Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Joe!” I heard Grace scream. “Fall back.” And suddenly the air around me exploded as six pistols fired at once. The front rank of the walkers was hurled back; then a second volley dropped more of them. I felt one round sing past me so close it burned the air next to my ear. I turned and saw Ollie staring at me with a shocked expression, and the gun in his hand trembled. Was it fatigue? Or fear of the walkers? Or had he missed the target he was aiming at? He opened his mouth to say something but I shot him a hard look as I rushed to get behind the line of guns.

Grace and her team had pushed tables together to create a redoubt. Skip was at the far end, boxed in behind the edge of a table and the last remaining cabinet; the rest were shoulder to shoulder behind the makeshift battlements. It was flimsy, but it was all we had. On the floor at Skip’s feet was the lab tech, wide-eyed with fear.

As Top passed me a pistol he murmured, “Getting to be a real nice time for that cavalry, Cap’n.”

“Prayer might help,” I said. “You a churchgoing man, Top?”

“Not lately, but if things work out right I might start up again.”

Grace and I stood behind one table, sharing half a box of bullets, timing our shots so that one fired while the other reloaded. “Some rescue, huh?” she said, trying to make a joke of it even as tears glittered in the corners of her eyes.

“I’m sorry about your team.”

She sniffed and cleared her throat. “We’re at war. People die.”

I looked at her for a long moment but she turned her face toward the door and I could see her features harden up like concrete drying in a hot sun. On top of everything else the loss of her team was a terrible blow, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a fatal one. Not only for us in the moment, but for her if she lived through this. Maybe Rudy could help. Or, maybe I could. I hoped the schism didn’t run too deep for anyone to reach.

I drew a breath as two more walkers shuffled into the corridor, then three more, then nine. They moaned like lost souls, though I wondered if they were truly without souls or if in some dreadful way the person that these creatures had once been was somehow trapped in those undead bodies; caught there with no way to control the killing machine that their bodies had become, watching with awful impotence as they shambled toward murder or death.

It was bad, bad thinking and I wondered if I was going into shock. Shit, I snarled inwardly. Got to stay solid. Got to stay sharp.

I squeezed the trigger and the leading walker was flung backward against the others, the whole front of his face disintegrating in a cloud of pink mist. I fired again and Grace shot at the same moment. Then everyone was firing and once more the room became a hell of earsplitting gunfire, the moans of the dead, and the screams of the living. The living dead kept coming, wave after wave of them. We shot well, a head shot nearly every time, but they kept coming.

The hammer of Grace’s pistol clicked on an empty cylinder. “Bugger all,” she hissed, “I’m out.”

One by one we emptied our guns and they kept on coming, moaning, reaching for us. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grace’s profile. Even dirty and marked by strain she was beautiful. So brave and noble. As I fired my last bullet I could feel my heart sink to a lower spot in my chest. The dead were going to get to us. There were still forty or more of them in the room and more of them kept shambling through the door. I knew what I was going to have to do. It would be simple… stand up and take her chin in one hand and gather up her hair in the other. It was easy, nothing more than a quick turn of her head and then she’d be free of all of this, beyond the reach of the walkers and their plague. I could do it. I’d done it twice with walkers—with Javad and with the walker in Room 12. I could do it now for Grace to keep her from slipping into that ungodly hell. The last gun clicked empty. Around us the air was filled with the hungry cries of the dead.

I felt myself getting to my feet, felt my hands flexing open, felt myself starting to move toward Grace, the movement necessary but the motion stalled by doubt. What if I’m wrong? What if she stops me and they get us both while we’re struggling? What if I… and then above us, all at once, six of the steel-shuttered windows blew inward.

We all looked up, and even some of the walkers turned their dead faces upward as the steel panels—buckled and in fragments—tumbled murderously into the room.

“Heads up!” I screamed and my reaching hands closed on her shoulders and pulled Grace back as a huge chunk of steel drove like a logger’s maul right down onto the spot where Grace had been leaning, cleaving the table in half. We both screamed as my pull carried us back and down, and then we were rolling over and over each other until we collided with the wall. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in the crook of her neck as debris pelted down on my back. The others dove beneath the heavy lab tables or crowded into the corners as hundreds of pounds of jagged steel slammed into the ground. The front three ranks of the walkers were crushed and torn to rags, but the others, unable to feel shock or surprise, tottered forward with no change in their singleness of purpose. We had no cover except the shattered debris of our redoubt, but even as we raised our heads the air was rent by the heavy chatter of automatic gunfire. We scrambled farther back against the walls and covered our ears and eyes as a hail of bullets tore the crowd of walkers to pieces. Ricochets slapped the walls over our heads and dusted us with plaster.

I caught Top’s eye and he looked at me, looked up, rolled his eyes and shook his head. Despite the absolute insanity of the moment, he mouthed the words “Hooray for the cavalry.” Then he cracked up.

With bullets whipping past us and death all around, I felt a hitch in my chest and thought with horror that I was about to cry, but I burst out laughing instead. Grace looked at us like we’d lost our minds. Bunny joined us and we howled like madmen.

“Bloody Yanks,” Grace said, and then was laughing, too, though tears coursed down her cheeks. I pulled her to me and held her as her laughter melted into sobs.

I was still holding her when Gus Dietrich came down through a window on a fast-rope, firing an automatic weapon as he dropped into the room.

SS Albert Schweitzer / Wednesday, July 1

MEN IN BANDAGES walked the decks, or slumped onto chaise longues, or sat in wheelchairs with the brakes locked against the slow pitch and yaw of the freighter. The SS Albert Schweitzer had been on semipermanent loan to the International Red Cross for over sixteen years now, and for more than half a decade it had assisted the British and American navies with the transport of wounded and convalescing service personnel from theaters of war to their homelands, or to nations where the right kind of medical treatment was available. Experimental surgery in Switzerland and Holland, reconstructive surgery in Brazil, microsurgery in Canada, thoracic and neurosurgery in the United States. Funding for the ship’s staff and enormous operating costs were underwritten by five governments, but in real dollars and cents the government donations barely kept coal in the furnaces. The crew and staff salaries, the medical equipment, the drugs and surgical supplies, and even the food and drink were provided via generous grants from three different multinational corporations: Hamish Dunwoody of Scotland, Ingersol-Spüngen Pharmaceuticals of Holland, and an America-based vaccine company called Synthetic Solutions. The companies shared no known connection, but all three were owned in part, and by several clever removes, by Gen2000. And Gen2000 was Sebastian Gault.