Page 7 of Breaking Danger
This was well beyond anything she could fix.
One of her first memories was 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 had 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. Couldfeelsickness 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 and she’d found herself studying biology then virology because they 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 had been fascinated by viruses, those minute segments of protein that seemed to hold such immense power over human beings. Such terrible diseases. Rabies, Ebola, Hanta, Covid, the 2028 bird flu that killed two million people. Certain cancers were caused by viruses.
She wanted to make that better. She wanted tofixthat. 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 forher.Men in black, in the night. Just like in a holo-movie, only for real.
She managed to get a call to Elle to warn her when they came for her. She had hacked into the head of Arka Pharmaceutical’s computer and had read, with horror, about a virus he had been bio-engineering. 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 in the study on psychic phenomena, injected them with the virus and harvested the brains. From his notes, he’d 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 had turned them into killing machines. She’d known then that she had to get her hands on that virus. When they came for her and locked her up in the underground test labs, she’d 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 had 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 and 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 US Special Forces, didn’t stand a chance.
Sophie had hidden 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 had taken the elevator to the 21st 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 hadn’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 threw 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. They were all 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.
