Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

Grace and I found Church sitting alone in a deserted anteroom at the FBI field office in Philadelphia, quietly munching vanilla wafers.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked, but he was a long time in responding.

“Mr. Church…?” Grace prompted softly.

Church drank some water. “He gave us a name.” He leaned back in his chair and considered the half-eaten cookie he held between thumb and forefinger. “Sebastian Gault.”

Grace blanched. “No…”

She told me who Gault was, but even I’d heard of him. Who hadn’t? “If this is true…”

Church didn’t look at her. “It’s true. Lee was ultimately…” He paused and thought about the right word. “Forthcoming.”

“God. This will hurt a lot of people.”

Church nodded. “I called Aunt Sallie. She’s initiated a worldwide search for him. Very quiet, but very thorough.”

Grace shook her head. “So… this was all for money?”

“No,” he said. “For Gault it clearly was; but not for El Mujahid. He was doing this for his God. He said as much to Captain Ledger and Lee verified it. He said that Gault had been funding the terrorists with the agenda of scaring the U.S. into backing out of the Middle East. It’s what you thought, Captain, and it probably would have worked. But El Mujahid apparently had a separate agenda and he really was trying to release the plague, and it was worse even than that: he wasn’t just willing to die for his cause, he was willing to become a monster. He had no use for Gault’s money. What good would it be to him? To what he became?”

“What was he?” I asked. “He clearly wasn’t a walker.”

“Yes he was. We found Ahmed Mahoud’s car. There were two spent vials of a different strain of the pathogen. Hu’s labeled it a ‘transformative mutation.’ It kept the oxygen flowing to El Mujahid’s brain so there was no loss of higher function. Hu surmises that El Mujahid planned to share that version with other fundamentalists so that even if the plague got out of hand and they were infected they would still retain awareness, and with awareness, faith.” He sighed. “Hu tells me that the version of the pathogen fired from the Freedom Bell was yet another strain. Far more virulent.” He looked at me. “If you hadn’t ordered Brierly to seal the doors at the Liberty Center…”

“God,” Grace breathed. I couldn’t think of anything to add to that.

Church pushed the plate of cookies over to me without any further comment. Grace and I both had one.

A pillar of smoke rose three hundred feet above the smoking pit that still burned deep in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. British Army helicopters circled the vicinity and satellites were retasked to probe the region. Something had happened deep beneath the sands that no seismograph had predicted. There were known spots of deeply buried geothermal activity, but nothing like this had happened in over a hundred years. It would take years to uncover the cause.

About ten days later I found Church in his office at the Warehouse. I’d heard that he was moving back to the Hangar at Floyd Bennett Field.

“Are you closing the Warehouse?”

“No… you and Grace can run it. We need a base here.”

I liked the sound of that, but I kept the smile off my face. Grace and I had been too busy to share that drink since the Liberty Bell Center catastrophe, but we had a rendezvous planned for tonight. From the secret smiles she’d been giving me I thought we might go beyond the platonic sleepover. I pulled up a chair and sat down. “So, where are we?” I asked him.

Church set down the papers he had been sorting and spread his hands. “We saved the world, Captain Ledger. More or less. And we certainly saved the economy of the United States. We also took down a major terrorist network. We’re heroes and we have the thanks of a grateful nation, though no one will ever say so. But along the way we embarrassed a lot of people and made a few enemies. The Vice President’s wife would like to see Major Courtland’s head on a pike. On the other hand the First Lady wants you and First Sergeant Sims canonized.”

“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.”

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.

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.

“Terrifyingly terrific!”

“A fast-paced, creepy thriller… prickly as a hospital needle… This guy is good.”

“Maberry has outdone himself with a deliciously diabolical plot and bone-chilling scenarios.”