Patient Zero

by Maberry, Jonathan

  “Oh, I’m well over the border into total freakout. Luckily I have years of practice at a professional appearance of calm tranquility. Inside I’m a mess.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” His smile looked frozen into place. “Church told me about St. Michael’s and about that village in Afghanistan.”

  I nodded, and for a moment I had this weird feeling that we were standing there surrounded by ghosts.

  “And now you’re working for them,” Rudy said.

  “Working for them maybe isn’t the right way to say it. It’s more like we’re both working against the same enemy.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Church said that you might be leading a small team against these terrorists. Why not send the entire army, navy, and marine corps all at once?”

  I shook my head. “The more feet on the ground the bigger the risk of uncontrollable contamination. A small team wouldn’t get in each other’s way; there would be fewer instances where a soldier would be faced with the choice of whether to shoot an infected comrade. It simplifies things. And . . . if worse comes to worst and the infection has to be contained like it was at St. Michael’s then there are fewer overall losses of assets.”

  “ ‘Assets’?” Rudy echoed.

  “People.”

  “Dios mio. How do you know all this?”

  “It’s just common sense,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “it’s not. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Most people wouldn’t.”

  “A fighter would.”

  “You mean a warrior,” said Rudy.

  I nodded.

  Rudy gave me a strange look. Behind him my four team members came filing in dressed in black BDUs. Rudy turned and watched as they walked over to the training area. “They look like tough men.”

  “They are.”

  He turned back to me. “I hope they’re not so tough that they’re hardened, Joe. We’re not just fighting against something . . . we’re fighting for something, and it would be a shame to destroy the very thing you’re fighting to preserve.”

  “I know.”

  “I hope you do.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go. Mr. Church is going to introduce me to the research teams. I think he’s trying to recruit me, too.”

  “Ha! That’ll be the day.”

  But Rudy gave me a funny look before he turned and headed back into the offices with the guard a half step behind him, rifle at port arms. I watched them until they passed through the far doorway.

  “Shit,” I murmured. I walked over to the team and had just opened my mouth to explain the first drill I wanted them to do, but I never got the chance as behind us a door banged open and Sergeant Gus Dietrich came pelting into the room.

  “Captain Ledger! Mr. Church wants you immediately.”

  “For what?” I asked as Dietrich skidded to a halt.

  Dietrich hesitated for a fraction of a second, the new chain of command probably still uncertain in his head. He made his decision quickly, though. “Surveillance teams found the missing truck. We think we found the third cell.”

  “Where?”

  “Delaware. He wants you to hit it.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” said a voice, and I wheeled to see Church and Major Courtland striding across the floor. “Training time’s over,” he said. “Echo Team is wheels up in thirty.”

  Chapter Forty

  Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:18 P.M.

  FOUR HOURS AGO I was buying coffee for Rudy at a Starbucks near the Baltimore aquarium and now I was ankle deep in shit and sewer water in a tunnel under Claymont, Delaware. Life just gets better and better. I was even wearing my street shoes, too. Once we’d gotten the go order there was no time to find boots my size or change into fatigue pants.

  We all wore Kevlar chest protectors, limb pads, gun belts, and tactical helmets and night-vision goggles. We had enough weapons to start a small war, which was pretty much the plan.

  We’d taken a chopper from Baltimore and offloaded in the parking lot of an abandoned elementary school near Route 13 near Bellevue State Park. Not a lot of foot traffic out that way. From there we’d piled into the back of a fake UPS van borrowed from the local vice squad’s surveillance team and they drove us around behind a liquor warehouse up the street from Selby’s Fine Meats. We used the warehouse’s cellar to access the storm drains and from there into the main sewer line that was supposed to have a vent in the meatpacking plant. My handheld GPS tracker pointed the way.

  Ollie Brown was on point and I liked the smooth way he moved, making very little noise despite the water; he checked his corners and kept his eyes pointing in the same direction as his gun sights. The big guy, Bunny, was our cover man, tailing us with a M1014 combat shotgun that looked like a toy in his hands, and in the bad light he looked like a hulking cave troll as he walked bent over, filling the tunnel. I was second in the string, with Top Sims and Skip Tyler behind me. I didn’t have a silencer for my .45 so Sergeant Dietrich had loaned me a Beretta M9 with a Trinity sound suppressor and four extra magazines. I didn’t have a long gun, though everyone else did; handguns were always my thing.

  We moved like ghosts, no chatter, just a line of men moving through shadows to face monsters. It was unreal, I felt like I was in a video game. Shame real life doesn’t have a reset button.

  In the chopper we’d sketched out what plans we could. “Here’s the skinny,” I said as we nodded our heads together over a map in the narrow confines of the chopper’s cabin. “Church has a en route to give us a thermal scan of the place, but that’s about as much intel as we have. He’s also arranging to have phone lines cut and Major Courtland said that they’ll get a presidential order allowing them to disrupt all cell reception in the area. We don’t want one of the hostiles texting his buds on his LG Chocolate.”

  “LOL,” Bunny murmured.

  “We’ll come up through the sewers. We pulled up the schematics for the storm drains and there’s a big line that goes right under the plant, very nicely placed for a quiet walk-in once the lights are off. Questions?”

  “Mission priorities?” asked Top.

  “Mr. Church wants prisoners for interrogations. We’d all like more intel before we kick the doors on that crab plant. From all indications that’s going to be the big enchilada. The computer geeks think this meatpacking place is a storage depot for our hostiles, not a main action center.”

  “Does that mean taking a bullet to give him his prisoner?” Ollie asked, his eyes hard, challenging.

  “No, but don’t let it fall that way. Shoot to wound, try to disable whenever possible, but don’t get killed.”

  “High on my to-do list, boss,” observed Bunny, and Skip nodded.

  “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.