Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

Sebastian Gault loved his father. Damn shame the man had smoked like a furnace, otherwise he might be here to share in the billions rather than lying dead in a Bishops Gate cemetery. Cancer had taken him in less than sixteen months. Gault had been eighteen the day before the funeral, and had stepped right in as owner-manager of the chain. He sold it immediately, finished college, and invested every dime in pharmaceutical industry stock, taking some risks, acting as his own broker so that he saved his fees for reinvestment, buying smart, and constantly looking toward the horizon for the next trend. Unlike his peers he never bothered looking for the Golden Fleece pharma stock—the elusive wonder drug that will actually cure something. Instead he focused on new treatment areas for diseases that might never be cured. It wasn’t until well after he made his first billion that he even paid attention to cures; and even then it was cures for diseases that nobody cared about, things that affected tribes in third-world shit holes. If it hadn’t been for Internet news he might never have even gone in that direction, but then he had a revelation. A major one. Cure something in the third world, take a visible financial loss on the effort to do so, and then let the Internet news junkies turn you into a saint.

He tried it, and it worked. It was easier than he expected. Most of the third world diseases were easy to cure; they exist largely because no major pharmaceutical company gives a tinker’s damn about starving people in some African nation whose name changes every other week. When Gault’s first company, PharmaSolutions, found a cure for swamp blight, a rare disease in Somalia, he borrowed money to mass-produce and distribute the drug through the World Health Organization. The WHO—the most well-intentioned and earnest people in the world, but easily duped because of their desperate need for support—told everyone in the world press about how this fledging company nearly bankrupted itself to cure a tragic disease. The story hit the Internet on a Tuesday morning; by Wednesday evening it was on CNN and by Thursday midday it was picked up by wire services everywhere. By close of business on Friday PharmaSolutions stock had doubled; by the close of business the following week the stock price had gone vertical. That was the first time Gault, then twenty-two years old, made it onto the cover of Newsweek.

By the time Gault was twenty-six he was a billionaire several times over. He openly pumped millions into research and scored one cure after another. When he launched Gen2000 he stepped into the global pharmaceutical arena for real, but by then he owned billions in stock in other pharma companies. The fact that at least half of the diseases for which he ultimately found a cure were pathogens cooked up in his lab never made it into the press. It wasn’t even a rumor in the wind. Enough money saw to that; and so far his father—bless his soul—had been right. Everyone had a price or a vice.

Toys was reading the London Times. “Mmm,” he murmured, “there’s speculation—again—about your being given a knighthood; and another rumor about a Nobel Prize.” He folded down the paper and looked at Gault. “Which would you prefer?”

Gault shrugged, not terribly interested. The papers dredged that much up every few weeks. “The Nobel win would drive up the stock prices.”

“Sure, but the knighthood would get you laid a lot more often.”

“I get laid quite enough, thank you.”

Toys sniffed. “I’ve seen some of the cows you bring home.”

Gault sipped his drink. “So how would a knighthood change that?”

“Well,” Toys drawled, “‘Sir Sebastian’ would at very least get some well-bred ass. As it is now you seem to rate your playmates by cup size.”

“Better than the half-starved creatures you find so thrilling.”

“You can never be too thin or too rich,” Toys said, quoting sagely.

They were interrupted by the chirp of Toys’s cell phone. Toys looked at it and handed it over without answering. “The Yank.”

Gault flipped it open and heard the American’s familiar Texas drawl. “Line?”

“Clear. Good to hear from you.” As usual Toys bent close to listen in.

“Yeah, well, the shit’s hit the fan round here and we’ve all been scrambling. I’ve been in continuous meetings for the last couple of days. There’s the matter of a tape from Afghanistan. An attack on a village. You follow me?”

“Of course.”

“You should warn me about shit like that, dammit. That’s set a lot of brushfires and Big G has been trying to take over the whole show. There’s been a lot of pressure to crowd the new team out.”

“The DMS?”

He could almost hear the American flinch at the use of an uncoded word. “Yeah. The President wants them in, and everyone else wants them out, and I mean out: closed down.”

“Any chance of that?”

“None, far as I can see. For whatever reason the President seems to be defending this group against all comers. I actually witnessed him read the riot act to the National Security advisor in front of a couple of generals. It’s getting ugly in D.C.

“I’m working on planting one of my guys in this group.”

“How sure are you that you can?”

The American paused. “Pretty sure.”

Toys raised his eyebrows and mimed applause. Gault said, “Keep me posted.”

He closed the phone and set it aside. Toys walked back to his chair and settled into it and the two of them considered the implications of the call.

Toys said, “Perhaps I’ve been underestimating that bloke.”

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:36 P.M.

“OKAY,” I SAID, “so we danced a bit earlier. Is anyone too damaged to train? More to the point, is anyone too banged up to go into combat today or tomorrow if it comes to it?”

“Well… my nuts still hurt,” Ollie said, then added, “sir. But I can pull a trigger.”

“I’m good,” Bunny said. He tossed the ice pack onto the floor beside the mats.

Skip winced. “Nuts for me, too, sir. I think they’re up in my chest cavity somewhere.”

“They’ll drop when you hit puberty,” Bunny said under his breath. He looked at me. “Sir.”

“Skip the ‘sir’ shit unless we’re not alone. It’s already getting old.”

“I can fight,” Skip said.

I nodded to First Sergeant Sims. “What about you, Top? Any damage?”

“Just to my pride. Never been blindsided before.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Church wants Echo Team to be operationally ready to carry out an urban infiltration sometime in the next day or two. The last two combat teams were KIA by these walkers. I haven’t seen the tapes yet, but they tell me those guys were at full complement and fully trained, but because of the unknown nature of the enemy at the time they became confused, and that caused hesitation, which proved disastrous. The five of us are supposed to be the new bulldogs in the junkyard. Sounds great, sounds very heroic—but on a practical level I’ve never led a team before.”

“As pep talks go, coach,” Bunny said, “this one kinda blows.”

I ignored him. “But what I have done is train fighters. That I know I can do. So, because I’m the big dog I get to teach you four to fight the Joe Ledger way.”

So far the Joe Ledger way had involved them getting their asses handed to them, so they weren’t all that eager to rush in. Not a “rah team” moment.

“How exactly are we supposed to kill these walker things?” Skip asked. “They, er, being dead and all.”

“Try not to get bitten, son,” Bunny said. “That’s a start.”

“In the absence of further info from the medical team we’ll proceed on the assumption that the spine and/or brain stem is the key: damage that and you pull the plug on these things. I kicked the living shit out of the first one—Javad—and I might as well have been shaking his hand; but then I broke his neck and he went right down. Seems reasonable that there’s activity in the brain stem area, so for us the new sweet spot is the spine.”