Predator One (44 page)

Rudy shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

“I suppose I’m having d
é
j
à
vu. Have we been in this exact hospital in this same kind of situation?”

We paused, each of us
looking around and looking backward into memory.

“Damn,” I said softly. “I know what you mean. Feels like half a dozen times I can name. Maybe more.”

“More,” Rudy agreed, then added. “Too many.”

A door opened down the hall and a doctor came out, spotted us, and came to meet us.

“I’m Doctor Alur,” he said. “Infectious Diseases. They called me in.”

We introduced ourselves.

“Good to meet you,
Doctor,” I said.

“Yes,” said Alur, “though I’m sorry it’s under such unfortunate circumstances.”

“Exactly how unfortunate are we talking? What is this? Ebola or—?”

“No,” said Alur, “but I’m not sure we should be relieved. The two victims both exhibit symptoms consistent with a disease that cannot do what it apparently has.”

“You lost me.”

“Please explain,” urged Rudy.

“Disease symptoms follow
patterns,” Alur explained. “Even in the cases of mutation, the symptoms are part of a logic chain. We can understand the pathology because we know what diseases of various kinds are likely to do. There isn’t much room for them to do things entirely outside of their symptomatological profiles. Do you follow?”

The question was directed at me, the thug without a medical degree.

“Right,” I said.
“If you catch a flu, your ass won’t fall off. Got it.”

He almost smiled. Managed not to. “In cases of extreme mutation, where an unforeseen acceleration of the disease has occurred, we can still look for—and generally find—a chain of cause and effect.”

“But not in this case?” I asked.

“Not so far.”

Rudy frowned. “What disease are we talking about?”

He took a breath. “We believe that this
is some kind of extreme or mutated form of necrotizing fasciitis.”

I stared at him. “Necrotizing—? Wait, are you talking about the flesh-eating disease?”

“That’s a misnomer,” said Alur, “but yes. Are you familiar with it?”

“Not really. I know about it, but from a distance.”

“Doctor,” said Rudy, “Captain Ledger has been around weaponized pathogens for some time. Please give him what you have.
If he has questions later, I’ll be able to fill in the blanks.”

Alur nodded. “We call it NF, though the press likes to call it the flesh-eating disease or the flesh-eating bacteria syndrome. It’s a very rare infection of the deeper layers of skin and subcutaneous tissues. Even in ordinary cases, it progresses rapidly, having greater risk of developing in patients who are immunocompromised. In
patients, say, with cancer or diabetes. Understand: even in ordinary cases, it is known as a severe disease of sudden onset. Treatment usually involves high doses of intravenous antibiotics and debriding of the necrotic flesh. It’s typically fatal when untreated.”

“This is a bacteria, not a virus?” I asked.

“Yes, but it’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s always more complicated than that,”
I muttered.

“This disease agent is a Type One polymicrobial, so, actually, quite a few different types of bacteria can cause NF. Group A streptococcus—
Streptococcus pyogenes
—
Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium perfringens, Bacteroides fragilis, Aeromonas hydrophila,
and others. And there are other kinds of NF: Type Two, which are triggered by a single kind of bacteria. And since 2001, we’ve cataloged
another serious form of monomicrobial necrotizing fasciitis that has been observed with increasing frequency, caused by methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
—”

I held up a hand. “Not studying for a test, doc. Hit me with what I need to know.”

He looked momentarily flustered, then nodded. My guess was that this was all so big and scary to him that he was letting his clinical knowledge prop
up the rest of him. I’ve seen it a hundred times.

“When we encounter patients presenting with signs of cellulitis, we have several tests we can perform to determine the likelihood of NF. C-reactive protein, total white-blood-cell count, hemoglobin, sodium, creatinine, and glucose. We ran all of those on the deceased, and we hit the right bells each time. This is, without a doubt, necrotizing
fasciitis.”

“The police and your own people have determined that the disease was spread through contaminated food. Specifically, some Mexican food that was delivered via one of those drones.”

“NachoCopter,” I said. “It’s one of those five-prop commercial drones. A quintocopter made by Sullivan Airdrop in Pasadena. We’ve got people on there way now, and we had local law shut the place down and
quarantine the staff.”

Alur shook his head. “I read about those kinds of companies, about the drone deliveries, but I can’t believe the FAA granted approval.”

“Supreme Court overruled the FAA,” I said. “The corporations that want to use commercial delivery drones swing a lot of political weight.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked or appalled by that.”

“Shocked, no? Appalled—yeah, I think you
can run with that. Their ads say that the drone will deliver hot food in under twenty minutes. Domino’s is doing the same thing. So are Papa John’s, McDonald’s, and others. Fact of life that this shit’s happening. However, it doesn’t explain what happened today. How did that happen? Was the NF introduced to the food at the restaurant?”

Rudy consulted a notebook. “From phone records we were able
to determine that Mr. Qui
ñ
ones ordered his food by phone and the drone made the delivery nineteen minutes later.”

“Has anyone talked to the drone operator?” asked Alur. “I read that there’s someone in a room using remote control—?”

“That’s the thing, doc,” I said, “NachoCopter doesn’t use remote pilots. They’re using autonomous piloting software.”

Rudy knew about Regis, but there was no need
to explain it to Alur. Not yet, anyway.

“Oh.” Alur looked deeply troubled. “Was that same drone used for other deliveries today?”

“Yeah, it was,” I said. “Seventeen more. And before you ask, our team rolled cars to each location. So far, all of the other customers are okay. No one else is sick. So far, at least. What’s the timetable if someone else was exposed?”

“With this version of NF? I
don’t know. I’d be guessing…”

“Guess,” I suggested.

“Under two hours. Mr. Qui
ñ
ones and Ms. Santa Domingo apparently collapsed after eating the food. Possibly no more than sixty to ninety minutes later. They succumbed to deterioration of their tissues and died shortly after that.”

I whistled. Rudy shook his head, not in refusal of the doctor’s words but because it was like taking another arrow
in the chest. Idealism and optimism glow pretty brightly, and that gives the bastards of this world something to aim at.

“Last delivery before we shut it down was four hours ago,” I said. “Give it forty-five minutes’ max time before someone eats something they’ve ordered delivered. That gives us three hours for there to be more dead bodies. Why aren’t we seeing that?”

Rudy nodded to Doctor Alur.
“Are we positive the bacteria was in the Mexican food?”

“Yes,” he said. “We were able to analyze the stomach contents.”

“How long should it have taken them to die from exposure under ordinary circumstances?” I asked.

“If left untreated, NF could kill in only a few months. Some cases take years.”

“Big scary question,” I said. “How contagious is this?”

Rudy fielded that. “Generally, not very.
However, it’s possible for uninfected people to come into contact with patients with the disease and become infected with an organism that may eventually cause necrotizing fasciitis. Transmission from one person to another usually requires direct contact with a patient or some item that can transfer it to another person’s skin. Infection usually requires a cut or abrasion for the organisms to establish
an infection. However, once contracted, mortality rates can be as high as twenty-five percent.”

Alur nodded. “We see about six hundred to a thousand cases each year.”

“Here in Chula Vista?” I asked.

“No, here in the United States.”

“So, how do two people like this die of a disease like that in a couple of hours?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Can you take a guess?”

Alur paused,
then said, “Come and look at the bodies.”

We followed him down the hall and through one of those big leather and plastic doors that flap open and shut. Like they have in meat lockers, which is a visual I wish I hadn’t made for myself. We went through several layers of hanging sheets of thick plastic into a biohazard isolation suite. We didn’t pass through the last layer of plastic but instead
stared in horror at what lay on two identical steel tables. At two bodies. If you could call them bodies. You certainly couldn’t call them people.

Not anymore.

There were red lumps on two side-by-side stainless-steel tables. They had arms and legs. There were bony nobs that were about the size of heads. The rest?

God.

They really did look like the kind of melted corpses you see in those old
horror movies. But no movie, despite great scripts and acting, despite computer-generated special effects and brilliant cinematography, can capture that one element that will always separate fantasy from reality.

Those were actual people there. Not actors, not stunt doubles. Not animatronic monsters.

These were people, and this disease had stolen their lives, stolen their faces, consumed their
futures. Robbed them not just of heartbeat and breath, but of all those moments that make up a life. Small joys, intimate conversations, unexpected excitements, casual insights. Happiness and love. Family. All gone.

Devoured.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed. “How could this happen?”

The doctor’s eyes looked strange. Haunted. Deeply frightened.

“If I had to guess,” he said softly, “I’d say that
this was a deliberate mutation.”

Chapter One Hundred and Two

Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center

Medical Center Court, Chula Vista, California

March 31, 9:17
P.M.

The big flap door behind us opened and a man peered in. Hard to say what he looked like beneath the hazmat suit except that he was black, medium height, and wore wire-frame glasses. His head jerked a bit in surprise.

“Oh! Pardon me,” he said quickly. “I was looking
for the physician in charge.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Are you the doctor?”

“I’m the man asking who you are,” I said, my tone on the sharp side of friendly.

“Sorry, the ER staff sent me down here to ask the doctor to come look at someone they just brought in. They think it might be the same thing.”

“Brought in?” cried Alur. “Brought in where? Is the patient alive? Is he conscious?”

The man,
who was still only head and shoulders into the room, turned to face Alur. “You’re the doctor?”

“Yes,” said Alur.

“Okay, great.”

The man stepped into the room, and as he did so he brought up the combat shotgun that he’d been hiding.

There was no time to do anything.

Not soon enough.

The blast caught Doctor Alur full in the chest. One magnum twelve-gauge shell tore the man to rags. It shredded
his chest, vaporized his heart, and blew out his spine. At that distance—less than fifteen feet—there was no way for Alur to run. Just as there was no way for the killer to miss.

I was in motion before Alur’s body could even fall.

I shoved Rudy behind a table and dove for the gunman. My sidearm was in my shoulder holster under the hazmat suit. These weren’t combat overgarments, not like the
Saratoga hammer suits we usually wore for combat in hot zones. I was unarmed against a shotgun.

But I was so close. Too close for him to swing the barrel toward me. Not in time. Beyond him, I could hear other men shouting. There was another shot. Down the hall.

This was a full-out assault.

That flashed through my brain as I leaped inside the space of a moment, caught the barrel as he tried
to bring it to bear, grabbed the barrel with my right, and jerked it high, catching him across the face with a left-hand cutting palm. It spun him as surely as if I’d hit him with a baseball bat. Feels about the same, too. His chin spun around, and his body wanted to follow, but he still had a solid grip on the gun. That grip created resistance. Maybe it sprained his neck. I don’t know—I didn’t ask.
I chop-kicked him in the knee, feeling the cartilage and bones crumble; and as he sagged back, I tore the shotgun from him, reversed it in my grip, jammed the barrel against his cheekbone, and blew his head all over the door.

He toppled outward, spraying the floor outside with blood and brain matter.

Two men stood a dozen yards away, staring in shock and horror at the nearly headless corpse.
Maybe they knew who it was. They were all carrying similar weapons. I didn’t know who they were, didn’t know where Brian and the rest of my team was.

I didn’t wait to find out. The Benelli M3 combat shotgun in my hands held twelve shells. Two were gone. I hosed the guys in the hall with the rest. They tried so hard to bring their guns up. To make a fight of this. To have a chance.

I took that
chance from them.

The shells tore them into scarlet inhumanity.

The front door opened, and Brian Botley staggered in. He was splashed with blood, and his hazmat suit was torn. He had an M5 is his hands.

“They ambushed us,” he gasped. “Riker and Smalls are down.”

“How bad are you hurt?”

“Body armor took the hit. I think. Cracked some ribs.”

He was wheezing and could barely stand. I pointed
the way I’d come.

At the far end of the hall, I heard another shotgun blast. There were more of these pricks.

“Call it, sir,” said Brian.

“Alur’s dead. Rudy’s not. Make sure he stays safe. Go.”