The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story

by Farnsworth, Christopher

  With every second, as he spoke, as the sun rose over the makeshift city, he seemed to change. When he was dancing in the dark, he seemed huge and vital. Now he looked like a tree that had somehow survived a forest fire, blackened and twisted.

  Josh felt uneasy. Maybe the high was wearing off.

  He stood up to go back to their campsite. But Adam rose, too.

  “You talk like you’ve got a better idea,” he said to the old man.

  “You talk about the world burning? It’s not burning nearly quickly enough. It is time for a purifying fire,” the old man said. “And I can show you the way.”

  Josh really wanted to leave. But his feet seemed stuck in the sand. He could feel the same hesitation from his friends. They would do what Adam did. As always.

  Josh desperately wanted Adam to walk away, right now.

  Adam said, “All right then. Show me.”

  The old man walked back toward his camp, waving them along. Adam went with him. So did Marc, and Julius, and a couple others. Josh was the last to follow. But he followed.

  A day later, the makeshift campsites were taken down. The Man was nothing but ashes on the playa, the bigger chunks carefully swept up and carted away. RVs and cars and trucks started their engines and drove back to civilization.

  But one SUV stayed where it was. A tow truck, kept on hand by the festival organizers, dragged it out to the highway, where it was impounded by the county sheriff. Nobody ever came back to claim it.

  Josh and five of his friends never made it back to school, either. The old man had showed them, just like he promised.

  

  “We all know how to do it now,” Josh told Zach and Cade. “They left us after they taught us how.”

  “You can do the same thing as the others?” Zach asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Josh said. “I could even teach you, if you wanted.”

  “Pass,” Zach said.

  Josh thought that was funny. “Yeah. It’s sort of a one-time-only trick.”

  “So why do it at all?”

  “Adam said we could show people, we could make a difference, that we’d make them understand. We were going to infiltrate the highest security events. Go right through the metal detectors. And then, you know, kaboom. Take out the people responsible for everything. We’d cut the head off the serpent, he said.”

  “Why?” Zach asked. He really wanted to know.

  “Hey. The world is dying,” Josh said. “Even I can see that. Something’s gotta stop it. I thought, sure, maybe that would be worth my life.”

  “Noble of you,” Cade said.

  Josh glared at him. Or tried to. He looked away after a fraction of a second.

  “What changed?” Zach asked.

  Josh gave a little shrug, a small laugh. “Turns out it’s really hard to even get close to those kind of things. Most of the time you have to have an invitation. Or a security clearance. So Adam sent us out to find other targets.”

  “Like movie theaters and malls,” Cade said.

  Josh looked down, shame evident on his face. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. That’s why I waited here. I knew someone would track me down. I’ll help you find Adam and Ty. Give me some paperwork, sign me up for witness protection, whatever. I’ll help you.”

  “Where are your friends now?” Cade said, moving closer to him.

  “I don’t know.” He shrank back from Cade. “Honest. I don’t. We split into three groups. That way if one of us got caught — ”

  “ — The others would still be able to carry out their attacks,” Cade finished for him. “Yes. I know. Where do you think they are? You know them. Where would they go?”

  Josh bit his lip. “If I could think of a place, I’d tell you.”

  “You have to do better than that.” Cade’s tone didn’t change, but the threat was loud and clear.

  “I don’t know. I swear. All I can think of is Adam really wanted people to get it. He wanted them to know they weren’t safe anywhere.”

  “What did he say? Think harder,” Cade said.

  Sweat popped out on Josh’s upper lip. “That’s it, man, seriously. Sheep, he said. Sheep huddled behind fences thinking they were safe from the wolves. He talked like that all the time.”

  Cade waited.

  “I swear, that’s all I know.”

  “Then we’re done here,” Cade said. He stepped close to the chair where Josh was seated and kneeled down to the young man.

  “What?” Josh said. “I told you. I’ll cooperate. I’ll even go to jail if I have to.”

  Cade didn’t respond. Zach saw Josh go still with pure terror.

  “Cade. Do you really have to do this?”

  “What do you suggest? A trial? So the world learns this is possible? Or prison? Where he could teach others? No. No one can know about this.”

  “He let us find him.”

  “His attack of conscience came a bit late for seventeen people.”

  Josh understood what was happening, even if he didn’t want to. He shook as if he was caught in the freezing cold. “Come on, man. I helped you,” he said.

  Cade didn’t respond.

  “I told you everything I know. Come on. That’s got to be worth something.”

  “I’ll make it quick,” Cade said. “That’s all I can offer you.”

  “Come on, man. What was I supposed to do?” Josh said, his voice nearly a shriek now. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “The right thing,” Cade said.

  Zach wondered whether he could order Cade to stop. Then it was already done.

  Zach didn’t see Cade’s hands move. He only heard the sound as Josh’s neck snapped.

  The young man’s body sagged to the ground. Cade was already at the front door.

  Zach stood there, watching as the corpse settled to the floor, eyes still open, staring at nothing.

  “He tried to do the right thing,” Zach said.

  “Yes he did,” Cade said. “Eventually.”

  Zach didn’t reply. He just kept looking at the body.

  “You said you wanted to be a part of this,” Cade reminded him, and walked out the door.

  A moment later, Zach followed.

  

  Cade drove, and let Zach stew with his guilt and his indecision. That was part of his job, after all.

  Cade wasn’t burdened with those problems. He considered the problem so he could find the most effective solution. That was Cade’s job.

  It was all down to Adam. Where would he go? None of them had shown much imagination so far. After returning from Nevada, they hadn’t gone far. Perhaps that was a side effect of the change they’d made inside themselves. Perhaps their time was limited before they burned.

  Or perhaps they were simply too eager to show the world what they could do.

  Either way, it led him to believe the last two would not go far. But Adam would want to make a statement. Especially now that Zach had spoiled the fear and panic of the mall attack by turning it into an accident in the eyes of the public.

  Adam wanted people to know they were not safe. That he could walk past any obstacle and burn them into nothingness. This was a boy raised on terror alerts and media panics. What would be the best place to spread fear? Where would he find his next mass of humanity, his next group of victims? Sheep, huddled behind fences, believing that made them safe from the wolves.

  No one was ever safe, Cade knew.

  And suddenly, he had the answer.

  He swung the car into a U-turn on the freeway. It snapped Zach out of his reverie.

  “Cade, what the hell?”

  “The airport,” Cade said. “They’re going to attack the airport.”

  

  Logan International Airport was a zoo at the best of times. With the theater bombing, and the freak explosion at the mall — Zach’s spin on that was holding — people were even more tense.

  But they still had places to go, and they’d paid too much for their tick
ets, and they weren’t about to lose their spot on the 7:40 a.m. shuttle to JFK just because some idiot blew himself to bits. So they got out of their taxis, or kissed their loved ones goodbye at the curb, pulled their carrier bags behind them as they rushed to stand in line along with thousands of people just like them.

  Thousands. All moving in and out of the doors and crammed into waiting areas and stuck in the extra-long lines at the TSA checkpoints.

  There were so many of them, Zach realized. So many faces, it inspired vertigo.

  He stood in Logan’s central security office, watching them all on over a dozen small high-definition screens, cycling through every angle of the airport’s security cameras on a three-second rotation. There were hundreds of feeds and thousands of images per minute, arranged specially as part of a pilot program to use facial recognition software to track suspected terrorists. Logan was one of the few airports in the nation to have the cameras and the equipment ready.

  The only problem was that the software wasn’t finalized yet. It was still in the debugging phase. Testing wasn’t supposed for another six months.

  Instead, they had Cade.

  He sat at the console for the cameras, running them all manually, his hands a constant blur over the keys. Cade’s eyes scanned the screens, never blinking, never resting for more than a fraction of a second. It didn’t remind Zach of anything as cold and emotionless as a computer. This was more like watching a hawk look for mice from a thousand yards in the air. Pure predator mode.

  Zach hoped it would be enough.

  There was a specially trained Secret Service agent in the room with them, the commander of one of the Secret Service’s Emergency Response Teams. He was in full body armor and gear, with a walkie-talkie tuned to a channel that would alert his team as soon as Cade saw something.

  “We should be setting up sniper positions,” the ERT leader said. He was still unhappy with Zach and Cade running this operation. He’d worked with them in the past, and he was aware Cade was some kind of government special weapon in human form. But he’d never seen Cade in action first-hand. And he wanted to follow standard protocol.

  Zach didn’t answer. He didn’t want to distract Cade.

  “I said, we should set up — ”

  Cade’s eyes didn’t move from the screens when he replied: “I heard what you said. I was ignoring you.”

  The man reddened, but kept his temper. “If there’s a threat like you say, we need to get the locals involved, set up a perimeter, control the access points. Just for starters.”

  Zach sighed. The guy needed it spelled out for him, and Cade wasn’t going to do it.

  “We don’t have time,” Zach said. “They’re on their way already. We set up checkpoints, they’ll panic, and then they’ll trigger before we can get to them. If we tell the local authorities, they’ll start evacuating the airport, and that will cause a panic, and our guys will see that and trigger before we can stop them. And a lot of people die, either way.”

  The ERT leader wasn’t mollified. “You should at least let me put my men into position.”

  “We can’t risk our guys seeing your men in body armor and freaking out. Trust me. Cade is the only one who can move fast enough.”

  “My men are pretty fast.”

  Zach was losing patience. “Really? Can they set up a sniper position in less than 30 seconds after we find one of these guys? Can they run at 75 miles per hour? Can they move faster than a literal goddamn speeding bullet?”

  The ERT commander didn’t respond.

  “Language,” Cade said, again without looking away.

  “Sorry,” Zach said to Cade. To the ERT leader, he said, “This is our best shot. Cade can pick them out of the crowd and put them down before they blow. It’s our only shot of avoiding another massacre.”

  The ERT leader nodded. Zach tried to look confident. But he couldn’t help but notice the time. They were getting into the heavy-traffic hours for the airport: all the morning flights, everyone trying to arrive early and get a jump on their day. The screens were packed with people, and more kept showing up.

  Worse, the sun was rising.

  Cade wouldn’t burst into flame in daylight. That was just in the movies. Instead, he got slower. He got sick. He got tired. He could operate inside, out of direct sunlight, but like every other airport, Logan was filled with floor-to-ceiling windows that let the sun shine in. Right now, there was patchy fog keeping the morning dim and gray. Thank God for New England weather in the fall. Zach hoped it would stick around.

  Minutes ticked by. The images strobed across the screens. Zach was beginning to get a migraine. He thought he saw the same people over and over. Every second, he expected to hear an explosion from one of the places where they couldn’t cast their net.

  Then Cade froze. His hands moved over the controls. Every screen filled with the same image.

  It was Tyson Novak. He’d shaved off his scruffy beard and was wearing sunglasses, but Zach was certain this was the same kid from the Facebook photos. More importantly, so was Cade.

  “Get ready to move,” the ERT commander said into his radio.

  “No,” Cade snapped, and the man actually recoiled.

  “I have this,” Cade said, more quietly. “Your men can’t stop him. I can.”

  “I heard what you said. But we can help — ”

  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 possible. 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 syste
m. 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 arms 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.