Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

The first door we came to was set with a simple keycard lock. Nothing that would slow us up for very long if we were in a hurry.

“Bug,” I said, and Ollie fished in his pocket and removed two tiny devices. The first was the size of a postage stamp and painted a neutral gray. He handed it to me and I pulled off a clear plastic cover to expose the photosensitive chemicals, and then pressed it to the side of the metal door for three seconds. When I finished counting Mississippis I pulled the strip off and saw that it was now the same color as the door. I turned it over and removed the tape from the other side, exposing a strong adhesive, and then pressed it to the door at about knee level, below where the eye would not naturally fall when opening a door. I examined the results and Ollie and I exchanged a raised-eyebrows look. Unless you knew exactly where to look the thing was invisible, blending in completely with the paint on the door. The little chameleon bugs were supposed to have incredible pickup and could relay info up to a quarter mile.

“Nice,” Ollie said as he handed me the second device, a silver disk the size of a nickel. I removed the adhesive backing and placed the device on the underside of the keycard box. The bug would do nothing until someone used a keycard to open the door and then it would record the magnetic code and transmit it immediately to the DMS where it would be processed through MindReader and the code signal would be sent back to us. We each carried master keycards that could be remote-programmed by the DMS techs. Within ninety seconds of someone using a keycard here we’d all have cards with the same code. Our master keycards could store up to six separate card codes. Church really had nice toys, but I hoped it worked as well as promised.

I tapped my earpiece. “First one’s in place.”

We moved down the hallway and repeated the process at each door. Counting both sides of the hall, there were eleven doors in all; then the hallway ended at a T-juncture, with shorter corridors branching at right angles.

“Split up?” Ollie suggested.

I nodded. “Break squelch once if you find anything, twice if you need me to come running.”

“Roger that,” he said and melted away.

This part of the building was badly lit, with fluorescent lights hanging from their wires like debris caught in some gigantic spider web. The ceiling was cracked, water dripped from a damaged pipe somewhere in the walls. The floor was wet and the smell back here was awful. I edged forward carefully; debated switching to night vision, but the light was enough so that I could pick my way. My foot touched something and I looked down to see the bloated corpse of a dead rat lying there, its eyes and mouth open, tongue lolling. I stepped over it and moved forward until I reached the first door. It was closed and blocked by a row of dented trash cans filled with all kinds of junk: old coats, bent umbrellas, broken toys, newspapers, soiled diapers. Even with the cold there were flies buzzing everywhere and the stench intensified. I held my breath while I placed the chameleon bug and keycard scanner and was grateful when I could move away.

There was more trash in the hallway. Odd stuff. A deflated football lying on a brand-new left sneaker. An open briefcase whose papers had spilled out and become soaked with rust-colored water. A smashed cell phone. Two Frisbees and a push-up bra. Half a dozen iPods. Dozens of letters—most of them junk mail and bills—still sealed and stamped. The broken body of a headless Barbie doll. An overturned shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.

The sight of the junk scattered in the dark and rusty water gave me the creeps. Bad thoughts were forming in my head and the sane half of my brain was telling me to do an about-face and get the hell out of here. I moved along the hall to bug the last three doors before the hallway ended at another bend. With my pistol in both hands I hugged the near wall and then quick-looked around the corner, dodging my head in and back and then analyzing the flash image. What I saw sent an icy chill rippling down my spine.

Oh man, I thought. Don’t let me be right about this.

I rounded the corner, still checking for cameras and threats, pistol barrel following my line of vision so that it pointed everywhere I looked. In front of me was a big set of double doors. It wasn’t the door or even the stench that made me feel like there wasn’t enough air to breathe. The floor was heaped with lots more clothes, more personal items, more human detritus; some of it looked new, undamaged. It looked like stuff that had been taken away from ordinary people. A lot of ordinary people.

The door was sealed with a heavy padlock that was cinched tight through heavy metal rings that had been welded to the steel doorframe. And the door, the surrounding walls, and the floor were all smeared with some viscous substance that had dried to a chocolaty-brown color. I bent close and saw that hidden by the smeared goo were wires that trailed up the wall and disappeared into small holes that had been drilled through the concrete. I turned and followed the wires down the wall and along the hall for five feet to where they vanished behind a fire extinguisher that was mounted at chest height. Booby trap. Pretty well hidden, too. The question was whether the charge was inside the extinguisher or inside that locked room. Or both.

Screw this. I backed carefully away, then stopped and looked at where the water lapped against the bottom of the door. The rust color was richer and redder by the door as if something inside were feeding pigment to the mix.

Understanding hit me like a punch and I rose quickly and backed away from the door, feeling my heart hammering as an atavistic dread sprang up in my chest. I stared at the stained water and the smears on the walls as the full horror of it sank in. The dark muck smeared on the doors was not mud, and the water wasn’t stained with rust.

All of it, every square inch of it, was blood.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:23 A.M.

I TOOK A step forward and leaned as close to the door as I could without touching it. Beyond was silence. And yet… it was a strange silence, like someone holding their breath on the other end of a phone line. You’re sure they’re there but you can hear anything. I didn’t like this one damn bit and moved back to the bend in the hall. No sign of Ollie and no sounds from his direction. That silence didn’t feel good, either, but it wasn’t the same as what I’d sensed—or imagined—from beyond that grisly door.

I crouched down behind the trash cans and tapped my earpiece to open a secure channel to the DMS. “Deacon, do you read? This is Cowboy,” I said, using the code names we agreed upon before we saddled up. Rudy had suggested mine. Knowing the military sense of humor, it could have been a lot worse. I knew a guy back in the Rangers who got hung with the code name Cindy-Lou Who.

“Reading Cowboy; this is Deacon.” The headsets were so good it was like Church had snuck up behind me again and was whispering in my ear.

I quickly reported what I’d found, including the locked door and the blood.

“Leave it for now. All video went black as soon as you entered the building. We’re receiving zero wireless intel. Audio signal is fluctuating but still operational. Assume jamming devices. What’s your team status?”

“Scarface is taking a walk down the hall. Joker is on surveillance; rest of team is at door-knock.” I decided to give my team the nicknames I’d mentally hung on them when I met them. Joker, Scarface, Sergeant Rock, and Green Giant. “Note this: the ambient temperature whole building is just above freezing. Climate controlled. Confirm understood.”