Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

He fired and fired and fired. Behind him, through the narrow observation slit in the wall, he heard Amirah’s mad laughter.

Grace / The Bell Chamber / Saturday, July 4; 12:11 P.M.

“FOR GOD’S SAKE… help me!” The junior senator from the state of Alabama raised his head and stared pleadingly at Grace Courtland. His skin had already turned from a healthy tan to the color of old parchment. There were two puncture marks on his cheek from where a pair of the glass darts had struck him.

Grace raised her pistol and pointed it at him. “Get against the wall, sir,” she said tightly.

“I… don’t feel…” He shook his head as if trying to clear muddy thoughts. “I’m… sick…”

“Sir… for the love of God, please get against the wall with the others.”

Behind her a woman’s voice slashed the air. “Agent… what the hell do you think you’re doing? Lower your weapon immediately.” It was not the first time the Vice President’s wife had yelled at her in the last few minutes. Grace stood her ground.

The room was silent except for sobs from the wounded. Grace, Bunny, Dietrich, and Brierly had worked through the crowd, separating out anyone who had been stung by the darts. Over sixty people, all of them sick and shivering with fever, were huddled together in a cluster by the wall farthest from the STAFF ONLY door. Rudy moved among them making quick and purely visual assessments of them. His face was rigid with shock. A line of Secret Service agents, fifteen of them, stood with their pistols pointed at the sick and wounded, but even the toughest agents among them looked confused and frightened. Outside, on the other side of the thick glass walls, the National Guard were setting up machine gun emplacements, and the sky above Independence Mall was filled with army gunships.

Things had started brewing to a panic and so Grace had climbed to the top of the podium and fired a shot into the ceiling to get them to listen. “Listen to me!” she shouted.

Bunny and Dietrich took up positions around the base of the podium, their guns at the ready. The fifteen remaining Secret Service agents stood in a line between the infected and the rest, their faces showing the terrible doubt and conflict they each felt.

In a few short sentences Grace told everyone that the Freedom Bell had been rigged by terrorists and that anyone who had been struck by the darts was likely to become infected with a highly contagious disease. That helped with the separation as the uninjured moved quickly away from them. The disease, she told them, would cause erratic and violent behavior. As she spoke she looked for signs of infection in anyone who had not admitted to having been stung.

That’s when Audrey Collins, the VP’s wife, had suddenly spoken up to champion the cause of the infected. Collins was a thin woman with a hatchet face and fierce blue eyes, and despite the agony from three cracked ribs, she managed to muster enough personal power to take a commanding position in the conflict. “You will lower your weapon, Agent, or so help me God, I will make sure that you are punished to the fullest extent of the law.”

Grace stepped down from the podium, and Dietrich turned and brought his gun up to cover the infected junior senator. Grace said, “Ma’am, you have to be quiet and let us do our jobs—”

Collins cut her off. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, ma’am, I know who you are and I know full well that your husband can have me jailed, deported, and probably stood against a wall and shot… but right now I am trying to save the lives of most of the people in this room and probably all of the people in this country. If you interfere with me or prevent me from doing what I have to do I will knock you on your ass.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Grace took a step closer and the savage look in her eyes was so ferocious that the people who had gathered behind the VP’s wife faded back, leaving the woman alone with Grace.

“Ma’am, if you do anything— anything —to try and stop me I’ll put you against the wall with them. Believe me, you don’t want me to do that.”

“Ma’am,” said Rudy, stepping up beside Grace. “I implore you to listen.”

“Slow down here, Major,” Brierly said, coming up on Grace’s other side. “Everyone’s scared here.”

The remaining Presidential Detail agents milled uncertainly near Mrs. Collins. Brierly had briefed them and had even channeled the President himself on to the team’s command link. The President’s voice had been trembling with fear and rage but he had been clear: Grace Courtland was in charge. Even so, threats to their principal went against all of their training.

“No one more than me, sir,” Grace said, but her eyes locked on the VP’s wife. “But this is not something I can back down on. You know that.”

Bunny moved to Grace’s right with a good shooter’s angle to the presidential agents.

“Mrs. Collins…?” implored the junior senator.

Audrey Collins, apart from being married to the Vice President, was a career politician in her own right and she was used to giving orders rather than taking them. But for all her bluster she was no fool. She shifted her furious stare from Grace and looked at the young senator; and changed her expression from anger to wretched concern.

“Do what the major says, Tom,” she said to the frightened congressman. “Everything will be okay.”

She turned to Grace and the look they shared insisted that nothing was going to be okay. Not now, and maybe not ever. “If you’re wrong about this,” said Mrs. Collins, “I’ll—”

“I’m not,” Grace interrupted. Then she softened her own expression. “Thank you.”

“Fuck you,” said the Vice President’s wife.

Grace almost smiled, but then someone screamed.

“My God! She’s biting him!”

Everyone turned toward the wall, to where the anchorwoman for the local ABC affiliate was hunched over the unconscious body of a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. The anchorwoman, a petite blonde with sculpted nails and Prada shoes, was chewing on the tourist’s arm.

“No,” Bunny said. “Come on… no !”

“God help us all,” Grace said and raised her gun.

What happened next was unspeakable.

The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:12 P.M.

THERE WAS NO time to think. I put a shot into the head of the agent and spun on my heel before he flopped back against the ground, sprinting in the direction of the scream. That wasn’t the hunting-cat screech of a walker—it was filled with very human terror. I just hoped it wasn’t her last scream.

Screw caution—I ran. I tore through room after room. Twice white-faced figures lunged at me out of the shadows and each time I put them down with single shots without breaking stride. I could still hear voices behind. Top and Skip calling my name. They were smart enough to follow the trail of bodies.

The First Lady screamed again, just ahead, on the other side of a closed door.

I hit the door with a jumping kick that tore it off its hinges. The door crashed onto a walker and crushed him underneath. I leaped into the room, taking in the scene as I landed in a combat crouch.

The First Lady was huddled in the corner of an office cubicle. Her Secret Service detail had been slaughtered. Only one agent remained and there was a crowd of seven walkers trying to bring him down. The agent was bleeding from half a dozen bites and his face was white with pain and panic. Two of the walkers were the last remaining agents; the rest were employees of the Liberty Bell Center. No sign of Ollie or O’Brien.