The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story by Christopher Farnsworth Page A

splash any gasoline or even light a match. Just a flash of light, and then a small circle of hell opened up.
    Now he just stood there — what was left of him, arms still reaching for the sky.
    It seemed very much like the skull, black and hard as coal now, was grinning.
    Cade suddenly appeared at Zach’s side. He had been lurking in the shadows. It was what he did. He could see things in the dark.
    “It’s not a firebomb,” Cade said. “I can’t smell any gasoline or any accelerant in the air. There’s no scent of thermite or napalm or phosphorus. Nothing short of a thermobaric weapon could have burned fast and hot enough to melt plastic and burn bodies to ash, and there’s no trace of that, either. This was not natural, or technological. This is outside ordinary human means.”
    No bomb, no chemicals, no device. Nothing.
    It was impossible.
    That was why Zach and Cade were here. This was an inhuman act, and dealing with the inhuman was their job, not least because Cade himself was not human, either.
    Cade was a vampire. Zach had finally gotten over that. For the most part. Other people could argue about how vampires didn’t exist, how they were just relics of folklore and sexual repression and nightmares. Zach had to work with Cade. Denial only got in the way.
    They had started the day in Washington D.C., in the Reliquary, the hidden rooms beneath the Smithsonian where Cade made his home. Trophies from his previous hunts lined the walls and tables around his coffin: bits and pieces of impossible animals, ancient relics, sinister weapons. Zach’s predecessor had explained that Cade was a hunter, and like any hunter, he kept trophies from his 145 years on the job.
    Zach had a coffeemaker and a desk.
    When CNN began running alerts about the bombing outside Brockton, Mass., Zach did not think he’d have to get Cade out of his box. A bunch of regular people who had no idea they were about to be made extras in some lunatic’s personal action movie. Like a school shooting or a workplace massacre, just another atrocity, just another day. Zach expected they’d find a loser huddled in his parents’ basement and that would be the end of it until the next time.
    Then he noticed the narrowing of the story. Information got tighter. The facts from the official sources, usually eager to prove they were on top of the situation, trickled down to nothing. The press conference devolved into “No comment” repeated over and over. Interviews were cancelled at the last minute. He’d been in politics long enough to recognize the signs. Someone was panicking.
    He knocked on Cade’s coffin lid right before the encrypted line from the Oval Office rang.
    President Samuel Curtis was facing re-election soon; he’d pay attention to the bombing no matter what, but his opponents loved to cast him as soft on national security and terrorism, especially after the attack on the White House. (Zach often wondered how they’d react if they knew it had been zombies marching on the Rose Garden, not a Jihadi sleeper cell like the cover story said.)
    The first bomb techs on the scene couldn’t find a bomb. That tripped all kinds of alarms. Eventually, it got all the way to the White House, and the president made the decision to send in Cade to check it out. They flew out of Andrews on a private Gulfstream jet with blacked-out windows and were in the theater less than four hours after the incident.
    “No bomb. You’re sure?” Zach asked.
    As always, Cade’s face was nearly expressionless. But Zach had learned to find the meaning in the vampire’s very subtle shifts of tone and emphasis.
    The look Cade gave him was one of a series that was basically variations on the same theme: how dumb are you?
    “So it wasn’t a bomb,” Zach said. “Do you know what did this?”
    Cade shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have never seen anything quite like this. That’s what concerns me.”
    That concerned Zach, too. “Concerned” in this case