Page 36 of Breaking Danger
Hope.
CHAPTERSEVEN
San Francisco
Beach Street
They came in a flood,a bubbling madhouse tide of humanity. At first only five or six infected came running and Sophie let out a pent up breath. She’d been bracing herself…
And then they came, a solid phalanx of infected, obviously down from Jones, so many they erupted right into Beach and left toward Ghirardelli Square.
With a raised eyebrow at Jon, Sophie pushed the button that cracked the window open a little, just enough to stick her head out. She pulled her head back in immediately, terrified.
It was like a river in full spate, spilling over sidewalks, down every single road, rising on the backs of the fallen, some almost reaching the second floor. When the river of infected reached Beach, she closed the window. With the window open, the noise level was almost unbearable, a booming screech that the ear couldn’t correlate to human noise. It was more like a huge piece of broken machinery.
Even with the triple glazed window shut, the noise level was as high as a rock concert, only there was no backbeat. There was no beat at all, nothing rational, just loud noise emanating from once human throats.
It was almost impossible for the human eye to even distinguish individual forms. The onslaught of bodies was intertwined, limbs thrashing in such an enclosed area that fists took out eyes, legs tripped up bodies as a matter of course. They came in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, so densely packed that the bodies bent inward the closed steel garage doors and the metal barricades of the tourist shops.
Men in suits, students in tee shirts, housewives and children of all races. They all looked alike in a horrible way, all reduced to violent mindless beings. All with the same look on their blood-streaked faces. Eyes open so wide the whites were visible all around the irises, mouths open to emit those ululating howls, heads swiveling.
Sophie surreptitiously wiped damp hands on her yoga pants and asked, voice low, “Can you take a temperature reading on the scanner?”
She didn’t dare look at Jon. She didn’t want him to see the horror she felt reflected in his face. She had to keep some kind of detachment, she had to close down her heart, that part of her that couldn’t bear to watch what was happening below.
“I can’t read individual temperatures,” Jon answered. “But I have a general thermal reading of 102.5°.”
“If that’s the average, some will be over 104°. That’s not sustainable for long. The constitution of the infected has already been severely compromised.”
They both watched the violent scenes below, that dark mass of bodies swarming, killing, dying…
They would all die soon. It was just a question of whether they’d take the world down with them or whether something could be salvaged.
“Hand me your scanner, please.”
Jon handed it over silently. Sophie reached the menu that would show heart rates but all she saw was a flow of three digit numbers too fast to pinpoint any one number.
“I can’t tell individual rates. There are too many of them. But they are all accelerated.” She handed it back. “Is the record function on?”
Jon held it up. “It is now.”
Sophie wiped her mind of everything but scientific detachment and spoke clearly, for the record. “We are observing what at a conservative guess is one thousand infected currently swarming the street, with more stretching all the way to the horizon. The overall count must be in the thousands.” She leaned a little forward to observe better. “All surface areas appear to be swarmed. They are not breaking into stores but rather the sheer number of them pressing against both sides of the streets is caving in the non-protected storefronts. They are pouring into every gap, every window, every open door, every alleyway. For the moment we see no signs of them making their way up to second stories, but the sheer weight of them makes that inevitable.”
Sophie pressed her lips together and looked up at Jon, then at her door. He nodded reassuringly. They’d made the best barricade they could. And her door had a titanium core. They were as protected as they could be.
Observe, Sophie!
A strong man in a track suit wrenched the arm of a young girl out of its socket and tore it off. Sophie jolted and felt Jon’s strong hand on her shoulder. “Steady,” he whispered.
Yes, steady. They had to understand this to conquer it.
“There—” Sophie’s mouth was completely dry and she had to lick her lips. “There is a strong tropism in action. The—ah, the infected battle violently with each other, but they are sticking close together.” She tried to study the faces running past. “I see definite signs of dehydration, whether because they have been running for hours or because they are unable to procure water for themselves is an open question. Turning on a tap or opening a bottle—it is unclear whether they retain the cognitive skills to do that. Or even the fine motor skills. I see no signs of organized behavior.”
The roar of the crowd was deafening. She hungered for her noise cancelling headset but that would be merely cutting herself off from the world. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, not when the world had suddenly turned so feral.
“I see—” she counted silently. “I see about one in twenty falling and disappearing in the crowd. Simply falling and being trodden over. If they were dying before, when they fall they are definitely dead. No one could survive the trampling in that crowd. I would estimate that soon more and more in the swarm will fall. When the swarm passes, the streets will be littered with the dead.”
She glanced up at Jon’s grim face and he nodded. She knew he would factor that in in his calculations for their escape.
