Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “So you both said.”

  “If a person receives a fatal bite then shortly after clinical death the disease reactivates the central nervous system and, to a limited degree, some organ functions, and the victim rises as a new carrier. If a person receives even a mild bite the infection will kill them in about seventy hours, which at best gives us three days to locate any victims and contain them.”

  “I’m not sure I like the word ‘contain,’” I said.

  “No one will like that word if it comes to that,” Church said.

  “Bite victims begin to lose cognitive functions quickly,” Courtland continued, “and even before clinical death they become dissociative, delusional, and uncontrollably aggressive. In both the predeath and postreanimation phase the carriers have a cannibalistic compulsion.”

  Church said, “This is all information we learned after the fact.”

  I looked at them. “What the hell happened?”

  Church’s face was as ice. “We didn’t know what Javad was at first. How could we? The learning process for us was very… awkward.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You read about the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital? The night of the task force hit?”

  I sat there, not wanting to hear this. Grace looked away but Church stared back at me with a dreadful intensity.

  “Javad woke up hungry, Mr. Ledger. Only two DMS agents accompanied the body to the morgue. We lost contact with them shortly after arrival. Major Courtland and I were actually at the hospital but were conducting an interview in another wing. When the alert came in we called in all available teams, but by the time they arrived on the scene the infection had spread to an entire wing of the hospital. Major Courtland’s Alpha Team had perimeter duty and Bravo and Charlie teams entered the hospital to try and contain the situation.”

  “We thought there had been an attempt by other terrorists to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades,” Courtland said. “But it was only Javad. By the time the teams were inside the infection was completely out of control. Javad had gotten all the way down to the lobby and was attacking people in the waiting area. Mr. Church was able to subdue him—and before you ask, no, we didn’t know what Javad was at that point. He was a suspected terrorist, albeit one we thought had been killed. Our agents were confused because the attackers appeared to be patients, doctors, nurses. Our men… hesitated. They were overwhelmed.”

  “How many of them did you lose?”

  “All of them, Mr. Ledger,” Church said. “Two teams; twenty-two men and women. Plus the two agents who had been in the ambulance. Some of the finest and most capable tactical field operatives in the world. Torn to pieces by old women, children, ordinary civilians… and ultimately by each other.”

  “What… did you do?”

  “You read the newspapers. The situation needed to be contained.”

  I leaped to my feet. “Jesus Christ! Are you telling me that you deliberately burned down the entire fucking hospital…? What kind of sick son of a bitch are you?”

  Without turning he said, “Earlier, when I told you that if this plague gets out, there will be no way to stop it, I was not exaggerating. Everyone would die, Mr. Ledger. Everyone. We are talking the actual apocalypse here. Counting Javad, our patient zero, we have a loss of life totaling one hundred and eighty-eight civilians and twenty-four DMS operatives. Two hundred and ten deaths as a result of one carrier. Friends of mine are dead. People I knew and trusted—and all of this spread from a single source that was, more or less, contained. We lucked out in that the attack was inside a building that had reinforced windows and heavy-duty doors we could lock. And, to a small degree we were on the alert, though not for something like this. If no security had accompanied his body to the hospital… well, it’s doubtful we’d be here having this conversation. Same goes if the terrorist cell had followed through with its plan. Had Javad been turned loose, say, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or South Central L.A. on a Saturday afternoon, or at the rededication of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia this coming weekend, we would never have been able to contain it. Never. Now we are reasonably sure that there are more strike cells, each one likely to have one or more walkers. We know where one is and we have that under heavy surveillance. If there are others we need to find and neutralize them. We have to do everything we can to locate and destroy these other carriers. If we don’t then we will have failed all of humanity. We may already be too late.” He turned toward me, and his face was filled with a terrible and savage sadness. “To stop this thing… I’d burn down heaven itself.”

  I stood there, stunned and sick. “Why the hell did you drag me into this shit?”

  “I brought you here because you have qualities I need. You are an experienced investigator with an understanding of politics. You can speak several useful languages. You have extensive martial arts training. You are tough and you are ruthless when it comes down to it. You’ve demonstrated that you lack hesitation in a crisis. Hesitation got our other teams killed. You’re here because I can use you. I want you to lead my new team because my existing agents are being slaughtered and I need it to damn well stop!”

  “But why now? Why didn’t you tell me this the other day when I auditioned for you?”

  “Things have gotten worse,” said Courtland. “The other day we thought we had this under control, that we really had gotten the jump on it. We were wrong. We programmed MindReader to search all available databases for anything that might be related. One of the things we programmed it to find were cases of attacks involving biting.”

  “Oh crap…”

  Church said, “So far there have been three cases. All isolated, all in the Middle East. Two in very remote spots in Afghanistan and one in northern Iraq.”

  “When you say ‘isolated’…” I began.

  “All three were identical: small villages in remote areas that have natural barriers—mountains in two cases, a river and a cliff wall in the other. Each village was totally wiped out. Every single man, woman, and child was killed. Every body showed signs of human bites.”

  “And, what, the villagers were all walkers now?”

  “No,” said Courtland. “Every person in each village had been shot repeatedly in the head. No other bodies were found.”

  “What does that tell you?” Church asked.

  “God Almighty,” I breathed. “The isolation, the cleanup afterward… it sounds like someone’s been taking the walkers out for test-drives.”

  “The most recent one was five days ago,” Courtland said.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “Okay.”

  “This time they left a calling card,” Church said, “a video of the slaughter and a message from a hooded man. We’re running voice recognition on it but my guess is that it will be El Mujahid or one of his lieutenants.”

  “The attack took place in a small mountain village called Bitar in northern Afghanistan,” said Courtland quietly. “Military authorities were tipped off to the attack but arrived hours after it was over. They found a tape that had been left for them on one of the bodies of the dead. Barrier intercepted it and was only fortunate enough to keep it from being generally released. We’re lucky it wasn’t posted on YouTube.”

  “If you’re in,” Church said, “then as soon as possible I want you to lead Echo Team in a quiet infiltration of the crab plant in Crisfield. That will put you and the members of your team in terrible danger. I make no apologies about it… I brought you here because I need a weapon. A thinking weapon. Something I can launch against the kind of people who would use something like Javad against the American people.” He paused for a moment. “The only people who have ever faced a walker and lived are in this room. So let me ask you, Mr. Ledger,” he said softly, “are you in or not?”

  I wanted to kill him. Courtland, too. I could feel my lips curling back and past the stricture in my throat. With a hiss in my voice I said, “I’m in.”

  Church closed his eyes and sighed. He stood
with his head bowed for a moment. When he opened his eyes he looked ten years older but far, far more dangerous.

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Five days ago

  OF ALL OF the British forces in Iraq the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade had suffered the worst casualties. Their turnover of troops was steady, with fresh battalions moving into the field to replace those units that had suffered losses or had suffered too many days under the unforgiving Iraqi sun which daily beat down at above 120 degrees. Wounded soldiers—British, American, and a mixed bag of other Allied troops—were brought in with disheartening regularity. The triage process had taken on an assembly-line pace. Get them in, stabilize the most serious wounds, check their IDs, and then airlift the worst cases out to hospital ships in the Gulf. Less seriously wounded were transported by helicopter or armored medical bus to bases scattered around the country, where they would remain on the chance that they might be rotated back to their units. Great Britain had diminished its presence in Iraq since 2007 and it was more politically useful to keep the same experienced troops in the country than to send in fresh ones.

  The serious cases would eventually be transported home to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Too many of them would ultimately fall under the care of the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association who would try—and sometimes fail—to secure proper disability benefits for them and see them through rehab as they worked to find a new version of their civilian lives.

  Captain Gwyneth Dunne lived with these facts day after day. Running the British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion was like working a busy ER in one of the outer rings of Hell, or at least that’s how she described it to her husband, who was stationed with the 1st Royal Anglian regiment in Tikrit. She was a registered nurse whose training was in pediatrics, but the wizards at Division had decided that this qualified her to triage battle-wounded soldiers. It was a total ongoing cockup.

  She was at her desk in a Quonset hut that had two overhead fans that did nothing but push around stale hot air, reading through the computer printouts on the three wounded soldiers from the ambush near Najaf. Lieutenant Nigel Griffith, twenty-three; Sergeant Gareth Henderson, thirty; and Corporal Ian Potts, twenty. She didn’t know any of them; probably never would.

  The door opened and in walked Dr. Roger Colson, the senior triage surgeon.

  “What’s the butcher’s bill, Rog?” Dunne asked, waving him to a chair.

  He sank down with a sigh, rubbed his eyes, and gave her a bleary look. “It’s not promising. The officer, Griffith, has a chest wound that’s going to need more surgical attention than we can give here. The good news is that there’s a pretty good Swedish chest cutter on HMS Hecla. I’m having him prepped for airlift.”

  “Does he have a chance?”

  Dr. Colson lifted one hand and waggled it back and forth. “Shrapnel in the chest wall. We managed to reinflate the left lung, but he has some fragments near the heart. It’ll take a deft hand to sort him out.”

  “What about the others?”

  Colson shrugged. “They should both go out with Griffith. Corporal Potts is probably going to lose his left leg below the knee. Maybe the hand as well. We don’t have a microsurgeon here and they don’t have one on the hospital ship, either, so even if he keeps the hand he’ll lose most of its function, poor bastard.” He rubbed his eyes again, which were red and puffy from too many hours staring at wounds that he didn’t have the staff or materials to properly treat. “The best of the lot is Sergeant Henderson. Very bad facial laceration. He’ll be disfigured but the eyes were spared, so there’s that.”

  “I never met Henderson. He’s a new lad, transferred from the Suffolk regiment.”

  “Mm,” Colson said, indifferent to that part of it. “Should have stayed in Suffolk and raised sheep.”

  “You want him transported out?” Dunne asked.

  “I should think so. Injury like that will take a long time to heal and he looks like he might have been a handsome bloke. Injury of this kind will have traumatic personal effects.”

  Dunne looked down at the three printouts of the survivors spread out on her desk. She picked up Henderson’s and examined the face of the thirty-year-old sergeant from the farmlands. “He was a handsome lad.”

  She shook her head and turned the page over to show the doctor.

  “Ah well,” Colson said sadly, “he doesn’t look like that anymore. Pity, the poor blighter.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:12 P.M.

  AS CHURCH AND Courtland led me through a series of hallways I said, “I’m going to take a flyer here and assume that you know that there is no way this prion thing is simply the weapon du jour of a group of religious fundamentalists.”

  “No kidding,” Church said.

  The warehouse was very large, with suites of offices, workrooms of all kinds, and several big storage rooms. There were scores of jump-suited workmen shifting crates, running wires, and swinging hammers. Guards patrolled the hallway and every one of them looked like he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed. Not a lot of smiling in that place, and I could certainly understand why. I wondered how many of the people in the halls had lost friends at St. Michael’s.

  “So the real reason you didn’t hit the crab plant is because of what happened at St. Michael’s,” I said. “You’re thinking that if the DMS’s cream of the crop would fall prey to fatal hesitation then anyone else would, too. Even special ops.”

  “You’d make a bloody good terrorist,” Grace said with an approving smile.

  “I’m hoping he’ll make a great terrorist,” Church corrected and pushed through the door.

  Grace Courtland gave me a wink as she followed. I wondered why her team was not being offered the job. Maybe they were still too shocked and too hot after what happened to their friends at St. Michael’s. More likely they were too valuable to throw away on what clearly could be a suicide mission or a trap. I didn’t for a moment think that Church wouldn’t be aware that I would think that, but it did give me a bit of a measure between what Church needed to get done and what he could spare compassion on. Big gap, probably getting wider every minute.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:16 P.M.

  WE ENTERED THE main warehouse floor, which was big enough to be an airplane hanger. Back in the shadows I could see a number of vehicles, mostly civilian with a few military Hummers and transport trucks sprinkled throughout. There were two big storage bins lining one wall, one marked EQUIPMENT and the other ARMS. A soldier with an M-16 stood outside the arms locker, eyes slowly scanning the room, his finger laid straight along the outside of the trigger guard. One corner of the room had been turned into a makeshift training area with several hundred square feet of blue gym mats.

  The other candidates I’d tussled with—minus the clown I’d punched in the throat—were seated in the front row of an otherwise empty section of folding chairs. I could feel their eyes on me, and two of them gave me cautious nods: Sergeant Rock and the Jolly Green Giant. The latter held an ice pack to his face.

  Across from them was a second row of chairs and these were filled with a dozen hard-looking men and women in fatigue pants and black T-shirts. No one wore any patch or insignia indicating branch of service or rank, but at least half of them had military tattoos of one kind or another.

  Church stepped onto the mats and gave each group a long, considering stare. Even in that vast room he gave the impression of size and substance. All conversation ceased immediately and every eye was on him. I’ve seldom encountered a more commanding presence and though he was surely aware of the effect he had on everyone there wasn’t the slightest sign that he was jazzed by it. It was a fact of life to him, or, more probably, a tool.

  Grace and I stood at the edge of the
training floor, she on the side with the dozen—her team, I presumed—and me closer to the four men I was supposed to lead.

  “Time is short,” Church began, “so let’s cut right to it. With the loss of Bravo and Charlie teams at the hospital we are critically shorthanded. Over the next three months we will recruit and train at least a dozen additional teams, but that doesn’t help us right now.” He paused and looked at Grace’s team. “Echo Team needs to build, train, and get to combat readiness asap. I expect each member of Alpha Team to assist in any way possible.”

  Grins began to form on the faces of some of the Alpha Team bucks, but Church said, “Understand me here. If anyone, any single person, no matter what rank or MOS, does anything to interfere with the training process—whether by a harmless stunt or some kind of hazing nonsense—I will take it as a personal insult. It will be better for you to wake up in a room full of walkers, let me assure you.”

  That wiped the smile off everyone’s face. We all knew he meant it, and I was starting to get a pretty good idea that he was a total whack job.

  But he was our whack job.

  He turned to Echo Team. “Lieutenant Colonel Hanley has chosen to spend the rest of the day in intensive care. Apparently his larynx got in the way of his good judgment. Pity about that.” He looked real broken up about it, too. Church pointed to me. “Captain Ledger is now your team leader, effective immediately. You will all offer him your very best support.” He didn’t add a cheesy “or else” but everyone heard it.

  He waited for questions. Perhaps “dared” is another word, and then beckoned me over. When I was within range for a quiet comment I murmured, “‘Captain’ Ledger? I was only an E6 in the army.”

  “If ‘captain’ doesn’t suit you, we can discuss it later.”

  “Look… what’s my brief here? Is this a hand-to-hand session? Do you have a curriculum you want me to follow?”