His great adventure in Kuwait didn’t start at all like he planned.
He wandered around the Kuwait City airport, jet-lagged and clueless, surrounded by men and women wearing long robes. One of the locals spotted him, broke away from a pack of his friends, and approached.
Dylan was nervous. This was just after those contractors in Baghdad were kidnapped, and he had a frightening vision of his own head rolling on the floor in some Jihadi terrorist’s garage.
Then he recognized the guy behind the beard.
Khaled was wrapped in traditional robes, covered in hair. If he hadn’t smiled and said Dylan’s name, Dylan never would have put it together.
He embraced Dylan warmly, even though his friends all scowled. He escorted Dylan to a new apartment, which came with the job. Khaled couldn’t stay and talk—he was running his father’s shipping concerns in Kuwait—but he promised they’d catch up later.
After a month, Dylan was considering chucking the whole thing and heading home.
First off, he was getting a lot less than a hundred grand a year. The big money was for the people willing to work in Baghdad and risk getting blown into stew meat. His paycheck worked out to about what he was making back in the States.
But instead of loading up candy machines, he had the worst job on the base—mortuary support. Which was a fancy name for undertaker. Dead bodies would show up all day and all night at Camp Wolf. He was responsible for taking the coffins—sorry, “transfer cases,” the army called them—and stacking them, then driving them over to the airfield, where they’d be shipped back home.
Dylan realized he was in Hell. Roasting in the heat, then freezing in cold storage, surrounded by corpses every day.
When Khaled finally got back in touch, Dylan was pissed off and ready to go back to the States.
Khaled tried to soothe him. Dylan didn’t want to listen. He invited Dylan to his apartment. Dylan was hesitant, until Khaled mentioned beer.
Khaled sent his Bentley for Dylan. At his massive, luxury apartment, they opened a case of contraband Coors Light and drank while Khaled explained what was happening.
Obviously, he said, things had changed since college.
Dylan, who’d slammed two beers and was working on his third, said, “No shit. What’s with the outfit?”
Khaled explained: his father had found out how he was spending his time in America, and pulled him out of college. He was sent to a strict madrassa in Saudi Arabia.
“Sucks, man,” Dylan said.
Anger flashed in Khaled’s eyes, but it passed. “At first, I thought so,” he said. “But then I learned the truth.”
All of the things they’d talked about, all of the problems in the world, all of that had to change. And Khaled and his friends had the answer. They were going to make things right.
They were part of a group called Zulfiqar. They were a sword of righteousness to cut the evil out of the world.
But they needed Dylan. They needed him to step up and be a hero.
And, of course, they were willing to pay for one. Being a hero shouldn’t come without rewards, Khaled said. He offered an even million dollars.
Dylan passed. A million? That was less than he had in his trust fund. He could survive until forty. Not worth it.
There was some haggling. Khaled pointed out the benefits of tax-free cash. He eventually offered $3.5 million.
Dylan said, “Cool.”
The caskets were in the truck. Dylan started the engine and drove around the corner from the mortuary building.
He made sure the bitch sergeant wasn’t watching him as he left.
About halfway to the airfield, Dylan pulled into a parking lot and slid his truck between two personnel carriers. He shut down the engine.
He took the small toolbox Khaled had given him and hopped out of the cab. He didn’t look around as he got into the back of the truck. He’d learned one thing about the army: look like you knew what you were doing all the time. Do that, and nobody would question you; they had their own problems.
He’d made sure the casket he wanted was on top of the stacks. PFC MANUEL CASTILLO, THOUSAND PALMS, CALIF. He unstrapped it, quickly pulled the flag off like he was unwrapping a gift and snipped the fastener seal with wire cutters.
The remains inside were covered in plastic garbage bags full of ice. It didn’t matter much—PFC Castillo was headed to a closed-casket funeral. He’d been thrown from his Humvee by an explosion that tore through the bottom of his seat; they probably shoveled him into the body bag.
That’s why Dylan had picked him.
Dylan tossed the ice packs to the floor of the truck and unzipped the bag. Half the poor bastard’s head was sheared off, all the way to the collarbone; he’d been shot straight up, like an ejector seat, into the frame of the vehicle.
But his right leg was still intact, from the hip down.
Dylan checked his list, just to be sure. RIGHT LEG—followed by five boxes. Four of them had check marks. He took out a pen, crossed off the last empty spot.
Then he opened the toolbox and got to work.
The circular saw was remarkably compact. It was almost smaller than a cordless drill, and when it revved up, it cut through skin and bone like tofu. Dylan was glad, once again, these guys weren’t shipped home in their uniforms. That was all done at the other end, at Dover Air Force Base, after they’d been embalmed. He didn’t think he could handle stripping a corpse down to its underpants.
He checked the joint where the hip met the leg. He didn’t have to be precise, but Khaled bitched at him when he shaved off too much.
He leaned back as he pressed the power button on the saw. The first time he did this, he’d gotten a faceful of gore by hunching too close to the cadaver. He only had to learn that lesson once.
The blade sliced through the dead flesh and bone. A couple strands of skin snapped like rubber bands when he lifted the leg out of the body bag.
This was the way Khaled explained it to him. Nobody would ever miss a few body parts. The army morticians in the States certainly wouldn’t question it, because it wasn’t like they got an invoice of all the arms and legs a corpse was supposed to have upon delivery. The families back home were told their soldiers had been blown to pieces. They were expecting an incomplete package, if they even bothered to look. With all the car bombs and shrapnel and IEDs in Iraq, there were plenty of guys going home short a few limbs.
The only downside: Khaled wanted the heads of the soldiers, but Dylan’s best picks were all guys who didn’t have much left above the neck. It was a sore spot. Khaled had finally told Dylan to forget it, he’d make other arrangements.
Dylan turned off the saw and unfurled his own special plastic sack from the toolbox. There was some kind of chemical coating inside that kept the leg cold; it activated as soon as the sack was peeled open. Cold vapor curled in the air around him.
He crammed the leg inside, struggling with it like a side of beef.
Sweating, Dylan zipped up the body bag and repacked the corpse with ice, stuffing the bags around the casket. He latched it shut and used a tiny, battery-powered soldering iron to reseal the fasteners. Then he slung the sack with PFC Castillo’s leg over his shoulder.
He tossed the leg on the floor of the passenger seat and started the truck. It only took him a short while to clear the gate at the airport. He unloaded the coffins into a hangar, where they waited for the next flight out.
Nobody wanted to look at the flag-draped boxes. Nobody wanted to think about what was inside. Dylan was grateful for that.
He took the truck back out the gate. He slowed near the fence line, as he hefted the sack with the leg off the floor of the cab. With one smooth motion, he opened his door and dropped it onto the side of the road.
One of Khaled’s guys was waiting, as usual. He saw the dark figure scurry out of a ditch and pick up the bag.
Dylan smiled. He wasn’t sure if he believed everything Khaled was selling. Most of the time, he didn’t care one way or the other. But he definitely liked the idea of getting some payback from the world that had mistreated him. And getting paid at the same time.
Dylan could handle this shit job for a little while longer. He was undercover. Like James Bond.
Pretty soon, everyone who underestimated him and disrespected him would get a big lesson. Dylan would be rich, living the good life on a beach somewhere.
That would show his dad. And everyone else. They could all just blow him.
FOUR
Subject: Cade is functionally immortal. That is to say, his cells do not undergo regular cell death, or even aging or degradation, as long as the subject has a regular supply of fresh blood. Cell repairs are nearly perfect—any cells destroyed by an outside force (see Appendix: “Subject’s Resistance to Knife and Bullet Wounds”) are replaced with indistinguishable copies. Subject can heal from any wound short of massive bodily trauma in a matter of minutes, although his rate of recovery will vary depending on the amount of fresh blood in his system.
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET (
Eyes Onlyl
Classified/Above Top Secret per Executive Order 13292)
S
omething landed near Zach’s head, jarring him awake. He was facedown in the briefing book, his cheek resting in a lake of his own drool.
He looked around blearily, realized he was sitting at one of the tables in the basement of the Smithsonian.
And he wasn’t wearing his own pants.
“Oh good,” Zach said. “It wasn’t all just a wonderful dream.”
He’d fallen asleep reading the briefing book. It was hundreds of pages, and they were written like the owner’s manual for a microwave. He noticed the volume he’d been given was number five. He had a lot more to look forward to.
Griff loomed above him, holding the gym bag he’d thumped down on the table a second before.
“Brought you some clothes. You should move some things here from your apartment.
Zach yawned and stood, then had to hike up the sweatpants—stenciled PROP. SMITHSONIAN inst.—that Griff had given him after he’d soiled himself last night.
He checked his watch. Almost noon. “Hey,” he said. “Why am I up? I thought he slept during the day.”
“It’s only midnight.”
Zach checked his watch again. It wasn’t noon. There was no natural light down here. He yawned again.
Griff looked at the drool-soaked page of the book on the table. “How far did you get in that?”
“I skimmed it.”
“Right,” Griff said. “Here’s the Cliffs Notes version. Cade can operate during the day, just not in direct sunlight. He’s awake for days at a time. You’ll have to sleep when you can.”
“What if he gets hungry? Am I a convenient snack-pack?”
“He doesn’t feed on humans.”
“Seriously?”
Griff nodded.
“Why not?”
“Ask him.”
“Terrific.”
Zach began looking through the gym bag.
Jeans. T-shirts. Sweatshirt. Cross-trainers. Griff had gone through his bottom drawer, where he kept his rarely used workout gear.
“What is this?”
“You’re going out in the field. You need to be able to move.”
“You’re wearing a suit.”
“Old habits. I was FBI. We weren’t allowed to wear anything else.”
“What am I, the gardener? I’ve worn a suit to work every day since my first campaign, when I was fourteen. I’m not about to change that.”
Griff shrugged. “Fair enough. Your pants ought to be dry by now.”
He handed Zach a mug of coffee.
Zach took it, and his sweatpants nearly fell to his knees again.
He could have sworn Griff was trying not to laugh. Then he was distracted by the mobile phone Griff pulled from his suit jacket.
It looked like a touch-screen model, only slightly thicker, with a jutting antenna at the top.
“I know you wanted a decoder ring, but I got you this instead,” Griff said as he handed it to Zach. “Satellite-enabled, GPS tracking system, Internet access, camera, motion detector, emergency beacon, and a few other options you get to use after you’ve got more experience.”
“Nice,” Zach said. “Who pays for all this stuff? I’ve never seen an appropriation bill for vampires.”
“The White House dentist’s budget is surprisingly large.”
“Funny.” Zach kept fiddling with the phone. “Does this play MP3s?”
“Just learn to use it. It can save your life.”
“Do I get a gun, too?”
“Maybe when you hit puberty.”
Zach hiked up his pants with as much dignity as he could manage. If this was his job now, he was going to make the best showing possible. “Is there someplace I can shower? Or do you expect me to hose off outside?”
Griff pointed toward a wooden door on the opposite side of the room. “Help yourself.”
Zach grunted and headed through the door.
GRIFF CHECKED HIS WATCH and busied himself taking a waxed-paper carton—the size of a half-gallon container of milk—out of a small fridge under the coffeemaker. He shook it, then placed it in the microwave. When the timer beeped, he took it out and placed it on the nearest table.
Two minutes later, the coffin opened and Cade emerged, completely alert. His eyes made a quick scan of the room, as they did every time he woke up. He saw the carton, but ignored it.
Instead, he stripped out of his ragged military fatigues and stood on the cold stone floor naked. Griff had gotten used to this: Cade didn’t care about a lot of human niceties anymore.
Cade changed into a cheap button-down shirt and black suit hanging from a nearby hook. It was the kind of off-the-rack special any bureaucrat would buy on a government salary. The only difference was Cade didn’t wear a tie. Too many times, someone or something tried to use it to pull his head off. So now he looked like an accountant on casual Friday.