The Fall: Victim Zero

by Joshua Guess

  Karen shot him a dark look. Kell grimaced.

  “So. Jones has people in my house. That's just great.”

  “Sir, we only entered the house a minute ago. Agent Jones sent a priority message that you and your family were to leave immediately for your lab,” one of the men, who Kell thought of as Sandy because of his hair, said. “He mentioned he tried to call you.”

  “I've had six hours of sleep in the last three days, man. I haven't seen my wife or held my daughter. I thought it could wait.”

  The second agent, who Kell didn't have a nickname for because the man was utterly unremarkable, reached a hand into his pocket and removed an oversized smart phone. He held it out to Kell after unlocking the screen. “It can't, sir.”

  Priority One, the text message said. Incident reported, recall vital persons ASAP to secure location. Bring family.

  Cold sweat broke out across his entire body. This was it. Jones wouldn't have sent an alert for anything less than a worst-case situation.

  Karen was already grabbing the diaper bag and hauling baby Jennifer out of her high chair. The stove was off. Kell smiled. His wife was nothing if not thorough and prepared. He followed her and the agents out to the driveway, snagging the suitcase she'd brought in only hours before. Not even unpacked. Karen was nobody's fool.

  A giant black SUV screeched to a halt in front of the house. Sandy took the suitcase and diaper bag, loading them into the shiny truck as the other agent pulled the car seat from Kell's sedan. In less than a minute they were off, Kell's heart hammering against his ribcage but somehow less stressed than he had been in days. The worst might be here, but his family was with him where he knew they were safe.

  “What's the situation?” Kell asked. “Anyone know the details?”

  The driver looked at them in the rear view, his eyes flat and empty. “I've been instructed to have you call Agent Jones at your earliest opportunity,” the man said before settling his gaze on Karen. “I'm ordered to tell you, Mrs. McDonald, that from this moment on anything you hear or see is to be considered classified information. Revealing that information will result in harsh punishment, is that understood?”

  Karen's face tightened in anger, but she nodded.

  Jones answered immediately, and didn't wait for pleasantries.

  “McDonald, good. Your patient died.”

  It took a few seconds for that information to process. His patient? “What, do you mean David?” Kell said. “What happened to him?”

  “He committed suicide about an hour ago,” Jones replied. “He left a note, not that it matters. The point is, he didn't die from Chimera. He took his own life.”

  “Then why is this a priority whatever?” Kell asked. “If Chimera didn't do it, why are we on our way to the lab?”

  “Because,” Jones said. “He didn't stay dead.”

  Part Two: Precipice

  We climbed, he going first and I behind,

  Until through some small aperture I saw

  The lovely things the skies above us bear.

  Now we came out and once more saw the stars.

  Dante's Inferno, from the thirty-fourth Canto

  Chapter Five

  Karen and Jennifer safely tucked away in his office, Kell went to visit David Markwell.

  What used to be David Markwell, anyway.

  The stench hit him before he even made it into the room. Bodily waste. David had done what all people do when they pass on, but the thing that had risen in his place seemed to have no sense of its actions. The plexiglass was smeared with feces and urine.

  Kell watched the thing try to reach him; screeching and thrashing against the barrier, it seemed to feel no pain. Its face was nearly black—David had hung himself with the bed sheet still dangling from his neck—and his eyes were glazed. The shy intelligence behind them was gone. Whatever Kell was looking at, David was no part of it.

  Kell was staring the the gaping red gashes on the walking corpse's fingers and hands when Jones walked in the room.

  “What do you think, Doctor?” the agent said.

  I want to vomit, that's what I think. I want to weep for this poor kid.

  “It doesn't feel any pain,” Kell said instead, pointing at the gashes. “It's been shredding itself against the holes in that plexiglass for ten minutes now, but hasn't so much as blinked. Coordination is reasonably good, though the subject seems to focus solely on aggression. I won't stick my hand in there to prove it, but I'd guess it's hungry.”

  Jones recoiled, the first honest reaction Kell had seen from the man. “You mean it wants to eat us?”

  “Yeah, that would be my guess. Brain activity seems to be rooted in the lower functions. Aggression and hunger are linked. I could be wrong, of course. Feel free to test my theory.”

  Jones scowled. “I wasn't asking for your thoughts on Mr. Markwell, at any rate. I want to know if you think you can stop this.”

  Kell gaped. “Seriously? What do you think I've been trying to do since you dropped this whole thing on me? I've gone over it from every angle, Jones. This,” he said, waving a hand toward the wretched thing that had been David Markwell, “is something I can't even explain, much less fix. For the love of God, man, we have to tell people. He's not going to be the only one.”

  Jones simmered. There was a war on his face between forced impassivity and the strange reality moaning and hissing right in front of him. “What am I supposed to tell people, McDonald? Huh? Am I supposed to tell the leader of the free world a dead person just stood back up and tried to bite the guy cleaning up his body?”

  Kell stood abruptly, towering over Jones. He thrust a hand toward the isolation booth. “You know what this is. It's your fucking job to tell them what happened. A man died, and thanks to my research, which was taken without my approval and used by idiots, his dead body reanimated and became uncontrollably violent. You've seen the movies. You damn well know what this is. So if you have to call the president and tell him a bunch of scientific jargon that convinces him we accidentally made zombies a real thing, that's what you do. Every test I've run over the last three days indicates we're all infected with this same version of Chimera. Which means as soon as the incubation period is finished and it reaches total saturation within a host, this is going to start happening to other people.”

  Jones stared at him, mouth open and teeth clenched in a snarl. “I can't believe you just said that word. Fucking zombies? Really?”

  Kell slammed a fist into the wall beside him. “I can't believe you're still here talking to me about this. Get on the goddamn phone and maybe we can get ahead of this thing before it turns into a total clusterfuck.”

  For a moment both men were caught in the magnetic grip of a stare that neither seemed willing to break. Jones was frustrated and angry that the situation was spiraling badly out of control. Kell, on the other hand, saw the larger picture. The variant was now a plague, and everything he knew told him it was probably global by now. A matter of time before the first person outside containment died and came back. The thought sent a chill through his spine, but it filled his entire body with overwhelming rage as well. This was his work, perverted.

  Jones, faced with nearly three hundred pounds of pissed-off scientist, looked away first. He knocked on the door, and Sandy came in.

  “Kill that thing,” Jones ordered, then left the room.

  Sandy unholstered his weapon and took aim through one of the holes in the wall. He turned his head and met Kell's gaze. “I understand you were friends with this man, sir. You may want to leave the room.”

  Kell shook his head. “I told him I'd help him. I should be here for the end.”

  Something like approval danced across Sandy's face before the level stare of a killer took back over.

  Sandy took aim and fired expertly through the small hole. Three shots in the chest, clustered in a space less than two inches across. Other than to stumble back slightly under the impact, David's corpse didn't seem bothered.

  “Hol
y shit,” Sandy said. “I just shot him through the heart three times. How...”

  Kell's mind raced, and he fell into a habit from his teens—muttering to himself as he worked out a problem.

  “Chimera had to have infiltrated every system to have gained this kind of control. Started out in the nervous system, and obviously it has control of the body...” He snapped his fingers at Sandy, who was looking dazed, to get his attention. “You're going to have to damage the brain. If that doesn't work, then we're in way more trouble than we can handle.”

  Trembling slightly, the other man took a deep breath and raised his weapon. He shuffled to the right to get a better angle through another of the ventilation holes. Kell wanted to turn away but couldn't; he had prepared himself for the horror of watching his friend fall the first time. When he hadn't, detached curiosity took over.

  Sandy's finger squeezed the trigger.

  The hammer fell forward, forcing the firing pin into the casing of the bullet. The primer fired, igniting the powder, and the resulting explosion of gas propelled the .40 caliber copper-jacketed round through the hexagonal rifling of the barrel.

  The journey through the intervening space was uninteresting and short, and for the purposes of the result might as well not have happened. Over that distance air drag, gravity, and other important factors played virtually no part in the bullet's flight. From barrel to left-of-center forehead, the physics of the bullet were essentially unchanged.

  The moment of impact was key.

  Inside the skull of David Markwell, Chimera had grown strong. Giving the organism a motive would be needlessly dramatic; it was, after all, only an infection. Industrious and nearly infinite in flexibility and adaptability, but an infection nonetheless.

  The bullet, in those first few microseconds of impact, began to spread and tumble. The shockwave it sent through David's brain damaged the microscopic cilia threaded through his nervous system and brain tissue. Not enough to kill Chimera yet, but enough to stun the entire parasitic system. Had the impact ended there, Kell and Sandy—whose real name was Burt Grigsby, much less poetic—would have had ten or fifteen seconds to finish the job themselves.

  The bullet had momentum, though, and did not stop there. The shallow head of the bullet with its hollow point and shaped walls bloomed like some hideous flower as it broke through the wall of the skull. The shock of impact was nothing compared to the physical presence of the round itself, shedding inertia within the confines of white and gray-matter filled brain case by pure friction.

  Chimera, delicate and wispy, didn't stand a chance.

  For the men observing, it took a fraction of a second. David began to fall even before the exit wound fountained chips of skull and brain from the back of his head. On a layman's level, Sandy (who was also Burt) understood that shooting someone in the head equals death.

  Kell was able to apply what he knew of Chimera to the observation in front of him, and understood the deeper revelation. If more of these things popped up, and they surely would, the only reliable way to stop them was to damage the brain.

  Four hours and a dozen tests later, Kell was certain they were all royally fucked.

  Karen sat next to him in the isolation room—now cleaned spotless—as Kell went over his own test results.

  “How bad is it?” Karen asked as she pulled the baby away from her breast.

  “Bad. I was probably the first person exposed to David after Chimera went airborne, and we've got no way of knowing how long ago that was. The Boston lab is testing their people, but most of them are coming up clean so far. That means it happened here. Call it less than six weeks, and whenever I was exposed during that time, Chimera has fully infiltrated my system.”

  Her gaze fell on the empty booth beside them. “So...if something happened to you, if you...”

  “If I died,” he finished for her. She was tough, but no one on the planet had the experience needed to harden them against this situation. Who could? “Yeah. I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen to me.” He left unsaid that his contact with Karen and Jennifer almost guaranteed the same was true for them, but his wife was razor-sharp. She didn't miss much.

  “You think it's going to be this way for everyone, don't you? Me, the baby, people everywhere.”

  With a shiver, Kell nodded.

  “Jesus,” Karen said.

  “Well, yes, he did come back from the dead, but I don't think the cases are related.”

  Karen's mouth fell open in shock, and she laughed hard.

  He smiled at the sound, musical and pure. “I remember you laughing at me on our first date,” he said. “I was trying so hard to impress you, but my pants were too short and I didn't have time to change from the lab. You pointed to that stain on the front of my shirt and told me I'd spilled ketchup on it. When I told you it was a mixture of blood and cerebral fluid from a dissected test subject, you thought I was joking, trying to gross you out.”

  Karen laughed harder from the memory. “You were so awkward. Tall and strong as a football player, but quiet and such a damn nerd. All you could talk about was work, you kept remembering you were on a date and blurting out 'you're beautiful!' and got all flustered. God, that was painful to watch.”

  Kell chuckled. “I can't believe you gave me a second chance. The first date was so bad, I went home and beat myself up for two days until you finally called me.”

  Karen shifted the baby around and leaned against her husband, laying her head on his arm. “I'd say I knew right then you were the one for me, but you know that isn't true. I thought you were cute and sweet, and so different from the men I'd dated before. So smart, but so clueless. You went on about cells and gene sequencing and never a word about yourself.”

  He smiled down at her. “So you're saying I only got that second date because I was too much of a nerd to talk about me?”

  She smiled back, but there was sadness in it. “No. Because I wanted to know what made you tick. Most guys talk about their accomplishments or the expensive things they've bought. You told me—and I'll never forget this—that you'd just figured out how to resequence a chunk of DNA the day before. Like it was something anyone could have done. You were passionate about what you did. I wanted to know where that passion came from.”

  She stood and leaned in close, kissing him on the mouth. “I wondered if you could be that passionate about a person,” she said with a wink. “Turns out you could.”

  Kell took in the scent of her, that unique combination that makes every person unique. It was the smell of clean skin and expensive conditioner, subtle perfume and freshly pressed suits. Maybe not amazing or especially romantic, but singularly Karen.

  He looked past her, eyes falling on the small inner room that had housed a decent man a few hours before, and the moment was broken.

  “We've got to get out of here,” Kell said.

  Karen followed his gaze. “Yeah, this room is kind of creepy.”

  “No, not the room or even the lab. We need to leave the city. Maybe the state. It's only a matter of time before this thing goes nuclear, and Cincinnati was exposed first. This is ground zero.”

  Karen agreed, and they worked their way back to Kell's office, where Jones had set up a compact command center in their absence. The man was working furiously, tapping away at a keyboard while holding a phone to his ear with one shoulder. He looked up at them as they entered, acknowledging them with a slight nod, and held up a finger.

  “Yes, sir, we're keeping an eye on all the morgues and funeral homes. We've sent instructions to the hospitals, nursing homes, everywhere we can think of. If someone dies, they'll be diverted to the staging ground immediately. Yes, we have teams set up to handle the...disposal. More boots on the ground would be helpful, yes. We're equipped to handle a large workload, but the setup is still underway. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Jones hung up the phone and stopped typing. “What can I do for you?”

  Kell glanced at his wife, who nodded.

 
; “We think it's best if we leave the city,” Kell said. “You and I both know eventually this is going to be outside your control. I'd rather my family not be here for that.”

  Surprisingly, Jones nodded. “I agree. More important, my superiors agree. You and your team are our best shot at finding some kind of long-term solution. We're going to send you to a mobile CDC unit we've had set up about fifty miles northwest of Des Moines. It's relatively low population, so it should be safe when this...plague finally hits.”

  Relief flooded over Kell. “Thank you, thank you so much. I'll call my parents--”

  Jones held up a hand. “I'm afraid not, Doctor McDonald. This is need-to-know only. Spouses and children, that's the limit, and I had to fight to get that. But I know the only way any of you would go and still be willing to do any work is if your wives and husbands and kids are safe, too.”

  It made sense, but the mechanical way Jones said it still grated. “Your compassion is boundless, Agent Jones.”

  The other man stared at Kell for several seconds. “Sarcasm noted, Doctor. You should probably start packing. It's nearly midnight now, and a car will take you to the airport at six sharp. You can call your parents if you want, but don't tell them any details. We'll be listening.”

  Kell swore under his breath but nodded. There was only so much you could do, and the rest was in the hands of fate.

  Chapter Six

  As Kell and his family piled into a large SUV for their trip to the airport, surrounded by agents who would travel with them, a woman several miles away was in the midst of having a very bad morning.

  Her last bad day, or at least the last one she would be aware of.

  In an outbreak event, the person initially infected with a pathogen is referred to as Patient Zero, the point of origin. Kell would have called David Markwell his patient zero, but Chimera was unique; it didn't kill. It didn't do much of anything negative while the infected person in question still lived.