Breaking Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Mac.”

  “Okay, Mac. Do you?”

  Mac turned to Elle.

  “Yes,” Elle said. “Three. Nick picked them up when he went to a research lab to liberate some equipment for us. Why?”

  “We need dead bodies. We need to know how long the virus can survive in corpses. I think we should be okay. The most virulent viruses known to us—the hemorrhagic fever viruses like Ebola—cannot last more than three days in corpses. Smallpox can’t survive more than twenty-four hours. And most viruses deteriorate when exposed to ultraviolet rays. A lot of the dead infected will be outdoors. This is my best assessment. But . . . we need to be sure. So have two men in hazmat suits find a dead infected, put him in another hazmat suit and we’ll try to replicate a Level-4 containment lab to the best of our ability.”

  Nick stirred, looked at Elle, then back at her. “Sounds dangerous for you guys.”

  “It’s all dangerous, Nick,” Sophie said before Elle could talk. “But we’re going to beat this thing, and when we start reconstruction we will also have to know whether a coyote who slinks away with an infected’s arm will become infected and infect a human being in turn. I don’t think the virus is transmissible to animals because it was tailored for humans, but we must know for certain. We have to know whether we need to undertake a massive program of burying in mass graves dug very deep and lined and covered with cement or if we can simply bury the dead normally, because the virus is dead. Any mass graves that would have to be dug under containment conditions would take months and months. And in the meantime, men, women, and children will starve to death. If we know that the virus can’t survive outside a live body, we can bury the dead quickly even as we care for the living.”

  Nick nodded, a brusque up and down movement. “On it. I’ll grab one of the ex-Marines not on guard duty and go out.” He disappeared from the screen.

  Elle’s eyes followed him, then turned back to the vid. “And I’ll set up a separate lab with Catherine, trying to make it as much a containment lab as we can.”

  “How are you doing for supplies?” Jon asked.

  Mac sighed, a huge heave of his massive chest. “Up until yesterday I’d have said we’re doing fine, but we just got another influx of three hundred refugees. We’ve got people sleeping in the corridors in shifts. We’re down to about four days’ reserves.”

  “Well, we’re bringing in as much as we can in the Lynx. And if ever a helo can be spared, Robb’s got enormous stocks of food here.”

  “Yeah. He said. So we’ve done as much on our end as we can for you. We lost satellite contact about twelve hours ago, so we can’t give you any more details on the terrain you’re going to have to cross. ETA?”

  “The way I mapped it, if we get a straight run, we should be at Haven at around 0700 hours tomorrow morning. That’s if we don’t run into problems. If the Herrington Bridge is still intact. If we don’t run into more infected than we can deal with. If Robb’s Lynx holds up. Lots of variables.”

  Mac gave a two-fingered salute off his forehead. “We’ll be at the road entrance to Haven from 0600 hours on. Good luck, soldier.” Mac’s gaze turned to Sophie, then back to Jon. “Bring her home.”

  “Yessir. See you at 0700 hours tomorrow.” Jon’s jaw was tight as he switched off the comms unit and turned to her. He was less wild-eyed than before, steadier. Mission-ready. “You ready, honey? It’s going to be a long, hard trip.”

  Dangerous too. He hadn’t mentioned that part. He didn’t need to. “Ready” was all she said.

  Jon pushed a button and the engine lit up. There was barely any noise, just a low controlled purr, which was lucky since noise attracted the infected. He didn’t switch the headlights on. With a great deal of luck, they would be able to find their way home silently and invisibly.

  Sophie hardly dared hope for such luck, but since their ride back to Haven—the helicopter—had blown up back in San Francisco, she figured the scales needed balancing and that would do nicely. A long, hard, safe trek across the state. Yes, she was up for that.

  “Heading out,” Jon said and the Lynx moved forward. He pressed a button on the panel. The gate behind the house started slowly rolling open. It was set in the high walls cutting the compound off from the rest of the world. Jon went slowly over the gate tracks set in the ground, pushed the button again, and the gates closed.

  Sophie turned her head to look at the compound one last time, already almost invisible in the darkness. A massive dark shape in the general darkness.

  “I’m very grateful to that place,” she said. “In more ways than one.” She smiled and put her hand on Jon’s arm. Just for a second, just to let him know the deeper meaning of her words. His hard profile didn’t change, but he placed his hand over hers briefly, then removed it.

  Sophie missed that hand. Jon had a way of inspiring trust with the merest touch, but now he needed to concentrate on the task in front of him, getting them and the case to Haven, safe and sound. She was scared, but she was also determined to help, not hinder him. Though he hadn’t asked her to, she resolved to keep an eye on the scanner set on the dashboard signaling the existence of infected within a 500-meter radius.

  The monitor with the waypoints was above the scanner so Jon could reference them both easily at a glance. “It looks like we have safe, clear passage right across the Humboldt State Park,” he said. “It must have been fairly deserted before the infection hit. As of yesterday there were no pileups. The pileups begin right after we leave the park and we’ll have to go off road.” He shot her a look. “It won’t be comfortable.”

  Sophie looked at him and sighed. “I’m not a cream puff, Jon. I can take a little jostling.”

  His face transformed suddenly. In a flash his cheekbones flushed and his eyes narrowed, and she realized that there could be sexual innuendos inferred in her words. Of course, when she and Jon were in the same room, sex was in the room too. And they were in an enclosed space here in the Lynx, which was suddenly suffused with pheromones.

  “You are most definitely a cream puff, honey. My cream puff and I love gobbling you up. Jostling you too.”

  Heat flashed and oxygen fled the cabin of the vehicle. There was some snappy sexy comeback, and if she had access to her brain, she’d have said it. Definitely. As it was, she didn’t have access to her brain, only to her sex organs. Her thighs clenched hard as her vagina contracted. Oh God. Had he noticed?

  Yes, he definitely had.

  But they were rolling out onto a road now and he didn’t say anything. He put on his night vision gear, which looked like unusually thick sunglasses, and turned to the road ahead.

  Sophie couldn’t see anything in the total darkness. She had never been in a moving vehicle before without any lights at all, not even headlights. It was unnerving.

  Her time in California had been spent studying and working, she’d never made it up this far north before. She knew about the park, of course. It had the tallest trees in the world, that was all she knew.

  Soon they were deep in the forest, but she could only tell by negative input. The black sky’s blackness became even more absolute with the tall canopy blotting out the night sky. She could infer trees by an abstract structure, maybe some kind of electric charge of living things, but not by sight. They were almost visible out of the corner of her eye but disappeared when she looked straight at them, like ghosts or goblins.

  Jon wasn’t having any problems, though. He was seeing everything, clearly in control. For just a moment, Sophie was tempted to ask to peer through the night vision glasses but resisted. It would be folly for him to take them off, even for a second. They weren’t on a sightseeing trip, they were running for their lives.

  So on they drove, through darkness for her, through a flat green-tinted dayscape for Jon. The only thing that told her they were on a road was the smooth feel of the asphalt beneath the wheels. Soon, she knew, that would stop and the truly dangerous part would begin.

  There was silence in the veh
icle. Sophie didn’t feel like breaking it, though she knew Jon would answer if she made a comment. But really, what was there to say? She wanted to know more about this beautiful warrior, much more. She wanted to find out how he could have remained sane under constant stress while undercover. She wanted to understand how he felt about his teammates. She wanted to find out what his love life had been.

  But—it could go either one of two ways. Either they were ambushed or the vehicle crashed and they died and she’d meet her maker together with one of the bravest men she’d ever met. Or—they’d make it to Haven and work hard, hand in hand, to put the world back together. If they were lucky enough to walk through door number two, there’d be plenty of time to explore fascinating Jon World.

  There was something almost soothing about this journey in darkness and silence. The world was insane outside the vehicle, but inside, she and Jon were two people working hard together to achieve something difficult under dangerous circumstances. Not much more had to be said. They both understood the danger, they were both ready for it. Maybe this was what it was like for warriors on a mission? No talking, the time for talking was done. Just action. And a strong sense of common purpose.

  After an hour of smooth rolling, Jon spoke. He glanced at the map and back at the road and said, “Going off road, Sophie. There’s a pileup about a hundred yards ahead and beyond that, the road is littered with crashed cars and trucks for the next fifty miles. It would take us days to get past them. I don’t have much depth perception, so it might be a bumpy ride.”

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “You concentrate on the road, and I’ll watch the scanner.”

  He nodded and maneuvered them off the road.

  They were well out of the state park or at least on the edges of it. Without being able to see much, Sophie could sense fewer tall trees, the canopy overhead disappearing as under the wheels they transitioned from smooth asphalt to rocky surface. The wheels slid and Jon cursed, regaining control. Jon was leaning forward a little now, because there was no road to follow anymore, just badlands.

  One wheel dipped into a deep hole and Jon fought to keep the vehicle upright. Sophie knocked her head badly against the window but didn’t make a sound. Jon couldn’t be distracted now. She braced herself against the door so the next time the Lynx rocked, she was able to keep herself upright, though the seat belt pulled so tight against her chest it hurt.

  The vehicle rocked as if in a strong wind as it climbed out of the hole.

  The really hard part had begun.

  Later, Jon would barely understand how he did it. Adrenaline, terror—they helped. What didn’t help was having Sophie with him. Every time he fought the wheel to keep the vehicle upright, he had to fight the temptation to hold her back against her seat with his arm. It was pure instinct and it wasn’t helping. Like himself, she was strapped in via a five-point belt and his arm was much less effective a barrier than the belt. But every single goddamned time, he was distracted from the driving by wanting to protect Sophie.

  The only thing he could do to protect Sophie was getting her to Haven safely as fast as possible and the constant distraction of her next to him was putting both their lives at risk. He tried not to look at her but he couldn’t stop smelling her, some mixture of Anna Robb’s soap and shampoo and Sophie’s skin. He remembered the smell of Sophie’s skin in the deepest recesses of his brain. She was a distraction and he had to wrestle with himself just as much as he wrestled with the wheel to keep them moving.

  It wasn’t as if she was deliberately distracting him, God no. Even when the vehicle slid out of control for a few seconds, teetered for an instant on two wheels, even when he had to wrench the car to avoid an almost invisible hole, she didn’t make a sound. He could feel her anxiety like waves beating up against the shore, but she didn’t say a word and she didn’t make any movements that could have distracted him.

  But she did distract him. She didn’t want to, that was clear, but she did. He couldn’t fucking keep her out of his mind. Swerving, testing out the depth of craters because he couldn’t see for shit—all he saw was vague contours but not the size of hillocks and vales—gunning the engine when he saw he had a clear shot, slowing down to a walking pace where the land was strewn with boulders and brush. And all the time he was thinking of her, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible, terrified the night vision wouldn’t show him where the ground sheared off into a cliff until it was too late and they were rolling down the sheer face to the bottom of the cliff.

  He’d always had a very good imagination. It helped, as a soldier. He could think ahead and see the scenarios for each decision on a decision tree. But now that gift turned on him and bit him on the ass. Because his mind created two really good images to deal with. One: the car slides down a steep hill, hits the bottom and explodes or, even better, two: he and Sophie trapped in the vehicle until some infected comes along and tears Sophie’s heart out of her chest.

  That last one was rendered in full living color, with sound effects.

  Shit! He wanted to pound the wheel but didn’t, because he needed to control the wheel and he needed to control his reactions. How crazy was that? He was nothing but cool and calm under pressure, even extreme pressure. Except apparently now, when it would be really useful to switch to Cool Surfer Dude instead of sweaty desperate Totally Uncool Dude.

  The vehicle lurched heavily to the right, tilting slightly, the left wheels lifting off the ground—Jon wrenched the car back to where at least the four wheels were touching the ground at the same time.

  He had to stop thinking of her, stop trying to keep her safe. Because if he kept having divided attention, he’d kill them both. Or worse—kill himself and maybe leave her alive in the middle of the badlands.

  That image—of him crushed in an accident, Sophie alive and staked out like a goat for the monsters to find her—got his head straight. He had to focus. Focus was what he did, focus was what Jon was all about. So he narrowed his attention to the vehicle and the road, nothing else existed in the whole wide world. There was only the feel of the vehicle and the terrain in front of them.

  The GPS waypoints Mac and the others at Haven had mapped out for him were twenty-four hours old and worse than useless. What was miles and miles of empty roadway on their map turned out to be cluttered with pileups, articulated trucks jacked sideways, one huge tractor trailer upside down like an enormous black cockroach, wheels in the air instead of legs.

  Every single inch of this nightmare journey was one he had to feel his way through. In the end it was easier to just stay off road since it was so hard to get on and get off at irregular intervals. The Lynx could smash its way through the guardrails easily enough, but after ten or twelve times Jon thought he might be undermining the structural integrity of the fenders, so he just abandoned highways. There were some state roads he could follow for a while. When he came across tangles of wrecked cars, if the road wasn’t on a raised grade, it was easy enough to simply drive off road, skirt the wreck, then drive back on.

  What wasn’t so easy was ignoring the bodies around the pileups. He was glad Sophie didn’t have night vision. Driving by an endless succession of broken human beings was hard to take for him. She would be heartsick.

  He had to keep to under twenty miles an hour so he could correct if the car slid or threatened to overturn, but he’d counted on thirty miles an hour, making it to Mount Blue by around sunrise. At this rate, they’d arrive several hours after dawn.

  No matter. He gripped the wheel harder, fighting the temptation to speed up. That could get them killed. They’d get to Haven when they got there. Not before and not later.

  After six hours of driving, Jon’s muscles were aching. If this were any other situation he’d stop and stretch. But it was what it was, and he didn’t want to endanger Sophie by stopping, not even if the scanner was clear.

  He was trying to negotiate a sudden dip in the land that turned out to be almost a pit when Sophie said, very quietly, “Jon.”<
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  He couldn’t look at her until he’d gunned the engine to work the vehicle up and over the other side of the deep depression. Then he spared her a quick glance.

  “What?”

  “Infected.” She tilted the scanner so he could see clearly. Yep, a pack of them. About twenty, milling aimlessly about 500 meters west.

  “Car’s very quiet,” he said. “Maybe we can slip by without them noticing.”

  He concentrated fiercely on the road, speeding up. They would be safe in the cabin, but he didn’t want to engage with infected at all. He pushed the car’s speed up even more, carefully threading around trees and humps in the ground.

  Finally, Sophie spoke again. “We’ve cleared them.”

  “Good.” Jon eased up on the accelerator. They’d been traveling dangerously fast, at a clip he couldn’t maintain without risking an accident. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? There’s some food and water in the cooler right behind my seat.”

  “I’ll eat and drink at Haven.” Sophie reached out, caressed his cheek lightly. Her hand was warm, soft. Comforting. “Until then I think we need to pay attention to the road.”

  Jon grunted. It was exactly what a fellow soldier would say. Top priority—the mission. Creature comforts can come when the op is done. In the meantime, do what you have to do to come back safely.

  Sophie looked around. The darkness was absolute, but the quality of the darkness changed. “What’s the landscape like now?”

  “More open,” Jon replied. “We’re coming now into open ground. If the clouds break, you’ll see starlight.”

  She craned her neck to look out the side window but the cloud cover was thick. “The darkness is oppressive,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you have night vision.”

  Jon grunted. He was glad too. Otherwise, this nighttime journey across California would have been impossible.

  To the north was a source of light, showing up in night vision as a diffuse glare. They turned a corner and even Sophie could see it. “What is it?” she asked.