PART ONE
HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN TONIGHT
JONATHAN MABERRY
DURING THE OUTBREAK
— 1 —
NOW
Ever been in a helicopter crash?
There is no way to brace. There is no way to deal with any part of it. Your only hope is to get right with Jesus as fast as you can and hope that he isn’t playing golf with Buddha, with his phone switched off.
In the split second the pilot yells that he has a dead stick and that you’re all going down hard, you become acutely aware that a helicopter is a small metal box. It’s filled with sharp edges and a lot of incidental shit that’s suddenly going with you into an industrial dryer. The world spins and you can feel the subjective floor beneath you drop away. Gravity whispers bad promises in your ear. Adrenaline speed-bags your heart. You hear grown men and women—all of them tough and hardened—begin to scream. Through the windows you see the world whip around like a tilt-a-whirl.
You know the ground is waiting for you and it loves to kill things. Consider all of the billions of dead whose bones rest in the ground. It’s a hungry thing and it is never satisfied.
All of this is bad. All of this is absolutely fucking terrifying.
But any bad thing can get worse. Much, much worse.
Like when the guy strapped into the seat next to you on that falling helicopter is trying to bite you. Not out of fear, but because he has a hunger so deep that nothing, not even death, is going to stop it.
That’s how we fell.
It’s why we fell.
— 2 —
SIX HOURS AGO
It started in another aircraft. A plane. One of those big-ass air force C-5m Super Galaxy transport jobs bringing my team back from a base in Japan to LAX. We were alone in the plane, having dropped off the rest of the human luggage in Hawaii. Just me, Top and Bunny, sitting in shocked silence as we watched the news unfolding on our laptop screens.
We’d been radio silent for nearly a week because Echo Team had crossed the North Korean border to find a factory where they were developing a new kind of DSRV that could transport high-yield nukes right into American harbors. Intel from Japanese, South Korean, and American spies agreed that these deep-water vehicles were invisible to our best sonar. My boss, Mr. Church, took ownership of the case away from the U.S. JSOC people and put my Rogue Team International into play. I took Top and Bunny with me because I needed brains and muscles for a situation where lack of numbers would work better than a crowd scene. Because we operate outside of American law—we don’t even return the president’s emails most of the time—if we make a mess, then it’s all on us. The U.N. Security Council knew about us, but only off the record. No one else knows we exist, which is kind of the idea. Covert ops, you dig?
We found the base and discovered that the North Korean DSRV program was only days away from launching. That is some scary shit right there. Ten mini-subs armed with single-use missile launchers, each capable of carrying one fifty-megaton nuke. We hacked their network and identified all ten targets. New York, Los Angeles, Port of New Savannah, Port of Seattle, Port of Virginia, Port of Houston, the naval base in San Diego, as well as the Jebel Ali port in Dubai, Busan in South Korea, and Tokyo Harbor. And there were twenty-eight more of the machines in various stages of construction.
When we left, there was a smoking crater where the factory had been and a tapeworm in their computer system that did irreparable damage to their research databases. We made sure we were in the air, hitching a ride with the air force, before we switched our radios back on. And that’s when we all got kicked in the nuts. The world we just saved was already dying, and we were too late to do much of anything about it.
— 3 —
The devil slipped the leash in a small nobody-gives-a-fuck town in western Pennsylvania.
The devil’s name was Lucifer 113. One of those old Cold War bioweapons people created to kill everyone if their side lost. A doomsday weapon.
People, as I’ve said way too many times, are assholes. Not all of them, but enough of them. Especially the kind of entitled asshole who thinks the world is his bitch and—because he’s a jealous, childish and petty asshole—he’d rather burn it down than let anyone share. Maybe I’m mixing a metaphor. Don’t know, don’t care.
Military intel divisions—especially SpecOps teams—are always calm, cool and collected. There could be missiles inbound and they’d sound like they’re giving color commentary on a golf match. That wasn’t what we were hearing on the military channels. What we heard were screams. And weeping. And prayers. The story came out broken and jagged and it left us bleeding.
Dr. Herman Volker had been a young and brilliant bioweapons developer in the last few years of the Soviet Union. Some CIA spooks cultivated him as an asset, turned him and eventually brought him to the U.S. to help us develop a response to the weapons he’d helped create. That weapon, Lucifer, was based on parasites rather than something as fragile as a virus. These parasites were the ones you sometimes saw in internet news stories called “zombie wasps” or “zombie ants.” Volker and his team found a way to use them to create a real motherfucker of a bioweapon that rewired the human brain so that higher reasoning was gone and a lot of what they considered less important body functions were allowed to go idle. At the same time the parasites drove the hosts to spread their larvae through bites, and the weapon supported this by amping up aggression.
Yeah, process that for a moment.
In the decades since the Cold War ended, maniacs like Volker were semi-retired. A lot of them were given jobs in R and D projects tied to DARPA or in corporations doing government contract work. There was always supervision so they didn’t do anything hinky. Which is like saying condoms are one hundred percent effective.
So, Volker said he wanted to stay active and asked for a job as a doctor in a super-max prison. Sew up some tough guys after yard brawls and maybe do some quiet research on the side with “test subjects” who wouldn’t complain a whole lot. Wasn’t supposed to be working on anything within a million miles of Lucifer. What his handler failed to grasp was that Volker had history apart from his work with the Soviet bioweapons lab. Family members of his had been torn apart by a serial killer, and that left him scarred. Or, maybe “warped” is a better word. His hatred of those kinds of predators was the fuel that fired his engines, but also consumed his humanity.
When a particularly vicious serial murderer came up for lethal injection, Volker decided to get a little of his own brand of revenge. He replaced the usual chemical cocktail with a brand-new version of the one he’d helped develop—Lucifer 113. His plan? He wanted the killer to go into the ground and then reanimate inside his coffin. Awake, aware, connected to all five senses, but totally unable to control his body. He would lie there, feeling himself rot, kept alive by the parasites that fed on him with infinite slowness.
Problem was that an aunt nobody knew about filed papers to claim his body after the execution and had it transported to her home town for burial on family land.
In the mortuary of that little town, the killer woke up. He woke up hungry, too.
That’s how it started. A big-ass super-cell storm hitting the area was how containment failed. People fleeing the area in cars, trains, on foot and on planes was how it spread.
Now it was everywhere.
We sat on the plane and watched the end of the world. Three big, tough, ruthless, capable special operators. Helpless as fucking babies.
— 4 —
And then the phone rang.
— 5 —
“Captain Ledger,” said a male voice. “This is Scott Pruitt, National Security Advisor—”
“I know who you are,” I interrupted. “Tell me you’re calling to tell me this shit isn’t as bad as it looks.”
There was a beat. “It’s worse than it looks,” said Pruitt.