Breaking Danger (2 page)

One tank had crashed through a railing and hung half on, half off the bridge.

It was a good thing Jon wouldn't need to exit the city to the north from the bridge. It hurt to think that maybe no one would ever cross that bridge again.

No use thinking that way. It was what it was.

The beautiful white skyline of San Francisco drew nearer. Black columns of smoke resolved into flames at the base, whole sections of the city burning.

This is what 1906 must have looked like, he thought. Only no fire brigades were coming. No communal kitchens, no armies of volunteers helping the wounded. There would be no rebuilding.

He reached the outer arm of the marina, followed it in, crossed over into the city along the waterfront, alive with infected. No one looked up at his passage. Light was draining from the sky and his helo was a dull matte black with no reflective surfaces. And no one had the concept of helicopter in their heads anymore.

He flew over vicious street brawls, vehicles left askew, a cable car at the turning station lying on its side. He crossed the grassy expanse of Ghirardelli Square, hovering for a moment over the roof of the Ghirardelli Building, then landed lightly. He killed the engines and sat there for a moment, head bowed.

His hands dropped to his lap. They were trembling slightly.

Amazing.

Jon had spent his entire adult life either in training for combat, in combat or undercover. He'd spent two years undercover, pretending to be a dealer in the Cartagena cartel, where any second he could be unmasked and hung on a meat hook as reprisal and warning. Nothing fazed him, nothing scared him.

Or so he'd thought.

Turned out that the end of the world scared the shit out of him.

So though the city was burning around him, though time was pressing—because who knew if, even at this moment, Sophie Daniels was being torn to bits, the case with the vaccines kicked into the bay—Jon sat still in his little helo, a marvel of technology and engineering, and waited for his hands to stop shaking.

Screams came from the streets below. Bellows, really. Of rage, of fury. Something crashed heavily.

This wasn't getting any better.

Time to go.

He had his backpack already at the helo door. With an almost silent hiss of hydraulics, the helo door opened and Jon stepped out onto the Ghirardelli Building roof. From up here, where he couldn't see the street level, he could almost pretend that nothing had happened. If you ignored the smoke, you could almost think that it was two days ago and mankind was still rolling along in its lying, cheating, thieving ways, where, however, in the interstices and almost as an afterthought, some people got medical care, some cops were able to stop crime, some kids got educated.

Someone played music, wrote books, painted canvases.

He stepped to the edge of the building and the fantasy disappeared. Down on the street it was a jungle. Worse than a jungle. In the jungle, animals didn't try to exterminate their own species.

He strapped his scanner to his wrist and adjusted it to IR. Immediately, red human-shaped splodges appeared on the screen, crazy even in IR.

It was getting darker now. Jon watched the street carefully, looking for breaks in the patterns. He couldn't tell if the infected hunted in packs systematically or whether packs formed spontaneously. A snarling, crazed group of twenty creatures would go by, then nothing for a minute or two. Did they slow down with the darkness? Did they hunt at night? Did they sleep?

He had no idea.

His entire life as a soldier he'd pitted himself against enemies of different cultures. Pakistanis, Afghanis, Chinese, Mongolians, Colombians. All different, but now he realized they were more similar than different. Because they behaved according to human rules—the rules that were ingrained in our DNA.

Another pack passed by. And another. Then three separately, snarling down the street.

Fuck. There wasn't going to be a break in these creatures.

The math was against him. Almost by definition anyone on the street was infected. The few who weren't—and there was no way to tell how many of the uninfected were left—were locked indoors, frightened and trapped.

Like Sophie Daniels.

It was that thought—of Sophie Daniels trapped and terrified—that galvanized him.

He'd never met her, but he'd seen her photograph. She was beautiful, but beyond that she had the look of Mac's wife, Catherine, and Nick's woman, Elle: very smart and very kind. The kind of woman who had a glow about her. They didn't grow women like that on trees.

She'd been kidnapped by the goons of the company that had unleashed this virus, Arka Pharmaceuticals. Before being caught, she'd had the presence of mind and the courage to take a few moments to warn Elle. Elle had escaped, rescued by Nick, but Sophie had been caught. Maybe those moments had been just enough to have her fall into the hands of the fuckers who wanted to test her like an animal. Elle had been scared sick for her friend. The three of them—Mac, Nick, and Jon—had gone to Arka's headquarters to free the people being tested, including Sophie, but she was gone by then.

By some miracle, Sophie had escaped from the prison lab in the chaos of the infection; and instead of immediately getting the hell out, she'd gone back into the offices of a building full of monsters to hunt down and steal the vaccine. On the off chance that her bravery would give humanity a chance.

It was very likely that the fate of humanity rested with one lone, brave scientist trapped on Beach Street.

He looked east, to where Beach Street began. It was clogged with infected, looking like crazed cockroaches from his vantage point high on the roof of the Ghirardelli Building.

The salvation of humanity might be on that street.

Jon wasn't too fond of humanity. To his mind, it was already barreling toward disaster before the infection exploded. Most humans were petty and mean, with streaks of greed and cruelty running through them.

But there were exceptions. To his vast surprise, he'd found out that there were many who were good and brave, talented and selfless. Haven was full of people like that. People who deserved saving.

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.

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, she was stuck with what her eyes told her.