The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (16 page)

“What? What’s wrong?” Gary asked, even though he was fairly certain he knew.

“I don’t know . . . I think I know that car behind us. Could be bad news. Either way, I can’t take you straight to our place anymore. We’re going to have to take a little detour.”

They were next at the booth, and Josie had exact change ready. The gate lifted, and she pulled away quickly, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the SUV. Gary watched in the side-view mirror as it pulled out from the gate and stopped for a moment at the intersection, then headed in the opposite direction. He told Josie, whose tense demeanor slowly relaxed into a self-deprecating smile.

“Sorry. Like I said, first time doing this. I guess I keep expecting to get tailed or something,” she chuckled.

Her easy transition put Gary more at ease, and he leaned back into his seat, taking in the city as they cruised down nearly empty streets.

“So,” Josie spoke up suddenly, “how did you get the samples?”

He was surprised to feel a slight blush rise to his cheeks; it was embarrassing to think about the lie he had told, and equally as embarrassing to wonder if he had done it well. Keeping his eyes forward, he explained, “Oh, uh . . . I told my kids they needed to know their blood types. Especially the boys, since they surf . . . shark attacks and stuff, you know. I bought a kit and everything. So we all pricked our fingers and put a few drops on a slide. I just kept the slides when we were done and packed Brandon’s like you said. There’s not much there, but you said you only needed a little, right?”

She shrugged and answered, “More would have been better, but I guess there wasn’t much you could do. I didn’t really think about that.”

Her blunt reaction stung him slightly; he had been pretty impressed with himself, figuring out a way to take a blood sample without alarming his kids. Trying not to sound defensive, he told her he had brought a hair sample too.

“He buzzed his hair off a few weeks ago and left some pretty big clumps in the bathroom sink. I put a few in a baggy and brought it as well. And his old toothbrush. I thought maybe it might have DNA on it or something.” Gary was beginning to feel more and more foolish as he spoke without inspiring any reaction in Josie, so he shut his mouth and turned to look out the window. They were nearly to the freeway, and traffic had picked up. Ahead, he saw a huge mall advertising a Fredericks of Hollywood and a Banana Republic. He was not surprised to see the number of people out roaming the streets so late and thought of Waikiki, where tourists and druggies prowled the sidewalks until the clubs and restaurants shut down. A few minutes passed in silence before he pulled out his phone and opened it to make a call.

“What are you doing?” Josie asked. Her voice sounded tight.

“Calling my kids. I should let them know I landed.” He called Kai’s phone first, hoping he had finally turned it on. Instead of going straight to voice mail, he got a prerecorded message informing him that the cell phone user he was trying to reach was outside the coverage zone and to please try again later. Next, he dialed Paul. The same message played after one short ring. Confused, he dialed Sarah, wondering if he could have forgotten to pay the cell phone bill somehow.
Mine would be off too, then,
he thought as the same message started up. His confusion deepened into worry, and he decided finally to call the house. Two rings gave him a brief opportunity to feel hopeful, and then another prerecorded message picked up. “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and dial again.”

Josie glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Everything okay?” she asked. Her tone had softened slightly, and she was checking the rearview mirror less often.

“No one’s picking up,” he said quietly, frowning.

She smiled and replied, “Well, they’re kids, right? They’re probably having a party or something.”

Gary shook his head. “No, I mean the numbers don’t go through. Not to their cell phones, and not to the house. I get a prerecorded message from them all.”

She considered this quietly as she merged on to the freeway, slipping easily into the steady stream of cars flowing north. “Do you know anyone else you could call?” she finally asked.

He told her he’d rather not try, since it was now well past eleven o’clock and he was sure it was just a power outage or something. “I’m sure they’re fine,” he said unconvincingly. In reality, he was feeling very far away from his kids, and trying to quell the urge to overreact and call the police. After mentally going over a list of reasons why Kai was qualified to handle things at home, he suddenly found the silence in the car to be stifling.

“So, you said there’s a cure for this stuff, but it doesn’t work. Doesn’t that make it not a cure?” he asked. The question came out sounding slightly more snarky than he had intended.

Josie started to answer several times before finally saying, “Okay. No, it’s not a cure if it doesn’t work. At the same time, yes, it is a cure because we know it
does
work. We just have to figure out a way for it to move faster.”

“And you just need Brandon’s blood to do that?”

She was silent for a second, searching for an answer. The adrenaline from their meeting and escape had worn off, and he could tell that she was beginning to feel the late hour. Finally, after taking a deep breath, she said, “Brandon’s blood might show us how the nanotech interacts with an individual human subject. We should be able to get some samples of more current particles as well. We’re thinking some of the design was altered before the trial began, in an attempt to ‘fix the issues’ they had with the animals.” She scoffed. “Problem is, the ‘issue’ is the nature of nanotechnology.”

Before she could continue, Gary cut her off, saying, “But how do you know you can make a cure?” He was beginning to worry that he had gotten himself involved in something he could never understand and that might very well turn out to be fruitless.

Josie glanced at him and said quietly, “I told you, we made a cure; it just needs to be refined.”

“No, what you said was it works, but it doesn’t really work!” he burst out, his frustration mounting. “It seems to me if these particles are really as unpredictable as you say they are, you don’t have any way of knowing what you’re doing. No more than the people you used to work for.”

“Well . . . that’s true,” she replied, forcing herself to keep calm. “But I know we can make a cure.”

“How?” he demanded.

Glancing at him, she said in a deliberate voice, “Because Argo has one.”

Dumbstruck, Gary stared at her with his mouth hanging open. “What?” he choked out.

She jerked the car angrily into the number three lane, heading for their off-ramp. A horn blared behind her as the driver of a sleek sports car swung around them and flipped Josie off, clearly shouting something at them. Returning the gesture, she slowed and pulled off the freeway.

“Gary, try to understand. What happened to those animals . . . that’s what is, in all probability, going to happen to Brandon, and a lot of other people on Oahu, in a very short while. We believe that Argo has some sort of emergency safety measure prepared, but we don’t know what it is.”

“Then what the hell am I doing here?” he shouted.

He watched as she tried to keep her temper. In the same quiet voice, she finally answered, “When the nanotech goes rogue, it puts the host body into a deep state of shock. That’s how it breaches the nervous system. Its interactions with the brain change almost immediately; in some ways, it’s like a clot moving through the brain. Most subjects experience massive cardiac arrest. Then the particles take over the muscle system.” She fell silent as she maneuvered the car through ever-narrowing streets, heading away from the bright lights of downtown.

Feeling like a complete fool, Gary replied, “I don’t understand.”

The muscles in her jaw flexed before she said, “In almost every instance, the shock kills the subject. Then the nanites take over; they keep the blood moving, the lungs taking in oxygen, everything. But they don’t use the heart to pump the blood, and we think they shut down parts of the brain that we haven’t quite figured out how to . . . fire back up again. It’s massive, massive trauma to the brain. Right now if we kill off the particles, we kill off the host.”

Horror ran through Gary’s body like an electric current. His mind conjured up the image of his son, dying horribly, then kept living but not alive. He found he could not speak, his lips moving silently as he searched for an answer, eyes staring straight ahead.

He was snapped out of his stupor by Josie’s strange choked whisper. “Oh no!”

Turning slowly to look at her, he saw that her eyes were glued to the mirror. He glanced out the back window and saw a black SUV pull up behind them. Before he could ask if it was the same vehicle, its engine revved loudly. Instantly, Josie slammed the pedal to the floor, sending their car squealing around a corner; Gary saw a small group of drunken teenagers hoot at them as they sped down a quiet side street, the black SUV close on their tail.

Josie said nothing, but kept her eyes darting between the road and the mirror, her hands wrapped tight around the wheel.

“Where are you going?” Gary shouted over the engine.

She whipped around another corner before she answered, “The freeway! There are cars on the freeway! Witnesses!”

A cold shudder of dread swept through his body as he realized the implication of her words. His brain reeled as they screeched around another corner, the sound of the SUV’s tires squealing behind them. He tried to brace himself for what would come next, but he wasn’t sure what to prepare for. The shattering of glass as bullets ripped into the car? The awful crunch of metal against metal as they slammed their much larger vehicle into the sedan? His mind rebelled, shutting down, refusing to offer more possibilities, and he was left to simply brace himself against the floorboards and armrests.

Josie was breathing hard, leaning forward in her seat, when the freeway finally came back into view. She checked her mirror once more as she ran the last red light before a series of green that stood between them and the on-ramp, accelerating hard. Behind them, the SUV bucked as the driver slammed it into a higher gear and swung out to the left, pulling up beside the Honda.

“What the hell are they doing?” Gary gasped. The other vehicle’s windows were tinted almost black. It was impossible to see how many people were in the vehicle or who they were.

“I don’t know,” she answered breathlessly, eyes on the ramp that was only a few blocks away. The SUV’s engine roared as the driver gunned it, shooting out in front of them.

“Shit,” Josie hissed. There was nowhere to go but forward. “Listen to me, Gary. I want you to put this number in your phone and dial. Whoever answers, just tell them Lashbrook says ‘ambush.’” She rattled off the number as he fumbled with his phone and pressed “call.” Watching her face as the phone rang in his ear, Gary could see she was trying to calculate her chances of getting the Honda to the on-ramp before whatever the occupants of the SUV were planning could happen. When it was a few car lengths ahead of them, the passenger side window rolled halfway down; they caught a glimpse of movement in the SUV’s side-view mirror, and Josie suddenly shouted, “Oh God, Gary, hang on to something!”

He tried to hold his phone and brace himself as a black-clad arm flung something out of the SUV’s window. A tiny bit of silver glinted in the streetlight, scattering across the ground less than half a block in front of them. Josie screamed through clenched teeth and slammed her foot on the brake just as Gary finished dialing. He looked up for a brief second and realized in horror that road spikes had been thrown down on the street in front of them. There was no time to check the speedometer, but he knew that the SUV driver’s ploy had worked perfectly. Josie had pushed the Honda up to freeway speeds; seeing the spikes had made her panic and slam on the brakes, causing the little car to fishtail wildly. She jerked the wheel back, overcorrecting, and an earsplitting explosion of sound rocked the car. Then they were airborne, grasping frantically for some kind of brace, crying out as their heads cracked together and against the windows.

The Honda smashed into the asphalt and spun into the air again, then slammed into the foundation of the freeway overpass. Another blast of sound ripped through Gary’s ears, followed instantaneously by an excruciating impact that slammed his upper body back into the seat. The immediate stinging on his skin exploded into a burn so intense he thought he was on fire, and he tried to raise his arms to swat away the flames, but found he could not move.

As his eyes rolled back, he dimly heard a tiny buzzing from the backseat. And then everything went black.

~

The strip malls and industrial buildings soon gave way to smaller gas stations and local shops as Mike, Heather, and Sarah made their way toward the Pearl City police station. Their eyes adjusted to the night quickly, and now they could discern the dark buildings huddled back off the sidewalk. Every so often a car would pass, its headlights scattering shadows down the sidewalk, or they would find a small cluster of cars stopped in the middle of the street with a few people standing together talking. They were nearing another when Sarah realized Mike was huffing and puffing.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” she murmured, stopping him. “You can put me down. I’ll be okay.”

He couldn’t catch his breath to speak, so he just smiled warmly at her and set her gently on the concrete. Heather stepped up beside her, and they continued on, flanking Sarah. As they approached the mass of cars, the sounds of static and complaining became clearer. A figure was bent over the driver’s seat of one car, fumbling with the radio. Several other people stood nearby, rubbing their arms to keep warm and conversing quietly with each other.

Suddenly the static on the radio gave way to an obnoxious, blaring alarm, and a heavy male voice broke in to say, “This is the emergency broadcast system. This is Sheriff Stan Akebono of Pearl City, and this is not a test. We are experiencing blackouts throughout the island, making driving hazardous. Some isolated incidents of violence have been reported in Honolulu and its outlying areas.” The hushed conversation at the side of the road went silent. “We are requesting that citizens return to their homes, if possible, and proceed to the nearest police station or public school building if not. Again, this is not a test. This message will repeat in thirty seconds.” The alarm picked up again, and the man controlling the radio switched it off.