Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  Without saying a word, we moved, spreading out, weapons up and ready, eyes and gun barrels moving in unison, fingers laid along the outside of the trigger guards, going fast but no faster than good caution allowed. Ghost ranged ahead but not too far, and if there was something to see, he didn’t see it. That was comforting, but only if you didn’t look too closely at it. Just because a dog didn’t see, smell, or hear something did not mean it wasn’t there.

  We swept along the strip of jungle fifty feet in from the sand, using the slanting rays of morning light to pick our way.

  Top was on point and he stopped with a raised fist. Bunny and I immediately knelt, alert and ready. Top pointed to something ahead and off to our right, then gestured for us to approach. We came up on it quickly.

  It was the Coast Guard RHIB, a seventeen-foot Zodiac Hurricane with a 100-horsepower diesel engine and M240B machine guns mounted fore and aft. Very fast and fierce.

  It sat on the sand. Empty, abandoned, undamaged.

  There was no one there. Not even footprints in the sand. No sign at all of what happened except for something Ghost found. He jumped into the craft and stood growling at something I couldn’t see until I climbed in. Top and Bunny provided cover in case it was someone or something nasty hiding there. It wasn’t.

  On the back of the pilot’s seat was a muddy handprint. Full palm and fingers.

  Only here’s the thing. The fingers were way too long and each finger ended in wickedly sharp points.

  And there were four of them.

  I’m not talking about a hand with a missing finger. What we saw was a handprint of something that had a thumb and three fingers. Three clawed fingers. Like a bird’s, except that’s not what it was.

  All the hairs on Ghost’s back stood up in a stiff row. The hairs on the back of my neck did the same thing. Ghost growled at the handprint and took a slow, fearful step backward.

  I looked from the print to Bunny and then to Top, and then we all slowly turned and looked at the thick wall of shadow-filled forest.

  “Fuck me,” whispered Bunny.

  “Don’t touch that shit,” warned Top.

  I almost laughed. “There is not one chance in ten trillion that I was going to do that.”

  We backed away and then climbed out of the boat. We all wanted to talk about that print, maybe we needed to. We didn’t. Instead we moved off down the beach and then edged back toward the trees. The jungle seemed a lot less inviting now than before. Instead of seeming to offer cover it had a feeling of occupation to it, a vague presence that was impossible to define. Could have been my imagination running hot after seeing that print on the boat. Just as easily could have been my rational mind wondering why in the wide blue fuck I was on this island and in this line of work. I used to be a cop in Baltimore. Not once in all those years on the force did I encounter a four-fingered monster handprint. It’s not the sort of thing you tend to encounter, even in Baltimore. Made me long for a boring life of being shot at by gangbangers and cartel pistoleros.

  I was on the island right now, though, and tough as they were, my men looked to me for guidance, for leadership, for the kind of stoic toughness that makes great copy in speeches about Special Operations. So I kept my poker face in place and shifted to take point. Top yielded that position without argument.

  Inside the wall of the forest the ground was a soft mixture of sand and soil, with many palm fronds knocked loose by the crash. As we moved, we began to smell the stink of burned foliage and torn earth. There is a distinctive smell to land that has been torn by cataclysm, be it a bomb, an earthquake, or a plane crash. The richer soil is ripped up and exposed to the air, releasing microparticles of nutrients and rotting plant matter, and infused with it are the smells conjured by great heat. Of silica sand fused into glass and wood burned to charcoal.

  We did not find a single human footprint. Nothing to indicate what had happened to the sailors from the boat we’d found. No prints, no shell casings to indicate a fight. Nothing, and that was very spooky.

  I stopped the team because Ghost suddenly crouched low and bared his teeth. Thirty feet in front of us was a thick tangle of vines draped between a stand of pines and an ancient overgrown aloe plant. I couldn’t see anything, but Ghost did. His titanium fangs gleamed with reflected sunlight, making it look as if he had bitten down on raw fire. His eyes were fixed, unblinking as he stared at a spot just behind the stiff, serrated aloe leaves.

  I felt it then.

  That strange, unnerving sensation of being watched. Not suspecting that you are. Knowing it. I snugged my rifle stock into my shoulder and aimed at the aloe plant. At what was behind it.

  It’s such a strange feeling, and your conscious evolved mind wars with the instincts of the lizard brain as to whether to believe it or not. Good soldiers don’t ignore those kinds of feelings. I may fail at a lot of important things in my life, but I am a good soldier.

  We shifted around and found cover, each of us kneeling, aiming, waiting, straining with our senses to justify what we knew was there. The jungle was unnaturally still and even the soft slosh of the waves on the sand was muted. The breeze died as if the world held its breath, silencing the whisk of palm leaves and the creak of tree trunks. It was a silence so complete that you become unnaturally aware of your own shallow breathing, certain that it is far too loud, that it can be heard all the way across the forest floor, that it draws the ear, the eye, and the aim of whatever weapon is seeking you from the shadows.

  There was no good play here. If we fired, we could hit someone hiding in fear, and that could be a sailor from the navy or Coast Guard, or one of the scientists from the nature research team. Or maybe we’d be firing at a bunch of plants and trees and accomplish nothing more than revealing our location and our numbers. Or we could hit one of them. Whatever they were.

  I signaled my guys and sent Top cutting left in a wide circle, indicating that Bunny should go right down to the sand and circle around behind the trees. I’d wait for them to get into position and then go up the pipe. They moved off, though I could see from their expressions that they didn’t like the plan for the same reasons I didn’t like it. But there was no better way to play this.

  Cold sweat trickled down my back between my shoulder blades and zigzagged over the knobs of my spine. Ghost was still crouched low, still caught in that animal zone where fear and anger are the same thing. I could relate.

  Top and Bunny reached their points and gave me nods.

  I moved first, went in with my own zigzag, cutting left and right to make use of natural cover and spoil aim. Ghost was right at my side because I did not want him to rush into a blind spot like that without my eyes on him.

  “Cowboy!”

  I heard Top yell out my combat call sign, but it came one-half second too late. The whole front of the forest seemed to move, to pulse outward toward me as if it were a door someone was kicking open. The huge aloe plant crashed into me before I could even think about stopping. There was no time to evade, no time to brace. There was only time to feel it.

  It was hard.

  It hurt.

  It was like a tidal wave of plant matter and it struck me with enough force to knock all the light out of the world.

  -4-

  PALMYRA ATOLL

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, TIME UNKNOWN

  _______________

  I was nowhere.

  It was the strangest feeling.

  I had a body and I was aware of it. Breath wheezing in and out of my bruised chest. The gunfire rattle of my terrified heartbeat. The pain of shocked and abused skin. The ache of muscles.

  But there was something missing.

  There was no downward pull. It’s something you never take notice of day to day. The pull of gravity. You feel lead-footed when you’re tired, but otherwise it’s normal to be tied to the earth, to be pulled into standing, sitting, falling, lying down.

  Not now.

  There was no actual sensation of gravity, not in any specif
ic direction.

  I’ve never been in space, but I’ve been in a reduced-gravity aircraft. A vomit comet, they call them. They’re fixed-wing aircraft that provide a brief near weightless environment for astronaut training. Hollywood uses them for making movies about space travel.

  It was like that.

  But not like that.

  In reduced-gravity aircraft you feel your skin become rubbery, your hair and clothing tend to float on you. I could feel my clothes hanging normally on me, as if gravity applied to that but not to me. Which made no sense at all.

  It was absolutely pitch black. So dark I had to blink to make sure my eyes were even open.

  No sound. I was neither hot nor cold. No sensation of air passing my skin, no wind. Nothing like that.

  A smell, though, and a taste to go with it. Metallic, like copper. And a bit of ozone, like after a lightning strike.

  “Hey!” I yelled, and my voice was strangely distant, the way it sounds when you’re in a wide-open place and there’s no wall to bounce or trap your noise.

  Yelling did not help, but it gave me something to do. I could hear my own voice, so I kept yelling. It was a long, long time before I heard another sound. I think it was a long time because time itself had no meaning for me.

  A voice spoke. Male. Heavily accented, but it was a kind of American accent I’d never quite heard before. New England, but not. A rough voice, used to yelling in order to be heard.

  “Captain, there’s a reef two points off the port bow,” called the voice. “A mile or less. God’s love and we’d have struck ’em if we hadn’t dropped anchor last night.”

  I listened for more, but that was it. There and gone.

  “Hello!” I yelled, then as I replayed what the man had said, I tried, “Hello the boat.”

  Nothing.

  “Ahoy the ship.”

  I’m not a sailor, but I hoped that was the right thing to say.

  Nothing.

  I drifted in nowhere.

  Maybe I fell asleep. Maybe I just stopped thinking. No way to know, but I was jarred to awareness by the unmistakable sound of something heavy and wooden smashing into something immovable. Men screamed. Many men. I could hear the pop and snap of cloth. Sails? People cursing and calling orders out to shorten this and belay that and plug something else. Lots of nautical terms that I barely understood, and the gushing sound of water rushing in where it wasn’t supposed to be. Even a landlubber like me could figure it out. A ship had hit the reef of the island.

  Right?

  I remembered seeing the reef on the chart, but the RHIB had hydroplaned over it and Bunny had steered us around the fangs of rock that had jutted out of the water. The destroyer was steel and I doubted they had any wooden boats aboard. Why would they? This was the age of metal, of plastic and rubber.

  So what was I hearing?

  The men screamed and called out for help, yelled orders, cried out to God and their mothers, and gradually, gradually, the voices faded as if drowned by the sea. But it wasn’t the sea that took the voices away. It was the nothingness in which I floated.

  I tried to make sense of it.

  Was I dead?

  Was I in a coma? Or dreaming? Or, had I finally gone mad? All of those were real possibilities with me.

  Sounds came and went. The creak of oars and the splash of the oar blades in the water. Men slogging through surf. Laughing, joking, telling stories. None of it made sense, though. They talked about whales. They talked about the brown-skinned girls of Hawaii, but they spoke of them in the rude exaggerations of simple men to whom such things were rare and magical. Some of the voices were American, though crude and strange; and some were clearly British. One of the men said something about making a legal claim for Queen Victoria, and that made no goddamn sense at all.

  Queen Victoria?

  Jesus H. Christ.

  I slept again.

  And woke when someone kicked me in the ribs.

  -5-

  PALMYRA ATOLL

  TIME AND DATE UNKNOWN

  _______________

  “Aufstehen!”

  The voice growled it as he kicked me again. Harder.

  I twisted away and sand shifted under me and all at once there was light. Not much of it. Moonlight spilling down and painting everything around me in silver. I saw two figures standing above me, silhouetted against the moon. Men. Big, young, broad-shouldered. Wearing black skin-diving outfits. Fins and old-fashioned tanks lay on the wet sand.

  “We bist du?” said one of them, and all at once I realized two very strange things.

  The first problem was that they were speaking German in a tense, secretive whisper. The man who’d told me to get up and asked who I was. I understood it; I’m good with languages.

  I was less good with the second thing I realized.

  Their equipment was wrong. Very wrong. The one who kicked me held a Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr semiautomatic rifle. It was a classic example of a weapon known as a Volkssturm rifle, a “people’s assault” rifle, a cheap last-ditch kind of gun used in combat in the final months of World War II. The other guy held a Luger. Not the modern P38 used in Germany nowadays. No, that might have made a fraction of sense. This was the older model, the one collectors prized and hundreds of U.S. soldiers smuggled home after the fall of Berlin. A P04 or maybe the P08. Hard to tell because it was dark, I was scared, and there was a cheap-looking silencer screwed into the barrel.

  So, here we are. A couple of big blond guys with new-looking antique gear. The wrong moon in the sky. What the actual fuck? At that moment I was pretty sure the world had fallen off its hinges and that I was in deep shit. The two men weren’t tourists. These weren’t gun nuts that got lost at sea. And they weren’t amused to find me.

  Crazy as it sounds, crazy as it felt, I was absolutely certain I was a lot more lost than I thought. This may have been Palmyra Atoll, but I was lost.

  They were Nazis.

  -6-

  PALMYRA ATOLL

  TIME AND DATE UNKNOWN

  _______________

  I smiled my very best I’m not your enemy and the world isn’t bug-fuck nuts smile. They seemed to expect me to raise my hands, so I obliged.

  “Wer bist du und was machst du denn hier?” demanded the man with the Luger. He had the officer look, expecting to be answered at once.

  Who are you and what are you doing here?

  The rifleman gave me an evil look and said, “Amerikanisch.”

  They were not happy at all with the thought that I was an American. Although I could speak German, I was pretty sure there was going to be some kind of need for a code word, which I did not have. On the upside I wore no insignia or other markings. Nothing in my pockets other than a folding knife clipped to my inner right-hand trouser pocket, some nonfunctioning electronic doodads, and the SIG Sauer P226 Combat TB snugged into my shoulder rig.

  The moment was surreal.

  The moon was full and bright, and when all this insanity started it was bright morning. Last night’s moon had been a sickle slash of a crescent. So there was that. The island—what I could see of it in the moonlight—was different. I was on the same part of the beach where we’d stopped by the aloe plant and knot of palm trees. There were plenty of aloe plants, but none of them were the right size or in the right place. The trees looked strange, none of them squaring with my memory of the landscape I’d traversed with Top, Bunny, and Ghost.

  The officer ticked his head toward me and barked an order to his companion: “Suchen seine kleidung.” Search his clothes.

  The rifleman stepped forward to pat me down. He paused for a moment, staring at the handgun I wore. Even in bad light he had to know it was a model he’d never seen. There wasn’t much I could say that would turn this situation in my favor. These cats were up to no good, and if I played it wrong I was going to die on this beach.

  I kept my hands up and tried to look dumber, shorter, and slower than I am. The rifleman switched his gun to his left and reac
hed out to take the SIG while his boss kept the Luger trained on me.

  That’s where they made a mistake.

  As soon as the rifleman grabbed the polymer grips of the handgun, I pivoted my body real damn fast, clamping his hand to the gun with my left and shoving him hard with my right. It put his body between me and the Luger and I ducked and drove, using his center-mass as both shield and battering ram. The Luger barked twice and I could feel the impact of the bullets punching into the rifleman, knocking wet coughs from him. I rammed the dying man into the officer and they went down hard onto the sand. Unfortunately, I caught a glimpse of my SIG Sauer flying from the rifleman’s hand, turning over and over as it spun through the air and then landing barrel first in the wet sand. Shit.

  No time to worry about it, though, because the officer was quick and much stronger than I thought. He shoved the rifleman to one side and came up off the ground with a disheartening degree of rubbery agility, the Luger still in his grip. There was a fragment of a fragment of a moment open to me and I took the long reach and knuckle-punched the back of his hand. The Luger fired and the bullet tugged at the loose fabric of my upper inner left thigh. Half an inch more and I’d have been singing castrato in the celestial choir. His gun vanished, but the German did not gape or hesitate. Instead he punched me in the face with a pair of rapid-fire jabs that loosened the light bulbs inside my brain. I staggered back and tripped over the rifleman’s outstretched ankle. I went down just as something silver whipped past my face. I turned the fall into a backroll and came up on fingers and toes, spitting blood from my mouth, and saw the knife in his hand. It was another relic of a war that ended decades before I was born. A brass-handled German navy diver’s knife. Twelve and a quarter inches overall, with a wickedly sharp seven-and-five-eighths-inch blade. Sturdy and lethal. He came at me, moving well and low, nicely angled and well-balanced, with the blade shielded by the other hand, doing it all the right way, very smooth and professional and deadly.