Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Spot on,” Courtland said. “Mr. Church would probably give you a biscuit for that assessment. MindReader caught a whiff of biological research equipment being bought, as you say, piecemeal. Very carefully, you understand, and in small quantities to avoid ringing the kinds of alarms that have in fact been rung. It took a while for any of this to be noticed because it wasn’t precisely the sort of thing we were expecting to find, and without MindReader we would never have spotted it at all. These materials were being ordered by firms located within nations that had been hit by crop blight, livestock disease, or similar natural calamity. Anyone who didn’t have a suspicious mind would think that these countries were scrambling to find cures for the diseases that were creating famine and starvation affecting their own people.”

“Like mad cow disease,” I suggested.

“Top marks. Except for India and a handful of others, virtually every nation on earth depends on beef production and that disease was responsible for millions of cattle deaths and billions of pounds of economic loss. It would be natural for such countries to do anything they could to find a cure.”

“Seems to me that you guys should have hit that plant already.” I saw her eyes shift away for a moment. “If the DMS has a combat team then they should have been deployed. You keep dodging my questions about what happened to the rest of your team, Major.”

“They died, Mr. Ledger.” It was Church’s voice and damn if I didn’t hear him approach. Few people can sneak up on me. I turned quickly to see Church standing in the doorway, his face dour. He came into the room and leaned against the wall by the window.

“Died how?”

Courtland looked at Church, but he was looking at me. He said, “Javad.”

“I killed Javad—”

“Twice, yes; but the first time you encountered him he was still technically alive. Infected, sure; dying, to be certain… but alive. He was being transported to a hospital for a postmortem.”

“Yeah, and—?”

“He woke up on the way to the morgue.”

“God…”

Courtland said, “The bite of a walker is one hundred percent infectious…”

“So you both said.”

“If a person receives a fatal bite then shortly after clinical death the disease reactivates the central nervous system and, to a limited degree, some organ functions, and the victim rises as a new carrier. If a person receives even a mild bite the infection will kill them in about seventy hours, which at best gives us three days to locate any victims and contain them.”

“I’m not sure I like the word ‘contain,’” I said.

“No one will like that word if it comes to that,” Church said.

“Bite victims begin to lose cognitive functions quickly,” Courtland continued, “and even before clinical death they become dissociative, delusional, and uncontrollably aggressive. In both the predeath and postreanimation phase the carriers have a cannibalistic compulsion.”

Church said, “This is all information we learned after the fact.”

I looked at them. “What the hell happened?”

Church’s face was as ice. “We didn’t know what Javad was at first. How could we? The learning process for us was very… awkward.”

“What does that mean?”

“You read about the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital? The night of the task force hit?”

I sat there, not wanting to hear this. Grace looked away but Church stared back at me with a dreadful intensity.

“Javad woke up hungry, Mr. Ledger. Only two DMS agents accompanied the body to the morgue. We lost contact with them shortly after arrival. Major Courtland and I were actually at the hospital but were conducting an interview in another wing. When the alert came in we called in all available teams, but by the time they arrived on the scene the infection had spread to an entire wing of the hospital. Major Courtland’s Alpha Team had perimeter duty and Bravo and Charlie teams entered the hospital to try and contain the situation.”

“We thought there had been an attempt by other terrorists to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades,” Courtland said. “But it was only Javad. By the time the teams were inside the infection was completely out of control. Javad had gotten all the way down to the lobby and was attacking people in the waiting area. Mr. Church was able to subdue him—and before you ask, no, we didn’t know what Javad was at that point. He was a suspected terrorist, albeit one we thought had been killed. Our agents were confused because the attackers appeared to be patients, doctors, nurses. Our men… hesitated. They were overwhelmed.”

“How many of them did you lose?”

“All of them, Mr. Ledger,” Church said. “Two teams; twenty-two men and women. Plus the two agents who had been in the ambulance. Some of the finest and most capable tactical field operatives in the world. Torn to pieces by old women, children, ordinary civilians… and ultimately by each other.”

“What… did you do?”

“You read the newspapers. The situation needed to be contained.”

I leaped to my feet. “ Jesus Christ! Are you telling me that you deliberately burned down the entire fucking hospital…? What kind of sick son of a bitch are you?”

Without turning he said, “Earlier, when I told you that if this plague gets out, there will be no way to stop it, I was not exaggerating. Everyone would die, Mr. Ledger. Everyone. We are talking the actual apocalypse here. Counting Javad, our patient zero, we have a loss of life totaling one hundred and eighty-eight civilians and twenty-four DMS operatives. Two hundred and ten deaths as a result of one carrier. Friends of mine are dead. People I knew and trusted—and all of this spread from a single source that was, more or less, contained. We lucked out in that the attack was inside a building that had reinforced windows and heavy-duty doors we could lock. And, to a small degree we were on the alert, though not for something like this. If no security had accompanied his body to the hospital… well, it’s doubtful we’d be here having this conversation. Same goes if the terrorist cell had followed through with its plan. Had Javad been turned loose, say, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or South Central L.A. on a Saturday afternoon, or at the rededication of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia this coming weekend, we would never have been able to contain it. Never. Now we are reasonably sure that there are more strike cells, each one likely to have one or more walkers. We know where one is and we have that under heavy surveillance. If there are others we need to find and neutralize them. We have to do everything we can to locate and destroy these other carriers. If we don’t then we will have failed all of humanity. We may already be too late.” He turned toward me, and his face was filled with a terrible and savage sadness. “To stop this thing… I’d burn down heaven itself.”

I stood there, stunned and sick. “Why the hell did you drag me into this shit?”

“I brought you here because you have qualities I need. You are an experienced investigator with an understanding of politics. You can speak several useful languages. You have extensive martial arts training. You are tough and you are ruthless when it comes down to it. You’ve demonstrated that you lack hesitation in a crisis. Hesitation got our other teams killed. You’re here because I can use you. I want you to lead my new team because my existing agents are being slaughtered and I need it to damn well stop!”

“But why now? Why didn’t you tell me this the other day when I auditioned for you?”

“Things have gotten worse,” said Courtland. “The other day we thought we had this under control, that we really had gotten the jump on it. We were wrong. We programmed MindReader to search all available databases for anything that might be related. One of the things we programmed it to find were cases of attacks involving biting.”