At the city end of the bridge, the access road had been blown up, leaving an inaccessible 50 foot hole in the ground.
Back in Haven they’d been glued to their monitors, watching breaking news. The Marines had held the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, effectively quarantining the city. But apparently a few infected got through and each infected person became a vector, infecting, ten, maybe hundreds, in turn. It was exponential and it was fast.
One tank had crashed through a railing and hung half-on, half-off the bridge.
It was a good thing Jon wouldn’t need to exit the city to the north from the bridge. It hurt to think that maybe no one would ever cross that bridge again.
No use thinking that way. It was what it was.
The beautiful white skyline of San Francisco drew nearer. Black columns of smoke resolved into flames at the base, whole sections of the city burning.
This is what 1906 must have looked like, he thought. Only no fire brigades were coming. No communal kitchens, no armies of volunteers helping the wounded. There would be no rebuilding.
He reached the outer arm of the marina, followed it in, crossed over into the city along the waterfront, alive with infected. No one looked up at his passage. Light was draining from the sky and his helo was a dull matte black with no reflective surfaces. And no one had the concept of a helicopter in their heads anymore.
He flew over vicious street brawls, vehicles left askew, a cable car at the Powell turning station lying on its side. He crossed the grassy expanse of Ghirardelli Square, hovering for a moment over the roof of the Ghirardelli Building, then landed lightly. He killed the engines and sat there for a moment, head bowed.
His hands dropped to his lap. They were trembling slightly.
Amazing.
Jon had spent his entire adult life either in training for combat, in combat or undercover. He’d spent two years undercover, pretending to be a dealer in the Cartagena cartel, where any second he could be unmasked and hanged on a meat hook as reprisal and as a warning. Nothing fazed him, nothing scared him.
Or so he’d thought.
Turned out that the end of the world scared the shit out of him.
So though the city was burning around him, though time was pressing because who knew if even at this moment Sophie Daniels was being torn to bits, the case with the vaccines kicked into the bay, Jon sat still in his little helo, a marvel of technology and engineering and waited for his hands to stop shaking.
Screams came from the streets below. Bellows, really. Of rage, of fury. Something crashed heavily. Horribly another scream, this time of a child, but it wasn’t a scream of fear. No, it was savagery.
This wasn’t getting any better.
Time to go.
He had his backpack already at the helo door. With an almost silent hiss of hydraulics the helo door opened and Jon stepped out onto the Ghirardelli building’s roof. From up here, where he couldn’t see the street level, he could almost pretend that nothing had happened. If you ignored the smoke, you could almost think that it was two days ago and mankind was still rolling along in its lying, cheating, thieving ways where, however, in the interstices and almost as an afterthought, some people got medical care, some cops were able to stop crime, some kids got educated.
Someone played music, wrote books, painted canvases.
He stepped to the edge of the building and the fantasy disappeared. Down on the street it was a jungle. Worse than a jungle. In the jungle, animals didn’t try to exterminate their own species.
He strapped his scanner to his wrist and adjusted it to IR. Immediately, hot human-shaped splodges appeared on the screen, crazy even in IR.
It was getting darker now. Jon watched the street carefully, looking for breaks in the patterns. He couldn’t tell if the infected hunted in packs systematically or whether packs formed spontaneously. A snarling, crazed group of twenty creatures would go by, then nothing for a minute or two. Did they slow down with the darkness? Did they hunt at night? Did they sleep?
He had no idea.
His entire life as a soldier he’d pitted himself against enemies of different cultures. Pakistanis, Afghanis, Chinese, Mongolians, Colombians. All different, but now he realized they were more similar than different. Because they behaved according to human rules—the rules that were ingrained in our DNA.
These creatures knew no rules and he had no idea what kind of strategy would work against them, other than—don’t get caught.Because then, God forbid, you were worse than dead. You were lost.
As he watched a babbling, snarling pack pass by below he made a vow to himself. If he were infected, he would immediately kill himself. The idea of becoming one of them—a creature that would kill women and children, that would attack on sight—gave him a primordial sense of horror that he couldn’t shake.
He would never become one of those creatures of the night.
He would rather die.
Another pack passed by. And another. Then three separately, snarling down the street. A granny, a kid, a woman. Who wouldn’t hesitate to eat his face.
