Breaking Danger (23 page)

There was so much she didn't know about him. His tastes in music and movies. What kind of food he liked. How strong a sense of humor he had. How well read he was.

None of that really mattered, though, when measured against her understanding of his character.

Not to mention he was a god in bed.

That took her by surprise because Sophie didn't really judge men by their prowess in the bedroom. It was a nice extra if it was there, that was all. But sex with Jon was . . . was overwhelming. Almost an extrasensory event. Beyond the five senses, moving into a world beyond her ken. The sheer power of the experience swept her away. When he kissed her, caressed her, entered her, the world disappeared and there was only the two of them, an explosion of heat and light.

Life.

When they were surrounded by death.

Here on the vast dark ocean it was almost easy to forget for a few moments that the world was ripping itself apart. Here, right now, under the vast star-filled sky, arrowing their way north, they could simply be a normal couple going on vacation, with no deeper concerns than the quality of the food at their destination.

She rolled that in her head for a moment. She and Jon, a normal couple in a normal world. How could that have worked out? Where would they have met? They could have met at—oh, a movie theater? Or perhaps at an outdoor café? Or at a concert? Met, flirted, liked each other. Dated a few times, gone to bed, had sex, found themselves compatible.

The usual, like normal people did.

But no, that scenario didn't work. Their regular lives held no points of intersection. He was a warrior, constantly on mission, and then he'd had to go into hiding. She was absorbed in her job. She didn't go to the movies or linger at outdoor cafés or go to concerts. She had a nice home entertainment system and saw all her films and listened to her music at home. Her life was home and work and home again.

Particularly this past year working on the Arka project with Elle, that electric feeling of being on the cutting edge of science, of discovering something completely new. That had kept her so absorbed, there hadn't been time for anything else. This past year she and Elle had been married to the lab.

No, she'd never have met Jon under other circumstances.

How strange to think that it took the end of the world to bring them together.

Her thoughts were lazy now, lulled by the sound of the boat skimming over the flat dark sea. People were dying, society was dying all across the land to her right. She hadn't seen anything outside San Francisco, but it was easy to imagine. Towns and cities devastated. Homes abandoned, front doors open, wrecked furniture inside. Cars left where they were, blocking roads. Smashed windows everywhere, shattered little shards of light on the streets. Whole sections of towns burned to the ground.

And bodies. Bodies everywhere, both the infected and the healthy, locked in a death struggle. Most of the population, dead.

She closed her eyes and leaned more heavily against Jon. Against his solid strength. She took enormous consolation in feeling him against her, breathing slowly and easily, moving a little at times to check on gauges and do whatever one did when piloting a boat. There was a palpable sense of vast strength, enormous reserves, as if he could keep going forever.

On the mainland was tragedy on a vast scale, a death toll in the millions. But right here, right now, on this silent boat cutting through the sea, she felt safe with Jon. He'd see them to the B & B compound, get them overland to this place, this Haven. Where Elle was, with her man. Where Catherine Young was, a woman she knew by reputation. With Jon's teammates and a whole community of people surviving, thinking beyond this almost-extinction event to a possible future. Planning for it, even.

There was fear in her, cold slimy fear penetrating down to the bone. And yet, and yet . . . there was also a sense of safety with Jon. It was partly his godlike physique, of course. She'd never touched a man as strong as Jon. He gave the impression of leanness, but his muscles were thick, the strength going deep. And he was so brave. Every second of their mad dash from her apartment to the marina, Jon had clearly been willing to sacrifice himself for her.

Partly, it was his training as a soldier. The infected hordes had been unnerving in a primordial way. Terrifying beyond words. But through it all, Jon had been absolutely steady, never faltering, always thinking several steps ahead, even when all this was totally unprecedented. There was no way he could have trained for this nightmare scenario, and yet it was as if he'd trained for it all his life.

What she'd seen of him in action made her think she would follow him straight into the jaws of hell itself because he'd lead them right back out.

They had a long trek in front of them, one they might not survive. But right now, she gave herself over completely to the boat ride, breathing in the cold salty night air. Every once in a while, a gust brought the chemical stink of something burning, but it dissipated the further north they went. They had long stretches on the calm flat sea from which the only smell was of the sea itself, and the only light that of the stars overhead, the Milky Way looping its bright way across the sky.

“Seems almost peaceful, doesn't it?” Jon's deep voice was quiet.

“Mm-hm.” She sighed. “It would be nice to think we're on a—a boating trip, going north to go camping or something.”

He slanted a glance down at her, his ice blue eyes bright in the starlight. “You go camping?”

Sophie laughed. “Nope. Not a chance. Bears and mosquitoes and squatting to take a poop.” She gave a theatrical shudder. “Not for me. I imagine you're the camping sort of guy, am I right?”

“No way.” It was his turn to laugh. “We do what you'd call camping in the rough for a living. We once slept outdoors for three months in—in a place that was equatorial jungle. Mosquitoes the size of birds, spiders the size of dinner plates, I kid you not. We had to smother ourselves in enough Deet to cause liver damage. Part of those three months was the monsoon season, so we got toe and crotch rot. We couldn't use heat for cooking so we ate MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, though ‘Meal' is stretching it. They're like lightly flavored sludge, and gum you up. We couldn't talk and we couldn't move. So pitching a tent somewhere and using oak leaves for toilet paper is not my favorite leisure activity, no.”

Sophie laughed. She could see it, see how uncomfortable he and his teammates had been. She'd seen his captain and two of his teammates. They looked just as hard and driven as Jon. They'd lived in those appalling conditions for three months and—

“Did you accomplish what you set out to do? In those three months?”

His eyes narrowed to a light blue slit, firm beautiful mouth curved up in a smile. God. He was devastating when he smiled. “Oh yeah,” he said softly. “We did.”

“Whacked a bad guy, eh?” she said and he recoiled.

“Who told—” then he bit his lips.

Sophie laughed. “I can't imagine any other reason for camping out under those conditions for three months. If it was intelligence you were after, there are easier ways. A listening drone at a high altitude would have done it.”

He smiled again and mimed zipping his mouth shut. Oh God. Now a
dimple.
Not fair. A dimple was overkill.

She sighed.

So he'd camped out for three months to kill someone. Someone who undoubtedly needed killing. If you'd asked her even a week ago if she could become the lover of a man who killed for a living, she'd have said no. Unequivocably no.

But that was then and this was now. She'd known, theoretically, as a purely abstract concept, that evil existed in the world. She'd been five years old when the Twin Towers fell. She remembered watching it with her parents, both of them silent and dismayed. She hadn't quite understood what had happened, but she had understood that evil had come into the world. She'd felt it quite distinctly. The first time in her young life that she'd understood even the concept of evil.

What had been unleashed now was evil on an unimaginable scale. She'd been able to piece together some of the story from Dr. Charles Lee's computer. He'd been working on a secret program of human enhancement via a new drug. Genetic material delivered in a viral vector. Only it had backfired. It had, yes, enhanced the infected's performance. The infected were indeed stronger and faster and utterly unafraid. They were also insane. And doomed to die in a few days like some monstrous insect that was born, lived, and died in the space of a week.

And she knew the reason the virus was so virulent. It was because Dr. Lee had been in such a hurry. For some reason, he'd been under massive time pressure. If she'd had access to all his files, she could have pieced it together, though now it was ancient history.

And because Dr. Charles Lee had been in a hurry, he'd created an abomination that had the potential to wipe human life off the face of the earth. If they couldn't contain it, only a few strongholds on the planet would survive. On the vast steppes of Central Asia, perhaps. In Antarctica, maybe. Some isolated tribes in Amazonia. The poor souls on the Space Station wouldn't survive because there would be no one left on earth with the technical expertise to bring them back down.

All of this was evil. And combating this required not only her skills and Elle's skills and Catherine's skills, but it also required the skills of Jon Ryan and his fellow warriors. And she could only be happy that he was a trained killer because he was the right man in the right place.

She would never have escaped San Francisco with the vaccine without him. She'd have died in her apartment when the water and food ran out. And anyway, before that happened, the vaccine would have been rendered inert.

Jon had saved her life, saved the vaccine, and was still doing it.

He was also teaching her about love. The tough, trained killer had opened an unimagined world to her. While chaos ruled in the streets outside her windows, he'd given her pleasure she'd never even known existed. It wasn't casual, what they shared. They were two people who would never have gotten together under any other possible circumstances, but what they had, forged in fire and death, was real. She believed that with all her heart.

She breathed in, no burning smells at all, only the salt spray and diesel from the engine. A very old-fashioned smell. Nothing ran on diesel anymore except boats and the few heavy trucks left on the road.

His finger caressed her cheek. “Beautiful night for the end of the world.” She felt his deep voice vibrate in his chest.

“It is.”

His large hand slid into her hair, holding her still as he leaned over and kissed her brow. “But if we do our jobs right and our guys up in Haven do their jobs right, it might not be the end of the world, after all.”

“What do you think it might be like?”

“What?”

“The aftermath. What do you think might happen? Best-case scenario.”

“Well.” He took a deep sigh. “Best-case scenario. I'm the wrong guy to ask about a best-case scenario; soldiers tend to look at worst-case scenarios and plan accordingly. But okay. So . . . everything goes well in the next week. We stabilize the uninfected in their homes. Make sure they can protect themselves and have ample food and water. Once we get some air support, we drop in supplies. It looks like by next week most of the infected might be dead, if they can't fend for themselves. But we don't know if pockets of the virus can survive—you and your brainiac girlfriends will be able to tell us about that. So we need to make sure that vaccine gets to every able-bodied and able-minded man, woman, and child in the continental USA. And strict protocols on who gets in and out of the country. So international commerce is going to stop for a while. There's going to be an international economic crisis. The U.S. government is going to be very, very sorry it behaved like it did with us in California. It behaved badly, but there was a lot of panic. But if I know my captain and Mac, and I do, and if Snyder is as tough as his reputation, our guys are going to milk that regret for all it's worth. Any reconstruction work and money going on is going to happen here first.”

She was listening and not listening. The words made sense and sounded nice. Underneath the words, his tone was level, the sound of a man who was already thinking ahead, part of a team of very smart people. Survivors.

Survivors. They were going to survive this. She felt that suddenly, in her bones. Strength of purpose, comradeship with a team of people, growing by the day. It was what was going to let them survive this terrible ordeal.

And who knew? Someday, maybe, this night rush up the coast of California, a brave warrior and a scientist, carrying a vaccine that could inoculate millions, would become part of history. Like Paul Revere's ride, only bigger, with something more important than victory in a war of independence at stake.

Someday perhaps schoolkids would read about this. Their mad dash upcountry, Haven's gathering in of thousands of uninfected, helping pockets of uninfected survive, then the push-back—she could see it. Fanning out in armored convoys, bearing the vaccine. Shoring up defenses, bringing supplies, moving on. The fortified communities reaching out to each other. Clearing bodies, clearing transport lines. The government lifting the quarantine, reconstruction workers pouring in . . .

God. It felt so good just to think in these terms. Not cowering, hoping to survive another night but fighting back. Helping others survive, rebuilding.

This nighttime trip would be an integral part of all that. The narrow boat spearing through the water, Jon watchful at the helm. The indifferent star-filled sky overhead watching over them.

Hope, which had fled her, crept back into her heart. Carefully. For hope was a fragile thing. But once hope takes root, it grows strong.

The sliver of moon traced a silver path through the calm ocean. Little ripples sometimes flashed over the ocean's surface, like twinkling stars. The quiet of the night, the low hum of the engine, the slight rocking of the boat lulled her, calmed her, and she drifted gently to sleep.