Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Captain,” Church said, “let me introduce Doctor Hu.”

I stared. “Doctor Who? Are you shitting me? This some kind of goofy code name or something?”

“H-U,” Church said, spelling it.

“Oh.”

Without rising Hu offered his hand and I shook it. I expected something slack and moist but he broke the stereotype and gave me a hard, dry shake. What he said, though, was, “You’re the hotshot zombie killer. Man, I just saw the footage from Delaware. Wow! Freaking awesome! You can kick zombie ass”

He smelled like old baked bread, which is not as good as it sounds. “I thought you guys called them walkers.”

“Yeah, sometimes.” He shrugged. “It’s more PC, I guess. Doesn’t stress the troops.”

I gave his toys a significant nod. “And you wouldn’t want to appear insensitive.”

Hu grinned. “Denial is stupid. We’re fighting the living dead. Would you prefer we call them ‘undead citizens’? I mean, I originally wanted to call them ALFs.”

I looked from him to Church. “Alien lifeless forms,” Church said with a wooden face.

“Get it?” Hu said, “Because they’re illegal aliens.”

I said, “How do people not shoot you?”

He spread his hands. “I’m useful.”

And I swear to God I saw Church’s mouth silently form the words “Only just.” Aloud he said, “Dr. Hu enjoys his jokes more than does his audience.”

“You said as much about me the first time we met.”

“Mm.” Church turned to the scientist. “Please answer any questions Captain Ledger has.”

“What’s his clearance level?”

Church was looking at me as he said, “Open door. He’s in the family now.” With that he walked over to a nearby workstation, pulled out the chair, sat, crossed his legs, and appeared to totally tune us out.

Hu looked me up and down for a moment, nodding to himself, then he beamed a great smile. “You have any background in science?”

“Forensics on the job,” I said, “a few related night courses, and a subscription to Popular Science. ”

“I’ll use smallish words,” he said, trying not to sound as condescending as he was. “We’re dealing with a weaponized disease of immense complexity. This didn’t evolve, this isn’t Mother Nature getting cranky and throwing out a mutation. This isn’t even a disease pathogen that could have evolved. We’re into the bizarro zone here. Somebody brewed this up in a lab, and whoever made this is smart.”

“Joe Obvious speaks,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I mean scary smart. Whoever did this should have a shelf full of Nobel Prizes and a whole alphabet soup behind his name. I don’t have the stuff to make this and Mr. Church buys me lots of nice toys. This would take a major research facility, electron mikes, clean rooms, and a lot of shit you never heard of maybe. Maybe stuff no one’s ever heard of. This is radical technology, Captain.”

“Call me Joe.”

“Joe?” He snapped his fingers. “Hey… your name’s Joe Ledger.”

“Yeah, I thought we’d pretty well established that.”

“You into comic books. Y’know… Dr. Spectrum?” He had an expectant look on his face. “Dr. Spectrum, the superhero from Marvel Comics? His secret identity is ‘Joe Ledger.’ That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”

“All things considered,” I said, “no, not very much.”

“Doctor…” Church said with a note of soft warning in his voice.

“Okay, okay, whatever. We’re talking about the disease,” he said, and for a moment I saw the scientist behind the geek façade. “Look, science is only occasionally cool and a soul-crushing bore the other ninety-nine percent of the time. Aside from the fact that the empirical process requires endless repetition on each and every freaking step, there’s also the reality of state and federal regulations on what we can and cannot do. A lot of research opportunities are limited and some are blocked. Biological weapons, that sort of thing.”

“Even with the military?”

“Yes.”

“Even supersecret military?” I said, half smiling.

He hesitated. “Well, okay, that starts getting to be a bit more fun, but even then you can’t publish half the time, which means you don’t get prizes and you don’t write bestsellers.”

“No groupies?”

“You joke, but there are women attracted to brains. We don’t all die virgins.”

“Okay. And this relates to zombies how?”

“I think we have ourselves a genuine mad scientist. A supervillain.” He seemed really happy about the idea. I kind of wanted to punch him.

I glanced at Church, who raised his eyebrows in a “you’re the one who wanted to talk to him” kind of look.

Hu said, “I’m serious. We have someone with deep intellect and vast resources. I mean that: vast. Bear in mind that lots of terrorists come from oil-producing nations. It would take that kind of money for our Dr. Evil to do this sort of thing.”

“Got it. So has your supervillain actually managed to raise the dead?”

“No, look… these walkers are not actually dead… but they’re not alive, either.”

“I thought those were pretty much the only two choices.”

“Times change. You know that movie, Night of the Living Dead ? Well, I think ‘living dead’ is a pretty good name for what we got here.” He took a Slinky off his desk and let it flow back and forth between his palms. “Here’s the thing, the body is designed by evolution to have natural redundancies, without which we’d never survive injury or illness. For example, you only really need about ten percent function of the liver, twenty percent function of one kidney, part of one lung. You can live with both arms and legs removed. There are millions of pages of research and case evaluation of patients who have continued to live well past the point where their bodies should have shut down. In some cases we can discover why, in some cases we’re still in the dark. With me so far?”

“Sure.”

“Now look at the walkers. If they were truly and completely dead then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d still be in Brooklyn and you’d be doing whatever you were doing before Mr. Church shanghaied you. Why? Because the dead are dead. They have zero brain function, they don’t get up and chase people.”

“Javad Mustapha was dead,” I pointed out. “I killed him. Twice.”

Hu shook his head. “No, you killed him once, and that was during your second encounter with him. Mind you, when you shot him during that raid you gave him what should have been mortal wounds, and he would have died had it not been for the presence of this pathogen; but this little bastard of a disease did not allow Javad to die. You see, this disease shuts down any part of the body that is not directly related to the purpose of its existence.”

“Which is?”

“To spread the disease. These things are designed to be vectors. Very aggressive vectors. The disease simply shut off the areas damaged by your bullets. Don’t look at me like that; I know how weird this sounds, but someone cooked up something that nearly kills its victims but at the same time prevents them from dying as we previously understood death. Plus, they added a little of this and a little of that so that the host body—the walker—aggressively spreads the pathogen. It’s marvelous but it’s bizarre, because the disease is constantly trying to kill the host while working like a bastard to keep parts of it alive.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does, but not in the way you think; and to a degree that does fit with nature… sort of. When you have an infection the fever you get is the immune system’s attempt to burn it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes the fever does more harm than the disease. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis… they’re a couple of examples of the immune system doing harm because it’s trying to fix the wrong problem, or trying too hard to fix a minor problem. In nature there are plenty of examples,” he said, “but what we have here is someone who has taken that concept into a totally new direction. We have a fatal disease, several parasites, gene therapy, plus some other shit we haven’t sorted out yet, all present in a molecular cluster unlike anything on record. If these guys weren’t trying to destroy America they could make billions off the patents alone.”