Page 2 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

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 of Yersinia 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.

At the city end of the bridge, the access road had been blown up, leaving an inaccessible 50 foot hole in the ground.

Back in Haven they’d been glued to their monitors, watching breaking news.

The Marines had held the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, effectively quarantining the city.

But apparently a few infected got through and each infected person became a vector, infecting, ten, maybe hundreds, in turn. It was exponential and it was fast.

One tank had crashed through a railing and hung half-on, half-off the bridge.

It was a good thing Jon wouldn’t need to exit the city to the north from the bridge. It hurt to think that maybe no one would ever cross that bridge again.

No use thinking that way. It was what it was.

The beautiful white skyline of San Francisco drew nearer. Black columns of smoke resolved into flames at the base, whole sections of the city burning.

This is what 1906 must have looked like, he thought. Only no fire brigades were coming. No communal kitchens, no armies of volunteers helping the wounded. There would be no rebuilding.

He reached the outer arm of the marina, followed it in, crossed over into the city along the waterfront, alive with infected.

No one looked up at his passage. Light was draining from the sky and his helo was a dull matte black with no reflective surfaces.

And no one had the concept of a helicopter in their heads anymore.

He flew over vicious street brawls, vehicles left askew, a cable car at the Powell turning station lying on its side.

He crossed the grassy expanse of Ghirardelli Square, hovering for a moment over the roof of the Ghirardelli Building, then landed lightly.

He killed the engines and sat there for a moment, head bowed.

His hands dropped to his lap. They were trembling slightly.

Amazing.

Jon had spent his entire adult life either in training for combat, in combat or undercover.

He’d spent two years undercover, pretending to be a dealer in the Cartagena cartel, where any second he could be unmasked and hanged on a meat hook as reprisal and as a warning. Nothing fazed him, nothing scared him.

Or so he’d thought.

Turned out that the end of the world scared the shit out of him.

So though the city was burning around him, though time was pressing because who knew if even at this moment Sophie Daniels was being torn to bits, the case with the vaccines kicked into the bay, Jon sat still in his little helo, a marvel of technology and engineering and waited for his hands to stop shaking.

Screams came from the streets below. Bellows, really. Of rage, of fury. Something crashed heavily. Horribly another scream, this time of a child, but it wasn’t a scream of fear. No, it was savagery.

This wasn’t getting any better.

Time to go.

He had his backpack already at the helo door.

With an almost silent hiss of hydraulics the helo door opened and Jon stepped out onto the Ghirardelli building’s roof.

From up here, where he couldn’t see the street level, he could almost pretend that nothing had happened.

If you ignored the smoke, you could almost think that it was two days ago and mankind was still rolling along in its lying, cheating, thieving ways where, however, in the interstices and almost as an afterthought, some people got medical care, some cops were able to stop crime, some kids got educated.

Someone played music, wrote books, painted canvases.

He stepped to the edge of the building and the fantasy disappeared. Down on the street it was a jungle. Worse than a jungle. In the jungle, animals didn’t try to exterminate their own species.

He strapped his scanner to his wrist and adjusted it to IR. Immediately, hot human-shaped splodges appeared on the screen, crazy even in IR.

It was getting darker now. Jon watched the street carefully, looking for breaks in the patterns.

He couldn’t tell if the infected hunted in packs systematically or whether packs formed spontaneously.

A snarling, crazed group of twenty creatures would go by, then nothing for a minute or two.

Did they slow down with the darkness? Did they hunt at night? Did they sleep?

He had no idea.

His entire life as a soldier he’d pitted himself against enemies of different cultures.

Pakistanis, Afghanis, Chinese, Mongolians, Colombians.

All different, but now he realized they were more similar than different.

Because they behaved according to human rules—the rules that were ingrained in our DNA.

These creatures knew no rules and he had no idea what kind of strategy would work against them, other than— don’t get caught. Because then, God forbid, you were worse than dead. You were lost.

As he watched a babbling, snarling pack pass by below he made a vow to himself.

If he were infected, he would immediately kill himself.

The idea of becoming one of them—a creature that would kill women and children, that would attack on sight—gave him a primordial sense of horror that he couldn’t shake.

He would never become one of those creatures of the night.

He would rather die.

Another pack passed by. And another. Then three separately, snarling down the street. A granny, a kid, a woman. Who wouldn’t hesitate to eat his face.

Fuck. There wasn’t going to be a break in these creatures.

The math was against him. Almost by definition anyone on the street was infected. The few who weren’t—and there was no way to tell how many of the uninfected were left—were locked indoors, frightened and trapped.

Like Sophie Daniels.

It was that thought—of Sophie Daniels trapped and terrified—that galvanized him.

He’d never met her but he’d seen her photograph. She was beautiful but beyond that she had the look of Mac’s wife, Catherine, and Nick’s woman, Elle. Very smart and very kind. The kind of woman who had a glow about her. They didn’t grow women like that on trees.