The King of Plagues

by Jonathan Maberry

  The Shetland Isles

  December 18, 2:54 P.M. GMT

  “I’m at the door,” I said quietly. I was in a hazmat-augmented HAMMER suit with a bunch of Star Trek gizmos clipped to my belt. I was miked into the temporary command center set up in the chopper and there was a small camera on my helmet. I passed a sensor gadget over the door frame but got no pings, so I knelt and peered through the glass and along the cracks.

  “No visible booby traps. Dalek, what’s the call on the lock?” We’d switched to call signs only. Redcap was Prebble; Church was Deacon. Dr. Hu’s call sign was Dalek. He was a nerd on several continents.

  “The outer door is nothing special, Cowboy,” replied Hu. “All of the special locks are inside.”

  “Nothing visible through the glass,” I said. “Proceeding inside.”

  I took a very careful hold of the metal door handle. No shocks and nothing exploded. I pulled gently and the door yielded, but I stayed on the balls of my feet. If I felt the tension of a wire or heard a click, I was going to set a new land speed record for a scared white guy in a hazmat suit.

  The door opened with a wonderfully boring lack of explosions.

  I went inside. The reception area was empty and sparsely furnished with a functional desk, a file cabinet, two ugly plastic visitor chairs, and a glass coffee table littered with magazines that were three years old. The walls were covered with posters about bacterial research and its benefits to the fishing industry, a map of the coastal waters, and a complex set of tide tables. I quickly searched the whole room and came up dry. No traps, no surprises.

  And that, by itself, was surprising.

  There was a set of double doors behind the counter that looked cheap and fragile, but the wood grain was a clever fake and when I ran a finger along the surface I felt the cool hardness of steel. A keycard scanner was mounted in a discreet niche in the wall. All DMS agents have a programmable master keycard, and the key codes to this facility had been uploaded to mine. I swiped the card and was surprised that it worked. I’d expected the codes to have been changed or at least disabled.

  I did not, however, take that as a sign that all was well and that the wacky professor was brewing a pot of chamomile for us to share with a plate of ginger snaps. There are a lot of ways to lay a trap.

  The door opened with a click. I unclipped a handheld BAMS unit—a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer—from my belt. It was one of Hu’s sci-fi gadgets, a few steps up from what they use in airports. The BAMS allowed for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. It has a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Most of the commercial BAMS units were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density, but Church always made sure that Hu had the best toys. Ours wasn’t mounted on a cart like the airport model.

  I checked several spots in the room and the light stayed green. If there were pathogens loose in here, the concentration was too low for the BAMS unit to detect.

  I moved inside.

  The door opened into a faux vestibule that was actually a low-level air lock. As I key-swiped the inner door, the one behind me swung shut with a hydraulic hiss. With the BAMS unit in one hand and my Beretta 92F in the other, I moved out of the air lock. The inner room was large and empty. Computer workstations and wheeled chairs, flat-screen monitors in the walls. A Mr. Coffee on a table. Coffee cups.

  The scanner was still green, but I had an itch tickling me between the shoulder blades. It was the kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s in the tall grass watching you through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. I crept across the room, moving on the balls of my feet, checking corners, checking under desks, looking for trip wires, expecting an attack. Doing this sort of stuff for a living does not totally harden you to the stress. Sure, you get cooler, you learn the tricks of ratcheting down the tension on your nerves, but you aren’t a tenth as calm as you look. It’s one of the reasons we take precautions, like keeping our finger flat along the outside curve of the trigger guard. You keep your finger on the trigger and you either shoot yourself or shoot the first poor son of a bitch who wanders into the moment.

  Like the kid who opened the side door to the staff room.

  I never heard him, didn’t see him, had no clue he was there until he spoke.

  “Are you him?”

  I instantly spun around and screwed the barrel of the pistol into soft flesh between a pair of large watery green eyes. In the split part of a second it took for me to pivot and slip my finger inside the trigger guard I registered how short and how young he was.

  Maybe seven.

  Fire engine red hair, cat green eyes in a freckly face that was white with shock as he stared cross-eyed at the gun barrel. In a movie it would have been a comical moment. In the flesh it was horrible on too many levels to count.

  “I.I … ,” he stammered, and I stepped back and pulled the gun away, but only just. Kids can kill, too. They can pull triggers and they can wear explosive vests. The only reason he didn’t get shot was because his hands were empty.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  He had to try it several times before he could squeeze it out. “M-Mikey,” he said. “I’m Mikey Grey.”

  “Hold your arms out to your sides. Do it now,” I ordered, and after a moment’s indecision he did it, standing there like a trembling scarecrow as I clipped the BAMS unit to my belt and patted him down. He was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Sneakers and a SpongeBob wristwatch.

  A couple of tears boiled into the corners of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to be brave, his mouth trembled. Seven was no age at all. A baby.

  I hated myself for this.

  “Is your dad Charles Grey?” I asked, trying to take the edge off my voice and utterly failing. I wasn’t prepared for this even though I knew that Grey had brought his family into the lab with him.

  “Yes,” Mikey said, almost making it a question, unsure of what kind of answer would placate this big, mean stranger with the funny costume and the gun. Then he found another splinter of courage and lifted his chin. “Are you here to hurt my dad?”

  “Why would I want to do that, kid?”

  “I don’t know. ’Cause he said you were.”

  Christ.

  “I’m not here to hurt anyone,” I said, and hoped that it wasn’t a lie. Of course, this was coming from a guy holding a loaded gun. “But I do have to talk to your dad.”

  “I’m scared,” said the kid. His face was still paper white with fear.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “I’m scared of my dad,” he said.

  I wanted to peel off my hood and put my sidearm away and give this kid a hug, get him outside this madhouse. I knelt in front of him.

  “Why are you scared of your dad, Mikey?”

  “He keeps yelling,” he said. “Yelling and crying. I don’t like it when he cries.”

  Swell.

  “Listen, Mikey … can you take me to him?”

  “No! You’re going to hurt him.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists, but the action looked more like he was tired than crying. In the harsh fluorescent lighting his pale skin looked almost green.

  “I’m not here to hurt your dad, kid.”

  He stared up at me, his face filled with doubt; then his eyes shifted away toward the door. “I’m scared to go back in there.”

  “I’ll be right with you, kiddo,” I said as I straightened.

  The kid sneezed and I instantly jerked back from him and made a grab for the BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. It glowed orange.

  Mikey wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I have a cold.”

  “How long have you had a cold, kid?”

  He sniffed. “I don’t know. I just got it, I guess.”

  “Today? Did you wake up with a co
ld?”

  “No.” He sniffed again and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on his forehead. “I keep sneezing and I can’t find any tissues. I think Mommy used them all.”

  “Does your mom have a cold, too?”

  “She sneezed so much she had a nosebleed.”

  “Where is she? Where’s your mom?”

  He looked around for a few seconds, like he was trying to orient himself. “Isn’t she here?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  He sneezed again. I held the BAMS out to try to catch some of the spray.

  The light changed from orange to red.

  Everything in my gut turned to greasy ice water.

  “I … don’t know,” Mikey said distantly. “I think she went to lie down. She had a nosebleed.”

  Mikey wiped at his nose and stared at the drops of blood on his wrist. He looked at me, confused, wanting and needing an answer. He was swaying slightly, as if there was a strong breeze. Beneath his freckles his color was bad. Definitely green, with dark red splotches blossoming on his cheeks.

  I heard a click in my ear and then Church’s voice: “Deacon for Cowboy, Deacon for Deacon, copy?”

  “Go for Cowboy,” I murmured, stepping away from the boy. The kid stood there, clearly unsure of where he was. Blood ran from both nostrils and he didn’t appear to notice.

  “Cowboy,” Church said, “we’re receiving the telemetry feeds from the BAMS unit. Be advised that the room is now officially compromised. Repeat, you are in a hot zone. We’re getting V-readings.”

  V for virus. Damn.

  I stepped away and touched my earbud. “What kind?”

  “Dalek is matching the readings with the facility’s database and—”

  Another voice cut in. Dr. Hu. “Cowboy, be advised, the kid appears to be infected with a strain of QOBE.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “It’s something they were working on at Fair Isle. Quick Onset Bundibugyo Ebolavirus.”

  “Say again?”

  Church’s voice cut back in, “The boy has Ebola.”

  A cold hand clamped around my heart.

  “Then it’s in the main air supply. Talk to me about containment, ’cause I’m outside of the Hot Room.”

  “We’ve got the exterior vents draped and we’re sealing them with foam. Nothing can get out.”

  “Does that include me?”

  “We’re airlifting in a hyperbaric decontamination module. We’ll soft-dock it to one of the doors. You’ll be okay as long as your suit seals are intact.” He sounded almost disappointed.

  The kid couldn’t hear the conversation. He was using his sleeve to blot blood from his nose. At first I thought he was remarkably calm, but when he glanced at me I could see that his eyes were already starting to glaze with fever.

  “That’s nuts,” I whispered. “Ebola has a five-day incubation—”

  “Not QOBE,” said Hu. “It’s a bioweapon engineered to hit and present within minutes to hours. Introduce it into a bunker or secure facility and everyone in there dies. Without living hosts an insertion team in HAMMER suits can infiltrate and gain access to computers and other materials. Infection rate is ninety-eight point eight; mortality rate among infected is one hundred percent.”

  “Tell me that someone else cooked this up and that we were just working on a cure.”

  There was silence on the line, and then Hu said, “Grow up, Cowboy.”

  “We’ll talk about that when I get out of here,” I said softly, though it occurred to me that Hu probably wouldn’t have made that comment if he thought there was a snowball’s chance of me getting out.

  “What’s my time frame here?” I asked.

  Church said, “You’re fighting the clock. If the boy has just started showing symptoms, say one hour before you’re alone in there.”

  “Deacon,” I said, “tell me one thing. Did you know about this?”

  “That it was being studied? Yes. That it was off the leash, no.”

  What remained unsaid was whether he would have sent me in here regardless. I think we both knew the answer to that.

  Second day back on the fucking job.

  I turned back to the kid. “C’mon, Mikey … let’s go see your dad.”

  The kid sniffed again and turned toward the nearest door, but he blinked at it for a moment, his face screwed up with uncertainty.

  “What was I doing?” he asked distractedly.

  “You’re taking me to see your dad.” My voice almost cracked.

  “Oh … okay.”

  He reached for the knob, turned it the wrong way several times, and then wiped his nose with his wrist. When he reached for the doorknob again there was a long smear of blood on his wrist. Mikey finally opened the door and walked through, and I followed, torn between the demands of the mission and the horror I felt for what I was seeing.

  I was watching a child die.

  The virus was going to kill him in minutes. An hour tops. That was all the time this kid had left. There was no cure, no magic bullet. There was something so enormously obscene about it that I could feel the anger rising like lava inside me. The Modern Man within me—the civilized aspect of my fractured persona—was numb with the shock of this. My inner Cop wanted answers. But it was the third aspect, the Warrior, who was grinding his teeth in a murderous rage. Even that part of me, the Killer, was offended by this because this was something that transcended civilization, transcended law and order: this was the primal and visceral response to protect the young of the tribe. And here was one who was in mortal peril, and no laws or strength of arms could do a single thing. All I could do was use the last minutes of this child’s life to further my mission.

  God …

  The kid led me through the outer layer of the FIRE facility—the staff quarters, supply rooms, mess hall, and other nonessential sections. The doors to each room stood ajar. No one was there. There were signs of conflict, though: coffee cups that had dropped and shattered on the floor, briefcases left standing in the middle of a hallway, discarded purses, and a number of cell phones that had been tossed to the floor and then smashed under heel. Mikey lingered by a broken BlackBerry that had a pink gel case. He looked at it for several seconds, chewing his lip and furrowing his brow.

  Then he looked up at me. “Mom had a nosebleed,” he said. “She had to lie down.”

  “I know, Mikey. I’m sure she’ll be okay,” I said, and the lie was like broken glass in my mouth. “Let’s go see your dad.”

  Mikey suddenly smiled brightly. “Daddy’s taking us to work today!”

  I started to speak, but then the moment passed and the dull, disconnected look returned. Mikey sneezed and continued along the hall.

  At the end of the hallway was an air lock, the door of which was blocked by a wheeled desk chair. A sign read: CENTRAL LABORATORY COMPLEX.

  “Daddy said to keep the doors open,” said Mikey as he squeezed past the chair and entered the air lock on the far side.

  “Where is your dad, Mikey?”

  “In the Hot Room. Though … it’s not hot. It’s pretty cold in there. Isn’t that funny, that they call it a hot room?” He sneezed. “C’mon … .”

  Everything he said had a dreamy quality to it. Even when he looked at the blood on his hands from his sneeze his expression didn’t flicker. It was apparently unreal to him, and I guess that was a blessing. No tears, no screaming, no panic. Even though I was glad the kid wasn’t terrified and screaming, his calm was eerie.

  I followed him through two more air locks. The front and back doors of those locks whose lock assemblies had been torn apart, the hydraulics bashed out of shape and ripped open.

  “Did your dad do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mikey said defensively. A fit of sneezing hit him and the kid reeled against the wall and sneezed until blood fairly poured from between his fingers. I crossed to the closest office and found a box of tissues, tore out a fistful, and brought them back to the kid. He
mumbled something and used the whole wad to clean his face.

  “Mom had a bloody nose, too,” he said. Then he seemed to forget about the tissues and they fell from his small fingers.

  Tears burned my eyes, but I sniffed them back. I couldn’t wipe them away while wearing the suit, and I couldn’t risk blurred vision. I bit down on my fury, grinding it between my teeth until my jaw ached.

  I followed Mikey through the central labs.

  “Daddy’s in there,” Mikey said, pointing a trembling finger at the far wall, into which was set a much heavier air lock. Huge, thick, solid, and probably impenetrable under any ordinary circumstances. It was the kind of air lock that would have kept even the most virulent pathogen locked in, but I knew that we were past that point. The proof stood beside me, tracing his name on a desktop in his own blood.

  This one had not been disabled. But the kicker was what someone had painted on the wall in dark red paint.

  The symbol of the Seven Kings.

  I bent close to examine it. The HAMMER suit’s filters don’t allow smells to get in, which was fine with me, because as I looked at the dark graffiti I realized that it wasn’t paint. It was blood.

  I spoke quietly into my helmet mike: “Cowboy to Deacon, are you seeing this?”

  “Copy that,” said Church, then added, “I would welcome the opportunity to chat with the person who painted that.”

  Casual words, but not casually meant.

  “Roger that.”

  I turned to Mikey. “Did your daddy put this here?”

  He looked at it for a blank second and then shrugged.

  We crossed the room to the door to the Hot Room. The air lock was flanked by double keycard terminals with computer keyboards. The idea was to make sure that no one could enter this kind of lab alone. They used the same thing in missile control rooms. No one can just waltz in and launch the nukes, and the odds of two complete whackos working on the same shift, in the same place, who both wanted to release the Big Bad Wolf were pretty damn slim. These systems allowed for one person to require compliance and agreement from another, and if something was hinky the other person’s lack of compliance kept the monster in its box. The terminals were too far apart for one person to operate them both simultaneously. The computer codes had to be entered in unison, as did the key swipes.