Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Do you believe in the Devil, Rudy?”

  Considering what she’d just been through, with most of her team murdered and the only other survivors in critical condition, it wasn’t such an odd question. “I believe in good and evil. My small part in that struggle is helping good people deal with traumatic events and the horrors they’ve faced. I’m just here to help you.”

  Carver stared at him for a long time. It was the first time her tremors had stopped. She responded as though she hadn’t even heard his words. “I believe in him now.”

  “You hungry? Want some coffee or something?”

  The survivor lifted her arm to show that her wrist was handcuffed to the metal table.

  “Yeah, well. Sorry. That’s not my call,” Rudy explained.

  “No. It’s his.” She looked over at the mirrored wall and raised her voice. “Hello, Mr. Church.”

  Rudy just shook his head, but he didn’t deny who was on the other side of the glass. He’d asked about the necessity of the restraints already—it was hard to make somebody feel safe enough to open up while they were chained like a prisoner—but he had been shot down. Apparently it wasn’t clear yet who had done all of the killing. Lieutenant Carver could be the survivor of some kind of new chemical hallucinatory attack, or the victim of an unknown terrorist bioweapon, or she could have just had a psychotic break, or even be a traitor who had simply murdered her teammates in cold blood and lied to cover it up. The fact was they didn’t even yet know what they didn’t know.

  Say what you will about working for the DMS, it was never predictable.

  “Let’s just talk. Tell me about the mission. Tell me about what happened in Mexico.”

  * * *

  This part of Sonora looked a lot like Arizona. She was born and raised in Phoenix, so it seemed weird to be rolling hot in an area of operation that looked suspiciously like her hometown. Only back home she hadn’t been worried about car bombs or cartel gunfights growing up, common threats the poor folks stuck here had to deal with on a daily basis.

  Their convoy moved fast. The black government Suburbans barely slowed as they left the paved road and hit gravel. Carver was at the wheel of the second vehicle in line. The view out the window was creosote bushes and sun-baked rocks as far as the eye could see, just as it had been for the last hour. The only difference was now the ride got bumpier, and she began to taste dust in the air-conditioning.

  Captain Quinn got on the radio. He said something in Spanish, and the last three vehicles in their convoy broke off. Those were white-and-green pickups filled with Federales. They would be setting up a roadblock to keep anyone from getting in or out of the AO. From here on in, the DMS was on its own. The Mexican government and the U.S. State Department had come to an agreement that all parties were cool with. This was the DMS’s show. Everybody official was just going to deny that this op ever happened anyway.

  Their commanding officer was in the vehicle behind them. Satisfied that they were now speeding toward the target by themselves, the captain switched to the encrypted DMS channels and addressed Bowie Team.

  “We’re ten minutes out. You know the drill.”

  There would be silence between their vehicles the rest of the way in. Intercepting even garbled radio transmissions could warn the bad guys something was up. Carver just concentrated on driving. The loose gravel turned to washboard, which threatened to rattle their armored vehicle to death. These pigs didn’t have the smoothest ride in the best situations.

  Sandbag was riding shotgun. Gator and Corvus were in the back seat. Louie was serving as trunk monkey, ready to pop open the back window and open fire with a SAW.

  “You really think there’s something to this intel, LT?” Sandbag asked.

  “We know Hezbollah has an exchange program going with the cartels for years,” she answered. “One side has expertise, the other has more money than it knows what to do with. Smuggling people and weapons across the border is a piece of cake to the cartel, and terrorists get an easy way into the U.S. It’s a match made in heaven.”

  “Yeah, nothing like sharing your cultural traditions with others, like beheading, or car bombings,” Gator interjected.

  “Well, now DMS thinks they’re sharing something else. Word is a few days ago an unknown weapon was shipped from an undisclosed location in the Middle East to this little town. Once it is ready, they’ll send it north. We just don’t know what it is yet. Which is why we’re going to nab these bastards and find out,” Carver stated. She was trying to stay right behind the truck ahead of her without rear-ending it while blinded by its plume of dust. At least the dust was obscuring the view of cactus and endless nothing. “It’s one thing to look at this area on the map, another to see it in person. They picked a village so isolated that it’s making me worried they’re playing with something really nasty.”

  Her teammates readied their weapons. They were pumped. They’d done this sort of thing many times before, but it was always exhilarating. When they were only a few minutes out, Carver hit play on the sound system. This song was pre-raid tradition for them. Captain Quinn was a proud Texan, so when the DMS had set up a team out of Fort Hood, he had christened it Bowie Team. Of course, his boys had immediately decided that meant David rather than Jim.

  “I’m Afraid of Americans” began playing over the Suburban’s speakers.

  Carver grinned. Good. The terrorist assholes they were hunting should be.

  The Suburban ahead of them was slowing down. That didn’t make any sense—the village was still a mile away—but she slammed on the brakes fast enough to keep from rear-ending them.

  “Get ready.” Something was up. It could be an ambush. It could be a barricade. Regardless, speed was their ally. Getting bogged down out here meant the cartel was more likely to see them coming and get ready. “What the hell, Zeke?” she muttered. He was driving the lead vehicle and wasn’t the type to hesitate.

  But nothing happened. The point vehicle maintained radio silence, lollygagged for only a few seconds, before speeding up again.

  “Yo, LT. Check it out.” It was Sandbag who first saw what had caused the point vehicle to hesitate. He tapped the bulletproof glass of the passenger-side window. “There’s a—Good Lord…”

  There were telephone lines running alongside the road. The poles were the tallest thing for miles, and so constant, flashing by every couple hundred feet, that she’d begun to tune them out. Only this one was different. Somebody had been nailed to it.

  There wasn’t much time to assess. Hanging ten feet up … adult male, Mexican, mid-thirties, jeans and a flannel shirt, coated in dried blood. Arms extended above his head, dangling with multiple nails—no, spikes—through his hands and wrists.

  Then it flashed by. She looked in her mirror, but the body was already obscured by the dust.

  Since Louie was in back he’d gotten the best look. “I know the cartel leaves some brutal warnings, but crucifixion? Damn. Fucking barbarians.”

  Then they passed another pole, and there was another body stuck to it. Female. Twenties. Vultures were perched on the crossbeam above her. There was more swearing and muttering. And then she, too, was swallowed by the dust.

  The next telephone pole had another body hung on it. This one was elderly. Had she been somebody’s abuelita? And the next. And the next. Every couple hundred feet the spectacle repeated. Men, women, children. The soldiers quit talking. This wasn’t a warning. This was a massacre.

  Numb, Carver concentrated on the road.

  * * *

  “All the way to the village?” Rudy asked.

  “All the way,” she confirmed. “Every single pole.”

  He swallowed hard. “That wasn’t in your initial report.”

  Carver shook her head. “Considering what else we saw, it wasn’t that noteworthy.”

  * * *

  Bowie Team rolled into the village ready for a fight.

  It was dead.

  She’d been ready for the sound of gunfire, bu
t there was nothing. There should have at least been a dog barking. There was no movement, no sound other than the wind. There were a few dozen small houses and other assorted buildings, but not so much as a curtain parted for the locals to spy on them. No matter how scared they were, nobody kept their heads down that well.

  Ten seconds after dismounting, they stacked up on the little grocery market that their intel had said housed their targets, tossed bangs through the windows, breached the doors, and rushed inside.

  “Clear!” Carver shouted after she swept through the back storage room. The smell of death assaulted her nostrils. There were dried blood puddles on the uneven wooden floor, big enough that it looked as if they’d butchered a cow in here, but no bodies, and certainly no living terrorists or cartel members.

  Somebody had set up a shrine inside the storeroom. She’d seen the painted skull faces in the briefings, Santa Muerte, popular with the cartel assassins. Corvus walked over to the shrine and started shoving around the flowers, papers, and dolls with the muzzle of his SCAR, checking if there was anything interesting. All of the crucifixes had been turned upside-down. He found a plastic dog bowl. Corvus gagged and backed away from the shrine. There was a pile of glistening white spheres inside.

  “I think those are human eyeballs, LT.”

  A bunch of little devotional candles were still lit around the shrine. So the occupants couldn’t have been gone long.

  “They must have bolted,” Sandbag said. “Did they see us coming?”

  She shook her head. There was only one road out, and nobody had passed them. The terrain was rugged enough that they could have escaped on foot, horseback, or four-wheelers, but she wasn’t getting that vibe at all. “My gut’s telling me nobody got out of this place.”

  “Yo, LT. I’ve got something weird here. It looks really old.” Gator had picked up an odd-looking silver amulet. He was scowling at it. “Is that Arabic?”

  She looked at the antique. It was the head of a goat, with ruby eyes. An unconscious shiver of revulsion went through her and she had no idea why. “Greek? Maybe. I don’t know what language that is.”

  Gator was holding it in his glove. Suddenly, red droplets of blood appeared on the silver. She looked up to see that it was coming from Gator’s nose. He was just staring at it, and didn’t seem to notice the rivulet of blood running down his chin. It was as if he were in a daze.

  “Gator, you’re bleeding.”

  It took him a long second to focus. He slowly looked up from the amulet. “Huh?”

  “Did you hit your head or something?”

  Gator seemed to snap out of it. He wiped the blood away with a sleeve and looked at it in surprise. “Naw. Damned dry heat.”

  Captain Quinn came over the radio. “Target’s in the wind. We’re splitting into teams and searching the town. Zeke, take the cantina. Carver, you’ve got the church.”

  “Roger that. We’re on the church.” She let go of the transmit button. “Bag that necklace and let’s go.”

  * * *

  “What did you find in the church?” Rudy asked softly.

  “He found us.” The lieutenant’s trembling had gotten worse. He was inclined to give her a sedative, but Mr. Church had been adamant they needed answers now.

  “Who is he?”

  Rudy waited for her to elaborate, but this interview was like pulling teeth. “Tell me about what happened in the church, Olivia.”

  Abruptly her trembling stopped. The change in manner was so complete, so chilling, that it brought to mind patients he’d worked with suffering from dissociative identity disorder. In the blink of an eye, there was a different person sitting across from him. Only this one was utterly calm.

  “Are you okay, Olivia?”

  Seemingly curious, Carver tilted her head to the side, a bit too far. “I like eyes. Your eyes are broken, Rudy. I can only see through one of them.”

  The shift was so sudden, and the topic so unexpected, that it put him off his game. “I was injured. I have a glass eye.”

  Carver nodded slowly. “Your world is flat.”

  “You mean I have no depth perception. Correct.”

  She stared at him for a long time. “It makes me sad you’re broken.”

  Despite being summer in Texas, Rudy felt a sudden chill. There was a knock on the other side of the glass. It made him jump.

  He tried to hide his relief at having an interruption. “Excuse me a minute.” Rudy got up and went to the door. He had to wait for them to unlock it.

  There were four MPs waiting in the hall. Mr. Church was by himself in the observation room. He was simply standing there in the dark, watching Lieutenant Carver through the one-way glass, inscrutable as ever.

  “What do you think, Doctor?”

  “It’s too early to tell. She’s a severely traumatized young woman who has been through a lot, but beyond that I’m going to need more time to reach her.”

  “I’ve received a call from another agency. They are sending a specialist. He’ll be here soon.”

  “What kind of specialist?” Rudy asked suspiciously. “From what agency?”

  “The kind you don’t ask questions about. His name is Franks. I’ve worked with him before.” Considering how broad and mysterious Church’s background was, that was incredibly unhelpful. “Agent Franks is a thoroughly unpleasant individual, but very good at what he does. You’ll want to stay out of his way. He’s not big on conversation.”

  “It’s unlike you to turn over DMS jurisdiction to someone else. Carver is one of us.”

  “Is she?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Church glanced at the wall clock. “He should arrive in an hour.”

  “Then let me keep talking to her until this specialist shows up.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that.… However, I will admit I’m curious to hear what she has to say. Carry on.”

  “Okay, then.” Rudy started walking away.

  Church called after him, “By the way, Doctor, we got the preliminary results back on her dead teammates. No toxins, drugs, or biological agents were present in their systems. The causes of death were all straightforward—gunshot wounds, stabbings, strangulation, blunt-force trauma, that sort of thing.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “It might be a sticky subject, but I would suggest asking her about the cannibalism.”

  “What?”

  “Human tissue was found in some of their stomachs. We have not had the time to get the DNA results yet, but considering some of the bite patterns on the survivors, it probably came from their teammates.”

  Rudy blanched.

  “Do you still want to continue?”

  As he’d told Carver, his small part was helping put the good people back together. Until proven otherwise, he was going to assume good whenever possible. “Yeah, I’ve got this.”

  “Very well. Can I help you with anything else, Doctor?”

  “Sure, tell the army to turn down the air conditioner. It’s freezing in that little room.”

  “Really? They were just apologizing to me for the accommodations. According to the thermometer it is over eighty degrees in here.”

  “Shit.” Rudy put his head down, plowed through the hall, past the MPs, and back into the oddest psych eval he’d done in quite some time.

  Carver had gone back to shaking and mumbling. It was sad, but that sign of human frailty made him far more comfortable than the creepy mood swing from a few minutes before. Rudy sat back down. She gave him a weak smile.

  “Okay, Olivia. Tell me about what happened inside that church.”

  * * *

  Corvus kicked the door open and her men swept inside. They had trained so constantly that their movement was like clockwork. Each one covered a sector.

  “Clear!”

  A minute later the small Catholic church was secured. There was still no sign of the tangos, or any of the locals, for that matter. There should have been something.

  The
church was old, and humble. The wooden walls had been painted white a long time ago, but they were faded and chipped now. Heavily lacquered wooden saints looked down on them. The pews were polished smooth from decades of use.

  “Where is everybody?” Louie wondered aloud.

  “Nailed to the telephone poles,” Sandbag muttered.

  “No, this town held more people than that.” But that didn’t mean she had a clue where they’d gone. Carver had her men take up defensive positions on the doors and got on her radio to contact Captain Quinn. She got nothing but static. Weird. “This place is giving me a bad vibe.”

  Carver turned around and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw a little Mexican boy sitting on the altar. Sensing her reaction, her men spun around, lifting their weapons.

  “Hold on!” she shouted before fingers could reach the triggers. “It’s just a kid.” He was probably only seven or eight years old, barefoot and wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “Whose section was that? Damn it, Corvus! Why didn’t you clear that?”

  “I did, LT. He wasn’t there a second ago.”

  It didn’t matter now. They’d found somebody. Carver swung her carbine around behind her back and let it dangle by the sling. She lifted both hands to show they were empty. “Hola.” She spoke three languages fluently, but Spanish wasn’t among them. Sandbag was fluent, though. “Tell him we’re friends.”

  Sandbag started talking. He was a big, scary dude, but he kept his voice nice and soothing. Only the little boy kept staring at her instead. She found it odd that he was sitting cross-legged on the altar. She wasn’t religious, but that seemed really disrespectful. “Ask him what’s going on.”

  Sandbag did. The boy smirked as he answered.

  “He says he just got up from a long nap.”

  “Huh? Where?”

  “In the ground, I think. No. A tomb.” Sandbag shrugged. “He’s not making a lot of sense, LT.”

  “Ask him where everybody is.”

  The little boy finally looked at Sandbag and rattled off a dismissive answer. Sandbag seemed really confused by it.

  “He says that he forced them to walk across the desert.”