Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Oh crap…”

Church said, “So far there have been three cases. All isolated, all in the Middle East. Two in very remote spots in Afghanistan and one in northern Iraq.”

“When you say ‘isolated’…” I began.

“All three were identical: small villages in remote areas that have natural barriers—mountains in two cases, a river and a cliff wall in the other. Each village was totally wiped out. Every single man, woman, and child was killed. Every body showed signs of human bites.”

“And, what, the villagers were all walkers now?”

“No,” said Courtland. “Every person in each village had been shot repeatedly in the head. No other bodies were found.”

“What does that tell you?” Church asked.

“God Almighty,” I breathed. “The isolation, the cleanup afterward… it sounds like someone’s been taking the walkers out for test-drives.”

“The most recent one was five days ago,” Courtland said.

“Okay,” I said softly. “Okay.”

“This time they left a calling card,” Church said, “a video of the slaughter and a message from a hooded man. We’re running voice recognition on it but my guess is that it will be El Mujahid or one of his lieutenants.”

“The attack took place in a small mountain village called Bitar in northern Afghanistan,” said Courtland quietly. “Military authorities were tipped off to the attack but arrived hours after it was over. They found a tape that had been left for them on one of the bodies of the dead. Barrier intercepted it and was only fortunate enough to keep it from being generally released. We’re lucky it wasn’t posted on YouTube.”

“If you’re in,” Church said, “then as soon as possible I want you to lead Echo Team in a quiet infiltration of the crab plant in Crisfield. That will put you and the members of your team in terrible danger. I make no apologies about it… I brought you here because I need a weapon. A thinking weapon. Something I can launch against the kind of people who would use something like Javad against the American people.” He paused for a moment. “The only people who have ever faced a walker and lived are in this room. So let me ask you, Mr. Ledger,” he said softly, “are you in or not?”

I wanted to kill him. Courtland, too. I could feel my lips curling back and past the stricture in my throat. With a hiss in my voice I said, “I’m in.”

Church closed his eyes and sighed. He stood with his head bowed for a moment. When he opened his eyes he looked ten years older but far, far more dangerous.

“Then let’s get to work.”

British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Five days ago

OF ALL OF the British forces in Iraq the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade had suffered the worst casualties. Their turnover of troops was steady, with fresh battalions moving into the field to replace those units that had suffered losses or had suffered too many days under the unforgiving Iraqi sun which daily beat down at above 120 degrees. Wounded soldiers—British, American, and a mixed bag of other Allied troops—were brought in with disheartening regularity. The triage process had taken on an assembly-line pace. Get them in, stabilize the most serious wounds, check their IDs, and then airlift the worst cases out to hospital ships in the Gulf. Less seriously wounded were transported by helicopter or armored medical bus to bases scattered around the country, where they would remain on the chance that they might be rotated back to their units. Great Britain had diminished its presence in Iraq since 2007 and it was more politically useful to keep the same experienced troops in the country than to send in fresh ones.

The serious cases would eventually be transported home to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Too many of them would ultimately fall under the care of the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association who would try—and sometimes fail—to secure proper disability benefits for them and see them through rehab as they worked to find a new version of their civilian lives.

Captain Gwyneth Dunne lived with these facts day after day. Running the British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion was like working a busy ER in one of the outer rings of Hell, or at least that’s how she described it to her husband, who was stationed with the 1st Royal Anglian regiment in Tikrit. She was a registered nurse whose training was in pediatrics, but the wizards at Division had decided that this qualified her to triage battle-wounded soldiers. It was a total ongoing cockup.

She was at her desk in a Quonset hut that had two overhead fans that did nothing but push around stale hot air, reading through the computer printouts on the three wounded soldiers from the ambush near Najaf. Lieutenant Nigel Griffith, twenty-three; Sergeant Gareth Henderson, thirty; and Corporal Ian Potts, twenty. She didn’t know any of them; probably never would.

The door opened and in walked Dr. Roger Colson, the senior triage surgeon.

“What’s the butcher’s bill, Rog?” Dunne asked, waving him to a chair.

He sank down with a sigh, rubbed his eyes, and gave her a bleary look. “It’s not promising. The officer, Griffith, has a chest wound that’s going to need more surgical attention than we can give here. The good news is that there’s a pretty good Swedish chest cutter on HMS Hecla . I’m having him prepped for airlift.”

“Does he have a chance?”

Dr. Colson lifted one hand and waggled it back and forth. “Shrapnel in the chest wall. We managed to reinflate the left lung, but he has some fragments near the heart. It’ll take a deft hand to sort him out.”

“What about the others?”

Colson shrugged. “They should both go out with Griffith. Corporal Potts is probably going to lose his left leg below the knee. Maybe the hand as well. We don’t have a microsurgeon here and they don’t have one on the hospital ship, either, so even if he keeps the hand he’ll lose most of its function, poor bastard.” He rubbed his eyes again, which were red and puffy from too many hours staring at wounds that he didn’t have the staff or materials to properly treat. “The best of the lot is Sergeant Henderson. Very bad facial laceration. He’ll be disfigured but the eyes were spared, so there’s that.”

“I never met Henderson. He’s a new lad, transferred from the Suffolk regiment.”

“Mm,” Colson said, indifferent to that part of it. “Should have stayed in Suffolk and raised sheep.”

“You want him transported out?” Dunne asked.

“I should think so. Injury like that will take a long time to heal and he looks like he might have been a handsome bloke. Injury of this kind will have traumatic personal effects.”

Dunne looked down at the three printouts of the survivors spread out on her desk. She picked up Henderson’s and examined the face of the thirty-year-old sergeant from the farmlands. “He was a handsome lad.”

She shook her head and turned the page over to show the doctor.

“Ah well,” Colson said sadly, “he doesn’t look like that anymore. Pity, the poor blighter.”

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:12 P.M.

AS CHURCH AND Courtland led me through a series of hallways I said, “I’m going to take a flyer here and assume that you know that there is no way this prion thing is simply the weapon du jour of a group of religious fundamentalists.”

“No kidding,” Church said.

The warehouse was very large, with suites of offices, workrooms of all kinds, and several big storage rooms. There were scores of jump-suited workmen shifting crates, running wires, and swinging hammers. Guards patrolled the hallway and every one of them looked like he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed. Not a lot of smiling in that place, and I could certainly understand why. I wondered how many of the people in the halls had lost friends at St. Michael’s.