Patient Zero (9 page)

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago

THE LEVEL-A PVC hazmat suit was air-cooled and very comfortable, but Gault still felt like a big marshmallow. He stood close to the airlock. In one hand he held a wireless remote that would trigger the emergency release on the lock in case he had to make a run for it; in the other he held a Snellig 46, an electric wire-dart pistol. Amirah stood behind a Plexiglas wall and her fingers hovered over a computer keyboard.

“What stage is it in?” Gault asked. Their suits were soundproof and the intercoms were of the best quality.

“Advanced stage one.”

Gault cocked an eyebrow. “It’s still alive?”

The creature standing there certainly didn’t look alive. The brown skin had faded to a sickly bruise-yellow; its mouth was slack, lips gray and rubbery. It was only when Gault shifted a few feet to one side in order to see the thing’s eyes that he could detect any trace of intelligence; but even then it was rudimentary.

“I resequenced the hormonal discharge to make the blood chemistry more hospitable for the parasites. They spread the prions at a much more accelerated rate now. The nonessential functions shut down more quickly,” Amirah said brightly. “Higher brain functions deteriorate at a faster rate now.”

“How much faster?”

Amirah paused and turned and flashed him a triumphant smile. “Eight times.”

He frowned. “This is Generation Three?”

She laughed. “Oh no, Sebastian      we’ve passed that phase a long time ago. What you’re seeing is Generation Seven of the
Seif al Din
pathogen. We’ve broken through almost all of the symptomatic barriers.”

Gault’s head whipped around and he stared at the subject then up at the big wall clock. “
Seven
 
    Christ! When was infection begun?”

“Right before I came to meet you.”

Gault licked his lips. “That’s      what, an hour?”

She shook her head. “Less. Forty-seven minutes, and I think we can get that down even more. That rate is based on injection only; we added a new parasite to the salivary glands so infection from bites is much faster, a matter of minutes. By Generation Eight we should have it down to seconds.”

The creature shook its head like an animal shaking off a biting fly. The hazmat suits prevented the subject from hearing or smelling them, which were the two most significant response triggers; however, the sight of them was causing it to become agitated. Without human scent or sound that hadn’t happened with earlier generations. Gault moved his hand experimentally, wanting to see if the creature would track him.

Suddenly it lunged.

Without warning or hesitation it threw itself at Gault, springing across the cold metal floor of the display area, hooked fingers clawing the air as it tried to grab him. Gault cried out and staggered back, but he brought up the Snellig and fired the weapon’s twin flachettes into the monster’s naked chest. He pressed his thumb down on the activator and sent 70,000 volts into the infected predator.

The subject let out a scream like a cougar—high and full of hate—but it dropped down into a fetal ball, twitching as the current burned through it.

“That’s enough,” he heard Amirah shout, and Gault sagged back, releasing the button. His chest was heaving and his heart hammering. Amirah laughed as she came out from behind the Plexi screen. “The new parasite has enhanced predatory aggression by at least half, and it begins far sooner. Even from a nonfatal bite the infection will take hold within minutes and begin reducing cognitive function. In cases of a more serious bite, or in the presence of other traumatic injuries, the infection will spread exponentially faster.”

“He could have killed me!” Gault snapped, rounding on her and pointing the Snellig at her chest. For a white-hot moment he almost pulled the trigger.

But she was still laughing, shaking her head. “Oh, don’t be such an old woman.” She used the toe of one booted foot to pull back the creature’s upper lip. Gault saw that the pale gums were smooth. Amirah said, “I had its teeth pulled in preparation for the demonstration. I’m not an idiot, Sebastian.”

Gault said nothing for a moment, his jaw locked, lips curled back from his teeth in as savage a snarl as he’d seen on the face of the subject. Then, by slow degrees, he forced himself to let go of the moment. He made his face relax first and gradually straightened his body from the defensive crouch. “You could have effing well warned me!”

“That would have been less fun.”

“God, you’re a wicked bitch,” he said, but now he was smiling, too. It was completely artificial but he made it look convincing, thinking,
You are so going to pay for that, my dear.

Amirah either couldn’t tell how upset he truly was, or didn’t care—and the hazmat suit hid most of his face—but she looked at the wall clock and then walked back to her control console, pulling off her hood. “The new hormone sequence has one more really marvelous effect,” she said as she punched some keys. There was a heavy metallic
chunk
as steel panels slid back on the floor. She hit another button and four curved sections of inch-thick reinforced glass rose from the floor. Their sides fit together with only a faintness of the seam visible. The glass walls hissed upward until they reached a large circular track in the ceiling. As the upper edges slid into the tracks there was another chunking sound and the walls stopped moving. Amirah watched the wall clock all the while. The subject lay in the center of a big glass and steel jar.

“Wait for it,” she murmured as the digital counters ticked away the seconds. “Should be right about now. Generation Seven is so wonderfully quick.”

The creature suddenly opened its eyes and peeled back its lips to issue a hiss of animal hatred. No sound escaped the barrier, but Gault still flinched. Then he blinked and looked from the subject to the clock and back again.

“Wait      ” he said, “that doesn’t      ”

Amirah’s gorgeous dark eyes sparkled with delight. “Reanimation time is now under ninety seconds.”

He tore off his hood and threw it onto a nearby console. “God,” he gasped, staring at the monster.

“If you were worried that the Americans might harvest one of our subjects for research it doesn’t matter now. They can have all of the subjects we’ve already sent      but any preventive measure they design will be built on the wrong generation of the disease.”

She walked over and placed her palm on the glass and even when the subject lunged at her and slammed its face against the inner wall on the other side she didn’t flinch. There was an adoring look on her face as she stared at the subject.

Gault came to stand next to her. The subject kept banging against the glass, its infected brain unable to process the concept of transparency. Even without scent it knew that its prey was there. That was the only thought it could hold on to.

In an awed voice, Amirah whispered, “Once we release these new subjects into the population the infection will spread beyond control. They won’t be able to keep ahead of it.”

Gault nodded slowly but his mind was working at computer speed, putting everything he’d seen and everything Amirah had said into context. It was an effort to keep his feelings about all of this off his face.

“This is unstoppable,” Amirah said with a predatory hiss in her voice. “We can kill them all.”

“Now, now,” he said, wrapping his arm around her, “let’s not lose focus here. We don’t want to kill them all, darling. What would be the point in that? We simply want to make them all very, very sick.”

He stroked her breast through the hazmat material.

She said nothing but he saw her turn away as if to look at some gauges and he was certain she was trying to hide her expression. “You told me to continue with the research, to improve the model. What do you expect me to do with everything I’ve developed? Just destroy it?”

“Yes, I bloody well do,” he said, but then he stopped, lips pursed, considering; then something occurred to him. “Actually      hold on a bit.”

She turned back to him, her face showing hurt and suspicion. “What?”

“I have a wonderful idea,” he purred. “I think I figured out how to use your new monster. Oh yes, this is both juicy and delicious.”

Still frowning, she said, “Tell me!”

“Before I do you have to promise me that you’ll use it only as I suggest. We can’t really let this generation of the pathogen out. Not ever. You do understand that, don’t you?”

She said nothing.

“Do you understand?” He said it again, slowly, reinforcing each syllable.

“Yes, yes, I understand. You really are such an old woman at times, Sebastian.”

“Dear heart      we want to buy the world, not bury it.”

Amirah gave him a slow three-count and then nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what we could accomplish. We’ve created a new kind of life, an entirely new state of existence.
Unlife.
”

He stepped back from her and stared, the devious smile still frozen onto his mouth.

Unlife.

God Almighty,
he thought.

“Now      tell me your idea,” she said, breaking through the shell of his shocked and fragile thoughts. “How can you use my new pathogen to help us in our cause?”

And suddenly Gault was snapped out of his reverie and out of his shock and was completely present in his mind. She had said “cause,” not program. Not scheme, or plan. Cause.
That is a very interesting choice of a word, my love,
he thought.

So he told her and he watched her face as she listened; and he paid special attention to the muscles around her eyes and the dilation of her pupils. What he saw told him a lot. Perhaps too much, and it both elated him and hurt him. By the time he was done her beautiful face was suffused with a terrible light.

Amirah pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him. They held tightly together, ignoring the absurdity of the PVC suits.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said, and meant it.

And when this is done I may have to feed you to one of your pets,
he thought. And he meant that, too.

Balkh, Afghanistan / Five days ago

THE TOWN OF Balkh in northern Afghanistan was once one of the great cities of the ancient world. Now, even with a population of over one hundred thousand the town is largely in ruins. The Iranian prophet Zoroaster was born there and for centuries it was the center of the Zoroastrian religion. Now, like much of Afghanistan it varies between poverty and desperation, with some rare spots of music, color, and the laughter of children too young to grasp the realities of the life that awaits them.

South and a little east of the city is the small town of Bitar, a village caught like an eagle’s nest in the spiky crags of a mountain pass. Only one serpentine road led up into it and a worse one wound down. Camels manage it because they’re stubborn, but even they slip once in a while. There are eighty-six people living in Bitar, most of them childless parents whose sons have died fighting either for the Taliban or against them; or who have gone off to work the poppy fields and never returned. A few of the youngest children walk seven miles to go to school. There are only thirty camels in the whole town. The chickens are all skinny. Only the goats look hardy, but they are a hardy breed used to very little. For plumbing the people have well water that smells of animal urine and old salt.

Eqbal was sixteen and his parents had not yet lost him to the poppy fields or the wars. Eqbal was destined to service Allah through service to his family. It was his
qawn
identity, he was sure, to be a farmer and in that way both preserve old ways and yet provide for the future. Despite war and strife, Eqbal believed in the future and to him it was bright with promise. Wars pass, but Afghanistan, graced by the love of Allah, endures.

Every morning Eqbal would rise with the day, clean himself, and then dress in loose robes and place a
kufi
cap on his head so that he would be ready to say his first prayers of the day, following the precise requirements of
salat.
First standing and then kneeling and finally prostrate in humility before the grace and majesty of God.

Though a young man of uncomplicated faith and one who had dedicated himself to the simple rigors of the farm life there in the dusty desert, Eqbal was not a simple-headed youth. As he tended his flocks or did chores around the farm he was often deep in complex thought, sometimes wrestling meanings out of the passages in the Qur’an; sometimes working to understand the complexities of delivering a breeched goat without losing either mother or kid. He did not think fast, but he always thought deep, and when he came to a conclusion he was generally correct.

Had he lived Eqbal would have very likely become the headman of the village, and certainly a man to be counted. But Eqbal did not live. Eqbal would not live to see his seventeenth birthday, which was eight days away.

“Eqbal!” called his father, who was laid up with a broken ankle. “How is that goat coming along?”

The young man crouched over the gravid goat, who was crying out in pain as Eqbal worked his hands inside the birth canal to try and turn the kid. The other goats picked up her nervousness and the air was a constant barrage of snorts and baas. Eqbal’s hands were red with blood and mucus and sweat shone brightly on his face as he worked, brow knitted, his clever fingers feeling along the tiny legs of the unborn goat.

“I think I have it, Father!” he called as his fingertips encountered the soft ropy length of the umbilical cord. “The cord is twisted around the hind legs.”

He heard the scrape of a crutch as his father shuffled toward the open window. “Be gentle now, boy. Nature does not want you to hurry.”

“Yes, Father,” Eqbal said. It was one of his father’s favorite sayings, and it matched the slow process of thought and action that made Eqbal his father’s son. Patience was as valuable to a farmer as seeds and water.

He curled one finger around the cord and gently—very gently—pulled it down and over the kid’s legs, then felt inside to make sure that there was no other obstruction. With great care he pushed on the kid to turn it inside the mother, who continued to bleat and cry.

“It’s clear, Father.”

“Then step back and let her do her own work,” his father advised, and Eqbal glanced up to see his father’s face in the window. He, too, was slick with sweat. The pain of his broken leg—shattered in a terrible fall on the cliffside—was etched into the lines on his face. His color was bad, but he was smiling at his son as Eqbal slowly withdrew his hand from the goat and sat back to watch.

The bleating of the goat changed in pitch as the baby began to slide along the birth canal. It was still painful, but now the goat did not sound desperate, merely tired and sore.

Within two minutes the wet, slime-slick little body slid out of her and flopped onto the straw-covered ground. Immediately the mother struggled to her feet and began licking at it, sponging clear her baby’s nose and mouth and eyes.

“A female, Father,” said Eqbal, turning again to look at his father. He froze, confused at the expression on his father’s face. Instead of relief or joy, his face stared at him with a an expression that was a twisted mask of shock and horror.

“Father        ”

Then Eqbal saw that his father was not looking at him      but behind him.

Eqbal whirled, thinking that it was one of the men from the Taliban group in the caves to the south; or a collector from the poppy farms come to take someone else off to work in the fields. Eqbal’s hand was straying toward his shepherd’s crook when he froze in place; and he could feel his own face contorting into lines of dread.

A man stood behind him.

No      not a man. A
thing.
It was dressed like a man but in strange clothes—light blue pants and a V-necked short-sleeved shirt. Eqbal had seen TV, he had been to the clinic in Balkh, he knew what hospital scrubs were; but he had never seen them out here. This man wore them now, and they were dirty and torn and stained to a dark shining purple wetness by blood. Blood was everywhere. On the man’s clothes, his hands, his face. His mouth. His teeth     

Eqbal heard his father scream and then his whole world was torn in red madness and pain.