The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story

by Farnsworth, Christopher

  He plugged his phone in with a USB cord, and bypassed all of the laptop’s security.

  There was not a lot that was useful, not at first glance. He did find Julius’ Facebook page, which had not been updated since August. The most recent pic was of Julius with a group of five other guys, all about the same age. One of them was tagged MARCUS WILKES.

  He called Ramos over. She looked at the image on the screen.

  “Just your best guess, but does this guy match the general dimensions of our first crispy critter?”

  She peered at the pic for a moment. “I can do better than that. Simulation’s ready.”

  She took out her own phone and zapped a picture over to his. It was the computer mock-up of the face on the burned man.

  It was bald and hairless, while the kid in the photo was bearded, but it was close enough to match. Definitely the same guy.

  Not good, Zach thought. There were six of them. Standard number for a cell. All of them mildly political, easily radicalized — you could put them in a term paper. If Julius and Marcus were working together, if they knew this secret, the odds were good that the other four were in on it, too.

  He copy-pasted their names: JOSH GREGORY, COOPER REED, TYSON NOVAK, ADAM THOMPSON. And then put his computer to work again, searching for them all, any traces they’d left, any phone calls, any emails, anything at all.

  Ramos put a gloved finger near the screen. “Where are they? Looks like a desert.”

  Zach read the caption, then snorted.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You’re going to love this. They’re at Burning Man.”

  Ramos said, “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  Zach’s phone suddenly buzzed. Direct call. Oval Office.

  Shit. He answered. “Sir.”

  “CNN,” President Curtis said, then hung up.

  There was a flatscreen on a desk nearby. Zach turned it on and found the right channel.

  The sun streamed down on the scene. A mall outside Springfield. People running and crying. The crawl along the bottom of the screen with a body count. Smoke pouring from windows that had been blown out of an atrium.

  Another one. This time in broad daylight.

  “Oh, no,” Ramos said. Her voice sounded very small.

  Zach got up and headed for the car, already dialing the pilot of the Gulfstream.

  “Do you want me to get Cade?” Ramos asked.

  “Tell him at sunset. He’ll find me. And keep working on those bodies.”

  No point in waking Cade right now. They were already too late.

  

  There was even less left behind this time. The burned man was mostly ash, a pile of cremated flesh and bone in the middle of the bombed-out food court. Maybe he burned hotter in a big, open space. Maybe he was better at the trick than either of the other two.

  Maybe Ramos could figure that out. Zach was just trying to keep from throwing up.

  The scene in the theater had been sterile compared to the mall. Fewer people had been close to him — small favors — but the panic had been worse. There were tables overturned, fast-food wrappers and spilled drinks everywhere. Blood on the tiles where people were knocked to the ground and trampled. The scent of burned flesh mingled with grease from deep fryers that no one had thought to turn off.

  In all, seven more dead, maybe thirty more injured. Zach had walked past the ambulances where the medics were working on people. He saw the body bags.

  Two of them were much too large for the tiny bodies inside.

  Zach had operated on autopilot, reflexes kicking in and taking over. He confiscated the security video before it ended up on YouTube. It showed a young man — it looked like Cooper Reed, but he couldn’t be sure — standing in the food court. And then a bright flash, and everything inside a circle around him was burning. People stood in shock, and then their mouths opened in silent screams.

  There was no sound on the video. Small favors.

  Zach shut the whole area down and called in the cleaners, the crew of people that worked for him and Cade picking up the wreckage of things that were not supposed to exist. The head cleaner, Smitty, wasn’t available, but he sent a team. Zach had them contain the scene and collect the evidence.

  Then there wasn’t much else he could do. He sat and watched them work. They were vacuuming up the ashes and bagging the bits that got clogged.

  “Seabrook’s people will love this,” one said to the other. “I bet he’ll have a campaign ad about it before the end of the week.”

  “Oh, hey. Too soon.”

  “Not for him. So what are we going to call this one?”

  “Gas main explosion?”

  “We use that all the time.”

  “Well, it happens.”

  Zach felt sick, and not from the barbecue stink in the air. The cleaners kept talking.

  “How about an electrical fire?”

  “That’s about as original as a gas main.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know we were grading on creativity.”

  “Hey, who says you can’t have fun at work?”

  They both laughed at that. It was the laughter that did it.

  “Will you both just shut the fuck up,” Zach said through gritted teeth.

  The cleaners turned. They looked puzzled.

  “You got a better idea, Barrows?” one asked. “You want to come up with a cover story on your own?”

  They didn’t get it. Zach crossed the floor to the nearest cleaner, grabbed the front of his coverall, and yanked him around violently to face the center of the explosion.

  “Seventeen people,” Zach said. “Seventeen. And that’s just so far. You want to keep making more jokes?”

  The cleaner seemed ready to make some kind of smart-ass comment. But then he saw the look in Zach’s eyes.

  “Hey,” he said, almost whining. “We’re just doing our job, Zach.”

  Zach let go of the man’s coverall and shoved him back. “Then do it.”

  The man looked sheepish. “Um. What do we say about — ”

  Zach locked it down. He felt embarrassed. This was his job. “Here’s what we do. We release the video.”

  “What?”

  “Freak accident. Gas leak. Pipes running under the concrete. One developed a crack. This guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “He wasn’t a bomber. He was a victim,” the cleaner said, getting it now.

  “Right,” Zach said. “A one-in-a-million chance. I can see the headline already. ‘This Guy Stepped in the Wrong Place at the Mall, and You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.’ No one would ever think this happened on purpose.”

  Then Zach heard Cade’s gravestone voice behind him. “Of course, it’s only a freak accident if it happens once.”

  Zach turned around. The cleaners edged away. Zach looked up through the shattered windows of the atrium. Night already. Cade must have woken up early.

  

  They walked to the car. Cade drove this time.

  Zach thought about all of the chalk outlines in the ash, each one signifying someone who just wanted a night out, or a couple hours’ distraction. Seventeen people who would never have another moment to waste, ever. Seventeen holes burned out of the world.

  “I want to tell you something,” Zach said. “Usually, I don’t want to know what you do. At the end. I get that some things require a permanent solution. But I do not like to be a part of it. The killing. I don’t like it. I never have. Most of the time, it makes me sick. Even when I know it’s necessary.”

  Cade didn’t reply. He knew all this.

  “Not this time,” he told Cade. “This time, I want to kill these people.”

  Cade nodded. “Then we should get to work.”

  Zach’s phone beeped to signal a priority message. Cade looked at him, waiting for the news.

  “Son of a bitch,” Zach said. “We got one of them.”

  

  Josh Gregory used
his credit card. A Visa he’d signed up for as a student, billing address at his parents’ house. Like his friends, he hadn’t used it at all since he’d been in Nevada last month.

  Zach put an alert through the financial system anyway, designed to ping him if it was run through any scanner anywhere in the U.S.

  He didn’t expect much of it. Then it hit. Someone used the card to pay for a hotel room in a Comfort Inn near Springfield College.

  It only took them about fifteen minutes to drive from the mall to the hotel. It only took a cold stare from Cade to get the desk clerk to give up the room number.

  Zach called Ramos. “Hey. We think we’ve got one. Any way you can tell us how to keep them from blowing up would be really helpful right now.”

  Eight seconds of silence followed.

  “You still there?”

  “I think Cade might have been right,” Ramos finally said. “I can’t figure out any biological way they’re doing this. This guy, the one you brought back, his insides were basically mush. His fat had already liquefied, to make it into some kind of accelerant. His muscles are filled with flammable compounds that should have killed him long before you found him. And I’ve got no idea how that happened.”

  “Well, super,” Zach said.

  “I’ll keep looking,” she said. “But I think your best bet is to stop the reaction before it begins. However they’re triggering it, it has to be a conscious process. Cade only stopped it when he killed this one.”

  “Yeah. We already knew that. Thanks.”

  Ramos started to apologize, but Zach hung up on her. He looked at Cade. “You caught all that?”

  Cade nodded. His hearing, like everything else about him, was inhuman. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “We need information from this guy, Cade.”

  “If he’s like the others, he can trigger the explosion in less than 30 seconds. I’m not inclined to give him the chance.”

  “I’m ordering you to wait and see if he’s hostile first. Maybe we can talk to him.”

  Cade hesitated, then nodded so slowly that it looked like it was painful. Zach finally realized something. Fire was one of the few things that could kill Cade again. And permanently, this time.

  “I know I’m asking you to take a risk here,” he said.

  Cade’s mouth twitched. “What’s life without risk?”

  Then he began walking. A moment later, they stood on the concrete balcony outside the second floor room.

  Cade hesitated outside the door. He sniffed.

  “Are you certain you should be here?” Cade asked.

  Zach didn’t need a vampire’s senses. The same smell. Sulfur.

  “I’m not waiting in the car.”

  “Idiot.”

  Cade used the master key card from the front desk. He went in first.

  Zach waited for a moment, crouching, half-expecting a fireball to erupt from the room.

  Then Cade called him inside.

  Zach entered. He saw a slightly doughy young man sitting in a chair by the bed, watching the coverage on CNN. Josh Gregory.

  The video was already making the rounds. Zach checked the screen. The local fire marshal was explaining to Wolf Blitzer about the freak accident.

  Josh made no attempt to get up, or even move. He sat next to a half-empty box of pizza.

  “I wondered when somebody would show up,” he said.

  Cade closed the door behind Zach.

  They both pulled up chairs.

  Josh looked at them. His eyes were red and puffy. He’d been crying.

  “I guess you probably want to know what’s going on, huh?”

  

  One month earlier. The Black Rock Desert, Nevada.

  “The system is corrupt,” Julius said. “You can’t work within a corrupt system and expect anything to change.”

  “That’s cynical bullshit. An excuse to sit on the sidelines while other people make the decisions and take the risks. You’ve got to get involved.”

  “We’re looking at two or three degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures in our lifetime. More if the methane feedback kicks in when the arctic permafrosts melt. Everything below the Arctic and Antarctic circles become deserts. The plankton in the seas dies off, and so do all the fish. So do all the crops. We run out of food. Wars. Plagues. Everyone dies. And you want to vote on it, like we’re in student council?”

  “Like you have the balls to do anything else?” Marc shot back. “When we were at the last demo, you were doing a puppet show when I was punching a cop.”

  Julius scowled. “Puppetry is an effective method of mocking the power structure and educating people, with a rich history dating back to the 14th century.”

  Josh watched Marc and Julius argue. They were at Burning Man right now, but they could have been anywhere. In their dorm room, in the dining hall, in class, or sitting on the quad. They went through it with new energy every time, no matter how often they repeated the same lines.

  Josh tried to play peacemaker with a joke, but they ignored him. Ty and Cooper were content to be the audience, grinning like morons. As usual, they all looked to Adam to make the final ruling.

  “The world is burning,” Adam said. “We’re all doing what we can. But maybe it’s not enough.”

  That calmed them down. Adam was the authority. They could all debate about libertarianism or anarcho-syndicalism but the fact was, he was their leader, no question and no argument. Their little group revolved around him, followed him, and always deferred to him, even if they couldn’t always say why.

  Maybe it was because he was ridiculously handsome, almost physically flawless. Josh knew Adam had been a catalog model for a little while — it was how he’d paid for college. Even when he slouched, Adam looked like he was still posing for an unseen camera.

  But there was more to it than his good looks. People just listened to Adam. It was like some kind of Jedi mind trick. He could say the stupidest shit, and everyone would nod like it was the smartest thing they’d ever heard. His jokes didn’t have to be funny for people to laugh. They didn’t even have to be jokes.

  Josh had heard the word charisma before, usually in his poli-sci required reading, but until he met Adam sophomore year, he’d never actually seen someone with it.

  It was Adam who got them all into causes, Adam who took them all to their first Burning Man, and Adam who led them into the Occupy movement. They’d all read the books he recommended (or, in the case of Marc, pretended to), mouthed the same slogans he did, and marched in the same demonstrations. They never would have said they were following him — they were individuals, they all just decided to do the same things that Adam did on their own.

  Josh was the only one who thought it was funny when he pointed that out. He didn’t mind. He knew his role. He was the clown. He kept things from getting too serious.

  It wasn’t like Josh disagreed with anything that Adam said, or believed. He knew the world was screwed. They were all loading up on student loan debt, trying to put off the day when they’d go out into the free market and learn firsthand how there were no jobs. In the meantime, the ice caps were melting, and a bunch of bankers had stolen all the money. Josh didn’t know what signing online petitions or squatting in a park was going to do to stop that, but it was better than nothing, right?

  They watched the group of fire-dancers in front of them with glazed eyes. There were always a lot of people doing fire-related tricks at Burning Man — it was there in the name. Every year about 50,000 people came out to the Black Rock desert in Nevada to listen to music, ingest a whole shitload of drugs, and watch a giant wooden man get burned to the ground,. Every year, before the man was burned, there were dozens of performances from people who would dance with burning torches, light vodka from their mouths, and even jump naked through flaming hoops.

  But this group was really good. They seemed to be able to make the fire itself dance, and unlike some of the amateurs playing with gasoline, they were ne
ver even singed while they performed.

  They called themselves the Sons of the Salamander.

  Personally, Josh wanted to go look for the topless girls giving away free hugs, but Adam was fascinated and refused to move. So they all stayed with him.

  Charisma. Or laziness. Whatever.

  The sun was rising over the playa before the dancers finally extinguished their torches and put away their props. They seemed cool and refreshed despite hours of exertion.

  One of them, a gray-haired man who looked like beef jerky stretched over a skeleton, looked at Adam and the rest of them as if noticing him for the first time.

  “You and your friends talk a lot of shit,” he said. He was smiling.

  Marc bristled at that. “We want to change the world, dude,” he said. “Takes more than just playing with matches and dancing around.”

  Marc had been a jock in high school. He wore his hair long and talked about peace and love now, but at heart, he still wanted to solve every problem by giving it a wedgie and slamming it into a locker somewhere.

  “Takes more than just talking, too,” the old man said. He kept looking at Adam, even though he was answering Marc.

  “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” Adam said. “We’re trying to find new ways. Better ways.”

  “New ways aren’t always better,” the old man said. “That’s why we dance with the fire. To re-connect. To get back into the true power. We summon the flame through us, to strengthen us, to transform us, body and soul.”

  “We’re looking for more than just a spiritual transformation,” Julius said. “We want real change.”

  “Do you?” The old man looked right at Josh when he said this. “Most of you little bastards are just here to see the naked girls.”

  “That’s just a fringe benefit,” Josh said, and everyone laughed.

  The old man didn’t stop smiling, but his eyes grew strangely cold.

  “You’re nothing,” he said. “You’re just like the rest. This world has a death wish. It has gone too far. Overgrown. Choked with weeds and covered in trash. You all know this, but you’re too fat and happy to do anything about it. You’ll watch it all strangle slowly.”