Page 11 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

“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, inoculate them and bring them back here.

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 300 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.”

“That’s ex-General Snyder, and 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 for defense. 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.

For all that they 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 the 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 tooks 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 north, then as they hit the water, northeast. 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.

The timeline said that it was now, and the swarm was heading their way.

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 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.

This was the opposite. Random observations over a couple of hours were nothing. But they had nothing else to go on. And perhaps science had fled the world anyway.

The holograms were positioned in such a way that the two images were on a parallel axis. It felt like she was looking straight into Elle and Catherine’s eyes. “Go ahead, Soph,” Elle said softly.

Sophie drew in a deep breath. “Okay. I think we can safely say that the virus knocks out the neocortex.” Both women nodded.

“Catherine, I’m going to make some assumptions about neurological damage, but of course, you’re the expert—” Catherine waved her hand.

“Not about this, my dear. I think we’re all in the dark. This is something entirely new.”

Sophie nodded. Yes, it was.