Breaking Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Partly, it was his training as a soldier. The infected hordes had been unnerving in a primordial way. Terrifying beyond words. But through it all, Jon had been absolutely steady, never faltering, always thinking several steps ahead, even when all this was totally unprecedented. There was no way he could have trained for this nightmare scenario, and yet it was as if he’d trained for it all his life.

  What she’d seen of him in action made her think she would follow him straight into the jaws of hell itself because he’d lead them right back out.

  They had a long trek in front of them, one they might not survive. But right now, she gave herself over completely to the boat ride, breathing in the cold salty night air. Every once in a while, a gust brought the chemical stink of something burning, but it dissipated the further north they went. They had long stretches on the calm flat sea from which the only smell was of the sea itself, and the only light that of the stars overhead, the Milky Way looping its bright way across the sky.

  “Seems almost peaceful, doesn’t it?” Jon’s deep voice was quiet.

  “Mm-hm.” She sighed. “It would be nice to think we’re on a—a boating trip, going north to go camping or something.”

  He slanted a glance down at her, his ice blue eyes bright in the starlight. “You go camping?”

  Sophie laughed. “Nope. Not a chance. Bears and mosquitoes and squatting to take a poop.” She gave a theatrical shudder. “Not for me. I imagine you’re the camping sort of guy, am I right?”

  “No way.” It was his turn to laugh. “We do what you’d call camping in the rough for a living. We once slept outdoors for three months in—in a place that was equatorial jungle. Mosquitoes the size of birds, spiders the size of dinner plates, I kid you not. We had to smother ourselves in enough Deet to cause liver damage. Part of those three months was the monsoon season, so we got toe and crotch rot. We couldn’t use heat for cooking so we ate MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, though ‘Meal’ is stretching it. They’re like lightly flavored sludge, and gum you up. We couldn’t talk and we couldn’t move. So pitching a tent somewhere and using oak leaves for toilet paper is not my favorite leisure activity, no.”

  Sophie laughed. She could see it, see how uncomfortable he and his teammates had been. She’d seen his captain and two of his teammates. They looked just as hard and driven as Jon. They’d lived in those appalling conditions for three months and—

  “Did you accomplish what you set out to do? In those three months?”

  His eyes narrowed to a light blue slit, firm beautiful mouth curved up in a smile. God. He was devastating when he smiled. “Oh yeah,” he said softly. “We did.”

  “Whacked a bad guy, eh?” she said and he recoiled.

  “Who told—” then he bit his lips.

  Sophie laughed. “I can’t imagine any other reason for camping out under those conditions for three months. If it was intelligence you were after, there are easier ways. A listening drone at a high altitude would have done it.”

  He smiled again and mimed zipping his mouth shut. Oh God. Now a dimple. Not fair. A dimple was overkill.

  She sighed.

  So he’d camped out for three months to kill someone. Someone who undoubtedly needed killing. If you’d asked her even a week ago if she could become the lover of a man who killed for a living, she’d have said no. Unequivocably no.

  But that was then and this was now. She’d known, theoretically, as a purely abstract concept, that evil existed in the world. She’d been five years old when the Twin Towers fell. She remembered watching it with her parents, both of them silent and dismayed. She hadn’t quite understood what had happened, but she had understood that evil had come into the world. She’d felt it quite distinctly. The first time in her young life that she’d understood even the concept of evil.

  What had been unleashed now was evil on an unimaginable scale. She’d been able to piece together some of the story from Dr. Charles Lee’s computer. He’d been working on a secret program of human enhancement via a new drug. Genetic material delivered in a viral vector. Only it had backfired. It had, yes, enhanced the infected’s performance. The infected were indeed stronger and faster and utterly unafraid. They were also insane. And doomed to die in a few days like some monstrous insect that was born, lived, and died in the space of a week.

  And she knew the reason the virus was so virulent. It was because Dr. Lee had been in such a hurry. For some reason, he’d been under massive time pressure. If she’d had access to all his files, she could have pieced it together, though now it was ancient history.

  And because Dr. Charles Lee had been in a hurry, he’d created an abomination that had the potential to wipe human life off the face of the earth. If they couldn’t contain it, only a few strongholds on the planet would survive. On the vast steppes of Central Asia, perhaps. In Antarctica, maybe. Some isolated tribes in Amazonia. The poor souls on the Space Station wouldn’t survive because there would be no one left on earth with the technical expertise to bring them back down.

  All of this was evil. And combating this required not only her skills and Elle’s skills and Catherine’s skills, but it also required the skills of Jon Ryan and his fellow warriors. And she could only be happy that he was a trained killer because he was the right man in the right place.

  She would never have escaped San Francisco with the vaccine without him. She’d have died in her apartment when the water and food ran out. And anyway, before that happened, the vaccine would have been rendered inert.

  Jon had saved her life, saved the vaccine, and was still doing it.

  He was also teaching her about love. The tough, trained killer had opened an unimagined world to her. While chaos ruled in the streets outside her windows, he’d given her pleasure she’d never even known existed. It wasn’t casual, what they shared. They were two people who would never have gotten together under any other possible circumstances, but what they had, forged in fire and death, was real. She believed that with all her heart.

  She breathed in, no burning smells at all, only the salt spray and diesel from the engine. A very old-fashioned smell. Nothing ran on diesel anymore except boats and the few heavy trucks left on the road.

  His finger caressed her cheek. “Beautiful night for the end of the world.” She felt his deep voice vibrate in his chest.

  “It is.”

  His large hand slid into her hair, holding her still as he leaned over and kissed her brow. “But if we do our jobs right and our guys up in Haven do their jobs right, it might not be the end of the world, after all.”

  “What do you think it might be like?”

  “What?”

  “The aftermath. What do you think might happen? Best-case scenario.”

  “Well.” He took a deep sigh. “Best-case scenario. I’m the wrong guy to ask about a best-case scenario; soldiers tend to look at worst-case scenarios and plan accordingly. But okay. So . . . everything goes well in the next week. We stabilize the uninfected in their homes. Make sure they can protect themselves and have ample food and water. Once we get some air support, we drop in supplies. It looks like by next week most of the infected might be dead, if they can’t fend for themselves. But we don’t know if pockets of the virus can survive—you and your brainiac girlfriends will be able to tell us about that. So we need to make sure that vaccine gets to every able-bodied and able-minded man, woman, and child in the continental USA. And strict protocols on who gets in and out of the country. So international commerce is going to stop for a while. There’s going to be an international economic crisis. The U.S. government is going to be very, very sorry it behaved like it did with us in California. It behaved badly, but there was a lot of panic. But if I know my captain and Mac, and I do, and if Snyder is as tough as his reputation, our guys are going to milk that regret for all it’s worth. Any reconstruction work and money going on is going to happen here first.”

  She was listening and not listening. The words made sense and sounded nice. Underneath the words, his
tone was level, the sound of a man who was already thinking ahead, part of a team of very smart people. Survivors.

  Survivors. They were going to survive this. She felt that suddenly, in her bones. Strength of purpose, comradeship with a team of people, growing by the day. It was what was going to let them survive this terrible ordeal.

  And who knew? Someday, maybe, this night rush up the coast of California, a brave warrior and a scientist, carrying a vaccine that could inoculate millions, would become part of history. Like Paul Revere’s ride, only bigger, with something more important than victory in a war of independence at stake.

  Someday perhaps schoolkids would read about this. Their mad dash upcountry, Haven’s gathering in of thousands of uninfected, helping pockets of uninfected survive, then the push-back—she could see it. Fanning out in armored convoys, bearing the vaccine. Shoring up defenses, bringing supplies, moving on. The fortified communities reaching out to each other. Clearing bodies, clearing transport lines. The government lifting the quarantine, reconstruction workers pouring in . . .

  God. It felt so good just to think in these terms. Not cowering, hoping to survive another night but fighting back. Helping others survive, rebuilding.

  This nighttime trip would be an integral part of all that. The narrow boat spearing through the water, Jon watchful at the helm. The indifferent star-filled sky overhead watching over them.

  Hope, which had fled her, crept back into her heart. Carefully. For hope was a fragile thing. But once hope takes root, it grows strong.

  The sliver of moon traced a silver path through the calm ocean. Little ripples sometimes flashed over the ocean’s surface, like twinkling stars. The quiet of the night, the low hum of the engine, the slight rocking of the boat lulled her, calmed her, and she drifted gently to sleep.

  Mount Blue

  Someone was tapping on her cheek. Elle instinctively tried to move her head away from the annoying tapping, but it was no use. Her eyes popped open and it took just a second to get oriented.

  White room. White walls, white floor, lots of people in white lab coats. Smell of Formalin and reagents and electrical equipment. A lab. The lab, at Haven.

  “That’s it, Sleeping Beauty,” her husband said, pulling gently at her shoulders until she sat up straight in her chair instead of slumping. “It’s bedtime for you.”

  She blinked, shook her head. “No.” The protest was automatic. So much to do, so little time. “We’re behind in our schedule—”

  “There will be no schedule if you work yourself to death,” he said, touching the skin beneath her eyes. “You’re exhausted. You’ve got bags under your eyes, Dr. Ross.”

  “Way to go, Mr. Ross. Convince your wife to do something by complaining about her looks.”

  He gave his slow smile. The one that never failed to turn her heart over. She’d been told that smile had been nonexistent until she came back into his life. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world, Dr. Ross. A few sleepless nights aren’t going to change that. So stop fishing for compliments and trying to change the subject. The subject is you. You’ve been working the best part of three days. Mac hauled Catherine off to bed, against her objections.” He shook his head. “You two just don’t know when to quit.”

  Elle was bone tired. But there was so much to do before the vaccine arrived. When it did, they had to hit the ground running. “We’ve still got to stabilize the accelerated cell line, check the reagents, test the equipment.”

  “Well, if you two make a mistake because you’re exhausted, you’ll just have to waste time correcting that mistake. Honey, part of our training is knowing when to find a way to rest because no one can go flat-out for days at a time.”

  She gave him her own smile. “Oh. I thought you, Mac, Jon, and the captain were Supermen. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Able to do your warrior thing for weeks, months.”

  “Uh-uh.” Nick lifted her out of her chair, put a firm hand to the small of her back, started walking her out of the lab. “You’re not going to distract me. You’re going to our quarters, you’re going to eat something warm, and then you’re going to bed. You’ll thank me later.” He tapped his comms, said something quiet about food to someone on the other end while they walked down the corridor to the elevator that would take them to their quarters.

  Quarters. That’s what he called it. It sounded Spartan, but it wasn’t. In any other place, it would be considered a very elegant small apartment with every modern con known to man, and some unknown. Like walls that could be turned into windows looking out over a mountain and the valley beyond.

  She had a brand-new husband. It still surprised her. The spiritual counselor who’d officiated at their wedding ceremony had also married Mac and Catherine and was busy marrying couples who realized, in the midst of extreme danger, how much they loved each other. Nothing like the end of the world to get your priorities straight.

  Haven worked. If there was one thing that had been brought home to her in the short time she’d been here at Haven, it was that Nick, Jon, and Mac, their captain, Lucius Ward, the three other Ghost Ops men who’d been rescued and, though half dead on their feet, capable of accomplishing a great deal and last, but certainly not least, the scary-looking but punctiliously polite former General Snyder, all of them were superbly capable men.

  She, Catherine, and Sophie were good at what they did; they’d be able to produce the vaccine in industrial quantities, no question. But for what came next, delivering the doses to besieged communities, protecting the convoys as they made their slow laborious way around the state, coordinating air drops, ensuring that the growing number of refugees here at Haven had sufficient shelter, food, and water—that was something the men had to do. She knew nothing of security or logistics.

  They’d created this amazing place while undercover as outlaws. They could do this too.

  Nick was hurrying her to their place so she could rest, but he was as tired as she was. He had to be. She couldn’t remember the last time he rested.

  If she rested then he had to too.

  Nick ushered her into their quarters. The nearly invisible door whooshed open at exactly the right time, just before Nick and she would have bumped noses against what looked like a wall. It had been coded to their bodies. Their morphology was the key that opened the door.

  Nick rushed her in, then stopped, sniffing.

  Elle lifted her head too, breathing in the deeply delicious smells. “Bless Stella,” she said at the sight of the big steel industrial cart with covered dishes on it.

  “Yeah, bless her,” Nick said fervently. “Now you—” He touched the tip of a callused finger to her nose. “You are going to take a nice warm shower while I get this all set out. You’re going to eat and then you’re going to bed.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Elle rolled her eyes but it was lost on Nick, who was busy uncovering dishes, setting out plates. God, the smells! Her stomach growled and she remembered she hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. Now that Nick had forced her to pay attention to herself, she realized how hungry and tired she was. He’d been right and she was wrong. Fainting from hunger and exhaustion wasn’t going to help anyone.

  By the time Elle came out from the bathroom, where she’d had a blissfully long and hot shower, Nick had arranged everything on the dining table. Done right too. Mats and plates and cutlery and two glasses, because there was also some wine decanting.

  She could afford one glass of wine. It would probably help her sleep.

  “Madame,” Nick intoned, a huge snowy napkin over one brawny forearm, the other hand pulling out her chair for her. He was trying to keep a straight face because Nick Ross did not look like a butler. Not in the slightest. He did look like a tough, very sexy man pretending for a second or two to be a butler.

  Elle sat with a sigh, her first moment of relaxation since the plague began.

  Nick was piling her plate high with food.

  “Nick,” she murmured. Her stomach started closin
g up. He looked up with a sharp gaze and stopped immediately. He set her plate in front of her.

  “Eat,” he ordered. “You’re not hungry, I get that. You’re too tired and stressed to be hungry. But trust me when I say you need some hot food in you. Once you start, you’ll feel better. Start with one bite.”

  Okay. She tried a bite of risotto. Mushroom risotto, creamy, with cheese and butter. Too rich, she thought, until it settled warmly in her stomach.

  “Another,” Nick said and she put another bite in her mouth. Instead of a blocked system, gullet and stomach closed tighter than a fist, her system opened up and accepted another bite. And she found she was ravenous.

  “That’s my girl,” Nick said as she started tasting the other dishes. Besides the risotto, which was of course delicious, Stella had sent a ragout of vegetables, baked goat cheese, an orange and fennel salad, fresh focaccia, and homemade raspberry ice cream.

  She ate half of what was on her plate and sat back to watch Nick demolish everything else, fast and neat.

  She sipped at her wine. “So. Sophie and Jon.” She cleared her throat delicately. “That was a surprise.”

  Nick stopped, fork in midair. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Elle turned her glass in her hands. “It just feels . . . weird.”

  She’d been utterly taken aback at seeing Sophie take Jon’s hand, smile up at him in that unmistakable way women had when looking at their man. The way she looked at Nick, the way Catherine looked at Mac. Though it took a lot of courage on Catherine’s part to look at Mac that way. Mac looked like he ate fragile young scientists for breakfast and spat out the bones.

  Still, Catherine was very, very happy. And Mac was visibly completely in love with her. So that was working out okay.

  “Weird how?” Nick spooned up the last of the raspberry ice cream and held it in front of her mouth. It was divine but she was stuffed. She shook her head.