Breaking Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

She nodded. “That surprised even me.”

  Jon looked down at her, at this unexpected pearl that had been given to him. He lay his hand on her flat belly, absorbing the warmth of her skin through the thin tee. He shifted his hand, started pulling it up. With his other hand, he lifted her shoulders off the bed while pulling the tee up and off. She wasn’t wearing a bra and she wasn’t wearing panties so after he’d slipped the thin cotton pants off her hips and down her legs, she was naked and he almost closed his eyes against the picture she made on the bed.

  Too much. Too much beauty. Too much sentiment in her eyes as she watched him. She didn’t try to cover herself up and she didn’t try to preen. She just lay there, open to him, watching him watching her.

  He put his hand back on her belly, relishing the feel of her skin now that he didn’t have to feel it through cloth.

  “Now you,” Sophie said and at first he didn’t understand what she meant. The gears in his head weren’t meshing too well. Then, “Oh—” She wanted him naked too.

  Oh yeah.

  In a second he’d stripped, as fast as he could because he didn’t want to lift his hand from Sophie for anything.

  “You’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

  Jon didn’t look down at himself. He knew what he looked like. Though he couldn’t recall a hard-on quite as hard as the one he was sporting now. He didn’t have to look down to know his dick was like a rock and immensely swollen. It fucking hurt.

  “Am I?” he whispered back. She nodded. “That should be my line.”

  Sophie smiled, placed her hand over his.

  Jon shut his eyes, his hand on Sophie’s belly, her hand over his, the heat from her hand rising up his arm. He stood stock-still, immense tension in every muscle in his body.

  And he realized: “I can’t go slow, Sophie.” He shook his head. “Sorry. Maybe I should—” He didn’t finish the rest of the sentence because he was tempted to offer something he didn’t think he could make good on. Like offering to step back, step away.

  Luckily, it didn’t make any difference because Sophie tugged on his forearm and he fell onto her. Just like before, only this time they were naked and he knew what to expect.

  Out-of-this-world pleasure, that’s what he was expecting. And that’s what he got.

  Warmth spread all along his body where they met.

  Sophie twined her arms around his neck, opened her mouth under his and that warmth kicked up to heat. That honeyed pleasure flowing through his veins became prickling heat right under his skin, requiring immediate action.

  A second later, he slid into her—into that hot secret place between her thighs—and a second after that his body slammed into action. It was completely beyond his control as he hammered into her, holding her hips with his hands.

  Some very, very dim part of his mind was exerting overwatch, if not control. If he had felt anything less than welcome, anything less than desire on her part, he’d have stopped. He hoped.

  As it was, Sophie was with him every step of the way, her body completely open to him, slick with juices that eased his way, holding him tightly with her arms and legs. Matching him, movement for movement.

  It was so intense, so hot, it couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Sophie tightened around his dick, threw her head back against the pillow, and emitted a low moan that came out stuttering because he was moving in her so strongly. She dug her nails into his back, tightened around him again and again. Her orgasm pushed him right off the edge and into another world of heat and light where he had to hold his breath as his body went into overdrive. He slammed into her, moving easily now, since she was slick with juices, in a frenzy of heat so great he thought he would blow up.

  And then he did.

  Great shuddering convulsions so intense his eyes rolled back under his lids and his toes curled. It went on forever as every ounce of liquid in his body poured into her and at the very last moment, just as he began to still, she convulsed again, lifting her hips up against his by leveraging herself up with her legs. She rotated her hips and arched her back to take more of him, breaths coming in pants against his ear, clenching tightly around him in pulls so strong he could feel her stomach muscles working against his abdomen.

  At the same moment, they blew out great gusty breaths and stilled.

  Jon collapsed bonelessly on her, every cell of his body drenched in pleasure. He should move. He was heavy and he was sure he was crushing her, but damn. This felt so . . . fucking . . . good. He couldn’t even think through the pleasure signals zapping through his body. That constant awareness he had at all times, the bit of himself he kept separate and vigilant, had taken a hike. The movie screen in his head started to blur, show static.

  He made one last heroic effort and cranked an eyelid open. All he really saw was a delicate jawbone, a small pink ear and a cloud of dark shiny hair. But his hazy mind could fill in the rest. Sophie.

  Everything felt so damned good exactly as he was, including his half-limp dick nestled deep within her. Oh man, that felt particularly good, like his own personal dick holster.

  Mmmm.

  However, good things don’t last. No one knew that better than he did. Jon planted his palms on the mattress next to her head and tensed his muscles. Pulling out and rolling over wasn’t going to be easy. Not because he didn’t have the strength but because he didn’t have the desire.

  He moved his hips and instantly Sophie’s arms and legs tightened around him.

  “Don’t,” she whispered.

  Oh man, no. But out of a sense of duty, he replied, “I’m heavy.”

  There was no refuting that and she didn’t try. “I like it.”

  Christ. She didn’t want him to pull out and roll over and he didn’t want to either.

  Something had messed with his soldier’s brain because he knew falling asleep in this position wasn’t smart, wasn’t in the battle manual.

  They had been taught how to sleep in battle conditions, been trained to it, sometimes with blood. They’d trained to operate at peak capacity on two hours’ sleep a week. They’d been trained to come out of REM sleep fighting. In the field, Jon had never been a second away from a weapon.

  Now, right now, goddammit, his weaponry was in the living room. Every single freaking piece of equipment was precious seconds away. The thought was unbearable for a professional soldier. But the thought of detaching himself from Sophie was . . . was even more unbearable. That warm softness all along his front, the silky hair tickling his face, that warm grip on his dick—he couldn’t do without it. Simply couldn’t.

  He was being rewired.

  That was his last thought before a warm perfumed blackness overcame his senses.

  The noise woke him. He was instantly awake, instantly realized what it was.

  Light colored the edges of Sophie’s lined curtains, enough to see the time on his wrist. He’d slept until after mid-day, something he couldn’t ever remember doing.

  Sometime during the night he’d slipped out of and off Sophie, his subconscious being more of a gentleman than his consciousness. She was lying half on him, head in the crook of his shoulder.

  He’d slept deeply, something he rarely did. That descent into deep sleep discomfited him. He sometimes had nightmares, which he hated. So he’d trained himself to go into a shallow sleep, completely unlike the semi-coma he felt he’d been in.

  He’d woken up because of the noise. The noise was unlike anything he had ever heard in his life. Jagged, dissonant, feral. Growing louder.

  Sophie raised her head, smiled at him, a frown between her dark eyebrows. In the faint light all he saw was pale skin and dark blue eyes.

  He smoothed his hand over her hair, wishing that things were different. Wishing he were here in this absurdly frilly and comfortable bed with this amazingly beautiful and smart woman under normal circumstances.

  Jon didn’t do romance and he sure didn’t do love. He was a love ’em and leave ’em guy, all the way. But Sophie?

  Wo
w, with Sophie he just might have made an exception. She was absolutely fascinating, probably smarter than he was, certainly better educated. Soft, gentle, very easy to be with. And he liked the glimpses of frills, of hyperfemininity that he’d seen.

  Another first. Jon’s life had always been reduced to essentials. For most of his life, he could have packed all his worldly goods into one duffel bag, ready to take off in ten minutes. He owned no property outside his guns. The military had given him all the essentials and he had wanted nothing else. No ties, no belongings, and above all, no frills.

  Ghost Ops had been made for him.

  No emotional ties either, until Haven. He’d respected Lucius and Mac, ready to follow their orders even if it led to his death. But now he could see beneath Lucius and Mac’s rough exterior, particularly with their women. It was as if they came alive in their presence. Mac was crazy about his wife, Catherine, and that child she was carrying. And Lucius—Lucius had been so beaten, so broken when he and Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist had arrived that Jon thought he could see death following Lucius around, one step behind him. Stella had yanked him right back into life.

  And Nick. Man. Iceman Nick who didn’t care about anything or anyone. When he’d received some secret signal from Elle that she was in danger, Jon thought Nick would go crazy. Implode from stress.

  Jon didn’t believe in love, of any kind. Not in love at first sight or second or even third sight. His parents had been sick fucks, incapable of loving anything except their drugs; and until Haven, until this past year, he’d never seen love at work, had never even believed it possible.

  But now . . . well, suppose it was possible? Suppose you could find someone you loved and admired and who loved you right back? Something he didn’t even imagine existed in the world until he saw it, firsthand, at Haven. So if you found it, what then?

  “Jon?” Sophie repeated sleepily, lifting up on one elbow. He reached out and tucked a dark shiny lock of hair behind her ear. “What’s that noise?”

  If you found it, you protected it.

  “The swarm,” he said grimly. “It’s coming.”

  They came and they came and they came. She and Jon stood by the window with the curtains open. The sky was cloudy with smoke, fire, and debris, casting a gray pall over the morning.

  At first they watched on Jon’s scanner fed by a couple of Haven drones. At some central control station back in Haven, they pieced together a large-scale picture from several drones. She could tell by the slight fracture marks in the hologram, which disappeared when Jon zoomed in with one drone’s video feed.

  It took a moment to realize what she was seeing, though she could hear it well enough. A loud, dissonant cacophony, growing louder by the minute. A noise unlike any she’d ever heard before, the very voice of utter chaos. Screams, bellows, fists against metal, glass shattering, all combined into one long rolling wall of sound that was the most frightening thing she’d ever heard.

  Jon zoomed in more closely and there it was—the swarm. The main force rolling up Jones, people shoulder to shoulder, shoving each other, striking randomly, a mass so dense that for a second it looked like one single organism with an infinite number of moving parts. The front part of the wave was twenty blocks long.

  Jon tapped and the focus zoomed in even more, so she could see individual faces.

  Every hair on her body stood up in an archaic, primitive rush of utter terror. She couldn’t imagine that so many expressions of violence and madness had ever been gathered together in the history of humanity. Even in the mass battles of the past, there must have been some human expressions among the rank and file, a few hanging back, not wanting to maim and pillage. Some who tended to the wounded. Some who simply didn’t want to fight.

  Here there was nothing she recognized as even vaguely human, just a boiling mass of bodies trying to kill each other.

  Half the faces were covered in blood, which was almost a blessing because she couldn’t see the inhumanity there. All she saw was blood on skin, sometimes dripping off the faces if the killing had been fresh. Nobody looked up, of course, because the drones were silent. Mute witnesses to mankind’s degradation, flying high overhead, robotic souls unflinching, cameras emotionlessly shooting video footage that sickened her heart.

  “They—” Her voice came out so faint she had to stop. She was leaning against Jon like you’d lean against a wall, to hold you up. He was absolutely solid, face without expression as he held out the monitor so she could watch. At her almost soundless voice, his intent gaze switched from the monitor to her face.

  She was a scientist. Maybe one of the few left alive. So as long as she had a beating heart and a functional brain she was going to do what was a scientist’s first duty—observe reality. There could be no hypotheses without observation. She remembered one of her first biology professors laying down the law and how she had thrilled at the thought. It had been like looking into the very heart of life.

  Well, now she was looking into the very heart of death, but her duty was still clear.

  She coughed, gathered her strength around her like a cloak.

  “They are behaving very much like a swarm,” she said, proud of the fact that her voice was clear and steady, even while her heart hurt so much in her chest. She watched them boil and scramble up to the top of Jones. “There’s a concept in biology known as emergence. That there can be a hierarchical form of organization not apparent at the lowest levels.” She tapped the air of the hologram. “Each individual is behaving randomly, and yet in their numbers, there is a primitive form of organization there. They are following the ‘nearest neighbor’ rule—blindly following where the person next to them leads. If they are swarming up Jones, I can only imagine that they have an instinctive tropism for water—for the Bay. So though each individual doesn’t know where he or she is going, the herd is heading for water.”

  Jon’s jaw muscles clenched. “Can they swim?”

  Could they swim? “I don’t want to give a glib answer, but my instinct is to say no. Swimming requires motor control and coordination adjustments. I don’t see any sign of that here. Many exhibit what could only be called spastic muscle movements, uncontrollable. That would be deadly in water. And I don’t think they could coordinate their breathing enough to stay afloat.” She looked up at him. “That’s my considered opinion, but I don’t know if I’d stake my life on it.”

  “If they are attracted to loud noises, maybe we could set up boom machines offshore. Watch them fall into the water like lemmings.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, turning the idea over in her mind. “That could work.” She shook her head. “Do you know, that would never have occurred to me.”

  “No.” His jaws snapped together with an audible click. “That’s not the way your mind thinks. You are looking to understand their behavior. I just want to find ways to kill the fuckers.” He slanted a look at her out of those ice blue eyes without turning his head. “Sorry.”

  Sophie closed her eyes, tried a smile. It was shaky and felt fake. “That’s okay. Monsters are roaming the streets, Jon. Ripping each other to pieces. I’m not going to faint at the f-bomb.”

  The hologram suddenly switched from the peninsula to some kind of war room. “Jon.”

  It was Mac. He was sitting in a room with Catherine Young, Elle and her guy, the scarred man, Lucius Ward, and another man. He was a fireplug of a man, short—certainly next to Mac and Elle’s guy and Ward—but very broad shouldered. He had a fleece plaid shirt and jeans on, but his short haircut, so extreme she could see scalp, and squared back shoulders spelled military, or at least former military, to her.

  “Boss,” Jon answered. “You don’t need to tell us—trouble’s on the way. We can see it for ourselves.”

  “Yeah.” Mac aimed a big thumb at Catherine and Elle. “The geek squad has come up with some facts they think you should know.”

  Sophie felt like she was looking directly into Elle’s eyes, the hologram was so lifelike. “They’re
swarming,” she said before Elle could speak.

  Elle dipped her head. “Yes, they are. Catherine and I have been observing them, with time lapses backward and forward. There’s good news and bad news. Which one do you want first?”

  Jon answered. “Bad news first. I can’t imagine there’s much good news.”

  “Okay.” Elle hesitated. She was pale, stressed. “Soph . . .” Her voice broke and her Nick put a big arm around her. For the very first time, Sophie understood down to the bone what having a strong man at your side meant, the support it could give. She leaned back, just a little, and there Jon was. Tall, broad, solid. A pillar of strength.

  She’d never believed in that whole man-woman thing. She’d always dated men who were basically her—cerebral and detached—but with a cylinder of flesh dangling between their legs that came in useful now and again. Her men had been narrow-shouldered, with pale undeveloped muscles, not too good with the physical, outside world. Bad drivers, hopeless at repairs—one boyfriend back in Chicago used to call her over to change lightbulbs, though he thanked her with food. He was a fabulous cook.

  Not at any stage of her life had Sophie thought to lean on a man as a source of strength. She’d never had to. But now the tables were turned and Jon and everything he represented—the iron and steel world of battle, the world of sheer male physical strength—were as necessary to her as breathing. As a matter of fact, if she wanted to keep breathing, if she wanted to make it out of the trap of her flat and to safety, she was going to need Jon’s qualities.

  “The swarm grew through the night. It seems to be a universal phenomenon with the virus. We’re seeing swarms forming in Oakland, in Sacramento. And, God, Soph. Los Angeles . . .”

  Sophie gasped. The Los Angeles basin was one large catchment area, a geographical trap, with mountains to the north, east, south, and ocean to the west.

  “Los Angeles is a nightmare.” Elle’s voice was shaky.

  “San Diego’s a little better,” Nick picked up. “But not much. So here’s what the San Francisco swarm looks like.”

  The hologram flickered and then there was a bird’s-eye view of the Bay Area, much higher than the drones’ eye view. For a moment, it looked like there had been a mudslide or a lava flow, oozing down the streets. Then the focus sharpened and it was clear that the streets were dark with infected swarming their way to the waterfront.