“What will all that mean for us?”
“Us?”
“For the DMS,” I said.
Church shrugged. “We’re still open for business.”
I looked him straight in the eyes. “Who are you, Church?”
“Just a government paper pusher.”
“Bullshit.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“Grace thinks you can keep all of the Washington power players at bay because you know where the bodies are buried.”
He gave me the bleakest, saddest smile I’d ever seen.
“I should,” he said softly. “I buried a lot of them.”
4.
That night, as Grace lay in my arms, we talked about things. We were both naked. The beer, untouched, sat on the floor amid a tangle of clothes. Some of the clothes were ripped. Mine and hers.
“So, you’re staying with us?” she asked. I knew she meant the DMS, but as usual she’d implied a bunch of other meanings.
“Sure. Rudy signed on. Jerry, too.” I paused and flexed my fingers, which were intertwined with hers. “I think I’ve found a home here.”
Grace was silent for a long, long time.
“Me, too,” she said.
I closed my eyes and pulled her closer to me.
5.
The medical ship HMS Agatha pitched and yawed slowly in the sluggish rollers that wandered across the Arabian Sea. It was a blistering night in mid-July and the staff had brought some of the more ambulatory soldiers on deck to allow them to get some relief from the sluggish breeze that moved across the wave tops. Some of the men and women were so badly injured that even the breeze gave no trace of relief, and of these the burn victims suffered most. Hot winds, poor air-conditioning belowdecks, and salt spray were each separate tortures.
But the man who sat alone in a wheelchair by the stern rail never voiced a single word of complaint. His face and hands were swathed heavily in gauze and one eye was clouded to a milky whiteness. The doctors had said that it had been virtually boiled in his skull. How the man had made it through the desert was a total mystery. He had no fingerprints left, but a DNA test revealed that his name was Steven Garrett, a medic assigned to a British unit that had been virtually wiped out during a series of suicide raids by insurgents. The burned man was incoherent with pain and once he’d been medivacked to the air station and then shuttled to the Agatha he had lapsed into a total silence. His experiences had broken him, the doctors agreed. Poor man.
The ship steered west toward the Gulf of Aden and then turned northwest into the Red Sea. The burned man watched the sun set over the rocky hills. He closed his eyes and bowed his head.
Next to him sat a slim young man with cat-green eyes and dark hair. He, too, was burned, but not badly. He wore a bandage on his face and one on his neck; and even though his hands were wrapped in gauze he held the other man’s hand, like a father would. Or a brother.
The badly burned man looked at him for a while and then stared back at the setting sun.
“Amirah…” he whispered.
His companion patted his hand again and smiled. “Shhh,” Toys whispered as the ship plowed on out of troubled waters.
Praise for Patient Zero
“Terrifyingly terrific!”
—Sherrilyn Kenyon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dark-Hunter series
“A fast-paced, creepy thriller… prickly as a hospital needle… This guy is good.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, author of Lost Echoes
“Maberry has outdone himself with a deliciously diabolical plot and bone-chilling scenarios.”
—L. A. Banks, New York Times bestselling author of the Vampire Huntress Legends series
“A first-rate thriller with a bioterror angle that is as horrific as it is plausible… Joe Ledger rules.”
—Douglas Preston, coauthor of The Wheel of Darkness and The Book of the Dead
“Jonathan Maberry deserves to take his place among the best suspense writers of recent years.”
—John Connolly, author of The Reapers and The Killing Kind
“His writing is powerful enough to sing with poetry while simultaneously scaring the hell out of you.”
—Tess Gerritsen, author of The Keepsake and The Bone Garden
“It is almost impossible to find a noir-thriller; the two genres are so distinct and separate. Until now. Jonathan Maberry has succeeded in merging the two to such a wondrous extent that we may have to coin neonoir-thriller just to describe it. This book stole a whole evening and most of a night from me, and I was glad of the theft! Patient Zero introduces a cop who is as compelling as any character I’ve read in years. If you took the pace of Grisham, the eerie atmospheric style of Peter Straub or Tom Piccirilli, the Wambaugh-type cop who has become a rarity, and the thriller skill of Lee Child, you’d have the best of all worlds. You’d in fact have Jonathan Maberry’s new novel. This is the new voice of the thriller!”
—Ken Bruen, author of Cross and Priest
“This is the coolest book I’ve read since discovering Covert-One. With this new series, Jonathan Maberry becomes my generation’s Robert Ludlum. Joe Ledger is a hero for the new millennium—tough as nails, sharp as a whip, and up for anything. He’s a man who puts honor before his own self-preservation, who rides the edges and isn’t afraid to go down fighting. The story is absolutely riveting and the scariest concept to come down the pike in a long while. I want Ledger to fight all my battles. I dare you to put this book down before the endgame plays out. I dare you.”
—J.T. Ellison, author of 14
“Fair warning: when you start this book, be sure you have budgeted the time to finish it. It’s very hard to put this one down. Patient Zero weaves science, police procedure, and modern anti-terror techniques into a unique blend and tops it off with a larger-than-life character who is utterly believable. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Jerry Pournelle
“Patient Zero is a feast for thriller lovers! It’s a delicious and diabolical stew of genres and traditions. With a pinch of forensic procedural, a dash of hard-boiled noir, a sprinkle of medical thriller, and a tincture of apocalyptic zombie epic, Jonathan Maberry cooks up a succulent meal of mayhem that slyly comments on our paranoid times. The hardshelled hero, Baltimore shamus Joe Ledger, deserves to stand alongside F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack in the pantheon of genre icons. Highest recommendation!”
—Jay Bonansinga, national bestselling author of Perfect Victim, Shattered, Twisted, and Frozen
“Patient Zero is an action-packed novel, filled with unforgettable characters and rapid-fire, spot-on dialogue that makes you eager for more. Within this story, Maberry brings new meaning to the word zombie, ripping it from the pages of folkloric fantasy and shoving it into the realm of horrific plausibility. I defy anyone to put this novel down after the first two pages: it simply can’t be done!”
—Deborah LeBlanc, president of the Horror Writers Association and author of Water Witch and Morbid Curiosity
“Jonathan Maberry has created a new genre. Mixing technology, thrills, chills, and procedural noir, Maberry shows why he is one of the freshest voices in fiction. Every reader will want to ride shotgun on Joe Ledger’s adventures.”
—Scott Nicholson, author of The Skull Ring
“Smart, scary, and relentless! Maberry’s Patient Zero keeps coming at you with action, suspense, and the kind of detail that makes you believe, ‘Yeah, this could really happen.’”
—D. H. Dublin, author of Freezer Burn and Body Trace
“This book KICKS ASS! I read the whole thing with a big crazy grin of pure delight on my face, and I haven’t stopped smiling yet. Zombies! Terrorists! Mad scientists! Heavy weapons! Stuff blowing up! And in the middle of it all, Joe Ledger, one truly badass action hero for the new millennium. You want to know what this book is? It’s pure distilled essence of fun. Take a big ol’ swallow of it and hang on tight, ’cause you ain’t sleeping ’til it’s done with you. But you are
gonna love the trip.”
—J. D. Rhoades, author of Safe and Sound and Good Day in Hell
“A riveting page-turner. Cool stuff! Hooray for Jonathan Maberry. Please give us more Joe Ledger right now!”
—Victor Gischler
“If Stephen King were to get hold of [Vince Flynn’s] Mitch Rapp, you’d have an idea of what Jonathan Maberry has accomplished with the Department of Military Science’s uberagent Joe Ledger. Patient Zero is a frightening tale that injects a new level of horror into the already terror-filled post-9/11 world. A bioterror weapon that raises the dead? In Maberry’s masterful hands, you will believe!”
—Ken Isaacson, author of Silent Counsel
Also by Jonathan Maberry
Fiction
Ghost Road Blues
Dead Man’s Song
Bad Moon Rising
Nonfiction
Vampire Universe
The Cryptopedia
Zombie CSU
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PATIENT ZERO. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Maberry. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Book design by Jonathan Bennett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maberry, Jonathan.
Patient zero : a Joe Ledger novel / Jonathan Maberry—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-38285-8
ISBN-10: 0-312-38285-5
1. Detectives—Maryland—Baltimore—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 3. Bioterrorism—Fiction. 4. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A19P38 2009
813’.6—dc22
2008038234
First Edition: March 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Document ID: 3936214f-9f97-4d80-9542-624964b94331
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 27.6.2013
Created using: calibre 0.9.36, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Namenlos
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