Patient Zero

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:46 P.M.

AFTER MAJOR COURTLAND called in the medical team she joined me in the hallway and I could tell she was reevaluating me. Her eyes roved over my face like a scanner and I could almost hear the relays click in her head. Across the hall was a men’s room and I started toward it but she stopped me with a touch on my arm.

“Ledger what made you think Mr. Church wanted you to do that?”

I shrugged. “He said time was short.”

“That’s not the same thing as telling you to go in there and start kicking everyone’s ass.”

“You have a problem with it?”

She smiled again, a nice smile. It transformed her from a cobra to something a hell of a lot more appealing: an actual human being. “Not at all. As much as I hate to say it I’m rather impressed.”

“ ‘Hate to say it’?” I echoed.

“You are a very hard person to like, Mr. Ledger.”

“Call me Joe. And no, I’m not. Lots of people like me.”

She didn’t comment on that. “Let me put it another way you’re a very hard man to trust. Especially in an operation of this kind.”

“Grace-may I call you Grace?”

“You may call me Major Courtland.”

“Okay, Major Courtland,” I said, “it isn’t my goal in life to get you to trust me. You jokers pulled me into this. I didn’t submit a résumé. I’m not military. So if you have issues about trust or anything else up to and including liking me, then, seriously, please go and screw yourself. Major.”

She blinked once.

“I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bullshit, dead guys, or pissing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-assed Earl Grey-drinking, scone-munching major who isn’t even my freaking boss. I don’t know you and I don’t give a rat’s ass if you trust me.”

“Mr. Ledger-”

“I have to take a piss.” I headed down the hall to the bathroom.

I USED THE toilet and then washed my face first with hot water and then cold, dabbed it dry with a fistful of paper towels, and then leaned on the edge of the sink, staring at my face in the mirror. My skin was flushed and my eyes had the jumpy look you usually see in junkies. My hair stuck out in all directions.

“Well,” I said to my reflection, “aren’t you a picture?”

I didn’t have a comb so I used wet fingers to plaster down my hair, and as I stood there the full weight and enormity of what was going on hit me like a freight train. I bowed over the sink, tasting bile, ready to throw up but my trembling stomach held. I raised my head again and looked into my eyes and saw fear in there, the naked realization of what all this meant.

There were more of them out there. More walkers. And I was being asked to step up and be what? Some kind of Captain Heroism who would lead the boys in the Red, White, and Blue to victory? What was I getting myself into? This wasn’t task force duty, this wasn’t even SWAT-team level. I’d never even smelled anything this big before and now I was expected to train and lead a black ops team? How frigging insane was this? Why were they asking me? I’m just a cop. Where are the guys who actually do this for a living? How come none of them were here? Where’s James Bond and Jack Bauer? Why me, of all people?

My reflection stared back, looking dazed and a little stupid.

Working the task force had not prepared me for this. After eighteen months of that-and the years since the World Trade Center-I’d come to share the more or less common view that the terrorists had fired their worst shots and were now hiding in caves and reevaluating the wisdom of having overplayed their hand. Now Church tells me that they hold the key to a global pandemic.

By raising the actual dead?

God Almighty. Flying planes into buildings is bad enough. Chemical weapons, anthrax, nerve gas, suicide bombers that stuff has collectively been the definition of terrorism to the global consciousness for years, and that’s been more than bad enough. This was so much worse I didn’t know if I could put it into any reasonable perspective. If they were trying to spread Ebola it wouldn’t be this bad because Ebola doesn’t chase and try to bite you. Whoever was behind this was one sick son of a bitch. Smart, sure, but sick. This went beyond religious fundamentalism or political extremism. Right at that moment I was sure we were looking at something born out of a mind that was truly and genuinely evil.

I don’t think I clearly understood Church until that moment. If I were in his place, looking into that same future, how would I handle it? How ruthless would I be? How ruthless could I be?

“I think you already answered that question, boyo,” I murmured, thinking about the five men in that room.

Church may act like a Vulcan but he had to be feeling all this stuff, too. If so, then the strain of holding back all of his emotions, all of his humanity, must be terrible. If I were going to work for him, then I’d have to look for signs of that pressure, look for cracks. Not only in me, but in him, too. On the other hand Church could be a monster himself just one on our side. There were guys like that. Hell, after World War II our own government hired a bunch of Nazi scientists. Better the devil you know. More to the point, there was the comment FDR supposedly made about Somoza. Something like, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Great. I’m going to work for a monster in order to fight other monsters. So what did that make me?

The bathroom floor seemed to tilt a bit as I headed for the door.