Okay.
He looked down from the parapet of the rooftop, checking his scanner, checking the writhing masses of red and yellow that appeared on his monitor. They were everywhere. There was never going to be a break. San Francisco was a city of 600,000 people and he had to assume that something like 80 to 90 percent were infected. Maybe more. The city was teeming with infected.
He had to go.
Now.
Without a second thought, he anchored two steel ropes, threw them over the side, grabbed one and rappelled down the building fast, kicking away a snarling infected before landing lightly onto the paving stones and taking off at a run for Sophie Daniels.
It was going to be a run for his life. On Jon’s side was that he was a highly trained warrior, and bristling with weapons. But he was one man in an area bristling with . . . meat. Tons of it. Looking down Beach Street he could see at least a hundred people. Say an average of 80 kg a head, he was looking right now at 8,000 kg of lethally deranged humanity that could overwhelm him in an instant.
The only thing that was going to save him was speed.
At first, it was basically a slalom around the infected, at top speed. By the time one of the fuckers realized he was coming, he was past them. He was at the corner of Beach and Jones, sorry to see the Buena Vista Café torched and charred, when he had the first problem. A big motherfucker, watching him coming, light blue eyes filled with empty madness. Dressed like a chef, bloody toque and all.
The guy reached out with a blood-flecked hand as Jon raced past and the hand bounced off Jon’s shoulder. He gave a huge yowl that lifted the hairs on the back of Jon’s neck, and then the creature launched after Jon.
This seemed to stir some kind of primitive pack instinct. Ten creatures started running after Jon. They might have lost their intelligence and humanity, but their muscles worked just fine. They were fucking fast.
Jon turned, gave a wide blast of his stunner set to lethal, saw the big guy and four others fall dead. The pack instinct didn’t run to helping one’s fellow monsters. The fuckers behind just vaulted over the dead bodies and came after him.
The lethal stunner worked. It worked real well. It’s just that there were so goddamned many of them. One of them reached out, hand sliding over the tough material of his armored jumpsuit.
Damn.
He was close now. Sophie Daniel’s apartment building was across the street and ten meters down.
Without looking, Jon tossed a grenade behind him, sprinted across the street to the apartment building, slamming open the street doors, pulling them together and throwing the bolt. It held against the dozens of bodies that piled up against the glass doors.
Most buildings had shatterproof glass in the doors, and Jon sure hoped the building was up to code because the motherfuckers kept slamming against the now blood-smeared glass of the doors—bodies thumping, fists pounding, mouths gaping open, unearthly howls coming out of them.
They looked . . . astonished. They could see him but not touch him. One man bashed his face against the glass doors so hard his teeth flew out of his mouth.
They’d lost the notion of glass.
His skin crawled.
Sophie Daniels lived on the third floor. Jon moved fast, taking the stairs three at a time, grimly resolved. The stairs were slick with blood.
The third floor was miraculously clear. The building was a big one, and the corridor went right and left at the end. Jon rushed down, leaping over the corpses, counting doors. 312, 313, 314 . . . 315!
He looked at the lock. Oddly enough it was a pretty good one. One it would take even him a minute to pick. He was vulnerable out here, goddammit.
He knocked softly on the door. Put his mouth close. “Dr. Daniels? Dr. Sophie Daniels?”
Silence.
He pressed against it, knocking softly again. “Sophie? Elle sends me. It’s Jon Ryan, she said she sent you an email—”
Oh Christ. A loud sound around the corner at the end. A blood-flecked face peeked around the corner. A big guy dressed in a suit now torn in tatters. When he saw Jon, he lifted his head and howled. Like a wolf.
Goose bumps broke out all over Jon’s body.
The guy started coming at him at a run.
“Sophie!” The rap was harder this time, still met by silence. Jon put his back to the door, took aim with his Glock 310, finger on the trigger, aiming at the neocortex—because he wanted the fucker to go down and stay down—tunnel visioning, finger tightening, the infected barreling down the corridor screaming—
The door at his back opened, a hand grabbed him around the throat from behind and pulled.
Taken off balance, still concentrated on the shot, Jon stumbled into the room, his shot gouging a hole in the wall next to the infected, who kept on coming. He fell down onto something soft, warm, fragrant.
Jon kicked his booted foot forward, slamming the door closed. The snick of the automatic lock sounded just as he heard a heavy body hitting the door.
Safe.
Safe in some soft, aromatic place.
With a beautiful woman.
He turned over.
He found himself on top of a woman with a heart-shaped face surrounded by a cloud of dark hair. Her skin was pale in the darkened room, but glowed in the dim light. Dark blue eyes, a small, straight nose, soft pillowy lips.
A face that was etched in his mind since he’d seen her photograph back in Haven among a list of scientists and test subjects who’d been kidnapped. The idea of her in the hands of Arka Pharmaceutical, which had tried to have him, Mac, Nick, Catherine, and Elle killed, had haunted his thoughts.
“Sophie Daniels,” he said to the woman underneath him.
She was pale but all of a sudden her face turned rosy with a blush.
Because something else was happening. Totally out of his control. The adrenaline of the chase and the hunt had given him a hard-on. A combat boner big as a house.
And she could feel every inch of it.
Chapter 2
San Francisco
Beach Street
Sophie peeked out from between her blinds at the violent chaos below. Her instinct, coming from the deepest part of her, was to shut them again and block everything out. But she was a scientist and every single thing she learned about this infection and the infected was useful.
It was easy to hate the creatures below. They were worse than animals. Animals went into feeding frenzies only when starving. They did it for food, for survival. The creatures crawling and running and biting and clawing below her window on Beach Street were motivated by some kind of insane, mindless lust for violence. Not hunger, not territoriality, not dominance. Sheer, mindless rage.
But . . . they’d been people once. And not long ago, either.
Only a week ago, before the security goons of Arka came for her, she’d been looking down onto Beach Street just as she was now. She often people-watched from her window.
Tourists and locals blended happily on her street, the tourists distinctive for their outlandish dress, broad grins, and sunburned foreheads. Many of them had just come from the Buena Vista Club down the street and had downed a couple too many delicious Irish coffees.
They’d been taken, all of them. Taken away somewhere, leaving behind these monstrous carapaces that had nothing to do with the souls that had inhabited them.
The world was burning.
What kept her going, what kept her from falling into the blackest pit of despair was that maybe, just maybe, some could be saved. Some small corner of the world could remain human. So she recorded. Watched, observed, took notes—noting hemorrhaging times, reflexes, reactions. What triggered the highest ferocity. How fast they ran, how impervious they were to pain. How they died, how they survived.
It was all stored in her computer, in her written notes, and she’d video recorded the accompanying scenes. It was getting to be too dark to film anything in the detail she needed. Crazily, she hadn’t downloaded the IR app; so now that it was dark, s
he was stuck with what her eyes told her.
The city lights were still on. Who knew for how long? They had come on an hour ago, but several were flickering. This time tomorrow or the next day, they could be gone.
She could be gone too.
Her door was stout but conceivably a concerted attack by a couple of heavy men could break it, or at least unmoor it from its hinges. That was one possibility. She could starve to death or die of thirst if she was trapped for too long. Nasty thought, that one. If it looked like that would be her end, she had an entire bottle of Nobital. Crushing all the tablets, dissolving them in water, and drinking it would put her to sleep forever. Many times throughout the long day, while the city fell, she longed for that bottle, had to almost physically wrench her thoughts away from it.
But that was crazy thinking, and it had to stop, immediately.
She was alive right now, and in her right senses, and she was a scientist. She had a duty to observe, record, even postulate theories, however much on the fly. Science didn’t work that way; it proceeded at its own stately pace. But this was different. The World of Science had waned and the World of Blood was rising. Hers might be the last scientific observations on earth.
She shook her head sharply. No thinking like that. Observe and understand. Keep your emotions out of it. Leave something behind in the hope that, at the end, there would be human beings to come across her findings.
A pack ran down the street, fast. She watched, observed.
She tapped her wrist to turn on the audio recording function.
“A group of infected is running down Beach. It is 5:25 P.M. It is almost exactly six hundred feet from the corner of Jones to Lorraine’s Pet Shop. The pack covered the distance in thirty seconds, which means the infected can run a four-minute mile. One of the pack is an obese man. He is keeping up but shows signs of cardiopathy. His breathing is irregular, coloring ruddy. He has stopped and is looking around bewildered, holding a hand to his chest.” Sophie watched as the man fell to one knee, still looking bewildered but not afraid, then pitched forward onto his face. No one in the pack stopped or even looked around. Eventually, his chest stopped moving. “Subject died at 5:37 P.M., presumably of a heart attack.”
No one will do an autopsy, she thought. There wouldn’t be a functioning morgue anywhere in the city. And what was one heart attack in the midst of so much death?
Sick at heart, Sophie turned away from the window. No more of this right now. She needed a short break. Watching the world go mad outside her window all day was breaking her heart, her spirit.
There was another factor. She was a healer. Had been, all her life.
This was well beyond anything she could fix.
One of her first memories was of holding a bird that had fallen to the ground. She remembered how it lay listlessly in her hands as she cried. Her mother had started gently curling her fingers away from the small body when suddenly there was a flutter in her hands and the bird flew away.
Then Nana Henderson had come for a stay when Sophie was seven years old. Nana suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and had walked with two canes, her face often disfigured by pain. Sophie sat on her Nana’s lap for a while every afternoon, and when Nana left, she was walking normally.
Sophie had missed a lot of school that semester because she’d always been sick.
Pain, disease, afflictions. As she grew older, Sophie had felt these things in her fingertips when she touched someone. She could feel her hands grow warmer, could feel muscles bunched against the pain relax in the other person. Could feel sickness departing the body.
And entering hers.
With hindsight, she realized her parents had worried about her.
A healer. If word got out, every sick person in the world would show up on the doorstep, begging for help. And it would kill her. Because the other side of the coin was that she had to rest for several days after touching someone who was sick. She was weak, feverish. Depleted.
Both her parents were scientists and they threw her into an accelerated program, a scientific fast track, where she found herself studying biology, then virology, because both were so fascinating. Her parents had wanted her to go into computer science, engineering, or pure math. Something as far from medicine as possible. But Sophie was fascinated by viruses, those minute segments of protein that seemed to hold such immense power over human beings. Such terrible diseases. Rabies, Ebola virus, hantavirus, the 2021 bird flu that killed two million people. Certain cancers were caused by viruses.
She wanted to make that better. She wanted to fix that. She couldn’t cure the world herself, but she could have a hand in finding out how to help the world heal itself. Virology proved to be a natural fit for her and she was recruited to Arka Pharmaceuticals directly from the Stanford PhD program.
Stanford was where she met her best friend, Elle Connolly. They were young and bright and were making names for themselves. They had something else in common too. Something deeper, something darker than shared courses and an inability to find decent dates.
Powers. Gifts. Curses. Whatever you wanted to call them.
Arka was funding a major study on psychic phenomena and by some principle of the drift factor, they’d both ended up in it. Elle as both a subject and researcher, which was a big no-no. There were a lot of no-nos in the program, it turned out, including human sacrifice. Research subjects were disappearing; and it just so happened that the ones who were disappearing were the most gifted with extrasensory powers. Those were the ones who ended up in an enormous black hole, nowhere to be found.
She was piecing together what was happening when they came for her. Men in black, in the night. Just like in a holomovie, only for real.
When they came, she had managed to get a call to Elle to warn her. She hacked into the computer of the head of Arka Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Charles Lee, and read, with horror, about a virus he had been bioengineering—a virus designed to enhance warriors. Only he was having trouble keeping the enhanced soldiers on this side of sane. Then he’d taken some of the test subjects from the study on psychic phenomena, injected them with the virus, and harvested their brains. From the notes Sophie had read, he liked what he’d seen, so he upped the dosage.
There had been some animal tests with bonobos, a peaceable breed of primate. The virus turned them into killing machines. She knew then that she had to get her hands on the virus. When they came for her and locked her up in the underground test labs, she looked for an opening, any opening at all, to escape, to get her hands on the virus. But by that time, the virus—rendered insanely virulent—had escaped from Arka’s control and spread to the employees in the Arka skyscraper.
It turned out she didn’t need for one of the men in black to glance in the other direction, or let down his guard. Turned out that two lab techs, Carla Stiller and Robert Krotow, two of the gentlest, smartest people she knew, had become infected. They basically ate the two men in black. Arka’s security guards, who she’d read had been recruited exclusively from U.S. Special Forces, didn’t stand a chance.
Sophie hid in a supply closet until the carnage outside was over, opening the door only when she saw the two blood-stained lab rats lope down the hall for other victims, leaving behind two men in black in six distinct pieces.
The concept of door handles proving too much for the infected to conceptualize, they’d forgotten all about her. It was now or never. Sophie took the elevator to the twenty-first floor of the Arka offices, where the big boss himself, Dr. Charles Lee, resided. It had been the slimmest of chances, and her heart had pounded every second while her body was screaming at her to get out.
But something told her she needed to have samples of the viruses and the vaccine that had been in Dr. Lee’s notes. She’d gone up to the administrative offices floor, hoping her Arka pass would let her through.
Her Arka pass didn’t made any difference at all. All doors were open, there were four dead bodies in the corridor, the fire alarm was booming, smoke was in the air.
The door to Dr. Lee’s sumptuous office was open, a big Halliburton case on the floor. She snatched that and the 360 terabyte flash drive on Dr. Lee’s desk and ran for the stairwell, reaching the bottom winded and desperate.
Chaos reigned. Several buildings had their fire alarms booming, up and down Market people were fighting, screaming, dying. Sophie had leaned with her back against the wall of the Arka building until she saw a taxi driver slow down. Without thinking, she wrenched open the door, threw in the case then herself after it.
“Beach Street,” she gasped.
The taxi driver turned a terrified dark face to her. “Hey, lady, I’m not in service! I’m getting the hell out of here. Whatever’s happening here, I don’t want no part of it.”
“Get out of town. Fast. The Bay Bridge is closed.” She’d seen that on Google news. “The Golden Gate will be open for a few hours more. Let me off at Beach Street and I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
The taxi driver’s jaw worked. Something really awful was going down. But . . . a hundred dollars.
He stepped on the accelerator and they shot up Market. The further away they got, the less chaos there was. Sophie planned to get her car in her building’s underground garage and head out. At Beach and Jones she had the driver stop a second, threw a hundred-dollar bill at him, and scrambled out. The case was so heavy she had to practically drag it, two-handed, home. She was wheezing by the time she made it to her building. She swiped her key, planning on descending to the garage, when a pack of monsters came unexpectedly around the corner, screaming and raging, caked with blood.
Two people at the head of the pack howled when they saw her. Heart pounding, she pulled the heavy front door behind her and ran up the stairs. The idea of being caught in the open spaces of the underground garage was too terrifying for words.
The stairs were clear and she managed to lug the heavy case to her apartment, slamming the door and leaning back against it, panting. The goons of Arka would look here for her first, of course. But somehow she was sure that the chain of command had broken now that the world was burning around them. Security would have no way of knowing she had the virus—and anyway, they were probably already dead or infected. Either way, she was sure no one would come for her.