Axiom’s Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

I’d never read anything by Jonathan Maberry until this novel. I’d heard of him, knew that he had won the Bram Stoker Award (an award given each year by the Horror Writers Association) a couple times. I didn’t know about all his non-fiction writing. Mr. Maberry is apparently an accomplished martial artist and has published several books on that subject. He is also a writing teacher and lecturer, and often speaks at writers conferences taking place at conventions like DragonCon and LunaCon. He has also decided to try his hand at comics writing, having published a story in Wolverine: Anniversary and having a Punisher story upcoming.

Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel is the story of a Baltimore, Md. Police officer, former military, who is recruited by a (everyone say it with me now) “super secret government organization”, in this case named innocuously enough Department of Military Science, to help fight a terrorist organization that has apparently developed a virus that turns people into flesh-hungry zombies. That’s the plot in a nutshell but there is, of course, much more to it. There’s international intrigue, interpersonal relationships laced with love and trust and hatred and betrayal. There are good guys who really are bad guys and bad guys who turn out to be Evil Incarnate. And, of course, there are various shades of gray throughout the novel.

The Heroes:

Ledger’s team at DMS, codenamed Team Echo, is filled with characters which are real characters, all of them very distinct individuals who really stand out from the page and draw the reader into the story. They are drawn from various disciplines and government organizations, from the military to the CIA. Top Sims, Skip Tyler, Ollie Brown, and Harvey Rabbit (that is really his name) are all very different people who ostensibly share only one thing: a love of country. Mr. Church, the mind behind the DMS and someone whom everyone in DC fears apparently, is enigmatic and very hard to get any kind of read on but Maberry still gives him life and vibrancy. Grace Courtland is the other team leader we get to meet here and we watch her transition from a coldly military cipher into a real flesh and blood woman the reader cares about. There is intrigue within this organizational dynamic, as it is shown early on that there is a traitor lurking somewhere in its midst. It is also shown that most of these people have been recruited and put together in a very short amount of time, leaving the reader no way to truly judge who might or might not be on the up and up. The only people we can be pretty sure about throughout the novel are Joe Ledger and his friend, the police psychologist Rudy Sanchez, who is brought in by Ledger after his first “job interview” with Church.

One thing odd about the heroes is the names. Joe Ledger is the civilian name of the character Dr. Spectrum in Marvel’s Squadron Supreme super-team. Harvey Rabbit, of course, everyone knows. There is also here a Dr. Hu (pronounced Who), who is one of the scientists working for DMS and a comics/zombie movie geek. He asks Ledger if he knows about the comics use of his name and has a Marvel Zombies action figure set on his desk. He also sports what could be a fatal sense of humor given his chosen profession and the temperament of the men he works with. It will be interesting to see him in a non-zombie storyline that is surely coming in this series.

The Villains

If the “secret government organization run by the strange man with no discernable past and answerable to virtually no one” makes an unlikely refuge for the heroes of the novel, the villains at least fall under familiar categories. First we have Sebastian Gault, the pharmaceutical billionaire who applies seemingly endless layers of secrecy and machinations to the plot he believes he has concocted, and his Man Friday known to the reader only as Toys. These two represent the “evil corporation” side of the villainous duplex. The other side is represented by El Mujahid, a Muslim terrorist whose hatred of infidels Gault uses to accomplish Gault’s ends, and Amirah, El Mujahid’s wife who is having an affair with Gault and is a fabulously brilliant scientist in her own right. It is Amirah who runs the lab that makes and upgrades the virus. Evil Corporation and Islamic Jihad make uneasy allies, each wanting what it wants and not big on sharing.

I haven’t said much about the zombies themselves here because they do change through the book, as the disease is mutated and refined. They start out as mindless drones whose only purpose seems to be to gain sustenance by consuming the living. Dr. Hu will tell us later that they aren’t really dead in the strictest sense. The disease reactivates the brain of its host but only after oxygen deprivation and the virus has destroyed higher brain function. It then automatically shuts down any part of the body too damaged to function while keeping the brain going. Their only real purpose in violence and biting seems to be to spread the disease, which makes it seem very much like The Rage from 28 Days Later (which Hu also mentions in the novel, now that I think of it).

Terrorism is a frightening reality of the world we live in. Fanatics willing to both kill and die for whatever cause are something we have to think about and guard against. Bioterrorism is an even more frightening thing than simple bombings because its effects can be much farther reaching and devastating. This book takes a fantastic concept and couches it in the very real and concrete modern world we live in, making it true sf in the finest tradition of the word. It is, at it’s heart, a military/cop novel with an excellent narrative and a truly scary premise that could, in large measure, be coming true even as we speak.

[Read author Jonathan Mayberry's comments on this review]

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