The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series)

by Tracy Serpa

  Marks didn’t react for a brief second, and then he smiled thinly.

  “Of course. We’ll wait in the hallway,” he said, and moved away, his partner following.

  She fought the urge to tell the nurse to call for help, and instead swiped her ID card to open the door into the ward. Once inside, she waited for the lock to reengage before she headed down the hallway for Brandon’s room, her mind racing. She would have to call Thad from the room and tell him to get some kind of security up to her immediately. She hoped desperately that there would be enough people available to answer such a call.

  She found Brandon asleep on the gurney in his room, his arms, legs, and waist still restrained. He was breathing peacefully, but his skin was a sickly, pallid shade of yellow. A small part of her thanked the men in the hallway for calling her here, as it was clear her patient was in need of treatment. A twang of guilt hit her as she realized how long it had been since she had even thought about Brandon. She checked his pulse and found it beating slightly too fast, and weakly. He didn’t wake at her touch.

  She picked up the phone and held it to her ear, dialing the extension for Thad’s office.

  “Oh . . . hello?” A female voice came through the speaker.

  “Hello?” Karen responded, confused.

  “Dr. Lau, this is the nurse. I was just calling in for you.”

  “Oh. What is it?” Karen felt her authoritative doctor persona reemerge as she waited impatiently for the nurse to respond.

  “Well, I’ve got a call from triage for you. They’ve been trying to find you, because a new patient is making things difficult for them down there. He keeps asking for you.”

  “Who is it?” Karen snapped.

  “Um, they said Kavida,” the nurse responded. “First name Kai.”

  Before Karen could respond, the sound of a gunshot blasted through the speaker, and the phone on the other end of the line clattered to the floor.

  Twenty-Two

  Mike had pulled the car off the side of the freeway to check the map, driving carefully into the dirt and coming to rest near a clump of smallish trees and bushes. With the headlights off, Sarah was able to see the line where the storm clouds hugged the dark island far off in the distance. The rain fell steadily against the roof of the car, drumming constantly in her ears.

  They had not passed many cars on the roads since backtracking from Honolulu, where both sides of the freeway had been jammed with vehicles trying to get into and out of the city. Many were abandoned, as people had opted to leave them behind and make for an emergency center on foot, although others sat waiting, the engines running, the windows slightly fogged. Before they had gotten close enough to get snared in the mess, Mike had crossed the median and headed back toward Pearl City.

  The traffic thinned as their distance from Honolulu increased, and soon Sarah only saw another car every few minutes. One truck materialized out of the night, its headlights off, screaming down the freeway at breakneck speed. Heather had cursed as it buzzed past their car, then looked immediately at her father, embarrassed. After a few seconds of looking stern, the smallest of smiles crossed his face.

  Sarah wasn’t sure how they were handling the horrific death of Heather’s mother, Mike’s wife, but no one had spoken a word about it since leaving the neighborhood. She felt sure they would grieve at another time, when the world around them didn’t seem to be crumbling to its very foundations. Even so, there was a new edge to Mike, a hardness in his face and voice when he spoke that she knew must indicate the level of pain he was experiencing.

  As she sat and waited for Mike to get the car moving again, she suddenly remembered Lani. She closed her eyes slowly; somehow, the terrifying reality of her friend’s death seemed too far away to impact her as intensely as it had earlier in the day. Everything she had seen and heard put a strange kind of distance between that trauma and herself, so that now all she felt was the soft, nagging pull of nausea in the pit of her stomach, mingled with a small, guilty kind of gratitude that she had survived.

  She opened her eyes again, looking out over the dark landscape, watching as another truck passed on the freeway, heading in the direction of Honolulu.

  “Where do you think everyone is?” she asked in a quiet voice, looking at Heather.

  The older girl looked tired, dark circles blooming under her eyes as she sat looking out the window in a haze.

  “Well, probably most people are trying the evacuation centers first. But if what Kai said is right, those might not be reliable. And if that’s the case . . . I don’t really know. If it was me, I’d probably—”

  Heather’s voice caught in her throat for a moment and thickened with emotion.

  “—I’d probably go home first. Someplace I knew and felt safe. And I’d try to wait this out, whatever it is.”

  Sarah leaned her head against Heather’s shoulder. She knew what Heather must be feeling—that her home was not safe, that it had been corrupted by a horrifying act of violence, and she would never feel safe there again—because she was feeling it too.

  “I just want to get to Kai,” Heather whispered. And for the first time, Sarah realized that she was not the only one worried about her brother.

  They watched together for a few more minutes while Mike looked over the map. Out in the night, a small fire blossomed, the smoke rising up to meet the storm clouds, and then they heard the gunfire. At first, Sarah thought it was heavier rain, but as she listened to the sporadic bursts, she realized she was listening to some kind of firefight.

  “Mike,” she said, but when she looked, she realized he was already staring intently out of the window toward the growing flames.

  The fire provided enough light to allow them to see the street immediately surrounding the building that burned. There was no way to know what the building had been; it might have been a grocery store or a retail shop of some kind. Outside in the street, a group of figures—Sarah counted five—moved into the firelight from out of the darkness, their shadows grotesque and shifting on the asphalt. They stalked forward in coordination, crouched and holding what appeared to be rifles, the butts tucked into their shoulders, the muzzles aimed at the burning building.

  “Are they looters?” Sarah whispered. No one answered her; they waited together, watching silently as the small group fanned out in front of the smoldering building.

  The fire had found some kind of fuel, because it burned suddenly brighter, more intensely, and the group in the street stepped back slightly, shielding their faces from the heat. In the same moment, a man burst out of the building, shattering a plate glass window as he came. The fleeing man’s clothes and hair burned fiercely, but he did not move as Sarah expected him to, flailing his arms or dropping to the ground. Instead, he charged immediately at the nearest member of the armed group, his arms outstretched and swiping at the air as he ran. Immediately, the street was alive with the chuk chuk chuk of automatic fire, with round after round finding its mark in the man’s chest, arms, legs, and neck. Still he charged, and in seconds he was on one of the group members, throwing him to the ground and pouncing on him. The others in the group scrambled forward, trying to pull the man off their comrade, when another figure burst out of the building. The second burning man charged the group as well, and Sarah thought she could hear a distant scream filled with rage and pain.

  The first burning man was still wrestling with his armed foe when a shot from somewhere struck him in the side of the head, and he collapsed to the street immediately. His victim shoved the body off and scrambled back into the street, grasping for the rifle he had dropped in the scuffle. The second burning man was locked in a brawl with another member of the group for a few seconds before another headshot sent him sprawling to the pavement as well.

  As the armed men regrouped, Sarah could see they had begun to argue about something. They gestured emphatically at each other, and it quickly became evident that the two men who had come into contact with the burning ones were standing against the other
three. Without warning, one of the three untouched men lifted his rifle and gunned down the other two, swiftly and precisely, one bullet apiece through each of their brains. Their bodies collapsed to the street next to the two burning men, whose bodies still smoldered in the rain.

  There was no more conversation among the group. Within seconds, they were hefting up the first body and hurling it back into the flaming building, followed immediately by the second attacker and then their own men. Finally they were moving again, disappearing almost immediately back into the darkness of the street.

  Sarah swallowed hard and looked up at Heather and Mike. They were both still watching the street: Mike’s face was a hard mask, unreadable; Heather’s eyes were wide, both fearful and angry, reflecting the blazing building.

  And then, without speaking, Mike started up the car and pulled carefully back out onto the freeway. Sarah noticed that he did not turn the headlights back on. Instead, they drove slowly, carefully, keeping to the slow lane except for the one time that they happened upon a small clump of abandoned cars clogging up an off-ramp.

  Finally, Sarah could not stand the heavy silence anymore.

  “We know where we’re going now?” she asked, her voice timid.

  “I found a marina on the map, just outside of Pearl Harbor. I’m guessing they’ll have some larger boats, which is good, because I don’t want to try to make an island crossing in some rinky-dink thing,” Mike answered.

  “Are you going to tell Kai?” Sarah pressed.

  “He said he’d contact us after he got to the hospital and found your brother. Until then, I’m going to leave the radio silent,” Mike responded. She could tell from his tone there was an important reason for this decision and assumed it had something to do with what they had just seen.

  As they drove, the storm clouds lightened from a deep, heavy gray, to a lighter purplish color. Sarah glanced at the dashboard clock and realized that dawn was approaching; she was unsure how she felt about that fact. The darkness that surrounded them was disconcerting, but it was also protection. With the sun up, the world would be more visible, but then again, so would they.

  Mike pulled off at an exit Sarah didn’t recognize, idling down the ramp and rolling through the dead light without stopping. Immediately, they were forced to slow their progress as the surface streets were more frequently clogged with abandoned cars. Twice, Mike was forced to pull up onto the sidewalk, and even then, he scraped his car along the side of another vehicle, his side-view mirror cracking as they navigated through the mess.

  As they neared the coast and the sky continued to lighten, the air around them thickened with fog. The storm had rolled past, leaving behind it the lower clouds that now dragged and swirled past Sarah’s window, obscuring the world beyond the sidewalks at the edge of the street. And the streets remained quiet; the shops were still dark, many of their windows broken, their displays gutted. All along the street, empty cars were parked haphazardly, often with their doors left open. Glass and debris littered the ground, soggy from the rain.

  When she saw the first person standing in the fog, Sarah let out a tiny gasp and pulled away from the window instinctually. Without saying a word, Mike followed her gaze, and they watched carefully as the car crept forward toward the figure waiting in the fog.

  She was probably just a teenager. Her feet and legs were bare up to the edges of her soiled jean shorts. The skin of her calves and thighs was horribly bruised, and a single, large wound ran from the back of her kneecap to the middle of her thigh. Her tank top hung off her shoulders, one of the straps broken, and much of the fabric torn and bloodied. It was difficult to see her face; she stood on a strip of grass in front of a row of shops with her head titled back, her mouth hanging open, and she stared glassy-eyed at the sky. Occasionally her lips, swollen as if she had been hit, would quiver as if she were whispering to herself or hearing some faraway music.

  “Oh my God,” Sarah whispered.

  There were more—many, many more. Out in the fog, along the sidewalk, inside the looted shops, even standing in the middle of the street, people stood or knelt in the same strange posture. Each of them bore the marks of attacks, their clothes and bodies tattered and ruined, their eyes glassy, staring, unseeing.

  “What are they doing?” Heather whispered.

  Mike had not dared to stop the car; they had been surrounded before they had realized what was going on. Sarah was silently grateful that they had ended up in his newer, and therefore much quieter SUV, rather than his noisy old truck. Still, the sound of that truck would always remind her of being rescued; suddenly she remembered the jogger and the way he had knelt in her living room, unaware of her as she moved directly past him.

  “The guy at my house was like this,” she said quietly, unable to tear her eyes away from the eerie vision outside her window. “He just sat there in the den when I was trying to get to the door, with his eyes open and everything. I kept waiting for him to . . . get up and come after me, but he never did.”

  She looked up at Mike. His eyes were moving slowly, methodically, from one figure to another, watching them as he navigated the street.

  “What’s doing this to people?” Heather asked in a quiet voice. “The message said to wear masks, so they think maybe it’s in the air or something? But how come we’re not . . . like that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mike answered. They were creeping along now, weaving through the shells of vehicles, past accidents, and more staring figures. “All of these people have been hurt,” he continued. “Seems to me that’s probably how this thing is getting transferred.”

  A sudden gunshot made them all jump, and Sarah squealed, clapping her hand over her mouth. Another followed immediately, and then another, each one closer than the last.

  “Where’s it coming from?” Mike said, his voice low and tense.

  They all craned their necks, looking from window to window, trying desperately to pinpoint the sounds as they echoed through the fog.

  “There,” said Heather, pointing out the windshield, toward the passenger side. A muzzle flash lit up the fog, and the crack of another bullet ripped through the cab. In the same moment, Sarah saw several of the figures begin to move, drawing their limbs into their bodies, shivering, as if they were just realizing that they were freezing cold. And then a wail picked up, muffled but somehow also amplified by the fog; it was met almost immediately by similar cries. All around them, the figures were beginning to move, the faces of those nearest to their car contorted in agony, their mouths twisted grimaces or wide “O”s of pain.

  The gunshots continued methodically, flashes lighting up the fog in the distance. Finally Sarah caught a glimpse of someone holding a weapon. He was dressed like the men who had started the fire, and carried a pistol. She thought she saw a rifle slung across his back, but she couldn’t be sure.

  “Those men, the ones we saw near the freeway—it’s them,” she said quickly.

  Mike only had to consider this information for a brief moment.

  “Duck your heads,” he said, his voice once again cold and commanding. He began accelerating, quickly but smoothly, the engine thrumming slightly louder as he pressed the gas pedal.

  “Who are they shooting at?” Sarah asked.

  “We’re not hanging around to find out,” was Mike’s only answer.

  ~

  “Start the timer.”

  Hammond was zipping up Nathan’s quarantine room, and he gave the order to no one in particular. Tab rolled forward on her chair and hit a button on the computer, presumably starting a clock that Gary couldn’t see.

  The room was fairly quiet aside from the whirring of the computers as they worked and cooled themselves and the small sounds of distress leaking through Nathan’s plastic surround. He had stopped screaming soon after Hammond pulled the needle from his arm, his shouts dissolving into a brief bout of hysterical tears, which had, in the last few seconds, calmed to low moans and chattering teeth.

  “What happens
now?” Gary asked Josie. She sat nearby on a folding chair, her head down, swollen eyes locked on the floor.

  “Now, we wait,” she answered, keeping her voice as low as his. “Either way, we learn valuable information about how this stuff is working. But the hope is that Argo has something to kill the nanites—a cure of sorts—and that Nathan will panic as he starts to feel the change happening and tell us what or where it is.”

  With that, she stood and dragged her chair over to the nearest wall, where she plopped back down and leaned her head back, closing her eyes. Obviously, the conversation was over.

  Gary watched Nathan squirming on the gurney for a few minutes before he realized that his legs were starting to tingle from sitting on the cold concrete floor. Gingerly, he shoved himself up, groaning as he moved, once again feeling every bit of the car accident. Was that just last night? he wondered. It seemed impossible.

  “How quickly should we expect results?” he heard Hammond asking as he crossed the room, looking for a more comfortable seat.

  Reggie, who sat at the computer table with the microscope and the samples, spun around in his chair to face his boss.

  “Hard to say. The sample we used came from one of the original patients, and we don’t know if the nanites are evolving as they spread. I think we’ll get a good idea of how quickly the breach occurs from this, but it’s certainly not real time. And it won’t account for all methods of transmission—this is blood to blood. Saliva might be different.”

  Hammond looked dissatisfied with this answer, and Nathan scoffed. Everyone in the room turned to look at the man inside the plastic.

  “Yes?” Hammond said, his tone edged with a threat. “You have something to add?”

  Nathan looked at each of them, his eyes moving deliberately to each of theirs, and then his thick lips set into an angry pout.

  “You’re already blinking a lot, Nate,” Josie piped up. She had barely moved, just opening her eyes and tilting her head down slightly. “That’s a bad sign. You know as well as I do, the animals that breached in the trials all displayed symptoms of ocular discomfort.”