Page 45 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

There was silence in the vehicle. Sophie didn’t feel like breaking it, though she knew Jon would answer if she made a comment.

But really, what was there to say? She wanted to know more about this beautiful warrior, much more.

She wanted to find out how he could have remained sane under constant stress while undercover.

She wanted to understand how he felt about his teammates.

She wanted to find out what his love life had been.

But—it could go either one of two ways. Either they were ambushed or the vehicle crashed and they died and she’d meet her maker together with one of the bravest men she’d ever met.

Or—they made it to Haven and worked hard, hand in hand, to put the world back together.

If they were lucky enough to walk through door number two, there’d be plenty of time to explore fascinating JonWorld.

There was something almost soothing about this journey in darkness and silence.

The world was insane outside the vehicle but inside, she and Jon were two people working hard together to achieve something difficult under dangerous circumstances.

Not much more had to be said. They both understood the danger, they were both ready for it.

Maybe this was what it was like for warriors on a mission?

No talking, the time for talking was done.

Just action. And a strong sense of common purpose.

After an hour of smooth rolling, Jon spoke.

He glanced at the map and back at the road and said, “Going off road, Sophie. There’s a pileup about 100 yards ahead and beyond that, the road is littered with crashed cars and trucks for the next fifty miles.

It would take us days to get past them. I don’t have much depth perception so it might be a bumpy ride. ”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “You concentrate on the road, and I’ll watch the scanner.”

He nodded and maneuvered them off the road.

They were well out of the state park or at least on the edges of it.

Without being able to see much, Sophie could sense fewer tall trees, the canopy overhead disappearing as, under the wheels, they transitioned from smooth asphalt to rocky surface.

The wheels slid and Jon cursed, regaining control.

Jon was leaning forward a little now, because there was no road to follow anymore, just badlands.

One wheel dipped into a deep hole and Jon fought to keep the vehicle upright.

Sophie knocked her head badly against the window but didn’t make a sound.

Jon couldn’t be distracted now. She braced herself against the door so the next time the Lynx rocked, she was able to keep herself upright, though the seat belt pulled so tight against her chest it hurt.

The vehicle rocked as if in a strong wind as it climbed out of the hole.

The really hard part had begun.

Later, Jon would barely understand how he did it.

Adrenaline, terror—they helped. What didn’t help was having Sophie with him.

Every time he fought the wheel to keep the vehicle upright he had to fight the temptation to hold her back against her seat with his arm.

It was pure instinct and it wasn’t helping.

Like himself, she was strapped in via a five point belt and his arm was much less effective a barrier than the belt.

But every single goddamned time, he was distracted from the driving by wanting to protect Sophie.

The only thing he could do to protect Sophie was getting her to Haven safely as fast as possible and the constant distraction of her next to him was putting both their lives at risk.

He tried not to look at her but he couldn’t stop smelling her, some mixture of Anna Robb’s soap and shampoo and Sophie’s skin.

He remembered the smell of Sophie’s skin in the deepest recesses of his brain.

She was a distraction and he had to wrestle with himself just as much as he wrestled with the wheel to keep them moving.

It wasn’t as if she was deliberately distracting him, God no.

Even when the vehicle slid out of control for a few seconds, teetered for an instant on two wheels, even when he had to wrench the car to avoid an almost invisible hole, she didn’t make a sound.

He could feel her anxiety like waves beating up against the shore but she didn’t say a word and she didn’t make any movements that could have distracted him.

But she did distract him. She didn’t want to, that was clear, but she did.

He couldn’t fucking keep her out of his mind.

Swerving, testing out the depth of craters because he couldn’t see for shit—all he saw was vague contours but not the size of hillocks and vales—gunning the engine when he saw he had a clear shot, slowing down to a walking pace where the land was strewn with boulders and brush.

And all the time he was thinking of her, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible, terrified the night vision wouldn’t show him where the ground sheared off into a cliff until it was too late and they were rolling down the sheer face to the bottom of the cliff.

He’d always had a very good imagination.

It helped, as a soldier. He could think ahead and see the scenarios for each decision on a decision tree.

But now that gift turned on him and bit him on the ass.

Because his mind created two really good images to deal with.

One: the car slides down a steep hill, hits the bottom and explodes or, even better, two: he and Sophie trapped in the vehicle until some infected comes along and tears Sophie’s heart out of her chest.

That last one was rendered in full living color, with sound effects.

Shit! He wanted to pound the wheel but didn’t, because he needed to control the wheel and he needed to control his reactions.

How crazy was that? He was nothing but cool and calm under pressure, even extreme pressure.

Except apparently now, when it would be really useful to switch to Cool Surfer Dude instead of sweaty, desperate Totally Uncool Dude.

The vehicle lurched heavily to the right, tilting slightly, the left wheels lifting off the ground…Jon wrenched the car back to where at least the four wheels were touching the ground at the same time.

He had to stop thinking of her, stop trying to keep her safe. Because if he kept having divided attention he’d kill them both. Or worse—kill himself and maybe leave her alive in the middle of the Badlands.

That image—of him crushed in an accident, Sophie alive and staked out like a goat for the monsters to find her—got his head straight.

He had to focus. Focus was what he did, focus was what Jon was all about.

So he narrowed his attention to the vehicle and the road, nothing else existed in the whole wide world.

There was only the feel of the vehicle and the terrain in front of them.

The GPS waypoints Mac and the others at Haven had mapped out for him were 24 hours old and worse than useless.

What was miles and miles of empty roadway on their map turned out to be cluttered with pileups, articulated trucks jacked sideways, one huge tractor trailer upside down like an enormous black cockroach, wheels in the air instead of legs.

Every single inch of this nightmare journey was one he had to feel his way through.

In the end it was easier to just stay off road since it was so hard to get on and get off at irregular intervals.

The Lynx could smash its way through the guardrails easily enough but after ten or twelve times Jon thought he might be undermining the structural integrity of the fenders, so he just abandoned highways.

There were some state roads he could follow for a while.

When he came across tangles of wrecked cars, if the road wasn’t on a raised grade, it was easy enough to simply drive off road, skirt the wreck, then drive back on.

What wasn’t so easy was ignoring the bodies around the pileups. He was glad Sophie didn’t have night vision. Driving by an endless succession of broken human beings was hard to take for him. She would be heart-sick.

He had to keep to under 25 miles an hour so he could correct if the car slid or threatened to overturn, but he’d counted on 50 miles an hour, making it to Mount Blue by around sunrise. At this rate, they’d arrive several hours after dawn.

No matter. He gripped the wheel harder, fighting the temptation to speed up. That could get them killed. They’d get to Haven when they got there. Not before and not later.

After six hours of driving Jon’s muscles were aching. If this were any other situation he’d stop and stretch. But it was what it was and he didn’t want to endanger Sophie by stopping, not even if the scanner was clear.

He was trying to negotiate a sudden dip in the land that turned out to be almost a pit when Sophie said, very quietly, “Jon.”

He couldn’t look at her until he’d gunned the engine to work the vehicle up and over the other side of the deep depression. Then he spared her a quick glance.

“What?”

“Infected.” She tilted the scanner so he could see clearly. Yep, a pack of them. About twenty, milling aimlessly about five hundred meters west.

“Car’s very quiet,” he said. “Maybe we can slip by without them noticing.”

He concentrated fiercely on the road, speeding up. They would be safe in the cabin but he didn’t want to engage with infected at all. He pushed the car’s speed up even more, carefully threading around trees and humps in the ground.

Finally Sophie spoke again. “We’ve cleared them.”

“Good.” Jon eased up on the accelerator. They’d been travelling dangerously fast, at a clip he couldn’t maintain without risking an accident. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? There’s some food and water in the the cooler right behind my seat.”