Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“The CIA? How do you know that?”

“He told us when we were trying to sort out who should be team leader. He said that he’d done extensive covert ops work. He’s a spook and I don’t trust spooks.”

“It could be anyone,” I said. “The DMS is ass deep in spooks and spies.”

“Yeah,” Top agreed slowly, “it sure could be anyone. For all you know it could be me. If I’d opened that door, then going back to Room Twelve with you and Bunny would have been perfect cover. Go in and pop a few caps. Who’d suspect me?”

“Yet you cleared Bunny because he was there. Double standard, Top?”

“Maybe I’m trying to confuse you, Cap’n.”

“You’re not. So, where’s that leave us?”

A smile blossomed on his dark face. It changed him, knocking years off, but even so it never reached his eyes. “I guess it leaves us both up shit creek, Cap’n. Personally, I don’t plan to trust nobody.”

“Trust is a hard thing to come by in this world.”

“It surely is.”

We let it drop and turned our attention to the room the Burmese lab tech had come out of. I snapped on the lights and we looked around at banks of computers. Big ones that whirred constantly. The temperature of the room was even lower than the rest of the building; a wall-mounted thermometer read thirty-five degrees. I examined the nearest computer, which was about the size of a Coca-Cola machine. The make and model were on brass plates screwed to the casing. I tapped the mike.

“Cowboy to Deacon, over.”

“Deacon.”

“Does the name IBM Blue Gene/L mean anything to you?”

“It does. Why?”

“I’m standing in a room full of them. Advise.”

“Cowboy, be advised you are holding winning lottery ticket.”

“Nice to know. Infil starting to get noisy. One guest catching Z’s. Green Giant taking him to back door; Joker is minding that location. Advise.”

There was a slight pause and I could imagine Church nibbling the edge of a vanilla wafer as he considered his answer. “Team status?”

“Scarface is MIA. Conducting search. My call is this: radio silence ten minutes plus one second then kick the doors. Cowboy out.”

The second I switched back to the team channel Bunny’s voice filled my ear. “Cowboy, Cowboy, this is Green Giant. Be advised Joker is MIA.”

I looked at Top who was frowning. “Repeat and verify, Green Giant.”

“Verified, Joker is MIA. No time for code, boss. Our long guns are gone and the back door is sealed. Some kind of security shutter rolled down over it. We’re in a box.”

“Drop your cargo and get back here on the double!” I snapped. Top and I rushed out into the hall, guns ready.

“That’s two down,” Top said.

We turned to see Bunny running up the hall like an offensive tackle after a slow quarterback. He skidded to a stop. “I left the prisoner at the door and called it in. No sign of Skip.”

I hit the button for the DMS channel. “Cowboy to Deacon, Cowboy to Deacon, request immediate hard infil. Kick the doors, repeat, kick the doors.”

But all I heard over my headset was the hiss of static. The signal was gone.

A sudden noise made us all jump and we formed a fast circle, guns pointing out. Somewhere deep inside the building there was a sound like the dying sigh of a giant as big turbine engines shut down, slowing their whine as they decelerated.

“What the hell was that?” Top growled.

“I think the refrigeration units just shut off,” Bunny whispered.

Then there was a loud blast as wall-mounted vents snapped from open and hot air shot into the corridor.

“Uh-oh,” Top said softly. The air coming out of the vents was intensely hot and within seconds the temperature in the hall had gone up ten degrees, then fifteen. It continued to climb.

“Something tells me this is not good news,” Bunny said, looking over his shoulder at me.

I tried calling Church again but still got only silence. It was the same on all channels. “Signal’s being jammed.”

“Yeah,” Bunny confirmed, “not good news.”

“Told you this was a goddamn trap,” Top said.

And at that moment the locks on all of the doors along the hallway clicked open. That’s when we heard the first moans as dozens of pale-faced people staggered out into the hall in front of us and behind.

This wasn’t a trap… it was a slaughterhouse.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:31 A.M.

WE WERE TRAPPED, front and back.

The closest of the people was twenty feet down the hall. It was a middle-aged woman with lank blond hair and a stained housedress. Her eyes were wide and she staggered and nearly fell as the crowd of them jostled her. I brought my pistol up and put the laser sight on her forehead. Bunny and Top were aiming at opposite ends of the hall, but none of us fired yet. My finger was still outside the trigger guard and I could feel cold slush churning in my stomach. These were civilians. Behind the woman was a young boy of no more than ten; and next to him a pretty teenage girl in a short denim skirt. There were people in business suits and bathing suits, and I caught the flash of a uniform and saw a mailman.

“Orders, sir?” hissed Top.

My finger stayed outside of the trigger guard. “We have to make sure.”

“Boss… this is getting tight,” Bunny whispered.

I wondered if this was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt at St. Michael’s. Was it the absolute inhumanity of the necessary response that kept them from shooting? The meatpacking plant had been different; that had been a straight good guys/bad guys shootout, but these people were not enemy combatants. At least, not yet. The crowd choked the hallway in both directions but they milled there, not moving forward, staring at us as we stared back. It was completely surreal.

“Hold your positions,” I said, staring at the crowd. The moment felt like it was stretching but in reality I knew that only a second or two had ticked off the clock.

“Maybe they ain’t walkers,” Bunny said.

“Say, farmboy,” Top said, “why don’t you go check ’em for a pulse.”

“Screw that.”

The middle-aged woman took an uncertain step toward us.

I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard.

She opened her mouth and for a moment I thought I saw her smile as if she was showing relief that someone had come to rescue her. But that smile stretched and stretched and stretched until it became a rapacious leer. With a scream like some jungle animal she ran straight at me.

Once she had probably been somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Maybe a grandmother with grandkids in diapers that she spoiled. I didn’t know who she was or how she came to be here in this terrible place; all I knew is that she was here and whatever loving personality she might once have had, and whatever memories and secrets she once knew, were gone now, torn away by a prion-driven parasite in her blood that left behind only a shell. A predatory thing in human disguise. This surely was what Baker and Charlie teams had felt: the dreadful certainty that no action could be right in a situation so thoroughly wrong. They must have felt the horror that I now felt as this woman lunged at me, running on pale legs marked with varicose veins, closing the distance in bedroom slippers that had a lilac print; her stomach bouncing, her breasts swaying, her mouth open in a feral grin of unnatural appetite. It was enough to take the heart and soul out of anyone. It had taken the soul out of all those men and women in those other two DMS teams.

But I shot her through the face without hesitation.

Dear God, what does that say about who and what I am?

Behind me Bunny and Top opened up. We all still had the sound suppressors on our guns so the fight became a ballet of muted carnage. The walkers in the back of the crowd moaned—and that sounded low and distant; the ones in the front screeched like cats, and our handguns made high, soft sounds like someone saying, “Psst!” to get everyone’s attention. Even as we fired the moment continued to be unreal.