Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What about those zombie motherfuckers?” asked Top.

  “If we’re lucky the walkers will be in their containers, locked up and on ice.”

  “And if we’re not lucky?”

  “If it doesn’t have a pulse, Top, you have my permission to blow it all the way back to hell.”

  They all nodded. It was the only part of the plan that they liked. I could see their point. In the annals of warfare there was a long history of men getting killed because they lacked clear intelligence. We had jack shit.

  Before we boarded the chopper I said, “Look, we don’t know each other and we haven’t even had the chance to train as a team. Church is asking us to hit the ground running. Let’s do just that. None of us are green at this sort of thing, so let’s act and function like professionals. Chain of command is me, then Top. Everyone else is equal. We all watch each other’s backs as well as our own. Five of us go in, five of us come out. We all clear on that?”

  “Hooah,” Top said.

  “Hoo-fricking-ah,” agreed Skip.

  That was half an hour ago; now we were in the sewers and as we walked I had to fight to keep my whole attention on the matter at hand. If there was ever a better definition of too much too soon I don’t want to hear it. I wondered how unsettled the others were, and how that would affect them once things got hot.

  Ollie stopped, one fist raised, and we froze in place. He pointed to our ten o’clock and I saw the rusty iron ladder bolted to the wall. It was covered in moss and rat shit and it ran up into a black hole in the ceiling. Thick frigid white mist snaked down through a grille set into the concrete.

  “Scope,” I whispered to Skip and he produced a fiberscope camera that was attached to the display screen of a miniature tactical video system. We clustered around and studied the screen display. It showed an empty room lined with stained metal tables. No movement except for the mist.

  “Must be cold as hell up there,” Top said. He glanced at me. “Them walkers need to be kept on ice, right?”

  “Let’s hope so; but even if it’s cold up there let’s not take anything for granted.”

  “Skip,” I said, “up the ladder. Look for trips and traps.”

  But after he was up there for a minute he quietly called down, “Clear. No electronics. Just a padlock. I need the bolt cutters.”

  Bunny pulled them from his pack and handed them up. There was a sharp metallic snap and then Skip was handing down the chain in sections. That was good news as far as it went, but it still spooked me. Any time something is too easy, it isn’t.

  “Go, go, go,” I hissed as one by one Echo Team climbed the ladder and took defensive positions inside the room. I went up next to last and gave the room a quick eyeball, but it really was empty, just an old meat-cutting room with roller tables and hooks on chains so that sides of beef or pork could be swung in on ceiling-mounted rails from the killing rooms, then once cut they would be rolled along the metal tables into an adjoining room for cleaning and packaging. Waste and blood was flushed down the floor gutters to the sewers. The function of the room was obvious and I don’t think any of Echo Team missed the irony of being in a room made for butchery.

  The mist was ankle deep and clung to the floor, obscuring our feet. It stank of raw sewage and decay. The ambient temperature had to be right above freezing although the air was oppressively humid. There were doors on either end of the room. One led to the disused packaging shed, which was empty except for old heaps of dirty Styrofoam meat trays and rolls of plastic wrap; the other door was locked.

  “I got it,” Ollie said, and as he knelt in front of it he pulled a very sweet set of professional lockpicks from his thigh pocket. It was as good a set as I’d ever seen and he handled them with practiced ease. It wasn’t the sort of thing soldiers carry; I’d have to ask him about it later.

  There was a soft buzz in my ear and I held up my hand for silence. There was some static on the line but Grace Courtland’s voice was clear and strong. “Thermal scans show multiple tangos.” “Tango,” or “T,” was field code for “terrorist.”

  “Count how many?”

  “Clustered. Maybe twenty, maybe forty.”

  “Say again.”

  She repeated it and asked me to confirm reception.

  “Echo One copy.”

  “Alpha on deck,” she said, “local law on standby.”

  “Copy that. Orders?”

  “Proceed with caution.”

  “Copy. Echo One out.”

  I called the men over and we crouched down, heads together. “Thermal scans say that we have upward of twenty warm bodies in the building. No way to know how many walkers—their heat signatures are too low.”

  I saw the news register on each man’s face. Skip looked scared, Bunny looked mad. Top’s eyes narrowed and Ollie’s face turned to stone.

  “Five men in, five men out,” I reminded them.

  They nodded, but I added, “This isn’t the O.K. Corral. We don’t know for sure that everyone in here is a hostile. Check your targets, no accidents, and I don’t want to hear about ‘friendly fire.’”

  “Hooah,” they said, but without much enthusiasm.

  “Now… let’s go kick some undead ass.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:23 P.M.

  OLLIE FINISHED PICKING the lock and Bunny teased the door open, wary for trip wires and alarms, but no bells rang and nothing blew up as the door swung inward on rusty hinges. There was no other sound except the distant hum of motors.

  I took point this time. My soaked sneakers wanted to squelch so I placed my feet carefully, taking my time to stay silent. The hall was empty and long, filled with gray shadows and the ever-present mist. We hugged one wall and moved forward in line, staying low, watching front and back, checking every door we passed. When the corridor ended at an L-junction I paused and peered carefully around the edge, keeping my head well below the normal light of sight. I made a “follow me” sign and we turned left to follow the hall. We found one locked door, which Ollie opened without effort, but it was just a storeroom.

  I lingered for a moment in the doorway trying to estimate the probable enemy numbers based on the amount of stored goods. I noticed Top nearby doing the same thing. He gave me a raised eyebrows look. Either there were twenty really hungry terrorists in this place or the count was closer to forty, maybe twice that.

  We backed out and closed the door.

  The hall took on a curve and we followed it for another twenty yards until we reached a set of those big vinyl double doors of the kind that flap open when you push a cart through them. We flanked the doors, staying low, and listened.

  It took a second to settle into the vibrational rhythm of the place, mentally filtering out the sounds of compressors and other ambient noises that you might expect in a dilapidated old building. Then we heard it.

  A low, inhuman moan.

  It suggested a dreadful hunger and it was on the other side of the door.

  Skip shot a nervous glance at Top, who gave him a wink that was supposed to look casual and light, and didn’t. I saw the looks on everyone’s faces and I made them meet my eyes. It would reinforce the orders I’d given them. Prisoners—if possible.

  Then there was a sound to our right farther along the curving corridor and as we looked there was a dark movement and then the weak overhead lights threw a shadow on the wall. A silhouette of a guard with a slung assault rifle. A guard, not a walker.

  Ollie was closest so I gave him the nod and he went down onto the floor like a snake and eased into a low shooting position. I saw the guard’s booted foot round the corner first and then his whole body, and then there was a phfft-phfft sound as Ollie squeezed off two silenced shots. The man’s head snapped back and he sagged against the wall; Bunny ran past me and reached the guard before he had a chance to collapse onto the floor. Between Ollie’s shot and Bunny’s quick feet the whole thing looked choreographed, practiced. In human terms
it was terrible, but in the way of warriors it was beautiful, a demonstration of the soldier’s art taken to its most polished level.

  The cop part of my mind noted that Ollie’s handgun of choice was a silenced .22. An assassin’s weapon. The low weight of the bullet made a dot of an entry wound but didn’t have the mass to exit the skull, so the bullet just bounced around and snaped off all the switches. Ollie had taken him in the head with both shots. Most shooters, even the very good ones, are not good enough to confidently try two in the head without a double-tap to the body to stall movement; and he’d taken the shots from thirty feet. Ollie had brought his A-game with him.

  Back at the vinyl door we set ourselves for our entry. Foggy mist curled out from under the door like the tentacles of some albino octopus. The smell was worse here. The sewers had been bad but the stench here was of meat rotting on the living bone, a vital corruption I’d only smelled once before—when I killed Javad. The second time.

  We flanked the door and Top pulled out a little handheld dentist’s mirror and angled it under the door, slowly turning it left and right. Inside there was a whole row of big blue cases. Not a surprise but it didn’t exactly make me want to do the Snoopy dance. From what I remembered of the building schematics this had to be the main production floor, but the row of cases blocked all but a narrow strip; and in the center of the row stood a guard. He had his back to us and he was craning to look through a slender gap between two of the cases. We heard more of the moaning and now we could orient sound with location. Something was happening on the far side of the cases, on the big production floor. The guard was eager to see it. So was I.

  I holstered my pistol and drew my knife. I held a finger to my lips then touched my chest. The others nodded. Bunny and Top curled their fingers under the flaps of the door. At my nod they pulled the flaps open as quickly as silence would allow, and I moved into the room fast and hard. I reached around and clamped my left palm over the guard’s mouth and used my thumb and the edge of my index finger to pinch his nose shut; at the same time I kicked him in the back of the knee with one foot and as he suddenly fell back against me I cut his throat from ear to ear, taking the carotids, the jugular, and the windpipe in one deep sweep. I pulled him back and pushed him into a forward crouch so that his nodding head would prevent the spray of arterial blood. He was dead before he knew he was in threat and it hadn’t made a sound. Bunny and Skip took the body and eased it down as I straightened. I wiped the blade and sheathed it, drew my pistol and thumbed off the safety.

  There were four cases in the row and they completely blocked the door and hid us from whoever else was in the room. I took the dentist’s mirror from Top and checked around both ends of the row. On our right I could see down a corridor formed by a second row of cases that were lined up at a right angle to the first set and a row of laboratory tables cluttered with equipment. There was one guard standing in the gap between the two sets of cases, and near him were six men in stained white lab coats. Everyone was looking through the gap into the center of the main room.

  I faded back and used the mirror to peer around the left end of our row. Two guards stood shoulder to shoulder about twenty feet away, also looking toward the center of the room, but this time I could see what they were looking at. What I saw froze the blood in my veins to black ice.

  The room was large, as big as a school auditorium, with a high ceiling set with grime-covered louvered windows. Against the far wall was a third row of blue cases, and against the left wall were more lab tables. Scattered throughout the room were at least a dozen armed guards, all of them with automatic weapons; and maybe four more men in lab coats. But in the far left corner was a big cage made from industrial-grade chicken wire and steel pipes. Ten of the blue cases stood with their doors wide open, and three guards were using electric cattle prods to drive a snarling, staggering line of walkers toward the cage.

  The cage was packed, wall to wall, with children.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:26 P.M.

  THE CHILDREN WERE huddled into a pack inside the cage, their eyes wide, their mouths trembling. I could see some of them weeping but they made no sound, though whether it was terror of the walkers or threats from the guards that stilled their tongues I couldn’t tell.

  I pulled back and handed the mirror to the others, making them each take a fast look.

  I mouthed the words “we need prisoners,” but I don’t know if any of them were able to process the thought. Top, the only man among us who had kids of his own, had the most murderous expression I’d ever seen on a human face.

  I held up three fingers and everyone got set, Ollie and Skip on the left flank, Bunny and Top with me. I counted down fast.

  “Go!” I snarled, and we rushed into the room.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:27 P.M.

  BUNNY OPENED UP with the shotgun on the two closest guards, blasting them into red tangles of flailing limbs; Top shot two of the lab techs and then turned his fire on the cluster of guards. I could hear shots and screams as Ollie and Skip tore into the guards on the far side. I raced straight forward, gun up and out, and shot the guard standing by the door to the cage. It was a long shot; bad aim could kill one of the kids, but I had no choice. The walkers were yards away. My shot took the guard in the mouth and he rebounded off the chicken wire and fell, his fingers still curled around the latch. As he fell the door swung open.

  The guards with the cattle prods turned toward us. Two of them tossed down their prods and fumbled for their guns. I shot one twice in the chest but even as I was swinging my barrel toward the other the nearest walker leaped at him and buried its teeth in his throat. They fell together in a thrashing heap. I shot the remaining guard who was caught in a moment of bad choice: drop the prod and grab his gun or fend off the walkers. My bullet knocked him into the arms of a walker. The creature, a middle-aged Asian man in a track suit, bore him down and began savaging him. I shot the walker in the back of the head.

  A man rushed at me from my right and I turned to see that there had been at least eight more guards on the other side of the first row of blue cases. They opened up with AK-47s and I had to dive for cover behind one of the lab tables. I dropped, rolled, and came up by the far corner and emptied my magazine into them, dropping two. As I ejected the mag and slapped another in, Top Sims caught them from an oblique angle, chopping down three of them with bursts from his MP5. Skip Tyler opened up from the other side and the guards tried to fight their way out of a crossfire.

  Behind me there was a huge shriek of noise and I spun to see the children surge through the open door of the cage. Three walkers lunged at them and that fast I was up and running, shooting above the heads of the children, trying to make head shots while dodging incoming fire. The children were hysterical and in their panic they flooded across the entire production floor. The gunfire from Echo Team faltered as the children surged around the lab techs and guards, trying to flee the walkers, looking for any way out and finding only guns and teeth and terror.

  One of the lab techs whipped back one flap of his white shirt-jacket and pulled a Sig Sauer and shot a ten-year-old girl in the chest.

  “Fuck prisoners!” I heard someone snarl and the tech died in a hail of bullets. The voice I’d heard had been my own, the bullets mine and Top’s.

  A guard brought an Uzi up and tried to shoot me even though there was a line of children between us. I shot him through the eye.

  “Run!” I yelled to the kids. “Go that way!” I pointed toward the door, even tried to shove some of the kids that way, but their terror was too deep, too complete.

  “Behind you!” I heard Bunny roar, and I crouched and spun to see a walker—a hulking brute in a football jersey—lunge at me, his mouth already smeared with blood. He was coming so fast that I knew that a head shot wouldn’t stop him, so I drove into him with a sliding side kick to the thigh that jerked him to a stop, and
as I pivoted off the kick I brought the gun up under his chin and blew off the top of his head. As he fell backward another walker leaped over him. This one was a young woman in what had once been a very expensive tailored suit. I shot her in the throat but the bullet tore only flesh and the slide locked back on my gun. There was no time to reload as she slammed into me; so I pivoted to let her mass whip around and past me. Her fingers never managed to grab me and she flew off and slid ten feet along the floor. With a human being the shock and impact of the fall would have given me a few seconds to reload; but the walker came right off the floor and dove at my legs, trying to bury her teeth in my flesh. With my left hand I drew my knife and drove the blade down as hard as I could in the back of her skull, right above the collar. The furious tension was instantly gone and she dropped to the ground, a piece of my pant leg caught between her teeth.

  Top Sims came from my left and stood cover while I reloaded, dropping a lab tech and a walker by the time I had the new mag in and the slide released.

  There was a bull roar and we pivoted to see Bunny being rushed by three walkers. There were a half dozen kids huddled behind him and his shotgun was empty. He slammed the folding stock of the shotgun across the face of one walker and I could tell that he was unnerved when the monster just shook it off. Years of training condition us to fight even the most aggressive person, but none of us had trained to fight the dead, to fight things that could not be hurt, that could barely be stopped.

  I started in his direction, but Top waved me off. “I got it!”

  Bullets burned the air around me and I turned to see a pair of guards using an overturned table as a shooting blind. Dumbasses. The table was aluminum. I put four rounds through the thin metal, two sets of two, and both men fell back with sucking chest wounds.

  A blur of movement made me turn again and a little boy of about seven wrapped his arms around my left thigh and clung to me, screaming, his face streaked with tears. A walker came loping across the floor, red teeth bared in a hungry grimace. I shot him in the chest and head and then shot a guard. The clinging child let go and I turned to see him falling to the floor. One side of his face was streaked with blood from a terrible bite. The walker had gotten him before he’d run to me for help. The child’s body twitched and thrashed, and lay still.