Breaking Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Jon checked that they had a relatively flat surface for the next kilometer, then tapped the side of his night vision goggles, turning them into high magnification binoculars. “A fire.” He exhaled a breath. “Looks like either a school or hospital.”

  They were both silent. Schools. Hospitals. Universities. All the things that helped humans live human lives. Without them people lived short, stunted lives, ignorant and bestial.

  Sophie’s voice was quiet but determined. “We’re going to rebuild. As soon as we can get the vaccine into production, we’ll do our best to inoculate as many people as possible and we’ll get the vaccine to the military as soon as they are capable of doing more than defending against the infected. But we’ll do it and we’ll rebuild. All of us will have a difficult five or ten years, but our children will live normal lives. We’ll make sure of it.”

  Our children. Jon’s heart gave a huge thump in his chest. Children. He knew that she was speaking generally and that she didn’t mean that she and Jon would have kids together, but somehow the idea, the image, zinged straight to some up-to-now dormant part of his brain and lodged there. He couldn’t shake it out of his head.

  His and Sophie’s children. A little girl, maybe two, looking just like Sophie. Pretty and solemn and smart. Loving him, looking to him for protection. Oh God.

  What the fuck was this? He had never wanted kids, ever. And had taken great precautions against fatherhood because the idea of a kid of his alone in the world, without protection . . .

  His heart gave another huge thump in his chest. Good thing he knew, without a doubt, that no kid of his was out there.

  His parents had been great at giving a big example of how not to be parents. Feckless and cruel in their indifference to anything but the next high, he’d had an example up close and personal of what not to do.

  He knew what not to do. He had that down pat.

  But being a good father? No frigging clue. He’d never seen it. He’d found structure and discipline in the military and then in Ghost Ops, but there wasn’t any touchy-feely nurturing going on there. Military life was really binary. Do. Obey. And not do and not obey hadn’t been options. You aren’t gently persuaded to do something in the military, explaining the reasons why. No moral lessons drawn, no rules for living. Just—get this done or you’ll be sorry.

  That was how he had intended to live out his entire life. Under the iron discipline of a military existence.

  Jon wasn’t a naturally philosophical person, but the few times he ever thought about his future, maybe life after Ghost Ops, he’d drawn a blank. He was going to die young so what was the use of planning for life after Ghost Ops. What could possibly fill his life? He’d had plenty of sex partners but never a girlfriend, so the question of a long-term relationship or—God!—kids had never come up.

  Marriage and children, a family, had never filled that blank space in his head. Being a husband and father wasn’t anything he could ever see for himself. Or, really, for any of his teammates, though Mac and Nick seemed happy now that they were settled.

  Really happy, in fact. Really, really happy. Mac, in particular, was going to be a father, and before the shit came down he’d been ecstatic.

  His heart gave another big thump and he rubbed his chest, because it freaking hurt.

  “Maybe—” Sophie said hesitantly, then stopped.

  Jon waited but she didn’t finish the thought. “Maybe?” he prodded.

  The surface had turned smoother. This was a stretch of plateau that seemed fairly flat so he could pay attention to what she was saying.

  “Maybe what, Sophie?”

  She sighed, a little exhalation of breath in the silence of the cabin. “I know it sounds crazy, considering that we’re risking our lives just driving a couple of hundred miles and we can’t even drive on roads because there are too many crashed cars and”—she swallowed, that long white throat working—“too many dead bodies. I know what we left behind in San Francisco and I can’t even think about L.A. or San Diego or Sacramento. So much death and destruction, it’s hard to even think of after . . . But the thing is . . .” She turned in her seat and looked at him. The night vision goggles covered his entire range of sight, but he had excellent peripheral vision. He could see her clearly, slightly green-tinged, beautiful and earnest, eyes wide in the darkness. “The thing is—what if we can rebuild better? There was so much wrong with the world, Jon. So much needless cruelty and materialism and crassness and exploitation. Suppose we can learn from the past and particularly from this tragedy? From what I could tell from Dr. Lee’s computer, the virus was designed to make huge amounts of money. Dr. Lee was a gifted scientist. He knew perfectly well that there were enormous risks involved and yet he continued the research. He and that idiot Flynn were willing to blow up the world if it made them money. But maybe—I don’t know. Maybe if there are just a few of us left and we have to band together to survive, we can build something better. Better than what was.”

  Silence. Jon mulled the idea over. Better. Something better.

  Like Haven.

  Haven was a community of misfits and geniuses and people on the run. They could only rely on themselves and they did. Everyone pitched in, everyone gave, no one complained. It was what drove Mac, Nick, and Jon to protect Haven with every ounce of their being.

  “But maybe that’s just a crazy idea. Wishful thinking.” She sighed.

  “Not so crazy,” Jon said softly.

  A world like Haven. He found himself smiling. Oh yeah. A world like Haven was worth fighting for.

  It was an endless ride, uncomfortable, rocky, dangerous. And yet Sophie was happy in the dark cabin with Jon. He was doing a magnificent job of steering them through the badlands even though they were rarely on an actual asphalted road. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that as fast as any vehicle and any driver could take her to safety, that was as fast as Jon was going.

  She was almost completely blind. A low cloud cover blocked off the stars and the sliver of moon, and there were no lights anywhere except occasionally a column of flame where something burned. She saw nothing. When driving through the redwood forest there had been faint shadows, more an idea of shapes than actual shapes, the canopy darker than the night. When they reached the middle of the state and open land, she could discern nothing other than blackness. Jon stopped calling out when the car would lurch. They often dove into holes, climbing out a minute later, rocking over fallen trees and boulders. It was pointless for Jon to warn her, he’d spend all his time calling out instead of paying attention to the landscape in front of him.

  Sophie simply strapped her belt more tightly, hung on to the handle above the door, and endured the teeth-rattling ride.

  Still, she’d rather this horrible bone-crunching ride over rough terrain with Jon than the smoothest ride in the latest Mercedes model with anyone else. He sat next to her, grappling with the steering wheel, concentrated on the terrain ahead and keeping them upright—and yet she felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to another human being.

  He was a warrior and she felt like a warrior too. They were in a war, together, fighting the odds. Teammates and lovers.

  There was a very faint light from the scanners lighting Jon’s face from below. Not quite enough to make out features but enough to highlight the strong jawline and high cheekbones. When he said that maybe, just maybe the idea of building something better in the aftermath of the infection was not so crazy, the corners of his hard mouth turned up because it made sense to him, too, and at that precise moment . . . she fell in love.

  Hard.

  She’d more or less written love off. How to negotiate telling her lover that she could heal but that it was an uncertain gift? That she could, but maybe she couldn’t? That it was a poisoned chalice? He’d either believe her or run for the hills away from the lunatic, and she had no idea which would be worse. It would completely skew the relationship, make it off kilter, make it about something other than two people. Her “gift”
would lie between them like an unwanted lover.

  No, love was off the table. Sex, too, apparently, since she rarely found herself attracted enough to sleep with a man. Casual affairs were sad. Dangerous. Better to just take sex and relationships off the table.

  Jon had broadsided her. They’d had sex before she even knew him, and it had been so intense she thought her heart would blow. And the man was even better than the sex. Her body had told her what to do before her mind could boycott it.

  She and Jon were a couple in the most primitive sense of the term—running for their lives, depending on each other completely, in total harmony. He was irrevocably a part of her. She studied his face in the faint light.

  Handsome, yes. But there were a lot of good-looking guys around. Buff too. But again, a lot of men went to the gym religiously, though Jon’s muscles were of an entirely different order. Muscles for work, not for show.

  She had no idea what his tastes in music and movies and books were.

  Didn’t matter. Because those were details, like clothes covering a man. The real man underneath the trappings, the essence of him, was brave beyond compare. Honorable and true. Even when he’d told her his great gift was lying, he was telling the truth. He’d completely glided over how dangerous undercover work was. How one misstep could betray you. She was fiercely happy he was a brilliant liar because it meant he’d survived where other men would have been killed.

  “You’re looking at me,” Jon said, eyes straight ahead. “What?”

  That was another thing. No games with Jon.

  “I love you,” she said quietly.

  The vehicle swerved, then righted itself. “What?”

  “You heard me.” Sophie had never felt more sure of herself.

  It was insane to tell a man you’d just met that you loved him. In the mating game, don’t show your hand was rule number one. But that was in the old world. Now they were in a new world and the old rules didn’t apply here.

  “I love you. I could beat around the bush and say I’m attracted to you—because I am—or that I like you—because I do—but it’s more than that. And on the off chance that we don’t make it, I wanted you to know. Because it’s important.”

  He was silent. Something was going on inside of him. Though she could barely make out his face, she could see his jaw muscles working, bunching and releasing as if he were chewing on words.

  Sophie wasn’t expecting much in the way of an answer. It didn’t make any difference. The world had become raw and violent, stripped down to bedrock. No time for games or ploys, no sense to them either. She’d said what she had to say and was happy with that. They could be dead in the next hour.

  “Sophie.” Jon’s voice was a low growl.

  Sophie kept her face forward. “It’s okay, Jon. You don’t have to say anything. Whatever you feel is okay.”

  His hands opened then closed tightly around the wheel, face tight with concentration. He took in a deep breath then let it out in a whoosh. “Well, all I can say is that it’s a lucky thing you love me because . . . I love you right back. And I have never said that to another human being in my life.” In the deep gloom she saw him shake his head. “I can barely believe I’m saying it now.”

  He reached out with one big hand and took hers, curling his fingers in hers. He brought the back of her hand to his mouth and kissed it. Her hand turned warm, as if his lips transferred fire.

  After that, there wasn’t much else to say. All the usual things Sophie supposed a man and a woman said to each other after declarations of love were perfectly pointless. There was no talking of where to go from here. The future for the moment didn’t exist. All that existed was right now, trekking slowly across California, hoping to make it to Haven.

  And anyway, everything that needed to be said had been said. Jon had risked death for her when he didn’t know her. Sophie had no doubt that he would fight to the death for her now. In their escape from San Francisco, she’d have died for him.

  That was it. That was what was important.

  Everything else was noise.

  Hour after hour rolled by. Though the cabin was warm, Sophie wasn’t even tempted to sleep. The ride was rough but beyond that, Jon was doing something almost impossible, ferrying them across the state off road, and in the dark. She knew how hard depth perception was with night vision. That they were still intact and hadn’t rolled over into a ditch or crashed into a boulder was entirely thanks to his driving skills. She couldn’t help him, but she could keep vigil with him, every step of the way.

  There was the faintest change in the sky ahead, to the east. Not so much light as the promise of light. Dawn was about an hour away.

  The land tilted upward. They were beginning the long climb to Mount Blue.

  Red light flashed from the scanners. “Infected?” Jon asked. His posture was tense, raked slightly forward. The faint dawn light was beginning to interfere with the night vision.

  Sophie studied the monitor carefully. “No. Two deer. I can’t tell the sex because antlers won’t show up in IR.”

  “Why are they showing up at all?” Jon asked. “Are they infected?”

  “I don’t think so. Animals have a higher base temperature than humans, that’s all. Dogs have a base temperature of about 101. They are sick if their temperature is 99 degrees and below. Deer typically have a base temperature of about 104 degrees.” She observed the monitor for several minutes, then sighed in relief. “They’re not infected,” she said decidedly. “Their movements are normal and they can stand still. Human infected can’t be still. Their nervous systems are too compromised.”

  She looked at Jon. She could see him a little more clearly now in the dawn light. To a casual observer, he looked exactly as he had when they started out. But Sophie was more than a casual observer. Deeply tanned, he was pale under the tan and the lines around his mouth were deeper.

  Well, maybe she could make him feel better.

  “That is actually very good news. The best. All this time, I’ve been terrified that the virus could infect animals as well. If that happened, our vaccine wouldn’t work forever and we’d have to inoculate the entire population again. It would be like what happens with the flu, where each year you are inoculated against last year’s mutation. However, if animals aren’t acting as a reservoir for the virus, we really can hope it can be vanquished forever, like smallpox.” She turned to him and smiled for the first time in what felt like forever. “There’s hope, Jon. Hope that we can win this thing.”

  “Hope. Man.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe it.”

  But he smiled too.

  The ground lifted even more as they began climbing the mountain in earnest. The Lynx was still silent, but Sophie had the impression that it was straining a little. After a few miles she could see individual trees, barely. A dense morning fog curled around the trees, swirling and dancing in the morning breeze just off the surface of the ground.

  Jon slowed the vehicle. “This is a dangerous moment. The light will blind me soon through the night vision goggles, but there isn’t enough light to drive by. I’m going to have to go really slow until there’s more light.”

  Sophie nodded.

  He slowed even further, pulling the goggles up over his head, placing them in the divider container between their seats. His eyes narrowed, hands tightened. Sophie’s eyesight was acclimated but not even she could see well enough to drive. The terrain grew rougher as they climbed. Rocks, fallen tree limbs, thick bushes. Jon was tense, checking their position constantly on the map. Then Jon glanced at the GPS and relaxed. “Okay. We have a series of tiny EMP sources ringing the mountain, releasing when any electronic device crosses a waypoint. It will kill any engine with electronics.” He smiled at some memory. “Killed Catherine’s little purple eCar stone dead. Mac went down to get her and threw her over his shoulder.”

  “That sounds like caveman tactics.”

  He shrugged one broad shoulder. “Worked, though. They’re expecting a ki
d. Some time in October.”

  Sophie gasped. “Dr. Young—Catherine is pregnant? Isn’t that dangerous right now?”

  “It was dangerous when she conceived because we had the entire U.S. government looking for us—Mac, top of the list. Doubly dangerous now. Danger hasn’t ever stopped people from having kids. Life goes on.”

  Life goes on. Indeed it did, she thought. Children. Well, she’d been talking about rebuilding. You can’t rebuild without a next generation.

  God, maybe they would already have begun rebuilding by the time Catherine’s child was born.

  Jon wrenched the wheel again. “From now on, there will not be, there cannot be, any vehicles on the road. They were all killed dead half a mile back. Our vehicles have transponders in them so the sensors know not to emit the pulse. My scanner has been reconfigured to act as a transponder. So right now we’re making our way to the road that will lead us straight to Haven.”

  He tapped his left wrist and glanced at her, ice blue eyes flashing light. That paleness beneath the tan had disappeared, as had the lines of tension.

  “Yeah,” he said suddenly, tapping his ear, straightening in his seat. “You’ve got our bearings, right? I’m heading toward the road. Turn off all the traps, for God’s sake. We’re friendlies.” He grinned. “Roger that. ETA?” He slanted her another glance. “About twenty minutes. Prepare us some food because we’re hungry and thirsty and tired. Tell Stella to get her game on. Out.”

  Food. Good food, apparently. Shower and a bed. Sophie was still mulling that over when with a crack! the world exploded. The Lynx smashed its way downhill, rolling over and over. The harness kept her in place, but her head beat hard against the window as the vehicle landed again and again on the passenger side, then continued its roll. It was like being in the spin cycle of a washing machine, almost without gravity, completely out of control. A particularly vicious landing against something hard almost broke her door open. She felt a sharp pain in her wrist and cried out.

  It seemed to last forever but suddenly they stopped, crashing up against a huge tree. Sophie banged her head against the window again and everything went black . . .