Chapter 55: Just Give Me Five Damn Minutes!
The ground had gone still. But Tikki hadn’t.
He was still down from the shoulder pocket with that low growl running out of him, aimed straight through the floor at something neither of us could see, while I stepped through the open door into the stairwell and started down anyway, because whatever was under us wasn’t a thing I could just shoot away.
Every cell in me wanted to take it three at a time, wanted to be down there already and have Nia’s father over my shoulder.
But magic powers or not, I wasn’t immune to bullets, so I leashed those thoughts tight and took it steady.
Tikki had stopped growling halfway down, paws on my shoulder, head up, ears swivelling at the dark, ready to launch himself at the first thing that got close.
By the time I reached the third floor, Awareness had already laid out half of it.
Four of them, clustered in the first room off the stairs.
Two more, loose in the hallway outside.
"Six close by..." I whispered as I set my shoulder against the wall beside the hallway. "You should see one by the window..."
"I do." Nia’s voice came back from a rooftop and a road away. "Maybe I’ll go for the head shot."
"Don’t."
I could already feel her grinning through the earpiece.
"Now, on the count of three..." I let my Awareness settle over the three that weren’t hers, finding the stalks of their necks in the dark, feeling the line the twist would take.
"One..." I whispered, feeling my heart rate kick up, " Two... three."
-Crash-!
Glass came apart across the room as her round punched through the window and exploded the head of the man standing at it, and in the same breath, I closed my will around three heads at once and wrenched.
-Snap-!-Snap-!-Snap-!
Not a grip on the throat, nothing so slow as choking.
Just rotation, hard and instant, and three spines turned past where a spine wasn’t built to go, and three bodies folding before the fourth had finished dropping by the window.
"What the-"
One of the two in the hallway, half a sentence, spinning toward the sound of the glass.
And I peeked into the hallway, SR-25 already up before-
-Dish-!
The round ripped through his head, blasting it apart in a shower of blood and brain before burying itself in the far wall.
And just as the woman behind him got her mouth open-
-Dish-!-Dish-!
I put two in her chest before the first’s casing even hit the floor.
Three rounds, and the loudest thing in that hallway was the brass hitting the concrete and the dull thud of lead going home in the wall.
[Holy shit, the recoil...]
I couldn’t help it.
[It’s so good! SO buttery!]
Barely above a 5.56, the muzzle sitting right back on target like it had never left, every Credit of that obscene invoice paying itself off round by round while I stepped out over the bodies.
"Nikki, what the hell!" Nia’s voice crackled with glee. "The shot from this thing was whisper-quiet!"
"I know, right..." I chuckled. "Just don’t forget the cooldowns..."
"The hell do you take me for..."
"Mea," said Tikki. He had his own comms now, new custom earbuds I’d bought him back at Nia’s apartment.
"Come on, man," Nia grumbled. "I’m not some trigger-happy psycho..."
Tikki and I both shared a look.
And then it happened again.
-Rumble-!
The building lurched again, harder than the first time, a deep sideways heave that shoved me into the wall while dust sifted down and the police station let out that same long, grinding groan beneath my feet.
While inside his pocket, Tikki’s head dropped, and the growl came right back up out of him, pointed straight down through the floor, exactly the way it had the first time.
And from outside, past the walls and across the courtyard and the road beyond it, the horde once again went haywire.
Muffled, distant, worn down by all that concrete and space, but I heard it, that endless roar breaking apart and climbing into something higher.
"Nikki." Her voice came instantly.
"Look..." I kept it flat, kept it level, poured everything I had into keeping it there. But my own heart was sitting up behind my teeth as I said it. "... I’m gonna hurry the hell up... because that’s all we can do... doesn’t matter if this was natural or the alternative."
Without waiting for her reply, I moved, quick yet quiet, down the length of the hallway with my Awareness giving me every room and wall and breathing body at once.
The hall ran long, with the stairwell in the middle of it, and offices on both sides. The whole right-hand wall was empty because that was the side facing Nia’s nest, the side nobody with sense went near anymore.
My Awareness kept finding people. Behind that door, in that room, and a few on the floor below.
And I let every one of them live.
I wasn’t here to clear the building. The more bodies I dropped, the higher the odds someone noticed, and then I’d have no choice but to do to this place what I’d done to the mafia compound, and I simply didn’t have time for that.
Taking the stairs leading to the floor below, I paused halfway, as two more stood in the hallway, with cigarettes in their mouths.
A man and a woman.
I stopped at the corner and let them talk, because what came out of their mouths next was worth more than the few seconds wasted.
"...tell you, it’s not even the shooting anymore..." The man dragged on the cigarette, his hand carrying the fine constant tremor of someone who hadn’t slept in a long time. "It’s that you never know when... Three in the morning, middle of the day..."
"Nobody even knows who it is." The woman took it off him, dark hollows scooped under her eyes. "Could be anybody... Somebody we crossed, somebody we didn’t... The whole world’s gone crazy, take your pick."
"Can’t even shoot back..." His sighed. "Second we do, all those things stacked up around that building come running, and then it’s not one shooter. So we just..."
"Boss thinks it’s about the doc."
"Boss thinks everything’s about the doc..." He shook his head. "Won’t use him, though. Says if he’s wrong, and he gets the one guy who can actually stitch people back together killed for nothing... Can’t blame him. Not with Reyna the way she is."
Something in my chest ticked over.
"How’s she doing?" The woman’s voice dropped. " How is she really doing?"
"Worse..." He was quiet for a second. "One of ’em got her arm two days back. Just the one bite. Doc’s handling her..."
"She’s a good woman..." The woman rubbed her face. "... Doesn’t deserve to go out from one lousy bite."
And every drop of blood in me went cold.
[One bite...]
Oh, they had no idea.
Of course they didn’t. Nobody out here did yet.
The shit-show was still counted in days, and everyone who’d made it this far had done it by slamming a door and never opening it again, sealed in their own little pocket of the world.
Hardly anyone has even gone out on a supply run yet.
So of course many people still didn’t know.
One bite, and you turn.
Every time.
And worse, there was no clock on it.
That was the part that hollowed you out. Some turned inside a second. Some took an hour. Some walked around talking and eating and hoping for weeks, right up until they didn’t.
That Reyna woman had been bitten two days ago.
Which meant she could still be Reyna.
Or she could stop being Reyna in the next thirty seconds, in a locked cell, with Nia’s father bent over her arm and nowhere on earth to run.
[Need to hurry the fuck up!]
-Snap-!-Snap-!
The man and the woman dropped where they stood, necks turned, the cigarettes rolling on the ground.
No reason to leave strolling the same hallway I might be extracting Nia’s father from.
No time to feel much of anything about it either.
"Nia." I had the comms up before they’d hit the floor. "Things have gotten worse... your dad’s being forced to somehow save an bitten woman..."
"Motherfucker!" Her breath came fast and ragged down the line. "Just hurry the hell up."
"Yeah. I know where the cells are..." I was already moving through the next set of stairs. "Gimme five minutes tops."
I knew this place.
At least the bones of it, and the municipal ugliness of it, because a little under a year ago, I had spent three nights in a cell in this exact building.
Took the Diavel to a race I had no business at, figured I’d make some money, and have some fun doing it, right up until the cops showed up and I put my hands up instead of running.
Kara bailed me out on the fourth morning and gave me a lecture I mostly deserved.
Point is, I knew the layout.
Three floors up off the street, then the ground floor, then one down to the holding cells, then down again to the underground parking.
And if I had kidnapped a doctor to keep a bitten wife breathing, I knew exactly where I’d have stashed him.
Room enough to work, four walls built to keep a person from leaving.
The cells right below the ground floor.
Which put Nia’s father two floors and a lifetime of stairs below me, shut in a box with a woman who could turn into a fresh sprinter at any moment.
And as if things couldn’t get worse-
-RUMBLE-!
Except this one didn’t roll; it hit with a violent shudder that ran up through the building, stuttering the lights and damn near sending me tumbling down the stairs.
While in his pocket, Tikki’s growl climbed up to a point it never did before.
I, too, stopped fighting the thought at this point.
No time left to keep lying to myself about the ground, no power to do anything about it either, so I shoved it all the way down and looked at the stairwell dropping away into the first floor, and leapt as though the whole place wasn’t crawling with people who’d shoot me on sight.
[Five minutes... Just give me five damn minutes!]