Patient Zero

Chapter Fifty-Two

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 10:21 P.M.

I TORE DOWN the hallway toward the open door. Gus Dietrich was coming out of his room dressed in boxer shorts and a beater. He saw me running and opened his mouth to say something but then I grabbed Hu and shoved him out of my way. Hu hit Dietrich and they fell together through Dietrich’s open doorway. I ran into the hall and cut left. My quarters were pretty close to the loading bay and I got to the bay door before any of the armed guards. There was a knot of confused techs and staff milling around at the bay doorway and I bellowed at them to clear a path.

“Got your back,” I heard Bunny say as he skidded into the bay right behind me. Top Sims was right behind him.

I turned to the crowd. “Everyone out-now! Close the door and kill that fucking alarm!”

They backed out of the room as the three of us hurried past rows of trailers. When we reached Room 12 what we saw stopped us in our tracks. The machine gun emplacement was deserted, the big gun still smoking, the floor littered with shell casings. I could only see one of the four guards-or, what was left of him. His body was bent backward over the low wall of sandbags surrounding the gun, his throat completely torn away. There were small pools of blood everywhere and spatters from what looked like arterial sprays. Whatever had happened here had happened fast and mean.

We moved up quick and quiet. Bunny scooped up an MP5.

“This is getting to be a long damn day,” he muttered as he checked the magazine. “It’s out.” He patted down the dead guard and found a fresh magazine.

“On my six!” I whispered and I could feel him come up behind me. Top flanked us. He’d picked up the dead guard’s handgun and was fanning it to cover all the corners. Someone in the crowd must have had some authority because the alarm died, leaving its banshee echo bouncing off the walls.

“Check your targets,” I said softly. “We don’t know who is infected or how many hostiles we have.”

We paused in a tight knot and listened. There were scuffling sounds from two directions: behind the trailer and inside.

“I’ll take the inside,” I whispered. “You two around the sides.”

“This is messed up,” said Bunny.

“No shit, farmboy,” snarled Top. “Let’s go.” They faded off to my left, heading down the length of the trailer as I moved onto the bottom step of the double-wide. The door to Room 12 was open and I could see figures moving inside. I saw another weapon on the deck, a Glock nine, but the slide was locked back, so I ignored it as I leaped up onto the top step. I was in a hurry but the cop in me was always watching and I flicked a glance at the door. No visible signs of a forced entry or forced exit. Even though I had no time to worry about that it still bothered the hell out of me.

I braced myself and stepped into the trailer. Inside it was a charnel house. Two lab-coated doctors lay in broken twists of limbs; beyond them three people dressed in hospital gowns were sprawled in pools of red. The prisoner we’d taken at the meatpacking plant had been in a surgical bay that was in a screened-off section of the trailer, but the screens had been torn down and the prisoner’s throat had been completely torn away. The doctors who had been working to save his life were dead. The air smelled of cordite and the coppery stink of blood. Each of the corpses had been shot repeatedly in the head. In the very back of the trailer was a fourth patient and he had one of the soldiers down and was tearing at him with broken teeth. The soldier was screaming and flailing his arms to fend off the attack and I couldn’t yet see if he’d been bitten, or if so how badly.

I went straight for the walker.

There wasn’t time to shout orders or to fall back and wait for reinforcements. Maybe more help was coming, but I didn’t know, and I had to trust that they’d handle things outside. I concentrated on the walker who was trying to kill this terrified young man.

The trailer was seventy feet long and I cleared the entire length in a couple of heartbeats. Gunfire erupted from outside and the walker froze in place, lifting its head, dead eyes casting around for the noise. While I was still twenty feet back I scooped up a heavy metal clipboard from a table and hurled it side-armed like a Frisbee. It was weighted with a thick sheaf of papers but I put a lot of shoulder into it. It whistled through the air and caught the walker on the side of the head, knocking him against the wall. He lost his grip on the soldier, who slumped down into a whimpering heap. The blow did no harm, though, and the creature instantly whipped its head around, lips peeling back from its teeth, dead eyes blazing. It lunged at me, but I was in full stride now, matching momentum and force with its angle of attack. As it reached for me I used my hands to slap both arms down and then grabbed its throat with my left and used my right to hit it with a palm shot to the temple. I knew I couldn’t hurt it, but my rushing mass slammed it back against the wall and I leaned into the throat grab, feeling the hyoid bone crunch. A normal man would have died right there, trying to suck wind through a throatful of broken junk; but this thing kept snarling. I hit it again, knocking its mouth away from me, and then slammed the side of its head a third time but this time I kept the heel of my palm pressed hard against its temple so that the walker was effectively pinned to the wall with that bloody mouth facing away from me. I wormed my fingers up the side of its head and knotted them in its lank and filthy hair.

I felt it tense all of its muscles to surge back against me, the way an animal will lunge to try and break free of another predator, but that’s what I wanted it to do. As the walker lunged off the wall I dropped back a step and pulled with all my strength. The effect was that the walker flew forward toward me far faster than it intended, and I immediately pivoted my hips so that its mass was accelerated even faster. The creature hit the center point of my turn and then flew past me as if repelled by a force field. My grip on throat and hair created torque and my pivot-plus my full body turn-propelled the walker’s body mass over and past me; but I still held on. There was a crucial point at which its flying mass sailed faster and farther than my grip on its head allowed, and at that precise moment I snapped down like a housewife shaking out a bed sheet. The zombie’s neck snapped with a loud wet crack.

I let go and let it crash down onto an examination table then it toppled lifelessly to the floor.

Outside I heard another crackle of gunfire.

There was a moan behind me and I spun around to see the soldier getting to his knees, one hand clamped to his bleeding cheek. The bite wasn’t big, but it was still a bite. Poor bastard. I saw the moment when the realization blossomed in his eyes. He knew he was a dead man and we both knew that there was nothing I could do.

I pointed at him and put steel in my voice. “Stay here, soldier!” He nodded, but his eyes were bright with tears. I turned and ran to the door of the lab, jumped left, and sprinted to the end of the trailer. Two soldiers, both transformed into walkers, were down, sawed in half by Bunny’s MP5. A second pair of walkers, both of whom looked like medical personnel, were slumped in the shadows by the wall, their heads showing wounds from small-arms fire. Top had his pistol in a two-hand grip as he moved past them.

“Watch!” Bunny yelled as a bloody-faced figure rose up from behind a stack of boxes and drove at me; but I’d already heard it. I turned into the rush and as it barreled toward me I suddenly shifted to one side and chopped him across the throat with a stiff forearm. His head and shoulders stopped right there but his feet ran all the way up into the air the way a tight end will after he’s been clotheslined by a defensive tackle. The walker crashed down onto the concrete and I pivoted to hit it again when Bunny shoved me aside, stamped down on its chest to hold it in place, and put two rounds into its skull.

We both turned to see Top sidestep another walker and chop it down with a vicious side kick to the knee, and by the time its kneecaps cracked to the ground he had the barrel jammed against its temple and fired. The slide locked back after the shot, but the walker fell away into a rag-doll sprawl.

There was a sudden, harsh silence broken only by the fading echoes of the gunfire.

“Top?”

“Clear.”

“Bunny?”

“Clear, boss,” he said almost in my ear. “We got them all.”

I turned and looked up at Bunny, whose face had transformed from its usual boyish humor into something harder and far more dangerous. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and then nodded to agree with his own assessment. “I’m good, boss,” he said after a moment.

Top was looking from corner to corner, checking every shadow, with eyes as cold as a rattlesnake’s. He met my glance and gave me a short nod.

Behind us I could hear the wounded soldier sobbing.