Patient Zero

Chapter One Hundred Eight

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker

GAULT OPENED A slit in a wall panel and peered through it and almost gasped. Amirah was not five feet from him. Below her the nurses had nearly completed the injections.

He steeled himself and aimed his pistol through the gap and put the red dot of his laser, light as a whisper, on Amirah’s back, right between her shoulders. One shot from this distance would punch through her spine, tear through her heart, and burst from between her breasts to leave a gaping red hole the size of a golf ball. One flex of his finger and the traitorous bitch would be dead. He could do it. He knew he could.

Damn you, Amirah, he said, and without meaning to he mentally added, my love.

Tears jeweled his vision, warping her with prismatic distortion. The barrel of the pistol wavered. His assault team would be entering the cave any moment and Toys would lead them here. Gault shivered, partly at the thought of the firestorm Captain Zeller would be unleashing here in the Bunker, and partly at the thought of Toys’s transformation. Had his assistant actually changed that much or had Gault been blind all these years to the scorpion he kept by his side?

The seconds ticked away. Soon the whole Bunker would be a hell of bullets and blood. Soon everyone would be dead. Amirah, too, whether he killed her himself or not. His orders to Zeller had been specific. Kill everyone, no exceptions.

Amirah.

God.

Tears broke and rolled down his cheeks and before he could stop it a single, heartbroken sob escaped his throat. He saw Amirah stiffen, but she did not turn, and Gault forced his hands to steady, to hold the red pinprick of the laser sight on her back. Be a fucking man, he snarled inwardly.

Amirah.

And then she spoke.

“Sebastian,” she said.

Amirah turned without haste to face him. Her head was bowed, looking down to see the red laser dot on her chest, wavering right over her heart. She raised her head slowly.

Gault felt a cold hand reach into his own chest and squeeze his heart to a tiny block of ice. Amirah’s eyes were wide and glassy, bright with fever. She reached a hand up to the front of her chadri, gathered the black cloth in her fingers, and slowly pulled the scarf down to reveal her smiling mouth. Her lovely olive skin had paled to a sickly sand color, almost gray, and her full lips were stained with fresh blood.

“Sebastian,” she said softly as her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl of vicious animal hunger.

“My God.” Gault recoiled in horror. “What have you done?”

Amirah advanced toward the wall and even through the narrow opening of the observation slit he could smell her. A fetid, rotting-meat stink that rolled off her like the perfume of hell.

“Seif al Din,” she whispered, leaning to peer in through the slit.

“You’re infected!” His gun hand was shaking so bad that he almost dropped the weapon. Sweat burst from his pores and his pulse snapped like firecrackers. “What have you done?” he asked again in a terrified whisper.

She shook her head, still smiling. “No, Sebastian, I’m not infected. I’m reborn. I’m more alive now than I ever imagined.”

“This will kill you!”

She shook her head again. “The pathogen is no longer fatal I’ve perfected it. You only saw Generation Seven.” She giggled. “That one scared you, Sebastian. You almost screamed like a woman.” Amirah wiped drool from her lips. “By now my lovely El Mujahid should have launched Generation Ten on the American people. They will be dying soon, Sebastian. All of them. Seif al Din is so quick.” She snapped her fingers in front of the slot and Gault jumped.

“Generation Ten? You’re insane!”

“I’m immortal,” she countered. “You see we had a breakthrough, Sebastian. We’ve been working so hard for so long, and you thought we were plodding along with Generation Three. But, oh Generation Ten is immediate. The body reanimates immediately. No lag time, no time to quarantine the infected. Generation Ten is the perfect plague.”

“Perfect?” The word was like bile in his mouth.

She ignored him, totally rapt by her discoveries. “But we went further still. Generation Eleven was a disappointment, but, oh Generation Twelve!” She drew the word out, filling it with wonder and with threat. “We broke through into an entirely new area of science. It’s what I’ve been laboring on for the last year while you left me here in this bunker. The killer pathogen was developed to Generation Ten before you even knew of the second generation.” She laughed at the look of shocked hurt on his face. “We had the plague but we couldn’t use it until we had the cure. And now Oh, Sebastian, it’s a fire in my blood! I can feel it moving through me.”

“You used it on yourself! You’ve turned yourself into one of those damned monsters ”

“Do I look like a monster?” she said. She stepped back from the slot and cupped her breasts through her robes. “Do you think I’m a monster, Sebastian?”

“God ”

Amirah’s face instantly changed and she whipped her hands away from her breasts and slapped them against the wall on either side of the slot. It was like an entirely different personality had shoved itself into place behind her dark eyes. “God? How dare you even mention Him! Your god is money, you worthless piece of shit.”

Gault recoiled and raised the pistol.

“You don’t even understand what it means to worship God. You couldn’t know, Sebastian, what it feels like to feel Him in every thought, every breath, to hear His words flowing over the desert sands. You pretended to read the writings of the Prophet to fool El Mujahid, but you lacked even the depth of understanding to let those words enter your soul! You think you made me into your whore? Do you think that I would truly betray my husband, my people, my faith, for you?” She spat at him and he dodged away, terrified of what might be in that sputum. He swung the pistol up and put the dot of the laser sight on her forehead where it glowed like an Indian bindhi.

“I loved you,” he said weakly. And then his mind replayed those words and he realized that he had said “loved,” not “love.” It nearly broke him. In his mind’s eye he saw himself turning away from her and bringing the barrel of his pistol up to his own temple. Better to snuff out that loss than endure its absence.

But although his hands trembled the gun did not move.

Amirah ignored it. “Have you figured it out yet? You must have or why else would you be here, Sebastian?” She was using his name like a whip and each time it stung him. “You think you found us, but we had been looking for you for years. Not specifically you-you’re just not that important-no, we were looking for any faithless greedy dog who had the resources you have. It was so easy!” She laughed and shook her head, delighting in the pain she caused him. “It was so easy to lure you with covert hints through your network of spies, to draw you to us step by step, to stage things so that you always felt that you were in control when all the time this was a plan my husband and I had made. Yes my husband. El Mujahid, the greatest of God’s warriors on Earth. A true soldier of the Faith, a man who lives the words of the Prophet every minute of every day.”

“But you we ”

She spat again, but this time on the floor. “What? We made love? Is that what you were going to say?” Her voice made the words intensely ugly. “I’m not a man, Sebastian. I can’t go into battle with guns and knives like my husband and his soldiers. I’m a woman and I am forced to use other weapons no matter how utterly disgusting and humiliating it has been to open my body to you.”

“No,” Gault snapped back, anger flaring. “I know you loved me. I know.”

He saw the mad look in her eyes flicker and for a second that other personality, the dreamy one, seemed to drift back. And Gault knew-knew for sure-that he saw the fires of love still there. Or maybe it was only the embers, for in the next moment the hard and murderous personality reemerged.

“Each day I get down on my knees to beg forgiveness from Allah for what I have done, even though it is His will and serves His ends. You made me a whore in the eyes of God, Sebastian. How many deaths does that earn you?”

Behind Amirah there was a strange sound. The gathered scientists and technicians were all jabbering loudly, some in shocked protest, others in fury. Amirah stepped back to allow Gault to see what was happening.

“They think we have an antidote,” she said softly as below more than two thirds of the crowd were sinking down to their knees or collapsing onto tables. “They think we are all safe from Seif al Din.”

“What have you done?”

She turned to him. “I gave my best people-a few fighters, a few scientists-Generation Twelve. Like me.” She raised her arm and pulled back her sleeve to show the needle mark on her arm. From the dark pinprick black lines of infection radiated out like a dark spider-web.

“You’ve killed your own people.”

“Oh no not all. The rest of them were given Generation Ten, and soon I’ll open the Bunker doors and they’ll spread out across Arabia like the plague they are. The Great Satan does not have enough bullets to stop the waves of them that will come.”

“You’re insane! You’ve doomed us all.”

But Amirah shook her head. “No Generation Twelve is different. We don’t die like they do. We ascend. I’ve already ascended. I died without dying, Sebastian, but I suffered no brain death, no loss of brain or motor function, no loss of intellect. I am me, Amirah, scientist, wife of El Mujahid, loyal handmaiden to Allah, a servant of the word of the Prophet but now I cannot ever die. I’ve been reborn, you see. Seif al Din has cut through me like a purifying scythe. My sins, my earthly attachments have been carved away by the Sword of the Faithful. What remains is pure. What remains is the instrument of God on Earth.”

“Oh Amirah my princess,” Gault murmured, tears cascading down his cheeks. “What have you done? What have you done ”

“Beginning today thousands of doses of Generation Twelve will be sent from here to those fighters who have proven their faith. Once they have ascended they will share the gift with their families and their most trusted friends, and then we will sit back and watch the rest of the godless world devour itself!”

“I won’t let you!”

Amirah reached out to grasp the lip of the observation slit. She pulled herself close and whispered like a child conveying a great secret. “I know everything about the Bunker, Sebastian. Everything. I know all your secrets.”

Gault stared at her, puzzled, and then he heard the slow scuff of shambling feet in the darkness of the corridor behind him.