Chapter 101: In This Sea Of Fugly Monsters…
The pile was exactly where I’d left it.
Out in the open now, no longer hidden by the rig line and the front of the convenience store, in what used to be the one blind spot that billboard across that highway could ever have seen into, and I stood in front of it at half past midnight with a red jerry can hanging from my left hand.
People, and dogs.
Twenty-five, thirty of them, arms through arms, one man’s boots up near a woman’s face, a kid’s jacket somewhere down in the middle, and the dogs threaded all the way through, one of them still wearing its collar and tag. The cold days of October had kept their bodies pretty fresh, but it had not made it one bit easier to look at.
It was the Revenant’s pantry.
And the last time I had stood on this exact spot, I had folded thirty meters of Awareness down onto this exact heap, so busy examining it that a seven-foot nightmare managed to walk up my back and slide the respirator off my face like a nurse.
[And Nia paid the bill for it...]
Around me, the lot was empty.
The gate truck, the trailer wall, the eighty-some in the west lot I’d been too rushed to take the first time, all of it folded into Inventory over the last hour, all of it going into a single slot, until the only things left standing at Four Corners were four lit buildings, a hundred-and-some graves, and this.
Payment, I guess. For what I was about to do for people who couldn’t ask.
And then, while I stood in front of their bodies working out where to start pouring, my head decided it was the perfect time to serve pancakes.
The kitchen came up over the pile without knocking.
Gold light on a wooden floor, crayon suns on the fridge, the mug warm in my hand, her turning from the stove with her eyes lighting up amber, and it landed OVER the corpses, laid across them like a projection on a bad screen, so that for half a second I was looking at a dead kid’s jacket through a window box full of flowers.
And my heart leaned into it.
My mind stayed right here, cold and clear and disgusted with itself, but my heart walked toward that kitchen anyway like a dog on a leash, and both of those things were me, at the same time, standing in front of a pile of dead families.
[Out.]
I bit down hard, letting out a silent scream, and the kitchen tore like wet paper and was gone, while my hands shook around the handle of the can.
"...Okay," I breathed. "New policy."
Out of Inventory came a cigar.
Not cigarettes, because cigarettes go into the lungs, and my lungs are currently the second most load-bearing organ I own with the amount of running for my life that has entered my life. And not the bottle either, not with what tomorrow is.
But cigar smoke you hold in your mouth and never inhale, and the nicotine walks in through the cheek anyway, and nicotine is one of exactly two levers I have left to pull against a craving that is only going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
I bit the cap off, spat it, and lit up.
The first mouthful sat on my tongue, fat and bitter, and the leash on my heart slowly began to go slack. Only a little. But a little was the entire point.
"Mea," came the editorial from the Ghostbird behind me, sitting in a loaf in the open doorway, pointedly upwind.
"It’s medicinal."
"Mea."
"No, I’m not lighting one for you..."
And with the smoke doing its small ugly job, I stood in front of that pile and let my head run the plan, because the plan was the other reason I couldn’t sleep.
The plan was to go home. Half an hour in the bird, maybe less, then hover over the roof, get Nia down.
And then face her father.
The kind-looking trauma surgeon in his fifties, and I was going to look into those green eyes and hand him the sentence I’d built and sanded smooth on the way west.
She got injured. She’s stable, out of danger, and she needs rest.
Every word of it true.
And the word ’bitten’ nowhere in it, and ’fifty percent’ nowhere in it, and ’a hundred and fifty million’ nowhere in it, nor a nuclear holocaust, because that conversation would run for at least four hours, would end with nobody asleep and everybody voting, and I had neither the four hours nor any intention to play Democracy with my plans.
[Too risky, they’d say... And they’d be right. That’s the annoying part... they’d be completely right.]
Then, I’d say I’m tired, and we’ll talk in the morning. Wouldn’t even have to act it.
Then everybody will go to bed.
And once the penthouse went dark, I’d sit down and write the most honest thing I’d say all night.
A letter, basically. Romantic, I know.
I’d detail the bite, the suppressant, the price, where the count stands. Ferrow Point, and what I did there.
Then the lake north of the city, and what I’m about to do there.
And at the bottom, in the plainest words I own: Take everyone and go west immediately. Do not wait for me. I’ll catch up.
And since that’d be an order issued while I am on the field, Democracy won’t be called.
I’d leave the letter in the hall where the morning finds it.
And be gone before the morning does.
Because tens of thousands of them stood consolidated on one shoreline north of the city, the densest concentration of Infected anywhere in a hundred-kilometer radius.
Ought to be fifty-plus million Credits standing in one place give or take, and the only way I make the rest of her cure in time is to walk into that and start a war with all of it at once.
Me against half a city. At dawn. Alone.
And in the shallows over all that dark water, the one thing on this earth I have personally watched shrug off everything money could buy.
The Tank.
[...I’ll figure something out.]
That was the plan for the Tank. That was the whole plan for the Tank, four words, and I knew exactly how thin they were, because you don’t ’figure out’ tens of tons of learning muscle that cuts swaths through buildings. You survive it. Sometimes. If it’s busy.
[I have the helicopter... Four Spikes, nineteen rockets, and three .50 cals. That’s not nothing.]
It wasn’t nothing. It also wasn’t a plan, and I filed the difference under ’morning problems’.
And I know what all of it is, by the way. I’m aware.
It’s stupid. It’s the kind of plan a sixteen-year-old writes in the back of a notebook, one man against the horde, tell no one, leave a note, go west and remember me fondly.
If Nia were awake, she’d laugh herself into a coughing fit and kick me in the balls and tie me up.
But this plan’s the one I’ve got, and it has to be done, and every hour I spent making it smarter was an hour her number got to move for free.
So stupid, at dawn, it is.
And whatever they wanted to do to me afterward, whatever the vote said, whatever her father’s face did when he finished that letter, I’d stand there and take every bit of it.
"It’s settled then..." I unscrewed the jerry can, and the fuel went over the pile in long swings, soaking into coats and fur and the cold-stiff folds of it, the smell cutting straight through the cigar, and I walked the length of the heap twice until the can swung empty.
They’d buried their own in the roundabout. Past a hundred graves, neat rows, markers, trinkets.
But there was nobody to bury those who did the burying, which more often than not is the case in this brand new world.
These got stacked in a blind spot like cordwood for a monster’s pantry, the people who didn’t make the cut and the dogs who did their jobs to the very end. Everyone who might have owed them better was under a marker twenty meters away, and the only person left standing in the world who’d ever looked at this pile long enough to owe it anything was the idiot it nearly killed.
So it fell to me.
I took the cigar out of my mouth, looked at it, and tossed it on.
-Fwoomph-!
And the fire went up in one soft orange breath, heat rolling back across my face, and the pile stopped being visible inside the light of it, which was the whole point, which was the only mercy left to give here.
I stood and watched it take.
"In this sea of fugly monsters, I am the greatest of them all... Pftt-! Who’re you kidding? Dude!" I chuckled at myself, trying and failing to find at least a gram of humor in it.
Then I turned my back on Four Corners for the last time and walked to the bird, where Tikki sat in the open door with the firelight caught in his eyes, two small orange coins watching me come.
"Mea?"
"Yeah, booger." I climbed up past him and pulled the door. "We’re going home... but only for a bit."