Chapter 100: It Was Just… Weather
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
Midnight came and went somewhere over the highway while I sat in the open door with my boots hanging out over a country with no lights in it, and I mean none, not one porch bulb or gas station sign or lit window between the horizons, just black fields under a half moon and the long grey ribbon of the highway sliding by underneath us.
The only lights left in the entire world were the soft green ticking off Nia’s monitors behind me, the bird’s electronics in the corner of my eye, and the solar-powered street lights on the road below.
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
Then nothing, for a long while.
At noon those had been arriving too fast to count. By sunset they’d slowed to a drizzle.
Now they came one at a time, with gaps you could eat a meal in.
"System... count."
-Ding!
{
Halden Operation: Running Total
Confirmed Kills: 481,506
Reward Subtotal: 72,225,900 Credits
Current Balance: 72,277,450 Credits
}
Seventy-two million.
Twelve hours ago I’d have kissed that number on the mouth.
Now I just ran the shape of it; the same shape that had been telling me the same thing since sunset.
The ones packed in that reactor fence died first, and everything since has been the outer edge, the stragglers, the wanderers, the ones taking their sweet time in a field somewhere and ones inside the city with a dose already in them.
[The curve isn’t slowing anymore... it’s landing.]
Run it out to the end, be generous with the wind, and the whole harvest dies somewhere short of a hundred million.
And then it just stops. Until, of course, the river does its magic. But that’d take time, and I don’t have time.
Fifty million short, give or take.
[And there isn’t another Halden...]
Halden came pre-loaded with a nuclear plant fifteen klicks upwind and a gunship delivered to my doorstep by twenty people kind enough to fly it there themselves.
Every single one of those things was a gift.
The next city comes with none of them, and a woman behind me with no clock on her.
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
"...Yeah. Thanks."
And with nothing left to calculate, the rest of it finally caught up with me, which is what happens when a man runs out of arithmetic.
Mara Voss, hanging in front of me with her boots off the floor, telling me there were no borders and no factions anymore, just us humans and our humanity.
Brandt’s hands. That’s the one that keeps coming back. Not his face, not the shot... just an old man’s hands moving over a console faster than they’d moved all day, with teeth clattering loud enough through sheer terror to hear across the room, because he’d decided the correct response to a monster behind him was to keep working.
A dog on a folded paper, drawn four times too big.
And I hadn’t cried about any of it.
That had been sitting next to me since around eleven and hadn’t moved since.
Because a lifetime ago, there was a kid who nursed a squirrel with a busted back leg for eleven days, and bawled for a week straight when the neighbor’s dog got it, and gave away his entire first paycheck to a shelter over one photo of a three-legged mutt.
Yesterday that same kid killed twenty people who came to save half a country, and he hasn’t shed one tear, and he hasn’t eaten, and the only reason he hasn’t slept is a counter he keeps wanting to check.
Four hundred and eighty-one thousand and counting.
Nobody in any war in history ever got close to that off one pair of hands.
Entire air fleets didn’t. And I did it in a day, alone, for one woman, and what I feel about it mostly arrives as a spreadsheet.
[...That’s the bit, isn’t it. I keep waiting to feel something... and what shows up instead is accounting.]
"Mea."
Tikki came off the seat without a sound and sat down against my hip in the doorway, tail wrapped over his paws, looking out at the dark with me.
"I’m not brooding," I told him. "I’m strategizing... It’s all very technical."
He leaned his whole small warm weight into my thigh and didn’t buy one word of it.
Then he looked up at me, and blinked. Slow, and deliberate, and unhurried, exactly like on the highway with his fur still standing up in patches.
I had to look back out at the fields for a second before my throat would work.
"...Yeah. You too."
He was on my shoulder for every second of yesterday. He knows exactly what I did.
And he still came and sat down next to me. Once the others found out about this, Tikki would probably be the only one who’d still do that.
I turned and looked at her.
Nia lay under the blanket with her face tipped toward the door, both eyes still bruised from my own fists, the swelling down enough overnight that she’d started looking like herself again, which was somehow worse.
[Fifty percent...] I couldn’t stop that sigh. Just sitting inside her, being fifty, where it could hold all week or take thirty points within the next ten minutes.
I’ve got telekinesis, a cosmic vending machine, seventy-two million Credits, and an armed helicopter that flies itself, and the virus inside her couldn’t care less about any of it.
I have never hated anything, in either life, the way I hate this...
[Which is why we’re done waiting.]
"System... the map I just bought..."
-Ding!
{Displaying.}
It unrolled across the corner of my vision in soft blue lines, four hundred kilometers of roads and rivers and little grey blocks of towns, one dirty red circle far behind us where a plant would keep venting into the sky long after everyone who remembered the why of it was gone.
And I began reading the map like a menu.
Because if the harvest wouldn’t come to me, then I was going to go out and take it, town by town, site by site, paying whatever the machine in my head asked, until either that counter rolled over a hundred and fifty million or there was nothing left standing between here and the coast.
That wasn’t a threat, and it wasn’t a speech either.
It was just... weather.
"Booger... we’re gonna be very busy demons."
"Mea."
And then the map scrolled along with us, and a name came up on the highway ahead, and everything in my chest went still at once.
FOUR CORNERS.
I leaned out of the door and looked down, and there it was, resolving out of the dark two kilometers ahead.
The billboard first, a tall black rectangle on steel legs beside six empty lanes, and I didn’t need any light to read it, because I’d crouched on that catwalk in the cold with a pair of binoculars and a cat’s ears turning beside my face.
Then the rest of it, under the half moon. The chain fence with the trailer wall backed hub to hub against the inside of it. The lot, thinned out where I’d taken half of it. The diner, and the motel with the plywood still over every upper window.
And the roundabout in the middle, the only soil on the entire property, with a hundred and some graves in neat rows with something stuck upright at the head of every one, pale markers catching the moonlight.
That’s where they buried their own.
That’s where a woman with green eyes came down off that billboard on her own two feet, knowing exactly what was standing at the bottom, because I was down there with my Awareness folded onto a pile of corpses like an idiot.
That’s where she took every word the monster said with my mouth.
That’s where the flowers were.
"System... change of plan. Take us down."
-Ding!
{Clarify destination.}
"There." I pointed straight down through the dark, at the graves, at the fence, at the place where all of this actually began. "Right there... Cause I’ve got some unfinished business down there..."