Chapter 59: Rideable and Safe
Around five kilometers of rooftops came and went under my feet before my body sent up the flare I’d been dreading, a dull ache right between my eyebrows, dead on the third-eye spot.
Nothing sharp yet. But I knew exactly what it was, and I knew what came after it.
My lungs had been burning since the police station, sweat kept finding my eyes faster than I could blink it out, and the roars behind me hadn’t stopped once, and somewhere in the middle of all that, my eyes and Awareness started reporting something strange.
The streets below were thinning.
Down south, around the penthouse, the infected moved in hordes, hundreds deep, packing avenues wall to wall. But up here were just stragglers and small packs, ten scattered through a parking lot, twenty strung out along a block, twenty-five at the very most.
[This is it!] My eyes went wide mid-glide. [The lake!]
Every Infected on this half of the city had spent days draining toward that shoreline to drink and to feed, which meant the streets between here and there weren’t crowded anymore.
Which also meant the roads were rideable.
Rideable and safe are two very different words. But I’d take rideable.
My first thought was the Ascender, my whole house on wheels, sitting right there in the Inventory, eleven tons of mesh-windowed, ram-wedged expedition truck built for exactly this flavor of world.
And I killed the thought in the same breath, because the thing behind me was throwing cars, and eleven tons of house does not dodge a flying sedan.
Even a clean miss would end with me swerving and wrapping around a building at highway speed.
And then the other option surfaced, the stupid one, the one so insane my brain tried to swallow it back down, but instead of swallowing, I felt a feral grin start splitting my face.
[Alright! I’m doing this!]
I spent the next thirty seconds gliding and zipping like the warning light wasn’t on, two hard corners, a dive down a service alley, one last zip that carried me over a row of shopfronts and down onto the road, and for the first time since the whole bullshit began, the thing behind me had no eyes on me.
Two blocks of stolen quiet. Maybe less.
I immediately opened the Inventory and pulled out the one thing I’d never been able to leave behind, the thing that made zero tactical sense to keep and that I’d kept anyway through every purge of dead weight that cramped storage grid ever forced on me.
The red Ducati Diavel dropped onto the road in front of me, and the whole city felt strangely quiet around it.
She sat there on the kickstand exactly the way she’d sat in my memory for three years, low and mean, all red muscle over that ridiculous 240 rear tire, the single most impractical thing I’d ever spent money on, and easily the best.
[Hey there, partner~]
There were exactly two objects on this planet I’d ever genuinely loved. One was a rifle with two names carved into the stock, currently headed south in a Cybertruck. The other one was this.
I’d lost her early last time. And honestly, even if I hadn’t, she was never a survival vehicle.
It was a fuel-guzzling hyperbike with an Akrapovič exhaust loud enough to ring the dinner bell across six blocks. One infected stepping into my line at speed meant a closed casket.
And I’d mourned her nonetheless.
But the System buys fuel now. And today I didn’t need quiet, or economy, or sense.
I needed agility, acceleration, and a way to keep a two-story monster glued to my taillight for fifteen kilometers.
That dinner-bell exhaust had just become the most useful thing I owned.
[So long as I’m quick...]
Tikki’s head came up out of the pocket the second my leg swung over the saddle.
He looked at the bike. He looked at me. He looked back at the bike, and I didn’t need magic powers to know exactly what was running through his head, because the next thing I felt was every single claw sinking through my jacket and locking in.
He knew.
And he loved this exact flavor of stupid as much as I did.
Thumb on the ignition and the fuel pump whined awake under the tank with a sound I could’ve picked out of a thousand, and I hit the starter.
-BRAAAP-!!
The Akrapovič ripped the silence apart, down the street, off the buildings, through six blocks of dead city, and every straggler in sight snapped around at once while birds exploded off the rooftops in one grey sheet.
The big V-4 caught on the first crank and settled into that lumpy idle, the whole machine rearing to go, and I blipped the throttle once just to hear it snap.
And far behind me, the footsteps stopped.
One second. Two.
-GRRAAAAAHHH-!!!
The roar came back with a brand-new pitch in it, and the ground started trembling in a rhythm I already knew, buildings coming apart somewhere back there in a straight line toward me. It had heard the dinner bell, and it was coming straight for it.
I rolled the throttle open, the front wheel lifted clean off as the rear tire hooked up, and the streets became a blur.
I threaded the first knot of infected at eighty, bodies and burned-out cars sliding past on both sides while Awareness fed me everything inside twenty meters before my eyes got their turn, the sprinter crouched behind the flipped van, the pothole hiding in the dark, the blind intersection with three of them jogging toward the noise, and I was leaned over and past every one of them with room to spare.
A sedan flipped over the rooftops on my left and landed in a storefront half a block ahead, glass washing across the road, and I put the bike through the gap between the wreck and a mailbox without lifting.
A lamp post helicoptered across an intersection behind me. Half a delivery truck went end over end through a second-floor apartment. But I didn’t even slow down.
All along, the ground never stopped shaking, the roars never stopped coming, and every block of it kept saying the same thing. One mistake. That’s all it would take.
And yet I was laughing.
Then the road bent left and the Tank didn’t, and half a block of corner building came down as it went straight through the turn instead of around it, erupting out of the brick in a wall of dust, close enough that chips of concrete rattled off my mirrors, and for exactly one heartbeat we were on the same street, side by side, before the next heartbeat put buildings between us again, because it could only ever run straight, and I could carve.
I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to, because the Akrapovič was screaming under me and the wind was pulling tears out of the corners of my eyes, and for the first time in three years I was pushing this bike the way I used to push her on open highways, back when the world was still a world, not a shit-show, and somewhere underneath all the terror, some idiot part of me was having the best time of his life.
Tikki rode it out on my shoulder with his head in the wind, ears pinned flat, nose scrunched, eyes huge, paws planted deep, and if cats could grin, he was grinning.
I kept it pinned at one-twenty and made myself go no faster, because I couldn’t lose the tank. If I did, it’d stop chasing and start searching.
And a searching Tank wanders wherever its nose points, which could be anywhere, and that anywhere could be south.
So one-twenty. Fast enough to be delicious. Slow enough to keep it on my tail.
I watched it in the mirrors between corners, a two-story shadow gaining in every stretch that was a curve and losing everything it gained when the road went straight again, while the net gap between us stayed exactly where I put it.
And just as I had settled into a rhythm, an infected stepped out from behind a panel van six meters ahead of my front wheel.
Awareness pinged it, my hands were already moving, and there was nowhere to go, no gap, no lean, and my heart instantly slammed up into my throat while the world went very slow and very simple.
[I’m dead.]
Then something bloomed.
Out of the middle of my head, out of the exact spot where the ache had been drilling, something opened outward, instinct pulling a trigger I never knew I owned before-
-Crash-!-Splat-!
The infected burst apart in a shower of blood, before being flung away against the empty air in front of my handlebars, blood sheeting sideways off nothing, its body ricocheting away over a parked car.
The bike didn’t wobble, the bars didn’t kick... I felt no impact at all.
Not a single bump.
And for one full second, the only sounds left in the world were the engine and the wind.
I kept riding, one-twenty, straight up the northern road, while my brain scrambled to catch up with whatever the hell my body had just done, before arriving at-
[A-a barrier!?]