylan said he’d like to go into the music business, like his father. Start a band. Maybe go on tour. It would take about fifty grand in operating capital.
Dylan’s father offered the opinion that it might be a good idea to learn an instrument, and perhaps how to read music, first.
Dylan countered with the observation that his father’s music sucked, and he didn’t need to read music to do better than that “dentist’s-office crap.”
Things deteriorated from there. Dylan’s father finally threw up his hands and walked into his home office, where he smoked a joint and wondered how he’d managed to raise such a thoroughly unpleasant little shit. Twenty years of voting Republican, and for what? He blamed the schools.
Dylan found his credit cards canceled, his trust fund locked up tight until he turned forty. His mother convinced her current husband to allow him to live in the guesthouse on their property. After six months of his moping, she insisted he take a job, and her husband called in a favor from a friend, getting Dylan a truck on a vending-machine route.
It was about that time when Khaled got in touch with him again. Dylan was playing Grand Theft Auto: Vatican City online at three a.m., after another unsuccessful band practice, taking out his frustration by slaughtering his opponents with an Uzi. The instant-message window on his computer popped up.
It was Khaled, a guy he’d known back at school. Khaled had been a Saudi student living in the dorm on the same floor.
Ordinarily, Dylan would have been the first to mock and abuse a foreigner living within such close range. But Khaled was awesome. He spoke English better than Dylan, wore jeans and T-shirts, and listened to hip-hop and rap. It also didn’t hurt that he had more money than God, and always scored good drugs.
They started IM’ing regularly over the next couple of months. Between rounds of virtual carnage, Khaled sympathized with Dylan’s troubles. He recalled the unfortunate incident with the girl and the pepper spray. Men—men like Khaled and Dylan—were cut off from their natural role, which was to command. To be respected. That woman who maced Dylan, for instance. She should have known her place. “Whores,” Khaled typed. “The world has turned all women into whores.”
The world was screwed up. Anyone could see that. But Khaled actually seemed to know why. He explained to Dylan how all of his problems were a result of the forces aligned against men like them. The war in Iraq was a ploy by international bankers. Just like 9/11, the government rigged the whole thing.
Which was also why Dylan couldn’t get a recording contract—the music business was completely controlled by the same people. And of course his father was hoarding his trust fund. The bankers wanted to keep it, to suck it dry.
It all fell into place. It really wasn’t Dylan’s fault. He wasn’t quite sure how it all added up, but he liked the bottom line: he deserved better, and someone had conspired to take it from him. There had to be some reason a guy like him was stocking candy and Coke machines for a living.
Some people were meant for better things than menial labor, Khaled said. He had a plan, and Dylan could be part of it.
Khaled’s father had multiple businesses contracting with the U.S. Army. In Kuwait, Khaled promised
, Dylan could be making as much as a hundred grand a year, just for driving a truck like he did now. Everyone else was profiting from the war, Khaled said. Why shouldn’t Dylan get a little of the action?
Dylan knew it was time for a life change. His once toned gym muscles were going soft, and his hair was getting thin. His band had broken up. His boss had knocked his hours back, and he tried to buy a girl a drink in a bar in Newport Beach a week ago, only to find he didn’t have enough in his wallet for her fourteen-dollar appletini.
What the hell, he thought. There was nothing tying him down. The closest thing he had to a relationship was a favorite stripper at Spearmint Rhino. Khaled sent him a plane ticket and an advance on the first month’s paycheck.
His great adventure in Kuwait didn’t start at all like he planned.
He wandered around the Kuwait City airport, jet-lagged and clueless, surrounded by men and women wearing long robes. One of the locals spotted him, broke away from a pack of his friends, and approached.
Dylan was nervous. This was just after those contractors in Baghdad were kidnapped, and he had a frightening vision of his own head rolling on the floor in some Jihadi terrorist’s garage.
Then he recognized the guy behind the beard.
Khaled was wrapped in traditional robes, covered in hair. If he hadn’t smiled and said Dylan’s name, Dylan never would have put it together.
He embraced Dylan warmly, even though his friends all scowled. He escorted Dylan to a new apartment, which came with the job. Khaled couldn’t stay and talk—he was running his father’s shipping concerns in Kuwait—but he promised they’d catch up later.
After a month, Dylan was considering chucking the whole thing and heading home.
First off, he was getting a lot less than a hundred grand a year. The big money was for the people willing to work in Baghdad and risk getting blown into stew meat. His paycheck worked out to about what he was making back in the States.
But instead of loading up candy machines, he had the worst job on the base—mortuary support. Which was a fancy name for undertaker. Dead bodies would show up all day and all night at Camp Wolf. He was responsible for taking the coffins—sorry, “transfer cases,” the army called them—and stacking them, then driving them over to the airfield, where they’d be shipped back home.
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