Chapter 61: Dead Angle
The guardrail came up at me at 270 Kmph while I rode the bike crouched on its seat like a monkey, and I did the last thing left on the list.
And the very next second, the Diavel stopped existing beneath my feet as I shoved it into the Inventory.
No wind-down, no wobble, no goodbye. The engine’s scream simply vanished out from under me mid-note while the rail flashed past below, and every last one of those 270 Kmph stayed exactly where they were.
In me.
The world went sky, then trees, then road, then sky again, then the lake upside down, while I screamed quite frankly like a little girl, and somewhere against my collarbone, Tikki was screaming, both of us pinwheeling through open evening air with nothing to grab and no up left to speak of.
[I’m a cannonball! I’m a literal human cannonball, and this was MY idea!]
Then the spin peeled him out of the pocket.
One heartbeat he was claws-deep in my shoulder, and the next he was a meter away from me in open air, legs spread wide, eyes enormous, screaming, falling with me and away from me at the same time, and every other thought in my skull died at once.
The migraine, the fall, and everything in between, it all stopped existing all at once.
"TIKKI-!"
TK closed around him before his name even finished leaving me, two and a half kilograms of cat yanked out of the sky and into my chest, and then both arms were locked around him, curled tight, and only after his claws found my jacket again did my brain politely remind me that I was still pinwheeling at something like two hundred kilometers an hour through open air.
[Right...]
The arc bent over its top and started taking me down, the rich district streaming underneath, gardens and stone walls and dark mansions, the lake swinging up ahead huge and orange with the sunset, and I reached for the glide, and TK caught me.
Sort of...
Feathering a fall works fine when the fall is a fall.
It had never once been asked to feather a man doing artillery speeds.
So the moment it engaged, the ache between my eyes went from a warning light to a drill, my vision smeared at the edges, and my flight path turned into a suggestion I was screaming requests at.
[This was a stupid idea!]
The glide held, barely, flattening the plunge into something merely insane, wind ripping tears sideways off my face while I came down across the district far too fast, and then the building was just there.
A lakefront tower, glass from street to sky, the tallest thing between me and the water, its top floor sitting dead center on my flight line.
I leaned everything sideways, while at the same time bleeding the speed with every scrap of TK the drill in my skull would still sell me.
And I bought maybe five degrees, and the math finished itself early, because by the time any correction mattered, I’d already be through the glass.
[Shiiit!]
I quit steering, curled into a ball around Tikki, knees to chest, chin down, cat in the very center of the smallest shape I could make, and threw the Barrier around us with everything left in the tank before-
-CRASH-!
And my world detonated into glass.
The Barrier ate the glass, ate the first meter of somebody’s bedroom, ate a wardrobe whole, and then it was gone, popped, nothing left to feed it, and the leftover momentum picked up what remained of me and spent it on the room, through a bedframe and across the floor until the far wall finally agreed to stop me, the helmet taking the concrete so my skull didn’t have to.
And somewhere in the middle of the tumbling, my mind detonated.
White.
Everything went white and silent at once, the migraine collapsing into a single point between my eyes and then bursting through the whole of my skull, and when the world came back, it came back wrong.
Blur where my eyes used to be. Cotton and water where my ears used to be.
And where twenty meters of constant living information had wrapped around me, there was darkness.
No, it’d be more accurate to call it absence.
Awareness was simply gone, all of it, numb the way a limb goes numb past the point of feeling anything at all.
I was in the wreck of a stranger’s bedroom, curled around a cat who was still with me, still warm, still gripping, while my body filed a report detailing how the ribs were screaming, how the shoulder felt wrong, the taste of copper in my mouth, and how my hands trembled through sheer agony.
[Get up...]
I somehow made it to my knees, tipped over, and made it up the second time.
And through the surviving stretch of glass wall, against all evening’s orange, far out and far below, a shape was moving. A massive blur coming fast and coming exactly here.
[Fuck.]
But there was nothing left in me to make it with. Just dread, flat and total, and the arithmetic of seconds.
I stumbled across the ruined bedroom toward the pale smear that had to be the door, hit the frame with my bad shoulder as I poured myself through into the hallway, and found what I needed by silhouette alone: a long, solid table standing against the interior wall, probably the only wall in this whole apartment made of actual concrete instead of glass and daylight. The wall, which also happened to be right in the middle of me and the direction the tremors were coming from.
I didn’t think; I just dove under the table, folding myself beneath with Tikki dragged against my chest, knees up, spine to the wall, as small as a grown man in full kit can get.
And then the tremors intensified.
Footfalls. Enormous ones. Each one coming up through the concrete and into my spine, closer, harder, stacking on each other, until-
-Crash-!
The whole tower took the hit somewhere far below. Then the floor jumped under me, while dust breathed out of every seam in the ceiling, and the building began to groan in long, low voices as death with its claws started up the outside of it.
It was climbing. Straight up the glass, claws punching into concrete floor by floor, taking the fastest possible line to the exact spot where it had watched me disappear, and every single impact traveled through the structure and the wall while glass burst somewhere below in one long falling sheet, and the very next second, the concrete against my spine flexed as the Tank reached my floor.
Tikki had gone perfectly still against my chest. Ears flat, eyes huge, breathing fast and shallow, and absolutely silent.
No confusion in him, no question, nothing that needed explaining, because the smartest cat alive knew exactly what was coming up the building, and he had already done the only correct thing left to do.
And that was to freeze.
Then came a breath of silence and before-
-CRASH-!
And the top of the world came off.
One swipe. That was all it was, one single deliberate sweep of an arm somewhere above me, and the roof and the upper halves of every wall exploded at once, swept off the building and out across the sky in a cloud of dust and shards of glass while the evening sunlight came pouring down into a bedroom and a kitchen and a living room that no longer had any business being indoors.
But a half-wall behind my spine held.
Waist-high now, just a stub of concrete.
But it was the only geometry left between us and it.
And then I felt its heart.
It arrived as vibration, through the floor and the wall and up the table legs, a heartbeat so big and so fast it hummed in the wood above my head.
It was a heart in free fall, spending itself double-time.
Its breathing arrived the same way, huge and wet and rapid, and under the breathing rolled a growl that never stopped, the vibration of it crawling over my skin while its upper body leaned in above the apartment and pushed the new sunlight into shadow.
It was searching.
My eyes gave me smears, light, one vast dark mass shifting above the wall behind me and the table above, and for once I was glad my eyes gave me nothing more, because what my body reported was already enough to break a mind.
The floor was trembling in time with its heart while the wet heat of its putrid breath rolled down over the wall.
And then a soft, fat patter started up on the tabletop directly above my skull.
Drool.
Ropes of it spattered the wood, one thick drop landing just past my boot and stringing there, while Tikki and I stopped breathing entirely.
My right hand moved on its own, the old instinct, crawling up the plate carrier toward the Glock, and it got exactly as far as the grip before what was left of my brain finished that math.
Ten millimeters. Against that.
It would have been the single most pathetic joke I would’ve pulled in my entire two lives.
The hand fell away all by itself.
Even my instincts were out of moves now.
So I did the one thing still on the menu. I held Tikki, and I stayed awake, fighting the darkness hell-bent on swamping my mind whole.
All the while, it searched slowly and thoroughly.
The massive shadow of its head slid across my smeared vision left to right and back, floorboards complaining somewhere under shifted weight, the drip tracking along the table’s edge, and the whole time, two heartbeats kept me awake in the dark.
One was the monster’s, through the floor, enormous and wrong and way too fast.
And the other was Tikki’s, against my palms, tiny and even faster, drumming and drumming and drumming...
I anchored to the small one, while my head dipped for the nth time.
But I caught it as I bit my tongue hard enough to flood fresh copper in my mouth, and dragged my eyes back open onto the same smear of shadow and orange.
And not even a few seconds later, my head dipped again.
I bit my lip this time, split it, held the sting for as long as it lasted, while somewhere inside me, a voice kept repeating the only order left, ’stay awake, stay awake, if you’re out, you can’t run, you can’t shield him, you can’t do anything at all, stay-’
Slowly, the migraine started going quiet.
That was the worst part, the pain easing, the drill between my eyes pulling back because it was taking the world with it.
Everything went soft and far away and warm at the edges.
The floor’s trembling faded toward something almost gentle.
The orange light dimmed without the sun moving anywhere.
Tikki’s heartbeat under my palms grew quieter and quieter, and my hands, my traitor hands, loosened around him one gram at a time, no matter what I ordered them to do.
[Stay... awake... stay awa...]
While above, a luxury apartment stood open to the evening sky, roofless, its dust drifting gold through the last of the light, while an enormous head moved slowly across the wreckage of bedroom and kitchen and living room, red eyes scanning, drool swinging, a two-story monster conducting its search one patient degree at a time.
And while below, against the last standing stretch of wall, beneath a simple wooden table, I lay unconscious in full kit with my arms going limp around a small calico cat who trembled against the chest of a man who was already lost to the darkness and could no longer be there for him.