Chapter 79: We Were Never Any Angels
"I need around a million kills."
The cab stayed quiet for a second, with nothing in it except the engine and the tires and Tikki’s eyes going back and forth between the two of us.
"...The fuck are you talkin’ about."
"There’s a cure."
"...What?"
"There’s a cure, Nia... For the bite. I just found it in the catalog... It’s been sitting in the catalog like a goddamn amoxicillin, and I only found it because I typed in Second Strain instead of bite."
"Nikki-"
"There’s two of them," I said as my eyes gazed at the panel in the corner of my vision.
-Ding!
{
Anti-Infection Suppressant
A temporary broad-spectrum antiviral engineered to neutralize the Second Strain before irreversible neurological conversion occurs.
Upon administration, all active Second Strain viral particles within the host are suppressed, returning the user to an uninfected physiological state.
Suppression remains active for 30 days. Any subsequent infection during this period immediately consumes the Suppressant’s therapeutic effect, requiring another dose.
Once the suppression expires, the infection resumes.
Does not reverse complete conversion.
Effective only on living, non-converted hosts.
Price: 150 Million Credits
}
I read the whole thing out to her.
Every line of it, out loud, at a hundred and forty kilometers an hour on an empty highway, and when I got to the price my voice did something stupid on the number, and I had to say it twice.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
And as I looked over, I saw her one working eye had come all the way open through the swelling, and she was staring at the roof of the cab like there was something written on it, and her chest was going up and down way faster than it had been thirty seconds ago.
"...Say it again."
"All active Second Strain viral particles within the host are suppressed, returning the user to an uninfected physiological state... System’s words, not mine."
"That’s-"
"Yeah... That’s thirty days," I said. "And then it comes back."
"...Thirty days."
"There’s a permanent one too."
But I didn’t read that one out.
She’d have asked for the number, and I wasn’t ready to say what it’d cost, so I let it sit there while she breathed and Tikki climbed off the dashboard and put himself down against her thigh.
"So here’s what we’re doing."
And I laid it out for her, fast, way too fast, one thing running into the next while my hands kept squeezing the wheel and letting go of it.
Park the Ascender somewhere it can’t be got at. Get to Halden, find a police headquarters or one of the big hospitals, because both keep birds on the roof, use the System to fabricate keys for it.
Fly low and loud, all the way across the city, and pull every single thing in Halden out toward that nuclear power plant.
And while they’re walking, put the reactor into meltdown.
"Blended rate would be somewhere around a hundred and fifty a head across shamblers and sprinters, and I’m not even counting people at all," I said, wide eyes staring ahead. "A million kills... that should be a hundred and fifty million, and I’m not even counting people, Nia, so if it’s less than a million it’s still-"
"Since when do you know how to melt down a reactor?"
"I don’t."
"Then-"
"The System offers consultancy!" I could hear how fast I was talking and I couldn’t slow it down. "It does construction, it does engineering, it did the whole sick bay off a two-line request. Look, point is, I buy the guidance, and it’ll walk me through it. Step by step. It’s basically a contractor... that’s all it’s ever been."
"They probably shut them down."
"...What?"
"The plants..." Her words were coming out through packed nostrils, and every one of them cost her. "Last time... every military that still had a chain of command... first thing they did was cold-shut every nuclear facility in reach... It was the only sensible thing anyone did that week. That plant’s been off for at least four days, Nikki. It’s off..."
"Then I’ll turn it back on."
"You can’t just-" Nia scoffed.
"I’ll turn it back on, Nia."
I pulled up the medical menu instead of arguing about it, buying everything I thought I would need without checking prices.
Broad-spectrum antibiotics. The good painkillers. Two more liters of Ringer’s and the giving set to run it.
"Open your mouth."
"Nikki-"
"Open your mouth, or I’ll pull over and do it the slow way."
She opened her mouth, and I got the antibiotics and two of the painkillers onto her tongue and held the bottle for her while she swallowed, and then I got the line into her good arm one-handed at a hundred and forty because I have done that particular trick in worse vehicles than this one.
We didn’t talk for a couple of minutes until-
"Sell the trucks." Nia suddenly said.
There it was. She got there in about two minutes.
"Sell them..." she said mid-wince again. "You’ve got eight rigs... eleven reefers full of food, tankers... Sell every last bolt of it back to the machine and-"
"Thirty thousand a day."
"...What?"
"Sell cap’s thirty thousand Credits a day." I heard my own voice go flat. "Doesn’t matter what I put in. I could feed a whole city block into that thing, and it’d hand me thirty grand and thank me for doing business with it... There’s an upgrade that raises the cap but..."
"How long?"
"Don’t."
The painkillers started working somewhere around the ninety-kilometer marker.
I could hear it in her, the words coming out a little cleaner, a little longer, her chest not working as hard, and she got herself maybe two inches higher in the seat with her good arm.
Then she tried to move the right one.
I watched her do it out of the corner of my eye, watched her jaw go tight, and her whole shoulder shift and the arm just lie there in her lap like it was somebody else’s.
She looked at it for a second and then looked away and never mentioned it once.
"Okay," she said. "Now listen to me properly."
"I’m listening."
"You’re not."
"I’m-"
"Ferrow Point’s on the Halden river."
That shut me up, which I think was the point.
"That river... after Halden..." she said, and I could feel her eyes staring at the side of my face. "... It runs south. It goes through, what, four counties? Five?... It goes through the whole southern half of the country, then out into the ocean... If you do this, Nikki... you’ll kill everything downstream forever, and everything the wind takes, and you have no idea which way the wind’ll be blowing next day."
"I know what a meltdown-"
"You don’t. Nobody does... That’s my whole point. Nobody who ever set one off knew what it was going to do afterward... that’s the entire history of the thing... and it’s only been six days."
"I know how long it’s been."
"No, that’s my point," she said, getting louder, and it hurt her to get louder, but she still went on. "Six days... Every city out there is still full of people... There are groups holed up in Halden right now... There are kids in that city..."
"We were never any angels, Nia." I looked at her with a blank face.
"Turn around."
"What?"
"Turn the truck around, Nikki."
"No!" It came out of me way too loud in a small space. Even Tikki flattened against her thigh. "That’s you telling me to drive you home, hand you to your dad and stand in a corner and wait, that’s not a plan, that’s a waiting room-"
"I’ll take the waiting room."
"WELL I WON’T."
The silence after that lasted about six seconds, and I spent all of them wanting to put my head through the windscreen.
"...Light a cigarette," she said.
"What? Why? I don’t want a cigarette."
"Nikki. Look at your hands."
And my gaze followed.
They were shaking on the wheel. Not a tremor either, a real visible shake, and I’d been driving with them like that for an hour and had genuinely not clocked it.
"Now look at me and tell me what you see."
"Nia-"
"I’ve got a bite in my shoulder, three gashes on my shoulder... and I’m about to die... again..." she said, very evenly, "... and I’m the calm one. You’ve been chewing your lips... Your hands won’t hold still, you’re breathing like you’re sprinting... your eyes are redder than mine... You’ve even shouted at me four times. You’re making the biggest call of two lifetimes at a hundred and forty an hour with a plan you built in about nine seconds, and the only bit of it you’ve thought through is the arithmetic."
"That’s not-"
"Every symptom on that list, Nikki," she said, gazing out the window. "Every single one. And they’re all on the wrong person."
I opened my mouth and shut it again.
Because right then, for maybe half a second, what I wanted more than anything in the world was to be standing in a kitchen with the sun coming through the window and a chipped mug in my hand and somebody complaining about the fence.
It went through me like a hand closing.
Then it was gone, and I was back in the truck, with a mouth gone dry.
I bought and lit a cigarette.
It didn’t help much. Hell, I coughed with every puff.
"There’s a permanent one..." she said, still gazing out.
Of course she’d come back to it. She’d been holding it since the start.
"...Yeah."
"How much?"
"Nia."
"How much, Nikki?"
"Twenty-two point two billion."
The number sat in the cab.
I watched her face while she did the division, one eye half shut, lips barely moving, a woman who has been doing range cards and holdovers in her head since she was nineteen.
"That’s a hundred and forty-eight doses of the thirty-day one."
"Yeah..."
"A hundred and forty-eight," she said again. "... Of the thirty-day one. Back to back. That’s twelve years of you doing this every month."
I didn’t say anything.
"So what happens after the thirty days, Nikki?"
I kept my eyes on the road.
"What happens in a month?"
But still nothing came out of me.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have an answer. I did.
I’d had it since about four seconds after I read the second listing, and it went like this.
Halden buys the first month.
Then somewhere further out there’s another city with another plant, or a dam, or a missile silo somewhere, or something else that turns a million people into a number in a ledger, and that buys the second month.
Then the third.
And I keep going, city after city after city, for as long as it takes, until either there’s nothing left standing between here and the coast or that counter finally rolls over twenty-two billion.
I’d already run how many cities that is.
But I wasn’t going to say it out loud in a truck.
But I didn’t have to, because I looked over and she was watching my face, and her one eye had gone very wide and very still, and she’d got it off me the way she gets everything off me.
"...Oh, you absolute idiot," Nia whispered, half-chuckling while a small tear slid down her eye.
She quickly turned her head away, and I pretended I did not see it fall.