Nightmerica

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

It’s a real gift to know that so many people are waiting for me to get back to Nathaniel Cade, the President’s Vampire, who is still my best-loved and most popular character. There are several reasons I haven’t done another full-length Cade novel, but it’s never been for a lack of appreciation from his fans. I’ve been busy with a lot of other things, and Cade is now a personal project, at least until another publisher picks him up, so he gets pushed to the back of the line.

I also have to admit the world has gotten so strange that it’s been hard to find a story for Cade. When I began writing these books, the line between conspiracy theory and mainstream political platform was a lot clearer. Now there are people who believe JFK Jr. is going to rise from the dead and lead an army against the Reptilian overlords who are harvesting bodily fluids from innocent children in their Martian work camps.

Speaking as a longtime researcher of conspiracies, that is some Grade-A crazy.

So I’ve had to think harder about an appropriate challenge for Cade, and how his world has to change to keep up with ours.

This is the start. I’m not sure where it ends yet, but I hope you like it.

NIGHTMERICA

Chapter 1

No one expected the end of the world to begin on a Tuesday. That’s probably why they all missed the signs.

At first, it was nothing but the usual noise along the usual channels. An astronomer looked up at the night sky through a telescope and then the entire observatory had to be evacuated and locked down. The first responders covered it up with a story about a janitor and kiddie porn, but the astronomer was placed in a mental institution because he wouldn’t stop screaming about something looking back at him.

Then a group of hikers vanished in Yosemite. Followed by a small child in a small town began speaking in a dead language. A clutch of eggs was found in a graveyard and the things that hatched from them claimed more than two dozen lives before they were finally put down.

Normal stuff, in other words. The protocols were followed. Any news coverage of the incidents was quickly extinguished, not only by the authorities with a vested interest in keeping things quiet, but by the natural human tendency to disbelieve stories involving the things that crept and slithered and bumped in the night.

But when the man who went by the name Proctor began assembling all the data a month later, he was disturbed by the frequency and number of the incidents.

An elder presence which was only supposed to appear every 500 years returned twice in a single week. A fake exorcism conducted at a megachurch ended up invoking a real demon, and the resulting bloodbath had to be covered up as a mass shooting. There was a goblin infestation in a nearly deserted mall; a group of serial killers began coordinating their efforts without any apparent means of communication; an outbreak of mindworms in a planned community not far from Ocala, Florida; a suicide-inspiring text chain that leaped from one high school to the next; and something that would not stay buried in Wyoming no matter how many times they killed it.

Proctor read all the relevant incident reports and knew he was not seeing the whole picture. Even for a man as connected as himself, information was imperfectly transmitted. Some things did not get written down, or passed on. Memos were shredded, files deleted, some sheriff in some backwater town decided to cover his ass by trying to forget the whole thing.

And some people died before they could warn anyone else, of course, or they became part of the problem, another vector for the transmission of the disease.

Ordinarily, this would not trouble him. Proctor had chosen his side in this fight. He was comfortable there, and believed it would all come out right in the end.

But that was precisely the problem. It was too soon. The End was not supposed to be this near.

Yet there was no arguing with the data. The Other Side was moving into this world at an unprecedented rate, taking more territory and more lives every day. It was breaking containment. You could see the pattern if you looked. Hot spots were all over the map of the United States on his computer screen.

At that point, Proctor leaned back in his chair, and pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his high forehead and rubbed his eyes. It was late, and it was a Friday, which meant he’d missed pizza night with his wife and kids. They hated it when that happened, and so did he.

But there was no helping it. He looked at all the paper across his desk, the open books, the newspaper clippings, the transcripts of witness testimony, the photos of the bodies.

And he kept coming back to the same question, over and over.

Where the hell was Nathaniel Cade?

Chapter 2

Cade wondered why the hell he was here.

There were many better uses for his time. He stood outside a small cinderblock building in the French countryside in the dead of night, waiting for someone in the White House to wake President Lester Wyman in order to give the final approval for the mission he’d planned.

Well. “Planned” was a strong word in this case.

Wyman had been livid at a perceived slight from the French president at their last joint press conference. He didn’t speak French himself, but someone had helpfully shown him what “tête d’épingle” meant on Google Translate. “I want to bloody that superior bastard’s nose,” he’d said in the White House. “What do they have that we can wreck?”

So Cade was here, at a small outpost of the Direction Fantôme, the French department that dealt with occult threats.

Honestly, a squad of reasonably well-trained operatives could handle this. Sending Cade was pure overkill.

But the President of the United States insisted, and Cade was bound to follow his orders, no matter how petty, stupid, or pointless.

One hundred and fifty-three years earlier, Cade had been turned into a predator, a blood-drinking monster, a drain on the human race known as a vampire. Shortly afterward, he was captured by the federal government and bound by a blood oath to serve the president and defend the country from the other unnatural creatures in the world. He’d served venal, selfish, and incompetent presidents before. He’d seen men who ignored their better instincts and the best advice available. He’d seen some of them who were corrupt, some who were arrogant, some who were impulsive, and some who were not very bright.

But Lester Wyman was the worst possible combination of all of those traits. What’s more, he knew it, and he did not care. He had been waiting his whole life to have the power to punish everyone who’d ever slighted him. Now that he had it, no one would tell him what to do.

Wyman’s predecessor, President Samuel Curtis, had once said that the president was the most dangerous narcissist in history — because the whole world really did revolve around him.

Curtis had been a decent man and a good president. His worst decision had been naming Wyman his vice-president.

Cade strongly suspected it had been a fatal decision. But he could not prove it. Could not do anything that was disloyal to Wyman, in fact, now that Wyman held the office. The bonds of his oath held him as tightly as chains. He’d resisted orders in the past. Seizures and unbearable pain were only the beginning.

Cade wondered if this was hell, then. To serve the worst man to ever sit in the Oval Office.

It was probably no worse than Cade deserved. He’d given up hoping there was something left of a soul inside him several years before. Once, he refrained from feeding on humans. He wore a cross around his neck, using the pain to distract him from the ever-present thirst.

He didn’t wear it any more. He’d settled that question for himself.

Cade’s earpiece, a nifty little bit of high-tech spy gear linked to a secure satellite channel, came to life. A Secret Service agent back in Washington D.C. spoke. “Nightmare Pet, do you copy?”

Cade’s code-name. Given to him a long time ago. “I’m here,” he said.

“The word is given. The big man says go. Fuck ‘em up, buddy.”

Cade did not really go in for human expressions anymore, like rolling his eyes or sighing. But there were times he was sorely tempted.

“I understand,” he said.

And then he was gone.

He crossed the darkened ground so fast no human eye could have caught him. He felt the first of the protective wards as he ran through it; it was meant to cause intense fear to anyone who came too close to the little building, to push them away. Cade, however, had left most of his fears behind when he died, and anyway, he was moving too fast by that point.

The second ward — the French used sorcery, the British used gadgets, and the United States used Cade — was meant to induce debilitating agony for anyone who wasn’t scared off by the first ward. Cade had a fairly high tolerance for that, too, and it was also set for someone moving at normal, human speeds.

The final ward was meant to kill anyone who got within a dozen feet of the front door. But Cade was already dead. The spell, like all magic, resembled computer software in that way. It worked by coding very specific responses to specific instructions. Cade was an anomaly. The conditions didn’t apply, so the spell simply ignored him.

There were other safeguards, of course, meant to alert the people inside the secret lair with alarms and flashing lights and a robotic, pre-recorded voice that said “Alerte! Alerte! Alerte!” over and over. The agents would respond to that, eventually.

But Cade was already through the door.

The inside of the blockhouse looked nothing like its plain exterior. It was, honestly, a marvel of technology used to harness the power of the occult. There were computers attached to satellite relays and antennas which detected vague tremors in the ether, and monitors that scanned the nation’s ley lines, looking for surges of power or breaks that indicated serious trouble. There was a weapons cabinet, racked with devices that fired wooden stakes for vampires like Cade — there had been an infestation of them in Paris for centuries — as well as automatic rifles loaded with silver ammunition, handheld high-intensity flamethrowers, holy water sprayers, and magical relics soaked in ritual energy. There was an agent on duty, clad in a tactical jumpsuit, seated at an array of equipment that was only beginning to tell him how much trouble he was in.

He managed to turn his head before Cade knocked him halfway across the room.

The man had training. Cade heard three of his ribs break when he hit the wall, but he was already muttering a curse as he got back to his feet.

Dark energy gathered in response, and Cade had to dodge a bolt of some kind of necromantic lightning that appeared out of nowhere.

A wizard. It had been years since Cade fought one. He punched the man in the throat and that ended that nonsense.

Cade was not specifically instructed to kill anyone, so he tried not to crush the man’s windpipe.

The man went down, unconscious.

Cade went to work, smashing the equipment, destroying the weapons, inflicting damage that would take months to repair.

He was fully aware of what he was doing here. He was helping to cripple another nation’s vital defense against the Other Side. It was a completely deniable action, because no world leader in their right mind would admit the threat existed, let alone that billions in tax dollars went to fighting demons and ghouls and goblins. It would cause pain and expense and Wyman would feel better for an hour, or maybe only a few minutes.

But there would always be another slight to be avenged, another idiotic mission to carry out to service Wyman’s ego. Cade had been doing a lot of these in the past three years. Sometimes against hostile nations, sometimes against allied ones. Wyman didn’t have any true friends. He didn’t believe in them.

All of this went through Cade’s incredibly quick mind as he pulled a length of specially looped cable from the wall. It shorted and fritzed, and a section of France’s secret surveillance system went blind.

Cade’s hearing picked up noise in the concrete levels below. There were more secret magician-soldiers stationed here, of course. They were moving, slowly but inevitably, up the emergency stairs.

Cade picked up a server rack and flung it across the room, wedging it firmly in the door. If they got past that, he would deal with them.

He really did not want to murder any of them simply for doing their job.

The first agent was, to his credit, trying to get back to his feet, choking and spitting. He might have been magically enhanced, which would surely shorten his life, or just stubborn, which would do the same thing in this line of work. He was staggering toward the weapons cabinet.

Cade was across the room in an instant. He grabbed the Direction Fantôm agent by the front of his little spy costume, intending to toss him against another wall to see if that would take the fight out of him.

Mistake. Pain shot up Cade’s arm and sent him shuddering backward, his hand smoking. The agent gave him a smile —  blood on his teeth, Cade must have broken something loose inside him — and showed Cade a talisman worn on a leather cord under his shirt. It glowed with some kind of curse or blessing. Probably holy. Something extraordinarily powerful either way, if it could jolt Cade like that.

“I am trying to save your life,” Cade said in English, not exactly keeping the annoyance from his voice.

The agent didn’t hear him or didn’t care. He used the moment to grab one of the stakers from the cabinet. He turned, painfully slow, and tried to rack a bolt into the firing chamber.

Cade picked up a laptop sitting on a nearby table and spun it like a frisbee. It knocked the staker from the agent’s hands and bounced against his face, breaking his nose with a satisfying crunch.

The agent went down again. Cade looked around the room and surveyed the damage.

The room was a wreck. It would take months to restore this particular section of wall in France’s border against the Other Side. It would be expensive and in the interim, people would probably die.

He supposed that would satisfy Wyman.

He turned to go.

Behind him, he heard the agent struggling to his feet again. Remarkable.

He was trying to speak, but it wasn’t a magic spell. Cade could tell that the man didn’t have the strength left to summon much of anything. Cade cocked his head to the side, waiting.

“Va te faire foutre, tampon,” the agent said, spitting blood.

Somehow an insult in French always sounded worse, Cade thought. He wondered how they managed that.

He turned and left the building. Cade could have crippled the man, but he was young, and it was admirable how he fought even when he should have run.

Stupid, yes, but admirable.

He reminded Cade of Zach.

…TO BE CONTINUED.