Jonathan Maberry: Patient Zero

Even though this was all happening too fast I still had time to register the look in his eyes. Despite the twisted, ferociously hungry snarl of his face and the snapping of his teeth, his eyes were totally empty. No flicker of awareness, no trace of self-knowledge, not even the fire of hate. This wasn’t the deadeye stare of a shark, nothing like that. This was freak-show stuff because there was nothing there; it was like looking into an empty room.

I think that terrified me more than the teeth that were biting the air an inch from my windpipe. Right then I knew why the other applicants had failed this audition. They’d probably been big men like me, strong men like me, and maybe they’d been able to hold him off this long—just long enough to look into those soulless eyes. I think that’s when they failed. I don’t know if Javad tore their throats out. I don’t know if this was the point where they started screaming for help and Church sent Buckethead and his goon squad in with Tasers and riot sticks. What I did know was that looking into those eyes nearly took the soul out of me. I could actually feel my throat closing up, could feel an icy wire sending electricity down through my bowels.

I saw terror and hopelessness there. I saw death.

But here’s the thing, you see, I’d seen those things before. I may not have been on any of the world’s battlefields, but Church was right when he’d said that I’ve seen the face of terror. It went a lot deeper than that, though. It isn’t just terror that I understood… I knew the face of death. I’d been bedside when cervical cancer took my mom. I was the last thing she saw before she slipped into the big black nothing, and I saw the light and life go out of her; I saw her eyes change from living eyes to those of a dead person. You can never forget that; the image is burned onto the front of your brain. I was also the one who found Helen after she’d swallowed half a bottle of drain cleaner. She’d left a goodbye message on my voice mail and was already gone when I kicked in the door. I saw her dead eyes, too.

I’ve also looked into the dead eyes of men I’ve killed on the job. Two men in eight years, not counting the four at the warehouse.

So, I’d looked into dead eyes before, I know what I saw there. I saw death and terror and hopelessness. Not my mom’s, not Helen’s, not the criminals I’ve killed—no, the deadness I see is my own, reflected in eyes that have nothing of their own to show. You can’t fake that dead look. A lot of warriors have that look because they are in harmony with death. Church probably knew all this. He knew everything else about me. He knew my psych file. That bastard knew.

Javad lunged forward again, his fingers tearing my shirt, his stink that of a carrion bird. No… that wasn’t right, that wasn’t it. Javad’s smell was that of carrion. He smelled like the dead. Because he was dead. This whole train of thought shot through my brain in a microsecond, its speed and clarity amplified by terror.

Terror’s a funny thing, though. It can take your heart from you and bare your throat to the wolves; it can make you go all hot and crazy, which almost always gets you killed… or it can make you go cold. That’s what happens to warriors—real ones, the kind who are defined by conflict. Like me.

So I went cold. Time slammed to a halt and the whole room seemed to go quiet except for the muffled hammering of my own heart. I stopped trying to get away from something I couldn’t escape—I was jammed into a corner and Church wasn’t sending the damned cavalry—so I did what Javad was doing. I attacked.

I swung my right hand around in a palm shot that turned his head so hard to the right that I heard his neck bones grind. It would have stopped anyone; it didn’t stop him any more than the two slugs had stopped him. But it gave me a few seconds’ escape from those teeth, and even as Javad started wrenching his face back toward me I hooked my leg around his and chopped at the back of his knee. Maybe he couldn’t feel pain but a bent knee is a bent knee—it’s a gravity thing. He canted to one side and I used his sagging weight to spin and drive him into the wall. I caught him by the back of the hair and slammed him face forward into the wall once, twice, again and again. His jaw disintegrated; but I grabbed what was left of his chin and twisted my fingers into his hair and then I pivoted my hips as hard and as fast as I could, taking his head with me. My body turned faster and farther than his neck could.

There was a huge wet snap !

And then Javad was gone. His body switched off like someone had kicked the plug out and he simply dropped. I stepped back and let him fall.

I could barely breathe; sweat poured down my face, stung my eyes. I heard a sound behind me—I wheeled around and Church was leaning against the frame of the open doorway.

“Welcome to the new face of global terrorism,” he said.

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:36 P.M.

“WHAT WAS HE?”

We were back at the table. They’d let me clean up in a bathroom. I showered and dressed in borrowed gym clothes. The shakes had started in the shower. Adrenaline accounted for a lot of it, but it was more than that. After thirty minutes my hands were still trembling and I didn’t care if Church saw it.

He shrugged. “We’re still working on a name for his condition.”

“ Condition? That son of a bitch was dead !”

“From now on,” Church said, “we may have to consider ‘dead’ a relative term.”

I had to sit with that for a while. Church waited me out.

“That is the same guy I shot at the warehouse, right? I mean, I put him down hard. I saw blood and bone on the walls…”

“Javad Mustapha, an Iraqi national,” Church agreed, nodding. “Your shots were mortal but not immediately so; he was still alive when he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced DOA. He ‘revived’ shortly after arrival.” He spread his hands. “We controlled that incident and you won’t find specific mention of it in the papers or in any official report.”

“Holy Christ… are we talking zombies here?”

Church smiled faintly. “We’re calling him a ‘walker.’ Short for ‘Dead Man Walking.’ The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. And before you ask, it’s not anything supernatural.”

“How did this happen? Some kind of toxic spill… a plague…?”

“We don’t know. A prion disease, perhaps, or a parasite; maybe both, but certainly something that causes hyperactivity of the stem cells. True to the nature of parasites, the infected have a totality of purpose built around procreation. Not sexually, of course, but through a bite that is apparently one hundred percent infectious. We’ve only begun to research it.”

“Is it only his bite that’s infectious?” I asked. It felt like ice-cold army ants were marching around in my gut.

“We’ve done a number of tests on sweat and other body fluids but the strongest concentration of the disease is in the saliva. The bite transmits the infection.”

I looked at the bruise on my arm. “I’m not wearing Kevlar. If I’d been bitten in there…”

He looked at me.

Anger was a white-hot furnace in my chest. “You’re a total rat bastard, you know that?”

“As I said, Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don’t yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the ‘patient zero’ for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection.” He paused. “We think we stopped them.”