Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  “You can leave,” the man says, and then he falls silent for a beat. When he speaks again, I hear a threat in the tone. “Unless you’re here for a reason?”

  “Same as you, would be my guess.” I fish the small white card out of my pocket and hold it up, the gold You’re invited … text easy to read in the moonlight. “Came here to help a friend in trouble?”

  “Shit,” the man says, and with a quick yank, he’s free of the cuffs. They’d already been picked. He was just biding his time, allowing the homunculus-bird to cut him with the hopes of garnering information about his friend. “You military?”

  I hand the man my utility knife, and he starts to work on the ropes binding his feet. “Something like that. You?”

  “Something like that.” After a few quick slices, he’s free. He stands up, swivels the short blade around in his hand, and offers it back, handle first.

  “Keep it,” I say. “You’ll probably need it.”

  He looks at the knife and smirks. “I’m used to longer.”

  “Thankfully,” I say, “you’re the first person to tell me that.” I offer my hand. “For now, you can call me Cowboy.”

  He shakes my hand and introduces himself with a single word. “King.”

  3

  My grip on the man’s hand and the machete’s handle tighten in unison. “King of what?”

  Still unruffled, the man named King glances down at our hands, and then the machete. “That’s a bad idea.”

  “King of what?” I ask again. If he makes me ask again, I’m going to punctuate the question by removing his hand. My previous experience with the Seven Kings has left me with a stark distrust of anyone bearing the name. King of Plagues. King of Fear. King of War. They’re all dead now, but there are always unsavory people looking to claim their legacy.

  Without tugging his hand away, he turns his back to me, revealing a tattoo of Elvis Presley. He wiggles his shoulder blade and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll looks as if he’s swaying his leg back and forth. “That and chess,” King says.

  I release his hand and step back.

  “Good grip,” he says, flexing his fingers.

  I motion in the direction the homunculus-bird exited. “Did you learn anything from him?”

  “Not much,” King says. “He’s a slight man. Aryan features. Hooked nose. Whoever he works for, he’s not the brains. But he does enjoy his job. What I really want to know is—” His head twitches as though he’s listening to something. Then he taps his ear and speaks. “Copy that. Thanks, Lew.”

  He taps his ear again, grumbles, “Damn it,” and then seems to remember I’m there. “The old friend used to lure me here is missing. Looks like someone has been living in his house for a week. Collecting the mail. Making purchases. And not leaving a trace.”

  I dig into my pocket, retrieving my phone, which is powered off and protected by a Ziploc bag. I power it on and clench my jaw when I see several messages from Bug. I play the newest, listen to the short message, and nearly crush the device in my hand. Laura is missing. Her husband is dead. Rotting in the bathtub, while someone created the digital illusion that the couple was still safe and sound.

  I don’t need to confirm my situation. He can see it in my eyes.

  Over the din of insect chirps rolling out of the jungle on the island’s coast, my ears pick up the familiar whine of small engines. “Take cover!” I lean behind the ruins of an interior stone wall, while King remains rooted in place, making me look and feel a little like a chicken-shit. But my caution comes from experience. When most people think of drones, they picture Peeping Toms hovering the craft outside bedroom windows or over nude beaches. But they’re easily modified to carry more than cameras—a fact I learned the hard way.

  “It’s a drone,” he says, eyes on the night sky, watching the stars, any one of which could be something else. “Ten of them, actually.”

  This revelation pulls me out of hiding. “You can see them?”

  “Their lights.”

  If the drones have lights on them, they blend in perfectly with the backdrop of stars.

  “I’ve looked at the stars long enough to know which of those”—he points at the sky—“shouldn’t be there. And if they wanted us dead, it would’ve been easy to blow up this rock when you arrived.”

  He’s right about that. They want something from us. From what I can tell, we’re similar men in similar positions. He’s a little more … casual about his mortality, but he’s got a familiar look in his eyes, as if he’s already strategizing. Chess King indeed.

  Several of the stars high above start shifting about, revealing themselves as drones, hundreds of feet up, where the buzz of their rotors blends with the sound of insects.

  Before either of us can react, a loud buzzing brings our attention to the air just thirty feet above us. A hexa-rotor drone hovers overhead, capturing King and me within the cone of its spotlight.

  “Glad to see you both made it.” It’s the homunculus-bird, his voice pumping from a speaker. “And thank you for not killing each other. The others bet against a civil meeting. Thought you two might tear each other apart. After all, life requires you both to sometimes shoot first and ask questions if there are survivors. But I had faith. You are two of the best candidates I’ve seen. Noble. Determined. Skilled. Team players. Deadly.”

  Candidates? This is some kind of test?

  A single drop of water, the faint bloop striking my ear like a Klaxon, warns me of danger. I whisper, “Incoming on my ten.”

  “More at my three,” King says.

  “This is a little elaborate for the Boy Scouts,” I say to the drone. “Who are you?”

  To my surprise, the man gives an answer that I suspect is honest, because it’s too ridiculous to be fiction. “The Princes of Peace.”

  “Listen, princess…,” King says.

  “Princes. Plural of prince.” The man’s loud retort makes the speaker crackle. King’s quip has revealed just how short a temper the man has, and people with short tempers make mistakes. “We will bring peace to Earth by ending conflicts before they begin. By toppling violent despots. By—”

  “Who decides?” I slowly pull the hammer from the belt loop where I tucked it. I tap King’s hand with the handle and he takes it with a subtle nod. It’s not much, but it will complement the three-inch blade. “Who decides who to kill, or overthrow?”

  “The Princes.” He enunciates more clearly this time. “We vote.”

  “Democratic assassins,” I say. “That’s new.”

  The drone buzzes for several seconds. When the man speaks again, it’s clear he’s trying to remain calm. “I’m no longer sure which of you I want to see survive this.”

  And here it comes. The reason why we’re here, and why only one of us is supposed to leave.

  “As you’ve no doubt already discerned, we have your friends. Whichever one of you walks out of Nan Madol will have their friend returned and be welcomed as a Prince of Peace. The other will meet the same fate as their fallen hero. And no, I don’t expect you to fight each other. I’m many things, but cliché is not one of them.”

  “Says the man giving a monologue.” King grins and it takes a concerted effort to not laugh.

  “And if the survivor refuses membership?” I ask.

  “There is no refusing. You are a member whether you accept it or not. Votes will be cast via text. Refusing to vote simply allows members you might disagree with to direct our course. Participation is the only way to influence the outcome.”

  “We could always stand directly in your way,” King says.

  “One of you,” homunculus-bird says, “is welcome to try. The other will be buried alongside Pohnpei’s ancients. Now then, the rules are simple. You—”

  King lunges to the side, hammer raised. There’s a shout, a thunk, and a splash.

  “Stop!” homunculus shouts. “The rules!”

  When King is thrown back into the small courtyard, rolling back to his feet, knife and ha
mmer at the ready, I head for the men entering to my left.

  “You can’t start yet! I haven’t—”

  There’s a thunk of metal on plastic, followed by a grinding. I glance up to see the drone wobbling, canting off to the side, two of its propellers shattered. King’s hammer clangs on the stone floor between us. He’s impulsive, but I think I like it.

  The sound of wet feet focuses my attention on the entryway through which I came just minutes ago, unaware that I was being watched, not by sharks but by evil men with evil intentions. The first man, dressed in a black wet suit and holding a hatchet, all but walks into the machete’s blade. The second man sees it happen and waits for a third man to join him. None of the men carry firearms, but they look comfortable with the assortment of blades. When one of them double-takes the machete now dripping with his comrade’s blood, I realize they expected us to be unarmed. And while a machete, hammer, and short knife don’t an arsenal make, they help even the odds a little.

  Though his face is mostly concealed by the wet suit’s hood, I see a surge of desperate confidence fill the man’s eyes. I’m not sure if these men are here willingly, or somehow being cajoled, but as the first of them swings a sword toward my neck, I decide it doesn’t matter. The sword comes to a stop when his wrist slaps into my raised machete hand. Gripping his shoulder with my free hand, I pull him in close and drive my forehead into his nose. Crunching bone is followed by a wet howl. There’s almost no resistance when I shove the man back, toppling him into his partner and sending them both sprawling into the sea. These men might be killers, but they’re also amateurs.

  King handles his attackers with the same lethal force, but employs a series of knife cuts, jabs, and pressure-point strikes that appear chaotic at first, but are actually a fluid use of multiple martial arts and more modern fighting techniques. King has been fighting for a long time.

  Who the hell is this guy?

  When the last of his assailants hits the stone floor, I say, “The drones have a limited range. Two thousand feet, tops, if they have an extender on one of the islets. We’ll find them on the mainland. And not far.”

  King gives a nod and steps toward the exit on his side, about to dive in and start swimming.

  “I came in a kayak,” I tell him.

  He pauses, looks back, and says, “Behind you.”

  I sidestep the man I heard coming before King’s warning and give his back a shove. He stumbles forward into King’s fist and drops. He’s alive, but he won’t be moving anytime soon. When King doesn’t put the knife in the man’s back, I know I’m dealing with someone whose sense of honor resembles my own. He has no trouble killing, but only when it’s necessary.

  King steps over the unconscious man and pauses as orange light fills the sky above us. A softball-sized orb of fire plummets from one of the drones.

  “Looks like Greek fire,” I observe.

  The comment snaps King’s eyes wide. “Down!” he shouts, sounding worried for the first time.

  The fiery sphere strikes an outcrop of angled stone and bounces like a kid’s rubber ball—if kids’ toys left explosive mountains of flame in their wake. The fireball ricochets off a wall, the tree, and the courtyard floor, each strike setting more foliage and vines ablaze, before zipping out the entrance beside me. There’s a thud and then a high-pitched wail. The man whose face I caved in took the projectile in the chest, and he’s now a walking inferno. He throws himself into the ocean, but the flames continue to eat him up as he thrashes. When his body falls still, floating out to sea, he looks like a Viking funeral pyre. The ball strikes the water and floats, flames spreading out from its core.

  “They’re kinetic fireball incendiaries,” King says. “They’re filled with jet fuel.”

  Before I can ask how he knows that, the night lights up around us. Ten more fiery spheres drop from the night sky. In their initial burst of orange light, I catch sight of the drones dropping them. Fucking drones. And then I don’t have time to think. Most of the KFIs strike islets around us, setting fire to the ancient ruins and the surrounding water. But three plummet toward the already burning courtyard.

  As fast as I am, and King appears to be, neither of us will be able to avoid being struck if one of the balls ricochets in our direction. And taking cover is a no-go. Our little fortress is about to be transformed into a volcano.

  “Water!” I shout, and dive out over the stone staircase I crawled up just minutes ago. I arc out over a blazing trail of jet fuel still leaking from the first fireball and plunge into the depths.

  I spin around underwater, watching through the waves, as orange trails of fire bounce around the ruins and through the water. The result is a fiery maze stretching farther than I can see, much of it between me and the mainland shoreline.

  I see no sign of the mysterious King.

  A twenty-foot gap between fiery streaks burning atop the water provides plenty of space for me to surface. I rise slowly, letting my face break the water just enough to take a breath and check things out. The air stings my nose and throat. It’s choked with chemical smoke. The fire burns hot, steaming the moisture from my skin. All around, ancient ruins burn. The stone structures will survive, just as they did the city’s sinking, but the vegetation will be scorched clean, along with any animal life on the islets—including myself and King if we linger much longer.

  There’s still no sign of the man, but my kayak floats free, overturned, but still buoyant. I can turn it back over, but will it carry me safely through the fires? I flinch back when the side of the kayak tips up and a face peers out at me and a deep voice says, “Under.”

  “Shit. King.” I dip under the water and come up inside the kayak, treading water, just a few feet away from King.

  “If you don’t want rules,” our adversary says, voice booming from another drone above, but muffled by the kayak’s shell, “that’s fine. We were going to do this in stages, but I think we’ll all just embrace the chaos you two seem to prefer.” A series of loud clunks sounds out. I have no idea what they could be, but I’m sure they’re not good.

  “Did you know that while uncommon, the occasional saltwater crocodile finds its way to Pohnpei? It’s a surprise every time, but it happens. A half dozen is far less likely, but we’re not making a National Geographic documentary, now, are we? And do you know the one thing every crocodile has in common when it reaches Pohnpei, after swimming through hundreds of miles of open ocean?”

  “They’re hungry,” I say a moment before our host continues.

  “They’re hungry.”

  “And he said he wasn’t cliché.”

  King grins, but the smile is wiped away when a loud thunk on the kayak’s hull is followed by a bright yellow illumination. The yellow plastic above us starts to thin and liquefy.

  “Get to shore!” I shout before ducking under the water, chased by globs of melted plastic. Under the water, King and I have the same idea. Before swimming, we shed our remaining clothes and shoes down to our boxers. King has the small knife gripped between his teeth, and I refasten my belt, with the machete, around my waist. Looking like a couple of Men’s Adventure action heroes, we swim for shore.

  Surfacing to breathe is tricky, but not impossible. The real problem is that the longer the fire burns, the more foul the air becomes. We’ve swum only a few hundred feet when I surface in three-foot shallows, breathe, and gag. We’re between two islets, both on fire. The real problem is that I’ve surfaced just ten feet away from a KFI, bobbing in the water and spewing toxic fumes.

  I turn to King, ready to plunge back in, when I see the ocean surging up over some kind of projectile headed for his back. Without warning, I shove King to the side, which is noble of me, but also puts me directly in the torpedo’s path.

  Only it’s not a torpedo at all.

  It’s a croc. Sort of.

  The front of its head is covered in electronics. Where its eyes should be are two sheets of brushed metal, riveted to flesh. I catch only a glimpse before it
s jaws snap open to engulf me, but there’s little doubt that the predators unleashed in Nan Madol have been somehow modified. Perhaps being controlled. Living drones.

  I fall back and slip under the water, letting my body arc beneath the croc. Darkness surrounds me as its massive form blocks out the fiery light above. A loud clunk reverberates through the water as its jaws snap shut, thankfully not on my head. But I’m far from safe. The behemoth starts to thrash. Its tail slams into my gut, shoving the acrid air from my lungs.

  Something clamps down on my wrist. I struggle for a moment, but then see King, yanking me out from under the croc. He shoves me above the waterline and my lungs fill with poisonous air. King surfaces beside me, coughing. Despite not being sucker punched by a croc’s tail, he’s not faring much better. But the croc has seen better days. Its thrashing illuminates the area, as its head and then body burst into flames thanks to the KFI clutched in its jaws.

  “Divide and conquer, mighty heroes,” the homunculus-bird says, apparently still watching from above. “If you both die, your friends both die. And we really would prefer one of you to survive. That is the point of all this.”

  “How long can you hold your breath?” King asks.

  “Three minutes,” I say, not taking into account that my lungs want nothing to do with the air I’m currently breathing.

  “We need to get off their radar. It’s the only way.”

  “So we go deep,” I say. It’s bullshit. My body says so. But the Warrior side of my personality is firing on all cylinders, roaring louder than the Civilized Man and Cop ever could.

  The familiar whir of chain guns warming up joins the chorus of insects and drones. Without another word between us, we dive into the sea once more, swimming away from the shallows between islets and diving deep. Angry bullet swarms pursue us into the depths, but the water saps their energy after just a few feet, protecting us better than any armor could.

  When my ears are about to burst from the pressure, we angle toward shore and kick hard. Forty feet above us is a light show from hell. Fire burns everywhere, in the water and on every dot of surrounding ruin. Water ripples from crosshatching lines of bullets scouring the surface. The silhouettes of four large crocs shift back and forth far above, but just under the waves, seeking us out. One of the apex predators leaves a trail of blood in its wake, most likely struck by friendly fire. The icing on top of this shit-cake is a fifth silhouette gliding toward the wounded croc.