Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  But part of me is as cold and inhuman as these monsters. It’s the part of me that survived the trauma of my childhood by being too vicious to die. It’s the part that somehow allowed me to complete the mission that Grace had died to accomplish, even though it meant facing impossible odds. It was the part of me that could kill despite idealism and compassion. It was the part of me that, on some level that I have never wanted to examine with total clarity, enjoys all of this. The pain, the violence.

  The killing.

  As my flesh ruptured and my bones broke, that part of me shoved the civilized aspect of my mind to one side. In that moment I stopped being a man and became the thing I needed to be in order to survive this encounter.

  I became a monster.

  With a snarl as inhuman as the thing that attacked me, I drove my knee up into its crotch, then head-butted the thing so hard I could hear cartilage and bone shatter. I drove my stiffened thumb into its eye, bursting the orb. Then I kicked its screaming, writhing body backward.

  My right arm flopped bloody and limp, the fingers feeling like swollen bags of blood. My gun was gone, I had no idea where.

  I ran at the monster that now lay twisting on the floor, hands pressed to its bloody eye socket. Its other eye stared at me with uncomprehending horror. It had killed the scientists in this room. It was a predator thing, designed for slaughter, and now it was hurt and helpless and being stalked by something that did not fear its power.

  It raised one hand in defense and I kicked it away, then stamped down hard on its throat.

  Without even pausing to watch it die, I whirled toward Felicity.

  She was not there.

  Instead I saw the third merman sprawled in a growing lake of blood, its body torn apart so savagely that its arms and legs were only attached by strings of meat.

  Something bulky and gray shot past me, brushing close enough to strike my uninjured arm. It moved so fast I could barely see it.

  It plunged into the water and was gone.

  It was not a woman, that much was clear.

  It looked like an animal.

  Almost like an animal.

  Its gray fur was crisscrossed by jagged cuts and streaked with blood. Within a moment all that was left was a stain of blood on the eddying waters.

  I stood alone in the cavernous lab.

  Twenty feet away, the merman who had fallen to the floor when my bullet smashed its tube was beginning to stir.

  I bent and picked up the pistol dropped by Felicity Hope.

  With blood falling from my shattered arm, I walked over to the creature as it struggled to get to its misshapen feet.

  I raised the gun.

  Fired.

  For a long, long time I stood there. Arm cradled to my body. Pain and adrenaline washing back and forth through me like tidewaters.

  There was no sign of Felicity Hope.

  I knew there would not be.

  Though…I did not understand why.

  As the monster in my mind crept back into its cave and the civilized man staggered out again, the mysteries of this place—of this afternoon—rose up above me like a tsunami and threatened to smash me flat.

  In my mind I heard the echoes of her voice.

  “Joe…it stops here.”

  I looked around at the computers. And at the tables piled high with equipment.

  And chemicals.

  And reams of paper.

  With my good hand, whimpering at the agony in my arm, I reached into my pocket for my lighter.

  Chap. 10

  The fire burned the building to black ash.

  I leaned against the fender of the ATF agents’ Crown Vic and watched it burn. They both yelled at me, demanding to know what happened, threatening to arrest me, trying to get me to react to them in any way. But all I did was watch the place burn.

  When the firemen and cops asked me how it started, I spun a bunch of lies.

  I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital where they had to do surgery to repair my arm. The doctors had a lot of questions about my arm. I told them that there had been a moray eel in a tank and that I was dumb enough to put my arm inside. They didn’t believe me. Mostly because they weren’t stupid enough to accept that story. And because the wound signature was wrong for an eel. Then Mr. Church showed up and people stopped asking me questions.

  The only one who heard the real story was Church.

  He listened the way he does—silent, without expression, cold. When I was done, he used his cell phone and, with me sitting right there in the E.R., ordered a full battery of physical and psychological tests for when I got back to Baltimore.

  Even a lie detector test.

  Our forensics people lifted blood samples from my clothes. Dark brick red blood from my shirt. The blood of the mermen.

  And brighter red blood from my sleeve.

  Her blood.

  They also lifted a full handprint from the back wall of the bathroom. The techs promised DNA and other lab work back as soon as possible.

  Dr. Hu spent days picking through the ashes of the Koenig building, his face alight with expectation, hoping to find something he could play with, but I’d built a very hot fire.

  He finally gave it up, defeated and mad at me.

  The doctors ran their tests.

  I passed them all. No hallucinogens or alcohol in my system.

  The shrinks ran and then re-ran their tests, and when they got the same answers they began looking at me funny. Then they stopped making eye contact altogether.

  On a warm summer evening ten days after the fire, Mr. Church called me into a private meeting. There was a plate of cookies—Nilla wafers and Oreos—and a tall bottle of very good, very old Scotch. There was also a stack of color-coded folders. I didn’t touch them, but I could see that some folders were from other agencies.

  After we sat and ate cookies and drank whiskey and stared at each other for too long, Church said, “Is there anything you would like to add to your report?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Is there anything about the report you would like to amend?”

  “No.”

  He nodded.

  We sat.

  We each had another cookie.

  Church picked up two FBI fingerprint cards and handed it to me. I looked at them and read the attached report. The conclusion was this: “Both sets of prints are clearly from the same source. They match on all points.”

  I sighed and set the report down.

  “Fingerprints can be faked,” said Church. “There are various polymers which can be worn over the fingertips, and even the whole hand, that can carry false prints.”

  “I know.”

  “The FBI report is therefore inconclusive as far as we’re concerned.”

  “Okay,” I said. He studied my face but I was giving him nothing to read. My face has been a stone since the fire. I didn’t want to show nothing to nobody.

  Church removed a report from a DNA lab that we often used. He studied it for a moment but didn’t pass it to me.

  “The lab says that the blood sample from your sleeve was contaminated. They pulled two blood types from it, one human and one animal.”

  “Which animal?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  “Halichoerus grypus,” he said. “Commonly known as the Atlantic gray seal.”

  I said nothing.

  “The blood was thoroughly mixed.”

  “Yes.”

  “So thoroughly mixed that they were unable to entirely separate the DNA strands. In fact the only complete DNA they’ve recovered is an even mix of human and seal genes.” He placed the report on the desk and laid his palm on it. “The scientists are floating various theories which could account for that level of genetic degradation. The leading theory is that the heat somehow fused the DNA.”

  “Is that even possible?” I asked quietly.

  He smiled. “No.”

  We sat there.

  The wall clock ticked away two full
minutes before he spoke again.

  Church said, “There’s a legend in Ireland and elsewhere about a magical creature called a selkie. They’re mysterious women who are actually seals.” He selected a cookie but didn’t eat it. Instead he rolled it back and forth on his desk top. “But that’s myth and legend.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the real world.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we don’t—or can’t—believe in the impossible,” he said. “Can we, Captain?”

  I said nothing. Three more minutes burned off the day. The office was absolutely quiet. Beyond the big picture window the brown waters of the Baltimore Harbor flowed and churned as boats passed by.

  “She’s dead,” murmured Church after a while.

  “I know.”

  “As much as both of us want her back, as much as each of us wants it to be untrue, Grace is dead.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Church finished his whiskey, got up and walked over to the window and stood there, hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the water.

  I looked at the fingerprint card.

  The partial palm print was matched against an official fingerprint ten-card used to record a full set of prints when anyone enters government service. The card they’d compared the partial to was old. Someone had affixed a small gold star sticker to one corner. They don’t give gold stars when you do something great or if you score on a test. They add that to your record when you die.

  The name on the card was a familiar one.

  Looking at it twisted a knife in my heart.

  The name was GRACE COURTLAND.

  I poured myself another glass of whiskey.

  ~The End~

  Mad Science

  NOTE: This story takes place after the events of Assassin’s Code. There are some spoilers if you haven’t read that book.

  Chap. 1

  We came in with the whole Mission: Impossible thing.

  Dropping through on wires, black clothes, whole bag of high-tech gizmos.

  No cool theme music, though.

  The ultraclean, ultrasecure lab was supposed to be making pills for old ladies with bad backs and men who wanted marathon erections.

  But an undisclosed source whispered something very nasty into the right phone. She said that someone at Marquis Pharmaceuticals was cooking up something very, very nasty. The kind of thing that gives any sane person a case of the shakes. Something that no one inside U.S. borders was supposed to be working on, and something world governments had agreed to ban under all circumstances.

  Two words.

  Weaponized Ebola.

  Yeah, sit with that for a moment. The black duds I wore were a modified Level A hazmat suit manufactured specifically for special operators. I didn’t look like the Michelin Man. More like a high-tech ninja, but there was no one around to tell me how badass I looked. Besides, I wasn’t wearing it for the cool-factor. Like I said…Ebola.

  This is what the caller said: “They’re working on QOBE—quick-onset Bundibugyo ebolavirus. They already have buyers lined up.”

  Quick-onset Ebola.

  It’s exactly what it sounds like. Ebola that works really freaking fast. Aerosolized for tactical deployment and married to nearly microscopic airborne parasites that act as aggressive vectors. This is not science fiction. This is science paid for by people who have had time to sit down, calm down, and think it over…and who still want to write a check for a bioweapon that, once introduced, will hit and present within hours. The idea was to use it in confined areas to remove hostile assets. Introduce it into a bunker or secure facility, and everyone in there would die. Without living hosts, an insertion team in combat hazmat suits can infiltrate and gain access to computers and other materials. Infection rate is ninety-eight point eight percent; mortality rate among infected is one hundred percent.

  Our people worked on this until the DMS found out about it and shut the facility down.

  Now someone else was screwing with it.

  Which is why I was hanging from wires ninety yards down an airshaft, wrapped in a nonconductive and nonreflective Hammer suit, armed to the teeth, and scared out of my mind.

  Oh yeah…and cranky.

  This one was making me very, very cranky.

  Chap. 2

  I had a handheld BAMS unit that I used to check the viral load in the air around me. These units were portable bio-aerosol mass spectrometers that were used for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. They have a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key particles like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. As I passed it in a slow circle all the little lights stayed resolutely green. Nice.

  I unfastened the airtight bioseal, peeled back the flexible hood of the modified Hammer suit I wore, and tapped my earbud to open the channel to Bug, our computer guy. He provides real time intel for gigs like this.

  “Talk to me,” I said quietly. “You crack their encryption yet, or am I hanging here just for shits and giggles?”

  “Yeah, Cowboy,” he said. “We’re in. Downloading a set of revised building schematics to you now.”

  I wore a pair of what looked like Wayfarers with slightly heavier frames. The frames contained micro-hardware that allowed the lenses to flash images invisible to anyone else but which displayed in detailed 3D to me. Suddenly I had an entire office building around me, floating in virtual space. A tiny mouse was built into my right glove, and I used the tip of my index finger against the ball of my thumb to scroll through the schematics.

  First thing was to orient myself. We’d pulled the building plans they’d filed with the proper agencies, but now that Bug used MindReader to hack the facility’s computers, we had the actual plans. The aboveground building was the same, but down where I was, four stories below street level, nothing looked the same. The ‘basement’ in the original plans was on the first of twelve sub-floors built into the bedrock of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.

  “Tell me about the floor,” I said.

  “It’s wired nine ways from Sunday,” said Bug, “but that’s not the bad news.”

  “It’s not? Then have MindReader go in there and kick over some furniture.”

  MindReader was the supercomputer around which the Department of Military Sciences was built. It was a freak of a computer, the only one of its kind, and it had a super-intrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One was to look for patterns by drawing information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing: MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to erase all traces of its presence.

  “Can’t—” began Bug, but I cut him off.

  “Don’t tell me ‘can’t.’”

  “Cowboy, listen to me. Their security runs out of a dedicated server that isn’t wired into their main computers. Not in, anyway—no WIFI, no hard lines. Nothing. You’re going to need to find it and plug a router cable into a USB port so MindReader can access it.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  There were no computers visible in the room.

  Not one. I wore a high-definition lapel cam, so he could see that, too.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

  That’s when another voice said, “I got this.”

  It should have been Top’s voice. He was suited up to follow me down. Or, if not him, then Bunny. We were the only three agents authorized to be here.

  It wasn’t them.

  It was a woman who dropped down on a second set of wires. Slim, gorgeous, with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. No hazmat suit. She used the hand brake on the drop wire and stopped exactly level with
me.

  She smiled.

  It was a big smile, full of white teeth and mischief.

  “Hello, Joseph,” she said.

  “Hello, Violin,” I said. “What in the wide blue fuck are you doing here?”

  Chap. 3

  Her smile didn’t waver.

  “I’m on a case,” she said.

  “You’re not supposed to be on this case,” I fired back.

  “You’re intruding into my case.”

  “Sorry, babe, this is U.S. soil, and I’m the one with official sanction.”

  “Really?” She pretended to pout. “You’re going to throw proper procedure at me? After all we’ve—”

  I cut her off. “Uh-uh. Don’t you dare give me the ‘after all we’ve been through’ speech. You’ve used that too many times.”

  “I have not.”

  “Excuse me? Paris? Cairo? Rio? Any of that ring a bell?”

  She dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “You sound like a shrewish old woman, Joseph. It’s really unattractive.”

  “And you’re wanted on four continents, including this one, darlin’. So how much do you want to push this?”

  We had to keep our voices to whispers, so there was an unintentional hushed comedy to the exchange.

  She started grinning right around the time I did.

  We hung there for a moment, smiling.

  I wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and I’m not sure the term ‘lover’ fit, either. We’d been through some terrible stuff together, and we’d both nearly died. Friends of ours did die. And, no joke, we saved the world. The actual world. So, every now and then, when we found ourselves in the same part of the world at the same time, and providing neither of us had any serious emotional commitments elsewhere, Violin and I celebrated our survival, celebrated the fact of being alive. When you’ve taken the kind of fire we have, you definitely take time for that. Some soldiers go to the Wall in D.C. and trace names. Some visit Ground Zero or sit in a church—any church that’s handy—and they thank their higher power for us being on the good side of the dirt.

  Violin and I? We celebrated it in a very primal, very steamy way. Clothes were torn. Furniture was broken. Cops were called more than once.