Page 51 of Breaking Danger
Elle’s eyes opened and everything but a light bulb went up over her head. She looked at a faintly smiling Sophie, to him, then back to Sophie and her mouth opened as wide as her eyes. A big hand reached over and gently closed her mouth.
Sophie wasn’t helping her and damned if Jon was going to. He didn’t care who knew he and Sophie were together. He’d found her and he was damned well going to keep her.
“Oh, um. Okay.” Elle was having trouble shifting gears.
Catherine joined her, tilted her head toward Elle and murmured, “The lab. Tell her about the lab.”
“Yes.” Elle shook herself out of her stupor and bounced straight into nerd scientist mode. “Okay. The lab. We’ve got a good cell line going so incubation time will be a matter of minutes. There’s a refugee here who worked at the Stanford research lab and we’re putting together an application via patch instead of injection. With that delivery system, we can double the inoculations.”
“Do we have an estimate of survivors?” Sophie asked.
Elle turned her head, spoke with Catherine, who spoke to someone else off screen. Elle checked a mini tablet then looked up. “Anywhere between one and two million people. As of now. That number will go down.”
Everyone was silent.
At the last census, California’s population stood at a little under sixty million. Jon glanced to his right, to the silent landmass of the coastline, dark except for a few fires. The whole state was the graveyard of about fifty eight million people, dead or dying over the course of the past forty eight hours. More than a million people an hour. Possibly the largest and fastest death event in the history of the world. Dead bodies piled up like a vast slaughter-house. Men and women and children. Nothing they could ever do would bring them back to life. Teachers and firemen and grade schoolers and musicians and doctors. The list went on and on. Humankind in California was reduced to a few strongholds fighting for survival, hunkering down like cavemen, shot back in time to ten thousand years ago.
Warmth on his hand. He glanced down to see Sophie’s small hand over his. Her hand was unusually warm, it seemed that heat spread up his arm, into his chest. He realized he’d been breathing shallowly, chest tight. Now his lungs expanded as he drew in the soft, night sea air. That touch somehow steadied him. He opened his hand, catching her fingers between his. Enjoying the glow of heat that came from her, as steady as a flame.
“Sophie was right,” Elle said. “The infected are dying fast. They have no instinct of self preservation. I have been unable to observe any signs of infected being able to feed themselves or even drink water. That swarm in San Francisco? Judging from the thermal scans about one third of that swarm is already dead. The infected are in effect the walking dead, only they still have the power to inflict great harm.”
“What’s the lab’s capacity?” Sophie asked.
Catherine answered, checking her tablet. “About fifty thousand doses in a 24 hour period.”
Sophie frowned. “Any hope of another lab somewhere coming online?”
“Yes. Two people here know of labs that can be converted and brought online as soon as we have the staffing and can create secure conditions. Right now, nobody can be spared but we have forty Marines arriving tomorrow with their families. They’ve already volunteered for anything we might need them to do.”
Mac looked up from his tablet. “Jon, we’ve just sent you the GPS coordinates of Robb’s compound. Check the perimeter when you arrive and contact us when you’re secure. We’re going to have to start pulling our drones, fuel is getting low. I can’t keep 24-hour oversight for you when we also have to check for survivors. When you’re secure for the day, we’ll call back the two drones watching you and I hope we can send them out again when you exfil. We’ll do our best, anyway.”
“Roger that,” Jon said. “Hooah.”
“Hooah.” Mac hesitated, then said something no military commander ever said before a mission. An op was all about getting the mission accomplished. All about grabbing what had to be grabbed. Killing whoever needed killing. The mission was first and last. If someone died, that was simply the way it rolled. No one ever talked about safety in the pre-mission briefing. It was never about safety, it was all about doing the job. But now it was a new ball game. “Stay safe,” he said.
Jon’s despairhad been almost palpable as his people in Haven were putting together scenarios for the future. It had hung like a dark cloud around him. Just as despair had hung around him when he talked of his past, his parents. He’d suffered and survived so much.
Her touch was instinctive, as instinctive as if he had been grievously wounded and she’d moved to staunch the flow of blood. As instinctive as when they’d talked about his past, back at her apartment. He’d been wounded then, too, though with that tough-guy exterior he’d probably rather be shot in the face than admit it. His voice had been laconic, emotionless. And underneath the skin, his emotions were boiling—a mixture of rage and sorrow and despair.
Then she’d touched him and felt a form of healing begin. That had never happened to her before, her gift used for spiritual illness. It had never even occurred to her that she could do such a thing. Maybe she could only do that with Jon. Maybe the sexual connection was so strong they were linked in some way. She’d had sex before but never such intensely intimate sex.
For long moments, she’d lost the separation between them, the separation that exists between all human beings, closed up in their skins. For long moments, she’d felt part of him, beneath the skin, inside his heart.
That wasn’t a good thing. There was a reason people were separate, apart. Such close links would be dangerous if they were common. She’d been inside him, he’d been inside her, in the most intimate kind of way. Not the connection of the flesh, which was easy, superficial. But a connection of the spirit.
It was dangerous. Someone who wasinsideyou could rip you to pieces.
She shivered.
“Here.” Jon did something to the display panel and left the wheel. He rummaged in the cabin until he found a blanket, dragged a bench over and placed it behind the wheel, sitting her down on it. He draped the blanket around her and put an arm around her with an audible grunt of satisfaction.
Sophie knew exactly how he felt. Sitting next to him on the speeding boat, so close she could feel his body heat, his arm around her, felt good, felt…right.She tipped her head against his shoulder and felt his lips kiss her hair.
“Rest now. We’ve still got a long journey ahead of us.”
“Don’t you need to, um…” What was the word?Drivefelt wrong. “Pilot the boat?” She could hear the quaver in her voice and hated it. The adrenaline of their escape was still coursing through her body. The blanket was a lightweight, thermal blanket and she was warm underneath it, but the trembling wasn’t from cold.
Jon tightened his arm around her. “It’s on autopilot. See this?” He tapped a dial. She nodded. “Radar and IR and thermal scanner. We’re not going to run into any boats, even those adrift. We’ve got another nine or ten hours to go so I want you to relax, if you can.”
