Page 4 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

CHAPTER TWO

San Francisco

Beach Street

Sophie peeked out from between her blinds at the violent chaos below. Her instinct, coming from the deepest part of her, was to shut them again and block everything out. But she was a scientist and every single thing she learned about this infection and the infected was useful.

It was easy to hate the creatures below.

They were worse than animals. Animals went into feeding frenzies only when starving.

They did it for food, for survival. The creatures crawling and running and biting and clawing on Beach Street below her window were motivated by some kind of insane, mindless lust for violence.

Not hunger, not territoriality, not dominance. Sheer, mindless rage.

But…they’d been people once. And not long ago, either.

Only a week ago, before the security goons of Arka came for her, she’d been looking down on to Beach Street, just as she was now. She often people-watched from her window.

Tourists and locals blended happily on her street, the tourists distinctive for their outlandish dress and broad grins and sunburned foreheads. Many of them had just come from the Buena Vista Club down the street and had downed a couple too many delicious Irish Coffees.

Dan, the busker who worked the area, had been at the corner of Beach and Jones as usual, playing his sax, as usual. He was a gifted musician who’d been cheated out of royalties by his music company and preferred busking to being a studio artist. Earned more money that way, too, he always said.

Not half an hour ago, Sophie had watched with tears in her eyes as Larry, the owner of Larry’s Burgers on Jefferson a block away, tore Dan’s arm off this morning.

While Dan, the gentlest man she’d ever met, did his best to bite Larry’s face off before bleeding to death.

They’d been taken, all of them. Taken away somewhere, leaving behind these monstrous carapaces that had nothing to do with the soul that had inhabited them.

The world was burning.

What kept her going, what kept her from falling into the blackest pit of despair was that maybe, just maybe, some could be saved. Some small corner of the world could remain human. So she recorded. Watched, observed, took notes.

Noted hemorrhaging times, reflexes, reactions. What triggered the highest ferocity. How fast they ran, how impervious they were to pain. How they died, how they survived.

It was all noted in her computer, in her written notes, and she’d video recorded the accompanying scenes. It was beginning to be too dark now to film anything in the detail she needed. Crazily, she hadn’t downloaded the IR app so now that it was dark she was stuck with what her eyes told her.

The city lights were still on. Who knew for how long? They had come on an hour ago but several were flickering. This time tomorrow or the next day they could be gone.

She could be gone, too.

Her door was stout but conceivably a concerted attack by a couple of heavy men could break it, or at least unmoor it from its hinges.

That was one possibility. She could starve to death or die of thirst if she were trapped for too long.

Nasty thought, that one. If it looked like that would be her end she had an entire bottle of Nobital.

Crushing all the tablets and dissolving them in water and drinking that would put her to sleep forever.

Many times throughout the long day while the city fell, she thought with longing of that bottle and had to almost physically wrench her thoughts away from it.

But that was crazy thinking, and had to stop, immediately.

She was alive right now, in her right senses, and she was a scientist. She had a duty to observe, record, even postulate theories, however much on the fly.

Science didn’t work that way, it proceeded at its own stately pace—but this was different.

The World of Science had waned and the World of Blood was rising.

Hers might be the last scientific observations on earth.

She shook her head sharply. No thinking like that. Observe and understand. Keep your emotions out of it. Leave something behind, in the hope that at the end, there would be human beings to come across her findings.

A pack ran down the street, fast. She watched, observed.

She tapped her wrist to turn on the audio recording function.

“A group of infected is running down Beach. It is 5:25 pm. It is almost exactly six hundred feet from the corner of Jones to Lorraine’s Pet Shop.

The pack covered the distance in thirty seconds, which means the infected can run a four minute mile.

One of the pack is an obese man. He is keeping up but shows signs of cardiopathy.

His breathing is irregular, coloring ruddy.

He has stopped and is looking around bewildered, holding a hand to his chest.” Sophie watched as the man fell to one knee, still looking bewildered but not afraid, then pitched forward onto his face.

No one in the pack stopped or even looked around.

Eventually, his chest stopped moving. “Subject died at 5:37 pm, presumably of a heart attack.”

No one will do an autopsy, she thought. There wouldn’t be a functioning morgue anywhere in the city. And what was one heart attack in the midst of so much death?

Sick at heart, Sophie turned away from the window. No more of this right now. She needed a short break. Watching the world go mad outside her window all day was breaking her heart, her spirit.

There was another factor. She was a healer. Had been, all her life.

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. Could feel sickness 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 to fix that. 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 for her. 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.