Page 22 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

CHAPTER SEVEN

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.

The noise was deafening. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the booming sounds of raw, piercing screams. The sounds of humans gone utterly mad.

Their blank, vicious bloodied faces was a sight taken from the depths of hell.

No painter, not even Hieronymus Bosch, could have even imagined what she and Jon were seeing.

If there was a hell, this was it.

It was too much. A coldness descended upon her soul, as if the temperature of the world had suddenly dropped.

She was chilled down to her bones, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air but the situation of the world.

It froze her mind, too. She looked up at Jon, opening her mouth then closing it again.

She wanted to tell him she couldn’t do this, couldn’t observe this massive vision of hell any longer but her lungs wouldn’t fill with enough air to form the words. She could barely breathe.

But Jon somehow understood. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her to him. Oh God. Warmth. He was this huge column of warm muscle. She leaned into him, trying to absorb some of his warmth, take it into herself.

“Come, Sophie. You’re in shock.”

Jon led her into the bedroom and made her get under the covers. She could barely walk, had to think about putting one foot in front of the other. Had to actively try not to stumble.

She didn’t have to think about not falling down though. Jon had a big arm around her waist and she felt like she couldn’t fall down. He wouldn’t let her.

On the way to the bed, Jon grabbed a cashmere throw across her sofa and wrapped it around her.

Once she was sitting in bed, covers up to her chin, the throw around her shoulders, she knew intellectually she shouldn’t be feeling any cold, but she was.

It was all-pervasive, muscle and bone deep.

No amount of swaddling could dissipate it.

Jon disappeared. While he was gone it was no-Jon time.

Time that didn’t matter, wasn’t observable.

She neither thought nor felt. It was like being in suspended animation.

She couldn’t even register the booming, crashing noises from outside.

Her bedroom looked out over an internal courtyard so the noises came over the rooftops.

A huge boom sounded, not a human noise. Some explosion somewhere. These were all thoughts that drifted through her mind without her understanding them fully.

“Here.” Startled, she looked up. Jon had a steaming cup of something on one of her pretty flower-themed trays. “Drink it all down.”

He put his big hand under the cup when she picked it up. He’d been right to. She seemed to have lost all muscle strength. The cup bobbled in her hand and the hot liquid would have splashed on her, burned her, if he hadn’t steadied it.

His eyes were as steady as his hands. “Drink,” he said quietly.

She drank. Coughed. Her vanilla tea had been laced with plenty of the aged Glenfiddich she kept on a sideboard. There was honey in there too. A drink she definitely needed.

He stood by the bedside until she drank the entire concoction, then moved to the other side of the bed, removed his boots and got under the covers with her. With his back against the headboard, he reached for her, snuggled her against him.

The hot tea, the hot man. Warmth penetrated and with it, the numbness that had protected her dissipated.

It was all too much. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept.

Jon held Sophie as she cried. It wasn’t an emotional crying jag like some women had, to get rid of stress. This was harsher, deeper, more desperate. It was a lament for the world. It was endless, bottomless grief.

He didn’t even try to shush her or comfort her with words.

There were no words, anyway. He simply held her.

He held her at that moment not as a man held a woman he was falling for, but as a comrade held a fallen teammate.

Sophie was grievously wounded and if the wound wasn’t actually bleeding, it was deadly nonetheless.

Sophie cried as if something inside her was broken, beyond healing.

Jon understood that, down to his bones. His world had been broken beyond healing in childhood.