Chapter 78: Dying of Me
I could no longer make one single sound come out of my mouth.
So I stopped trying, and I moved instead, because moving was the only thing left that I was any good at.
The trailer they’d parked across their own gate went into Inventory without me even breaking stride, and the sliding chain gate went sideways on its track with a shove of TK and a shot to its lock, and I was out of this damn place onto that access road with Nia floating along beside me and Tikki running right behind me.
I didn’t look back at the lot.
Not once.
The Ascender came out of the slot the second my boots hit the access road, all eleven tons of it dropping onto its suspension, and I had the passenger door open before it finished settling.
Passenger seat, not the bed.
If I had to plow something at a hundred and sixty, she’d have gone off that mattress, and into a wall.
But up front I could reach her without taking my eyes off the road, so I set her down into the leather and got the belt across her hips and low over her thighs and nowhere near that shoulder.
Tikki went up onto the dashboard, sitting down facing backward into the cab, right in front of her, putting his eyes on her face and did not take them off her again.
He still hadn’t looked at me.
I just got in, turned the key, and put my foot through the floor.
-WRROM-!
For about the first twenty seconds it was fine, because there was a road, a steering wheel and a job, and then the adrenaline started coming down off me and everything underneath it came up instead.
My hands were shaking on the wheel.
My jaw hurt from how hard I had it shut.
And there was a thing building behind my eyes, hot and enormous, and that made me wanna stop the Ascender, get out, and bash my head into the guardrail until the thinking stopped.
I actually looked at the guardrail.
I looked at it going past my window at a hundred and forty kilometers an hour, and I thought about it properly, the way you think about a real option.
Then I looked right, at her, and I kept driving.
Because if I did anything, anything at all, she’d see me do it, and she was already lying there watching the roof with three deep gashes on her one shoulder and a bite over the other.
She did not need to spend her last hours watching me fall apart on top of everything else I’d put on her tonight.
So I put both hands back on the wheel.
And I let it run around and around inside my skull instead, which was worse.
Because it’s all mine.
Every bit of it.
I narrowed my Awareness down onto a pile of corpses like an idiot and let it filter out the rest of the world, which is the exact thing that nearly got me killed in her nest, and I knew it was the exact thing, and I did it anyway.
And then when it stood behind me, I froze, like a fucking idiot.
I froze like I used to.
I had a rifle in my hands and thirty meters of TK in my head.
With just a thought I could snap a spine from across a road, and I stood there while a seven-foot thing reached up and slid my respirator down off my face like it was undressing a doll.
Worse, this whole trip was mine. My idea, my plan, my briefing, my parliament. I argued for it. I won.
And she came with me because she called democracy over it, and Tikki voted for her, and I sat on that balcony sulking about losing a vote when what actually happened is that I dragged the two of them into a Variant’s lair.
She fought me and a Variant for me.
Without a system. Without the fancy magic powers. Without a single thing except two deployments and my rifle, she saved my life, and she did it without killing me when killing me would have been the easy call and the right one, just like she’s done so many times already.
And what she got out of it was her being punched over and over again, three claw wounds, an arm that hasn’t moved since I came to, and the absolute worst things I could have possibly said to her.
And a bite.
[She saved my life, and now she’s going to turn because of it... and it’s all my fault... That’s it. That’s the whole night. That’s what I did with it.]
"Nikki."
Her voice came out through packed nostrils and broken teeth.
"Yeah. Yeah, I’m here."
"...Eyes... on th’ road."
I put my eyes on the road. Never even realized they had begun drifting until she called me out on it.
[Damn it!]
I opened the Shop and bought everything I could reach.
Steering with my left hand at a hundred and forty while the catalog ran down the right side of my vision, and I went through it like a man robbing a pharmacy.
Bought enough of O-negative to bathe in it. Plasma. Saline and Ringer’s by the case. A field surgical kit, the real one, the one with the clamps and the retractors and the sutures a trauma surgeon actually wants. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. Chest seals. A pulse oximeter. Painkillers all the way up the ladder.
-Ding!
{Order complete. Items stored in container.
Price: 31,880 Credits.
Remaining Balance: 62,204 Credits.}
I noticed that and filed it, then clipped the little oximeter onto her good hand and watched the number come up.
It wasn’t good, so I turned the screen away from her before she could see it.
"Ninety kilometers..." I said, keeping my voice gentle and without tremors, at least I think I did. "Eighty-six now. At this speed... we’d be there around half an hour..."
Nothing came back.
"Your dad’s going to have blood, proper units, not the bag-of-tricks stuff. I’ve got clamps in there, sutures and everything too. And we got that whole sick bay under the stairs too, cost me thirty grand and it’s been almost unused like an ornament, so honestly it’s about time somebody... Nia I-"
I heard my own voice go, and I shut up.
Then I said it anyway, because I couldn’t not.
"Nia. What I said back there-"
"Don’t."
It came out flat and immediate.
"I need to say it, I need you to know that I didn’t-"
"Nikki." She got her one working eye around to me. "Not now."
And that was all she gave me, and it wasn’t mercy, and it wasn’t punishment either.
It was a professional on death’s door deciding she couldn’t afford to open that door, because if she opened it she wasn’t getting it shut again until her last breath.
So I shut up and drove.
And then I started doing the thing I’d been dreading, which is watching her for it.
Because there’s no clock on a bite.
Seconds, hours, weeks, months, and the only way to read it is the symptoms, so every few kilometers I’d glance right and run the list.
Bloodshot eyes, jitters, shortness of breath, aggression, paranoia. The laugh that isn’t a laugh.
Her breathing was shallow and fast, but she’d lost about a liter and a half of blood, so that told me nothing.
Her eye was red, but I had punched that side of her face four times, so that told me nothing either.
Every single sign I was looking for, I’d already caused.
I couldn’t even tell whether she was dying of me or the bite.
At some point I reached over to check on that dressing.
And she flinched.
Not much. Maybe an inch. Her good hand came up about halfway before she caught it and put it back down, and neither of us said one word about it, while she looked at the roof, I at the road before eventually putting my hand back on the wheel without touching her at all.
I have been hurt a great deal in two lifetimes. Been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, even bit.
Nothing has ever come close.
So I went into the catalog again.
Not for supplies this time. I went in the way you go through a drawer at three in the morning looking for something you know isn’t in there, typing in everything I could think of.
Bite. Antiviral. Post-exposure. Infection. Conversion.
Half of it came back as fancy uselessness very much like myself.
The other half came back as the same field medicine I’d already bought.
All the while the fold sat there in the back of my head the whole time, the way it always does.
Kara. Nora. Leo. Nia. Her dad. Tikki.
I have said it to every single one of them at some point. Us first, always, and I’ll do whatever that costs, and I’ll sleep fine after.
I said it to Leo on a roof not even a full day ago while I handed him a rifle.
And then I walked into a Variant’s house and got one of them killed, and it was for food.
Shit I could’ve bought from the system.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t even about the food. It was about greed masked as preparation.
[She’s going to die out here because... fuck...]
I hit the bottom right about then.
Not a figure of speech either.
There was a stretch of road, maybe six or seven kilometers of it, where I genuinely stopped being a person and just steered.
Then the search for ’Second Strain’ finished loading.
And I began reading, not expecting anything at this point.
And by the time I finished reading it, my breath had locked up.
Then I read it again, because the first time through my brain refused to accept that the words were in the order they were in.
Then I looked at the price.
And what came out of me was supposed to be a laugh but arrived as something else entirely, and my hands came down on the wheel hard enough to hurt.
"...Oh."
[Oh... you beautiful, extortionate, magnificent bastard...]
"Nikki?"
I immediately threw the wheel over.
Eleven tons of Ascender went across three lanes and over the median at a hundred and thirty with the tires screaming and the whole cab leaning hard enough that Tikki almost tumbled down.
And in less than a second, we were eastbound, back to where we came from.
Nia’s head rolled toward me.
"Why are we not going home?" she said, voice out of breath, but sharp. "Where are you taking me?"
"Halden."
"Why? Take me to my father... I wanna see dad!"
"We’re going to the Ferrow Point Nuclear Generating Station," I said, eyes going wider and wider by the second. "About fifteen kilometers this side of the city of Halden."
Her frown deepened.
Tikki turned around on the dashboard and looked at me for the first time since he’d let go of my hand.
"I need a hundred and fifty million Credits," I said, mouth slowly curling into a feral grin and a snarl, "And for that... going by the average rate, taking in sprinters, shamblers and humans... I need around a million kills."