Chapter 98: I’ve Come Too Far
I ran the math over and over against the only thing that mattered, the whole ten hours of it.
The sun had gone all the way across the sky, and now it was sitting fat and orange on the western horizon ahead of us, laying a long copper stripe down the whole length of the Ghostbird’s flank and straight into the cabin behind me, while I sat in that open door with my boots hanging over nothing.
The credits in the corner of my eye had not stopped moving once in all that time.
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!
They’d arrived in a solid wall for the first few hours, so fast and so many that the System eventually stopped announcing them one by one and just gave me a subtotal that ticked instead, and I’d sat and watched that number climb the way you watch rain come across a field.
"System... give me the count."
-Ding!
{
Halden Operation: Running Total
Confirmed Kills: 411,268
Reward Subtotal: 61,690,200 Credits
Current Balance: 61,734,650 Credits
}
Sixty-one million, seven hundred thousand and then some change.
I had never in either of my lives held a number like that in any of my accounts, and I’d made it in a single day, and every single Credit of it had walked out of what is now an irradiated wasteland.
[Sixty-one out of a hundred and fifty... That’s forty-one percent, and it’s not even dinner time.]
I let myself have about four seconds of that.
Four seconds of sitting in a door at two thousand feet with a grin pulling at the tape on my cheek, because forty-one percent of a miracle in ten hours is genuinely, objectively incredible, and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.
Then the four seconds ended, and I ran the math.
The first three hours had paid me three hundred and six thousand of those kills.
And the two hours after it had paid me a hundred and five.
[Three hundred thousand in three hours... then a hundred and five in two... That’s a hundred thousand an hour dropping to fifteen...]
I sat there with the wind hauling at my jacket and did the ugly version out loud in my head, because the ugly version was the only one that counted.
The ones packed against the fence line had died first and died fastest, thousands deep and standing directly on top of the thing that killed them, and credits for every one of them had been in my pocket before lunch.
Everything after that was the outer edge.
The stragglers who’d fallen behind on the walk from the city. The ones that had lost interest halfway and wandered into a field. The ones sitting in a lethal dose right now and taking their sweet time about the dying.
And the further out you go, the fewer of them there are per square kilometer, and the weaker the dose gets, and the slower each one takes to fall over.
"System, project it out for me... When do I hit a hundred and fifty million?"
-Ding!
{Projection declined.}
"...Come on."
-Ding!
{
Rationale: Insufficient environmental modeling.
Variables: wind vector, precipitation, particulate dispersion, accumulation, undetermined population remainder.
Projection would be speculative.
}
"You projected a wall’s service life at a two-line request."
-Ding!
{A wall does not walk away.}
"...Fair."
So I did it myself, which is what I should have done in the first place, and I did it sitting on the edge of a helicopter with my legs swinging over a country I’d just poisoned for centuries to come.
And all that mental gymnastics led to the fact that the curve wasn’t linear.
The rate at which I was netting credits was, simply put, random.
And I was running out of time, and I wasn’t even sure at what rate.
[Halden’s entire population is a million and change... and I doubt the whole city ever walked to that plant...]
After all, some of them stayed behind in the buildings. Some of them were locked in rooms and cars and stairwells with no way to follow the helicopter. Some of them were even underground in a metro tunnel.
I’d needed all of them.
Every last one, no misses, no leftovers, a perfect harvest off an entire city, and I had never once had a plan in either of my lifetimes that survived contact with the word ’perfect’.
And I needed them all now.
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
"Yeah, thanks..." I muttered. "Very helpful, that one."
I stopped looking at the credit count after that, because looking at it was doing my state of mind more harm than good. So I got up out of the door and went back into the cabin instead.
Nia hadn’t moved. She still lay strapped down on the litter with the drip running into her left arm and the three monitors ticking their slow green lines off the rail, the ear pro still seated exactly the way I’d set it, and Tikki curled into a loaf against her thigh with one eye half open at me.
"...Hey, booger."
"Mea."
"Yeah, I know. Numbers aren’t loving me today."
I crouched down beside the litter, checked the drip, straightened the blanket over her legs where the vibration had crept it sideways, and tucked the corner back under her heel before putting two fingers on the back of her good hand.
She was warm.
That’s the whole thing I got out of it: her hand was warm, and I stood there inside a stolen helicopter like an absolute idiot, holding two fingers against the back of a sleeping woman’s hand while she was already connected to three monitors."
"System... Patient report."
-Ding!
{
Patient Report: Nia
Status: Stable.
Sedation: Maintained.
Rest mandate: 51 hours remaining.
Reconstructive healing: Accelerated. Right arm function returning.
Second Strain Progression: 50%
Note: Conversion becomes irreversible at 80%.
Progression rate: Indeterminate. Projection declined.
}
Fifty.
I read it three times, and the third time I read it my thumb had started moving back and forth across her knuckles without me telling it to.
Thirty percent at the cube. Fifty now.
[That’s twenty points... in a day...]
Except it wasn’t just about twenty points in a day.
There’s no clock when it came down to turning, and there never has been, and it doesn’t tick along politely at twenty points a day so you can plan your week around it.
It sits still for six hours, and then it takes nine points in the next twenty minutes or none for so long you’d forget you were ever bit.
She could hold at fifty until Thursday.
She could be at eighty by dinner, and there would be exactly nothing I could do about it.
Thirty percentage points of her. Eighty-eight million Credits slowly climbing.
That was the whole of it, right there, laid out either side of a woman who was breathing slow and even under a blanket I’d just straightened for the third time.
"...You’d have some really foul joke about this," I told her. "Something about us getting high..."
And that’s when it came back. The kitchen.
Followed right behind by sunlight lying gold across a wooden floor and a chipped mug warm in my hand, a fridge covered in crayon suns, a woman with long brown hair at a stove turning around with her eyes lighting up amber, and pancakes, and a cow shouting for the good hay somewhere outside a window with flower boxes under it.
It arrived without knocking, and it arrived at the exact moment I was crouched over the actual woman actually dying in front of me, and every part of me wanted it so badly that my hands started shaking on the litter rail.
[No. No, no, no, get out... GET OUT-]
I bit down until my jaw creaked, hard enough that the two teeth on the left side lit up and screamed at me, but I kept biting, because pain was at least real and that kitchen was not.
It went away, eventually. It always goes. It just never goes very far.
I stood there with my breath coming out ragged through a nose that still didn’t work right and my thumb still moving over her knuckles and a small warm calico pressed against her thigh watching me the whole time, and I made myself say what it was out loud, because what the hell else could I’ve done?
"A chemical imbalance... that’s all this is... my body is craving that Revenant’s psychedelic."
"Mea."
"...Yeah. I know."
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
Then -Ding! again, and again, further apart than they used to be, each one another thing lying down in a field somewhere east of here and paying me a hundred and fifty for the trouble.
I got up off that deck slowly, and I put my hand on Tikki’s head on the way past, and I went back to the open door and sat down in it with the last of the sun coming straight into my face.
And I sat there for a while in that door, watching the sun go down over a horizon somewhere west of everything, with my balance going slower and slower in the corner of my eye like a tap somebody had started closing, and I finally let myself look straight at the thing I’d been walking around all afternoon.
I had bet her life on a city.
That was it. That was the actual plan, in plain words. I had taken the whole thing, every single percentage point of her, and I had put it on the hope that a city’s worth of Infected would be obliging enough to walk out to the radiation zone and lie down in the right order at the right speed.
I never doubted the credits wouldn’t be enough. It was not about that. Even if Halden’s entire population ran short, there were still other large cities further south of the river.
It was about not being able to net a hundred and fifty million fast enough to matter.
And now I was two thousand feet up in a machine I couldn’t do a single useful thing from, watching a number I couldn’t touch crawl toward a wall it may not reach in time, and calling that a strategy.
[To be honest... I didn’t think about that far ahead... I was just...]
And I felt my face change.
I actually felt it happen, my brows coming down, my whole expression sliding into the one Nia calls my accounting face, while the last of the sun went under the horizon and the cabin behind me went blue and dim and cold.
[No... Not like this. I’ve come too far to leave it up to fate...]