Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 27

Everyone slowly lowered their weapons except Top and me. He remained where he was, quiet and ready, while I got to my feet and walked toward her, my gun out, the red dot steady on her chest.

"Joe," she said with evident relief, "I'm glad you're all right."

"I'm not looking to take a chance here, Grace. Tell me what happened."

"There was a team of hostiles holding this end of the hallway, trying to get in."

I caught that she said "was." Another figure moved through the dust and as he stepped into the lab I was surprised to see who it was. I lowered my gun and held it down at my side.

"Skip? Where the h.e.l.l have you been?"

"Sorry, Captain I got blindsided."

The young man looked worse than Grace. His eyes were jumpy and darted back and forth and his smile was both brief and tremulous. I gave him a nod and he stayed where he was, looking around uncertainly as if unsure to which team he belonged.

I moved closer to Grace. "Tell me what happened."

She told me everything in a few terse sentences. The hurt in her face and voice was bottomless. "We saw a group of hostiles trying to shoot their way in," she concluded. "We took them out. All communications are jammed, so we couldn't download a keycard code, so I had Jackson blow the door."

Behind me Bunny swore. I turned to see that Top had helped the big young man to a sitting position. Bunny was groggily shaking his head, blood trickling down the left side of his face. Top removed Bunny's helmet and examined the bruise, then he turned and gave me a quick nod. "Farmboy here took a blunt-force hit to the head. He'll be okay."

"I ain't a farmboy, you s.h.i.t-kicker," Bunny complained. "I'm from Orange County."

Top patted his shoulder. "Now that the cavalry's here maybe we should saddle up and ride."

"The cavalry's still not here," Grace said softly. "My team is Gus Dietrich and the others should be breaching the wall any minute."

I suddenly felt old and used up. "Well, then we'll have to make our stand here and wait. No back doors, and I don't particularly want to go back down that corridor."

"Sod that," murmured Grace.

Ollie stood by the table looking as much like an uninvited guest as did Skip. I avoided looking at either of them at the moment. Both of them had gone missing in ways as yet unexplained, both miraculously alive despite the terrorists and the walkers. I was going to have to sit down and have long talks with each of them. It would be better for everyone if they both had nice, clear, and believable stories.

Over by the door Jackson called out sharply. "Major Captain Ledger we're about to have company."

"What have you got?" I called.

Jackson looked stricken. "Walkers! Hundreds of them."

"Terrific," Top said sourly. "I'm down to one magazine, Cap'n."

"They're here!"

We all turned to see the shambling ma.s.s of walkers round the bend in the hall outside and fill the doorway. Rank upon rank of them.

There was no time to think, just to act.

"Make a barricade!" I grabbed the nearest table to me and heaved. Grace caught the other end and we shoved it forward, the legs screeching on the concrete floor, the vibration sending delicate instruments crashing to the ground, and I hoped we weren't breaking anything that contained a virus or parasite. The Hammer suits would protect us from skin contact but none of us were wearing masks.

Bunny was sick and dazed from his head injury but he bulled his way through it; he grabbed the corner of one big table and with a grunt of effort heaved it over onto its side then rammed it with a shoulder to drive it into the doorway. Top began tossing chairs over the table to create an obstacle course to slow the walkers down. Ollie rushed to help him. Skip looked around and grabbed another table and hauled on it without much effect; I took the other end and we pushed that against the others.

Then the ma.s.s of walkers. .h.i.t the barrier like a tidal surge. They were only as strong as ordinary humans but there was so many of them that their sheer weight of numbers acted like a battering ram that drove the barricade backward nearly three feet. Jackson reached over the edge of the barricade and opened up into the ma.s.sed bodies. A few went down, but most of his bullets tore through chests and limbs without doing much to stop them.

"Pick your bleeding targets, Jackson!" Grace snarled. "Shoot for the head."

The barricade shuddered again and slid farther into the room as hundreds of the living dead surged forward again and again. At the front of the ma.s.s a few of the walkers collapsed, crushed by those behind them, and I could hear bones breaking. But it was weird, without screams or grunts, just low moans, even from those who were being trampled.

"It's not going to hold," warned Ollie as he shoved another table against the barricade.

"Nothing gets over that wall!" yelled Grace as she leveled her gun and opened fire, dropping two walkers with headshots and tearing away the jaw of a third. I drew my gun and stepped up next to her and fired; Top and Bunny flanked us and then Skip and Jackson. Ollie and Skip took handguns from Alpha Team members who had MP5s. Eventually all of us had formed a shooting line a few yards on our side of the barrier, shooting point-blank at the walkers as they climbed up the sides of the tables and overturned chairs. The thunder of our combined gunfire was deafening as we fired, fired, fired. The walkers fell but the surge never faltered. As the creatures in front died, the others climbed over them to try and get to us.

The slide of my pistol locked back and I fumbled for my last magazine and slapped it in. Fifteen rounds. "Last mag!" I yelled.

"I'm out!" Top said a moment later. He spun out of the line to look for one of the AK-47s, found it and came back firing, the selector switch set to semiauto.

Grace was shooting slower than the rest of us but she was making more kills. She aimed and fired, aimed and fired, and with each shot a zombie toppled backward, its infernal life force snuffed out. I followed her lead and slowed my rate of fire.

The walkers fell by the dozen. By the score.

The dead were heaped so high that for a moment they blocked the door, but then the surge hit the other side of it and the mountain of corpses toppled into the room. We had to jump backward to keep from being buried by them, and that broke our line. The barricade was gone and now the walkers were climbing into the room over the heaped dead.

"Remember the Spartans," Bunny mumbled as he backed up.

"We ain't dead yet, farmboy," Top said.

"I told you already that I'm not aw, f.u.c.k it." He shot two walkers who tried to rush him from his blind side. His gun clicked empty as the slide locked. "s.h.i.t! Who's got a mag?"

n.o.body answered him. Those of us with bullets kept firing.

"s.h.i.t!" he swore again, and threw his pistol so hard at a rushing ghoul that it knocked the creature onto its back. Bunny rushed over to a far wall and tore a fire axe out its metal clips. "C'mon, you undead sonsab.i.t.c.hes!"

They came. They swarmed at him and he laid into them with the axe, swinging it with such incredible force that arms and heads flew through the air. His backhand slash dropped two walkers with broken necks. One walker lunged at him and sank its teeth into the fabric of his Hammer suit and though Bunny broke its back with a chop of the axe the creature's bite tore the whole front of the suit open.

I fired my last shot and tossed the gun aside. Grace and her team still had ammunition and they re-formed into a tighter line, firing constantly but now their shots were killing only one in two, and then one in three as their hands went numb from the recoil and their hearts froze in their chests. Even Grace was missing the kill nearly half the time.

"Out!" Top called and fell back. He caught my eye and gave me a wicked grin. "Be nice if this was like the movies. n.o.body ever runs out of ammo in the G.o.dd.a.m.n movies."

Ollie fired his last shot and dropped out of the line, too. "Now what?" he asked.

I cast around for something to use as a weapon and spotted a set of shelves made from wire racks and chrome-plated pipes. I s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and swung it with all my strength against a wall where it exploded into its component parts. I picked out a six-foot-long upright and swung the bar with all the force I could muster from need and terror, and laid into the front rank of the walkers, crushing the head of one and breaking the neck of another. I heard a roaring sound and realized that it was my own voice, raised into an animal howl of rage as I swung and smashed and thrust at the living dead.

I swung low to knock the legs out from under two of the creatures and suddenly Top and Ollie were there, both of them with shorter pieces of chromed pipe in their hands. They crushed the heads of the walkers I'd knocked down and that fast we had a rhythm. I knocked them down and they finished them off. I could hear Bunny's bull roar behind me, as loud as my own. Top's arm was red to the shoulder; then Ollie slipped in a pool of blood and went down with three of the creatures on top of him. In a flash Skip was there, his gun empty but a KABAR in his hand, and the blade flashed out, cutting tendons and slashing throats. Top pulled Ollie up and the three of them fanned out behind me as we met the next wave. And the next. And the next.

Five walkers rushed me and I chopped the outermost one in the temple so that he crashed into the others and knocked the whole line off balance. Top leaped at them, hammering away with the pipe, but I could see that his blows were coming slower and with less force. He was tiring. So was I. It had been an insanely long day and this was past human endurance.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and wheeled to see three walkers coming at Grace from her blind side.

"Grace! Left flank!" I yelled, and went for a long reach with my pole.

She saw my swing and ducked under it, allowing the bar to smash into the face of one of her attackers. She shot the other two and then she was empty.

I pulled her away and pushed her behind me. "Fall back!" I shouted to the others. There were six tables at the back of the room. If nothing else we could try a second barricade. "Bunny, plow the road!"

Bunny leaped forward and cut down two ghouls with a swing that was so powerful that it cut one of them nearly in half. He hacked his way to us. I realized that both sides of the lab were lined with tall metal cabinets. They were freestanding, not bolted to the wall, and it gave me a spark of hope. "Skip Ollie!" As they turned toward me I grabbed the corner of one of the cabinets and pulled it as hard as I could. It toppled easily and fell with a deafening crash, crushing one of the walkers under its ponderous bulk. The others got the idea at once and immediately began overturning the cabinets so that within seconds we had created a steel corridor that limited how many of them could approach at once.

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 pa.s.sed 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. s.h.i.t, 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 h.e.l.l 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. "b.u.g.g.e.r 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 n.o.ble. 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 unG.o.dly h.e.l.l. 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.

"b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

Chapter Sixty-Eight.

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 a.s.sisted 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-Spungen 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 doc.u.ments, 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 h.e.l.lish 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.

Part Four Killers

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.

Chapter Sixty-Nine.

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 airs.p.a.ce 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."