Authors: Farnsworth| Christopher

The President's Vampire (31 page)

BOOK: The President's Vampire

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Graves didn’t have the strength of an old man, either. In a remote corner of his brain, Cade wondered what, exactly, had been done to Graves in order to give him this vitality.

Then Graves began to saw, and Cade felt the steel grinding his bones. That put the question more or less out of his head.

Cade was handicapped by the pardon covering Graves like a shield. He could not kill Graves, or even hurt him. But neither could he allow Graves to keep him from his mission.

Graves kneed him in the back again, and again. Cade pushed against the wire. It wouldn’t break. His hand was pinned against his own throat.

Cade felt his fangs emerge. He was starting to lose himself to his rage. But no. He was not about to forget who he was. He was still in charge of himself.

He snapped backward, rolling in the same direction that Graves pulled him.

Graves couldn’t hang on. He fell over.

Cade was on his feet, standing over Graves, on the floor. Graves realized he no longer had the saw in his hands. He looked around for it, and then looked up.

It was buried deep in Cade’s palm, the flesh trying to close around the wound already.

Graves was panting like a dog. His unnatural burst of strength had deserted him. Now he just looked like an old man who’d slipped in the kitchen.

He grinned at Cade. “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said.

Cade stared directly at Graves as he grabbed one ring of the saw and pulled. The saw came free of his hand with a slick pop.

He dropped it on Graves’s chest. And left.

Graves bellowed after him as the vampire moved down the corridor.

“You’re an idiot. What do you think you’re going to do down there?”

“My job” was all Cade said.

GRAVES WATCHED THE VAMPIRE GO. He shook his head. Stubborn. No reasoning with some creatures.

Graves took out his radio. “Baker team, this is Graves. Report.”

“Vaughn here, sir. We’re holding,” the answer came back. The squad leader sounded nervous. “We’re hearing some strange noises down in the cells—”

“That’s not your concern now,” Graves said. “I want you to move your men to Level Two, Sector B. Intruder moving west, on foot. Find him and kill him.”

“You said it was crucial to guard this corridor, sir. If anything were to get past us—”

“I’m giving you new orders. Understood?”

A slight hesitation. “Clear, sir.”

“Good,” Graves said. “One more thing. Your target will be alone, and apparently unarmed. Do not let that fool you.”

“Just one man.” Vaughn managed to make it sound like he was clarifying the order, not questioning Graves again.

Not exactly a man, Graves thought. But this wasn’t the time to get into it.

“Don’t give him a chance, Vaughn. You get one shot, then you’re lunch.”

He clicked off the radio before Vaughn could respond and turned to his keyboard.

He entered a series of commands, followed by codes and passwords. The software behind the Site’s engineering and environmental protocols kept asking him to confirm the orders, like a bartender checking on a drunk who keeps asking for another round.
Are you sure you want to do this? Y/N?

Graves was sure. Proctor and the higher-ups in the Company might balk, but he was tired of waiting for the Apocalypse. Maybe they weren’t prepared to light the fires, but he’d always believed in taking initiative. It’s why he’d come as far as he had.

And if anyone questioned him—if there was anyone left to question him, in the aftermath—well, then, he could disavow all knowledge.

But he didn’t think he was going to fail. Cade couldn’t stop him. No one could stop him. Armageddon was about to begin in the heartland of America.

He entered the final command:
Open all cells.

Are you sure you want to do this? Y/N?

Yes. He was sure.

He hit ENTER, and with the tap of a key, set everything he’d been hiding in the Black Site free.

It was time to open the reptile house to the general public.

THIRTY-THREE

1955—Marineland, Florida—Locals report encounters with a reptilian, amphibious “Gill-Man,” supposedly captured from the Amazon. Several deaths are attributed to the creature, who vanishes into the ocean.

—BRIEFING BOOK: CODE NAME: NIGHTMARE PET

LEVEL SIX

T
ania took the elevator shaft down to the final level of the Site. She levered the doors open by hand and slid down the cables. The elevator car blocked her descent at Level Five. She crawled down the side of it, headfirst, and then down the wall to the bottom level of the Site.

The rudimentary map of the Site told her that utilities and pipelines would be down here. This is where she’d find the task that Cade set out for her.

She thought it was a waste of her talents, but she supposed this is what it meant to compromise in a relationship.

Moving silently down the corridors, she found the generator room in a matter of minutes. There was only one sentry.

She smiled. Cade may have ordered her away from the prisoners, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy herself.

SEAN EARLY WASN’T a bad guy, as Archer/Andrews employees went. He wasn’t bounced out of the military for rape or murder or anything like that. He hadn’t participated in the prisoner beatings at Bagram. He’d never gotten his jollies beating guys with batons or shoving light sticks up their butts. But when the investigators had come around, asking questions, Early kept his mouth shut. He was no snitch. He was granted an honorable discharge as part of the general effort to minimize the P.R. damage to the War on Terror.

Archer/Andrews, however, could use a guy who knew how to keep a secret. After a series of rotations at ever-more-secret prisons, Early was finally given a job at the Black Site under Liberty.

It didn’t seem like that big a deal, honestly. Most of his time was spent monitoring the Site’s power plant. He sat in a chair, watching the big 200-kilowatt generators spin away the hours.

The Site ran on a pipeline of compressed natural gas that could pump a thousand gallons per minute through twenty-eight miles of pipes. It fed the big generators and provided heat and fuel to the rest of the complex. The whole power plant was automated. Early wasn’t required to fix or maintain anything. He was just there to watch it.

There were worse assignments, of course. He supposed the stink of fuel, the constant thrum of the engines and the endless boredom were better than having your ass shot off.

Still, he thought there would be more excitement in being part of a top-secret military installation.

Then he saw the redhead.

She sauntered up to him like he was in a bar. His jaw dropped. He’d been down in the Site for nine months. The last woman he’d seen had been a tech who wore heavy sweaters and a lab coat all the time.

This woman was wrapped in an outfit that looked like it had been applied by a paintbrush.

It threw him so completely that he almost didn’t get his weapon free of the holster.

He pointed it at her. He knew, no matter how many porn movies he’d seen, that this couldn’t be right. At best, she was a prisoner from Level Five who’d gotten free. At worst, there was a breach, and he was in a world of shit.

She looked at him over the barrel of his gun and frowned. “Oh come on,” she said. She didn’t sound scared. Just annoyed. “Am I completely losing my touch, or are they feeding you guys something?”

“Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t even think it.”

He reached for the radio attached at his shoulder, ready to call for backup.

Then his gun was gone and he was pinned to the wall. Her hand was a steel clamp at his throat.

She smiled. He saw her fangs.

“You really took the fun out of this,” she said, as his vision began to go gray around the edges. She still sounded upset.

Early’s last thought was that finally, something interesting happened, something right out of a spy movie, and it was over in a moment. First hot chick he’d seen in a year, and she was a monster.

TANIA FINISHED HER MEAL before she looked over the power plant.

She sought out the main generator. It only took her a moment to figure out the fuel line and trace it back to the main pipeline.

She found a toolbox with everything she needed. It was nothing more than a matter of removing some nuts and bolts and finding a feeder line into the fire-suppression system.

Tania had been raised with seven brothers when she was human. Even before she became a supernatural killing machine, she’d never bought into the notion that women were supposed to be useless with anything mechanical.

THIRTY-FOUR

There are more than a hundred of these deep underground military bases (also known as DUMBs) in the United States alone, according to the believers. Some of the more famous include the base at Dulce, New Mexico, the base under Area 51, aka Groom Lake, Nevada, and beneath Mount Shasta in California. No government map will show them, of course, but dedicated researchers have spent hours painstakingly tracing the routes and locations onto their own hand-drawn atlases and exchanging their work over the Internet and at conspiracy conferences. If this is a secret plan to rule the world, a lot of people seem to know about it.

—Cole Daniels,
Black Ops: The Occult-CIA Connection

LEVEL TWO

C
ade worked his way methodically through the Site, room by room. It was time-consuming and frustrating, but to find Zach, he had no choice.

That Zach might already be dead didn’t slow him down in the least. Zach’s life was his responsibility until one or the other of them was dead. Until he found Zach’s body, he moved forward. Simple as that.

He kept checking the rooms, one after another.

Sirens blasted at him. Enormous steel shutters slammed down across the corridors. This wasn’t just in his wing. He felt the change in the air pressure in the Site. All throughout the complex, exits were being sealed.

Cade held himself very still and listened even more closely. He heard the thrum of the air forced through the ductwork. He heard the vibrations still moving through concrete and rebar like the aftershocks of a quake. And finally, he heard the oiled slide of a thousand doors being opened.

This could not possibly be good news for Zach, or anyone else locked in here.

If he were human, he might waste a moment in denial. But he knew what had happened instantly. Graves had released his prisoners. Cade was almost certain none of them were human any longer.

Cade found a door at the end of the corridor. It was like a hatch on a submarine—a sally port, designed like airlocks, with two doors on a connecting space. They were common in prisons. One door can only be opened when the other door is closed and locked, so only one or two people can go through at any time. Even if a guard were forced by a prisoner to open one door, the tight spaces would prevent more than one prisoner from going through the passage.

Down the other way, thick metal shutters, from floor to ceiling, created seamless new walls, blocking the stairwells.

Still, Graves would have left a way to the surface. He wouldn’t leave the Snakeheads to starve down here. For a man like him, that would be like refusing to fire a loaded gun.

He would have left a path for the creatures, Cade knew, because he’d already prepared a meal for them. He and Tania had walked through them on their way into the Site: tens of thousands of happy shoppers, waiting outside the Mall.

He felt a familiar surge of anger welling up inside.

Fortunately, a group of heavily armed men showed up at that moment, giving him the perfect targets to take it out on.