Breaking Danger

  Even with the triple-glazed window shut, the noise level was as high as a rock concert, only there was no backbeat. There was no beat at all, nothing rational, just loud noise emanating from once human throats.

  It was almost impossible for the human eye to even distinguish individual forms. The onslaught of bodies was intertwined, limbs thrashing in such an enclosed area that fists took out eyes, legs tripped up bodies as a matter of course. They came in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, so densely packed that the bodies bent inward the closed steel garage doors and the metal barricades of the tourist shops.

  Men in suits, students in T-shirts, housewives, children, of all races. They all looked alike in a horrible way, all reduced to violent mindless beings. All with the same look on their blood-streaked faces. Eyes open so wide the whites were visible all around the irises, mouths open to emit those ululating howls, heads swiveling.

  Sophie surreptitiously wiped damp hands on her yoga pants and asked, voice low, “Can you take a temperature reading on the scanner?”

  She didn’t dare look at Jon. She didn’t want him to see the horror she felt. She had to keep some kind of detachment, she had to close down her heart, that part of her that couldn’t bear to watch what was happening below.

  “I can’t read individual temperatures,” Jon answered. “But I have a general thermal reading of 102.5 degrees.”

  “If that’s the average, some will be over 104. That’s not sustainable for long. The constitution of the infected has already been severely compromised.”

  They both watched the violent scenes below, that dark mass of bodies swarming, killing, dying . . .

  They would all die soon. It was just a question of whether they’d take the world down with them or whether something could be salvaged.

  “Hand me your scanner, please.”

  Jon handed it over silently. Sophie reached the menu that would show heart rates, but all she saw was a flow of three-digit numbers too fast to pinpoint any one number.

  “I can’t tell individual rates. There are too many of them. But they are all accelerated.” She handed it back. “Is the record function on?”

  Jon held it up. “It is now.”

  Sophie wiped her mind of everything but scientific detachment and spoke clearly, for the record. “We are observing what at a conservative guess is one thousand infected currently swarming the street, with more stretching all the way to the horizon. The overall count must be in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands.” She leaned a little forward to observe better. “All surface areas appear to be swarmed. They are not breaking into stores but rather the sheer number of them, pressing against both sides of the streets, is caving in the unprotected storefronts. They are pouring into every gap, every window, every open door, every alleyway. For the moment we see no signs of them making their way up to second stories, but the sheer weight of them might make that inevitable.”

  Sophie pressed her lips together and looked up at Jon, then at her door. He nodded reassuringly. They’d made the best barricade they could. And her door had a titanium core. They were as protected as they could be.

  Observe, Sophie!

  A strong man in a track suit wrenched the arm of a young girl out of its socket and tore it off. Sophie jolted and felt Jon’s strong hand on her shoulder. “Steady,” he whispered.

  Yes, steady. They had to understand this to conquer it.

  “There”—Sophie’s mouth was completely dry and she had to lick her lips—“There is a strong tropism in action. The—ah, the infected battle violently with each other, but they are sticking close together.” She tried to study the faces running past. “I see definite signs of dehydration, whether because they have been running for hours or because they are unable to procure water for themselves is an open question. Turning on a tap or opening a bottle—it is unclear whether they retain the cognitive skills to do that. Or even the fine motor skills. I see no signs of organized behavior.”

  The roar of the crowd was deafening. She hungered for her noise-canceling headset, but that would be merely cutting herself off from the world. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, not when the world had suddenly turned so feral.

  “I see—” she counted silently. “I see about one in twenty falling and disappearing in the crowd. Simply falling and being trodden over. If they were dying before, when they fall they are definitely dead. No one could survive the trampling in that crowd. I would estimate that soon more and more in the swarm will fall. When the swarm passes, the streets will be littered with the dead.”

  She glanced up at Jon’s grim face and he nodded. She knew he would factor that into his calculations for their escape.

  The noise was deafening. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the booming sounds of raw, piercing screams. The sounds of humans gone utterly mad. Their blank, vicious bloodied faces was a sight taken from the depths of hell. No painter, not even Hieronymus Bosch, could have even imagined what she and Jon were seeing.

  If there was a hell, this was it.

  It was too much. A coldness descended upon her soul, as if the temperature of the world had suddenly dropped.

  She was chilled down to her bones, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air but the situation of the world. It froze her mind too. She looked up at Jon, opening her mouth then closing it again. She wanted to tell him she couldn’t do this, couldn’t observe this massive vision of hell any longer, but her lungs wouldn’t fill with enough air to form the words. She could barely breathe.

  Jon somehow understood. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her to him. Oh God. Warmth. He was this huge column of warm muscle. She leaned into him, trying to absorb some of his heat, take it into herself.

  “Come, Sophie. You’re in shock.”

  Jon led her into the bedroom and made her get under the covers. She could barely walk, had to think about putting one foot in front of the other. Had to actively try not to stumble.

  She didn’t have to think about not falling down, though. Jon had a big arm around her waist and she felt like she couldn’t fall down. He wouldn’t let her.

  On the way to the bed, Jon grabbed a cashmere throw that was lying across her sofa and wrapped it around her. Once she was sitting in bed, covers up to her chin, the throw around her shoulders, she knew intellectually she shouldn’t be feeling any cold, but she was. It was all-pervasive, muscle and bone deep. No amount of swaddling could dissipate it.

  Jon disappeared. While he was gone, it was no-Jon time. Time that didn’t matter, wasn’t observable. She neither thought nor felt. It was like being in suspended animation. She couldn’t even register the booming, crashing noises from outside. Her bedroom looked out over an internal courtyard so the noises came over the rooftops.

  A huge boom sounded, not a human noise. Some explosion somewhere. These were all thoughts that drifted through her mind without her understanding them fully.

  “Here.” Startled, she looked up. Jon had a steaming cup of something on one of her pretty flower-themed trays. “Drink it all down.”

  He put his big hand under the cup when she picked it up. He’d been right to. She seemed to have lost all muscle strength. The cup bobbled in her hand and the hot liquid would have splashed on her, burned her, if he hadn’t steadied it.

  His eyes were as steady as his hands. “Drink,” he said quietly.

  She drank. Coughed. Her vanilla tea had been laced with plenty of the aged Glenfiddich she kept on a sideboard. There was honey in there too. A drink she definitely needed.

  He stood by the bedside until she drank the entire concoction, then moved to the other side of the bed, removed his boots, and got under the covers with her. With his back against the headboard, he reached for her, snuggled her against him.

  The hot tea, the hot man. Warmth penetrated and with it, the numbness that had protected her dissipated.

  It was all too much. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept.

  Jon held Sophie
as she cried. It wasn’t an emotional crying jag like some women had, to get rid of stress. This was harsher, deeper, more desperate. It was a lament for the world. It was endless, bottomless grief.

  He didn’t even try to shush her or comfort her with words. There were no words, anyway. He simply held her. He held her at that moment not as a man held a woman he was falling for, but as a comrade held a fallen teammate. Sophie was grievously wounded, and if the wound wasn’t actually bleeding, it was deadly nonetheless.

  Sophie cried as if something inside her was broken, beyond healing.

  Jon understood that, down to his bones. His world had been broken beyond healing in childhood.

  She had one hand clutching his neck and the other holding his side. He held her tightly, one hand along her narrow back, feeling the stuttering rise and fall of her back as she sobbed and gasped for air. She was crying with her entire body, every muscle clenched in grief. In her bedroom, the sounds of the world outside were muted, her sobs audible above the shrieks and yells of the infected.

  Jon held her more tightly. The world was drowning and the woman who held the key to healing was grieving in his arms. They had a perilous mission to undertake. She needed to vent her emotions now, in a safe environment, in his arms. A meltdown like this in the field would be deadly.

  He couldn’t fault her, though. The depth of her sorrow was a sign of the depth of her emotions. She wouldn’t be what she was if she couldn’t feel the horror of what was happening down to her very soul.

  Something, some primordial instinct, told Jon that Sophie Daniels had never encountered the full depravity of the world. Granted, this was far worse than the depravity and heartlessness Jon had seen in his parents and their drug-addled “friends.” This was the whole world falling, not one small corner of it. But he felt as if he’d been somehow inoculated against the grief she was feeling, able to bear up under its terrible burden. If there was anyone who could understand her, and stand for her, it was him.

  So he held her, giving her the warmth and the unspoken support of his body while she cried out her rage and frustration and despair. She wept hot tears, holding nothing back. It wasn’t female tears of frustration but the tears of a soul in torment. She wept until she could barely breathe, breaths coming in shaking gasps. Her heart fluttered under his hand, fast and heavy, as if she were running a marathon. He tucked her more tightly against him, her tears making his T-shirt damp. He didn’t care. She needed this. He almost envied her. Many times in his life he wished he could have wept out his rage, and hatred, and despair, but he never could. He just put it away somewhere deep inside where he could pretend it had dissipated.

  Sophie wept a storm, and like all storms, it was too violent to last. She finally cried herself out through sheer exhaustion.

  The sobs quieted, stopped. She was leaning heavily against him, as if without his support she’d collapse. That was fine. Jon would be her support for as long as she needed it. Beyond, even.

  Her heart rate under his hand slowed, her breathing slowed, too, became regular. Finally she was quiet. He lifted his head and looked down at her. All he could see were absurdly long eyelashes clumped together from the tears and pale, high cheekbones. She was so still, the quiet after the storm. He hoped she’d fallen asleep. She needed to rest. Rest healed, he knew that. Just like he knew that she was going to be caught up in the lab in Haven as soon as they arrived. From what he understood, the lab was working around the clock and she seemed as dedicated as Catherine and Elle. She’d hit the ground running and would work around the clock too.

  So if she could find some peace and rest in sleep, all the better.

  But she wasn’t asleep. She let out a long sigh. Her right hand had been tightly clutching the damp white cotton of his shirt. She opened her fist, then tried to straighten out the wrinkles where she’d clutched the material.

  She sighed again, her entire narrow rib cage lifting and dropping. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  Oh God, no. Jon dug his fingers into her thick dark hair, releasing a faint fragrance of lemon and strawberries. He massaged the back of her head, her neck. She was a knot of tension.

  “Don’t be sorry. You’re a doctor, you know that tears release . . .” He racked his brain, trying to remember an article he’d read in the waiting room of the base doctor, there for his annual checkup. “Some kind of hormone. Don’t remember which one, but one of the good ones.”

  “Endorphins,” she said.

  “There you go.” He lifted his head again so he could see her face. Her lips were slightly upturned. Good. She turned her face up to his, and he saw with a sigh that she was one of those women who still looked lovely even after a crying jag. His heart gave a painful pulse in his chest. She looked beautiful and solemn. Sad, but not afraid.

  She lifted a hand and cupped his jaw. Her hand was warm and soft. The coldness of shock had dissipated. “You didn’t cry. We might be watching the end of the world. We have monsters running around outside, lost to us, but you didn’t cry. I wish I could be like you. I can hardly breathe from the sadness. From the grief and rage.”

  Jon opened his mouth to say something soothing and meaningless, but something else popped out. Something dangerous, from the depths of his being. “My parents sold me when I was nine years old.”

  He froze. Where the fuck had that come from? Oh fuck, oh fuck.

  He’d never told anyone, ever. Not even the military shrink they’d sent him to before allowing him to join Ghost Ops. The shrink had probed, like the proverbial blind man who senses something but cannot see it, but Jon was hard as a rock. He presented nothing but a flat granite face. The shrink knew, because it was in his files, that he’d been sent to a series of foster homes from the age of ten on, and that he’d joined the army as soon as he legally could. The shrink could pick at him and pry all he wanted, but the fucker’d got jackshit out of him.

  The condition for joining Ghost Ops was that you had no family or friends. No one to care for and no one to care about you. Their pasts were wiped out and they became Ghosts, men who cast no shadow. That kind of man doesn’t come from a happy, loving family. They all came from severe dysfunction.

  The only person who had an inkling that there was something behind his smooth California surfer persona other than a badass warrior was Catherine McEnroe, Mac’s wife. And that was only because she had this freaky . . . ability. Skill. Power. Whatever the fuck it was, it was scary shit. She’d touched him, eyes wide, and knew with that one touch that he’d been badly betrayed. She didn’t have any details but she knew the heart of it.

  So he had no idea why he opened his mouth and that came out. With Sophie Daniels of all people. They’d fucked, yeah. Well, it had been sex, but not like any sex he’d ever had before. He’d never had anything like that intensity, that degree of closeness, that sense of falling out of himself and into someone else.

  But though he was willing to admit, in the deepest, darkest most hidden part of himself, that his heart might have been involved in the sex—either that or he had a cardiac condition—he would never have revealed anything about himself. About his secrets.

  Except . . . he had.

  He tried not to stiffen, not give any importance to his words but she wasn’t buying it. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. Not shocked, not revulsed. Just sad. And waiting for more. Nobody could say that line and shut up afterward.

  “They were drug addicts,” he said, then froze again. He’d never even said the words out loud. The instant he’d joined the military, he’d felt like a page had been turned, the past wiped out. But the past was never completely wiped out. It was always there, waiting to bite you in the ass.

  He wanted to continue, but something had happened to his throat. It wasn’t working. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t even swallow.

  She broke the long silence. “That must have been hard,” she said gently.

  Hard. Yes, very hard. Two people who were supposed to look after him, more often than not s
toned out of their minds. The money that should have gone into rent and food going into their veins. As a very little kid he’d more than once been terrified that they’d died, and in a way he’d been right. They had died, just not their bodies.

  Sophie said nothing. Her deep blue eyes searched his, not breaking contact. Not disgusted, not frightened.

  His throat eased, just a little. He found he could swallow.

  “I don’t remember much of my childhood. Probably better that way. I remember when I was around seven or eight finding money for the drugs became this big deal. I think they’d managed to hold down some part-time jobs to feed the habit but then they lost those. The car went. My dad or my mom would disappear for a few days. They were taken in for petty theft, then let loose. Like you’d release a fish that wasn’t worth the effort of catching.”

  Once, in a compulsion he’d been unable to resist, he’d hacked the Sacramento police department files for the relevant years and followed his parents’ decline. His mother had been arrested seven times for solicitation. She’d turned to hooking to feed the habit, with his father’s blessing.

  Reading the file made him feel filthy that he shared their blood. If he could have scrubbed his DNA, he would have.

  He never read any files pertaining to them after that. He didn’t even know if they were alive or dead, and had no desire to know. He suspected they were dead, though. Twenty-five years ago they’d been weak and emaciated. There was no way they could have survived their addiction.

  Sophie had somehow snuggled closer to him, closer than when she’d been weeping. A hand lay on his chest, right over his heart. It was crazy, but it felt like her hand emanated heat, reaching deep through bone and muscle to reach the frozen bits of himself. Catherine’s touch had been like that too. Warm and soothing. Sophie’s touch was that, but also—though that was crazy—somehow healing.

  The scenes came to him in dreams. Nightmares. He’d wake up sweating and panicked, breath coming harshly, heart pounding. For a moment after he woke up, he’d be back there, in the filthy hovel he shared with his parents, small and weak and utter prey. For a second, he was nine years old and his parents were selling him to a man who terrified him.