Breaking Danger

  If not for the intensive care Catherine and later Elle provided, his captain and teammates would never have made it.

  Jon straightened and Sophie looked at him in surprise. “Sir.”

  The last time Jon had seen the captain, he needed two sticks to walk. Now he only needed one. Probably the reason for that was behind him, the once famous actress Stella Cummings, now their chef and head of the communal kitchens. Though her beautiful face had been slashed to ribbons, she was still beautiful in everyone’s eyes. Not to mention the fact that they ate better than any community on earth.

  “Jon,” the captain replied. “We have some news. Good news.”

  Jon blinked. Good news. Christ. “That’s—that’s good,” he said lamely. He hardly knew where to put good news in his head. No place for it.

  “The U.S. government has started getting its finger out of its butt.” Someone slapped him lightly on the back and he turned his head and mouthed sorry. “They’re not ready to cross the quarantine zone, though, the fuckers. Sorry,” he said before the hand could slap him again. “There’s a lot of confusion in the military going right up to the Joint Chiefs level, and in government, going right to the top. The fact that a former general, that dickhead Clancy Flynn—”

  He braced himself, but clearly Stella had given up on cleaning his language up. And Flynn was a dickhead. Had been a dickhead. A murderous son of a bitch dickhead. Luckily, he was now dead.

  “Flynn was part of the creation of this virus, so there’s been a lot of finger-pointing. I begged them in Washington—begged them—for a helo to pick you guys up, but there have been outbreaks of infection in Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas and they are busy trying to contain them together with setting up a reporting system in every community in the U.S. I simply haven’t been able to get through to anyone who has an airborne command. Actually, we can’t get through to anyone. That helo manufacturer I told you about, his fuel tanks blew. Nobody can use them until we can scavenge more fuel, but that won’t be soon.”

  Fuck. Jon had been hoping for a helo pickup. Not going to happen. “So what’s the situation between us and you?”

  The captain’s bald head was cruelly crisscrossed with surgical scars. When his jaw muscles tightened, the scars danced on his head. “Not good. We’ve got pockets, strongholds really, of uninfected but they are holed up, and if you make a beeline, they’re not close enough to come out and help. You’re just going to have to make a run for it at night.”

  “Over uneven terrain. In the dark, with night vision.” Yeah, that was going to be fun.

  Lucius shrugged. “All you can do is hope the Lynx is up to it. We can’t clear the way for you with bombs. The noise and maybe the light would attract them.”

  “Yeah, we saw that in San Francisco.”

  “Get that case to us, son, but don’t get here without Dr. Daniels, or I won’t answer for your safety. And Elle would have my head. But once we have vaccines, we’re going to save us a lot of souls. Couple people here are already starting planning for after. Rebuilding. We save enough people, we can start society all over again. Which is better than what we thought we’d be facing when this clusterfuck started.”

  Fuck yeah. They had been looking at a future in which they might have been the only people alive in California. Maybe the world. If people were already thinking of rebuilding, someone was feeling hope.

  “Okay, son, that’s about it. We’ll be with you every step of the way but we can’t help. Get here safely with the vaccine and Dr. Daniels and we’ll start saving the world. Before I sign off there’s someone who wants to talk with Dr. Daniels.”

  He shuffled slowly aside and Elle took his place. Her face was pinched and anxious, but cleared when she saw Sophie. Her hand went to her throat. “Oh God, Soph! You’re okay! When the helicopter blew up, we thought—we thought you wouldn’t make it. We watched you guys get out of Dodge. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared as that in my life.”

  Sophie took Jon’s hand, held it tightly. “Jon got us out safely. I knew he would.” She turned her head, kissed his cheek. Jon looked at her, at her mouth, and was tempted. Really, really tempted.

  Silence.

  Elle’s eyes opened and everything but a lightbulb went up over her head. She looked at a faintly smiling Sophie, to him, then back to Sophie, and her mouth opened as wide as her eyes. A big hand reached over and gently closed her mouth.

  Sophie wasn’t helping her, and damned if Jon was going to. He didn’t care who knew he and Sophie were together. He’d found her and he was damned well going to keep her.

  “Oh, um. Okay.” Elle was having trouble shifting gears.

  Catherine joined her, tilted her head toward Elle and murmured, “The lab. Tell her about the lab.”

  “Yes.” Elle shook herself out of her stupor and bounced straight into nerd scientist mode. “Okay. The lab. We’ve got a good cell line going, so incubation time will be a matter of minutes. There’s a refugee here who worked at the Stanford research lab and we’re putting together an application via patch instead of injection. With that delivery system, we can double the inoculations.”

  “Do we have an estimate of survivors?” Sophie asked.

  Elle turned her head, spoke with Catherine, who spoke to someone else off screen. Elle checked a mini tablet then looked up. “Anywhere between one and two million people. As of now. That number will go down.”

  Everyone was silent.

  At the last census, California’s population stood at a little under sixty million. Jon glanced to his right, to the silent landmass of the coastline, dark except for a few fires. The whole state was the graveyard of about fifty-eight million people, dead or dying over the course of the past forty-eight hours. More than a million people an hour. Possibly the largest and fastest death event in the history of the world. Dead bodies piled up like a vast slaughterhouse. Men and women and children . . . Nothing they could ever do would bring them back to life. Teachers and firemen and grade-schoolers and musicians and doctors. The list went on and on. Humankind in California was reduced to a few strongholds fighting for survival, hunkering down like cavemen, shot back in time to ten thousand years ago.

  Warmth on his hand. He glanced down to see Sophie’s small hand over his. Her hand was unusually warm, it seemed that heat spread up his arm, into his chest. He realized he’d been breathing shallowly, chest tight. Now his lungs expanded as he drew in the soft night sea air. That touch somehow steadied him. He opened his hand, catching her fingers between his, enjoying the glow of heat that came from her as steady as a flame.

  “Sophie was right,” Elle said. “The infected are dying fast. They have no instinct of self-preservation. I have been unable to observe any signs of infected being able to feed themselves or even drink water. That swarm in San Francisco? Judging from the thermal scans about one-third of that swarm is already dead. The infected are in effect the walking dead, only they still have the power to inflict great harm.”

  “What’s the lab’s capacity?” Sophie asked.

  Catherine answered, checking her tablet. “About fifty thousand doses in a twenty-four-hour period.”

  Sophie frowned. “Any hope of another lab somewhere coming online?”

  “Yes. Two people here know of labs that can be converted and brought online as soon as we have the staffing and can create secure conditions. Right now, nobody can be spared, but we have forty Marines arriving tomorrow with their families. They’ve already volunteered for anything we might need them to do.”

  Mac looked up from his tablet. “Jon, we’ve just sent you the GPS coordinates of Robb’s compound. Check the perimeter when you arrive and contact us when you’re secure. We’re going to have to start pulling our drones, fuel is getting low. I can’t keep twenty-four-hour oversight for you when we also have to check for survivors. When you’re secure for the day, we’ll call back the two drones watching you, and hope to send them out again when you exfil. We’ll do our best, anyway.”

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; “Roger that,” Jon said. “Hooah.”

  “Hooah.” Mac hesitated, then said something no military commander ever said before a mission. An op was all about getting the mission accomplished. All about grabbing what had to be grabbed. Killing whoever needed killing. The mission was first and last. If someone died, that was simply the way it rolled. No one ever talked about safety in the pre-mission briefing. It was never about safety, it was all about doing the job. But now it was a new ball game. “Stay safe,” he said.

  Jon’s despair had been almost palpable as his people in Haven were putting together scenarios for the future. It had hung like a dark cloud around him. Just as despair had hung around him when he talked of his past, his parents. He’d suffered and survived so much.

  Her touch was instinctive, as instinctive as if he had been grievously wounded and she’d moved to stanch the flow of blood. As instinctive as when they’d talked about his past, back at her apartment. He’d been wounded then, too, though, with that tough-guy exterior he’d probably rather be shot in the face than admit it. His voice had been laconic, emotionless. And underneath the skin, his emotions were boiling—a mixture of rage and sorrow and despair.

  Then she’d touched him and felt a form of healing begin. That had never happened to her before, her gift used for spiritual illness. It had never even occurred to her that she could do such a thing. Maybe she could only do that with Jon. Maybe the sexual connection was so strong, they were linked in some way. She’d had sex before, but never such intensely intimate sex.

  For long moments, she’d lost the separation between them, the separation that exists between all human beings, closed up in their skins. For long moments, she’d felt part of him, beneath the skin, inside his heart.

  That wasn’t a good thing. There was a reason people were separate, apart. Such close links would be dangerous if they were common. She’d been inside him, he’d been inside her, in the most intimate kind of way. Not the connection of the flesh, which is easy, superficial. But a connection of the spirit.

  It was dangerous. Someone who was inside you could rip you to pieces.

  She shivered.

  “Here.” Jon did something to the display panel and left the wheel. He rummaged in the cabin until he found a blanket, dragged a bench over, and placed it behind the wheel. He sat her down on it, draped the blanket around her, and put his arm around her with an audible grunt of satisfaction.

  Sophie knew exactly how he felt. Sitting next to him on the speeding boat, so close she could feel his body heat, his arm around her, felt good, felt . . . right. She tipped her head against his shoulder and felt his lips kiss her hair.

  “Rest now. We’ve still got a long journey ahead of us.”

  “Don’t you need to, um . . .” What was the word? Drive felt wrong. “Pilot the boat?” She could hear the quaver in her voice and hated it. The adrenaline of their escape was still coursing through her body. The blanket was a lightweight thermal blanket and she was warm underneath it, but the trembling wasn’t from cold.

  Jon tightened his arm around her. “It’s on autopilot. See this?” He tapped a dial. She nodded. “Radar and IR and thermal scanner. We’re not going to run into any boats, even those adrift. We’ve got another nine or ten hours to go, so I want you to relax, if you can.”

  Relax? “How can I relax when—”

  He kissed her. He turned, took her in both arms and kissed her and kissed her. One big hand held the back of her head, as if she might want to turn away when nothing on this earth would make her turn away. His mouth was so delicious! Heat came off him like steam off an iron. She’d been so cold up until a few moments ago. The cold of fear, of adrenaline rushing through her system. The cold even of despair, because there was no guarantee that they’d make it. No guarantee that she could get the vaccine up to Haven. She and Jon were willing to die to complete this mission and they might end up doing just that.

  But she couldn’t think that as Jon kissed her. Kissed her as if his life depended on it. In a very real sense, her life certainly did. He pulled back, ran his thumb under her eyes. “You’re tired,” he said gently. “Rest.”

  Sophie thought she could never rest again, but she was wrong. Leaning against Jon’s broad shoulder, she watched as the dark mainland drifted by. With no light pollution the stars were bright, constellations she hadn’t seen in years decorating the sky. The light from some of those stars was a million years old, before mankind had begun its journey. And even if mankind ceased to exist, those same cold, bright stars would send their light across the vast expanse of the universe, forever. Uncaring about men.

  The boat was steady, the sea calm. They arrowed their way silently through the water, hardly any spray lifting. Twice a boom came from the mainland. Other than that, silence.

  Everyone was so used to the sounds of civilization. Cars, generators, TVs. She wasn’t a camper, didn’t go trekking over the weekends. She was a city girl, used to city noises. This was the still silence not of peace but of a world breaking down.

  Jon’s hand lifted from where it cupped her shoulder to run a long, callused finger down her cheek.

  And yet, and yet. The world was breaking down, yes, but there were some smart, strong people working hard to hold it together. Like the man holding her. She looked straight ahead into the blackness, feeling his solid, warm strength along her side, feeling his strong hand caressing her cheek, playing with her hair.

  A man she barely knew, and yet she knew him down to his core. Knew the strength and honor in him. Knew that he was fearless, that he worked for the good. She’d felt his pain when he spoke of the betrayal of his parents and what he thought had been the betrayal of the man he’d chosen to follow. It had been as painful and as deep as any wound, any organic illness. Most people, when grievously wounded, curled up and withdrew from the world. It was the body’s natural reflex, to curl in on itself. But not Jon. Jon had turned himself into a man of strength and he stepped forward, not backward.

  There was so much she didn’t know about him. His tastes in music and movies. What kind of food he liked. How strong a sense of humor he had. How well read he was.

  None of that really mattered, though, when measured against her understanding of his character.

  Not to mention he was a god in bed.

  That took her by surprise because Sophie didn’t really judge men by their prowess in the bedroom. It was a nice extra if it was there, that was all. But sex with Jon was . . . was overwhelming. Almost an extrasensory event. Beyond the five senses, moving into a world beyond her ken. The sheer power of the experience swept her away. When he kissed her, caressed her, entered her, the world disappeared and there was only the two of them, an explosion of heat and light.

  Life.

  When they were surrounded by death.

  Here on the vast dark ocean it was almost easy to forget for a few moments that the world was ripping itself apart. Here, right now, under the vast star-filled sky, arrowing their way north, they could simply be a normal couple going on vacation, with no deeper concerns than the quality of the food at their destination.

  She rolled that in her head for a moment. She and Jon, a normal couple in a normal world. How could that have worked out? Where would they have met? They could have met at—oh, a movie theater? Or perhaps at an outdoor café? Or at a concert? Met, flirted, liked each other. Dated a few times, gone to bed, had sex, found themselves compatible.

  The usual, like normal people did.

  But no, that scenario didn’t work. Their regular lives held no points of intersection. He was a warrior, constantly on mission, and then he’d had to go into hiding. She was absorbed in her job. She didn’t go to the movies or linger at outdoor cafés or go to concerts. She had a nice home entertainment system and saw all her films and listened to her music at home. Her life was home and work and home again.

  Particularly this past year working on the Arka project with Elle, that electric feeling of being on the cutting edge of science, of
discovering something completely new. That had kept her so absorbed, there hadn’t been time for anything else. This past year she and Elle had been married to the lab.

  No, she’d never have met Jon under other circumstances.

  How strange to think that it took the end of the world to bring them together.

  Her thoughts were lazy now, lulled by the sound of the boat skimming over the flat dark sea. People were dying, society was dying all across the land to her right. She hadn’t seen anything outside San Francisco, but it was easy to imagine. Towns and cities devastated. Homes abandoned, front doors open, wrecked furniture inside. Cars left where they were, blocking roads. Smashed windows everywhere, shattered little shards of light on the streets. Whole sections of towns burned to the ground.

  And bodies. Bodies everywhere, both the infected and the healthy, locked in a death struggle. Most of the population, dead.

  She closed her eyes and leaned more heavily against Jon. Against his solid strength. She took enormous consolation in feeling him against her, breathing slowly and easily, moving a little at times to check on gauges and do whatever one did when piloting a boat. There was a palpable sense of vast strength, enormous reserves, as if he could keep going forever.

  On the mainland was tragedy on a vast scale, a death toll in the millions. But right here, right now, on this silent boat cutting through the sea, she felt safe with Jon. He’d see them to the B & B compound, get them overland to this place, this Haven. Where Elle was, with her man. Where Catherine Young was, a woman she knew by reputation. With Jon’s teammates and a whole community of people surviving, thinking beyond this almost-extinction event to a possible future. Planning for it, even.

  There was fear in her, cold slimy fear penetrating down to the bone. And yet, and yet . . . there was also a sense of safety with Jon. It was partly his godlike physique, of course. She’d never touched a man as strong as Jon. He gave the impression of leanness, but his muscles were thick, the strength going deep. And he was so brave. Every second of their mad dash from her apartment to the marina, Jon had clearly been willing to sacrifice himself for her.