Chapter 106: Chicken Soup
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
The notepad was inside my Inventory before her voice had finished crossing the door.
[Smooth... Real smooth. "W-who is it." Nailed it...]
I took a breath, checked the room like a guilty man, and found nothing but a cat, a bed, and a person dressed at three in the morning like he was about to go somewhere.
"...Come in."
The door opened, and Kara stepped through it with a steaming bowl balanced in both hands and a spoon handle sticking out of it, still in her white pajamas, chestnut hair loose down one shoulder, and pushed the door shut behind her with her heel.
"Leftovers from tonight’s dinner," she said, crossing the room. "Chicken soup."
"Kara, I’m-"
"You haven’t eaten in over a day." She held the bowl out. "Don’t bother denying it. Your face already confessed."
I looked at the bowl.
Kara has been showing up at my door with food in her hands since the first semester of university, and some habits apparently survive the actual end of the world, and I took it from her because there has never once existed a version of me that didn’t.
The warmth came through the ceramic and into my palms.
And my body basically signed off without asking me first, the tension going out of my shoulders in one long quiet slide, and I was three spoonfuls deep before I even registered sitting back down, because a day and a half of hunger doesn’t knock, it just waits for the door to open.
I demolished the whole thing within minutes while Kara settled into the armchair by the dresser and watched me eat.
The moment she sat, Tikki abandoned my bed immediately, flowed across the floor, and poured himself into her lap like the traitor he has always been, and her hand found the spot behind his ears on autopilot.
And while I ate, her eyes moved.
Over the boots I hadn’t taken off. Over the jeans. Over the black jacket hanging off my shoulders, the one that had been torn in three places when I landed, sitting on me now without a single mark on it courtesy of the System.
Pristine jacket. Ruined owner.
She looked at all of it, one item at a time, and said absolutely nothing, and filed it wherever Kara files things.
"Thanks..." I set the empty bowl on the nightstand.
She nodded.
And then she just sat there, hands quiet on the cat, making no move whatsoever toward the door, and I have known this woman for three years and a week of apocalypse, and I knew exactly what that particular stillness means.
She wasn’t leaving until I talked.
I could outwait a horde. I have never once outwaited Kara Woodbrew.
The silence stretched long enough for the lamp’s hum to begin feeling deafening, and I looked at the taped-black pane across the room, and somewhere in the middle of all that quiet I heard my own voice come out flat and small.
"Nia’s bitten."
Kara went completely still.
The hand on Tikki’s back stopped mid-stroke, the blood walked out of her face one shade at a time, and her lips came apart around a word that never made it out.
And before she could find another one, I kept going.
"There was a Revenant at the truck stop. You know what those do... you wrote the notes." My eyes stayed on the taped glass. "It doesed with its psychedelic... because I was standing in front of a pile of bodies with my whole Awareness folded onto it. Thirty meters of the best detection system left on this planet, pointed at corpses, while a seven-foot-tall Variant walked up my back."
My hands had found each other in my lap.
"What it put in me... I lost it, Kara. All of it. It took my eyes and my mind and left the rest of me standing, and when Nia tried to bring me back..." The fists happened on their own, knuckles going white. "Those bruises on her face. Under the dressings. Both eyes... Those are mine. My own two fists."
I heard her breath change, but I didn’t look.
"She never put me down. She could have. Any second of it, one trigger pull, and she’d have been right to..." My voice shook, but I forced it down. "Instead she took every hit and talked to the monster wearing my mouth until it wore off... And by the time I got myself back, there was a bite in her shoulder."
The lamp hummed.
"Bite is a guaranteed turn... no exceptions, no immunity, the second strain doesn’t care. But the System sells a cure..."
And I let the number out slowly. "A hundred and fifty million Credits. I’ve managed seventy-two... She’s at fifty percent turning, and it goes irreversible at eighty... And there is no clock, Kara. It can sit still for a week or take ten points within ten minutes, and nobody gets told which."
My voice had started shaking despite it all, and I let it.
"I have telekinesis... A barrier that stops bullets. Thirty meters of Awareness and two enhancers... and-" The lump in my throat came up hard. "And she got bitten three steps away from me, in one blink, because I was looking at a pile."
Kara said nothing, didn’t move either.
And I made myself keep going, because the next part was the part I’d actually been afraid of and the part I wanted to let out the most.
"You heard the helicopter tonight, right?... Twenty soldiers flew it out of a fort up north to a nuclear plant two hundred kilometers east... Ferrow Point... They came to shut it down safely, before it could fail on its own and poison the river that feeds everything south of it. They were good people. The real thing. One of them had his daughter’s crayon drawing taped inside his helmet."
My jaw was trembling now, and I locked it, and it came out anyway.
"I killed all twenty of them and took their bird... Then I flew laps over Halden until close to a million Infected followed the noise, and I parked every one of them on that plant’s front lawn... and then I pushed the button myself."
Taking a deep breath that shuddered as it went in, I continued.
"There’s a counter in the corner of my eye that’s been paying me a hundred and fifty Credits a head ever since. That’s where the seventy-two million came from... A third of the country, Kara. My country. Every camp on that river, every field anybody was going to plant in spring, for longer than anyone alive will stay alive."
I couldn’t look at her. I hadn’t looked at her once since the word ’bitten,’ because I could feel the expression she was probably making, and feeling it was survivable and seeing it was not.
"I put his drawing back in his helmet before I left. That’s the kind of people they were... better than me. All twenty of them..."
And then the last of it, flat, because it was the truest thing in the room.
"And I’d do it again. Every single part of it... Tomorrow, if I have to... I’d do it all over again... That’s the part I need you to understand."
And all that followed was silence.
I don’t know how long it held. But it was long enough for my fists to start aching. Long enough for the lamp’s hum to become the loudest thing in the world.
Then the armchair creaked.
Tikki hit the floor with a soft thump, and Kara crossed the space between us, and her arms came around me slowly, one over my shoulder and one around my head, and she pulled me into her the way you pull something in out of the rain.
"It’s okay..." she said softly, into my hair. "It’s okay, Nikki."
Not what I did. Never once what I did.
Just me.
Over her shoulder, Tikki sat on the carpet watching us with those round, unhurried eyes, the only other soul in the room who knew what I’d left out, and he didn’t make a sound.
And the moment I closed my eyes, it came.
For two days I had waited to feel something and been handed spreadsheets. Twenty people, five hundred a head. A country, at a hundred and fifty per unit. All of it filed, all of it arithmetic.
But it all arrived now. At once. And with interest.
The tears slowly came up from under the accounting, and I leaned into her, and before I could stop it, the first sob broke out, but I quickly muffled it.
Because there was a grieving father one door and fifteen meters away, so I buried it in her shoulder and let the rest come the same way, muffled, ugly, my whole body shaking against her while everything I’d carried across three days came out of me at once.
Nia’s face under my fists. The bite I was three steps too stupid to stop. Twenty better people. A crayon dog drawn four times too big. A third of a country, dying downstream of my signature.
Kara’s chest caught once against my cheek, one single hitch, and her arms only tightened.
"It’s okay..."
And I let her hold all of it.