Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  The People’s Choice Award became so slippery, in fact, that I had to slam two open palm strikes into its square base. The first strike hammered it through the open space above his jaw, past the roof of his mouth, and into his sinus cavity. The second strike was necessary to find lethal purchase in Blond Mountain’s frontal lobe, just behind his orbital plate.

  So that slowed me down.

  It also gave Cole McAdams time to hit a panic button and disappear behind the pneumatic hiss of a rapidly opening and closing wall panel.

  The good news is that, being the world’s biggest movie star, Cole McAdams wasn’t going to be hard to find. I already had an idea where he was headed.

  So, as Blond Mountain fell twitching to his knees, and then face-planted onto the hardwood floor to let out a sad little death rattle, I let Cole McAdams bitch out of the straight fight he could have had with me and turned my attention to Three-Piece.

  It turns out that the Emmy Award (which Cole McAdams had won in 1997 after attaching himself as executive producer to, and narrator of, The Silent Struggle, an unimpeachable PBS documentary about the role of deaf-mutes in the civil rights movement) provided not only a perfect pommel as I rammed the lightning-shaped wings of the statue just above Three-Piece’s jugular notch but also a profoundly satisfying crack! when I delivered its heavy metal base against the bottom of his skull.

  I turned to the now bloodstained screen and took a final look at the corpse of Amy Garfunkel.

  All she did was spill some fucking paint on the ground.

  Wherever she is, I hope she knows that her broken dreams fueled the vengeance I took in her name.

  I found my cell phone in Blond Mountain’s breast pocket, wiped his blood and gore off the screen, removed the monitoring chip, and dialed the emergency transponder activation number. In less than an hour, this place would be crawling with DMS forensic investigation experts.

  Using the remote control, I changed the channel on the display screen to Cole McAdams’s security feed. I found him in the garage, angrily shouting orders at a man I can only imagine was Blond Mountain’s backup—and his three-man team of gun-drawing private security thick-necks, all in black suits.

  The men advanced into the house in cover formation, presumably heading up to the office to finish me off.

  I reached into Blond Mountain’s clothes, retrieved both his shoulder and ankle carries (Beretta 93R machine pistol on top, Glock on the bottom), and headed out to intercept the coming army. I imagine that this would have been a scintillating gun battle had the security camera feed not told me exactly where they were coming from.

  Also, because I’m nice like that, I did try sparing them all by attempting to escape through the only other exit to the office: the panic button/wall panel. That turned out to be coded to Cole McAdams’s thumbprint.

  So yeah, I found a nearby hallway closet and closed the office doors behind me on the way out. When they got there, opened the doors, threw in a flashbanger, and then opened fire into the smoke, thinking they had fish in a barrel, I rolled out of the closet and plugged every last one of the sons of bitches in the back.

  * * *

  It turns out that “TMZ” is a fancy Hollywood term for “thirty-mile zone”: the area around the city proper where movie companies are allowed to film without paying travel expenses, per diems, and lodging to their actors and crew. It’s also the name of an annoying celebrity gossip website from which I had spent most of my life mercifully shielded.

  Anyway, in an incident that TMZ would later report as an unfortunate confluence of bad weather (in Los Angeles, shyeah) and pilot error, Cole McAdams’s 747-100 jumbo jet (which had been lavishly restored for his personal use) skidded off a runway at a private airport in the San Fernando Valley, fully fueled for an impromptu international flight, and exploded, killing everyone on board. The reality was a little more cinematic. Hell, it might have won me a People’s Choice Award had Mr. Church not chosen to keep it off the papers.

  As Cole McAdams boarded his plane, I was screaming up the Cahuenga pass on his first-off-the-assembly-line Ducati Multistrada 1200 S-Touring, trying to keep the backpack I had shanghaied from his gear locker attached to my body as I white-knuckled the heated grips.

  Yeah, you read that right.

  Heated grips on a motorcycle.

  What an asshole.

  In the cockpit of his luxury jetliner, Cole McAdams went through a seriously shortened pre-flight checklist with his co-pilot, a former Soviet fighter jockey whose silence and loyalty had been purchased with vast sums of cash and the occasional life-extension/healing treatments from McAdams’s illicit operation. Meanwhile, at the front gate, I was shouting at Homeland Security officers, telling them to call the number leading straight to Mr. Church’s “give this guy whatever the hell he needs and stay out of his goddamned way” red phone.

  Cole McAdams’s 747-100 taxied out of its hangar and onto the runway. His flight plan said nothing about how he intended to fly it to a private South Pacific island well outside of the rule of United States law.

  I peeled rubber in a hairpin turn that Tokyo-drifted me right behind the jumbo jet’s enormous tailplane. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this gonna be a martial arts fight on the wing like in Die Hard 2: Die Harder, or a game of “land vehicle vs. airplane chicken” like in Face/Off?

  Okay, maybe you’re not thinking that, but since it was the first thing out of Dr. Hu’s mouth when I told him the story, I figured I’d mention it.

  Anyway, the 747 turned onto the runway.

  I gunned the throttle on the Ducati and took advantage of that one last remaining moment in which I’d be faster than four Rolls-Royce jet engines tasked with lifting a half-million pounds of shining steel into the air.

  I overshot the plane and kept going at top speed to the end of the runway. Before running out of blacktop, I skid-turned the bike to a near halt and let it scrape the road in a shower of sparks as I dismounted.

  I could see Cole McAdams’s smug, self-satisfied, grin. I caught a flash of his perfect teeth as he saw me and gunned the throttle.

  The foremost of his landing gear trembled, tentatively letting go of the ground below.

  I also saw the change in Cole McAdams’s expression right before the forward landing gear rose to expose the plane’s underbelly.

  It was at that exact moment that I reached into his backpack and pulled out the prized item of his indeed massive and varied arms collection.

  The hero prop rocket-powered grenade launcher from Relentless 2.

  I don’t care how famous you are. I don’t care how many awards you’ve won. I don’t care how much money you’ve earned. And I truly don’t care how many fugitive life-extension and limb-regeneration scientists from the bowels of the Cold War you have in business with you.

  No murdering son of a bitch comes back from a rocket-powered grenade to the center-wing fuel tank.

  Fade to black, motherfucker.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Though best known as one of the Emmy Award–winning producers of Lost, and for creating The Middleman comic books and TV series, Javier Grillo-Marxuach is a prolific creator of TV, films, graphic novels, and transmedia content. In addition to his work as writer/producer on shows ranging from The 100 and The Shannara Chronicles to Medium and Boomtown, Grillo-Marxuach co-hosts the Children of Tendu podcast, an educational series for writers, and is an avid participant of the Writers Guild mentors program. Grillo-Marxuach can be found online at www.OKBJGM.com and on Twitter @OKBJGM, and his podcast is available free of charge on iTunes, with Stitcher, and at www.childrenoftendu.com. Javier Grillo-Marxuach was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and his name is pronounced “HA-VEE-AIR-GREE-JOE-MARKS-WATCH.”

  GANBATTE

  BY KEITH R. A. DeCANDIDO

  The wind whipped through Lydia Ruiz’s hair as she drove her cherry-red Mercedes-Benz SL550 convertible down US Route 1, the Overseas Highway, through the Florida Keys.

  When she booked her trip
home with the travel office at the Department of Military Sciences, the woman there was confused as to why she was booking a flight to Miami International Airport rather than Key West International Airport.

  “My car’s in long-term parking at MIA,” was the only answer she gave.

  But that wasn’t the real reason.

  You didn’t just fly into Key West. It was too abrupt a transition, to go from the real world to paradise.

  No, it was better to fly into Miami, get into a car, and take the three hours to drive south on US 1. Made it way easier to assimilate.

  And right now, Lydia needed paradise. The real world had gotten too unreal since joining the DMS.

  As she took the bridge from Long Key to Marathon, she glanced down at the digital display. It was 5:30 PM on a Tuesday, so the dojo was open and Yona Congrejo would be teaching the five o’clock kids class.

  When she reached 89th Street, she made a U-turn and pulled into the small shopping center on the northbound side of the Overseas Highway.

  But Kaicho Bill’s wasn’t there. Instead, there was a clothing store.

  She pulled into a parking space and leaped out of the Mercedes without opening the door.

  For about ten seconds, she just stared at the clothing store and thought back to the first time she came to this shopping center.

  You look up at the sign that says KAICHO BILL’S MARATHON KARATE, then you look at Yona. “What the fuck am I supposed to be doing here?”

  “Watch your mouth, chica.”

  Then you smile. “Don’t call me chica, bitch.”

  Yona throws up her hands. “Fine, you don’t want to do this, I’ll go tell the Key West cops who left José Alvarez bleeding on Southard last weekend.”

  “Motherfucker had it comin’!”

  “Funny thing about felony assault—there is no proviso in it for whether or not the person being assaulted had it coming.”

  “Well, there fuckin’ should be.”

  Yona grabs you by the shoulders. “Look, Lydia, you’ve got two choices—karate or jail. Doesn’t matter to me which it is.”

  “If it don’t matter, then why we here?”

  “Because I give a fuck.”

  You grin, then. “Watch your mouth, chica.”

  And Yona grins right back. “Don’t call me chica, bitch. Now you gonna take the trial class?”

  “I guess. But do I gotta wear the pajamas?”

  “It’s a gi, not pajamas.”

  Yona brings you inside. There’s a waiting area up front, and a tiny, wizened Asian guy standing in the middle of the wooden floor just past the waiting area. Eight kids wearing different-colored belts are facing him, performing moves while the Asian guy yells out instructions.

  “That’s Kaicho,” Yona tells you.

  Kaicho Bill Nakahara sees you and Yona walk in and he says, “Stop!”

  He doesn’t say it very loudly, but something in his tone makes you completely freeze.

  “Turn,” Kaicho says, indicating Yona with his left hand, “and face Senpai Yona. Bow, osu!”

  All eight kids make fists and bend their elbows so those fists are in front of their chests, and they all bow toward Yona and cry out, “Osu!”

  The thing that really strikes you is how Kaicho moves. He’s like a coil about to spring. It’s the coolest thing you ever have seen, and right there you decide you need to learn how to be a badass like this guy.

  Lydia pulled out her cell phone and immediately called Yona’s cell.

  “Holy shit, Lydia, is that you?”

  “Watch your mouth, chica,” Lydia said automatically.

  “Don’t call me chica, bitch. Where are you?”

  “Well, I thought I was at the dojo. What the hell happened?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Yona’s voice caught. “Lydia—Kaicho died last year.”

  “What!? How?”

  “Heart attack, they said.”

  “So the dojo just closed?”

  “Yeah.” Yona let out a long breath. “Did you know Kaicho had three kids?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Neither did anyone else. I only found out ’cause some lawyer was supervising the people taking all the equipment out to put it up on eBay or something before they broke the lease. Turns out he has a kid in Seattle, a kid in San Francisco, and a kid in D.C., and none of them give a damn about the martial arts, so the dojo’s dead.”

  “Carajo. So now what?”

  “Now nothing. I joined up with one of Grandmaster Ken’s dojos here in Miami.”

  “Hold up.” Lydia shook her head. “You’re in fuckin’ Miami? You swore to me you’d die before you lived there.”

  “Well, that’s why I shouldn’t swear. My job moved up here.”

  “You ain’t workin’ for Martinez no more?”

  “The congresswoman lost her seat in a hotly contested election and is now back in the private sector, so I went to work for Congressman Nieto here in Miami. And I kinda need to get back to work, I was just out for a smoke break.”

  “Since when do you smoke?”

  “Since I started working for a lunatic. Look, how long you back home for?”

  “Just a few days. We just finished an assignment that—well, it was kind of…” Lydia’s voice trailed off.

  “Crazy?”

  “Nah, chica, it needed to get a helluva lot calmer before it was as good as crazy. I got a few days to decompress, figured we could get together and hoist a tequila or six—maybe I come by the dojo and get in a workout.”

  “Well, I’m still game for the tequilas. Look, tonight’s no good, but what about tomorrow at the Schooner Wharf? I’ll leave the office at five, should be there by nine or ten, depending on traffic?”

  Grinning, Lydia jumped back into her Mercedes. “You are on.”

  She pulled out of the driveway and turned right onto US 1 until she could make a U-turn, then headed back down toward the Keys.

  The Seven Mile Bridge stretched out before her as she left Marathon, and as she always did, she found herself lost in the expanse of blue water on both sides of her.

  There were no vampires (vampires!), no terrorists, no jihadists, no nuclear bombs, none of what had become the new normal since she joined the DMS.

  No, there was just the bridge, the water, and the memories.

  You struggle to thrust yourself upward into a push-up position, and each one is agony, your arms simply not up to the task of raising your weight off the floor.

  Expecting Kaicho to yell at you or scream at you or call you a failure, you hear him say in a gentle but firm voice, “Keep trying. Keep pushing.”

  And you do.

  That first class has a total of thirty push-ups in sets of ten at various points in the one-hour class. You successfully do maybe eight.

  You feel like a total fuckup. It’s a class for beginners, but the other three adults in the class all seem to at least have an idea what they’re doing. You look like a klutzy fool.

  At the end of the class, after you all bow out and clean the floor as a courtesy to the next class, you expect Kaicho to tell you how badly you screwed up this trial class he let you do as a favor to Yona. You expect him to tell you to not bother showing up for the next class.

  Instead he says, “Osu, Lydia, are you familiar with the Japanese word ganbatte?”

  You barely remember to start your sentence with “Osu, Kaicho,” before continuing: “Only Japanese I know is what you said tonight in class.”

  He smiles. “It is what we traditionally say before a student is about to engage in a difficult undertaking.”

  “So it means ‘good luck’?”

  “In fact, it does not. It means ‘try your best.’ That is all I ask of my students, Lydia, is that they give the maximum effort. It matters less if you succeed. It matters more that you make every effort to succeed, because without the effort, the success will never come.” He bows his head. “Osu, Lydia, you did well. I hope we will see you again on Thursday.”


  Yona drives you home to Stock Island, and you think about what Kaicho said, which encourages you, since you sucked pretty hard in that first class.

  But you’ll get better.

  Yona finally made it to the Schooner Wharf Bar in the Old Town section of Key West at almost 10:30.

  “Sorry,” she said breathlessly as she joined Lydia at a table near the bar that also had a good view of the stage, where a band was playing country music. Off the beaten path of the main drag of Duval Street, the Schooner Wharf was right on the water and tended to be calmer than the other bars on the island. That was what had drawn Lydia here in the first place years ago. People went to the bars on Duval to get drunk. People came to the Schooner Wharf to drink.

  Lydia had already ordered Yona’s favorite so it was waiting for her when she arrived. For her part, the first thing Lydia noticed was that Yona pretty well reeked of cigarette smoke.

  Holding up her strawberry margarita, Yona said, “It’s really good to see you, Lydia.”

  “Likewise.” Lydia held up her neat tequila. “To Kaicho.”

  “To Kaicho. Osu!”

  “Osu!”

  They clinked glasses.

  After licking a bit of the salt on the rim and sipping her margarita, Yona put the big glass down and pulled out a cigarette.

  “So talk to me, chica,” Lydia said while Yona lit up. “I Googled this Grandmaster Ken pendejo. Didn’t think he’d be your kinda teacher.”

  “He’s kind of intense.” Yona looked away and stared at her margarita. Puffing on the cigarette, she grabbed the drink. “Four of us went over to his dojo after Kaicho died. I’m up to yellow belt now, so that’s good.”

  “Wait, you had to start over?”

  Yona nodded, after licking another bit of salt and gulping down more of her drink. “It’s no big deal, that’s what usually happens when you switch dojos.”

  Lydia nodded. “So all four of you had to go back to white belt?”

  “Me and Ana did. Senpai—Sorry, Master Phil and Master Cliff both got to keep their black belts, though they did have to go through a full black belt promotion.”