Chapter 80: Nothing Before Us
I pretended I hadn’t seen it. She pretended she hadn’t let it fall. So for about four minutes that was the arrangement.
Then she wiped her face with the back of her good hand, ruining it.
"You’d do it..." she said, staring straight ahead through the mesh. "You’d actually go and do it, wouldn’t you? Burn this whole country down one city at a time, callin’ it groceries-"
"Nothing before us!"
My own voice came back off the windscreen at me.
"Nothing comes before us! That’s how we’ve lived!" My knuckles had gone white on the wheel. "I told every one of you more than once, and everybody nodded, voted, went to bed. Now it’s real, and suddenly-"
"I know, Nikki." Her voice cracked straight down the middle. "And I agree... That’s why you don’t get to do this... there’s no coming back from what you’re about to do..."
And the kitchen came back.
Half a second of it, maybe less, sunlight lying gold across a wooden floor with a chipped mug in my hand, somebody complaining about snow on the stairs.
I bit down until my jaw ached, before dragging on the fourth cigarette hard enough to burn my lungs.
Because that’s the thing about what that creature breathes into you.
It doesn’t sell you a high. After all, a high, you can talk yourself out of.
It sells you addiction and a dream come true.
Some rotten little corner of my head has been keeping the log house warm ever since, waiting for me to be quiet for two seconds so it can slide the door open again, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to go back to a driveway that never existed.
I’ve lost a great deal in the last life.
And that thing handed all of it back to me, just the way it would’ve been if the shit show had never happened.
"Turn the truck around," Nia’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts.
"No."
"Turn it around, Nikki."
"NO."
Then Nia stopped arguing.
Her holster’s retention came open, a small plastic click barely audible over the engine, and by the time I got my head around, she had the pistol up against her own temple with her one working hand, thumb already coming off the safety.
"Turn around."
Everything in me went cold, stopping dead.
"...Nia."
"Turn the fuck around! NOW!"
"Okay. Okay. Okay!" My foot came off the accelerator completely, eleven tons coasting down through a hundred and twenty, then a hundred and ten. "Okay... Hey. Look at me. Put that down."
"Turn it around, then I’ll put it down."
"How about this? I’ll take you home first." The words came out fast, tripping over each other. "Right now, straight there, no detour... Your dad gets you stable, you say whatever you need to say to whoever you want, and then I go. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That-"
"Then you go?!"
"Then I go, yeah-"
"Same plan, Nikki..." Her hand was shaking against her own skull, the muzzle wandering a centimeter across her hairline with every bump in the road. "Just with a stopover. You think that-?"
"Then come with me!" I had one hand off the wheel, palm out toward her, like that ever worked on anybody. "Both of you! I’ll put your dad in this truck, he can work on you the whole way, I’ll pull the surgical kit, he’ll have blood, he’ll have light-"
"You’d bring my father to watch this?"
That one landed deep.
On the seat beside her, Tikki got up with his whole body low, staring at that pistol against her head, ears flat, and he made a sound I have never heard out of him in four years, thin and rising and awful.
Neither of us could look at him. Nia flinched but kept the pistol to her head. And I didn’t dare to take my eyes off of her.
"Nia, please, put it down-"
"No!"
"Then what the fuck do you want me to do?!" My voice came apart on the last word. "Watch you turn?! Sit in a corner at the penthouse holding your dad’s hand, WATCHING IT HAPPEN when I can do something about it?! I can DO something about it!"
"A million fucking kills, Nikki." She said it perfectly evenly, which was somehow worse than screaming. "For one month. What happens after that?"
"Put it down."
"What happens after that!"
"PUT IT DOWN!"
"TURN THE FUCK AROUND!" she screamed, blood coming out of her mouth with it. "Turn around and let me say my proper goodbyes! Let me see my dad! Let me see Kara and Nora and that big stupid farm boy! Let me have that, and-"
"NO!"
Her teeth came together hard enough that I heard them, jaw setting, her mouth opening to say something else-
-CRASH-!
Something came out of the dark off the left shoulder, hitting the front of my truck.
The whole bonnet dropped under the weight, the wheel tearing itself half out of my hands, then there were claws through the mesh on my windshield, every one of them hooked into the diamond pattern up to the second knuckle.
It was that Revenant.
-GRRAAAAHHHHH-!!!
Tikki went off the seat into Nia’s lap, flattening himself against her stomach.
And I did not feel one single ounce of fear.
What came up instead came up so fast, so hot, that my vision actually narrowed at the edges, my hand going to the respirator at my neck, dragging it up over my face while I was still snarling at the thing on my bonnet.
Nia already had hers on.
Four feet away, on the other side of that glass, crouched an old woman.
That’s all she... no, it was.
In a thin cotton nightdress gone grey with filth, white hair hanging in strings around a face full of deep wrinkles, wrists no thicker than broom handles.
Except that thing was seven feet, folded down onto her haunches like something built to spring, and every one of those wrinkled fingers ended in two inches of black claw.
And the whole left side of her forehead was caved into a dish-shaped hollow above her eyebrow with the skin split across the middle of it and old blood dried down her temple and into her hair, exactly the shape somebody gets from a hammer.
That was Nia’s first shot.
That 6.5 Creedmoor round had gone into that skull and it had not gone through.
Then its eyes came up.
Two red points, settling on us with a ferality that left no room for a retreat this time.
Nia’s arm came up across her body, left-handed, awkward, the pistol shaking before-
-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!
Five rounds through my windshield from a range of about four feet, and what was once an old woman did not so much as even flinch, did not blink, did not look at her.
Two hours ago, six of those had sent it running into the darkness.
And Nia and I both knew in that instant, the Revenant wasn’t hunting food; it was hunting us.
It had been sitting on that road’s shoulder in the dark waiting for us to drive past.
With another snarl, both its sets of claws got into the mesh, and the next instant, the 304 stainless expanded steel came off my truck like a scab, frame bolts included, going away into the dark behind us.
Then its left arm punched through the windshield.
The entire pane went at once, into my face, across the dash in a wave of glass, her forearm inside my cab, reaching, claws opening.
All of it inside two seconds.
I got the Glock off my chest plate, shoved it up under her wrist, and held down the trigger.
-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-...
Twenty rounds of full-auto 10mm shoved into it in under three seconds, muzzle flash filling the whole cab, brass bouncing off the windscreen frame, off my helmet, down my collar, while the compensator screamed.
Its forearm jerking with each hit while its hide opened up, blood coming back through the hole in the glass, hitting me in the chest.
But it kept reaching.
Its face came through the shattered windshield after its arm, that mouth splitting open past the corners of it until half its head was teeth.
[Damn it!] I gritted my teeth and threw the wheel.
Hard left, hard right, hard left again, the eleven-ton Ascender lurching across four empty lanes with the tires howling, the whole box behind us groaning on its mounts, every cupboard in that galley coming off its catches, Nia shouting something into her respirator that I couldn’t make out, all of it to shake that thing off the nose of my own house.
I held it at ninety kilometers an hour, knowing exactly what an eleven-ton truck does when you swerve it.
But that thing still held on, claws shoved into the Ascender, while it snapped its maw at me, while I prepped the Telekinesis shove that’d send it flying onto the road ahead and under my tires.
Which is why I never saw the semi.
-CRASH-!