Breaking Danger
Authors: Lisa Marie Rice
To my fellow Brainstormers. Well, gang, here it is. The third book in the trilogy I first brainstormed with you. Here's to you all! And a big thanks to Christine Witthohn, agent extraordinaire, who helped brainstorm the books from the beginning!
Chapter 1
In the air from Mount Blue in
Northern California to San Francisco
Hang in there, Sophie Daniels,
Jon Ryan thought grimly.
I'm coming for you as fast as I can. Whatever you do, whatever it takes, stay alive.
He'd only seen her in photographs and only knew of her through her friend Elle Connolly, who had also worked at Arka Pharmaceuticals. He knew only that she was beautiful and smart. A researcher, a virologist, and now a vulnerable woman surrounded by danger.
Jon Ryan looked down at the ravaged, smoking landscape. His stealth helicopter basically flew itself and for the first time he regretted that. Having to pay attention to flying would have kept his mind off what he was seeing below. Death. Destruction. Chaos.
There were so many columns of smoke, he didn't bother flying around them but arrowed his way through. The helo's air filters could take care of the smoke.
Pity they couldn't filter out his feelings.
The helo was hermetically sealed, so he couldn't smell the smoke. But he knew what burning vehicles smelled like. And burning people.
The world was dying, right before his eyes. There was the tiniest spark of hope waiting for him on Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Sophie Daniels. A scientist with a vaccine against the virus that was tearing humanity apart. The Doom Bug.
Jon had never met her, but she was Elle Connolly's best friend. Elle Connolly soon-to-be Elle Ross. He knew that in his teammate Nick Ross's eyes, Elle was already his wife. Nick had loved Elle forever and had lost her, then found her again. Just before scumbags who worked for Arka Pharmaceutical's security system tried to kill her.
Arka was responsible for murdering the world, its death throes visible right below him. But the world might survive if he got to Sophie Daniels in time. If she was still alive. If he could smuggle her out of a San Francisco with an estimated 600,000 monsters roaming the streets. If they could replicate that vaccine, in a lab which was even now being prepped back at Haven on Mount Blue. If the vaccine worked.
A long shot, but the only one they had.
Was Sophie Daniels still alive?
He remembered the last email Sophie sent to her friend and colleague, Elle.
Elle, I think Arka has bioengineered a virulently contagious virus that takes out the neocortex and activates the limbic system. If you're reading this, then you'll know that the virus has been unleashed. I hacked into the files and I discovered that there is a vaccine. It was in Dr. Lee's office in the Arka building, in a case that also contained the live virus. There was so much chaos that I was able to steal it. So I have a refrigerator case of 200 vials of vaccine and 4 doses of live virus. The electricity has gone out and I don't think the coolant in the case will last much more than 96 hours. I'm in my apartment on Beach Street and I don't dare go out. These . . . creatures are running around in the streets. All I can do is stay locked up in the apartment and hope that someone can come for me.
If you're reading this, Elle, send someone. This vaccine is our only hope.
Soph
They'd received that message twenty-four hours ago. Elle had replied that Jon was on his way. He'd wanted to head out immediately. Go grab her and the vaccine and bring her back to safety. Their little stealth helo could make it to San Francisco and back in a few hours, easy.
That had been the plan.
But in this new world, no plans worked. He'd had to leave their main helo on the rooftop of the Arka skyscraper in the Financial District of San Francisco. He was flying an older helo that had been in maintenance. And instead of heading out immediately, he'd headed out twenty-four hours late because the rotor head had to be replaced and they had to go steal one in what had, overnight, become badlands.
Twenty-four hours was a long time in this new world. Time enough for Sophie Daniels to be caught and ripped to pieces. Time enough for the whole of fucking San Francisco to turn. Time enough for
her
to turn. Jesus.
At least her building was intact. He could see it both from the Keyhole satellite feed and their own drones that Mac and Nick had sent to hover over the Beach Street area.
To top it off, her Internet connection had broken down, but his was still functioning. Haven had an almost unbreakable connection. Its servers were in an impenetrable underground bunker about a mile away, safe and impregnable. He could talk to Haven and they could listen in and connect with anyone whose connection still worked. Sophie's didn't. Jon had done a fast check and the entire northern section of San Francisco was down.
He was flying in blind, without knowing what was at the other end. Knowing only that monsters were roaming the streets.
The creatures seemed to be able to find healthy people and go after them with unparalleled ferocity. Did they smell the healthy? God only knew. He didn't. Jon was a warrior and had been trained all his adult life in the warrior arts. But as a covert operative for the CIA and then a member of the elite and secret Ghost Ops group, he'd also received extensive training in other arts. Computer security, orienteering, a basic knowledge of mechanical engineering, and even medic training.
He was a master liar, really good at undercover ops.
But absolutely nothing in his training prepared him for this. For humanity going feral. Overnight.
Jon glanced down to the left and saw two kids up a tree. Two little kids, clinging to each other. And at the base of the tree, like a frothing mass of madness, ten, maybe fifteen, infected. According to Elle's pretty friend Sophie, with the neocortex out, the infected couldn't plan. They wouldn't be able to find a ladder to climb up to the kids, but, by God, they could pound against the trunk of the tree to loosen the kids' hold.
Jon watched as one of the children lifted his head and stared at the helo. He couldn't see Jon. The cockpit was covered with a bulletproof graphene coating that tinted the windows, making everything in the cockpit completely invisible, even to thermal and IR imagery. All the kid could see was a piece of machinery working. Maybe the last piece of working machinery in the world. And clearly someone uninfected was flying.
The kid's mouth opened in a silent scream that didn't penetrate the insulated cockpit. He let go of the branch he was holding and waved desperately, eyes and mouth wide, face turning as Jon flew by.
A second, twoâ
“
Goddammit!
” He slapped the instrument panel hard enough to hurt. It didn't affect the instrument panel, of course, which was made of a highly resistant epoxy resin, strong enough to survive a crash intact. All he did was hurt his hand and vent his feelings a little.
He checked his radar. The helo itself was stealth and never showed up on anyone else's radar. The new system had a hundred-mile radius, which served him well; he wouldn't crash into another aircraft. But there were no other aircraft on his radar. In the space of half a day, all aircraft had been grounded. It was possible there were no pilots left in California, maybe the United States.
“Little Bird, you copy?” A deep voice crackled in his ear. Mac McEnroe, back at base. Jon tapped the earbud.
“Copy. Sitrep.”
Please,
he thought.
Give me some good news.
“Not good, Jon.” Mac's deep voice was somber. “All TV channels have lost regular programming. There's an announcement by Governor Spielberg ordering a curfew, effective immediately. Everyone is to keep off the streets. But it's prerecorded and on a loop. We haven't heard anything new in hours, except . . .”
Jon's hand tightened on the stick. “Except?”
A heavy sigh. “Our drones have showed us that all interstate highways to the north and to the east have been firebombed. All bridges leading out of state, bombed. Nothing's getting in or getting out. All aircraft grounded. You seeing anything?”
“Negative, boss.” He thought for a moment. “So no one's coming to help?”
“Looks that way. Our drones show us Marine and National Guard units strung out along the firebombed highways and a presence where there are no natural boundaries. But the units are facing in. To California.”
“Not to keep people out but to keep people in,” Jon murmured.
“Yeah.”
He gritted his teeth so hard his jaws hurt. “They're abandoning us. The fuckers.”
Mac blew out a breath, thenâ“Get Elle's friend out, Jon. Get us that vaccine before the whole state dies.”
“Roger that.”
Jon switched off the entire comms system. There wasn't anything else he wanted to hear. He could see what the situation was right beneath the helo's skids on his monitor as he flew over once-prosperous towns now reduced to ashes and rubble. Some people were lying dead on the streets like feral dogs, creatures, their hands clawlike reaching out, their mouths red-stained; others were loping like wolves through the town. Occasionally, he'd see desperate uninfected faces plastered against windows, hoping for help, pleading for help.
Help wasn't coming. It looked like the country had turned its back on them.
Just like the country had turned its back on his team, Ghost Ops. Over a year ago, the Ghost Ops team had broken into a lab on the East Coast. Intel had it that the lab was brewing a weaponized form of
Yersinia pestis
. Bubonic plague. What it had actually been brewing was a cancer vaccine that was stolen. They'd been fed bad intel. It had been a trap, set to take Ghost Ops down. The Ghost Ops team had been ambushed. Jon, Mac, and Nick were able to escape, though, on their way to a court martial for treason, with the death penalty at the end of it. They'd made their way back west and set up a community of geniuses and runaways in an abandoned mine inside Mount Blue, and had been in the process of creating a thriving and almost self-sufficient community when the current shit came down.
So, yeah, they were used to being abandoned, making it on their own.
He was flying over the Marin Headlands now. Forest fires had broken out, but no firefighters were there to combat the spread of the flames. The funky multicolored homes of Sausalito, the lush millionaires' homes of Tiburon, all going up in smoke.
He flew alongside the most famous bridge in the world.
If you looked at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge, you could almost believe for a second that life was normal. There it stood, tall and red and elegant. But as he paralleled the bridge into San Francisco, he could see the roadway below clogged with abandoned tanks and military vehicles, several with smoke still pouring out from the engines. The roadway was clogged with bodies, too, some unrecognizable, just a red mass of protoplasm.
At the city end of the bridge, the access road had been blown up, leaving an inaccessible fifty-foot hole in the ground.
Back in Haven they'd been glued to their monitors, watching breaking news. The Marines had held the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, effectively quarantining the city. But apparently a few infected got through and each infected person became a vector, infecting ten or even hundreds in turn. It was exponential and it was fast.