The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (41 page)

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.”

Again, the same scoff.

“That was the animal trials,” he replied. “Like I said, we made adjustments.”

In spite of the situation, Gary found himself fighting a smile. Josie was clearly an impressive researcher; she knew how to get a subject talking, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the poor kid volunteered something he hoped to keep hidden.

“You said that,” she answered him, still unmoving. “So what are you so worried about?”

“I’m not worried,” was Nathan’s petulant response, but Gary saw him swallow hard. “I just happen to hate needles. I haven’t gotten a shot since I was twelve.”

“Mmm,” Josie replied, and closed her eyes. The seal was already broken. All she had to do was wait.

As if they all knew what she was doing, the others in the room remained silent, either working at their stations or watching the work get done. Gary, sitting on a computer chair he had pulled away from a desk, alternated between watching Nathan and Josie. The young programmer began chewing at his lip almost the second that everyone’s attention diverted away from him; as Gary watched, he began blinking more forcefully, rolling and squinting his eyes the way Gary had seen people with contacts sometimes do. Briefly, Nathan tried to reach his eyes with his hands, but they were strapped tightly to the metallic sides of the gurney. At the other end of the room, Josie waited, her eyes closed, her body relaxed.

“Ten minutes,” Reggie intoned, marking the timer. Once again, the room fell silent, and Nathan began to visibly sweat. And then, all of a sudden, he began to cry.

“Look, I already told you,” he murmured, “they don’t have a cure.”

“Come on, Nathan. They have to know what’s going on over in Hawaii. How can you sit there and tell me they have
nothing
prepared? Or even in the pipeline?” Josie pressed. Her voice was harder now, but her body was still relaxed.

Nathan began shaking his head back and forth slowly, like a dazed animal.

“You don’t understand, you don’t understand,” he moaned.

“Help me,” Josie said, finally sitting up. “Help me understand, Nate. You know if you tell me, you’re the first one we’ll help.”

Gary watched the young man look up and meet Josie’s eyes. A small but noticeable shudder ran through his body, and his teeth began to chatter again.

“Fifteen minutes,” Reggie intoned.

“Oh shit,” Nathan moaned.

“Nate, if you help me understand, then I can help you,” Josie repeated. “And I can help the people on the island,” she continued gently, trying to draw Nathan’s attention back to her. “Help me, Nate.”

“Oh God,” he moaned. “I can feel it happening.”

“You still have time,” Josie responded quickly, her body tensing. Gary watched her force it back into relaxation.

“No.” Nathan was crying again. “They
don’t have a cure.
” The insistence in his voice struck Gary, and it was clear to him that the others felt it as well.

“How can that be?” Josie asked.

The young man went back to shaking his head slowly, his eyes closed. And then, finally, Gary saw the resistance go out of his body.

“After the animal trials, we wanted to go back and revise the code for all the nanites. But the board wouldn’t approve the funds or the timetable. You know, Josie, it would have set us back almost a year before we could start field testing again.”

Josie nodded, her eyes soft with encouragement and understanding.

“The amount of money they gave us . . . it was laughable. And they wanted to leak word of the product in the pipeline by the end of the year, to boost stock prices. So we ended up just revising the code for the transmitter.”

Everyone besides Josie looked as confused as Gary felt.