Breaking Danger (7 page)

“Beach Street is a tourist street. At any given moment, there will be lots of people sixty-five or older. Lots of retired people on vacation. But not now. Not with those numbers. What you're seeing are heart rates. Their hearts are pumping painfully fast in their chests. The maximum heart rate you can survive is 220 minus your age. So if you have a sixty-five-year-old whose maximum heart rate should be 155, and it's 190, that heart is going to explode in his or her chest. Soon. They're dying, Jon. All of them. Even the hardiest won't survive more than a month, unless they can learn some basic skills like looking for water. And that's being generous. The people outside on the street right now? They're the walking dead.”

His jaw muscles clenched. “A month? That's enough to break down civilization. Reduce us to rubble. Reduce us to the Stone Age. Wipe us out.”

“Yeah.” Sophie's voice wobbled. She cleared her throat. “That's what we're going to prevent. We're going to produce as many doses of vaccine as possible and inoculate as many people as we can as fast as we can.”

“How fast can that be?”

“I don't know what the lab facilities are . . . where we're going. Where Elle is. If you don't have the equipment we'd have to—I don't know . . . invade a lab, secure it, and produce the doses on an industrial level.”

“Do you want to talk to Elle? She's with another scientist, Catherine Young.”

Sophie's eyes widened. “
The
Catherine Young? She's a genius! Oh my God! With Elle and Dr. Young we might really have a fighting chance!”

Sophie was practically hopping with excitement. Elle was superb at lab work and Dr. Young—she was an expert on dementia. The virus inflicted huge neurological damage, which was Dr. Young's specialty. And Dr. Young knew a lot about virology. The three of them were like a sports Dream Team, only for viruses.

Jon's mouth lifted at the corners. It wasn't quite a smile, but it lightened his features. “So. Would you like to talk to Elle? And Catherine?”

Oh God, yes!
She almost shouted the words when she remembered and her heart sank. “The Internet's down. The heliostat will keep the electricity on as long as it remains undamaged, but I lost Internet contact yesterday.”

Jon had reached down to pull out a flexible tablet that had been rolled up in a pocket of his magic suit and spread it out. “We have our own Internet, no problem.” He unrolled the tablet, tapped it, the hologram bloomed in the air and—

Oh my God! There she is!

“Elle!” Sophie instinctively reached out to touch her friend, her hand going right through Elle's cheek. Elle was flanked by a tall, tough-looking guy. Dark-haired. Grim.

The image was so lifelike, it was as if Elle were right here in the room with them. Sophie realized she'd had low-level anxiety that Elle hadn't made it. Elle had sent an email, but that wasn't the same as actually seeing her.

Elle held her hand in front of her mouth, stifling a sob. “Oh my God, Soph, you're alive! I was so worried!”

The tall dark guy put his arm around Elle's shoulders, hugging her to him.
Elle had a boyfriend?
Elle was even pickier than she was. For just a second, Sophie forgot the marauding infected, the violence on the streets, the end of the world. Elle had a boyfriend!

Then she dismissed the guy and concentrated on her best friend. “Elle, I've got the virus and the vaccine. Do you have any lab equipment where you are?”

“Oh yeah.” Elle glanced up at the man gripping her shoulders, and even in the hologram Sophie could see Elle's pale skin flush. “There are some . . . guys here who are very good at, um, liberating things.”

She meant steal. Very cool.

“What equipment do you have?”

“We have it all. Including a Step Facility.”

“Wow.” The Step Facility was brand-new, revolutionary. A system that cut the production time to less than twenty-four hours and allowed for immediate mass production.

Another woman stepped to Elle's side. Pretty, slender, dark-haired. “Dr. Daniels, I am Catherine Young. If you can get the vaccine here as fast as possible, we can start mass manufacture immediately.”

Wow. Catherine Young in person! Sophie had never met her but had read her papers. “Dr. Young! It's an honor to meet you!”

A huge man stepped to her side. If he hadn't put a protective arm around her, Sophie would have shouted at Catherine Young to run like the devil. He was enormous, even more heavily muscled than Jon or the guy with an arm around Elle, and had badass, scarred features. He looked like something out of a horror movie. The kind of guy you ran from the instant you saw him.

Dr. Young didn't look afraid, though. She reached up to touch the huge scarred hand cupping her shoulder, glancing up at him and smiling. She didn't look like she was running away from him any time soon.

“Please, call me Catherine. And I'm hoping I can call you Sophie.”

“Of course. It would be an honor.”

“And the two gentlemen here are Mac and Nick.” She gestured. Mac was the Hulk and Nick was the Brooder holding Elle. Sophie noticed that no one mentioned last names.

“Sweetie.” Elle leaned forward, her pretty face filling the hologram. “I can't thank you enough for warning me the other night. You saved my life. You gave me just enough time to get away. Arka goons were after me and after the whole project group.”

“I know. I think they got Les, Moira, and Roger.” It pained Sophie's heart. The only saving grace was that they had probably been killed before the virus was released and had been spared the end of the world.

“No, no they didn't.” Elle looked up lovingly at the dark man holding her tightly. “Nick and Mac and Jon rescued them. They are actually here with us.”

“Oh my gosh!” Tears sprang to Sophie's eyes. This was the first piece of good news in . . . forever, it seemed. She swiveled her head up to look at Jon.
Thank you
, she mouthed and he dipped his head. “So . . . where is here?”

Silence. Elle bit her lip and the two men in the hologram looked even grimmer.

Catherine Young answered. “ 'Here' is a community situated on, or rather in, Mount Blue. About 450 miles from where you are now.” She looked at the huge man holding her, narrowing her eyes at him. She spoke directly to him. “She has a right to know. And with any luck she'll be here soon. So I don't want any flak from you.”

Sophie would have felt a little scared of the huge scowl she got, but it didn't seem to faze Catherine any.

“So, Sophie,” Catherine continued, “our news is that as soon as you get the vaccine here, we are fully equipped to start incubating and then mass producing. We've had an input of new arrivals and plans are being made to go out in armored vehicles to reach the uninfected and inoculate them. So you guys get here as soon as you can. For the rest, I think Mac and Nick here want to give Jon the latest news.”

“Sitrep,” Jon barked.

Sophie's head swirled. These guys, together with Catherine and Elle, were equipped and had plans, whatever they were. Oh God. She clung to that thought. That someone somewhere had a
plan
and that she could play a part in it. That somewhere reason and will survived. And might even prevail.

Jon was exchanging news with the two men. She barely followed, but then he suddenly shouted, “
What?
”

“You heard me,” the man called Mac said. “We've got General Snyder here. Together with about three hundred civilians. Some are ex-Marines, so we're looking good security-wise.”

Jon looked at her, then back at the hologram. “You know the score, Mac,” he growled. “General Snyder is our enemy.”

“He's not the enemy. Never was. He had to take early retirement because he didn't believe the story about Cambridge and kicked up a fuss. The Pentagon Internet is still up, I checked, and it's true. So he's now Robert Snyder, and he retired to a community about 150 miles from where we are now. The captain talked to him. The community where he lives is a gated community with a lot of former military people and they took security seriously. So when the shit came down—”

Catherine Young elbowed him and his eyes rolled. He blew out a breath, looked straight into the camera, dipped his head. “Begging your pardon, ma'am.”

Sophie waved that off.

Mac continued. “So when the virus hit, they were able to close themselves off fast. There are no infected in their group. We heard them issuing a general SOS. I didn't want to contact them at first because, fuck—” He rolled his eyes and sidestepped another sharp elbow to his side. “Sorry. I didn't want to contact them for reasons you can imagine. But the captain overrode me. He said Snyder had always been a good guy. And you know, Jon. It's a whole other ball game now. Anyway, we gave them directions. There were enough secure vehicles to evacuate the entire community—almost a hundred families. They also came with provisions and weapons and they are now part of Haven. And we're happy to have them. They are also happy that there is the possibility of a vaccine. And that's that, Jon. End of story.”

Mac's voice had turned hard at the end, as if knowing that Jon had objections. Whatever objections he might have, they were overruled. Jon stiffened. “Yes, sir,” he replied.

“The group also has some useful skills. Military-trained men and women for defense. Four armorers. Eight nurses, two with emergency training, two medics, eight cooks. We're in touch with other groups who've barricaded themselves against the infection. We're estimating at least three thousand people within an hour's radius. Get that vaccine to us fast, Jon, and we're going to save some lives. Maybe even civilization while we're at it.”

“Yeah, there's something else, too,” Nick said.

Sophie was interested in what he had to say, but she was also interested because of Elle. Though she and Elle were very good friends, Elle had spoken very little of her love life, maybe because she had even less of one than Sophie did. But Sophie had had the impression that Elle had loved someone very much in the past and that the memory was painful. There was a feeling that Elle had been brutally abandoned.

Could this possibly be that guy? Though . . . Elle's body language wasn't one of anger or resentment. She loved this guy, and Elle wasn't the type to fall in love overnight. So maybe this was the guy she'd been secretly in love with all this time?

Sophie tried to focus on what the guy was saying.

“Jon, we've analyzed the situation and we think you shouldn't move until tomorrow. Here.” Nick made a movement off screen and suddenly Sophie was looking at . . . she had no idea what she was looking at. She tilted her head. Masses of fiery red blobs moving in a sort of Brownian motion. Nick made another movement and a map was superimposed and suddenly it made sense. A terrible kind of sense.

Sophie gasped, heartsick.

What she was seeing was a thermal image of an area a couple of miles from her home, in the Western Addition. It was teeming—
teeming
—with infected. “Fuck,” Jon said quietly.

“Wait,” Nick said and manipulated the image. “It's not all bad. What you're seeing is—I don't know what else to call it but a swarm. Like of insects. We checked our drone tapes and went back about ten hours and it looks like there was a locus of infection in Richmond during a big street fair and a whole
nest
of the things spent a lot of time killing everything in sight, then they started moving. They seem to be moving counterclockwise. Here, let me show you.”

The hologram switched to daytime, on fast forward. It was an area she was familiar with, made up of funky wooden houses, most at least sixty years old, and tiny little shops. She'd been to that street fair many times. At first, the streets were full of happy tourists and locals, going from stall to stall. In fast-forward, the infection looked weird, like an old-time movie. Somehow, it was less horrible on fast-forward. A few blood-stained infected erupted into the crowd, which ran away. But not fast enough. From a few infected, within the space of three hours, according to the timeline at the bottom of the hologram, it looked like tens of thousands of infected crowded the streets.

At first, they moved completely separately, but as soon as a critical mass was achieved, which Sophie judged to be about four hundred infected, they started swarming behavior. It took hours and hours for the swarm to form, and the outlying edges of it showed anomalous behavior, but the center held. And a few hours after that, they started the trek east, then as they hit the water, doubling back northwest. It was a swarm about two miles across and it was terrifying. It moved slowly, but it left utter devastation in its wake. The images had quickly followed the day into night. Judging from the footage she'd seen, they'd come to her part of town some time tomorrow.

“Swarming behavior,” Sophie murmured.

Elle and Catherine nodded.

“So.” Mac's eyes narrowed. “They've become insects?”

“Sort of.” Sophie looked up at Jon. He tipped his head in a
go ahead
gesture.

Jon turned to the hologram. “Sophie's been observing the—the infected. They're right outside her window. She has some interesting theories.”

“Please, Sophie,” Nick said. “Any information you have is useful. Could save lives.”

“Okay. This is anecdotal, you understand.” She tried to gather her thoughts, resisting the urge to stay quiet until she had further data. Science moved slowly, but thoroughly. Each hypothesis tested and retested to make sure it could bear the weight of other facts being loaded onto it. A little like walking across a frozen pond, testing each step before putting your full weight on it.

It was what she loved about science. It was not random. Her parents' deaths had been random, completely unexpected and it had cracked her faith in the world as a knowable entity. Science had saved her from plunging into despair. Most things were knowable, if you approached everything using the scientific method.