Chapter 74: Instrument
The column was cold enough that I felt it through the gloves as I vaulted over the metal railings of the billboard, dropped the last four meters, and let TK eat the landing soft enough that even the highway never heard me touch it.
Then I went across all six lanes at a crouch, into the ditch, pulled out the grapple gun, and up the other side before dropping into a sea of trailers. These were the trailers and trucks that never left the parking lot.
And I started sending them in the Inventory. After all, if someone made me and things went sideways, and I had to run, at least I wouldn’t have to run empty-handed.
[God bless capitalism~] I couldn’t help chuckle as I sent them every truck and trailer I could get my hands on, always making sure, never to ’steal’ enough that I would have no cover to hide behind.
"You’re clear...." Nia’s voice came in flat and professional. "Nothing’s moved."
"Nothing’s moved in two hours, Nia," I replied through the comms, sending another into the Inventory full of winter wear.
"Nothing’s moved in two hours and one minute now."
"Mea," Tikki added, clearly siding with her.
I ignored them and focused on the Awareness, trying to find the next best trailer to take next.
Thirty meters, every direction, through the containers, and the stuff inside- clothes, furniture, toys... and the whole thing arrived at once and arrived already sorted.
And I went to work, sending into the Inventory a container out of every four I came across as I slowly and silently made my way across the nexus of the camp.
But throughout the whole way, Awareness never pinged a single soul. Not a person or a dog
"Anything?" Nia asked.
"Empty as far as I can reach."
"That’s not comforting."
"Wasn’t trying to comfort you."
I started walking towards the nexus of trucks and trailers that the people here had arranged, stopping behind cover just far enough that the edge of my Awareness covered some trailers with chairs on their roofs, because the chairs were the thing I wanted to see up close.
And they got worse the more I scanned them.
Four camp chairs set in a loose half-circle on the roof of a temp-controlled trailer full of produce, facing out over the fence, exactly where you’d put them if your job was watching a highway all night.
A folding table with a lantern still standing on it.
A mattress on the roof with a blanket kicked down to the bottom of it.
Beer bottles lined up along the roof edge in a neat little row, with one more standing next to the nearest chair. And that one was still half full.
[...Okay.]
There was a rifle leaning against the chair, a bolt action with a scuffed wooden stock, muzzle down, propped up the exact way a man leaves one when he’s coming right back.
[... Let’s just get close... may be then...]
As I got closer, slow, keeping my steps soft, rifle raised high, eyes and mind scanning everything they could over and over again, feeling my Awareness cover more and more of everything... I still detected not one ounce of life.
The reefers... those temp-controlled trailers hummed, yes.
But nothing else did.
I moved down the line with the M110A2 up and my shoulder brushing the trailer, while Awareness ran ahead of me through the walls of them the way a flashlight runs ahead of your feet.
And it was so much loot I nearly forgot where I was.
Pallets stacked to the roof in the box behind the third truck.
Frozen meat, blocks and blocks of it, in the fourth.
Sacks in the fifth, at least forty kilos each, hundreds of them.
Diesel sitting fat in the saddle tanks of every single one.
There were even two tankers full of diesel and petrol there.
[That’s a winter... That’s a whole winter for six people out of one trailer, and there are eleven of them lined up... And a whole lot more miscellaneous stuff in that lot...]
My hand actually twitched toward the Inventory before I caught it.
[I’ll handle these later... Gotta find out what happened first.]
Because the closer I got to the middle of that lot, the more of it I could see properly, and it kept getting worse, and my instincts flared up. Even as the October chill rolled off, I felt my back drenched in sweat, and my breathing turning rapid.
My hand instinctively went to the half-face respirator dangling from my neck, and before I knew it, I already had it over my mouth while my focus went to the cab door standing open on the second truck with the step still down.
Then at the dog bowl by the front wheel of the fourth, plastic, chewed around the rim, half full of water.
A folding chair by the fifth, lying on its side.
Nobody had been dragged out of those cabs.
They’d walked.
And that’s when I noticed the bullet holes.
Some trucks and trailers had them, most didn’t, across their bodies.
And that was also when I started walking on something sticky.
One glance down, and I knew that was blood. Half dried, half still wet.
Then Awareness hit the mass behind the trucks.
It arrived as weight, a great cold heap of it, sitting in the gap between the back of the rig line and the front of the convenience store where nothing on that billboard could ever have seen it.
Cold all the way through, stacked with many...
I already knew what that was, and my gut told me to run that very same instant.
But I walked around the tail of the last trailer anyway, because knowing and seeing are different jobs, and I needed to know for sure.
The light from the convenience store window reached just far enough, and I saw it in all its supposed glory.
They were piled.
That was the only word for it, and I wished I had a better one.
Twenty-five to thirty people stacked into each other, arms through arms, one man’s boots up near another woman’s face, a kid’s jacket somewhere down in the middle of it, all of them tangled the way bodies are when they’ve been carried and dropped, carried and dropped
And dogs.
So many dogs.
Big ones, small ones, one of them still wearing a collar with a tag hanging off it, threaded all the way through the pile like somebody had been sorting them together.
I instinctively put a hand on the trailer beside me and made myself breathe through my mouth, and then I did the thing I do, which is stop being a person for a minute and start being a set of instruments.
Awareness narrowed down off thirty meters and onto that heap, tightening in until I could read the shapes of the wounds without laying a finger on anybody, and I went through them one at a time.
[Bite wounds... Not scattered nips either, whole chunks taken clean out of thighs and shoulders and bellies, jaw-wide, deep... Obviously an Infected...]
Then I found the claw marks.
Long ones, four abreast, opened straight through jackets and ribs the way a lion opens its prey up.
And, I found the bullet wounds.
In almost every single one of them.
Chest, back, head, at ranges you don’t miss from, and I did not need to check the calibers to know they’d come out of the guns those same people had been carrying.
[Looks like infighting... doesn’t explain the bites, something ate them... or the claws...]
Twenty-five, thirty people with rifles and hunting guns and dogs, walled in behind their own cargo, shot each other to pieces, and then something with claws and a mouth had at them, before they were stacked into that pile.
[... The whole thing looks like...Oh no. Oh, no, no, no, that’s a-] My eyes instantly snapped open in pure terror as the image of those two bulbous red eyes flashed my mind like a thunderclap.
And then-
"MEAAAA-!"
Tikki’s scream came through the comms so loud and so wrong that it went into me like a nail.
"NIKKI! RUN!"
And I didn’t think.
Not one thought, not one plan, not one glance at anything, because when Nia’s voice sounds like that, you move first and understand later, and my whole body was already turning to run before her second word finished.
And just as I did, I came face to face with it.
The damn thing was just standing there.
Less than a foot from my face, its hand already on my respirator.
I had to look up to catch its face.
Seven feet of it, thin as famine, white as the underside of something, hunched forward with its shoulders up around a neck that was too long. One arm hanging down past its knees, the other on my mask, every finger ending in a claw as long as my fingers.
And those red, bulging eyes, staring at me unblinking, locking me in spot.
It didn’t snarl or scream; it just stood unmoving in the dark a foot away from me, watching me, breathing, with its head lowered so it could keep those eyes level with mine.
My hands were shaking on the rifle, not even daring to lift it up and pull the trigger, terrified its hand less than an inch from my face would move.
I had been far too focused on analyzing those bodies, reading them, ranking them, being an ’instrument’ about it, that I had folded thirty meters of Awareness down onto one cold pile and let it filter out everything else in the world, so much so that something seven feet tall had walked up behind me and stood there while I did it.
Same mistake.
Same exact mistake I made in Nia’s nest... same fucking mistake.
But then again, had I detected it coming up my back, I would’ve been the first in history to do it.
I knew what that was. And I almost hated that I did, because it made the sheer fucking terror even worse than it would’ve. At least my body would’ve cooperated if nothing else.
Then slowly, almost gently, it slid the respirator off my face while its chest expanded, slow, deliberate, drawing in.
And then it breathed out into my face.
Flowers... That was all.
Warm and thick and impossibly sweet, a whole spring in it, and it came in through my nose and my mouth before I understood that I was already breathing it.
"NIKKI-!"
Nia’s voice cracked in the middle of my name.
And it reached me from somewhere far away and underwater, and the second time she said it I could barely tell it was words at all.
The asphalt went soft under my boots.
The lights of the convenience store smeared out sideways.
Everything behind that thing began sliding away from me, the trucks, the fence, all of it draining out of the edges of my sight while my heartbeat slowed down into something enormous and far off.
But it stayed, perfectly clear, and perfectly still right in front of me while the world went.
Then its mouth started to open, going past the corners, past where a face ends, splitting up into its cheeks until half its head was teeth, and all the way through it those red eyes never once left mine.
And it tilted its head.
But I saw just one thing-
"K-Kara?"