Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  Hence the conspiracy charges for which she was convicted.

  Which brought her to today.

  The sentencing.

  Her looks and the judge’s poor personal judgment when it came to women. One card left to play.

  The judge sat behind his bench and listened to prosecution and defense make their elaborate arguments for and against a harsh sentence. Bliss thought her lawyers were particularly eloquent, and the judge even smiled as he watched the younger of the two attorneys jiggle her way to the lectern. The cuffs had been removed before the proceedings began.

  The judge then turned to Bliss.

  “Would the accused like to make a statement?”

  “Yes, your honor,” said Bliss, rising slowly to her feet. Exactly as she had been coached.

  He gestured for her to continue.

  “Your honor,” began Bliss, “I understand the gravity and consequences of what I did. I really do. But I meant no harm. I’ve been a loyal and dedicated member of the team since its inception.” It had been agreed by all parties that the DMS would never be named and would instead be referred to as the “team.” “I’ve done everything I could to help strengthen our country against all threats.” Her use of our was deliberate and she leaned on it ever so slightly. “Everything I’ve done since joining the team was to make sure that we were prepared for anything that could pose a threat to us. Collecting and collating data, analyzing it, disseminating it to the proper groups within the team was my only concern. Everything else was part of that goal. Everything. I love our country. And I want to continue to serve it and to help protect the American people.” She paused and gave him a brave smile. “Thank you.”

  There was a frown on the judge’s face. Was it doubt about the convictions? Was it doubt about whatever sentence he’d already decided before today? As she sat down, each of her attorneys took one of her hands. When she cut a look at the prosecutors, they looked worried.

  The judge was silent for a long time, his lips pursed, chin sunk on his chest. Finally, he looked at Bliss and nodded.

  “Very well,” he said. “Bearing in mind your record, the evidence, and the remarks made here this morning, I am prepared to pronounce sentence.”

  He cited the verdicts and the applicable laws and statutes.

  Then he smiled at her. “Dr. Bliss, you are a very attractive and charming woman. You are a brilliant scientist and perhaps one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Your skills and your potential are, as has been pointed out, a powerful weapon capable of doing great good for the American people in these troubled times.”

  Bliss brightened, and both of the hands holding hers tightened.

  “However,” said the judge, “when a person puts self-interest in front of patriotism, and personal gain before the general welfare, then that person has thrown away any grace or consideration she might otherwise have.”

  Bliss did not hear anything else the judge said.

  Her mind simply shut down.

  There were only vague memories. She remembered screaming. Weeping. People putting hands on her. The coldness of handcuffs. Shouts.

  Red madness.

  It was only later that she was able to assemble the facts. The horrible, impossible facts.

  The judge had given her the maximum sentence for each separate charge.

  One hundred and sixty-five years.

  Life.

  And death, because she would never get out.

  They had to drag her from the court.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Fulton Street Line

  Near Euclid Avenue Station

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 2:09 p.m.

  Sometimes a gunshot is a small, hollow pok. Sometimes it’s a sharp crack.

  In the damp blackness of the subway tunnel, my pistol boomed like thunder. Too loud, too harsh, the echo slammed off the wall and boomed into my eardrums.

  The SWAT officer’s head snapped back and he fell.

  It was that quick.

  There was no intermediary phase of a body slowing down from the chemical urgency of life into the stillness of death. This was as immediate as throwing a switch. Like cutting the strings of a puppet. The strange blend of misfolded proteins, chemicals, and genetically modified parasites that made up the seif-al-din kept only a part of the brain alive. The motor cortex and some cranial nerves. Everything else was already dead. So when my hollow-point bullet punched through his forehead and exploded his brain, that entire process simply stopped. On one side of a broken moment the man was a walking, ravenous monster, and on the other he was simply dead. Totally, finally, tragically dead.

  I watched the officer fall.

  A SWAT operator.

  A cop.

  A person.

  Gone.

  I heard Ivan say something. No joke about balls in this moment. He called on God, needing and wanting some mercy down here. Some grace. But then movement around the bend proved that we were closer to hell than heaven as several figures shambled around into view.

  Four.

  Six.

  More.

  The rest of the SWAT team. Their Kevlar armor ripped and yanked aside to reveal flesh that was no longer whole. We saw dreadful things.

  They were twenty feet away and moving toward us. Their moans rose from the cry of the lost to a more urgent and hungry tone.

  “Hellboy,” I said, using Ivan’s combat call sign.

  He did not move.

  “Ivan,” I barked, my voice as sharp as a gunshot.

  He flinched and jumped. For one brief, wretched moment he looked away from them and into my eyes. With the night vision he could not have seen much, and maybe it wasn’t a visual connection he was looking for. Maybe he needed to see the living, to remember that he, too, was alive, before he could bring himself to fight the dead. I don’t know. I’m a soldier, not a psychologist, not a philosopher.

  “Ivan,” I said again. Just that. His name.

  I saw the exact moment when he regained himself. He jerked as if I’d shocked him with an electrical cord, and I think that’s when he realized that this was how so many of our comrades had died in the past. Charlie and Delta Teams, who were devoured the first time any of us encountered this disease. This was how the SWAT team died. Ivan’s mouth became a hard line and he bared his teeth as he brought his gun up.

  He carried an AA-12 assault shotgun and the big drum magazine loaded with twelve-gauge rounds. He had the selector switch set to full automatic, and the gun fired five rounds per second, filling the tunnel with thunder a hundred times worse than my Beretta. The walking dead men were caught in a maelstrom of destructive force. Ivan was aiming at them but not aiming for their heads. His first thirty rounds tore away arms and legs, blew torsos apart, tore heads from necks, but he wasn’t destroying enough of them.

  Then Lydia was there and with her were the new members of Echo Team. More and greater thunder filled the tunnel. Lydia had her rifle snugged against her shoulder, shooting on semiauto, taking time to hit the head. To end the unlife of these monsters. Duncan, Montana, and Noah hesitated for only a moment, and then they crossed the line that the moment demanded we all cross. They opened up on fellow officers, on men and women in uniform. On victims of terrorism who had been forced to embody the very concept of terror.

  There were screams stitched into the thunder.

  They did not come from the walking dead.

  The screams came from the living.

  From us.

  From all of us.

  The SWAT members fell, but the fight did not end there. We stepped over torn pieces of bodies and rounded the bend. Knowing what we’d find.

  The train was there.

  The tunnel was filled with the dead.

  Hundreds of them.

  Some dismembered, some dragging twisted limbs. Others achingly whole, their death wounds hidden from our eyes.

  All of them dead.

  Walkers.

&nbs
p; Zombies.

  Coming for us. Moaning, aching for our flesh.

  We stood there in a shooting line. Lydia, Sam, Ivan, Duncan, Montana, and Noah. And me. Echo Team.

  We fired and fired and fired.

  We covered one another as we reloaded.

  Our guns bucked in our hands, the barrels growing hot. The air was thick and toxic with gun smoke and cordite.

  The dead walked into our gunfire. They did not—could not—evade or duck away. They came into the bright muzzle flashes and the lead. They flew apart like broken toys.

  We used every bullet, every grenade, every magazine.

  And they still kept coming.

  In the end, when the last bullets were fired and the empty magazines dropped, when we were ankle-deep in blood and spent shell casings, the dead still came.

  A few left.

  Civilians.

  The ones from the last car.

  Old and young. Some children among them.

  They came.

  Ivan was weeping openly. So was Noah. Lydia’s face was stone and I feared for her. She was way, way out on the edge.

  “God, please,” said Duncan. He was breathing too fast, his whole system teetering on the edge of shock as he slapped his pockets for fresh magazines that weren’t there. “I’m out. I’m out.”

  I felt a sob break in my chest as I drew my knife.

  What followed was unspeakable.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Westin Hotel

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, August 31, 2:15 p.m.

  Mother Night watched the video feeds.

  There were six cameras mounted at different points around the subway train. Each one had a lens that provided a panoramic view of the slaughter. Three of them showed close-ups of the infected, and she took them offline, not wanting to send a mixed message. One camera had a tight view of a line of DMS agents, and Mother Night was almost positive that the second man in that line was Joe Ledger. Even with the helmet, a balaclava covering his nose and mouth, and night-vision goggles, he had the right build, the right carriage. He looked like a video game character. She could have sampled him and built him into one of her own games. Maybe she would. She’d already established a network of dummy corporations and technical obfuscation that would allow her to bring games to market under a variety of false names so that nothing could be traced back to her.

  It would be hilarious to have Joe Ledger, Top Sims, and that hunky Bunny as characters. Maybe Lydia, too, though Mother Night did not know her very well. The others were strangers to her except as names on covert reports hacked by Haruspex.

  The two remaining cameras showed the whole line of shooters from a distance, and as the walkers shambled forward they were torn apart. Nice. From that angle and that distance, and in that shitty light, it was impossible to tell that they were infected. Or how badly they were infected. They looked like frightened people reaching out for help. And being killed by government troops.

  Absolutely perfect.

  She took a sip of Diet Coke, drew in a calming breath, let it out slowly, and then tapped the keys that would send this video feed to its various targets.

  First was YouTube, with links automatically placed on six hundred preset Twitter pages and fifty Facebook group and event pages, as well as on thousands of blogs into which Haruspex had intruded.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Using reposting services modeled after Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, the link was posted over and over again every few seconds. Tiny changes in wording and URL kept the antispam programs from blocking her out.

  The number of hits began sluggishly, but within three minutes it had jumped, and then soared.

  The thought of it going “viral” was an irony not lost on her.

  She took another sip of Diet Coke.

  Then she sent the YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook links to the media.

  To every network news desk. To more than six hundred global news agencies, from the Associated Press to Al Jazeera. And then Haruspex took over, sending the links to local affiliates, newspapers, and Web news editors.

  Within minutes the slaughter in the Brooklyn subway system had hit sixteen thousand news sources.

  “Burn to shine, motherfuckers,” she murmured.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  The Oval Office

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  Sunday, August 31, 2:19 p.m.

  Vice President William Collins stood with a group of top advisors as they clustered around the president’s desk to watch the horror unfolding on the TV screen. The image was that of American troops in unmarked black combat gear firing continuously on a group of unarmed civilians.

  The bullets tore into the people.

  The soundtrack was filled with shrieks and screams as the people begged for mercy. Threaded through the gunfire was the sound of gruff laughter.

  Nice touch, thought Collins; and he wondered from which video game or movie Mother Night had lifted that soundtrack. In all the confusion it was impossible to match those cries for help to any actual mouth on the screen. Maybe one day someone would discover that the soundtrack didn’t match the video at all, but by then it would be a different world.

  And a different president.

  Maybe a president whose last name began with a C.

  It was hard not to smile, so he took the urge and made it look like a grimace.

  The gunfire began to dwindle as the last of the civilians staggered and fell. Collins knew that the staggering movements were as much to do with the nature of the seif-al-din pathogen as they were from bullet impacts, but millions of TV watchers wouldn’t know or suspect that.

  The secretary of state said, “Oh my god.”

  The president was pale with shock. “How did this get on the air?”

  Collins pushed through the crowd. “Did you authorize this?” he demanded. “Did you send troops in to kill those people? My god … these are Americans!”

  The president shook his head, dazed and apparently lost. “How did this get on the air?” he repeated.

  Collins had to bite his tongue to keep from smiling.

  Chapter Sixty

  Fulton Street Line

  Near Euclid Avenue Station

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 2:22 p.m.

  We stood there, wrapped in a shroud of gun smoke, haunted by the echoes of our guns, ankle-deep in blood, filled with horror.

  Everybody was panting. Hands shook with a palsy that was born of the realization that this moment was both unreal and yet sewn into the fabric of our lives. No matter what else happened, no matter how hardened we got, or how insane we became, in one way or another we would each revisit this place in dreams. In those dark times we would stand in the fetid darkness and do awful things, knowing that we must and knowing that with each bullet fired we were blasting away at those precious human qualities that defined us. In a very real way, we all died a little that day, and we would be less alive from here on.

  Behind me I heard someone quietly weeping. Maybe one of the newbies, maybe one of the regulars. I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

  I understood, though.

  If this had been a regular battle between us and the bad guys—terrorists, criminals, soldiers in a foreign army—then there would be some kind of natural path along which we could walk from here back to the world.

  These were civilians. They hadn’t been driven by an ideology to attack us. It wasn’t politics or religion or even greed.

  They were victims.

  They had been murdered twice.

  Once by whomever had released the seif-al-din pathogen aboard that train; and then again by us.

  My earbud buzzed.

  “Deacon to Cowboy,” said Mr. Church, “I need you to listen to me very carefully. Do not say anything. Not a word. Switch to my private channel. Only you.”

  I raised my hand and snapped my fingers. Everyone fell silent.

>   Church said, “This action has been filmed. Look for cameras.”

  I did. And I found them. Same as the ones from the tunnel, but we’d missed them as we’d closed on the train. There had been no time to look for cameras at that time. Now I saw all the little red lights shimmering like rats’ eyes in a sewer.

  “Disable the cameras,” ordered Church.

  But before I could even reach out the red lights flickered off. They all went dark.

  “Cowboy, the feed has stopped,” said Church. “Locate and collect those cameras. Bug will want to examine them.”

  Top instantly organized everyone into a search.

  Church switched to a private channel. “Just listen. We have a situation developing. The feeds from those cameras were streamed to the Internet and all major news services.” He quickly explained about the soundtrack of people screaming and begging for mercy. The president just called me and demanded that I pull your team and order you to stand down pending an investigation. The media is exploding with this, and a great deal of that heat will be directed toward the president. It’s likely to damage or destroy this administration.”

  I cursed very quietly.

  “Do not exit at Euclid Avenue,” Church continued. “Proceed along the tracks three stops to Liberty Avenue station. It’s a mile and a half. I’ll have people down there with decontamination equipment and fresh clothes. We’ll extract you from there.”

  “How much shit are we in?” I asked.

  Instead of answering he said, “Get moving.”

  The line went dead. I called my people over and gave them the short version of what was happening.

  Ivan said, “This sucks dog balls.”

  “Hooah,” muttered Top darkly.

  “Nobody knows who we are,” I told them, touching my balaclava. “We’re soldiers in unmarked black. Trust Deacon to protect us.”

  “Can he?” asked Montana.

  “If anyone can,” I said, which did not sound as comforting as I hoped it would. “Clock’s ticking, so let’s haul ass.”

  We hauled ass.