Chapter 60: Buckle Up
The wind hammered my face and snapped my jacket out behind me, the sling rattling against my back while Tikki’s ears lay pinned flat against his head, the Diavel screaming underneath us as half an air conditioner went past my head with maybe a meter to spare and yet-
[A barrier... a fuckin’ barrier!] The grin split my face right through the migraine.
Tikki peeled one paw off my shoulder and patted my cheek twice, head tilting into the corner of my vision with his ears still flattened by the wind.
"Mea?"
"Mea!" I answered, with feeling, eyes never leaving the road.
And he accepted that completely and dug his claws back in while I chased the feeling instead of the road for half a second, the pressure, the instinct, the exact way it had bloomed out from between my eyes, the way you flex a muscle you’ve only ever flexed by accident, and...
It was there.
Nothing visible, nothing flashy, no shimmer in the air. I simply knew it existed, the same way I always know where my Awareness ends, and I couldn’t help cackling like an idiot.
[So... how do I get it to block?] I could also tell it wasn’t blocking anything. So, my mind went to the wind. After all, it was right there, slapping my face at a hundred and twenty. And with just a thought-
-Whoop-!
The wind stopped hitting me as though an invisible windshield had grown up out of the handlebars.
And the very next second, my skull lit up.
The dull ache between my eyes spiked while my vision tightened at the corners, and I dropped the thing so fast it was gone before I finished wincing.
But the grin got even wider, because that settled it, no luck involved. I just unlocked a new ability.
[Holy... shit! System, explain what just happened!]
I already knew, near enough. I asked anyway, because today was a wrong day to find out I’d skipped a detail.
-Ding!
{Telekinetic Barrier: a defensive application of Host’s Telekinesis. Conscious thought is required to maintain it. Maintenance costs is negligible. Stopping force is not.
All external force directed at the protected area is stopped upon contact. Cost scales with the force stopped. Force exceeding Host’s current stamina continues through unimpeded.
Observation: Host’s remaining capacity is not commensurate with Host’s enthusiasm.}
[...it’s basically a force field.]
And my brain took off without me. Bullets, falls, punches, explosions, car crashes... Every one of them was just force, and the best part, the part that made me want to kiss lady luck for giving me Telekinesis, was that Barrier wasn’t some separate skill with its own separate grind. It was a part of Telekinesis. And every scrap of TK training I put in from here on out would make it stronger for free.
[God, I love TK...]
A pickup truck ended the seminar.
It came over a rooftop on my right, and I was already leaning hard left off Awareness’s warning before my eyes even caught it, the truck landing where my lane used to be and cartwheeling through a storefront in a spray of glass.
I didn’t even consider the Barrier. Rather, I didn’t dare consider it.
Some part of me already knew, at the marrow level, that a thrown truck or a Tank’s fist would blow straight through my current capacity and kill me with whatever was left over.
One hit and I was still dead. Barrier or not.
I checked the side mirror.
The Tank filled it, two blocks back, foam sheeting off its jaw and drool whipping away in ropes, shouldering through the corner of a building because turning had stopped being an option for it.
It took the falling masonry across the back without registering any of it.
Its hunting brain was gone, and what was left was spending its own life to end mine.
And if that wasn’t enough, the migraine had sharpened, my vision had started blurring at the edges, and every Infected bashed through between me and the lake was a bill I couldn’t pay.
That killed the fun right on schedule.
Every Infected the Barrier stopped came straight out of the same muscle that was already failing.
[I can’t afford to waste even a tiny bit of stamina...]
Because I needed it. All of it. For the last part.
A dead SUV sat across both lanes at the next intersection, and I threw the Diavel into a drift that scrubbed forty off of the speed and most of my nerve, boots damn near skimming asphalt, the rear tire howling past an infected close enough that its fingers raked the air behind my seat.
The next one came out from between two stalled cars with no gap left to give, and the Barrier went up on my call this time before-
-Crash-!
It burst against the empty air ahead of my front wheel and cartwheeled away over a hedge wall, the bars never so much as shivering, and the spike that went through my skull in payment nearly whited out my left eye.
A traffic light tore off its pole somewhere behind me and helicoptered past overhead, wires whipping, close enough that I ducked flat on instinct.
Then came a chunk of concrete the size of a microwave, missing Tikki by a hand’s width while he squeaked, an honest, tiny squeak before burying himself so deep against my neck that his claws found skin through the jacket.
Another Infected stepped out of a gated doorway directly into my line, and despite the Awareness, I had no time, no room, no-
-Crash-!
Blood sheeted sideways off nothing while the lump that was its body ricocheted into a mailbox.
But this time the payment came with interest as the migraine rolled like thunder between my eyes, while the street ahead doubled for one long second before my eyes agreed to focus again.
And yet for reasons I didn’t know myself, I laughed.
Cracked and breathless and a good distance from sane, though Tikki did not join in, going completely quiet against my neck.
My stomach had started rolling on every hard lean, my next two dodges had come a beat later than they should have, and I was running on the very last of it now, low enough that I genuinely didn’t know anymore whether the final part would even work.
Then the city changed around me.
The streets widened out, buildings stepped back behind stone walls and iron gates, with gardens on the other side, with trees lining the lanes, and mansions sitting dark and huge on their lots, while a carved wooden sign flashed past with BOAT CLUB and an arrow on it
Barely any of them were left on the streets, because everything that used to walk this district had already walked down to the water.
And then I saw it.
Half a kilometer ahead, the road ran straight at the sky and dropped away over a crest, and past that edge, far below and far out, a sheet of dark water lay across the bottom.
The lake.
The downhill started right at that crest, and I knew the stretch from a lifetime ago, a long, steep zigzag carved into the hillside, hairpins stacked over hairpins all the way down into the lakeside flats, guardrail at every single bend.
My spine straightened up off the tank on its own, and my breathing went slow and deep without me commanding it to.
Taking the way sane people took it, that road wanted my feet pressed hard on the brakes right about now, down to forty, or even thirty, before the first bend.
After all, at one-twenty, the first bend was crashed into a guardrail, and then the open air and a very long drop.
I pulled one breath all the way down to the bottom of my lungs. Then another. Then a third, slower this time before-
"Buckle up."
"Mea!"
No hesitation in it at all, and his claws were already set.
While I jumped my boots up onto the seat, knees bent, crouched low over the bars with both hands still on them. And even then, the Diavel was dead steady underneath me at a hundred and twenty like we’d rehearsed this a hundred times before, which we absolutely had not.
I looked back one last time over my shoulder, and the Tank was still there, still coming, a wall of muscle ripping a stone gatepost out of its way without slowing, eyes locked on me and on nothing else left in the world.
-GRRAAAAAHHH-!!!
[Good...]
Throughout the whole chase, I’d held my partner at one-twenty for that thing’s sake, kept her on a leash she was never built to wear.
But now, I stopped holding her.
The throttle went to the stop, and the Akrapovič climbed the definition of music to my ears.
And within a second I was doing one-forty...
Then one-eighty with the wind prying at my arms while I folded myself down small over the bars.
Then two-fifty while Tikki plastered flat against my neck, the crest rushing in before...
I was going two-seventy Kilometers an hour towards a guardrail and a cliff.