Code Zero (Joe Ledger) - Softcover

Maberry, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250033438 ISBN 13: 9781250033437

Verlag: St. Martins Press-3PL, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

For years the Department of Military Sciences has fought to stop terrorists from using radical bioweapons-designer plagues, weaponized pathogens, genetically modified viruses, and even the zombie plague that first brought Ledger into the DMS. These terrible weapons have been locked away in the world's most secure facility. Until now. Joe Ledger and Echo Team are scrambled when a highly elite team of killers breaks the unbreakable security and steals the world's most dangerous weapons. Within days there are outbreaks of mass slaughter and murderous insanity across the American heartland. Can Joe Ledger stop a brilliant and devious master criminal from turning the Land of the Free into a land of the dead?
Code Zero, a Joe Ledger novel from Jonathan Maberry, is the exciting direct sequel to Patient Zero.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, four-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes horror, thrillers, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and suspense for adults and teens. His novels include Predator One, Code Zero, Rot & Ruin, Fall of Night, Ghost Road Blues, Patient Zero, and many others. Several of Jonathan's novels are in development for movies or TV including V-Wars, Extinction Machine, Rot & Ruin, and Dead of Night. He's the editor/co-author of V¿Wars, a vampire¿themed anthology; and is editor for a series of all-original X-FILES anthologies, the YA anthology Scary Out There, and the dark fantasy anthology Out of Tune. His V-Wars books have been developed as a board game. He is a popular featured expert on History Channel shows like Zombies: A Living History and Monsters, Myth and Legend. Since 1978 he's sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, and poetry. His comics include V-Wars, Rot & Ruin, Captain America: Hail Hydra, Bad Blood, Marvel Zombies Return and Marvel Universe VS The Avenger. He lives in Del Mar, California with his wife, Sara Jo and their dog, Rosie. www.jonathanmaberry.com.

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Code Zero

By Jonathan Maberry

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2014 Jonathan Maberry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-03343-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Part One: VaultBreaker, 
Part Two: Mother Night, 
Part Three: Burn to Shine, 
Part Four: Fun and Games, 
Part Five: First-Person Shooter, 
Epilogue, 
Also by Jonathan Maberry, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

The philosopher Nietzsche didn't get it right. He said, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster."

That's not exactly true.

Or, at least, not all the time.

If you battle monsters you don't always become a monster.

But you aren't entirely human anymore, either.

CHAPTER 2

1100 Block of North Stuart Street

Arlington, Virginia

Thursday, April 14, 1:22 p.m.

Some cases start big. Something blows up or someone unleashes a nasty bug and Echo Team hits the ground running. Most of the time, even if we don't know what the endgame is going to look like, we have some idea of what kind of fight we're in. And we can usually hear that big clock ticking down to boom time. Other cases are running fights and they end when one side runs out of bullets and the other doesn't.

I've had a lot of both.

This one started weird and stayed weird, and for most of it felt like we were swinging punches at shadows. We didn't even know what we were fighting until we were right there at the edge of the abyss.

And even then, it wasn't what we thought it was.

Not until we knew what it was.

Yeah, it was like that.

It started four months ago on one of those sunny days T. S. Eliot wrote about when he said that April was the cruelest month. When spring rains wake the dead bulbs buried in the cold dirt and coax flowers into first blooms. When we look at the flowers we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

I spent years mourning the dead. Helen. Grace. My friends and colleagues at the Warehouse. Members of my team who fell in battle. All of them in the cold, cold ground.

Now it was April and there were flowers.

In my life there was Junie Flynn. She was the flower of my spring.

As far as we knew, her cancer was in remission, though we were waiting for her last panels. But for right now, the sun shone through yellow curtains and birds sang in the trees.

I sat at a kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the remains of a big slice of apple-pecan pie. The rest of the pie was gone. There was evidence of it in crumbs and beige glob smeared on the floor, on the aluminum pie plate, and on the muzzle of my dog. Ghost. Big white shepherd.

He loves pie.

The mess was considerable. However, I had no intention of cleaning it up. It wasn't my pie.

It wasn't my house.

When the actual owner of the house — a Mr. Reginald Boyd — came home and then came storming into the kitchen, he told me, very loudly and with lots of cursing, that it wasn't my house, my kitchen, or my goddamn pie.

I agreed with those observations. Less so about his accusations that I fornicate with livestock.

Reginald Boyd was a big man gone soft in the middle, like an athlete who has gone to seed. Played some ball in college, hit the gym a bit after that. Started going soft probably around the same time that he started getting paid for stealing some real important shit from work.

"Work" was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Basically a collection of the most dangerous geeks on earth. Except for idiots like Reggie, those geeks try to keep America safe.

"Get the fuck out of my house," yelled Reginald Boyd.

Ghost, his face covered in apple pie and pecan bits, stood up and showed Boyd how big he was. And how many teeth he had.

I smiled at Boyd and said, "Lower your voice."

Boyd backed a step away. "You broke into my house."

"Only technically. I loided the lock with my library card. Loided," I repeated. "It's a word, look it up. It means to bypass a lock. You have a two-hundred-dollar dead bolt on your front door and a Mickey Mouse spring lock on the back door. A moron could get in here. So ... whereas I got in, I did no actual breaking."

He didn't know how to respond to that, so he glared at what was on the table. "You made coffee? And you ate my pie?"

I felt like I was in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears reboot.

"First off, the coffee is Sanka. How the hell can you call yourself an American and all you have in your pantry is powdered decaf? I ought to sic Ghost on you just for that."

"What —?"

"The pie's good though," I continued. "Could use more pecans. Store-bought, am I right? Take a tip and switch to Whole Foods, they have a killer deep-dish apple that'll make you cry."

"You're fucking crazy."

"Very likely," I admitted.

His hand touched the cell phone clipped to his belt. "Get the hell out before I call —"

I reached under my jacket, slid the Beretta 92F from its clamshell holster, and laid it on the table. "Seriously, Mr. Boyd — actually, may I call you Reggie?"

"Fuck you."

"Seriously, Reggie, do you really want to reach for that cell phone? I mean — who are you gonna call?"

"I'll call the fucking cops is who I'll call."

"No you won't."

"Why the fuck not?"

"'Cause I'm a cop, Einstein," I said. Which was kind of true. I used to be a cop in Baltimore before I was shanghaied into the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS gig gives me access to credentials from every law enforcement agency from the FBI to local law to the housing police. I need to flash a badge; they give me the right badge. The DMS, though, doesn't have its own badges.

Boyd eyed me. "You're no cop."

"I could be."

"Bullshit. I'm going to call the cops."

"No you're not."

"You can't stop me, this is my house."

I drummed my fingers on the table next to my gun. "Honestly, Reggie, they said you weren't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but come on ... Big guy? Big dog? Big gun? You're armed with a cell phone and a beer gut. How do you think this is going to play out?"

"I'm not afraid of any stupid dog."

I held up a finger. "Whoa now, Reggie. There are all kinds of lines we can step over. Insulting my dog, however, is a line you do not want to cross. I get weird about that, and you do not want me to get weird on you."

He stared blankly at me, trying hard to make sense of our encounter. His eyes flicked from me to Ghost — who noisily licked his muzzle — and back to me.

He narrowed his eyes to prove that he was shrewd. "What do you want?"

"What do you think I want?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you do."

"No, I don't know."

I sighed. "Okay, I'll give you a hint because you may actually be that stupid."

He started to open his mouth.

I said, "VaultBreaker."

His mouth snapped shut.

"Proprietary military software? Am I ringing any bells here?" I asked. "Anything? Anything? Bueller?"

That's when Reggie Boyd tried to run. He spun around and bolted down the hallway toward the front door.

I took a sip of the coffee. Sighed. Said, "Go ahead."

Ghost shot after him like a bullet, nails...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250033438
• ISBN 13: 9781250033437
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland