Chapter 62: Coffee & Democracy
On a certain roofless top floor in one of the most high-end neighborhoods of the entire city, I stood in a stranger’s kitchen, making coffee, while the events of yesterday played on a continuous loop behind my eyes.
Morning light came down into the apartment through the space where a ceiling used to be, laying gold across the shattered glass and the wrecked furniture, while the cold October breeze wandered in over the half-walls without asking anybody.
The kitchen had survived better than the rest of the place. Whoever lived here kept some really expensive beans in the cabinet and a grinder by the stove, and I’d raided both without a shred of ceremony, moving around the island as though the lease had my name on it.
The dead, as it turned out, made surprisingly generous hosts.
"-and you went -Kzzzt-! dark for the entire -Kzzzt-! night, Nikki! The ENTIRE night! -Kzzzt-! irresponsible -Kzzzt-! "
The radio on the counter crackled through Kara’s scolding with holes punched in it, because I was standing at the absolute edge of the radio setup’s range.
Nora had built the whole comms station herself back at our penthouse, base radio, batteries, the works. The only thing I handled was the ten-meter antenna I’d bolted up on the roof using the Base Building Module, and the range on that thing was frankly absurd. Just not infinite.
Up here, on the other side of the city, the words arrived with pieces missing.
"Say again? You broke up somewhere after ’irresponsible.’"
"I SAID-" -Kzzzt-! "-half to DEATH! You couldn’t have -Kzzzt-! -radioed BEFORE doing whatever you did?!"
"In my defense," I poured the water slowly, "I was unconscious for most of it."
"THAT’S NOT THE DEFENSE YOU THINK IT IS!"
Fair.
This made the second time I’d gone dark on her and turned back up later, worse for wear.
The first had ended with Nia pointing my own grenade launcher at me and my face doing its best panda impression.
Kara had been at this whole apocalypse thing for less than a week. In that one week, the man with the magic pocket had pulled this stunt on her twice now.
She was understandably scared, so were Nora and Leo, and it was coming out of the radio at volume, and I let her spend every bit of it on me.
"So talk," she demanded through the static. "What happened out there?"
"Ran into that big thing... Nia’s probably told you all about it. Buying Nia and her dad time to get clear took longer than planned, and I burned through the TK doing it." I recounted while I stirred the cup. "... Overdid it, found a place to hole up, and blacked out. That’s the whole story."
I had, very tactfully, decided to leave out the part that involved the Diavel, the human cannonball part, and the part where I entered this top-floor apartment through the wall.
Omitting isn’t the same as lying. And every word I’d said was true.
Besides, it’s done now, and there was no sense in volunteering my way into a second scolding.
On the kitchen island, sprawled dead center in a patch of sunlight, Tikki slept.
On his back. All four legs stretched out to their full. Tongue hanging out.
The hardest sleeper alive, radiating the deep, bulletproof peace of a creature with zero unfinished business in this world.
I picked up my cup, pressed two knuckles into the spot between my eyebrows where the headache had taken up long-term residence, and turned around.
And the hallway came into view.
Three infected lay dead in it, close to the table I’d woken up under.
I kept half an ear on Kara and looked them over the rim of the coffee, facts first.
Three bodies, grown adults, all carrying the swollen, wrong-jointed look of week-old Infected.
One near the mouth of the hallway, two deeper in, a few steps short of the table. Past them, the apartment’s front door stood open onto a dark corridor.
They had not been there when I dove in yesterday.
I was sure of that much.
Blind, deaf, and half-dead, it doesn’t matter; I’d still have known because they would have come straight at me the second I dragged myself into that hallway, and the evening would have ended very differently.
So they’d wandered up during the night. From somewhere down inside the building, pulled by all the noise a two-story monster makes while taking a tower apart, in through the open front door, down the hall, straight toward the unconscious man under the table.
And died on the way there.
I crossed over and crouched by the nearest one, coffee still in hand.
The neck was snapped. Cleanly too. The head sat against the base of the wall at a perfect right angle to the spine, the exact geometry of a body that had fallen just wrong, neck-first into the wall with all of its weight behind it.
The second one, same. The third, same, against the opposite wall.
Three separate falls, three identical results.
And nothing else.
No claw marks, no blood beyond what the falls had cost, no torn clothing, no sign of any struggle anywhere in that hallway.
The Tank was out immediately; that thing didn’t do delicate; it did craters, and these three looked as though they’d simply tripped in the dark at the worst possible angle of their lives.
Three times. In a row.
Which left the question.
Who in this apartment was still conscious last night?
I ran it the slow way, because the answer waiting at the end deserved the walk.
The Tank was probably long gone by then.
And I was a corpse with a pulse.
Nia was tens of kilometers south, at the penthouse, with her father.
And the only other living soul on this floor, the only creature awake in the entire geometry of that hallway...
My eyes slid back to the kitchen island.
To the belly. The stretched paws. The tongue.
[How’d you even...]
I genuinely couldn’t build it. I knew the result, three grown infected dead in three perfect falls, and I could not reconstruct one single step of the method, and somehow that made it better.
My chest went warmer than the coffee, and the smile arrived small and stayed put.
He’d stood watch. All night.
Two and a half kilograms of prematurely born calico against everything the dark sent up those stairs, and when the job was done, and I had woken up, he’d climbed onto the island and gone to sleep with his tongue out.
[My booger...]
I gave the sleeping menace a small nod of genuine, unironic respect, the kind you give a professional, and carried my coffee out toward the balcony.
The cold morning breeze met me in full at the rail. And beyond it was the lake.
The shoreline was packed shoulder to shoulder, body against body, thousands of infected standing in the shallows and on the sand and up the banks with no gaps left anywhere between them, packed the way a crowd packs the front row of a concert, and from up here the whole shore moved as one thing, an anthill the size of a district.
And what were they doing?
The widest orgy a healthy human mind can comprehend.
These things won’t eat themselves out with time. They fornicate at a level that’d put rabbits to shame.
The worst part? The pregnancy doesn’t last 9 months. Just a few weeks, and that supposed ’child’ will eat its way out of its mother’s womb, before eating its mother entirely to grow, damn near completing adolescence in just a few more weeks.
It wasn’t just some wild orgy party by a lake.
It was an ecosystem, running on its own logic. Fucked up as it may be, it was, at the end of the day, nature finding its level in a world that will never be the same, and not one thing about it was random.
And in the center of it all, flat on its back in the shallows with its arms and legs flung wide, the mountain slept.
The Tank’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, slow and enormous and steady, water lapping at it while infected eddied around it like terrain.
Four days, maybe five. That was the going rate on a Tank’s feast-coma, and then that chest would stop rising slowly, and the thing would sit up in the middle of its own buffet with a full tank and a fresh appetite, in a city everyone I loved was still inside.
[Look at it... sleeping like a fucking baby...]
The countdown had started the moment those eyes closed.
"Nikki!" -Kzzzt-! "Are you even listening to me?!"
Kara’s voice snapped me back onto the balcony.
"Yes, mommy..."
"Y-you!"
The radio delivered her speechlessness in high fidelity, followed immediately by Nora’s laughter somewhere in the background, bright and completely unhelpful.
Then the line carried a long sigh, and when Kara came back, all the volume had gone out of her.
"Look, Nikki... I get it, you got an honest-to-god system, telekinesis, all that fancy gear... and you’re a regressor on top of that." -Kzzzt-! "But you’re not some webnovel protagonist..."
"Who knows..." I chuckled as I sipped the coffee, "There might be folks in some parallel universe reading about us right now... probably unlocking the Chapter with this exact conversation using fuckin fast passes..."
A breathy chuckle escaped her before she could stop it, the exasperated kind that regrets itself immediately, while I continued-
"But I feel you... I get what you’re trying to say," I went on, quieter. "I just don’t agree with it."
"Nikki..."
"I can’t agree with it..." I cut her off, gently. "Kara, the timeline is accelerating like crazy... that Tank wasn’t supposed to be running around till next year. I can’t trust my own knowledge anymore..."
"Then rely on us... even if just a bit."
"You didn’t know how to reload a gun a few days ago, Kara." A chuckle got into it, but the point underneath stayed firm. "...You now know what’s out there... You can barely be trusted with your own life."
"Yeah... you’re right." -Kzzzt-! "I see what’s out there... and the way I see it, you can’t be trusted with your own life either... even with all the fancy shit you got. Same goes for Tikki..."
I had no answer for that one.
So I sighed, sipped my coffee, and looked out at the anthill having the time of its life and the sleeping mountain, and let her be right for a while.
"Look, Kara... I can’t be sure of anything now," I said finally. "Otherwise, believe me, I wouldn’t even be out here. But well... since it can’t be all sunshine and post-apocalyptic rainbows... I gotta take the risks. We need to move, prepare... a-and consolidate. And we need to do it fast. Because once other Variants start popping up, no place in the world will be safe."
"I get it... But, I just..."
"It’s gonna be okay. I once lived through the worst of this shit without the system and all that fancy shit... I’ll be fine."
A pause worth more than words rode the static for a moment before-
"When will you be back?"
"A few days... before the Tank wakes up."
"Wai-what!"
"I’m going on a solo road trip east... After that, we’ll have enough supplies to last us a very long while..."
"I heard solo somewhere there..." Nia’s voice slid onto the channel from the other side, easy and pleasant, and I knew instantly that she’d been standing somewhere near that radio listening this entire time, and just heard the road trip we planned turning into a solo one.
"You heard right," I confirmed.
"Then I heard some damn funny bullshit."
"Nia..."
"No."
"Look, the Tank will wake up in four to five days..." I said, hoping to reason with her. "And if I’m late somehow... I need you to be there to extract everyone out of the city and begin heading west... I’ll catch up."
"Nope."
Flat and cheerful and immovable.
"Look, until Angelica joins us... I’m calling the shots... so-"
"Then I’m calling democracy."
And the channel went quiet.
The static kept crackling away underneath, but nobody on the line spoke, and I stood there on a stranger’s balcony with cooling coffee and the full, dawning headache of what she’d just invoked.
The first call I’d made since declaring myself the man in charge.
And she’d democracy’d it.
"Oh, motherfu-!"