Patient Zero (29 page)

Grace herded her team back, and Jackson had enough presence of mind to drag our prisoner with them. That showed optimism, I thought. Then something caught my attention and I turned to look at a steel cabinet mounted against one wall. It was chained shut and across it was stenciled ARMS in Farsi.

“Top! Arms locker on your nine o’clock!”

He spun around and saw the cabinet and a big grin broke out on his face. He couldn’t read Farsi but he got the picture and with a heave of his whole body he brought his bar down on the lock, shattering it. He pulled open the door and we saw six police-style .38 revolvers hung on pegs and a shelf of boxed cartridges. Top’s smile faltered. Automatics and preloaded mags would have been a lot more comforting.

“Buy me some time, farmboy,” he called to Bunny as he and Grace began pulling down guns and tearing open boxes.

I stepped into the corridor to meet the rush of walkers who had succeeded in climbing over the piles of their own dead; Bunny flanked me and together we attacked. The pipe felt like it weighed a ton and each time the shock of impact sent painful shudders through my wrists and shoulders. I could barely drag in enough breath, and sweat stung my eyes. Bunny had to feel the same, and we stood there, fighting to hold the line. But every few seconds we were forced back a step and then another.

“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.

The big man standing by the railing only knew that Gault was involved, though the level and scope of that involvement was unknown to him. Not that it mattered. To El Mujahid the only crucial information was that while aboard this ship he was believed to be Sonny Bertucci, a second-generation Italian American from the tough streets around Coney Island in Brooklyn. In his wallet was a snapshot of Sonny and his wife, Gina, and their two young sons Vincent and Danny. A search of his fingerprints would show that he had worked as a civilian security guard at a Coast Guard base and that he had served for three years with Global Security, a private company licensed to operate in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the most scrupulous computer search would only come up with information verifying this identify because all documents, from the New York State driver’s license to the frequent blood donor’s card he carried in his wallet to the credentials locked in the ship’s safe, were issued by the actual organizations. Gault was wired in everywhere.

The fighter rested his muscular forearms on the cool metal rail and looked out over the waters to the far horizon. The swollen summer sun was setting in the west and its dying light was a fierce red that seemed to set each wave top ablaze. Everything was painted with the hellish glow, and the skyline far across the waters was as black as charred stumps against the fiery sky. Closer to the ship, standing all alone in the burning waters, the Statue of Liberty seemed to melt in the inferno of the sun’s immolation and in El Mujahid’s fierce stare.

Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes
to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts,
and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John
will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

–HEINRICH HEINE,
“LUTETIA; OR, PARIS,”
AUGSBURG GAZETTE,
1842

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 5:01 A.M.

CHURCH DIDN’T ASK me if I was okay. He leaned against the fender of a DMS Humvee and listened as I described everything that had happened in the plant. Around us the DMS operatives and their colleagues from half the civil and federal agencies in the phone book were in full swing. Stadium floodlights had been erected and it was bright as day even though dawn was an hour off. Except for military choppers the airspace above us was designated a no-fly zone; all business and residential properties had been emptied and the whole population of the area moved to a safe distance. The press was not invited in and the scene was officially designated as the target of a “possible” terrorist attack. According to Homeland’s complicated playbook this meant that it was considered a war zone and that in turn meant the military could call all the shots.

When I was finished he stared at me, lips pursed judiciously, and then nodded. “Has everyone been thoroughly checked and cleared by the doctors?”

“Yes. Lots of scratches and cuts, but no bites. My guys are suffering from exhaustion and everyone’s in some level of shock.”

“You as well?” His gaze was penetrating.

“Absolutely. Physically and mentally. Who wouldn’t be? I got the shakes and every muscle I own feels like it’s been run through a Cuisinart. Hu shot me up with some kind of vitamin cocktail, and I’ve had hot coffee, food, and a protein shake that tasted like a horse pissed in it. I feel like crap, but I’ll live.”

He gave a small nod. Mr. Warmth.

“What’s your assessment of what happened in there this morning?” he asked.

A dozen smartass replies came to mind but I kept a leash on my tongue. I said, “It was a trap and we walked into it.”

“You got out of it.”

“We were getting our asses handed to us in there. I got lucky.”

“Not counting your two encounters with Javad, this is your third combat situation with the walkers with zero casualties from your own team. In this kind of fight, ‘lucky’ can be enough.”

“Not for Grace’s people. Alpha Team got chopped. That’s hard, man.”

“It’s very hard,” he agreed.

“They had the whole place booby-trapped and as soon as we broke into the lab they remote-detonated the computer room. The holding pens for the walkers were rigged to open all at once, which means we tripped some kind of alarm, something we didn’t see. None of that was an accident. Those bastards knew we were coming.”

“Knew that it was today, or knew that it was inevitable?”

It was a crucial question and one that I’d been mulling for the last few hours. Our entire assessment of the enemy and his potential hung on that answer. “I don’t know. They were ready, but not completely. Only two of their bombs went off. The walkers didn’t come after us fast enough or in the right place. It should have been an all-you-can-eat affair, but we survived. And none of the walkers got out. None of that adds up.”

“No,” he said, and I think he was as troubled by these facts as I was.

“Y’know, I don’t know if we’re looking at this thing the right way.”

“I’m pretty certain we’re not.”

“We were expecting to find      what, a bunch of guys sitting around a table plotting the downfall of Western civilization? Instead we find what looks to me like a testing facility. These guys were studying the walkers. More so and more thoroughly than down in Delaware.”

“What about your team? Did they perform to your expectations?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I expect a frank and open report, Captain. Now’s not a good time to be coy.”

“I’m not being coy, Church. I’ve known these guys for less than a full day and all of it’s been action. Yesterday they performed superbly. This morning we hit some potholes. Skip Tyler and Ollie Brown both went missing under questionable circumstances and I haven’t had time to fully debrief them. There are some      twitchy points about that. Skip claims he was jumped and Tasered from his blind side, but that doesn’t square with the facts because there were only two ways out of that shower room: the door my team came through and the corridor Skip was watching. He says he got zapped and then woke up in a storeroom, managed to cut his bonds and retrieve his weapon, and was then set upon by walkers. Ollie’s story is about the same. Says someone must have opened a door and Tasered him. Both of them have burns on their necks, and most of the guards in the plant carried Tasers.” I didn’t mention the fact that Ollie had nearly blown my head off during the fight. It was something Ollie and I would discuss at some later time.

“So, for a considerable amount of time you can’t account for either of those men?”

“Guess not.”

“By your own statement there was a period where you were alone, which means that Sims and Rabbit were not with you throughout the mission. And you told me that Sergeant Rabbit carried a prisoner back to the entrance and it was he who reported that Tyler was missing. How do you know that he didn’t disable Tyler and then break the prisoner’s neck? We have no immediate proof that the prisoner died as a result of Alpha Team blowing open the door.”

“Are you targeting Echo Team? You think that’s where the mole is?”

“I have no idea where the mole is and I’m questioning everyone,” he said with some edge in his voice. “I’m not a big fan of making assumptions, Captain. Until proven otherwise everyone is under the microscope.”

We glared at each other for a minute, but then I nodded. “Yeah, damn it.”

Church looked away to watch a truck drive by and when he turned back to me he was completely composed.

“Maybe you should broaden your search,” I said. “Instead of just going all Inquisition on everyone in the DMS, you might want to take a close look at whoever sent these people to you. Everyone you have was handpicked, right? Well, then, how sure are you about the people who picked them?”

Church gazed at me for a space and I thought I could hear relays clicking in his head. “Thank you for that suggestion, Captain. It wouldn’t surprise me if the mole was planted simply to bring the DMS down. It might not even be connected with the terrorists. After all, everyone in the intelligence community constantly jockeys for funding and there’s probably some hard feelings from some quarters that we’re getting their funding.”

“And are we?”

“Sure, but there’s a war on and we’re a little more ‘frontline’ than most. Mind you, there is always some political espionage and backstabbing going on in the intelligence services. Always has been, and it’s factored into daily life. The release of the walkers from Room Twelve may have been a terrorist act or it may have been meant to disrupt the DMS and discredit me.”

“Mass murder is a pretty extreme thing to do just to discredit someone. Are you that important?”

He shrugged.

“Well then, let me put it another way: are you that vulnerable?”

I didn’t expect an answer to that but he surprised me. “Not as much as some people might think.” He wouldn’t elaborate on that rather enigmatic remark, however, nor did he return to the topic. His cell beeped and he opened it and listened for a moment and then hung up without comment. “Dr. Hu has finished prepping the prisoner for interrogation.”

As he turned to go I blocked his way. “Slow your roll one minute more. I failed in there, Church. The quiet infil turned into a full-out assault and people died. You hired me on to lead Echo Team and I led them right into a trap.”

He looked at me steadily through the nearly opaque lenses of his glasses. “What do you want to hear? That I’m disappointed? That this was a badly led mission? That I want you to resign?”

I wasn’t going to feed him the script to my own dismissal so I waited.

“Sorry,” he said, “but you’re still Echo Team leader. I don’t have much interest in Monday-morning quarterbacking. So far you’re still four and oh with walkers. Baker and Charlie teams were totally destroyed; Alpha Team has been cut down by half      while Echo Team, small as it is, remains intact.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m the man for this job—”

He sighed through his nose. “If you need absolution go see a priest. If you want to decompress, talk to Dr. Sanchez. However, if you feel that you have some need to put things right and balance the scales, then help me stop this thing. Besides      last night you told me that you wanted to wait until your team was fully rested. We didn’t, and we can both take blame for that if blame needs to be assigned.”

I said, “What about reinforcements? I thought you had more Echo Team candidates on their way.”

“Some of them have already arrived. They’re being processed at the warehouse as we speak. They’ll be shown the tapes, given the speeches, and when you get back you can start training them.”

“Maybe we should send Top Sims back there now. Him and Bunny. They can start training the new guys.”

“Not Brown and Tyler?”

“I need to have a chat with each of them first.”

His phone rang again and he looked at the display and his mouth twitched with impatience. He flipped his phone open. “Yes, Mr. President,” he said. I raised my eyebrows but Church kept his usual composure. He listened for a few moments, then said, “Mr. President, I have neither the time nor the facts to give you a full briefing. What I can tell you now is that the crab plant appears to have been rigged as a trap. Yes, sir, we sustained heavy casualties.” He gave a bare-bones account of the hit. The President interrupted him at least six times. “We have one prisoner, Mr. President. Yes, that’s correct, just the one. I am on my way to conduct an interview with him right now so time is pressing,” Church listened some more and I could actually see the point at which his patience evaporated. He did something that I had never even heard of anyone doing before, and something I would have thought that not even Church would dare. “Mr. President, with all due respect this conversation is wasting my time. The clock is ticking for my interview and if you keep trying to micromanage this we’re going to lose the best opportunity we have. Now, please, sir, let’s stick to our original agreement. You will be properly informed when I am ready to make my report. Good day, sir.”

He didn’t wait for a reply but simply closed his phone and put it back in his pocket. He saw me goggling at him and said, “What?”

“Church      you just bitch-slapped the President of the United States.”

He said nothing,

“Nobody does that. Nobody
can
do that. How the hell did you—?” Church made a dismissive gesture. “We have an understanding. The DMS was built upon and continues to operate based on that understanding.”

“Care to share what that understanding is?”

“No,” he said.