Patient Zero (28 page)

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:38 A.M.

A SECOND BLAST rocked the whole building, this one ten times louder. Plaster and metal fittings fell from the ceilings and several lights flared white and then exploded in showers of smoky sparks. We all crouched, staring around, waiting for the next shoe to drop, but after a moment the rumblings stopped and the building settled in to an eerie silence.

“The hell was that?” Bunny grumbled.

Top spat out some plaster dust. “Still ain’t the cavalry, farmboy. Wrong blast signature.”

Outside the door the gunfire started up again, but there was no way they were going to shoot their way in. I wondered why they bothered. Then it hit me      gunfire doesn’t always have to be an attack: it could also be a lure.

“Grace!” I said aloud, and that fast there was a fresh burst of gunfire—definitely MP5s this time. I paused and looked at Bunny, who was grinning.

“Now that,” he said, “is the cavalry.”

He took a single step toward the door when the wall blew up. I dove left and pushed Ollie out of the way as the whole door careened inward. Top did a neat little sidestep to avoid a big chunk of twisted metal, but a piece of cinderblock the size of a softball caught Bunny on the helmet and knocked him flat.

Figures began moving through the smoke; Top and I darted to either side, hunkering down behind lab tables, guns held straight and level. Two figures leaped into the room brandishing guns and yelling for us to freeze, to lay down our arms. They yelled in English. The loudest voice belonged to a woman.

Grace.

I started to smile and then I saw the blood on her face and the wild, almost inhuman expression in her eyes and my trigger finger twitched at the same moment my heart slammed against the walls of my chest.
God! Is she infected?

“Hold your fire!” I yelled and everybody froze. “Grace! Stand down, stand down!”

She wheeled in my direction, bringing the barrel of her weapon up. Her hair was gray with dust and blood flowed freely from cuts on her forehead and cheek. She was panting—whether from effort, stress, or infection I couldn’t tell. Though it hurt my soul to do it I put the deathly red finger of my laser sight on her chest, right over her heart.

“Grace      stand down!” I shouted.

“J      Joe?” A few other Alpha Team agents clustered around her, all of them bleeding, all of them in torn and dusty uniforms. Their barrels aimed past her toward me. They hadn’t seen Top from his place of concealment. Ollie was with me, down behind the table, unarmed. Bunny hadn’t moved from where he’d fallen.

“Stand down,” I repeated, keeping the edge in my voice. “I won’t tell you again.”

“Joe      are you hurt? The walkers      ”

“No one in here is infected, Grace. What about you?”

She took a breath, and then shook her head as she lowered her gun. To her team she said, “Stand down.”

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 hell 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 shit-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 mass 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 mass of walkers hit 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 massed 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 mass 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, fuck it.” He shot two walkers who tried to rush him from his blind side. His gun clicked empty as the slide locked. “Shit! Who’s got a mag?”

Nobody answered him. Those of us with bullets kept firing.

“Shit!” 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 sonsabitches!”

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. Nobody ever runs out of ammo in the goddamn 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 snatched 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.