Page 2 of Breaking Danger
Jon watched as one of the kids lifted his head, staring at his 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. The kid let go of the branch he was holding and waved desperately, eyes and mouth wide, face turning as Jon flew by.
At the base, an infected, by chance, managed to make it to within a few inches of the kid’s leg by climbing over another infected. It brushed the kid’s shoe with its fingertips.
The kid would be dead within the hour. Maybe before. Both of them were as good as dead.
Jon turned his head away as he flew past.
A second, two. Then—”Goddammit!”
He slapped the dashboard, hard enough to hurt. It didn’t affect the dashboard, 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, a new system that had a hundred-mile radius. The helo itself was stealth and never showed up on anyone else’s radar. The 100 mile radius served him so 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 US. If not by today then by tomorrow.
“Little Bird, you copy?” A deep voice crackled in his ear. Mac, 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 pre-recorded 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. Then—”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, people lying dead on the streets like dogs, feral creatures with hands up like claws, mouths red-stained, loping like wolves through the towns. And, occasionally, 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 ofYersinia 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 escaping 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, multi-colored homes of Sausalito, the lush millionnaire’s homes of Tiburon, all going up in smoke. Flying over Bunker Road, Jon saw a Marine tearing apart an elderly woman, sinking his teeth into her neck. Arterial blood geysered out. The woman tried feebly to push him away but it was useless. A second later she slumped in that familiar pose of death.
She was gone. The Marine cocked his head to the side and his mouth opened wide. Jon had a horrible feeling that it was a howl. Of victory. Over an elderly woman.
Special Ops soldiers thought other forces were pussies but no one ever called the Marines pussies. They were experts at combat and were all sharpshooters. This Marine had body armour and was heavily built. The woman had had no hope. Even if by some miracle she could have been a match for a body-armored Marine, all the infected seemed to be infused with some kind of super strength.
He flew alongside the most famous bridge in the world.
If you looked at the top of the 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.
