Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 32

The sword of the faithful.

It was nothing that could have ever developed in nature, though each of its components was, to a degree, natural. The core of the seif-al-din was a prion disease known as fatal familial insomnia, a terrible variation of spongiform encephalitis from which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. In its original form it was a process that took months, and the victim generally died as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. But Sebastian Gault and his scientist-lover Amirah rebuilt the disease and married it to several parasites and a radical kind of viral delivery system. The infection rate of this designer pathogen is absolute, and it triggers an uncontrollable urge in the infected to spread the disease. It is spread primarily through bites.

The infected host lapses into a nearly hibernative state, with most body systems shut down and all conscious and higher mental functions permanently destroyed. Stripped-down parts of the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems remain in operation-only enough to keep the host on its feet and able to attack in order to spread the disease.

Unless you used very precise medical equipment it is impossible to detect signs of life. Heartbeat is minimal, respiration is incredibly shallow. And those tissues that are not necessary to the parasitic drive are not fed by blood or oxygen and therefore become necrotic. What is left is a mindless, shambling, eternally hungry killing machine with an infection rate of nearly one hundred percent.

A walker.

A zombie.

No one had survived a bite; no one came back from infection.

That was the seif-al-din.

That was a Code Zero.

We stopped an intended ma.s.s release at the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia four years ago. All of our computer models predicted that an outbreak in a densely populated area would result in an uncontrollable spread. If this got out, the world would consume itself.

Totally.

Completely.

Ravenously.

Dear G.o.d.

All of this-the science, the memories, the horror-flashed through my brain in a hot microsecond after the video ended.

"Where?" I demanded.

Church told me. "The infected are still in the tunnel, but it's only a matter of time before they find their way to the station and then up to the streets. I have a chopper in the air. It will pick you up in Prospect Park. Echo Team will rendezvous with you at Euclid Avenue station, and I've called in the National Guard. Every subway exit is being sealed, but I need you to go down there, Captain. I need you to stop this." He paused for a terrible moment, then added those dreadful words. "No matter what it takes."

But I was already pushing past cops and EMTs, yelling for Top and Bunny. Ghost barked as we ran. All four of us were bleeding and hurt but we ran like we didn't care, like we didn't have time to be hurt. I could hear the distant beat of the heavy rotors of a military Black Hawk. Prospect Park was only a few blocks from here.

We piled in the car. I hit lights and sirens and we broke laws as I kicked the pedal all the way down, scattering civilians and emergency personnel in every direction.

There are times to stand there with your jaw slack and your pulse hammering, and there are times to get your a.s.s into high gear and run over anything in your way.

Chapter Fifty.

Pierre Hotel East Sixty-second Street New York City Sunday, August 31, 1:34 p.m.

Ludo was masturbating when the phone rang.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants and boxers puddled around his ankles, staring at the rifle on its tripod as his hand moved with feverish speed.

Nearby, the rifle gleamed. Oiled and curved and so lovely.

Olga.

The phone began jangling with the same shrill outrage that was in his mother's voice when she'd caught him doing this. There had been no gun that first time, but that didn't matter. She'd dragged him out into the hall in front of his younger brother and older sister, his underpants still down, and had beaten him to the edge of unconsciousness. Calling him a freak, a pervert. Telling him that G.o.d was watching. Saying that G.o.d would punish him.

Ludo had tried to cover his shame with hands over his groin and face, but his mother slapped those hands away and rained blows on every inch of him. Even when his siblings started screaming for her to stop, she kept hitting.

Ludo did not remember how it had ended. He'd begun screaming, too, and he'd screamed so long and so loud that it opened a big, dark trapdoor in the floor of his mind, and he'd plunged downward into shadows.

There had been other beatings, of course. And his mother had removed the locks on the bathroom door so she could barge in to try to catch Ludo doing something disgusting. Something worthy of a beating.

The others got beatings, too. His sister, Gayle, lost hearing in her left ear because of a beating. And Bobby, who was a bleeder, had tiny scars all over his body. Mother always found something they were doing wrong.

Always.

She hadn't ever caught him masturbating again, but that didn't matter. She searched his belongings and found things that gave her fists their purpose. A copy of Playboy Ludo had stolen from a drugstore. Pictures of naked girls Ludo downloaded from the Net. Then, later, as Ludo spent more and more time swimming in the shadows beneath the floor of his mind, the things she found were different. Gun magazines. And then guns.

That was when the beatings stopped.

As Ludo grew, he sometimes walked in on her in the bathroom. While she was on the toilet. Ludo would stand there with a gun in his hand, saying nothing while his mother tried to hide her shame.

That's when his mother started drinking.

She never could find his guns after that. She looked everywhere. When he was out, either at school or bagging groceries at the Acme, his mother looked. Every once in a while Ludo would leave a bullet for her to find. The lead tips were bright with dots of her lipstick. Ludo wished he could have seen her face when she found those.

A few weeks later, after his mother died in an unexplained fire, Ludo snuck into the cemetery the night they buried her. With shadows swimming around him, he dropped his pants and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed on her grave.

It was the fastest he ever came. And it removed so much of the tension in his soul. Even so, it was oddly as.e.xual, despite the necessary mechanics of the process. He never fantasized about his mother. He didn't think about seeing her naked-a thought that deeply disgusted him. And he never thought about having s.e.x with her. He'd rather stab his own eyes out. What turned him on was the thought of maggots and worms wriggling their way through her skin. The mental picture of c.o.c.kroaches and beetles feasting on her flesh and s.h.i.tting on her bones was deeply erotic.

Today, though, it was the gun.

Olga.

So pretty.

So saucy.

Sitting there in the hotel room, waiting for the kill order, he kept glancing at her. Kept remembering what it felt like to slip his finger inside her trigger guard. To let his fingers glide ever so lightly along the length of her barrel. He stuck the tip of his tongue into the opening of the barrel, licking and tasting the gun oil.

That was when he knew he had to rub one out, and his pants were down in a moment.

And then the d.a.m.n phone rang.

Mother Night.

Another mother.

f.u.c.k.

Catching him at the wrong moment, catching him in a shameful act.

His p.e.n.i.s went instantly soft and he grabbed for his pants as quickly and desperately as if Mother Night had banged the door open right here.

He was panting when he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone.

"Yes," he gasped.

"Ludo-?"

"Yes."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Why are you out of breath?"

"I-"

"What were you doing?"

The moment froze around him. G.o.d! Did she see him? Did she have this room bugged? Were there cameras in here? Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d.

"I-I-," he stammered. "I was doing push-ups."

A beat.

"Push-ups?"

"Yes."

"Why?" asked Mother Night.

"Um ... trying to keep my muscle tone."

Another beat. "Uh-huh," she said slowly.

"Seriously. You can't do what I do with flabby, um, muscles. Killing requires core strength." He winced at that, believing it to be the single silliest thing he'd ever said.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said.

There was a final beat.

Then, "Ludo, are you feeling okay today?"

He paused before answering, taking a moment to make sure his voice and tone were perfectly normal.

"Sure," he said. "Absolutely tip-top."

"I can get someone else in there if you want me to."

"No."

"You'll still get paid," she insisted. "It won't be a problem."

"No," he said again, leaning on it. "I'm right as rain."

"Okay," she said dubiously.

"Okay."

"Now listen to me. I want you to rest. I don't think I'll need you today. Maybe tonight, though. Or early tomorrow."

Ludo felt his flaccid p.e.n.i.s suddenly jump to new hardness. He glanced at Olga, who waited there for his touch.

"Oh," he said, deflated.

"Proceed to the other location and wait for my call or a text. And Ludo-?"

"Yes, Mother?"

"No more push-ups."

The line went dead, but he barely noticed. He tossed the phone onto the bed and, with slow steps and a beating heart, he approached the lovely, lovely rifle.

Interlude Eleven The Dragon Factory Dogfish Cay, The Bahamas Three Years Ago The place was called the Dragon Factory, but that was a conceit. There was only one dragon there and it was a pathetic little thing that had been cobbled together from other animals in an attempt to make it look like a Chinese dragon. The wings of an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the h.o.r.n.y crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body that was mostly an immature Komodo monitor. From the records Artemisia Bliss found on the recovered computers, the creature had been made to impress Chinese investors. But it was a fraud. A chimera born of radical surgery and ill-conceived transgenics.

It lay dead, its neck broken from repeated impacts with the gla.s.s wall of its cage as it tried to flee the sounds of gunfire and slaughter. Most of the other animals were dead as well. Faux unicorns and griffins and basilisks. And some things that were almost sad-midgets surgically altered to look like leprechauns or satyrs. Sad, pathetic things that were insane from pain, humiliation, and the horror of what had been done to them.

Bliss kept expecting some kind of outrage to soar up inside her. Or empathy. But there wasn't even much sympathy flickering in her heart as she moved through the complex, day after day, collecting samples, weighing and measuring corpses, and sitting in on the endless dissections.

The only thrills of any kind, she felt, were when she cracked another level of the encryption the Jakoby twins had built into their computers. Sadly, the code writers who created the system for the twins were dead. Most of the staff was either dead or keeping mum per their attorneys' instructions.

That meant each level of the encryption had to be cracked.

That, for Bliss, was fun.

Every time she bypa.s.sed a firewall or disabled a self-delete subroutine, Bliss felt a genuine thrill. A tingle at first, but one that grew and grew.

And grew.

There was so d.a.m.n much here.