Chapter 77: Wish...
She just looked at me, hurt... and done.
And I had to take my finger off that trigger one joint at a time.
It wouldn’t come on its own. The whole hand had locked up and wasn’t listening to me anymore.
So instead, I slowly drew the barrel back out of her mouth so slowly that I heard it come off her teeth.
And the second it cleared her lips, the thing chewing on my other hand let go.
Tikki dropped off my wrist onto the asphalt with blood soaked into the fur all around his muzzle and his ears flat back against his skull.
But he didn’t look at me.
He went around me, up along her shoulder, and put his face against her cheek.
And my body picked that exact moment to tell me everything it had been screaming about for the last four minutes.
My heart was going way too fast, the kind of fast where you can feel it in your throat and behind your eyes and it doesn’t slow down just because you took a deep breath.
My shirt was soaked through under the plate carrier and going cold.
My nose was broken and shoved off to one side. Two back teeth loose. My shin was one long bar of fire. My right hand had holes punched deep in. My left forearm and my calf were basically in ribbons, and the entire right side of my face was burning where my eyebrow and my cheek and the corner of my mouth had been laid open.
My cat did nearly all of that, and he didn’t hold back even a single ounce. He went for my face exactly like he went for every enemy.
[He was trying to stop me... He was trying to stop me, and I kept going.]
My stomach came up.
I lurched to the ground, heaved twice, but nothing came out except blood and spit.
There was a high, thin ringing in both ears. Even my hands felt numb and useless like they belonged to somebody else.
[Not now!]
I looked up to check on Nia’s condition, and the moment my eyes landed on her shoulder, everything else in the world just switched off.
Three gashes running from the top of her right shoulder down across her collarbone into the muscle underneath, deep ones, four inches apart, her carrier strap cut clean through and the whole plate hanging loose off that side.
And the blood coming out of the bottom one wasn’t just seeping... It was pumping.
"H-Hey! Nia! NIA! Hey. Look at me, look at me-"
My voice came out more than an octave up and cracked in the middle as I dragged the misc chest out of Inventory, threw the lid back, got both hands into it, and came up with the big kit.
My hands were shaking so hard that I almost couldn’t open it.
"Okay. Okay okay okay-"
[Steady. Steady. STEADY, you asshole-!]
They wouldn’t steady. I jammed my right wrist down against my own thigh to kill some of it, and it wasn’t enough, and I did it anyway.
"Okay, look," I turned to Nia, who even now was looking behind me out in the darkness, eyes vigilant through those swollen slits.
"This is gonna hurt." I said through clenched teeth, feeling as though that was the most shameless thing I had ever said in my life, "This is gonna hurt a lot, and I need you to hold still, okay? Okay? I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-"
With a weak nod from her, I got two fingers down into the bottom gash, found where it was coming from, and packed the gauze into her chest.
She instantly screamed through gritted teeth, trying to hunch forward, but I held her down.
"I know. I know, I know, almost done, almost-"
Second wound packed. Third one shallower, so gauze laid flat into it.
Trauma dressing over the top of all three, tail run under her armpit and back over her shoulder, pressure bar cranked until the elastic bit down.
Then I put her left hand on it.
"Press. Hard as you can. Don’t stop pressing, okay? Don’t stop."
She nodded weakly and pressed.
Her right arm hadn’t moved once the entire time. It was lying out on the ground beside her exactly where it had been when I got off her.
I tried not to look at that.
Then the fast stuff. Gauze packed into both nostrils because her nose was in pieces and I wasn’t having her drown in it. Cravat under her jaw. Saline out of the pouch.
Which meant I had to look at her face.
Up close. Properly. Both eyes swelling shut, her cheekbone gone soft under my thumb, lip split all the way through to the gum, and the blood that matted into her hair on both sides.
I knew which punch did which, because I was there, I was sitting on her chest doing it with both hands, screaming, with a part of me enjoying it.
Through gritted teeth and shaking hands, I sat over her with the saline in my fist and my chest heaving like I’d run a kilometer and tears coming off my jaw onto her plate carrier, and for four or five seconds I was no use to anybody.
[Move. MOVE. She’s bleeding out, and you’re sat here having a-!]
"...Rev’nant," she said as her one working eye came up to mine.
Every word costing her something.
"Fled... west... six rounds... an’ one from rifle... in th’ face."
"Don’t talk."
"Whole lot’s-"
"Nia. Please. Please don’t talk."
She stopped.
And the quiet after it was worse, because there was nothing in it except what I’d been running from since the snow came off the yard.
She heard all of it.
Every word I said high on that thing’s hallucinogenics.
We’ve both seen one of those things work before, from the far side of a valley in a life that doesn’t exist anymore, so she knew exactly what was standing in front of her when she came around that trailer.
She came down off that billboard anyway.
And then she stood there and took it.
The heat went up my neck into my face, even my whole scalp prickled with it, and I have never in either of my lives wanted so badly to simply stop existing.
Because that thing doesn’t put anything into you.
It doesn’t write it. It doesn’t feed you a script.
It just opens the door.
And whatever’s already sat in the back of your own skull gets up and walks out wearing whichever face it likes.
Nobody put Kara in that kitchen.
[I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean one word of it, not one, I don’t think that, I’ve never once thought that about her-]
[Then why was it in there?]
[Why was any of it in there?]
I got up before that finished, because if I’d stayed down another ten seconds I don’t think I’d have gotten up at all.
Her pistol was still in my left hand.
I holstered it on her chest plate where it lives, then pulled my Shorty 40 Grenade launcher from the shoulder holster, and gently sat it on her lap.
"Pull the trigger at whatever Tikki points at."
"...Mm."
"Tikki."
He was already sat up against her ribs with his front paws planted and his ears going, and he didn’t turn around when I said his name.
He hadn’t looked at me once since he let go of my hand.
"You see the Revenant... You tell Nia about it."
"Mea."
And with that, I pushed Awareness out. Thirty meters, every direction, through the trailers and under them and out across the lot.
And it came clean.
But I did another sweep, because I no longer trusted it.
Or rather, I no longer trusted myself with it.
I did it a third time about ten seconds later and got exactly the same answer, while I stood there in the middle of that lot with my heart hammering and my shirt freezing to my back, and I did not believe one single thing my own head told me.
Because one of the worst kinds of Variant was out there somewhere, bleeding, waiting for us to be by ourselves again.
I couldn’t tell where it was, whether it was somewhere outside my Awareness, crouched in the dark, looking at us, waiting for us to make a move.
That’s the bit that had me sweating through my shirt on an October night.
But still I ran.
And running helped, honestly, because it was something to do that wasn’t looking at her.
The eight rigs the truckers had been living out of went first, tankers and trailers together, one after another after another.
Reefers next. Eleven of them, every single one still running when they went in, packed and frozen and worth more than everything else in that lot put together.
I went through that camp at a dead sprint with blood coming off my chin in strings and my left leg folding under me every fourth step and my breath whistling in and out of a nose that had stopped working.
[Take it!]
[Take all of it, take everything you came for! Because if you leave one thing behind, then it was all for nothing.]
Forty-one seconds that was all it took, but even that felt too long... but also too short.
By the forty-fifth second, I was back down on one knee beside her, and she was still pressing on that dressing with her left hand. Tikki hadn’t moved, hadn’t moved an inch either. Just looking at them made me wanna shoot myself in the head.
"Okay..." I got TK spreading out under her, wrapping her body in a way nothing would fold on the way up. "... Okay, it’s done, we’re going, we’re going right now. Ninety kilometers. That’s it... That’s nothing, we’ll be there in less than an hour."
Her one eye tracked up to me.
"Your dad’s a trauma surgeon, yeah? And we got that whole sick bay under the stairs... Three beds, air handler, the works, cost me thirty grand... you’ll be fine."
I was babbling. I could hear myself doing it, and I couldn’t stop.
I didn’t dare stop.
"So you just stay awake. That’s all you’ve got to do. Stay awake, and I’ll talk the whole way... You’ll be fine, just hold on..."
And she just chuckled.
It came out of her wet and broken, and it obviously hurt her to do it, but she did it anyway.
"Wish..." She rasped, and then her left hand came off the dressing.
I got as far as opening my mouth to tell her to keep pressing before she hooked two fingers into the collar of her shirt on the other side.
The good side.
And the moment she pulled the shirt down off her left shoulder, my vision closed down to a tunnel with her shoulder at the far end of it, my hands went cold and dead, my chest locked up completely with nothing going in or out, and my heart hit the inside of my chest twice and then seemed to give up on the whole thing.
The bite was jaw-wide.
Top of her shoulder into the meat above her armpit, a full set of them, deep with the edges torn where something had pulled its head back with her still in its teeth.
The ringing came up in my ears so loud it drowned out my own booming heartbeat.
"No..."
My vision went blurry, my voice cracking, while tears went down my face that I tried and failed to hold back.
"Please no..."