The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Hold your arms out to your sides. Do it now,” I ordered, and after a moment’s indecision he did it, standing there like a trembling scarecrow as I clipped the BAMS unit to my belt and patted him down. He was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Sneakers and a SpongeBob wristwatch.

  A couple of tears boiled into the corners of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to be brave, his mouth trembled. Seven was no age at all. A baby.

  I hated myself for this.

  “Is your dad Charles Grey?” I asked, trying to take the edge off my voice and utterly failing. I wasn’t prepared for this even though I knew that Grey had brought his family into the lab with him.

  “Yes,” Mikey said, almost making it a question, unsure of what kind of answer would placate this big, mean stranger with the funny costume and the gun. Then he found another splinter of courage and lifted his chin. “Are you here to hurt my dad?”

  “Why would I want to do that, kid?”

  “I don’t know. ’Cause he said you were.”

  Christ.

  “I’m not here to hurt anyone,” I said, and hoped that it wasn’t a lie. Of course, this was coming from a guy holding a loaded gun. “But I do have to talk to your dad.”

  “I’m scared,” said the kid. His face was still paper white with fear.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “I’m scared of my dad,” he said.

  I wanted to peel off my hood and put my sidearm away and give this kid a hug, get him outside this madhouse. I knelt in front of him.

  “Why are you scared of your dad, Mikey?”

  “He keeps yelling,” he said. “Yelling and crying. I don’t like it when he cries.”

  Swell.

  “Listen, Mikey … can you take me to him?”

  “No! You’re going to hurt him.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists, but the action looked more like he was tired than crying. In the harsh fluorescent lighting his pale skin looked almost green.

  “I’m not here to hurt your dad, kid.”

  He stared up at me, his face filled with doubt; then his eyes shifted away toward the door. “I’m scared to go back in there.”

  “I’ll be right with you, kiddo,” I said as I straightened.

  The kid sneezed and I instantly jerked back from him and made a grab for the BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. It glowed orange.

  Mikey wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I have a cold.”

  “How long have you had a cold, kid?”

  He sniffed. “I don’t know. I just got it, I guess.”

  “Today? Did you wake up with a cold?”

  “No.” He sniffed again and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on his forehead. “I keep sneezing and I can’t find any tissues. I think Mommy used them all.”

  “Does your mom have a cold, too?”

  “She sneezed so much she had a nosebleed.”

  “Where is she? Where’s your mom?”

  He looked around for a few seconds, like he was trying to orient himself. “Isn’t she here?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  He sneezed again. I held the BAMS out to try to catch some of the spray.

  The light changed from orange to red.

  Everything in my gut turned to greasy ice water.

  “I … don’t know,” Mikey said distantly. “I think she went to lie down. She had a nosebleed.”

  Mikey wiped at his nose and stared at the drops of blood on his wrist. He looked at me, confused, wanting and needing an answer. He was swaying slightly, as if there was a strong breeze. Beneath his freckles his color was bad. Definitely green, with dark red splotches blossoming on his cheeks.

  I heard a click in my ear and then Church’s voice: “Deacon for Cowboy, Deacon for Deacon, copy?”

  “Go for Cowboy,” I murmured, stepping away from the boy. The kid stood there, clearly unsure of where he was. Blood ran from both nostrils and he didn’t appear to notice.

  “Cowboy,” Church said, “we’re receiving the telemetry feeds from the BAMS unit. Be advised that the room is now officially compromised. Repeat, you are in a hot zone. We’re getting V-readings.”

  V for virus. Damn.

  I stepped away and touched my earbud. “What kind?”

  “Dalek is matching the readings with the facility’s database and—”

  Another voice cut in. Dr. Hu. “Cowboy, be advised, the kid appears to be infected with a strain of QOBE.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “It’s something they were working on at Fair Isle. Quick Onset Bundibugyo Ebolavirus.”

  “Say again?”

  Church’s voice cut back in, “The boy has Ebola.”

  A cold hand clamped around my heart.

  “Then it’s in the main air supply. Talk to me about containment, ’cause I’m outside of the Hot Room.”

  “We’ve got the exterior vents draped and we’re sealing them with foam. Nothing can get out.”

  “Does that include me?”

  “We’re airlifting in a hyperbaric decontamination module. We’ll soft-dock it to one of the doors. You’ll be okay as long as your suit seals are intact.” He sounded almost disappointed.

  The kid couldn’t hear the conversation. He was using his sleeve to blot blood from his nose. At first I thought he was remarkably calm, but when he glanced at me I could see that his eyes were already starting to glaze with fever.

  “That’s nuts,” I whispered. “Ebola has a five-day incubation—”

  “Not QOBE,” said Hu. “It’s a bioweapon engineered to hit and present within minutes to hours. Introduce it into a bunker or secure facility and everyone in there dies. Without living hosts an insertion team in HAMMER suits can infiltrate and gain access to computers and other materials. Infection rate is ninety-eight point eight; mortality rate among infected is one hundred percent.”

  “Tell me that someone else cooked this up and that we were just working on a cure.”

  There was silence on the line, and then Hu said, “Grow up, Cowboy.”

  “We’ll talk about that when I get out of here,” I said softly, though it occurred to me that Hu probably wouldn’t have made that comment if he thought there was a snowball’s chance of me getting out.

  “What’s my time frame here?” I asked.

  Church said, “You’re fighting the clock. If the boy has just started showing symptoms, say one hour before you’re alone in there.”

  “Deacon,” I said, “tell me one thing. Did you know about this?”

  “That it was being studied? Yes. That it was off the leash, no.”

  What remained unsaid was whether he would have sent me in here regardless. I think we both knew the answer to that.

  Second day back on the fucking job.

  I turned back to the kid. “C’mon, Mikey … let’s go see your dad.”

  The kid sniffed again and turned toward the nearest door, but he blinked at it for a moment, his face screwed up with uncertainty.

  “What was I doing?” he asked distractedly.

  “You’re taking me to see your dad.” My voice almost cracked.

  “Oh … okay.”

  He reached for the knob, turned it the wrong way several times, and then wiped his nose with his wrist. When he reached for the doorknob again there was a long smear of blood on his wrist. Mikey finally opened the door and walked through, and I followed, torn between the demands of the mission and the horror I felt for what I was seeing.

  I was watching a child die.

  The virus was going to kill him in minutes. An hour tops. That was all the time this kid had left. There was no cure, no magic bullet. There was something so enormously obscene about it that I could feel the anger rising like lava inside me. The Modern Man within me—the civilized aspect of my fractured persona—was numb with the shock of this. My inner Cop wanted answers. But it was the third aspect, the Warrior, who was grinding his teeth in a murderous rage. Even that part of me, the Killer, was offended by th
is because this was something that transcended civilization, transcended law and order: this was the primal and visceral response to protect the young of the tribe. And here was one who was in mortal peril, and no laws or strength of arms could do a single thing. All I could do was use the last minutes of this child’s life to further my mission.

  God …

  The kid led me through the outer layer of the FIRE facility—the staff quarters, supply rooms, mess hall, and other nonessential sections. The doors to each room stood ajar. No one was there. There were signs of conflict, though: coffee cups that had dropped and shattered on the floor, briefcases left standing in the middle of a hallway, discarded purses, and a number of cell phones that had been tossed to the floor and then smashed under heel. Mikey lingered by a broken BlackBerry that had a pink gel case. He looked at it for several seconds, chewing his lip and furrowing his brow.

  Then he looked up at me. “Mom had a nosebleed,” he said. “She had to lie down.”

  “I know, Mikey. I’m sure she’ll be okay,” I said, and the lie was like broken glass in my mouth. “Let’s go see your dad.”

  Mikey suddenly smiled brightly. “Daddy’s taking us to work today!”

  I started to speak, but then the moment passed and the dull, disconnected look returned. Mikey sneezed and continued along the hall.

  At the end of the hallway was an air lock, the door of which was blocked by a wheeled desk chair. A sign read: CENTRAL LABORATORY COMPLEX.

  “Daddy said to keep the doors open,” said Mikey as he squeezed past the chair and entered the air lock on the far side.

  “Where is your dad, Mikey?”

  “In the Hot Room. Though … it’s not hot. It’s pretty cold in there. Isn’t that funny, that they call it a hot room?” He sneezed. “C’mon … .”

  Everything he said had a dreamy quality to it. Even when he looked at the blood on his hands from his sneeze his expression didn’t flicker. It was apparently unreal to him, and I guess that was a blessing. No tears, no screaming, no panic. Even though I was glad the kid wasn’t terrified and screaming, his calm was eerie.

  I followed him through two more air locks. The front and back doors of those locks whose lock assemblies had been torn apart, the hydraulics bashed out of shape and ripped open.

  “Did your dad do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mikey said defensively. A fit of sneezing hit him and the kid reeled against the wall and sneezed until blood fairly poured from between his fingers. I crossed to the closest office and found a box of tissues, tore out a fistful, and brought them back to the kid. He mumbled something and used the whole wad to clean his face.

  “Mom had a bloody nose, too,” he said. Then he seemed to forget about the tissues and they fell from his small fingers.

  Tears burned my eyes, but I sniffed them back. I couldn’t wipe them away while wearing the suit, and I couldn’t risk blurred vision. I bit down on my fury, grinding it between my teeth until my jaw ached.

  I followed Mikey through the central labs.

  “Daddy’s in there,” Mikey said, pointing a trembling finger at the far wall, into which was set a much heavier air lock. Huge, thick, solid, and probably impenetrable under any ordinary circumstances. It was the kind of air lock that would have kept even the most virulent pathogen locked in, but I knew that we were past that point. The proof stood beside me, tracing his name on a desktop in his own blood.

  This one had not been disabled. But the kicker was what someone had painted on the wall in dark red paint.

  The symbol of the Seven Kings.

  I bent close to examine it. The HAMMER suit’s filters don’t allow smells to get in, which was fine with me, because as I looked at the dark graffiti I realized that it wasn’t paint. It was blood.

  I spoke quietly into my helmet mike: “Cowboy to Deacon, are you seeing this?”

  “Copy that,” said Church, then added, “I would welcome the opportunity to chat with the person who painted that.”

  Casual words, but not casually meant.

  “Roger that.”

  I turned to Mikey. “Did your daddy put this here?”

  He looked at it for a blank second and then shrugged.

  We crossed the room to the door to the Hot Room. The air lock was flanked by double keycard terminals with computer keyboards. The idea was to make sure that no one could enter this kind of lab alone. They used the same thing in missile control rooms. No one can just waltz in and launch the nukes, and the odds of two complete whackos working on the same shift, in the same place, who both wanted to release the Big Bad Wolf were pretty damn slim. These systems allowed for one person to require compliance and agreement from another, and if something was hinky the other person’s lack of compliance kept the monster in its box. The terminals were too far apart for one person to operate them both simultaneously. The computer codes had to be entered in unison, as did the key swipes.

  Dr. Grey probably used a colleague to gain entry earlier. Why not? Back then nobody knew he was nuts.

  Now he sent a kid. His own damn son.

  “I have a card thingee,” Mikey said. He bent and picked it up from the floor near the air lock. “Daddy told me to leave it here. There’s one for you, too. He said we had to type in those numbers and then use the cards. He said to do it together. Like a game. It’ll only work if we do it together.”

  He pointed to the metal door, on which a security day code had been written in what looked like lipstick. Rose pink. A nice color.

  “Okay, Mikey,” I said in a voice that I barely recognized as my own. “Let’s play the game.”

  Interlude Twenty

  The Seven Kings

  Four Months Ago

  Gault stood by the throne of the King of Plagues. Up close Gault could see that the chair was ornately carved with scenes from Gilles Le Muisit, Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, and Jean Pucelle’s Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg. He trailed his fingers over the carvings of the frantic and helpless doctors, the wretched infected, and the skeletal dead.

  “Lovely,” he murmured.

  “Take it for a test drive, Sebastian,” suggested the American, his tone of voice at odds with the grandeur of the moment.

  Gault climbed into the seat. It was very comfortable, the leather seat built over padded springs.

  Toys stepped up behind him and pushed the heavy chair closer to the table. “Looks good on you,” he whispered.

  Gault nodded and his eyes were filled with fire. “King of Plagues,” he murmured.

  Toys looked at Fear. “What now? Does Sebastian swear some kind of oath? Or is it more secret society–ish—you know, with a blood pact and all that?”

  The others laughed.

  “We thought about that in the beginning,” said the Frenchman. “We concocted a dozen rituals and, yes, blood oaths were considered. But in the end we decided on a much stronger ritual.”

  Gault look up sharply. “What kind of ritual?”

  “We gave our word,” said the American. “One to the other.”

  Both Toys and Gault started to laugh and then realized that the American wasn’t joking.

  “Really?” asked Gault. “That’s it? Your word?”

  The Saudi leaned forward, his face serious and intense. “It all depends to whom your word is given. We each agreed to give and receive our word of trust. We agreed never to lie to one another. To everyone else, to the world, to our closest friends on the other side of that door, yes. We agreed that our word would only matter to the Seven Kings and the Seven Consciences of the New World Trust.”

  “It’s a covenant,” said Thieves. “A sacred one.”

  Toys and Gault exchanged a look that turned into a smile.

  Famine cocked an eyebrow. “You find that amusing?”

  “Well,” said Gault, “it smacks of ‘honor among thieves,’ doesn’t it?”

  The Frenchman shrugged. “I assure you that this is not a joke.”

  “He’s right, Sebastian,�
�� said the American. “The one thing we don’t joke about is the integrity of our word when given to the others here in this room. It’s what bonds us and defines us.”

  “Very impressive, I’m sure,” said Toys. “But what does Sebastian get out of this?”

  The grin that bloomed on the American’s face was broad and toothy and filled with true delight. “Why, son, you both get every goddamned thing you ever wanted. And I’m not talking about caviar and blow jobs; I’m talking about everything. You think you understand what power is? I’m here to tell you, boys, that you surely do not.”

  The King of Famine nodded. “When people talk about secret societies they claim that these groups want power, but they don’t attempt to decode what the word ‘power’ truly means. But I will bet you already know.”

  “Money,” answered Gault. “It’s always about money. Money buys power—which itself is a catchall term for the ability to do things. Purchase, push, build, destroy, own … money is the only path worth walking.”

  “Root of all evil,” said Toys. Several of the Kings nodded at him with approval. “So then … what is evil?”

  “It’s how the losers describe the winners,” said the American.

  Gault nodded and rubbed his palms back and forth along the armrests of the throne. “So,” he said, “you really are an ancient society?”

  The American gave a dismissive laugh. “Nah. That’s the myth we’ve been constructing. It’s what we sell to the rubes. Truth is, we’ve only been in operation for twenty-five years, give or take. We studied all those conspiracy theories to design our group and build our myth. And we hijack a lot of stuff to make that myth look ancient. It’s easy, ’cause if you look hard enough you can find clues to anything, whether it’s there or not. That’s how all those kooky New Age books about Lemuria and Atlantis and the Alien Reptoids got traction. Take a glyph from some tomb that shows a guy in a weird headdress sitting in a chair, and with the right caption underneath it in a book aimed at the right audience you can convince people that it’s a spaceman who visited the Aztecs. Erich von Däniken made a frigging fortune with that, all that Chariots of the Gods bullshit. We spent years on that sort of thing, and we used our people to seed it into pop-culture books on ancient societies, historical mysteries, and conspiracy theories. We poured money into programming at local libraries and coffeehouses for the most vocal nut jobs, and we used dummy corporations to set up a lot of the more subversive small presses that publish books about the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission. All of that stuff. Mind you, some of it’s true, of course, and that makes the deception that much more compelling. There’s an old carnival barker saying: ‘Use nine truths to sell one lie.’ That’s us.”