Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  He shook his head slowly, with a level of indecision that I didn’t like. Then his eyes narrowed, as though he’d made a difficult decision and he was about to do something risky.

  Something dangerous.

  He charged.

  Top would’ve taken him out before he reached me. Well, assuming his bull hide wasn’t thick enough to stop a bullet. Hell, I would’ve put at least two bullets in him myself. Bunny, too, if he’d had the right angle. But there was something I’d forgotten and two things I hadn’t counted on: the Minotaur was damn fast; it wasn’t actually charging at me; and Sanders rushed toward it, causing me to yell for Top and Bunny to hold their fire.

  Sanders evidently thought I was shouting at him, because he replied, “Screw you and screw that thing! It killed Gale and Johnson and I’m taking it down.”

  He fired his Glock, but he got only one shot off before the fleeing Minotaur rounded a corner.

  I thought I heard a grunt of pain, but I couldn’t be sure because the wall engine fired up at the same time. I rounded the corner to see Sanders’s second shot ricochet off a closing wall.

  The Minotaur was gone.

  No doubt Goldman didn’t want Sanders killing the Minotaur before it killed me.

  Something was nagging at me, as though I weren’t getting the full picture. Then Top put his finger on it for me. “Something I don’t get, Cap,” he said. “Goldman knows we’re an elite black ops team, yet he traps us with just one monster?”

  “Budget cuts?” Bunny offered.

  “You think he’s got a whole herd in here?” I asked.

  “We got a big influx of prisoners a couple weeks ago,” Sanders said.

  “How many we talking about?”

  “A dozen.” He no longer looked hell-bent on vengeance; he looked suddenly petrified. To put it bluntly, he looked ready to piss his pants.

  To lighten the mood, I said, “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to do that running of the bulls thing. Now I don’t have to go to Spain to find out.”

  “I’d rather do the one in New Orleans,” Bunny said. I raised a quizzical eyebrow, so he explained. “Instead of bulls, you run with Roller Derby girls wearing bull-horn hats. They won’t gore you, but they’ll whack you with plastic baseball bats.”

  “Dewey Beach, Delaware, has the best one,” Top said. “No bats, just some dude in a bull costume and a lot of girls running in bikinis.”

  The mood suitably lightened, I suggested we move on. I should’ve known better than to relax, even a little—I was just taunting Murphy’s Law.

  So, obviously, it was right at that moment that a strange wheezing sound started up. It could’ve just been that one of the Minotaurs had asthma, but something about it seemed wrong. As the sound grew closer, my mouth went dry and my ass cheeks clenched.

  I blamed Goldman. And since I couldn’t shoot him, I chose the closest camera. I got a childish pleasure out of watching my bullet smash through it.

  I also distracted the others at the exact wrong moment, just as that bastard Murphy would’ve wanted.

  Sanders shrieked, dropping his Glock as he was yanked off his feet by something that most definitely was not a mutant man-bull.

  More like—

  “The Fly!” Top shouted.

  “Fruit fly,” I said distractedly as I tried to get a clear shot, which was near impossible with the way the man-fly was jerking around, apparently having difficulty staying aloft with the added weight.

  “How can you tell?” Bunny asked, agitated.

  He had a point.

  While the shape and translucence of the mutant’s wings could have been from a housefly or a fruit fly, the chitinous scales that blotted out most of his skin were a yellow brown rather than black. And his eyes were a bright red. “Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “Actually, I remember the original Goldman mentioning something about fruit flies.”

  “I dunno,” Top said. “This guy kinda looks like Jeff Goldblum if you ask me.”

  Sanders struggled to get free, but the attacker held on to his prey tenaciously. As I jogged along after them, I tried to recall what I knew about fruit flies. Did they just eat rotting fruit or would they eat meat?

  The security guard flailed around and managed to grab hold of the creature’s left wing. He threw his whole body into a strong tug and yanked the wing right off the man-fly’s body.

  The monster let out a very human shriek of pain. Although his right wing kept flapping ineffectively, he instantly lost the ability to fly, dropping straight down. Still gripping the severed wing, Sanders hit the floor first and I lost sight of him when the giant fruit fly landed on top of him.

  Before I could check to see if they were alive, the wheezing noise—which I now realized was a messed-up human-fly buzzing sound—returned.

  Even as I called out a warning, they were on us.

  They flew in from behind us. I thought I heard words beneath the incessant buzzing—two repeated words, like a chant—but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what they were saying before the inquisitive Cop part of me was overtaken by the Warrior.

  Two of them lifted Bunny off the ground. Each gripping a shoulder, they struggled to carry the big man, but then a third grabbed him by the neck.

  I shot that one first. An instant later, Top hit the one on the left and I hit the right. All head shots. Those bulging red eyes were the perfect bull’s-eyes.

  All three of the creatures dropped dead onto Bunny, knocking him down. His knees hit the concrete floor hard, causing him to let out a cry of discomfort, which was immediately muffled as one of the men-flies’ bodies forced his face down, smothering him.

  I didn’t have time to dig him out from the pileup as four more mutant fruit flies swarmed down on me and Top.

  Top screamed, or maybe I did—probably we both did—as we swept our guns across their bodies. We didn’t call out our targets, we didn’t aim for the bull’s-eye eyes, we just sprayed them with industrial-strength bug spray. For monster-sized pests, forget DEET, lead is much more effective.

  Bunny shoved his way out from under the bodies covering him just as the remaining men-flies dropped dead onto him, knocking him back down. He groaned, though out of pain or irritation, I couldn’t tell.

  “You okay under there?” I asked, doing a poor job of suppressing a morbid chuckle.

  Bunny shoved a single hand up between two bodies, his middle finger extended.

  “Pretty fly for a white guy,” Top said just loud enough for me to hear. I groaned.

  “I’m okay!” Sanders suddenly called out, apparently thinking my question to Bunny had been for him.

  Then suddenly he was not okay.

  “Ah!” he screamed. “It’s alive!”

  The fruit fly creature that had tried to abduct him moved feebly, trying to stand up. He repeated the same words the swarm had been chanting, only this time I made them out: “Kill me.”

  I don’t know if Sanders heard and understood the mutant’s plea or if he was just scared out of his wits, but he moved with unexpected speed. He dove for his fallen gun, snatched it up, and spun around, grouping three bullets into where I assumed the man-thing’s heart still resided. I was impressed.

  “Now that’s how you swat a fly!” he said. “Booyah!” He got to his feet and surveyed the gore on the walls around us. It looked exactly as if we’d swatted seven very large flies. Sanders’s puffed chest deflated. “Well, I guess you guys know how to take care of monster pests, too.”

  Throwing the guy a bone, I said, “Hey, smart thinking yanking that thing’s wing off.”

  He perked up. “Thanks. When I was a kid, I, er, a friend of mine used to pull the wings off flies.”

  “I heard one of the early signs of serial killers was that they pulled the wings off butterflies as kids,” Top mused.

  “Butterflies are beautiful and graceful, flies are ugly and annoying,” Sanders said defensively.

  “You’re starting to look ugly and annoying,” Top said.
r />   “Cool it, First Sergeant,” I said.

  Top scowled at Sanders. “I bet the guy was the type to put firecrackers in frogs’ asses and blow them up.”

  Sanders looked as if he were going to deny it, instead he blurted out, “George W. Bush did that, too!”

  “Yeah, and he probably shot them with BB guns, as well,” I said. “For all we know, there could be mutant man-frogs waiting around the next bend that we’ll have to shoot, so let’s reload and move out.”

  Farther into the maze, a loud buzzing heralded the approach of a new threat. The sound was similar to the droning of the fruit fly monsters, yet distinctly different. Angrier.

  I racked my brain for any other flying insects the Vault’s Goldman had been working on. Then I remembered.

  Wasps.

  Why couldn’t it have been bullfrogs?

  I’ve been stung by a regular-sized wasp. It hurt like hell. And damn, did it itch. I was certain the poison from a man-sized wasp sting would do more than just itch. It’d kill.

  “I’m allergic to bees!” Sanders screamed. He took off at a run.

  “Wait!” I shouted. Besides the fact that we needed to stay together because of the shifting passages, the buzzing sound wasn’t coming from behind us like last time …

  He was running straight toward them.

  Sanders rounded a corner and let out a blood-curdling scream. I gave chase, expecting to find him impaled on a giant stinger.

  I found the guard holding a bloody hand to his neck, but he appeared relatively okay.

  The lone man-wasp standing a few feet away from him looked more predatory than the men-flies had. He had jagged, enlarged teeth, his wings were thicker and slender, and antennae jutted out of his ears. Where a tail would be on a monkey, a big-ass needle stuck out of him.

  Whether because he’d already written Sanders off as dead or because he saw me as a bigger threat, the man-wasp faced off against me. “Kill,” he said. He repeated it in a low, hoarse voice. Over and over.

  Probably the creepiest damn thing I’d ever heard.

  He spread his wings. I thought it was a macho thing, showing me how big he was.

  Nope. It was the start of a lightning-fast attack.

  Before I could get a shot off, he launched himself up over me. My barrel followed him, but he immediately plunged down stinger-first toward my upturned face.

  I barely had time to pivot out of the way, but even as I turned, I was planning my counterattack. He adjusted his plunge to land on his feet, his knees bending on impact, his stinger nearly touching the ground. I raised my booted right foot and stomped hard at the base of his stinger. With more of a crunch than the snap I’d expected, his unnatural appendage broke off, splattering my leg with black blood and yellow poison.

  Shrieking with pain and rage, he spun toward me, mouth wide-open. His teeth reminded me of shark teeth. The original Goldman had been trying to create new strains of humans that could withstand global warming or a nuclear apocalypse or whatever other damage we might do to our planet, so it made sense that he’d have shark genes in the mix since those beasts have survived four hundred million years of climate changes.

  This beast didn’t survive another four hundred milliseconds.

  I got my gun up just in time to shoot him in the mouth. The bullet sent shards of teeth that didn’t belong in a human mouth into a brain that was no longer human.

  “Get down!” Sanders shouted.

  I instinctively dropped to the ground as two more man-wasps buzzed over me. They got close enough for me to feel a breeze. And I swear I smelled pollen on them.

  “Kill. Kill. Kill,” they chanted with creepy, raspy voices.

  “Die, die, die,” Bunny shouted in response as he came around the corner. He collided with one and inadvertently drove it back toward me.

  I didn’t have a safe shot with it tangled up with Bunny, but when I reflexively crab-walked backward out of the way, my left hand fell on the first mutant’s separated stinger. I snatched it up and used it to deflect the second mutant’s stinger, which Bunny was unknowingly shoving toward my face.

  Weirdest sword fight ever.

  Bunny had his hands full trying to keep the monster’s teeth away from his neck, so I needed to end this. The man-wasp wore a hospital gown. Yeah, the kind that flaps open at the back. I stuck that stinger deep into a place where nothing sharp and pointy should ever go.

  Not my finest moment. Made even less so by my shouting out, “Tooshie!” the way a fencer yells, “Touché!”

  I don’t think anyone heard me, though, because at the same time Top emptied an entire mag into the third man-wasp. The creature dropped to the ground, his torso resembling a giant, blood-streaked slab of honeycomb.

  “A little overkill, don’t you think?” Bunny said, shoving away from the man-wasp I’d killed.

  “I did not want to get stung by that thing,” Top said, looking around at us. His eyes landed on Sanders, who had an angry red bump the size of a golf ball on his neck. “Oh. Uh, how are you feeling, Sanders?”

  The base guard managed a weak smile. “I think I’ll be okay, actually,” he said. “Maybe I’m not allergic to mutant human wasp venom.”

  We continued on, but while I knew I should stay alert for more threats, I found myself constantly glancing at the big bug bite, until it got to the point where I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  It was growing.

  It was the size of a baseball now.

  I put my hand on the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the edge of my pocket. “Hey, Sanders,” I said. “That bump looks uncomfortable. You want me to poke a hole in it? See if some monster puss drains out?”

  Sanders turned and opened his mouth to speak, but only a gasping sound came out.

  Forget pricking the bump, I was ready to amputate it. That wouldn’t help him, though, if what he really needed was a giant EpiPen.

  As if reading my thoughts, Top said, “He’s not going into anaphylactic shock, that thing’s grown so big it’s crushing his throat!”

  He was right and there was not a damn thing we could do about it.

  Sanders gurgled out some words that sounded eerily close to the fruit fly men’s “Kill me,” but I didn’t have to make that hard decision. Sanders’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, then he collapsed, his chest no longer moving.

  Guess he really was allergic. Poor bastard.

  I looked toward Bunny and Top, who were both staring at Sanders’s neck, and it took my mind a moment to process what I was seeing behind them.

  A tall naked woman—the term Amazon came to mind—appeared to be twerking, of all things. I thought she was trying to mesmerize me with her booty shake. As a battle tactic, I have to admit it almost worked.

  Until I noticed what was above the full moon.

  Just in time, I realized she was actually winding up to do a giant swing toward my teammates … using her massive stinger like a sword to slice them both in half.

  “Down!” I shouted.

  Top and Bunny obeyed without question.

  As the queen bee completed her swing, she continued the motion so that she stood facing me. The chitinous scales that covered her naked body reminded me of a girl with freckles I’d once dated. “You must be Captain Ledger,” she said in a surprisingly normal voice. Deeper, raspier, sure, but very feminine and seductive. “I’m going to eat you alive,” she said.

  I almost considered letting her.

  The Warrior overruled the Horn Dog and I aimed my pistol at her. Blood and gore exploded from her chest.

  Weird thing was, I hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  She lifted off the ground, yet her wings weren’t moving. She flew sideways, crashing into the wall. She fell dead to the ground.

  She’d been impaled and flung away by the maze’s alpha predator. The Minotaur.

  “Thanks?” I said.

  He glared at me, nostrils flaring. “Don’t thank me,” he said, his voice labored, as if it were a struggl
e to speak properly through his mutated mouth. “Dr. Goldman promised to reverse my mutation if I kill you. I just didn’t want her to get the credit.”

  He looked ready to charge me. Bunny and Top already had their laser sights on him and I could get off several shots before he reached me, but his leathery hide looked tough. Would our bullets even slow him down? I wore light body armor, but I didn’t think it’d be any match for those powerful horns.

  The Minotaur’s eyes widened when I raised my gun and fired toward his head.

  “That’s not going to stop me,” he said when he realized I’d been aiming at the video camera on the wall behind his head. “I don’t need Goldman to see me kill you. I’ll just drag your body to the next camera.”

  “That’s what I was planning on,” I said.

  The Minotaur looked just as confused as Top and Bunny.

  I holstered my gun and used my knife to cut two horn-sized holes in my jacket. I rubbed some of the wasp woman’s blood onto my chest to complete the disguise. I was a dead man.

  “What about us?” Top asked.

  “What about the other two?” Halverson echoed a moment later, when the Minotaur used Sanders’s radio to inform him of my death.

  “They said they were with you when Goldman’s brother died. They said you should let them go.”

  To my surprise and relief, Halverson replied, “Okay. You can bring them, but they have to leave their weapons. Remove Captain Ledger’s weapons as well.”

  Well, damn.

  As the Minotaur dragged me roughly along by my left arm, the walls rearranged themselves to give us direct passage to the entryway.

  “Have his friends bring him out,” Halverson said when the door opened. “You stay there.” He pointed his gun at the Minotaur.

  Top and Bunny each grabbed an arm and dragged me out next to Halverson. They weren’t any gentler than the Minotaur. Payback for all the times I’d kicked their asses sparring.