Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

by Jonathan Maberry

  I was what the guys affectionately called a FAG. A former action guy. A friend of the team, but no longer one of the team.

  “Let me take you outside, okay?” he said.

  I knew the drill. Mark and I were friends. Had been for a long time. But he had a job to do, and part of that job was evacuating those who had no business knowing what his job was.

  That meant me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I followed him out to the street. As I stepped onto the sidewalk I heard glass crunching behind me. I turned and saw Grunt Boy walk up to a team member who had Jun Kwai firmly in tow. He put his hands on Jun Kwai’s shoulders, just as he’d done when he’d saved the man’s life earlier in the evening, and seemed to straighten his shirt. Only this time I saw him remove a long blue vial, about the size of a cigar, from Jun Kwai’s inner pocket. He checked it, I guess to make sure it was still intact, then caught me looking at him.

  He held up the vial. “Trust me,” he said. “This right here. Everything that happened here. This was worth it.”

  With that, Mark led me away from the building.

  We headed over to an unmarked ambulance and he asked me if I needed anything.

  I told him I was good.

  “Cool,” he said. Then he looked me in the eye. “In just a bit we’re going to release your radio so you can call in the fire. Cool?”

  “What fire?”

  “Cleaners, remember?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.”

  “And this is classified.”

  My turn to look him in the eye. “Screw you, Command Sergeant Major.”

  And we both laughed.

  * * *

  Nick Stewart carried the vial back into the store. It’d been a hell of a week, but they had the formula at last.

  He found Mr. Church standing in front of the cookie aisle. The man was tearing into a bag of Oreos.

  “Here it is,” Nick said, and put it on the shelf in front of Mr. Church.

  “That’s excellent,” the older man said, though how much older Nick could never tell. The man could have been forty-five or maybe sixty-five. There was just no way of telling. He was one of those people who defied description.

  “Anything else?” Nick asked.

  “You had help, I see.”

  “That cop, yeah. Former Ranger, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “He handled himself well?”

  “Very well.”

  “Oh. That’s excellent.” Mr. Church twisted open an Oreo cookie and ate the filling first. “Someone we should keep an eye on, perhaps?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  Mr. Church finished off the rest of his Oreo, apparently lost in thought.

  Nick knew better than to fill up the silence with small talk. With nothing more to say, he quietly bled back into the night.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joe McKinney has his feet in several different worlds. In his day job, he has worked as a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a DWI enforcement officer, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective, the director of the city of San Antonio’s 911 call center, and a patrol supervisor. He played college baseball for Trinity University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was the manager of a Barnes & Noble for a while, where he indulged a lifelong obsession with books. He published his first novel, Dead City, in 2006, a book that has since been recognized as a seminal work in the zombie genre. Since then, he has gone on to win two Bram Stoker Awards and expanded his oeuvre to cover everything from true crime and writings on police procedure to science fiction to cooking to Texas history. The author of more than twenty books, he is a frequent guest at horror and mystery conventions. Joe and his wife, Tina, have two lovely daughters and make their home in a little town just outside of San Antonio, where he pursues his passion for cooking and makes what some consider to be the finest batch of chili in Texas. You can keep up with all of Joe’s latest releases by friending him on Facebook.

  THREE TIMES

  BY JENNIFER CAMPBELL-HICKS

  Emily Grant’s assignment that day: cover the historic unveiling of the Freedom Bell. She walked from the newsroom, only a few blocks away. Hundreds of people had gathered outside the Liberty Bell Center in the muggy summer heat, waiting for the July Fourth festivities to begin. Emily wove her way through the crowd to the building’s entrance.

  A uniformed guard eyed her. “What’s the name, sweetheart?”

  Sweetheart? She cringed.

  “Emily Grant. Philadelphia Inquirer.”

  “Credentials?”

  She flashed her work ID, which he checked against a list.

  “Over there with the others.”

  The others were reporters, photographers, television camera operators, and TV talking heads—local and national—crushed along one wall, roped off like dangerous animals.

  “Good idea,” Emily said. “Wouldn’t want us mingling with the First Lady and the Washington bigwigs. You never know, we might bite.”

  “Next,” the guard said.

  Scowling, Emily walked through the metal detectors and inside.

  She spotted the Inquirer’s photographer Craig and joined him against the rope line. The toll from decades of chasing down news was etched into his weathered face. He nodded to her while he fiddled with his camera’s buttons and dials.

  Emily looked around the open, airy hall. She’d meant to bring her daughter, Mia, here but hadn’t found the time. They’d moved to Philly only a few months ago, after Mia’s father left them. Not that Emily blamed him. Doug wanted stable, and she’d been anything but. As always when she thought about Doug, her fingers sought out the small silver medallion hooked to her purse zipper. Three months sober, it said.

  Across the hall stood the Liberty Bell, encased in glass, Independence Hall visible through floor-to-ceiling windows behind it. The bell radiated history, more than its copper and tin, the very soul of its era. Everyone felt it. Visitors, journalists, dignitaries, guards, they all kept glancing its way.

  A second, similar platform stood draped in a tent decorated in stars and stripes. That could only be the new Freedom Bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell but without the crack.

  People packed the hall, first the city’s movers and shakers, then a few dozen lucky members of the public, all under the watch of grim-faced government agents—tough-looking men and women, some in suits, some in civilian clothes. They looked ready for trouble, as though they expected it.

  One agent in particular caught Emily’s attention. Short brown hair and a fit body. She moved with confidence and poise, a woman whom men respected instead of objectified, who didn’t take shit from anyone. If someone called her “sweetheart,” she would kick their ass.

  “Who is she?” Emily asked, mostly to herself, but Craig answered.

  “Homeland Security or FBI. She looks tough. I heard someone call her ‘Major.’”

  “Is that a rank? Call sign?”

  He shrugged. “All I know is I wouldn’t want to cross her.”

  “I don’t want to cross her. I want to be her,” Emily said—instead of a recovering alcoholic single mother who hadn’t been to the gym in ages.

  “We’ll never be like her,” Craig said. “We eat cornflakes for breakfast. She eats bullets.”

  Emily laughed. “Bullets? Are you serious?”

  “Hey, it sounded good.”

  “It sounds like bad 1950s noir. And I hate cornflakes.”

  “Me too,” Craig said.

  When the hall was packed tighter than a bar during an Eagles game, and the stink of too many bodies bordered on intolerable, the First Lady stepped onto a podium and tapped her microphone.

  “Cue the boring speech,” Craig said.

  “You think?”

  “Bet you a dollar.”

  Emily didn’t take the bet and was glad she di
dn’t. The First Lady launched into a recitation of the Liberty Bell’s history. Emily took notes on her reporter’s pad and recorded audio on her phone to play back later in the newsroom. Not that she planned to include a history lesson in her article.

  The crowd shifted, restless. No one wanted to see the First Lady. Not really. They wanted the grand finale, still draped in patriotic red, white, and blue. The First Lady gestured to another woman on the podium wearing a yellow pantsuit—Andrea Lester, maker of the Freedom Bell, as grim-faced as the federal agents who prowled the hall.

  That was strange. Andrea Lester was the reason for this pomp. Every newspaper in the country would centerpiece her work on 1A, an artist’s dream come true. Shouldn’t she be glowing?

  “Something isn’t right,” Emily said.

  “What’s that?” Craig asked.

  Before she could explain, the First Lady finished her speech with a triumphant wave. The red, white, and blue covering fell away to reveal the Freedom Bell. The audience gasped and applauded. The crowd outside the windows roared. Craig and the other photographers snapped photos.

  A scream. A shout.

  Emily looked for the source.

  A yell from the podium. It was the artist, Andrea Lester. In her hand she held a knife.

  Emily froze. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away as Andrea Lester lunged toward the First Lady.

  This isn’t happening.

  Gunshots. Red blossomed across Andrea Lester’s yellow pantsuit, and she fell away from the First Lady. Panic crashed down like a tsunami, immediate, total, inescapable. It swept up Emily, too. An attack on the First Lady!

  At the rope line, Craig snapped photos.

  More gunshots. Suddenly every agent in the room held a weapon. Bullets flew. Emily ducked down. Why were they shooting at each other? Weren’t they all on the same side? What the hell was going on? The pop-pop of shots mixed with the screaming.

  “Seal the room!” a man yelled.

  On the podium, the First Lady had vanished under a pile of Secret Service agents.

  I have to get out, Emily thought with the dead certainty that she could never manage it. Too many people stood between her and the exit. And if agents had sealed the exits, no one was going anywhere.

  Agents bellowed orders.

  One yelled, “No!”

  The yell was desperate. Terrified.

  Something triggered in Emily. An instinct. Without knowing why, she dropped to the floor.

  The Freedom Bell exploded.

  It broke apart with a loud bang. Bits blew outward in all directions. Shards hit Congress members, dignitaries, ambassadors, children.

  By sheer chance, Craig stood between Emily and the bell. He dropped his camera as he reached to where a shard had punctured his neck. Emily snatched the camera and set it aside.

  Craig swayed. She helped him to sit on the floor. The room descended further in chaos. Now Emily silently thanked whoever had put the media pen where they had, because she and Craig weren’t in the middle of it. She pulled the shard from his neck. Glass, hollow with a pointed tip.

  “It’s a dart,” she said.

  “What the hell?” Craig said, and pulled another dart from his leg. “Why? What’s it for?”

  “Don’t know. Keep still.”

  “Are you hit?”

  She checked herself. “No.”

  “My camera—”

  “I caught it.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Are you crazy? We have to keep down. We’re in the middle of a terrorist attack.”

  Even as she said the words, she couldn’t believe them. Of course the United States had been hit before, but these things happened to other people, in other places.

  “My camera,” Craig repeated firmly. His face had a pallid, sickly sheen.

  He was right. They were journalists. People looked to them to make sense of the nonsensical. They had to do their jobs.

  Emily set the camera in his hands. He struggled to his feet. The shutter clicked. Legs shaking, Emily stood beside him and started taking notes again.

  Later, she would look at her notebook and not remember a single thing she had written there. She would recall only bits and pieces, like fitting together fragments of a broken mirror.

  Like when Craig dropped to his knees, eyes feverish and skin clammy. Others were also falling sick. Agents separated them out, though Craig still lay beside Emily, moaning.

  The agent in charge was the woman Emily had spotted before everything had gone to hell, the one Craig said was called Major. Blood splattered her clothing and skin. While others whimpered and shook, she kept her back straight and her voice steady.

  “Listen to me!” she said, and talked about a highly contagious disease. Emily caught only some of it. She couldn’t stop thinking about her daughter. What would happen to Mia if she died here? And what about Craig? Would he live? She clutched his camera to her chest.

  Craig stood with a strange, glassy expression. He moaned. The sound was inhuman. Emily gasped and tried to back away. Craig lunged at her, mouth wide-open, canines bared, so fast she could only scream.

  Then he was on her, his weight bearing her down. But no teeth broke her skin. Craig didn’t move. He lay on top of her, limp, a dead weight. His head lolled. Blood from a hole near his left ear dripped onto Emily’s dress.

  Above them stood Major, gun aimed at Craig, mouth pressed in a thin line, her eyes two bright, precise points.

  “Did he bite you?”

  “No.”

  “Stay there. Play dead. Don’t move.”

  She pivoted, aimed, fired.

  Emily flinched at each shot, squeezed her eyes shut, kept quiet, and followed the agent’s orders exactly.

  * * *

  Emily returned to work. She didn’t want to, but rent was due, and the bills didn’t care if you’d been in a terrorist attack. One morning in the newsroom, her head pounded from the bottle she’d emptied the night before, and her mouth tasted evil. There was only one way to fix that. She was pouring bourbon into her coffee when she looked up.

  Her editor, Chuck, stood over her desk, bald head gleaming under harsh fluorescent lights.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Damn it.

  Chuck did most of his work in the newsroom with the reporters, but he also had a closet-sized office with bare walls, a desk, and two chairs, which was where he led Emily. He squeezed his considerable bulk behind the desk, sat, and gestured for Emily to do the same. She couldn’t meet his gaze. She focused on his tie, blue with pinpoint yellow dots.

  He rubbed his thick brown beard. “How much have you had?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you drunk?”

  Not drunk enough. Guilt tore at her, for the sobriety medallion gone from her purse zipper, for what she was doing to Mia. Such a sweet, trusting girl, she deserved better.

  But only drinking made Emily forget the weight of Craig’s dead body, blood from the hole in his head dripping onto her cheek.

  Play dead. Don’t move.

  That woman had saved Emily’s life.

  Emily didn’t even know her name.

  “We have a zero-tolerance policy,” Chuck said. “You can do what you want at home, but there are no drugs or alcohol when you’re on the clock.”

  “I know.”

  He waited. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me? All right. You don’t leave me a choice. I have to suspend you for a week.”

  That surprised her. “You can’t. It was just a little kick in my coffee.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “But my investigation. I’m so close. I’ll have the story by Thursday. You can publish Sunday. No one else has this. It’ll be the scoop of the year!”

  This time Chuck rubbed his bushy eyebrows, as if he had a headache. As if she were giving him one. “We’ve talked about this. You said you’d drop it. I know what you think happened on July Fourth, that a biolo
gical agent turned people into some kind of zombies—”

  “Craig is not just people.”

  “It’s not true. FBI, DEA, NSA, they all say the same thing. It was a hallucinogen.”

  “It was real.”

  “You imagined it, Emily.”

  “They’re lying.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. You heard the audio I recorded.”

  “It proved nothing. It was mostly screams and static. If we had Craig’s photos…”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then there’s no story.”

  Not for the first time, Emily wished she had grabbed the camera when she’d been ushered from the center, but the bodies had terrified her. Her only thought had been to get to Mia and hug her daughter, and then get drunk. Just the one time.

  “I don’t need the photos,” Emily said. “I have twenty interviews, at least, maybe more.”

  “Let it go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to find her!”

  Emily jumped to her feet and yelled at her editor. Chuck also stood, not anger in his expression, but pity.

  “Who?” he asked.

  Emily’s voice was small. “The woman who saved my life. I’ve gone through all the agency files—the public ones, anyway—and checked with every government contact I have. I’ve talked to every survivor I can find. No one knows who she is, but I’m close to finding her. I know it.”

  More beard rubbing. “Go home,” Chuck said.

  Emily sank into her chair. The false story of the hallucinogen did a disservice to all who had died and survived that day. But part of her wondered: What if the story wasn’t false? What if she was wrong?

  No, she couldn’t accept that. Because if Chuck was right, then she was losing her mind. “I’ll show you,” she said.

  “Not this week. As of right now, you’re suspended. Use the time to get some help, all right? For your daughter’s sake, if nothing else. We’ll talk when you get back.”

  * * *

  Emily left to pick up Mia at day care. She pulled her old Ford Escort onto Market Street, headed out of Center City, and slammed down her hands on the steering wheel in anger.

  “Damn it!” she yelled.