Breaking Danger (3 page)

The city lights were still on. Who knew for how long? They had come on an hour ago, but several were flickering. This time tomorrow or the next day, they could be gone.

She could be gone too.

Her door was stout but conceivably a concerted attack by a couple of heavy men could break it, or at least unmoor it from its hinges. That was one possibility. She could starve to death or die of thirst if she was trapped for too long. Nasty thought, that one. If it looked like that would be her end, she had an entire bottle of Nobital. Crushing all the tablets, dissolving them in water, and drinking it would put her to sleep forever. Many times throughout the long day, while the city fell, she longed for that bottle, had to almost physically wrench her thoughts away from it.

But that was crazy thinking, and it had to stop, immediately.

She was alive right now, and in her right senses, and she was a scientist. She had a duty to observe, record, even postulate theories, however much on the fly. Science didn't work that way; it proceeded at its own stately pace. But this was different. The World of Science had waned and the World of Blood was rising. Hers might be the last scientific observations on earth.

She shook her head sharply. No thinking like that. Observe and understand. Keep your emotions out of it. Leave something behind in the hope that, at the end, there would be human beings to come across her findings.

A pack ran down the street, fast. She watched, observed.

She tapped her wrist to turn on the audio recording function.

“A group of infected is running down Beach. It is 5:25
P.M.
It is almost exactly six hundred feet from the corner of Jones to Lorraine's Pet Shop. The pack covered the distance in thirty seconds, which means the infected can run a four-minute mile. One of the pack is an obese man. He is keeping up but shows signs of cardiopathy. His breathing is irregular, coloring ruddy. He has stopped and is looking around bewildered, holding a hand to his chest.” Sophie watched as the man fell to one knee, still looking bewildered but not afraid, then pitched forward onto his face. No one in the pack stopped or even looked around. Eventually, his chest stopped moving. “Subject died at 5:37
P.M.
, presumably of a heart attack.”

No one will do an autopsy,
she thought. There wouldn't be a functioning morgue anywhere in the city. And what was one heart attack in the midst of so much death?

Sick at heart, Sophie turned away from the window. No more of this right now. She needed a short break. Watching the world go mad outside her window all day was breaking her heart, her spirit.

There was another factor. She was a healer. Had been, all her life.

This was well beyond anything she could fix.

One of her first memories was of holding a bird that had fallen to the ground. She remembered how it lay listlessly in her hands as she cried. Her mother had started gently curling her fingers away from the small body when suddenly there was a flutter in her hands and the bird flew away.

Then Nana Henderson had come for a stay when Sophie was seven years old. Nana suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and had walked with two canes, her face often disfigured by pain. Sophie sat on her Nana's lap for a while every afternoon, and when Nana left, she was walking normally.

Sophie had missed a lot of school that semester because she'd always been sick.

Pain, disease, afflictions. As she grew older, Sophie had felt these things in her fingertips when she touched someone. She could feel her hands grow warmer, could feel muscles bunched against the pain relax in the other person. Could
feel
sickness departing the body.

And entering hers.

With hindsight, she realized her parents had worried about her.

A healer. If word got out, every sick person in the world would show up on the doorstep, begging for help. And it would kill her. Because the other side of the coin was that she had to rest for several days after touching someone who was sick. She was weak, feverish. Depleted.

Both her parents were scientists and they threw her into an accelerated program, a scientific fast track, where she found herself studying biology, then virology, because both were so fascinating. Her parents had wanted her to go into computer science, engineering, or pure math. Something as far from medicine as possible. But Sophie was fascinated by viruses, those minute segments of protein that seemed to hold such immense power over human beings. Such terrible diseases. Rabies, Ebola virus, hantavirus, the 2021 bird flu that killed two million people. Certain cancers were caused by viruses.

She wanted to make that better. She wanted to
fix
that. She couldn't cure the world herself, but she could have a hand in finding out how to help the world heal itself. Virology proved to be a natural fit for her and she was recruited to Arka Pharmaceuticals directly from the Stanford PhD program.

Stanford was where she met her best friend, Elle Connolly. They were young and bright and were making names for themselves. They had something else in common too. Something deeper, something darker than shared courses and an inability to find decent dates.

Powers. Gifts. Curses. Whatever you wanted to call them.

Arka was funding a major study on psychic phenomena and by some principle of the drift factor, they'd both ended up in it. Elle as both a subject and researcher, which was a big no-no. There were a lot of no-nos in the program, it turned out, including human sacrifice. Research subjects were disappearing; and it just so happened that the ones who were disappearing were the most gifted with extrasensory powers. Those were the ones who ended up in an enormous black hole, nowhere to be found.

She was piecing together what was happening when they came for
her.
Men in black, in the night. Just like in a holomovie, only for real.

When they came, she had managed to get a call to Elle to warn her. She hacked into the computer of the head of Arka Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Charles Lee, and read, with horror, about a virus he had been bioengineering—a virus designed to enhance warriors. Only he was having trouble keeping the enhanced soldiers on this side of sane. Then he'd taken some of the test subjects from the study on psychic phenomena, injected them with the virus, and harvested their brains. From the notes Sophie had read, he liked what he'd seen, so he upped the dosage.

There had been some animal tests with bonobos, a peaceable breed of primate. The virus turned them into killing machines. She knew then that she had to get her hands on the virus. When they came for her and locked her up in the underground test labs, she looked for an opening, any opening at all, to escape, to get her hands on the virus. But by that time, the virus—rendered insanely virulent—had escaped from Arka's control and spread to the employees in the Arka skyscraper.

It turned out she didn't need for one of the men in black to glance in the other direction, or let down his guard. Turned out that two lab techs, Carla Stiller and Robert Krotow, two of the gentlest, smartest people she knew, had become infected. They basically ate the two men in black. Arka's security guards, who she'd read had been recruited exclusively from U.S. Special Forces, didn't stand a chance.

Sophie hid in a supply closet until the carnage outside was over, opening the door only when she saw the two blood-stained lab rats lope down the hall for other victims, leaving behind two men in black in six distinct pieces.

The concept of door handles proving too much for the infected to conceptualize, they'd forgotten all about her. It was now or never. Sophie took the elevator to the twenty-first floor of the Arka offices, where the big boss himself, Dr. Charles Lee, resided. It had been the slimmest of chances, and her heart had pounded every second while her body was screaming at her to get out.

But something told her she needed to have samples of the viruses and the vaccine that had been in Dr. Lee's notes. She'd gone up to the administrative offices floor, hoping her Arka pass would let her through.

Her Arka pass didn't made any difference at all. All doors were open, there were four dead bodies in the corridor, the fire alarm was booming, smoke was in the air. The door to Dr. Lee's sumptuous office was open, a big Halliburton case on the floor. She snatched that and the 360 terabyte flash drive on Dr. Lee's desk and ran for the stairwell, reaching the bottom winded and desperate.

Chaos reigned. Several buildings had their fire alarms booming, up and down Market people were fighting, screaming, dying. Sophie had leaned with her back against the wall of the Arka building until she saw a taxi driver slow down. Without thinking, she wrenched open the door, threw in the case then herself after it.

“Beach Street,” she gasped.

The taxi driver turned a terrified dark face to her. “Hey, lady, I'm not in service! I'm getting the hell out of here. Whatever's happening here, I don't want no part of it.”

“Get out of town. Fast. The Bay Bridge is closed.” She'd seen that on Google news. “The Golden Gate will be open for a few hours more. Let me off at Beach Street and I'll give you a hundred dollars.”

The taxi driver's jaw worked. Something really awful was going down. But . . . a hundred dollars.

He stepped on the accelerator and they shot up Market. The further away they got, the less chaos there was. Sophie planned to get her car in her building's underground garage and head out. At Beach and Jones she had the driver stop a second, threw a hundred-dollar bill at him, and scrambled out. The case was so heavy she had to practically drag it, two-handed, home. She was wheezing by the time she made it to her building. She swiped her key, planning on descending to the garage, when a pack of monsters came unexpectedly around the corner, screaming and raging, caked with blood.

Two people at the head of the pack howled when they saw her. Heart pounding, she pulled the heavy front door behind her and ran up the stairs. The idea of being caught in the open spaces of the underground garage was too terrifying for words.

The stairs were clear and she managed to lug the heavy case to her apartment, slamming the door and leaning back against it, panting. The goons of Arka would look here for her first, of course. But somehow she was sure that the chain of command had broken now that the world was burning around them. Security would have no way of knowing she had the virus—and anyway, they were probably already dead or infected. Either way, she was sure no one would come for her.

She was safe.

But she was trapped.

That was yesterday. She'd spent a sleepless night shaking, listening to the sounds of screams, explosions, the city falling apart. And she'd spent the day watching the carnage outside her windows.

Her building had photovoltaic solar panels on the roof. At least she'd have electricity until the end. Probably. Maybe.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat on the sofa. It was the new Frau model with a digital music player in the arm. She plugged in her new noise-canceling earbuds and sat back, eyes closed, savoring the utter silence for just a few minutes.

The day had been filled with the cries of the enraged and the dying. Fire and car alarms going off all over the city. The sounds of feet pounding on the pavement, glass shattering, a few far-off explosions as gas mains went. Howls. Terrifying sounds of utter destruction.

Now the noise-canceling earbuds gave her the gift of silence, a moment of weary peace. She loved silence. Sometimes after a stressful week, she'd head up to the Marin Headlands for a long walk. Something she'd never be able to do again.

The last of the TV announcements had said that both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate were closed off and that Marines were stationed at the San Francisco ends. Earlier today, there'd been a huge explosion, a column of smoke rising from the west. Her windows gave out onto Beach with no view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it sounded as if they'd blown it up. Or maybe they'd blown up the access roads?

Maybe she could never leave San Francisco ever again.

Unless . . .

Before the Internet had gone last night, her best friend Elle Connolly had emailed to say that someone named Jon was coming for her, would be there in a few hours. Elle had made only the vaguest mention of where she was—somewhere up north. And no mention of who this Jon was.

Then Sophie lost her Internet connection and was left only with this thin thread of hope.

Something about the way Elle had written the email—
Jon is coming—
had given her a rush of hope. Jon was coming. She had no idea who this Jon was, but it felt as if, even though the end of the world was here, Jon was coming and maybe, just maybe, things would get better.

That was twenty-four hours ago, and Jon hadn't come.

Jon was dead somewhere, torn limb from limb. Or, worse, Jon was now roaming the streets of San Francisco or wherever he was, with madness in his eyes, covered in blood, killing as many people as he could.

Sophie leaned back, enveloped in the cool embrace of the silence, wishing there was some kind of image-canceling mechanism too, something that would cancel memories the way the headsets canceled noise. But some things, once seen, could never be unseen.

So much violence, so much blood. So many dead.

She tried visualizing other things. Better things.

After all, her life had given her plenty of wonderful images. Her parents sneaking downstairs on Christmas Eve, placing presents under the ten-foot Christmas tree, relaxing with a glass of wine, making out on the couch, pretending with a perfectly straight face the next day that Santa had arrived.

Playing in the snow with her gorgeous, dumb-as-a-rock cocker spaniel Fritz on the lawn of their house outside Chicago. Pajama parties. Piano recitals, her first kiss, her first lover, Allan Mercer, who'd been just as gorgeous and just as dumb as Fritz.

She smiled, eyes closed.

Lots of good things.

Lots of not-so-good things too. The death of her parents in a car accident when she was twenty-four. It was the death of her family. No siblings, and her parents had been only children too. They'd been a close, charmed circle, untouchable until the hand of fate swatted her family away.