Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

by Jonathan Maberry

  I still couldn’t hear much, but I called it in to Bug and the other team.

  The cleanup team wasn’t going to like us very much. I knew that.

  The wall was ruined. More important, our ghost had stopped vibrating at the wrong time. She and the wall had become one.

  I can’t call this one a victory. I mean, partial, yes, we stopped the execution of several foreign dignitaries. Top and Warbride never saw a sign of any sort of ghostly assassin, so we decided there was only the one. It could have gone either way, I think. Their diplomat could have been first on the list or Maurice M’Gombe could have been first. Bunny and I just got lucky. The entire thing was over before they could make the distance from the Dolley Madison to the Madison, and the two hotels are less than a block apart.

  But back at the offices I discussed the entire thing with Mr. Church.

  After we were done with the formalities, we got down to business. I like that about my boss. He doesn’t usually dance around the subject.

  “Bug got back to me on the suit.”

  “Yeah? What did he have to say?”

  “The sort of thing that makes him happy. Point of origin unknown. There is some very common electronics at work, but only some. The scales and the fabric they were woven into are both puzzlingly organic.”

  “Come again?”

  “They’re artificial, but they show signs of having been grown, not manufactured.” Church reached for one of his vanilla wafers and contemplated it before speaking again. “There are at least four separate elements that no one in our department can identify.”

  “Let me guess, extraterrestrial?”

  “We can’t identify them. That means the possibility is real, no matter how improbable.”

  “What about our banshee?”

  “Is that what you’re calling her now?” He offered the smallest hint of a smile and then took a bite of his wafer before answering. “She’s a complete unknown. The damage to her body was very nearly on a cellular level. No teeth for dental records. No fingerprints, as her flesh was liquefied. If she has her DNA on file anywhere, we haven’t been able to locate it. Red hair, pale skin. That’s all we have.”

  “Got to wonder what our foreign dignitaries were up to.”

  Mr. Church nodded. “I was thinking the exact same thing. Interestingly enough, three of the survivors have been pulled from duty in the United States. Either their home countries are afraid we’ll start watching them or they’re potentially embarrassed by what was going on behind doors.”

  He finished his wafer. “Either way, it’ll be interesting to discover more information.”

  “Not a closed case?”

  “Not remotely.”

  Have I mentioned how much I hate unsolved riddles? Not as much as Mr. Church, but then again, that’s one of the things I like about my boss.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James A. Moore is the bestselling and award-winning author of more than forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy, and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under the Overtree, Blood Red, Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring antihero, Jonathan Crowley), and Seven Forges series. His most recent novels include The Silent Army and the forthcoming The Last Sacrifice. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, the British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications.

  RED DIRT

  BY MIRA GRANT

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  _______________

  Pallets of bottled water sat stacked against the wall of a storage container, waiting to be shipped on to their next destination. They were a new brand, something hoity-toity that claimed to come from the purest sources on Earth. As if that weren’t what they all said; as if it weren’t pure bullshit, designed to strip-mine the wallets of the rich and indolent. This stuff cost pennies to make, and probably drained some poor community that couldn’t afford to lose its groundwater in the process.

  Matthew O’Neil had been a night watchman for seven years. He knew where the cameras were. He knew when the other watchmen came through. Most of all, he knew what was safe to steal—or to allow to be stolen. He never took a damn thing for himself. That would have been a crime and a sin, and his mama didn’t raise no sinners. She’d raised three good, God-fearing boys who just wanted to give back to their communities in whatever way they could.

  The men who stood before him now, looking at the water, were practically drooling in their excitement. Clean water was always a good thing, and too often, it cost too dear for the people who needed it the most. The shelters and the hospitals would benefit like nothing going from having this, and the people who’d shipped it here? Who’d abandoned it here? They wouldn’t even notice that it was gone.

  “You’re sure?” one of them asked, for the fifth time.

  “Bill says it was supposed to ship out months ago,” said Matthew. “I don’t know whether a wire got crossed or whether their original buyer got cold feet, but it don’t bother me none. No one’s watching this stuff. Take it away, and if anyone ever comes looking—which I doubt—I’ll play dumb. Get it where it’s needed.”

  “You’re a good guy,” said one of the men, clapping Matthew on the shoulder. He drank in the praise, and watched as the three of them began hoisting water onto their shoulders and toting it away.

  God might help those who helped themselves, but there was nothing wrong with giving His hand a little nudge in the right direction every now and then.

  TROY, ALABAMA, SIX MONTHS LATER

  Sick people had a smell.

  Kathleen had known that since she was a little girl, when her Gram had gone down ill with the cancer, and taken to her bed to sweat the sick out as much as she could. “No hospitals for me, muffin,” she’d said when she caught her granddaughter and dearest love looking at her with concern. “Doctors can’t cut out what ails me, and they’ll just take all we’ve got left to us in the world and not leave you with a penny to call your own. Let me sleep. I’ll get better, if I can sleep.”

  Kathleen had known even then that cancer wasn’t like the flu. You couldn’t just sleep the cancer away. Cancer would have its due, and cancer had had its due, putting her Gram into the ground not six months after she’d been diagnosed. Half the town had come out for her funeral. Kathleen had spent the entire thing hiding her face in her mother’s skirts, and all those people had called her shy and delicate and sad, and not one of them had realized that she was furious. Rage was eating her alive the way cancer had eaten her Gram, because where had all these people been when Gram was dying? A dollar from every one of them would have paid for doctors, and tests, and time. Money bought time.

  Rich people could afford to get better. Poor people couldn’t afford anything but sleep, and when sleep didn’t cure what ailed them, they’d get a six-foot hole and a good pine box, and someone else would get their feather pillows.

  Kathleen had gotten her grandmother’s feather pillows, and then, when the will had been read, her grandmother’s life savings, kept in the bank and hidden from everyone else in the family. Her mother had been the one to take her down to the bank, to hear the number, and to tell her daughter, in a voice Kathleen had never heard before, “You need to pretend this never happened. You don’t have that money. You can’t loan it to me for the grocery bill, or use it to buy yourself a new pair of shoes. That money isn’t real until it’s time for college. Do you understand?”

  And Kathleen, who never wanted to see another person sleep the cancer away, had nodded. Had told her “Yes,” even though she hadn’t fully understood—not then, and not for another ten years, not until that money had been the seed that she planted to carry herself all the way to college, and then to medical school after that. No one else in her family was ever going to worry about a doctor taking them for everything they had. Never again.

  Now, as she walked the halls of Troy Memorial, heading for her office, she wanted nothing more in the world than to sink int
o her bed—still loaded down with feather pillows, even if they didn’t smell like Gram anymore—and sleep something else away: exhaustion. Being the head of Oncology for a hospital this small and this strapped really meant being the head of Whatever Damn Well Needs Doing. Over the course of the day she had set two broken bones, talked a pair of children into getting their shots, given prenatal vitamins to Susie from down the block, and helped a young woman get her brother, who was obviously suffering from some sort of overdose, into the exam room. It wasn’t just that she was young, and pretty, and still new enough to be enthusiastic about her work. It was that she came from here.

  Every other doctor in this hospital came from Away, that wide and nebulous place outside of Alabama, where people who didn’t understand their way of life tried to make laws defining it. There were people who didn’t want to be seen by anyone but her. She’d come from Here. She understood them in a way that no doctor from Away could ever hope to. So when emergencies came in, even if she wasn’t on call, she was more likely to be called in than anyone else in the building.

  Because of all this, and more, it was no surprise when she heard running footsteps behind her. “Kat! Wait up!”

  “Phil, no, and no, Phil, and every other variation on that sentence that you can come up with.” She turned, making no effort to hide her weariness. Maybe if he realized how tired she was, he would have mercy for the first time in his benighted life. “I’ve been on shift for twenty-four hours. I’m not a resident anymore! This shit is supposed to stop!”

  “I know, I know, and you know I wouldn’t do this unless it was an emergency.” Phil slowed to a stop, shoving his glasses back into place. They had slipped halfway down his nose, giving him the appearance of a genially absentminded professor.

  The impression wasn’t too far wrong. Dr. Phil Clines was a general practitioner, and was actually responsible for the sorts of things that Kathleen spent half her time doing. She wasn’t picking up his slack, either—if there was anyone at the hospital who worked as hard as she did, it was Phil. It was just a matter of too many patients and not nearly enough funding keeping them perpetually scrambling for solid ground.

  He really did look worried. Kathleen took pity. “What is it?”

  “I’ve had three cases in the last week that don’t match up with anything I’d expect to be seeing. You had one of them, actually. Winston Black?”

  “Presented with difficulty speaking and tracking conversation, mild motor impairment, and difficulty breathing,” said Kathleen without hesitation. “All signs pointed to a mild stroke. We kept him overnight for observation, and then his family took him home.”

  “He died.”

  Kathleen froze. “What?” she finally managed to squeak. Apart from his stroke symptoms, which had been reasonably mild, Winston Black was a man in the pink of health. He didn’t smoke, didn’t eat red meat, and ran two miles every morning. She had actually been worried about how healthy he was—paradoxically, the people who had the fewest problems before a stroke could have some of the worst problems after, when they had to adjust to their new limitations. Physical therapy and rehabilitation could restore the bulk of their lost function, but not always. There was no magic bullet where brain damage was concerned.

  “This morning,” said Phil. “He was also presenting with early-stage cataracts.”

  “Yes, I noted that on my report.”

  “Kat, he had galactosemia, and we didn’t catch it, and he died. His heart stopped.”

  Kathleen stared.

  Phil continued: “I only caught it because something looked off on his blood work, so I dug deeper. There was a child in the family fifteen years ago who died of the same thing.”

  “I remember.” Little Suzie Black, less than a year old, and dead because her family hadn’t trusted the doctors who tried to convince them to cut all dairy from her diet—even her mother’s own milk. They’d heard galactosemia as lactose intolerance, and thought the doctors insisting that it was something different were just busybodies, looking to interfere with the way they’d always done things.

  Kathleen had been in college when Suzie Black died. It had been in all the papers, and she remembered thinking that it was a death that she could have prevented, if she’d been there to talk to the family, to explain to them what was happening to their daughter. They had needed the local touch. That was one of the cases that had sealed her determination to come home after she had her degree, to work at a local hospital and make sure that things like this would become the anomalies they should have been all along. But Winston …

  “That’s not possible,” she said, finding her voice again. “Galactosemia appears in children, infant children, not in adult men. It must have been something else.”

  “There’s a family history. He shows the blood markers.”

  “I’ve seen him eating pizza with his family! He wasn’t even lactose intolerant!”

  “I know how this sounds, but I’m telling you, it was galactosemia, and that’s not the real problem.”

  “What is?”

  Phil looked at her wearily. “We have two more cases presenting exactly like his.”

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, THREE HOURS LATER

  Rudy Sanchez was considering the merits of a cold beer, a warm bath, and a bed that split the difference between the two when his phone rang.

  His first impulse was to ignore it. He wasn’t on duty, and the number wasn’t Joe’s: for Joe, he would have answered even if the world had been on fire. There were other people who could do everything he could do for the office, and many things he couldn’t do: everyone who worked for the DMS had their own area of specialization. Let someone else mop up the mess for a change. He’d earned the time to himself.

  Guilt followed hot on the heels of the idea that he had earned anything. He was still standing, wasn’t he? So many others weren’t. They deserved his full attention to duty, the willingness to serve when he was called upon, no matter what. He grabbed for the phone.

  The ringing stopped.

  Rudy blinked for a moment, nonplussed. Then he chuckled, half-wry, half-relieved. “That settles that, I suppose,” he said.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  He was on his feet before he’d consciously decided to move, heading for the sound with long, ground-eating strides. Not fast enough; the knock came again, harder this time, until the entire door shook in its frame.

  “I’m coming!” he shouted as he reached the door, unlocked it, and swung it open to reveal two of the last people he’d been expecting to see on his doorstep. He blinked.

  Bunny, standing with his massive hand raised for a third round of knocking, looked abashed. “Evenin’, Dr. Sanchez,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you were home.”

  “The lights are on, my car is in the driveway, and when I left, I said I was going home,” said Rudy. “Where else would I be? Mars?”

  “I hear the weather’s good there,” rumbled the mountain standing behind Bunny. Top was one of the only men Rudy could think of who could make the hulking Farm Boy seem to have been built according to normal human scale.

  Just my luck, he thought. I wanted to help the world, and wound up playing the Lilliputian in an action remake of Gulliver’s Travels. Aloud, he asked, “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “We have a bit of a problem,” said Bunny.

  Nothing about this was normal. Had he been looking for normal, Rudy wasn’t sure he would have been able to find this moment on the adjoining maps. He took a step back, making space for the two to enter. He did not, however, invite them in. If they wanted that particular pleasantry, they were going to need to explain what they were doing there after hours.

  Rudy would never have done this if Joe had been on his doorstep. But Joe was his friend, even outside of work, and more important, if Joe had been involved, the world would already have been on the brink of ending.

  They came in. “One of the analysts flagged a report from a hospital in rural Alabama,” said Top. �
��Lots of medical jargon, but one bit that really stood out: they’re seeing a sudden cluster of adult-onset cases of a rare genetic disorder called ‘galactosemia.’”

  Any thoughts Rudy had about his disrupted evening dissolved like sugar in water. “That’s not possible,” he said. “Galactosemia is diagnosed in childhood. It’s diagnosed, or you die.”

  “Well, we’ve got five cases at a hospital in Troy, Alabama. Started at three a few hours ago. Four of the people involved are related.”

  The Dragon Factory. The diseases they’d designed to kill the people whose genetic backgrounds they hadn’t approved of. People like him. “That’s not possible,” Rudy repeated, even though experience told him that it was bitterly, brutally possible. Things like this happened every day, whether he wanted them to or not. “All the agents were caught before they could deploy the viruses. We stopped the release of the bottled water that would prime populations for contamination. We stopped it.”

  “Nice ‘we’ there,” said Top with dark amusement. “Doesn’t change the report we intercepted.”

  “Joe—”

  “Joe’s busy,” said Top in a tone that brooked no argument.

  Rudy wondered sometimes whether Joe was aware of how many of his men—of his friends—would gladly die to protect him, even when he didn’t need protecting. He didn’t think so.

  “I’ll get my coat,” he said. “You call Dr. O’Tree. If we’re doing this, I’m not going to be the only medical authority on hand. I’m not that kind of doctor.”

  “So we’re doing this?” asked Bunny.

  Rudy paused long enough to look at him wearily. “Was there ever any question?”

  TROY, ALABAMA

  “Kat, we’re up to fifteen cases, and we’ve lost three more.” There was a weary helplessness in Phil’s tone that Kathleen had never heard before, not once. He sounded beaten.

  That frightened her.

  “What did the CDC say?” she asked.

  “They’re sending a team, but they don’t expect to be here before morning. The fact that it’s clustering in families makes them think it’s something environmental, and that moves it down on the priority list. Government funding isn’t what it used to be.”