Chapter 56: Ready?
I hit the stairs hard enough to feel it in my back teeth and took the next flight three steps at a time, one hand skating down the rail while the other kept the SR-25 pinned flat to my chest so the sling wouldn’t beat me to death on the way down.
The ground rolled again somewhere around the second floor, a long grinding heave that threw my shoulder into the wall mid-stride, and this time I didn’t stop for it, didn’t wait for it, just bounced off the concrete and kept falling down the stairwell in a way that only technically counted as running.
Two of them came out of a doorway on the first floor at the sound of my boots and-
-Snap-!-Snap-!
Their necks turned before their guns did, and I went past the bodies while they were still folding, the rifle hanging dead on its sling, because aiming took time and my will didn’t, and every warm shape my Awareness found anywhere near my path was an obstacle, and those obstacles got removed.
I came off the last flight onto the ground floor with my lungs on fire, and heard it.
Muffled shouting under my feet. Voices piling on top of each other, and threaded up through all of them, a woman screaming in a pitch that had nothing human left in it.
[Fuuuuuuuuuuck!]
I stopped using stairs like stairs, vaulted the rail, and dropped the whole first flight to the landing, hit, vaulted again, and came down in front of the holding cells with my knees screaming and the door already swinging under my palm.
The whole scene hit me at once as I burst through the doors.
Two massive bikers had a woman pinned across a bunk in the far cell, one across her legs, one bearing down on her shoulders, and she was bucking underneath them hard enough to lift men that size off their knees, soaked through with sweat, foam sheeting off her chin, every cord in her neck standing out while her jaws snapped at the air, again and again, at nothing.
Reyna.
Or what was left of her, anyway.
And bent over that thrashing mess of snapping teeth and rabid insanity, close enough to lose a hand to it, a skinny old man in round-rimmed glasses was trying with everything his shaking arms had left to line a syringe up on her arm.
"Hold still! Please, hold her still!" He was still trying to thread a needle into a woman the whole room could see was gone, while the two giants roared with all their might to keep her still.
My eyes cocked the wide-open cell doors, and the very next second, I closed my will around Nia’s father and reeled him straight out of the cell, up and across the block in one long pull, and parked him in the air at my shoulder with the syringe still clutched in his hand.
The scream got lost somewhere between his brain and his mouth, because all that came out of him was a small strangled sound while his glasses slid to the end of his nose and his loafers paddled at nothing.
The bikers’ heads snapped around, and both of those huge men went absolutely still, staring at the old man hanging in the air beside me, and for exactly one heartbeat, nobody in that room did anything at all.
Then it happened again, worse this time-
-RUMBLE-! -CRASH-!
The whole building jumped sideways, and beneath the floor, in the basement, the concrete gave way in a rumbling, tearing crunch while dust poured off the ceiling in sheets, and the tremor did what the woman couldn’t.
The biker on her shoulders lost his grip for half a second, and half a second was all it took to leap one surge and bury her teeth in his face.
-CRUNCH-!-AAAHHHA-!
She ripped her head sideways, tearing a fist-sized chunk of the man away, cheek and all, blood sheeting down both of them while his scream climbed into a pitch I’d be hearing for weeks, and the cell block before me dissolved into pure howling chaos all within a second of me bursting through its doors.
And then, from below all of it-
-GRRAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!
The roar came up through the floor from the parking level like thunder that had gotten into the basement, deep enough that I felt it in my sternum before my ears finished with it, and on its heels came gunfire. A lot of gunfire, overlapping with men screaming over it, and the repeated, crashing booms of something massive smashing through concrete.
My mouth went dry between one breath and the next, while my stomach dropped out from under me entirely, my body recognizing that sound a full two seconds before my brain agreed with it.
"Nikki!" Nia’s voice tore through the comms.
"I have him!" I was already moving, her father towed behind me while I took the stairs back up two at a time. "It’s a Tank! A fuckin’ Tank of all the damn fucking things!"
For half a breath, the line carried nothing except her breathing, because she had the same memories that I did.
"I’m rappelling down!"
"Be at the road right in front of your perch!"
I hit the ground floor at a dead sprint and found the hallway full.
Every door on the corridor had emptied, fifteen, maybe twenty of them spilling out armed and half-dressed and shouting over each other about the basement, and there was no stealth left to protect and no time left to spend, so I fired straight down the middle of all of it without breaking stride.
-Dish-!-Dish-!-Dish-!-Thard-!-Thard-! Thard-!-Thard-!...
The first three rounds left as whispers and the rest left as gunshots, the suppressor giving up at the fourth trigger pull, every round punching clean through the first body it met and burying itself in the one stacked behind, while the two threads of my Telekinesis that weren’t carrying Nia’s father worked the edges of the crowd, snapping necks two at a time, bodies folding into bodies, men in the back still shouting orders at men in the front who had already stopped being alive.
And under every second of it, the basement kept going, heavy impacts kept thundering the police station, and gunfire kept thinning out.
That thing was simply working, one floor down, through every living thing it found. We weren’t even on its list yet.
"W-who are you?" her father finally managed from behind my shoulder, thin and shaking.
"Not now!"
I dropped the dry mag, slapped in a fresh one on the run, cut left into the first office on Nia’s side of the building, and put my shoulder through the window without slowing down.
-CRASH-!
Glass went everywhere, cold air hit me, and my boots came down in the gravel on the compound’s back side with her father floating out through the broken frame behind me.
The boundary wall stood a few feet ahead, and my Awareness swept the far side of it and came back empty, so I lifted the old man up and over and set him down on the other side as gently as the schedule allowed.
Then the grapple gun was out and up.
-Disssh-! -Woosh-!
The hook bit into the second floor, the line snatched me up the wall, and I kicked off at the top of the pull and glided down the far side, landing next to a trauma surgeon who was rapidly starting to look like he needed one.
The street had already noticed us.
Infected came from both ends of it at a jog, eight, ten, a dozen, with more shapes peeling out of the side streets behind them, all of them running on a week of empty stomachs, slower, sloppier, and every last one of them still deadly to an unarmed old man in the open.
I put the dot on the closest chest and went to work.
-Dish-!-Thard-!-Thard-!
Rounds went out flat and loud, each one shredding through the first torso it found, and then the chest of whatever was stacked behind it.
But the noise rolled down the street and pulled more of them toward us.
I pulled the Cybertruck out of my Inventory onto the road beside me between one trigger pull and the next.
While behind me, inside the station, the gunfire stopped, all of it, all at once.
Everybody inside had lost. Of course they did.
Then the roar came again, arriving into one of my deepest, ugliest fears before it reached my ears, louder than before, and closer.
"System..." I ground out through my teeth, still shooting. "I need a 20mm rifle! And a crate of AP incendiary ammo for it!"
-Ding!
{Anzio 20mm with 20-}
"Just buy it!"
-Ding!
{Rifle stored in Inventory. No storage space for 20-}
"Try again!" The rifle was already coming back out of the Inventory and into my arms, a two-meter slab of tan steel, and I heaved it across the Cybertruck’s back seat with a grunt that cost me half a breath of shooting.
-Ding!
{Item bought and stored}
The ammo crate came out next and went in on top of the rifle and just then-
"Nia!" her father cried beside me.
She came out of the back alley across the road at a dead run, the M110A2 already up and already firing, dropping the two closest joggers mid-stride, messy black hair flying while her green eyes did one fast professional lap of her father, head to toe, checking for bites and blood before they cut to me.
"Take the car, and get to the penthouse!" I tossed her the key card, and she snatched it out of the air without looking at it. "Radio Kara, she’ll guide you in..."
"Get on the roof..." I jerked my chin at the back seat. "It’s one of the tallest out there, and use that..."
Her eyes flicked to the rifle, and the math landed behind them instantly.
"But it may not be-"
"Trust me!"
She swallowed the rest of the sentence whole and swung up into the driver’s seat, while her father stood exactly where I’d set him down, glasses crooked, syringe still in his hand, looking from his daughter to the truck to me to the roaring police station, his brain visibly refusing to accept any further input.
"What’re you waiting for?"
"W-what about you?"
Even now, even here, half a step from a building full of dying men and a roaring nightmare, the first whole sentence the man had built was about somebody else.
"Aww, that was so nice of you." I gave him the sweetest princess smile I could conjure. "But we really don’t have time for this shit."
"Dad!" Nia barked from the wheel. "Get in! Now!"
He jolted as though struck by lightning and scurried into the passenger seat, and the door hadn’t even finished closing before she stood on the accelerator.
-Screech-!
The Cybertruck tore off the line, and I had time for exactly nothing as-
-BOOM-!!
The police station exploded behind me.
The pressure arrived first, a hard shove across my right side that stumbled me a full step sideways, while came the sound of the building erupting outward, concrete and rebar and slabs of wall the size of cars blowing across the compound while dust boiled out over the boundary wall and turned the street grey around me.
And over it, through it, drowning all of it, the roar rolled out louder than the explosion it was riding.
Then-
-CRASH-!!
The road behind me rumbled as though an asteroid had come down on it, an impact that bounced me off my heels and cracked the asphalt hard enough that it split beneath my feet.
And then there were snarls directly behind me. Long and low. Deep enough that my entire body shook.
While I watched the Cybertruck swing the far corner with everyone I’d come for alive inside it, and only let my breath out when it was no longer visible.
My hands were trembling on the rifle hard enough that the sling buckle chattered against the stock while my breathing went short and high, because I knew, way too well what exactly stood behind me.
And I knew just as well that nothing I owned could kill it.
This rifle couldn’t. The twenty-millimeter driving away couldn’t. The C4 sitting rigged across the street couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
In my last life, putting down a single one of these had taken the leftovers of the world’s militaries. Missile volleys, Autocannon batteries, Columns of tanks and jets and choppers...
Humanity had thrown all of it, and humanity still lost.
And one of them was standing in the ruins twenty meters behind me, a year ahead of schedule.
I clutched the rifle tighter, pulled one long breath all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, and turned around.
My eyes had to climb to take it in.
Two stories of it.
Legs wider than three times my whole torso under a body of stacked, cabled muscle, arms longer than I was tall hanging from shoulders wide enough to carry the truck that had just escaped it.
All of it wrapped in thick purple hide, and where its fingers should have been, claws thicker than my arms extended. Curved, serrated things, every single one of them longer than my head.
Its maw hung open around rows of long teeth, its breath steaming off them into the cold, and its eyes, huge and burning arterial red, were already locked onto mine.
It had been looking at me before I turned around, as though It had been waiting for me to look back.
Neither of us moved.
The snarl rolling out of it stayed low and constant and unhurried, and those red eyes never blinked.
"Ready?" I asked, softly, to the only one who was still beside me.
Tikki’s claws dug through the jacket and into my shoulder, his ears pinned flat, and he licked his nose once as he stared with his eyes blown wide at the species that defeated humanity and went-
"Meah."
-GRRAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!! – KABOOOM-!!!