V-Wars: Shockwaves

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WRITTEN BY

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everyone Is Infected.

JENNIFER BROZEK • JOHN DIXON DANA FREDSTI • LOIS H. GRESH • NANCY HOLDER JONATHAN MABERRY • JEFFREY J. MARIOTTE MARSHEILA ROCKWELL • JOE MCKINNEY LUCAS MANGUM • YVONNE NAVARRO WESTON OCHSE • JADE SHAMES • JOHN SKIPP CODY GOODFELLOW • JAMES R. TUCK MIKE WATT OUR WORLD HAS BEEN TORN APART. LONG-FOUGHT WARS FIND NO PEACE, ENEMIES PROVIDE NO QUARTER. HOPE FADES. BLOOD SPILLS. THE VIRUS GOES ON. THIS IS LIFE. WHAT IS LEFT OF IT. PREPARE TO KNOW FEAR. THESE ARE THE VAMPIRE WARS.

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safety Is scarce.

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LOOK FOR V-WARS FROM IDW PUBLISHING: WWW.IDWPUBLISHING.COM 19.99

PROSE NOVEL VOLUME 1 HARDCOVER B&W 384 PG • $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-61377-151-8 GRAPHIC NOVEL VOLUME 1 HARDCOVER FULL COLOR • 116 PG • $9.99 ISBN: 978-1-63140-063-6

MAYBERRY

no one Is spared.

V-WARS: SHOCKWAVES CHRONICLES THE SPREAD OF BLOODLUST, BLOODSHED, AND VIOLENCE BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE UNDEAD. NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR JONATHAN MABERRY LEADS ANOTHER EXPEDITION INTO A BLOOD-SOAKED AND DANGEROUS WORLD WHERE ANYONE CAN TURN AT ANY TIME. IN THIS WORLD WHERE NO ONE IS SAFE, THE RESULTS OF INFECTION ARE FELT FAR AND WIDE.

VWARS SH O C KWAVE S

The war rages on.

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RICHARD SHEINAUS GOTHAM DESIGN

FO R

E D I TO R IAL AS S I STAN C E BY

SARAH DUFFY

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V-WARS: SHOCKWAVES. FIRST PRINTING. JULY 2016. ©2016 Idea and Design Works, LLC. All Rights Reserved. The stories, characters, and incidents featured in this publication are entirely fictional. © 2016 Idea and Design Works, LLC. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 2765 Truxtun Road, San Diego, CA 92106. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in Canada.

IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.

Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher Greg Goldstein, President & COO Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services Jeff Weber, VP of Licensing, Digital and Subsidiary Rights Jerry Bennington, VP of New Product Development For international rights, please contact licensing@idwpublishing.com V-WARS created by Jonathan Maberry.

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WET WORKS part 1

By Jonathan Maberry

Global Acquisitions LLC Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Day 17 of the Red Storm

“

A

re we going to die down here?” demanded Luther Swann.

“First off,” said the big man with the knife, “stop yelling.”

“I’m not yelling,” yelled Swann.

They stood facing each other in a red room that had been white ten minutes earlier. The floors, the walls, even the ceiling was splashpainted in red. It dripped and ran and pooled. It glistened in the light from the few unbroken bulbs. In the corners where the light did not reach, it gleamed like thick, black oil. Everywhere else it was a bright red. Not the red of clown noses or party balloons. Not a happy red. Not a candy red or a Christmas red. This was darker, more viscous, so much less appealing. And it stank of copper and mingled urine, of gun smoke and pain.

“You are yelling,” said the big man quietly, “and you really need to stop.”

“I am not yelling, goddamn it.”

“Shut up,” said the big man. “Right. Fucking. Now.” “Don’t tell me what to—” The big man’s hands had been down at his side. The left holding a knife, the right covered in blood. Now the right hand had closed around Swann’s throat. The professor had not seen that hand move. There was

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V-WARS volume 4

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barely even a blur and suddenly hard fingers circled his throat. Not hard.

It was not an attack. Not yet, anyway. The threat, however, was eloquent.

Luther Swann stopped yelling, but in a low, ice-cold voice he said, “Take your hand off me.”

“You going to behave?”

Swann tried to swat the hand away. He failed. He tried to pull it away. And failed there, too. He tried to step back out of reach and the big man followed him step by step until Swann’s back thumped into the red-smeared wall, at which point the man tightened his grip. Just a little. Enough.

“Listen to me, Doc,” said the man slowly, precisely; making sure his words were clear. “This isn’t over. You hear me? We’re in deep shit and I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this. I need to figure this out or we are both dog meat, capiche? Now I’m going to let you go, and you get stupid, I’m going to knock you the fuck out and maybe I’ll even leave you here so the fang gang out there have a little breakfast buffet.

If you shut up and behave, then maybe—just maybe—I’ll take you with me. Now, can I let go without you going all drama queen on me?”

Swann stared up into hard, blue eyes for a long moment, then he nodded.

The man smiled a charming smile. As if this was just another day and they were two completely different people. As if the world was different.

He dropped his hand and looked around.

The room was a charnel house. Six bodies lay sprawled in a lake of blood. None of them whole. None of them human.

The door was closed and locked, but Swann knew as well as the man with the knife that the lock would not hold. Not against the monsters that were hunting them.

No… it would not hold at all if the monsters really wanted to get in.

“Ledger,” said Swann, his voice quiet now, though even he could hear the latent shrillness of a panic barely controlled, “are we going to get out of here?”

Captain Joe Ledger walked across the bloody floor. His gun was soaked, the slide locked back, the magazine empty, and it lay in a

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w et w ork s

quarter inch of gore. The small-blade knife was all he had left, although Ledger had done terrible things with it.

Terrible things.

Even so, there was worse on the other side of that door.

Much worse.

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OUR MAN IN MALI

By Joe McKinney

Timbuktu, Mali September 19th

F

or five days, Walter Laurens, who worked as the West African Regional Control Officer for the U.S. Department of Military Sciences, had been unable to make contact with his top agent.

A week of silence.

Not unusual, by itself.

Dr. Miriam Bloch worked in some remote areas of the Sahara Desert.

Communication wasn’t easy, even with advanced DMS technology.

She’d been given the cover story of a doctor working on Ebola for Doctors Without Borders, but her real job was to learn everything she could about the bayi species of vampires that had recently surfaced among the Tuareg people of Northern Mali, and as the Tuareg were semi-nomadic, she was constantly on the move.

A few missed calls were understandable.

Except that, over the last four months or so, the quality of her work had become erratic. Her progress reports were often incomplete, failing to answer even some of the more obvious questions, and more than once Laurens had been forced to ask the same question several times, over several emails, before she finally addressed it satisfactorily.

She was still the best doctor in West Africa—she’d delivered his own son, Roger, after all—but he was worried about her. So he got in his Land Cruiser and headed north on one of the few roads that led out of Timbuktu.

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o u r m an I N M AL I

He traveled most of the afternoon on bad roads, arriving in the Tuareg village with less than two hours of usable sunlight. The village was a typical one for the Tuareg nomads, consisting of twenty large, domed huts with patchwork roofs and low grass walls. Their openings were barely tall enough for a child to walk through without stooping, but Laurens knew from past experience that once inside the hut was large enough for a family of ten or more. A village this size could easily hold three hundred men, women, and children. Big for a Tuareg community.

Only there was no one around.

He turned off his vehicle and squinted through the windshield, looking for any signs of movement.

Nothing.

He climbed out of the vehicle and stared about at the quiet huts, the vacant doorways. A breeze carried a cloud of dust through the village, but that was all that moved. He couldn’t help but feel that something was very wrong here. During his last three years in Africa, Laurens had been in countless villages like this one. There were always chickens and dogs running around, always children chasing each other through the grass, laughing and shouting the way kids do.

But there was nothing here.

No old women shelling beans, no old men watching him through the slits in thick black veils. The Tuareg were nomads. They could uproot a village at a moment’s notice and take their lives on the road, but that didn’t look like what had happened here. They’d left too many valuable things lying around, washtubs and portable stoves, things they’d never leave behind.

So where was everybody?

“Hello?” he called out.

Nothing.

He turned around in a slow circle, studying every doorway. “Hello?”

Not even a dog barking.

Laurens walked over to one of the huts and stuck his head inside— and immediately recoiled from the stench of death. He backed away from the opening and took several deep breaths, face pinched in surprise and disgust.

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