Dedication
To my fellow Brainstormers. Well, gang, here it is. The third book in the trilogy I first brainstormed with you. Here’s to you all! And a big thanks to Christine Witthohn, agent extraordinaire, who helped brainstorm the books from the beginning!
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lisa Marie Rice
Back Ads
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
In the air from Mount Blue in
Northern California to San Francisco
Hang in there, Sophie Daniels, Jon Ryan thought grimly. I’m coming for you as fast as I can. Whatever you do, whatever it takes, stay alive. He’d only seen her in photographs and only knew of her through her friend Elle Connolly, who had also worked at Arka Pharmaceuticals. He knew only that she was beautiful and smart. A researcher, a virologist, and now a vulnerable woman surrounded by danger.
Jon Ryan looked down at the ravaged, smoking landscape. His stealth helicopter basically flew itself and for the first time he regretted that. Having to pay attention to flying would have kept his mind off what he was seeing below. Death. Destruction. Chaos.
There were so many columns of smoke, he didn’t bother flying around them but arrowed his way through. The helo’s air filters could take care of the smoke.
Pity they couldn’t filter out his feelings.
The helo was hermetically sealed, so he couldn’t smell the smoke. But he knew what burning vehicles smelled like. And burning people.
The world was dying, right before his eyes. There was the tiniest spark of hope waiting for him on Beach Street, near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Sophie Daniels. A scientist with a vaccine against the virus that was tearing humanity apart. The Doom Bug.
Jon had never met her, but she was Elle Connolly’s best friend. Elle Connolly soon-to-be Elle Ross. He knew that in his teammate Nick Ross’s eyes, Elle was already his wife. Nick had loved Elle forever and had lost her, then found her again. Just before scumbags who worked for Arka Pharmaceutical’s security system tried to kill her.
Arka was responsible for murdering the world, its death throes visible right below him. But the world might survive if he got to Sophie Daniels in time. If she was still alive. If he could smuggle her out of a San Francisco with an estimated 600,000 monsters roaming the streets. If they could replicate that vaccine, in a lab which was even now being prepped back at Haven on Mount Blue. If the vaccine worked.
A long shot, but the only one they had.
Was Sophie Daniels still alive?
He remembered the last email Sophie sent to her friend and colleague, Elle.
Elle, I think Arka has bioengineered a virulently contagious virus that takes out the neocortex and activates the limbic system. If you’re reading this, then you’ll know that the virus has been unleashed. I hacked into the files and I discovered that there is a vaccine. It was in Dr. Lee’s office in the Arka building, in a case that also contained the live virus. There was so much chaos that I was able to steal it. So I have a refrigerator case of 200 vials of vaccine and 4 doses of live virus. The electricity has gone out and I don’t think the coolant in the case will last much more than 96 hours. I’m in my apartment on Beach Street and I don’t dare go out. These . . . creatures are running around in the streets. All I can do is stay locked up in the apartment and hope that someone can come for me.
If you’re reading this, Elle, send someone. This vaccine is our only hope.
Soph
They’d received that message twenty-four hours ago. Elle had replied that Jon was on his way. He’d wanted to head out immediately. Go grab her and the vaccine and bring her back to safety. Their little stealth helo could make it to San Francisco and back in a few hours, easy.
That had been the plan.
But in this new world, no plans worked. He’d had to leave their main helo on the rooftop of the Arka skyscraper in the Financial District of San Francisco. He was flying an older helo that had been in maintenance. And instead of heading out immediately, he’d headed out twenty-four hours late because the rotor head had to be replaced and they had to go steal one in what had, overnight, become badlands.
Twenty-four hours was a long time in this new world. Time enough for Sophie Daniels to be caught and ripped to pieces. Time enough for the whole of fucking San Francisco to turn. Time enough for her to turn. Jesus.
At least her building was intact. He could see it both from the Keyhole satellite feed and their own drones that Mac and Nick had sent to hover over the Beach Street area.
To top it off, her Internet connection had broken down, but his was still functioning. Haven had an almost unbreakable connection. Its servers were in an impenetrable underground bunker about a mile away, safe and impregnable. He could talk to Haven and they could listen in and connect with anyone whose connection still worked. Sophie’s didn’t. Jon had done a fast check and the entire northern section of San Francisco was down.
He was flying in blind, without knowing what was at the other end. Knowing only that monsters were roaming the streets.
The creatures seemed to be able to find healthy people and go after them with unparalleled ferocity. Did they smell the healthy? God only knew. He didn’t. Jon was a warrior and had been trained all his adult life in the warrior arts. But as a covert operative for the CIA and then a member of the elite and secret Ghost Ops group, he’d also received extensive training in other arts. Computer security, orienteering, a basic knowledge of mechanical engineering, and even medic training.
He was a master liar, really good at undercover ops.
But absolutely nothing in his training prepared him for this. For humanity going feral. Overnight.
Jon glanced down to the left and saw two kids up a tree. Two little kids, clinging to each other. And at the base of the tree, like a frothing mass of madness, ten, maybe fifteen, infected. According to Elle’s pretty friend Sophie, with the neocortex out, the infected couldn’t plan. They wouldn’t be able to find a ladder to climb up to the kids, but, by God, they could pound against the trunk of the tree to loosen the kids’ hold.
Jon watched as one of the children lifted his head and stared at the helo. He couldn’t see Jon. The cockpit was covered with a bulletproof graphene coating that tinted the windows, making everything in the cockpit completely invisible, even to thermal and IR imagery. All the kid could see was a piece of machinery working. Maybe the last piece of working machinery in the world. And clearly someone uninfected was flying.
The kid’s mouth opened in a silent scream that didn’t penetrate the insulated cockpit. He let go of the branch he was holding and waved desperately, eyes and mouth wide, face turning as Jon flew by.
A second, two—
“Goddammit!” He slapped the instrument panel hard enough to hurt. It didn’t affect the instrument panel, of course, which was made of a highly resistant epoxy resin, strong enough to survive a crash intact. All he did was hurt his hand and vent his feelings a little.
He checked his radar. The helo itself was stealth and never showed up on anyone else’s radar. The new system had a hundred-mile radius, which served him well; he wouldn’t crash into another aircraft. But there were no other aircraft on his radar. In the space of half a day, all aircraft had been grounded. It was possible there were no pilots left in Cali
fornia, maybe the United States.
“Little Bird, you copy?” A deep voice crackled in his ear. Mac McEnroe, back at base. Jon tapped the earbud.
“Copy. Sitrep.” Please, he thought. Give me some good news.
“Not good, Jon.” Mac’s deep voice was somber. “All TV channels have lost regular programming. There’s an announcement by Governor Spielberg ordering a curfew, effective immediately. Everyone is to keep off the streets. But it’s prerecorded and on a loop. We haven’t heard anything new in hours, except . . .”
Jon’s hand tightened on the stick. “Except?”
A heavy sigh. “Our drones have showed us that all interstate highways to the north and to the east have been firebombed. All bridges leading out of state, bombed. Nothing’s getting in or getting out. All aircraft grounded. You seeing anything?”
“Negative, boss.” He thought for a moment. “So no one’s coming to help?”
“Looks that way. Our drones show us Marine and National Guard units strung out along the firebombed highways and a presence where there are no natural boundaries. But the units are facing in. To California.”
“Not to keep people out but to keep people in,” Jon murmured.
“Yeah.”
He gritted his teeth so hard his jaws hurt. “They’re abandoning us. The fuckers.”
Mac blew out a breath, then—“Get Elle’s friend out, Jon. Get us that vaccine before the whole state dies.”
“Roger that.”
Jon switched off the entire comms system. There wasn’t anything else he wanted to hear. He could see what the situation was right beneath the helo’s skids on his monitor as he flew over once-prosperous towns now reduced to ashes and rubble. Some people were lying dead on the streets like feral dogs, creatures, their hands clawlike reaching out, their mouths red-stained; others were loping like wolves through the town. Occasionally, he’d see desperate uninfected faces plastered against windows, hoping for help, pleading for help.
Help wasn’t coming. It looked like the country had turned its back on them.
Just like the country had turned its back on his team, Ghost Ops. Over a year ago, the Ghost Ops team had broken into a lab on the East Coast. Intel had it that the lab was brewing a weaponized form of Yersinia pestis. Bubonic plague. What it had actually been brewing was a cancer vaccine that was stolen. They’d been fed bad intel. It had been a trap, set to take Ghost Ops down. The Ghost Ops team had been ambushed. Jon, Mac, and Nick were able to escape, though, on their way to a court martial for treason, with the death penalty at the end of it. They’d made their way back west and set up a community of geniuses and runaways in an abandoned mine inside Mount Blue, and had been in the process of creating a thriving and almost self-sufficient community when the current shit came down.
So, yeah, they were used to being abandoned, making it on their own.
He was flying over the Marin Headlands now. Forest fires had broken out, but no firefighters were there to combat the spread of the flames. The funky multicolored homes of Sausalito, the lush millionaires’ homes of Tiburon, all going up in smoke.
He flew alongside the most famous bridge in the world.
If you looked at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge, you could almost believe for a second that life was normal. There it stood, tall and red and elegant. But as he paralleled the bridge into San Francisco, he could see the roadway below clogged with abandoned tanks and military vehicles, several with smoke still pouring out from the engines. The roadway was clogged with bodies, too, some unrecognizable, just a red mass of protoplasm.
At the city end of the bridge, the access road had been blown up, leaving an inaccessible fifty-foot hole in the ground.
Back in Haven they’d been glued to their monitors, watching breaking news. The Marines had held the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, effectively quarantining the city. But apparently a few infected got through and each infected person became a vector, infecting ten or even hundreds in turn. It was exponential and it was fast.
One tank had crashed through a railing and hung half on, half off the bridge.
It was a good thing Jon wouldn’t need to exit the city to the north from the bridge. It hurt to think that maybe no one would ever cross that bridge again.
No use thinking that way. It was what it was.
The beautiful white skyline of San Francisco drew nearer. Black columns of smoke resolved into flames at the base, whole sections of the city burning.
This is what 1906 must have looked like, he thought. Only no fire brigades were coming. No communal kitchens, no armies of volunteers helping the wounded. There would be no rebuilding.
He reached the outer arm of the marina, followed it in, crossed over into the city along the waterfront, alive with infected. No one looked up at his passage. Light was draining from the sky and his helo was a dull matte black with no reflective surfaces. And no one had the concept of helicopter in their heads anymore.
He flew over vicious street brawls, vehicles left askew, a cable car at the turning station lying on its side. He crossed the grassy expanse of Ghirardelli Square, hovering for a moment over the roof of the Ghirardelli Building, then landed lightly. He killed the engines and sat there for a moment, head bowed.
His hands dropped to his lap. They were trembling slightly.
Amazing.
Jon had spent his entire adult life either in training for combat, in combat or undercover. He’d spent two years undercover, pretending to be a dealer in the Cartagena cartel, where any second he could be unmasked and hung on a meat hook as reprisal and warning. Nothing fazed him, nothing scared him.
Or so he’d thought.
Turned out that the end of the world scared the shit out of him.
So though the city was burning around him, though time was pressing—because who knew if, even at this moment, Sophie Daniels was being torn to bits, the case with the vaccines kicked into the bay—Jon sat still in his little helo, a marvel of technology and engineering, and waited for his hands to stop shaking.
Screams came from the streets below. Bellows, really. Of rage, of fury. Something crashed heavily.
This wasn’t getting any better.
Time to go.
He had his backpack already at the helo door. With an almost silent hiss of hydraulics, the helo door opened and Jon stepped out onto the Ghirardelli Building roof. From up here, where he couldn’t see the street level, he could almost pretend that nothing had happened. If you ignored the smoke, you could almost think that it was two days ago and mankind was still rolling along in its lying, cheating, thieving ways, where, however, in the interstices and almost as an afterthought, some people got medical care, some cops were able to stop crime, some kids got educated.
Someone played music, wrote books, painted canvases.
He stepped to the edge of the building and the fantasy disappeared. Down on the street it was a jungle. Worse than a jungle. In the jungle, animals didn’t try to exterminate their own species.
He strapped his scanner to his wrist and adjusted it to IR. Immediately, red human-shaped splodges appeared on the screen, crazy even in IR.
It was getting darker now. Jon watched the street carefully, looking for breaks in the patterns. He couldn’t tell if the infected hunted in packs systematically or whether packs formed spontaneously. A snarling, crazed group of twenty creatures would go by, then nothing for a minute or two. Did they slow down with the darkness? Did they hunt at night? Did they sleep?
He had no idea.
His entire life as a soldier he’d pitted himself against enemies of different cultures. Pakistanis, Afghanis, Chinese, Mongolians, Colombians. All different, but now he realized they were more similar than different. Because they behaved according to human rules—the rules that were ingrained in our DNA.
Another pack passed by. And another. Then three separately, snarling down the street.
Fuck. There wasn’t going to be a break in these creatures.
The math was aga
inst him. Almost by definition anyone on the street was infected. The few who weren’t—and there was no way to tell how many of the uninfected were left—were locked indoors, frightened and trapped.
Like Sophie Daniels.
It was that thought—of Sophie Daniels trapped and terrified—that galvanized him.
He’d never met her, but he’d seen her photograph. She was beautiful, but beyond that she had the look of Mac’s wife, Catherine, and Nick’s woman, Elle: very smart and very kind. The kind of woman who had a glow about her. They didn’t grow women like that on trees.
She’d been kidnapped by the goons of the company that had unleashed this virus, Arka Pharmaceuticals. Before being caught, she’d had the presence of mind and the courage to take a few moments to warn Elle. Elle had escaped, rescued by Nick, but Sophie had been caught. Maybe those moments had been just enough to have her fall into the hands of the fuckers who wanted to test her like an animal. Elle had been scared sick for her friend. The three of them—Mac, Nick, and Jon—had gone to Arka’s headquarters to free the people being tested, including Sophie, but she was gone by then.
By some miracle, Sophie had escaped from the prison lab in the chaos of the infection; and instead of immediately getting the hell out, she’d gone back into the offices of a building full of monsters to hunt down and steal the vaccine. On the off chance that her bravery would give humanity a chance.
It was very likely that the fate of humanity rested with one lone, brave scientist trapped on Beach Street.
He looked east, to where Beach Street began. It was clogged with infected, looking like crazed cockroaches from his vantage point high on the roof of the Ghirardelli Building.
The salvation of humanity might be on that street.
Jon wasn’t too fond of humanity. To his mind, it was already barreling toward disaster before the infection exploded. Most humans were petty and mean, with streaks of greed and cruelty running through them.
But there were exceptions. To his vast surprise, he’d found out that there were many who were good and brave, talented and selfless. Haven was full of people like that. People who deserved saving.