Chapter 96 -s in History Books
They were already inside when I hit the last stretch.
I felt them come in through my Awareness before I heard them, and they came in at the bottom, hitting the ground floor, one level under my boots, pouring in through the lobby doors and the turbine hall shutters and the north maintenance door I had personally unlocked for them.
And not one single one of them stopped there.
Because there was a helicopter hammering the air over the roof of this building, seven floors above every one of us, and that was the loudest and most interesting thing this entire county had heard since the world ended. The whole mass turned toward it at once and started to climb.
-Ding!
{
Sequence Status:
Remaining Actions: 2
}
I wrenched the wheel in front of me full open, the metal cold and stubborn under my gloves. At the same time, Awareness handed me thirty meters of building in every direction filling up with clumsy figures, the west stairwell already solid from the ground floor and thickening by the second.
[Too late now... Story of my life... It’s always too late...]
-Ding!
{
Final Action:
Location: Primary Control Console.
Component: Guarded Emergency Switch.
Required Action:
Lift protective cover.Depress switch.
}
I dashed back into the control room over the bodies, past Rourke, past that woman’s squared-away rifle, to the panel Brandt had died four minutes short of, and there it was under a hinged plastic guard, one switch, red as blood, the last thing standing between this plant and what everybody spent a year making sure it could never do.
Just as I flipped the cover up, the first of them came through the far doorway, grey and swollen, then two behind it, and within seconds that doorway wasn’t a doorway anymore; it was a mouth pouring them.in
But instead of turning around, I shoved my fist on the button.
[For her.]
-Ding!
{
Sequence Status: Catastrophic Failure Sequence: Complete.
Facility Status:
Reactor Protection: Disabled.
Core Cooling: Terminated.
Emergency Cooling: Unavailable.
Failure Progression: Underway.
Facility Alarms: Active.
Reversibility: 0%
}
And the very next second, the whole building changed its voice.
Alarms came up everywhere at once, a hard flat electronic scream in every corridor, red strobes waking that I hadn’t left power to, the plant finally understanding what had been done to it and telling the empty rooms about it in the only language it had, and under the alarms, under my feet, the pump’s note began to climb toward something very wrong.
-Dhum-!
And the room was full of them now.
"Okay," I grinned, "Now the cinematic part~"
-Bash-!
The first one to reach me got a shove of TK that folded it back into the three by the door, all four going down in a heap that plugged the frame for about two seconds, and I was already moving the other way, out the second door and into the first floor corridor at a dead sprint with the M110A2 up and Awareness running out ahead of my steps.
[West stair’s gone... packed to the third... east one, east one, go east-]
And so I ran east.
The corridor ran the length of the building, with the strobes turning every meter of it red, then dark, then again.
I took it flat out with my feet hammering, and Tikki braced low in the shoulder pocket against my neck.
Awareness gave me the east stairwell coming up on my right, and I knew that the Infected climbing it would reach my floor in about four seconds.
Four seconds was plenty.
I hit that landing ahead of them and went up.
And the moment my boots hit those stairs, it felt like half the building was already behind me.
That was the entire shape of the next four minutes, right there.
Seven floors of building, a helipad on top of it, one man and one cat and about a million of them, all of us running for the exact same helicopter through the stairs.
-Tish-!-Tish-!-Tish-!-Thard-!-Thard-!....
I opened up on the stragglers already on the second flight, ones that somehow made it through the stairs on the other side of the building, and the corridor, towards the stairs I was taking.
But never once did I stop even as the suppressor went into cooldown and the whispers turned into real gunshots that slammed off the concrete walls, punching them back down onto the ones behind them, taking the steps three at a time through the gap I’d made.
Then I stopped shooting entirely.
[Wait... Wait, you absolute idiot, what are you doing...]
Because that whole crowd was chasing noise; that was the only reason any of them were in this building at all; that was the entire trick.
I had personally walked a city here on a rotor blade, and here I was making the second loudest sound in the entire facility inside a sealed concrete tube.
Every round I fired was a hand raised in a crowd, and it was calling them onto me instead of the roof.
So the rifle came down and stayed down, and from that landing on it was my legs and my head and nothing else.
-Bash-!
I shoved a knot of six off the flight above me as I reached the third floor, and they went over the rail into the well, and I was through the space they left before the sound of them falling to their death even came back up, but my thighs had already started to burn.
Then came the fourth floor.
That surprised me, honestly. I’ve got a Physiological Enhancer sitting in my body; I can sprint a forest end to end, and I found that out for a fact a night ago running through black trees.
But a forest is flat.
This was seven floors of switchbacked stairs at a dead sprint after a night with no sleep, or food, close to a liter of my own blood on a highway, a shredded calf, a hand Tikki had chewed to the bone, and more than half my TK reserves already spent on this building.
So by the fourth floor my legs had gone to acid, and my breath was sawing in and out of me loud enough that I could hear it over the alarms.
Sweat ran into my eyes under the helmet. But I blinked it out and kept climbing.
-Bash-!-Crash-!
Two more knots, and I felt the tank go with them, because I can read my own reserves now, exactly, the way you can tell how much water’s left in a bottle by the weight of it, and that bottle was going disturbingly light in my hands.
[About a third... Maybe a bit under... Careful now...]
Fifth floor, and my hand went onto the rail without me deciding it, hauling where my legs used to do the work on their own.
While behind me and below me the stairwell had become one continuous roar, hundreds of them coming up through the red strobing dark with no back end to it, tripping and climbing over each other, going down and getting walked over, the whole mass rising through the building underneath me like water filling a pipe.
I risked one look back over the rail and got a spiral of snarling faces going down four floors with their arms clawing.
That was a mistake, and it cost me a step, and my boot skidded off the edge of a tread, and I crashed down onto one knee hard enough that the whole stairwell whited out for a second.
And that very moment, I felt claws dug into my shoulder through the jacket.
"Mea!"
"Yeah... yeah, I know, I’m up, I’m up... How about you carry me next time?"
"Mea!"
But even so, I gritted my teeth and got up.
I got up because there was a woman thirty kilometers west of this building lying in a truck with a green line ticking beside her head, and because the only thing between her and the suppressant was just these stairs.
From the Inventory, I pulled a flashbang out and floated beside me while I climbed, pin pulled with TK alone, and I sent it hurling back down the well over the rail into the middle of that column right behind me before turning around and covering my eyes.
-Bang-!
The pile it made at the fourth-floor landing bought me maybe six seconds.
Six seconds, and I spent every one of them on the last flight, and came out on the seventh floor with my chest heaving and my hands shaking and the whole front of me soaked through.
"You know," I said between breaths.
"Mea!"
"Fine! Less talking."
The seventh-floor corridor ran the full width of the building toward the roof access on the far side, glass offices down the left of it, and I put my head down and ran it.
It was close to a hundred meters, maybe a hundred and twenty.
But it felt like a lot more than that, and about halfway down it, my legs genuinely started to argue with me, that heavy dead feeling where the message goes out from your head and arrives a little late. However, I still ran through it with my mouth wide open, my breath tearing and my ear pro slick with sweat against the sides of my head, while behind me the stairwell door burst open and the screeching roars rippled in.
A hand came out of an office doorway on my left.
And I barely managed to spin straight through it, without ever slowing, despite having seen it coming, while Awareness screamed two more coming off my right and I ducked under the swipe I couldn’t see and let TK take their legs so they went down where I’d just been.
All the while, the alarms kept climbing, and the strobing red lights turned that whole run into a stop-motion nightmare, everything arriving in red flashes, a grey face here, a reaching arm there, my own shadow thrown ahead of me and snatched back again with every pulse.
Until finally I reached the door at the end, hitting it with my shoulder and the weight of my full body.
-CLANG-!
And I came out onto the balcony into cold grey daylight.
It was an external gantry, steel grating running along the seventh floor of the building with a handrail and a long drop, and the October wind coming off the river, hitting me in the face, and I actually staggered on it, one hand on the rail, dragging air in whole gulps.
Below me, the yard.
Fence line to building line with no ground showing anywhere. Every meter of it was full of them, and every single one of them shoving inside the facility through whatever gaps they could find.
And above me, forty feet up and out past the lip, the Ghostbird sat on her rotors in the downwash with her side door open, holding station exactly where I’d told her to hold it.
Stumbling once, I dashed to the metal stairs which ran up off the end of that gantry in two open flights of steel, and I ran up them with my thighs screaming and my heart slamming and the pad coming into view.
And the moment it did, I found the pad was already filling.
Because that west stairwell, the one I couldn’t use, the one that had been packed to the third floor before I ever pressed the button, had been quietly delivering its whole load up here the entire time I was climbing the east one, and there were maybe forty of them already up on that pad with their arms raised at the machine hovering a few meters beyond the lip of the pad.
And as I reached up, panting, sweating, sliding into my eyes, they slowly turned to me.
All the while behind me, six floors of everything else came out onto the gantry at once.
[Fuck it!]
Throwing caution to the wind, I ran for the bird with both halves of that building coming for me, and the TK barrier up.
A literal wall of Infected collided with the barrier surrounding me, getting pushed back while I ran as though my body couldn’t even feel them.
My body genuinely couldn’t feel them, but the spot between my eyes sure as hell felt every one of them bashing into the barrier.
Reaching the lip of the pad, I leaped with every ounce of strength my body could’ve possibly mustered, stretching my hands and torso out as far as I could make them, but distance in that moment felt so far away.
And just as my mind flashed that I might actually not, my outstretched hand caught the landing skid by mere inches, and my instincts instantly closed that hand into a death grip.
"Holy-!"
"Meaa!!"
"GO!" I shouted at a machine that was already going.
And the rotors bit down hard, the pad dropped away underneath, and the reaching hands fell back into the flood, until eventually Ferrow Point Nuclear Facility let go of us and the world all at once, sure to earn Chapters dedicated to it in history books should humanity ever win.