Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  I tried to push my way toward her, but a new surge swept me sideways.

  I thought I heard someone speaking through my earbud. I pressed the bud deeper into my ear and caught some of it. “… streets secure … crowd surge … need more trucks to block…” Then a note of rising panic. “They’re out! They’re out! I have walkers on … oh God!”

  And then a different voice.

  “… going weapons hot…”

  I recognized that voice. The pilot of my own Black Hawk.

  Even through the roar of the crowd I could hear a new and terrible sound. The thunder of heavy-caliber automatic guns all around the buildings.

  God help us.

  The infected had escaped the building and the helicopters were opening up on the crowd.

  Cursing, I tried to shoulder into the melee. A shrill scream made me spin, and a walker had a woman dressed as an elf and he was trying to bite her. She had her forearm jammed under his chin, but he was much bigger. I bashed him in the temple with my pistol butt, and as he staggered off I jammed my barrel against the bridge of his nose and blew off the back of his head. Blood sprayed the face of a second walker, momentarily blinding him. I shattered his knee with a side-thrust kick and as he fell I axe-kicked the side of his neck. He landed in a sprawl, his head tilted awkwardly on a shattered spine.

  When I turned to help the girl up, she was gone.

  I heard Mother Night shouting to the crowd, making crazy jokes with pop-culture references that were lost on me. I elbowed a bleeding man aside and turned to look. She was above me, leaning over the rail from the fifth floor. No idea how the hell she got up there. She must have had some of her anarchist crew with her to help clear out an elevator car. I raised my gun to fire again, but a powerful arm came whipping out of the crowd and slapped my pistol from my hands. The shock jerked my finger and there was a single bang, but I had no idea where the bullet went. As I lost the gun I spun toward the asshole who’d hit me. He was a real bull of a guy in a hooded sweatshirt and a rubber gorilla mask. He went to grab the front of my shirt, but I slapped his reaching hand away and drove a two-knuckle punch into his short ribs.

  I might as well have been punching a brick wall for all the good it did.

  He laughed.

  The son of a bitch actually laughed.

  So I tried to change his mood with a palm-heel shot across the chops that knocked the gorilla mask from his face.

  The blow did not drop the man, as I had every right to expect.

  It didn’t even stop him from laughing.

  The face that leered down at me was brutish, almost a match for the mask I’d just knocked away. A heavy brown, flat nose, overgrown incisors.

  It was a Berserker.

  But it was far worse than that.

  The skin was a pallid gray-green and he stank like rotting meat. Drool ran from the corners of his mouth, and in that bubbling spit I could see tiny maggots writhing and twisting. Its eyes, though, were filled with a terrible awareness and a dreadful hunger.

  The Berserker was a Generation Twelve walker.

  Oh shit.

  Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

  Grand Hyatt Hotel

  109 East Forty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, September 1, 4:01 p.m.

  Ludo Monk stared at her for several seconds, his eyes seeming to go in and out of focus.

  “Pregnant?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Mother didn’t say anything about you being pregnant.”

  “No one knows.”

  “Joey-boy doesn’t know?”

  “No one knows. Please … don’t hurt my baby.”

  “No,” said Monk. “You’re lying to me. You don’t even have a baby bump. This is a cheap trick and I’ve heard crap like this before.”

  “It’s the truth! Please, you don’t have to hurt me.”

  “Yeah,” said Ludo Monk, “I’m pretty sure I do. That’s how it works. Baby or no baby. That’s what Mother Night needs me to do. It’s just your good luck that I’m giving you a choice. A quick bullet or the needle. But I got to tell you, I don’t think you should even consider the second option, because then you’re this ugly monster lady and when Joey-boy comes home you’ll get all bitey on him, and that’s a downhill slide. There’s no happy ending to that romance, you see where I’m going with this?”

  “You can just leave,” begged Junie.

  “We covered that already. Don’t make me make this decision myself. I’m already pissed that I wasn’t allowed to do this my way. I hate personal interaction, and you’re sitting there with those big eyes and those sun freckles looking all innocent and wholesome, and I’m going to feel like a total piece of shit either way. At least the bullet is quick and clean.”

  “Listen to me,” said Junie, trying to keep her voice level, “if you know who I am, then you know who Joe is.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know about him? Do you?”

  “Yeah. He’s crazier than I am, and I’m really out there.”

  “Do you know what he’s capable of?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you know what he’s done to other people? People like criminals and terrorists.”

  “Yeah, he’s killed more people than God. That’s why Mother Night wanted him taken out of the picture. But now I hear that he slipped her punch. So if she can’t kill him, then she wants to do something worse.”

  Junie’s heart suddenly lifted. Joe was alive. Whatever that woman had tried to do, he’d escaped or survived it.

  “If you hurt me,” she said, “Joe is going to find you and he will—”

  A knock on the door interrupted her words. She and the man both froze, eyes darting to the door.

  And in that moment Junie moved.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs, slapped the syringe out of the man’s hand, and drove her shoulder into his chest, driving him backward into the desk. The movement was much faster and harder than either of them expected, and as they hit the edge of the desk the force spun them around and toward the floor. He tried to club her with the gun and break his fall and grab her all at the same time, and he failed in all three things. The gun struck the carpet, bounced, and hit the door with a thud. Then he and Junie crashed to the floor. His hand darted out and snagged her hair, and he jerked back to try to break her neck.

  The hair came away and he fell back as Junie flung herself sideways.

  Without her hair she was bald except for a dusting of peach fuzz on her scalp.

  A fist pounded on the door and Junie screamed for help as the man lunged for the fallen gun. She tried to kick it away, missed, and he snatched it just as the door burst inward in a spray of wood splinters and twisted metal.

  Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

  Marriott Marquis Hotel

  265 Peachtree Center Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, September 1, 4:03 p.m.

  The Berserker swung a fist at me with blinding speed but I got an elbow up in time to save my skull from being crushed. The force was incredible, though, and it plucked me clean off the ground and hurled me into a group of people trying to flee the carnage. We all landed badly and I felt something break under me. Someone’s leg, I think.

  I scrambled to my feet, shoving fleeing conferees out of my way. There was a man dressed as Thor from the movies and I grabbed his hammer, hoping to smash the zombie Berserker into roach paste. I was already in full motion, taking the hammer, swinging it, aiming, hitting, and all the time realizing that the hammer was made out of rubber and plastic. It exploded into empty debris. I would have done more damage blowing him a kiss.

  He snarled at me, showing his big gorilla teeth.

  Shit.

  Generation Twelve of the seif-al-din allows the infected to retain their full mental capacities even while the rest of the body begins a slowed-down process of decay. If there were a worst-case scenario for a zombie plague, genetically alt
ered supersoldiers would be way at the top of my list.

  He swung a punch that would have turned my head into pulp.

  I got under it and hooked a punch into his groin.

  It staggered him, just a little. He stumbled back a step and roared at me.

  Roared.

  Yeah.

  You’d think a guy like me wouldn’t be fazed by something like that. You’d be wrong. Like I said, mutant zombie supersoldier.

  Find a comfortable corner of your mind for that to curl up in.

  But …

  Damn if it didn’t feel like my knuckles punched actual balls instead of combat padding.

  Inside my head the Killer let loose with his own roar. Fuck it. If this monster wanted to fight dirty, then I was willing to get all sorts of dirty. Maybe he thought he didn’t need armor with the seif-al-din cooking in his bloodstream.

  I snatched my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket. It was the third one I’d had this weekend. The first was in a barrel along with my Hammer suit, either still down in the subway or in storage wherever they put toxic waste. The second was with my second Hammer suit in the decontamination unit at the Locker. This one was borrowed from Bird Dog, the DMS logistics utility infielder. He had good taste in knives, too. A Wilson Tactical Rapid Response knife with a three-and-three-eighths stainless blade. Not a lot of reach but it was so light that it moved at the same speed as my hand. My hands are very fucking fast.

  I moved in and left, ducking low and slashing at the side of his knee, feeling the tendon part. I don’t care if you’re a muscle freak, a zombie, or a mutant, you need your leg tendons. He went to one knee but chopped at my head with his elbow. Bastard was fast, but I took the impact on my shoulder and used the force to propel me forward and out of range. I banged into a walker who was biting Captain Kirk. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him backward and down. The back of his head hit the edge of a bar table. I sidestepped the mess. Captain Kirk wandered off, bleeding and screaming and weeping.

  The Berserker rushed me on wobbling legs, arms wide to scoop me into a crushing embrace. I met his rush with a flat-footed stamp-kick to the front of his hips. The effect is like running into a fireplug—everything below the waist stops, everything above the waist cants sharply forward. As his head bowed forward I jammed a palm against his shoulder and for a split second he was frozen in that bent-forward position. A split second was all the time I needed to bury my blade into the top of his skull. I knew the right spot. The fontanelle. That area of the skull that’s soft on babies and never quite firms up. I drove the knife in all the way to the hilt and then wrenched it a quarter turn.

  The Berserker died. Right then. There was no death spasm, no struggle to stave off the reaper. He simply stopped living. Everything that made him a monster, a person, and a threat was gone. I stepped back and let the fall of his body help me pull my knife free.

  “On your six!” I heard someone shout, and I turned to see Montana behind me. She was bleeding from a broken nose, and one eye was puffed nearly shut. She had her rifle up and fired three shots past me, dropping two walkers.

  “Give me your sidearm,” I snapped, and she pulled her Glock and handed it to me along with two magazines. There was considerable gunfire to our right, and we turned to see Bunny plowing the road with round after round from his drum-fed shotgun. Noah was with him, but there was no sign of Top.

  Outside, the sound of machine-gun fire was intensifying.

  The look in the eyes of my team was probably the same as what had to be in mine. Despair and fury in equal measure.

  “Mother Night’s up on the balcony. Where’s Sam?”

  Bunny jerked his head to the far side of the lobby. “Lost him and Top somewhere over there. They saw her running for the elevators with one of those Berserker assholes.”

  “The Berserkers are infected with Gen. Twelve.”

  “Well … fuck me blind.”

  A voice began speaking in my ear and I covered my ears to listen while my team circled up, their backs to me, firing into the crowd to try to stop the unstoppable tide.

  “Deacon to Cowboy…”

  “Go for Cowboy.”

  “The infection is in the streets. We are working to contain the spread. Have you acquired the target?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Give me an assessment. Can the civilians inside that hotel be saved?”

  It was such a hard, cruel, necessary question.

  “If they’re in their rooms, maybe. I think we’re losing the lobby.”

  “Be advised that the president and the governor have authorized sterilization of that building if there is no hope of preserving significant numbers of uninfected.”

  “Not yet, damn it.”

  “Give me another option.”

  “We need boots on the ground. Not out there—in here. Send in the damn cavalry.”

  Church paused. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And Mother Night may have video cameras in here.”

  “She does,” said Church, “the feed is leaking to the Internet.”

  “Shit. You got to find some way to—”

  “Bug is close to cracking her system and is confident he will be able to jam all the cameras. I will alert you when that happens.”

  “Make it fast. We’re going after Mother Night and I don’t want her gloating to the world.”

  “Captain, listen to me,” said Church, “we’re not interested in an arrest. Not this time.”

  “Preaching to the choir.”

  “Then good hunting, Captain. And God bless.”

  He was gone and I looked at the lobby. Maybe I was asking for help for something that was already helpless. But damn it, this was still a fight. There were still more people uninfected than transformed.

  And I needed to get to Mother Night. Goddamn it, I needed to look into her eyes and determine for myself if there was any shoe left to drop. Was this slaughter what she wanted or did she still have one last game to play?

  “We need to get to the elevators,” I yelled. “Clear me a path. Right now.”

  Bunny swapped in a new drum and everyone fished for fresh magazines. The elevators were thirty yards away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

  Even so, we had to try.

  We raised our weapons at the seething crowd and began firing.

  I would like to say that the only people we killed were infected. I would dearly love that to be true.

  But that would only be a lie.

  Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

  Grand Hyatt Hotel

  109 East Forty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, September 1, 4:04 p.m.

  As the door burst open, Ludo Monk snatched up the pistol, turned, fired without aiming. The figure coming through the doorway moved with blinding speed. There was a second shot. A third.

  A scream.

  No, screams.

  A woman’s scream. High, shrill, filled with pain and terror.

  And his own voice. Nearly as high, screeching so loud that the sound of it burned away the clouds in his mind, leaving him clearheaded for a moment. No intruding voices, no peculiar patterns of thought. In that moment he could see and hear and understand everything with a clarity that was so rare and …

  And lovely.

  It was beautiful. Never once in his entire life had there been such fidelity of vision and perception. Never before had something stilled the voices in his head. Not even the pills did it this completely.

  Monk tried to understand what was happening.

  He turned his head and it moved very loosely on his neck. Too loosely. He knew that his neck was not broken, yet the muscles were strangely slack.

  “What—?” he asked.

  A figure moved from left to right in front of him. Tall, slender, female, and familiar. He didn’t know her name, did he?

  Something …

  Something musical.

  He was sure o
f it.

  “M—Mother—?” he asked, hoping it was her. Needing it to be her.

  There was no answer. Not to his question. But the woman with the musical name was speaking. Shouting.

  Monk turned his head again, trying to see who was talking. Why was it so hard to remember who was in the room with him? He knew that he should know this. It was just a few moments ago.

  A few moments.

  Everything had changed in those moments.

  His mind became clearer and yet he could not fill it with names or meaning.

  The woman was kneeling now and he saw her bend down over something …

  No.

  Over someone.

  Another woman.

  A woman who seemed to be lying on a red blanket.

  Or floating in a red pool.

  Monk could not tell which, but as he watched the blanket or pool it grew larger and larger.

  “Mother?” he asked again.

  The women ignored him. Neither was his mother.

  He heard the tall woman yelling something.

  “Junie! Junie, stay with me. Stay with me…”

  That was funny to Monk because it was clear that the other woman, the bald woman, wasn’t trying to go anywhere. So strange.

  The lights in his mind began to go out as if someone were walking through a room and flipping switches. The darkness was soft and cool and it covered him completely.

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

  Marriott Marquis Hotel

  265 Peachtree Center Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, September 1, 4:11 p.m.

  It took two or three thousand years for us to fight our way across the lobby. Halfway there, Lydia joined us. She had a Sig Sauer in one hand and a Glock in the other and her face was flecked with powder burns.

  We kept going, kept fighting.

  This was so much worse than the slaughter outside the Ark chamber down in the Locker and worse even than the subway slaughter. Some of these people stared at us in horror, the hurt of betrayal in their terrified eyes. Some of them begged us for help even as their eyes began to glaze from infection. There were people of all kinds there. Adults of every age. Children.