Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  But all I heard over my headset was the hiss of static. The signal was gone.

  A sudden noise made us all jump and we formed a fast circle, guns pointing out. Somewhere deep inside the building there was a sound like the dying sigh of a giant as big turbine engines shut down, slowing their whine as they decelerated.

  “What the hell was that?” Top growled.

  “I think the refrigeration units just shut off,” Bunny whispered.

  Then there was a loud blast as wall-mounted vents snapped from open and hot air shot into the corridor.

  “Uh-oh,” Top said softly. The air coming out of the vents was intensely hot and within seconds the temperature in the hall had gone up ten degrees, then fifteen. It continued to climb.

  “Something tells me this is not good news,” Bunny said, looking over his shoulder at me.

  I tried calling Church again but still got only silence. It was the same on all channels. “Signal’s being jammed.”

  “Yeah,” Bunny confirmed, “not good news.”

  “Told you this was a goddamn trap,” Top said.

  And at that moment the locks on all of the doors along the hallway clicked open. That’s when we heard the first moans as dozens of pale-faced people staggered out into the hall in front of us and behind.

  This wasn’t a trap… it was a slaughterhouse.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:31 A.M.

  WE WERE TRAPPED, front and back.

  The closest of the people was twenty feet down the hall. It was a middle-aged woman with lank blond hair and a stained housedress. Her eyes were wide and she staggered and nearly fell as the crowd of them jostled her. I brought my pistol up and put the laser sight on her forehead. Bunny and Top were aiming at opposite ends of the hall, but none of us fired yet. My finger was still outside the trigger guard and I could feel cold slush churning in my stomach. These were civilians. Behind the woman was a young boy of no more than ten; and next to him a pretty teenage girl in a short denim skirt. There were people in business suits and bathing suits, and I caught the flash of a uniform and saw a mailman.

  “Orders, sir?” hissed Top.

  My finger stayed outside of the trigger guard. “We have to make sure.”

  “Boss… this is getting tight,” Bunny whispered.

  I wondered if this was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt at St. Michael’s. Was it the absolute inhumanity of the necessary response that kept them from shooting? The meatpacking plant had been different; that had been a straight good guys/bad guys shootout, but these people were not enemy combatants. At least, not yet. The crowd choked the hallway in both directions but they milled there, not moving forward, staring at us as we stared back. It was completely surreal.

  “Hold your positions,” I said, staring at the crowd. The moment felt like it was stretching but in reality I knew that only a second or two had ticked off the clock.

  “Maybe they ain’t walkers,” Bunny said.

  “Say, farmboy,” Top said, “why don’t you go check ’em for a pulse.”

  “Screw that.”

  The middle-aged woman took an uncertain step toward us.

  I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard.

  She opened her mouth and for a moment I thought I saw her smile as if she was showing relief that someone had come to rescue her. But that smile stretched and stretched and stretched until it became a rapacious leer. With a scream like some jungle animal she ran straight at me.

  Once she had probably been somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Maybe a grandmother with grandkids in diapers that she spoiled. I didn’t know who she was or how she came to be here in this terrible place; all I knew is that she was here and whatever loving personality she might once have had, and whatever memories and secrets she once knew, were gone now, torn away by a prion-driven parasite in her blood that left behind only a shell. A predatory thing in human disguise. This surely was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt: the dreadful certainty that no action could be right in a situation so thoroughly wrong. They must have felt the horror that I now felt as this woman lunged at me, running on pale legs marked with varicose veins, closing the distance in bedroom slippers that had a lilac print; her stomach bouncing, her breasts swaying, her mouth open in a feral grin of unnatural appetite. It was enough to take the heart and soul out of anyone. It had taken the soul out of all those men and women in those other two DMS teams.

  But I shot her through the face without hesitation.

  Dear God, what does that say about who and what I am?

  Behind me Bunny and Top opened up. We all still had the sound suppressors on our guns so the fight became a ballet of muted carnage. The walkers in the back of the crowd moaned—and that sounded low and distant; the ones in the front screeched like cats, and our handguns made high, soft sounds like someone saying, “Psst!” to get everyone’s attention. Even as we fired the moment continued to be unreal.

  There were at least twenty of them on my side of the corridor, and probably that many charging at my men. The narrow width of the hallway gave us no way out, but it also pushed them together into a line two abreast. They couldn’t surround us, couldn’t overwhelm us with their numbers. The magazine in my Beretta nine-millimeter carried fifteen rounds and I used them to kill eight of the walkers. I used one round to the chest to slow them and then a second to the brain. I shot the mailman next, and then I killed the teenage girl. I shot two men in business suits and a homeless man in rags. My fifteenth round dropped the little boy.

  I dropped the magazine and slapped in another one as fast as I could, the action smooth from years of practice, but even with all my speed they nearly had me. A twenty-something who looked like she could have been a grad student had climbed over the bodies and was crouching to leap when I brought the gun back up. My shot caught her in the throat and flung her back against the others who were crowding forward. It bought me enough time to aim the next shot. And the next.

  Behind me Bunny was saying: “Fuck me fuck me fuck me…” over and over again as he fired his gun dry and fished for a new magazine. Top fought in silence, but I believed I could feel waves of heartsick terror rolling off him as he fired.

  I dropped two more and then my end of the corridor was choked with the dead. The walkers on the other side of the mountain of corpses clawed and tore at the bodies in their way, which was nearly blocked. I dropped my second magazine and fished for a third but now my hands were shaking and I almost dropped the clip. I caught it and fumbled it into place, released the slide, brought the weapon up, ready, ready…

  “Clear!” Top yelled, and I turned to see that their combined gunfire had brought down all of the walkers on their side.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  “Go, go, go!” I pushed them both ahead of me and we began climbing over the heaped corpses. Top watched forward, I checked behind, as we scrambled awkwardly through the gun smoke and over the tangled limbs. A hand darted out of the tangle of limbs and closed around Top’s ankle; I kicked it loose and Top fired down into the mound of bodies. Maybe he hit the target, or maybe not—we didn’t linger long enough to find out.

  “This is fucked up,” Bunny muttered as he pushed aside a fat man in a bowling shirt. Our Hammer suits were streaked with blood and I could feel droplets of it burning on my face. I heard a sound behind me and whirled, a snake of terror coiling in the pit of my stomach.

  “They’re coming,” I snapped as the first of the walkers clambered over the piled dead at the far end. I dropped to one knee and fired two shots. His collapsing body plugged the hole, buying us seconds.

  We ran. Ahead of us a door opened and a man stepped out and leveled an AK-47 at us. It was the same man who had argued with the cop. Top put two into him before he could get off a shot.

  The hallway ended at another T-junction. The left-hand corridor ended in a brick wall; to our right a set of heavy steel doors stood ajar. A man was trying to pull it shut when B
unny leaped forward and grabbed him by the hair and shoulder and slammed him face forward into the wall. Bunny pounded three vicious uppercuts into his kidneys. The man groaned and sagged to his knees. If he lived through all this he’d be pissing blood for a month.

  “Drag him inside,” I ordered. Top guarded the hallway while Bunny then threw the dazed man like a sack of cornmeal into the next room. We flanked the doorway to provide cross-fire protection. There were four people in the room, which was a large laboratory cluttered with dozens of worktables and metal shelves of chemicals and materials. Set against one wall were two familiar-looking big blue cases. Both doors were still shut. Three of the men were Middle Eastern, two in lab coats and one dressed in jeans and a tank top. The guy with the tank top had a .45 and was swinging the barrel up when I gave him a triple-tap: two in the chest, one in the head. The men in lab coats were unarmed, but the one closest to me held a small black plastic device in one hand. The other one was already raising his hands in surrender.

  The fourth man was Ollie Brown. He was strapped to a chair and his face was covered with blood.

  I pointed my gun at the man with the plastic device. “Don’t do it!” I yelled in Farsi and then in several other languages.

  He cried, “Seif al Din!” in a high, hysterical voice and made his move. I shot him in the shoulder to try and stop him from pressing the button on what had to be a detonator, but it was no good: it was rigged with a dead-man’s switch. Even as my bullets tore his shoulder to rags his hand flexed open. The signal was sent.

  Suddenly there was a rumbling explosion on the far side of the building, the whole place shook all the way down to its foundations. The floor tiles rippled beneath our feet. Lab equipment vibrated to the edge of the tables and fell with a crash to the ground.

  The man I’d shot writhed in pain, but he was laughing in triumph, still chanting, “Seif al Din!”

  The Sword of the Faithful. The holy weapon of God.

  The deep-throated roar of the explosions slowly subsided.

  “Mother of God!” gasped Bunny.

  “That oughta tell the cavalry to come running,” said Top. There was a sound in the hall and he leaned out. “Shit. We got company.”

  “Walkers?” I demanded.

  A barrage of bullets pinged and whined as Top ducked out of the doorway and back-kicked the door closed. Bullets pelted the heavy steel. “Not as such,” Top said dryly.

  “Those are AKs,” Bunny said, listening to the gunfire. “Not our boys.”

  “Cavalry’s always late,” Top muttered as he threw the locks.

  Bunny grabbed the remaining scientist and punched him in the stomach then snapped plastic cuffs on him. “Deal with you later, shitbag.” He crossed to Ollie and slashed at his bonds with a folding knife. “How you doing, hoss?”

  Ollie spat blood onto the floor. “I’ve had better days.”

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:32 A.M.

  “MA’AM, I’VE LOST the signal,” reported the tech who was hunched over the communications board inside one of the ambulances. He tried another line, then another. “Cell lines are out, too. We haven’t yet set up the landline to ops. We’re blind and deaf. Everything’s being jammed by a very powerful transmitter. Has to be military grade, nothing else could cut us off this bad.”

  Grace bent forward to look at his display and then tapped her earpiece, heard only a hiss.

  “Ma’am,” called the tech again, “right before we lost our feeds audio picked up a change in ambient sound. I think the refrigeration units have all shut down. I got ten seconds of thermals before we went blind and it looks like the temperature inside the building is spiking.”

  Allenson, Grace’s second in command, gave her a sharp look. “Mr. Church said that Captain Ledger requested backup in silence plus ten minutes.”

  She turned to the tech. “Do we have that landline yet?”

  “Negative. ETA five minutes.”

  “Bugger that.” To Allenson she said, “This whole thing is wrong, I think Echo Team is in trouble.”

  Allenson grinned. “Alpha Team is locked and loaded, ma’am.”

  Grace pointed to a technician sitting in front of a screen that showed nothing but white noise. “You! You’re a runner. Find Mr. Church, tell him we have a total communications blackout. Apprise him of the temperature change. We need a full-team hit and we need it five minutes ago. Tell him the next sound he hears will be Alpha Team kicking in the door. Move!”

  The runner leaped out of the van and tore across the parking lot to the fake cable news van parked outside the gates.

  Grace Courtland snatched up her helmet. “Let’s go.”

  By the time the team was assembled at the door one of her men had a fast-pack charge beside the knob. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled and everyone fanned back as the doorknob blew apart. The door swung violently open but beyond it was a flat gray wall. The agent pounded his fist on it. “Steel plates. Going to take a hell of a big bang to get through that.”

  Then a moment later there was a second and much heavier explosion, but this one was deep inside the building. It shattered the glass in the windows and sent a shiver through the walls, then subsided into a threatening silence.

  “That was inside,” Allenson said.

  Another sound rent the air as heavy steel shutters slammed into place over every window in the building. Grace let out a string of vile curses and hoped that Church had the backup coming fast.

  “Make me a hole, Corporal,” she snarled, but the man was already sliding the pencil detonators into place.

  God, she prayed as they backed away from the explosives, don’t let this be another St. Michael’s. For one brief moment she closed her eyes and imagined Joe Ledger being dragged down by a sea of hungry white-faced ghouls. Please, God!

  The side of the building exploded.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:33 A.M.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Ollie.

  He shook his head like a dog shaking off fleas. “I don’t know. I was blindsided. Maybe Tasered. I remember a whole lot of pain and then it all went black. Next thing I know I’m duct-taped to a chair and some asshole is smacking me in the face and yelling in Arabic.”

  Top gave him a quick once-over and found a wet burn mark on his neck just above the collar and the back of his shirt was soaked. “Looks like you got hit with a liquid Taser, boy.”

  “Damn. I didn’t think those things worked that well.”

  “Little dab’ll do ya,” Top said from where he knelt by the scientist I’d shot, applying compresses to the wounds.

  Bullets were still whanging off the door, but so far they didn’t seem to be able to get in, and eventually they stopped firing. I don’t know if Bunny, Ollie, or Top thought that was strange, but I sure as hell did. There was a keycard station outside. How come nobody was trying to use a keycard? I almost said something to the others, but decided to keep it to myself for the moment. As the saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you aren’t being followed.” There were too many things in this place that didn’t add up.

  “The troops should be arriving any second,” I said. I looked up at the shuttered windows set high in the wall. “Bet you a dime they’ll come through those, so be smart when they enter. If they ask you to lay down your arms you do it. Remember, the first thing they’re going to be thinking is that we’ve been killed or infected. Let’s not give anyone a reason to get trigger happy.”

  “I’m with you on that, boss,” said Bunny.

  “Hey,” Ollie said as he got groggily to his feet, “where’s Skip?”

  Bunny glanced at me. “Unknown,” I said. “He went missing around the same time you did.” Ollie looked like he was about to ask a question, but I turned away and looked down at the dying scientist. “How’s he doing, Top?”

  “This guy’s circling the drain. You want to ask him a questi
on now would be the time.”

  I squatted on my heels. “You’re dying,” I said in Farsi. “You have a chance to do some good, turn things around before you die. Tell me, what is Seif al Din?”

  He sneered at me. “The infidels will all drown in rivers of blood.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I want you to tell me about the Sword of the Faithful.”

  He laughed. “You’ve already seen its power. It will consume your entire country,” he said, nodding with fierce joy, delighted at the thought.

  “If this thing is a plague, friend, then it’s going to consume your people, too.”

  He barked a laugh and blood flecked his lips. “Allah will protect His people.” He mumbled something else but all I caught were the words “generation twelve,” and I had no idea what it meant.

  I leaned close. “Right now about two hundred Special Forces soldiers are descending on this place. None of your infected subjects are going to get out of here. Not one. Everything you’ve worked for is going to stop right here, right now.”

  He tried to spit at me, but he lacked the power. He was fading fast. I glanced at Top who shook his head.

  “You have stopped nothing,” whispered the dying man, then repeated the word, savoring it. “Nothing.”

  “Is there another lab, another cell?”

  “It is… past that time,” he said with a bloody smile. “El Mujahid is coming. He wields the Sword of the Faithful. You are all too late. Soon all of Islam will be… free… of you.”

  Then he threw his head back and screamed out the name of God with such force that it tore the last bits of life out of him. He sank back against Top and his head lolled to one side.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:34 A.M.

  “ALPHA TEAM! ON me!”