Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“I’ll see what I can do.” I sighed. “What about treatment, something to kill these prions? Can we give people something to amp up their immune systems?”

He shook his head. “The body’s immune system doesn’t react to prion diseases the way it does to other diseases; it doesn’t kick in and the disease spreads too rapidly with nothing to slow it down. Once it takes hold there is no treatment.”

“Terrific.”

“And killing a prion is incredibly difficult. In labs, where growth hormones are cultivated from extracted pituitary glands, solvents of various kinds have been used to purify the tissue; these solvents kill everything… except the damn prions. Even formaldehyde won’t kill them, which really boggles me. Radiation treatment and bombardment with ultraviolet light doesn’t kill them. We—and by that I mean my fellow wizards in the scientific community as a whole—have tried virtually everything to kill TSEs including treating diseased brain tissues with all manner of chemicals including industrial detergent—and the prions simply won’t die. They don’t even die with the host organism. Bury a corpse with a prion disease and dig up the bones a century later… and the prions are still there. They are, after all, simply proteins.”

“Is that all of it?” I asked.

“I could go on and on about the science—”

“I mean, are those all of the highlights? Is there anything else I have to know if I’m going to lead my team into that crab plant?”

Again Hu looked at Church and now the distant look was gone from Church’s eyes. He nodded to the doctor. “Well,” Hu said, “there’s the issue of infection.”

“Right, it’s transmitted through a bite. I saw enough of that firsthand about three hours ago. I saw those bastards biting kids.”

I looked to see how that hit Hu but there wasn’t a flicker of compassion on his face. He was too caught up in how cool he thought this all was. I wondered how he’d feel if he was in a locked room with a walker.

Hu gave me a devious grin. “It’s a bit worse than that. A whole lot worse, actually.”

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:39 P.M.

“WHAT’S WORSE?”

We turned to see Grace Courtland entering the lab with Rudy right behind her. Rudy looked terrible. His face was the color of old milk, except for dark smudges under his eyes; his lips were a little wet and rubbery, and his eyes had the glassy and violated look of a victim of some dreadful crime.

“Jeez, Rude, are you okay—?” I said quietly as I moved to intercept him.

“Later, Joe. It’s been a hard day for everyone, but let’s talk later.”

Church got to his feet and joined the group. “Captain, your friend Dr. Sanchez has already been entertained by Dr. Hu. And I believe Major Courtland has shown him the St. Michael’s tapes.”

Rudy looked at the floor for a moment, then he took a deep breath and tried to master himself. I hadn’t yet seen those tapes, so having gotten my own tour of hell I could pretty well imagine what horrors were banging around in his head. It made me feel like a total shit for having gotten him dragged into this.

“You’re about to tell him about the rate of infection, Doctor?” Rudy asked in a voice that was steadier than I expected.

“Yep, but he’s your friend… why don’t you break the news to him.”

Rudy nodded. He cleared his throat. “Joe… I’m not sure which I think would be worse, a real case of supernatural zombies like out of the movies or what we have here.”

“Definitely what we have here,” Hu said. Courtland agreed, and even Church nodded.

“This is a lousy way to start a conversation,” I said. “I would have thought that zombies would pretty much be your worst-case scenario.”

Rudy grimaced and shook his head. “You understand what prions are, right? Okay, with any disease there is an incubation period, and for prion pathologies it’s typically very long, anywhere from several months to thirty years in humans.”

“I told him about the parasites,” Hu said.

Rudy nodded. “Prions, though extremely dangerous, are far from being short-term weapons and could at best represent a time-bomb effect. Whoever made this disease pioneered some new way to speed up the process of infection. Now it happens in minutes.”

“Seconds,” I corrected. “Like I said… I saw it.”

Hu said, “We’re seeing all kinds of variations in terms of infection, time of death, and speed of reanimation. We’re only just beginning to build models to study it but we’re nowhere near understanding it. The pattern’s funky, and I’ll bet you my whole set of Evil Dead action figures that we’ve either got mutations or more than one strain. In either case we are seriously screwed.”

Rudy said, “I think we can safely say that when the carrier and victim are in an agitated state, as we had in the hospital and in Delaware today, then the process happens very fast. Adrenaline and ambient temperature both accelerate the process.”

“This is why this is such a major threat,” Church interrupted quietly. “There has always been a lag factor with diseases, even weaponized diseases, and we don’t have that here.”

“Okay. Message understood. If any infected people get out we’re screwed.”

“And when in doubt, Captain,” said Church, “shoot to kill.”

“Dios mio,” Rudy murmured, but I met Church’s stare and gave him a microscopic nod.

“What about inoculation? Can you juice my team in case we get bit?”

“No way,” Hu said. “Remember, the core of this thing is a prion and a prion is simply a misfolded normal protein. Any vaccine that would destroy the prion would destroy all forms of that protein. Once we identify all the parasites we might be able to kill that, and maybe that’ll do some good. No, I think that your team has to consider prophylactic measures instead.”

“Is this thing airborne? I mean, if all we have to do is protect against a bite, then we can suit up with Dragon Skin or Interceptor, or some other kind of body armor. There’s plenty of stuff on the market.”

“I don’t think it’s airborne,” Hu said dubiously, “but it might be vapor borne, which means spit or sweat might carry it. In a tight room at high temperatures… you might want a hazmat suit of some kind.”

“Hard to fight in a hazmat,” I pointed out.

Church held up a finger. “I can make a call and have Saratoga Hammer Suits here by morning.” I guess all of us looked blank, so he added, “Permeable chemical warfare protective overgarments for domestic preparedness. It’s a composite filter fabric based on highly activated and hard carbon spheres fixed onto textile carrier fabrics. It’s tough, but light enough to permit agile movement as well as unarmed and armed combat. It’s been out for a bit, but I can get the latest generation. I have a friend in the industry.”

“You always have a friend in the industry,” Hu said under his breath, which got a flicker of a smile from Grace. A DMS in-joke apparently.

Church stepped away and opened his cell phone. When he came back he said, “A helo will meet us at the staging area for the crab plant raid by six A.M. with fifty suits.”

“I guess you do have a friend in the industry,” Rudy said.

“And the big man scores,” Hu said, and held up his hand for a high five but Church stared at him with calm, dark eyes. Hu coughed, lowered his hand, and turned to me. “If you go in with body armor and those suit thingees you should be okay. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless there are a lot of them.”

“Let’s hope not.”