The Fall: Victim Zero (5 page)

So he packed up for the day and left, calling Jones on his way out to let him know he'd be heading to see his family.

“
I'll have a car pick you up at your house in the morning, then, Doctor McDonald,” Jones said after Kell told him he was leaving.

“
No, that's fine. I'll just drive back in. I'm not going to the house anyway.”

Jones cleared his throat. “Actually, I think you are. Your wife and daughter have left the hotel and returned home.”

The room went cold, but after a moment Kell realized it was him. A ball of ice sat in his middle, fear and anger crushing against each other. “Interesting thing for you to know, Agent Jones,” Kell said. “Why do you think my wife would do a thing like that without telling me?”

Jones replied in an equally cool tone. “Because we told her to less than three hours ago. We also informed her any outside communications, especially to you, would result in heavy penalties for both of you.”

The cell phone creaked in his hand, a spurt of static fell across the call. Kell stood in the lab's parking lot, shouting.

“
What the fuck, Jones? What gives you the right? You know how bad this thing can go. You know the risks! You think I'm going to let my family stay here?”

“
No, Doctor, I don't think you would if it were up to you,” Jones replied, his voice now glacial. “But it isn't. I'm in charge of your life in the foreseeable future. You wanted to get them out of danger, not worry about their safety so you could work on a solution. Why should you get to send your family away when so many others don't even know there's a problem? No, McDonald, they're staying close. Because I
do
know how bad this can go. I want you to think about that as you're working. You need to have that motivation. You and I both know this thing needs a solution as soon as possible. This is how we're going to get results.”

“
You son of a bitch,” Kell said. “If anything happens to them, I'm going to fucking kill you.”

Jones grunted. “If anything happens to them, I think I'll have bigger problems than worrying about you. You should know I've been in town for the last day. For better or worse, I'm running this show. Get results, Doctor, and everyone walks away happy.”

Just before he pulled into the driveway, his phone rang. Kell saw on the caller ID that it was Jones again, but he let it go to voice mail. Ten minutes with his wife and daughter wasn't too much to ask after three days of solid work.

Kell smelled homemade tacos when he walked in, a favorite. Karen was usually home too late to make cooking something she did on a regular basis, so most of the time the task fell to him. Years of bachelorhood and college life built strong cooking skills if you wanted to eat well.

“I'm home,” he said as he threw his coat over the back of the recliner and made his way toward the kitchen. “Karen?”

In the kitchen he found his wife feeding his daughter between stirring the hamburger cooking on the stove. There were also two men who looked suspiciously like federal agents of some kind.

Karen shot him a dark look. Kell grimaced.

“
So. Jones has people in my house. That's just great.”

“
Sir, we only entered the house a minute ago. Agent Jones sent a priority message that you and your family were to leave immediately for your lab,” one of the men, who Kell thought of as Sandy because of his hair, said. “He mentioned he tried to call you.”

“
I've had six hours of sleep in the last three days, man. I haven't seen my wife or held my daughter. I thought it could wait.”

The second agent, who Kell didn't have a nickname for because the man was utterly unremarkable, reached a hand into his pocket and removed an oversized smart phone. He held it out to Kell after unlocking the screen. “It can't, sir.”

Priority One
, the text message said.
Incident reported, recall vital persons ASAP to secure location. Bring family.

Cold sweat broke out across his entire body. This was it. Jones wouldn't have sent an alert for anything less than a worst-case situation.

Karen was already grabbing the diaper bag and hauling baby Jennifer out of her high chair. The stove was off. Kell smiled. His wife was nothing if not thorough and prepared. He followed her and the agents out to the driveway, snagging the suitcase she'd brought in only hours before. Not even unpacked. Karen was nobody's fool.

A giant black SUV screeched to a halt in front of the house. Sandy took the suitcase and diaper bag, loading them into the shiny truck as the other agent pulled the car seat from Kell's sedan. In less than a minute they were off, Kell's heart hammering against his ribcage but somehow less stressed than he had been in days. The worst might be here, but his family was with him where he knew they were safe.

“What's the situation?” Kell asked. “Anyone know the details?”

The driver looked at them in the rear view, his eyes flat and empty. “I've been instructed to have you call Agent Jones at your earliest opportunity,” the man said before settling his gaze on Karen. “I'm ordered to tell you, Mrs. McDonald, that from this moment on anything you hear or see is to be considered classified information. Revealing that information will result in harsh punishment, is that understood?”

Karen's face tightened in anger, but she nodded.

Jones answered immediately, and didn't wait for pleasantries.

“McDonald, good. Your patient died.”

It took a few seconds for that information to process. His patient? “What, do you mean
David
?” Kell said. “What happened to him?”

“
He committed suicide about an hour ago,” Jones replied. “He left a note, not that it matters. The point is, he didn't die from Chimera. He took his own life.”

“
Then why is this a priority whatever?” Kell asked. “If Chimera didn't do it, why are we on our way to the lab?”

“
Because,” Jones said. “He didn't stay dead.”

Part Two
:
Precipice

We climbed, he going first and I behind,

Until through some small aperture I saw

The lovely things the skies above us bear.

Now we came out and once more saw the stars.

  
Dante's Inferno, from the thirty-fourth Canto

Chapter Five

Karen and Jennifer safely tucked away in his office, Kell went to visit David Markwell.

What
used
to be David Markwell, anyway.

The stench hit him before he even made it into the room. Bodily waste. David had done what all people do when they pass on, but the thing that had risen in his place seemed to have no sense of its actions. The plexiglass was smeared with feces and urine.

Kell watched the thing try to reach him; screeching and thrashing against the barrier, it seemed to feel no pain. Its face was nearly black—David had hung himself with the bed sheet still dangling from his neck—and his eyes were glazed. The shy intelligence behind them was gone. Whatever Kell was looking at, David was no part of it.

Kell was staring the the gaping red gashes on the walking corpse's fingers and hands when Jones walked in the room.

“What do you think, Doctor?” the agent said.

I want to vomit, that's what I think. I want to weep for this poor kid.

“It doesn't feel any pain,” Kell said instead, pointing at the gashes. “It's been shredding itself against the holes in that plexiglass for ten minutes now, but hasn't so much as blinked. Coordination is reasonably good, though the subject seems to focus solely on aggression. I won't stick my hand in there to prove it, but I'd guess it's hungry.”

Jones recoiled, the first honest reaction Kell had seen from the man. “You mean it wants to eat us?”

“Yeah, that would be my guess. Brain activity seems to be rooted in the lower functions. Aggression and hunger are linked. I could be wrong, of course. Feel free to test my theory.”

Jones scowled. “I wasn't asking for your thoughts on Mr. Markwell, at any rate. I want to know if you think you can stop this.”

Kell gaped. “Seriously? What do you think I've been trying to do since you dropped this whole thing on me? I've gone over it from every angle, Jones. This,” he said, waving a hand toward the wretched thing that had been David Markwell, “is something I can't even explain, much less
fix.
For the love of God, man, we have to tell people. He's not going to be the only one.”

Jones simmered. There was a war on his face between forced impassivity and the strange reality moaning and hissing right in front of him. “What am I supposed to tell people, McDonald? Huh? Am I supposed to tell the leader of the free world a dead person just stood back up and tried to bite the guy cleaning up his body?”

Kell stood abruptly, towering over Jones. He thrust a hand toward the isolation booth. “You know what this is. It's your fucking
job
to tell them what happened. A man died, and thanks to my research,
which was taken without my approval and used by idiots
, his dead body reanimated and became uncontrollably violent. You've seen the movies. You damn well know what this is. So if you have to call the president and tell him a bunch of scientific jargon that convinces him we accidentally made zombies a real thing, that's what you do. Every test I've run over the last three days indicates we're all infected with this same version of Chimera. Which means as soon as the incubation period is finished and it reaches total saturation within a host, this is going to start happening to other people.”

Jones stared at him, mouth open and teeth clenched in a snarl. “I can't believe you just said that word. Fucking zombies? Really?”

Kell slammed a fist into the wall beside him. “
I
can't believe you're still here talking to me about this. Get on the goddamn phone and maybe we can get ahead of this thing before it turns into a total clusterfuck.”

For a moment both men were caught in the magnetic grip of a stare that neither seemed willing to break. Jones was frustrated and angry that the situation was spiraling badly out of control. Kell, on the other hand, saw the larger picture. The variant was now a plague, and everything he knew told him it was probably global by now. A matter of time before the first person outside containment died and came back. The thought sent a chill through his spine, but it filled his entire body with overwhelming rage as well. This was his work, perverted.

Jones, faced with nearly three hundred pounds of pissed-off scientist, looked away first. He knocked on the door, and Sandy came in.

“
Kill that thing,” Jones ordered, then left the room.

Sandy unholstered his weapon and took aim through one of the holes in the wall. He turned his head and met Kell's gaze. “I understand you were friends with this man, sir. You may want to leave the room.”

Kell shook his head. “I told him I'd help him. I should be here for the end.”

Something like approval danced across Sandy's face before the level stare of a killer took back over.

Sandy took aim and fired expertly through the small hole. Three shots in the chest, clustered in a space less than two inches across. Other than to stumble back slightly under the impact, David's corpse didn't seem bothered.

“
Holy shit,” Sandy said. “I just shot him through the heart three times. How...”

Kell's mind raced, and he fell into a habit from his teens—muttering to himself as he worked out a problem.

“Chimera had to have infiltrated every system to have gained this kind of control. Started out in the nervous system, and obviously it has control of the body...” He snapped his fingers at Sandy, who was looking dazed, to get his attention. “You're going to have to damage the brain. If that doesn't work, then we're in way more trouble than we can handle.”

Trembling slightly, the other man took a deep breath and raised his weapon. He shuffled to the right to get a better angle through another of the ventilation holes. Kell wanted to turn away but couldn't; he had prepared himself for the horror of watching his friend fall the first time. When he hadn't, detached curiosity took over.

Sandy's finger squeezed the trigger.

The hammer fell forward, forcing the firing pin into the casing of the bullet. The primer fired, igniting the powder, and the resulting explosion of gas propelled the .40 caliber copper-jacketed round through the hexagonal rifling of the barrel.

The journey through the intervening space was uninteresting and short, and for the purposes of the result might as well not have happened. Over that distance air drag, gravity, and other important factors played virtually no part in the bullet's flight. From barrel to left-of-center forehead, the physics of the bullet were essentially unchanged.

The moment of impact was key.

Inside the skull of David Markwell, Chimera had grown strong. Giving the organism a motive would be needlessly dramatic; it was, after all, only an infection. Industrious and nearly infinite in flexibility and adaptability, but an infection nonetheless.