Us. She stopped herself before the truth could come tumbling out. The water she’d stored would outlast humanity, at this rate.
She tilted her head, studying him. He was tall, visibly very strong. There was a stunner in a holster on the floor next to his Superman suit, some kind of gun in a shoulder holster. But still—
“How did you make it here?” she asked.
Someone screamed. A woman. Not close, maybe from a building across the street. It wasn’t a scream of fear but of rage. Sophie waved a hand at the window, encompassing the fallen world outside. “How can anyone survive out there?”
It wasn’t an idle question. He was here to rescue her and get the case with the live virus and the vaccine, but unless he had a tank right outside her front door, she had no idea how they could manage to get five feet without dying or, worse, without being turned.
Something of her terror must have been showing. He lifted a big hand, cupped the side of her face. His deep voice was soft, almost tender. “I’ll keep you safe.”
She nodded, though of course that was an insane comment. Nobody could keep anybody safe. Not in this new, broken world. “How did you make it?” she repeated. She shivered.
Jon looked down at her. “I have a helo.”
She blinked. For a second she thought he said—I have a halo. He was an angel? What?—and then she understood. A helicopter. He had a helicopter.
A little shiver of hope went through her, the first in three days. A helicopter! Helicopters could land almost anywhere. And they took off, could just fly right over the chaos and violence.
“Here?” she asked eagerly, looking up toward the roof. Could it be that easy? Somehow make it up the stairs and away? “On top of my building?”
Jon sighed, that big chest expanding. It was a sigh almost of sorrow. “No, sorry. We checked your rooftop, and though my helo doesn’t need much of a helipad, there was some equipment taking up most of the roof. Couldn’t land safely.”
She bit her lips. “Oh no. They are making repairs, the whole condo voted on it. The workers must have just abandoned their equipment.” And she’d voted for the repairs too. “So where did you land? Not on the street, I hope.”
“Nope. I landed on top of the Ghirardelli Building. Biggest high, clear space around. And I looked carefully as I flew down. The . . . infected aren’t on rooftops. I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t like stairs or heights or what.”
“But . . . on top of the Ghirardelli Building.” Sophie tried to keep dismay out of her voice. She loved strolling over to the Ghirardelli Building on weekends, checking the shops. Sometimes she and Elle would indulge in a hamburger at Sara’s Diner, overlooking the Bay. It made for a nice walk. Running there, dodging monsters, lugging that heavy case . . . “If we make it, it would be a miracle. And the case is heavy.”
“I’ll take care of the case.” Jon reached out with his thumb to smooth the crease between her eyebrows. “I’m not going to insult you and say it’s going to be easy, but I have a stunner and a pistol and some grenades. And I’ll give you my suit. We’ll roll up the sleeves and pants. It’s scratch and bite proof. And—”
“And we’ll douse ourselves with perfume. I have plenty.”
His head jerked back. “What?”
“I’ve been observing them.” Her eyes slid to the window where she’d watched for hours, brokenhearted at the violence and bloodshed on her street. “I’m a scientist. That’s what I do. Observe. I think that their olfactory sense has strengthened. I’ve often watched as an infected stops and sniffs the air, like a dog would. Hunting for a particular scent. I think that’s what’s happening.” Her throat tightened. She had to swallow to get rid of the lump that had suddenly appeared. “I think they are hunting . . . humans.”
He made a low noise deep in his chest. “Yeah. So—what? Dousing ourselves with perfume would help?” He turned his head, looked at her door. “That’s all the scented candles at your door.”
She nodded. “Yes. It can’t hurt. You can have my Chanel N˚ 5. It’s real perfume and it costs the earth.” She smiled a little at the thought of him doused in her Chanel. He didn’t look like the Chanel type.
“What else? What else have you observed, Sophie? Anything at all. Any information is better than none, it ups our chances of survival.”
She didn’t need her notes, though she’d take them with her in her laptop. Everything she knew was seared into her mind. “I think their eyesight is diminished. Perhaps the virus affects the optic nerve, perhaps their brains are no longer equipped to process all the data that comes in through the eyes. Smell is the oldest and most primitive of the senses and that is why it is strengthened. I think the virus amplifies the limbic system, hence the savagery, the inability to reason. I haven’t seen an infected be able to open doors with handles and they have great difficulty navigating stairs. Eyesight is diminished, as I said. At twilight they start bumping into things. I think they might be essentially blind in the dark. But they’ll still attack if they touch someone.”
“Shit,” he swore in a vicious tone. “They’re like fucking zombies.”
“No,” Sophie said. “They seem like zombies because it appears they don’t feel pain. I think the pain receptors are wiped out. That’s very dangerous to them, by the way. You’ve heard the stories of people who have no pain receptors and who sometimes burn to death because they can’t feel pain. The same with the infected. They have absolutely no sense of self-preservation. And they are dying. Let me show you. Do you have a thermal scanner?”
He took a scanner and tapped the side. A hologram popped out. Their two bodies showed, glowing pale yellow.
“Now aim it out the window.”
He held his arm up and the hologram showed the street scene outside. There must have been a hundred infected outside on the street, showing up crimson with trailing tails of red when they moved fast. They were so hot, they managed to heat the air in their wake.
“Let me show you something else,” Sophie said, swiping her finger left to right along the bottom of the hologram. Instantly the outline of the bodies darkened, but digits appeared above their heads, following the infected in their almost Brownian movements. The digits ran from 99.5 to 104.
“Whoa.” Jon frowned. “I didn’t know it could do that.”
She looked up at him briefly, then concentrated on the scanner’s image. “We have these in the lab.” She closed her eyes in pain. “Had them in the lab.”
For an instant, Sophie allowed herself to mourn the lab. Except for the past few months, which had been weird, she loved her job. Loved the camaraderie of science. Everyone striving for the same goal: knowledge. Everything orderly and rational, everything this new world was not. Maybe science as she understood it was gone. Maybe the generations that would come—if there were to be any generations and mankind didn’t simply die off—would worship the moon and the stars.
She trembled at the thought. Jon put a big hand on her shoulder, almost as if he could read her mind. It steadied her, stabilized her. Science wasn’t quite dead. Not as long as she was alive. And if Elle was emailing her, she was somewhere safe. Elle was a brilliant scientist.
“So what are we looking at?” Jon asked.
Sophie shook her thoughts off. This was no time to be mourning what was lost. Now was the time to fight hard to keep what was left. “The infected’s temperatures.”
Jon’s eyes widened. “They’ve all got—”
“A fever. A raging fever. It’s why they show up so red on your scanners. There’s obviously been massive damage to the hypothalamus, which is the body’s thermostat, regulating body temperature. Everyone out there is close to heatstroke. I’ve seen a couple of infected fall down suddenly and twitch. I didn’t have my scanner with me, but it looked like they were having a seizure; and if their core temperatures reached 105 degrees, it was a seizure. One way to fight a high temperature, besides pharmacologically, is fluid and electrolyte replacement, but I don’t think th
ey have the brains to look for water. A fever this high for any sustained period is incompatible with life, as medical texts say. The infected are not doing anything at all to bring their temperatures down. There’s nothing they can do in their state. So they are all dying. It’s just a question of time. So we need to set your scanner to scan for bodies with a temperature of 98 degrees and up. That way we are almost sure to capture only the infected. Another thing . . .”
Sophie swiped from left to right again and the digits above the glowing outlines showed different figures ranging from 140 to 200.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Look at those numbers and then look outside.”
“Okay.” He studied the hologram, then watched the scenes below carefully. “What am I seeing? What are those numbers?”
“What you are seeing, first of all, is an exclusively young population. I’d guess there isn’t anyone over forty down there.”
Jon’s face tightened as he observed more closely, watching in silence for five minutes. “You’re right,” he said finally. “No old people at all.”
“Beach Street is a tourist street. At any given moment, there will be lots of people sixty-five or older. Lots of retired people on vacation. But not now. Not with those numbers. What you’re seeing are heart rates. Their hearts are pumping painfully fast in their chests. The maximum heart rate you can survive is 220 minus your age. So if you have a sixty-five-year-old whose maximum heart rate should be 155, and it’s 190, that heart is going to explode in his or her chest. Soon. They’re dying, Jon. All of them. Even the hardiest won’t survive more than a month, unless they can learn some basic skills like looking for water. And that’s being generous. The people outside on the street right now? They’re the walking dead.”
His jaw muscles clenched. “A month? That’s enough to break down civilization. Reduce us to rubble. Reduce us to the Stone Age. Wipe us out.”
“Yeah.” Sophie’s voice wobbled. She cleared her throat. “That’s what we’re going to prevent. We’re going to produce as many doses of vaccine as possible and inoculate as many people as we can as fast as we can.”
“How fast can that be?”
“I don’t know what the lab facilities are . . . where we’re going. Where Elle is. If you don’t have the equipment we’d have to—I don’t know . . . invade a lab, secure it, and produce the doses on an industrial level.”
“Do you want to talk to Elle? She’s with another scientist, Catherine Young.”
Sophie’s eyes widened. “The Catherine Young? She’s a genius! Oh my God! With Elle and Dr. Young we might really have a fighting chance!”
Sophie was practically hopping with excitement. Elle was superb at lab work and Dr. Young—she was an expert on dementia. The virus inflicted huge neurological damage, which was Dr. Young’s specialty. And Dr. Young knew a lot about virology. The three of them were like a sports Dream Team, only for viruses.
Jon’s mouth lifted at the corners. It wasn’t quite a smile, but it lightened his features. “So. Would you like to talk to Elle? And Catherine?”
Oh God, yes! She almost shouted the words when she remembered and her heart sank. “The Internet’s down. The heliostat will keep the electricity on as long as it remains undamaged, but I lost Internet contact yesterday.”
Jon had reached down to pull out a flexible tablet that had been rolled up in a pocket of his magic suit and spread it out. “We have our own Internet, no problem.” He unrolled the tablet, tapped it, the hologram bloomed in the air and—
Oh my God! There she is!
“Elle!” Sophie instinctively reached out to touch her friend, her hand going right through Elle’s cheek. Elle was flanked by a tall, tough-looking guy. Dark-haired. Grim.
The image was so lifelike, it was as if Elle were right here in the room with them. Sophie realized she’d had low-level anxiety that Elle hadn’t made it. Elle had sent an email, but that wasn’t the same as actually seeing her.
Elle held her hand in front of her mouth, stifling a sob. “Oh my God, Soph, you’re alive! I was so worried!”
The tall dark guy put his arm around Elle’s shoulders, hugging her to him. Elle had a boyfriend? Elle was even pickier than she was. For just a second, Sophie forgot the marauding infected, the violence on the streets, the end of the world. Elle had a boyfriend!
Then she dismissed the guy and concentrated on her best friend. “Elle, I’ve got the virus and the vaccine. Do you have any lab equipment where you are?”
“Oh yeah.” Elle glanced up at the man gripping her shoulders, and even in the hologram Sophie could see Elle’s pale skin flush. “There are some . . . guys here who are very good at, um, liberating things.”
She meant steal. Very cool.
“What equipment do you have?”
“We have it all. Including a Step Facility.”
“Wow.” The Step Facility was brand-new, revolutionary. A system that cut the production time to less than twenty-four hours and allowed for immediate mass production.
Another woman stepped to Elle’s side. Pretty, slender, dark-haired. “Dr. Daniels, I am Catherine Young. If you can get the vaccine here as fast as possible, we can start mass manufacture immediately.”
Wow. Catherine Young in person! Sophie had never met her but had read her papers. “Dr. Young! It’s an honor to meet you!”
A huge man stepped to her side. If he hadn’t put a protective arm around her, Sophie would have shouted at Catherine Young to run like the devil. He was enormous, even more heavily muscled than Jon or the guy with an arm around Elle, and had badass, scarred features. He looked like something out of a horror movie. The kind of guy you ran from the instant you saw him.
Dr. Young didn’t look afraid, though. She reached up to touch the huge scarred hand cupping her shoulder, glancing up at him and smiling. She didn’t look like she was running away from him any time soon.
“Please, call me Catherine. And I’m hoping I can call you Sophie.”
“Of course. It would be an honor.”
“And the two gentlemen here are Mac and Nick.” She gestured. Mac was the Hulk and Nick was the Brooder holding Elle. Sophie noticed that no one mentioned last names.
“Sweetie.” Elle leaned forward, her pretty face filling the hologram. “I can’t thank you enough for warning me the other night. You saved my life. You gave me just enough time to get away. Arka goons were after me and after the whole project group.”
“I know. I think they got Les, Moira, and Roger.” It pained Sophie’s heart. The only saving grace was that they had probably been killed before the virus was released and had been spared the end of the world.
“No, no they didn’t.” Elle looked up lovingly at the dark man holding her tightly. “Nick and Mac and Jon rescued them. They are actually here with us.”
“Oh my gosh!” Tears sprang to Sophie’s eyes. This was the first piece of good news in . . . forever, it seemed. She swiveled her head up to look at Jon. Thank you, she mouthed and he dipped his head. “So . . . where is here?”
Silence. Elle bit her lip and the two men in the hologram looked even grimmer.
Catherine Young answered. “ ’Here’ is a community situated on, or rather in, Mount Blue. About 450 miles from where you are now.” She looked at the huge man holding her, narrowing her eyes at him. She spoke directly to him. “She has a right to know. And with any luck she’ll be here soon. So I don’t want any flak from you.”
Sophie would have felt a little scared of the huge scowl she got, but it didn’t seem to faze Catherine any.
“So, Sophie,” Catherine continued, “our news is that as soon as you get the vaccine here, we are fully equipped to start incubating and then mass producing. We’ve had an input of new arrivals and plans are being made to go out in armored vehicles to reach the uninfected and inoculate them. So you guys get here as soon as you can. For the rest, I think Mac and Nick here want to give Jon the latest news.”
“Sitrep,” Jon barked.
Sophie’s head swirled. These guys, together with Catherine and Elle, were equipped and had plans, whatever they were. Oh God. She clung to that thought. That someone somewhere had a plan and that she could play a part in it. That somewhere reason and will survived. And might even prevail.
Jon was exchanging news with the two men. She barely followed, but then he suddenly shouted, “What?”
“You heard me,” the man called Mac said. “We’ve got General Snyder here. Together with about three hundred civilians. Some are ex-Marines, so we’re looking good security-wise.”
Jon looked at her, then back at the hologram. “You know the score, Mac,” he growled. “General Snyder is our enemy.”
“He’s not the enemy. Never was. He had to take early retirement because he didn’t believe the story about Cambridge and kicked up a fuss. The Pentagon Internet is still up, I checked, and it’s true. So he’s now Robert Snyder, and he retired to a community about 150 miles from where we are now. The captain talked to him. The community where he lives is a gated community with a lot of former military people and they took security seriously. So when the shit came down—”
Catherine Young elbowed him and his eyes rolled. He blew out a breath, looked straight into the camera, dipped his head. “Begging your pardon, ma’am.”
Sophie waved that off.
Mac continued. “So when the virus hit, they were able to close themselves off fast. There are no infected in their group. We heard them issuing a general SOS. I didn’t want to contact them at first because, fuck—” He rolled his eyes and sidestepped another sharp elbow to his side. “Sorry. I didn’t want to contact them for reasons you can imagine. But the captain overrode me. He said Snyder had always been a good guy. And you know, Jon. It’s a whole other ball game now. Anyway, we gave them directions. There were enough secure vehicles to evacuate the entire community—almost a hundred families. They also came with provisions and weapons and they are now part of Haven. And we’re happy to have them. They are also happy that there is the possibility of a vaccine. And that’s that, Jon. End of story.”