Chapter 109: Sleep Remains Unpurchaseable
**/Nikki’s First Person POV/**
I pushed the Ghostbird to the roof of a residential tower two kilometers back from the water t, the war drum that’d begin it all.
Then I walked in on foot.
The rich district went past me dark and nearly empty through the NVGs, everything washed in that grainy green, stone walls and iron gates and long gravel drives, hedges nobody would ever trim again, a Bentley sitting in a courtyard with all four doors hanging open.
Not one infected on any street.
They’d all gone down to the lake, every last one of them, and none of them had ever found a reason to come back up.
I came out at the crest above the hairpins and looked down at the reason.
[...Hotdamn.]
The entire lakeside was gone.
There was no sand down there, no boat club lawn, no marina parking, no ground of any kind visible anywhere between the bottom of the hillside and the shoreline, only a single unbroken grey mass filling every meter of it, packed shoulder against shoulder, spilling out into the shallows and standing in the water to their waists.
The whole thing moved together, slow and constant, breathing in and out along its edges.
And in the middle of it, flat on its back in the shallows with its arms flung wide and the water lapping over its chest, the mountain slept.
"System... count them for me."
-Ding!
{
Hostile Population Estimate: 512,000 ± 4%
Composition: Sprinter 41% / Shambler 59%
Blended bounty value: approximately 141 Credits per unit.
}
I did the math standing there with both hands on the guardrail.
Five hundred and twelve thousand, at a hundred and forty-one a head, came out around seventy-two million if I killed every single one of them and didn’t leave one body standing anywhere on that shore.
I needed seventy-eight.
[So the entire lakeside isn’t enough...]
Which left the difference sleeping in the shallows with its mouth open, and I finally let myself think the thing I hadn’t written into any letter.
"System... a Tank. What’s the bounty?"
-Ding!
{
Variant Class: Tank.
Bounty range: 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 Credits, scaled to specimen condition.
}
There it was.
The lakeside covered the rent, and the Tank covered the gap... I hate math.
I just hadn’t said it out loud, because saying it out loud made it a plan, and this wasn’t a plan.
But this was a bet with Nia on the table.
"Right..." I pushed off the rail. "I’m giving myself three hours. Let’s go shopping. System?"
-Ding!
{Listening...}
And so I began listing off enough ordnance to level a city block.
-Ding!
{
Procurement Invoice
M134D Minigun ×3, mounts, power packs, 7.62 linked: 1,150,000
Mk 19 Mod 3 40mm ×4, tripods, ammunition cans ×40: 1,340,000
RPG-7 ×1, thermobaric rounds ×24: 610,000
Demolition charge sets ×200, remote initiators ×4: 780,000
Thickened fuel drums ×160: 640,000
Ammunition resupply, 7.62 NATO, 10mm, 40mm HE: 95,000
Energy drink ×6: 108 Credits
Total: 4,615,108 Credits
Advisory: This purchase must be recovered from approximately 32,700 kills before Host earns one net Credit.
Advisory: Sleep remains unpurchasable.
}
"You’re never letting that one go, are you..."
-Ding!
{It remains the single largest unaddressed risk factor in this operation.}
"Confirm the order."
A week ago, thirty thousand Credits for a plastic room under a staircase had me swearing at the ceiling.
Tonight I spent four and a half million on things that blast people to smithereens and never once looked at the total twice.
And that purchase moved the target, because now the lakeside alone left me ten million short even if I got every last body, and my Tank was a scrawny, undernourished thing that tripped over a bus, which put it at the very bottom of that bounty range.
[Ten to twenty... scaled to condition. And compared to the other Tanks I’ve seen...mine’s built like a famine... ]
It was the whole shore. All of it. Every single one, and then the mountain, and even then it may not be enough.
[Good thing I’m constantly raking in credits thanks to the radiation poisoning...]
Then I got to work.
The district was the arena, and I gave myself three hours to build it.
Six blocks of the richest real estate in the city, sitting flat between the water and the small hill, laid out in the wide, clean grid rich people pay a premium for. Boulevards four lanes across.
Roundabouts with dead fountains in them. Villas behind stone walls, apartment towers with glass fronts and roof gardens, a boat club, a marina lot, and around half a million bodies standing on top of every bit of it.
And the whole place had exactly the geometry I needed.
Because I don’t fight half a million of anything head-on, nobody does.
The trick isn’t killing them, the trick is steering them, moving a mass that size the way you move water, and water only goes where the channel lets it.
So I spent the first hour deciding which streets existed.
Charges under the stone boundary walls on the east-west avenues so I could drop a wall across the road on command and turn a boulevard into a dead end whenever I felt like it. Drums of thickened fuel nested into three of the roundabouts, into the marina lot, into the mouth of every side street I wanted shut. Charge sets along the gates and the garden walls, at the choke points where the grid narrowed down to two lanes.
By the end of it, that district had a valve on every corner.
I could close a street, open a street, or set a street on fire, and the mass would go wherever the open path took it; after all, half a million bodies don’t make decisions. They flow.
"Mea?" Tikki asked from the shoulder pocket, very quietly.
"I’m not fighting them, booger," I whispered, seating another charge into the base of a garden wall. "I’m... plumbing, let’s just say..."
"Mea..."
"Yeah, I know how it sounds."
The guns went up in the second hour.
Four Mk 19s were my trump cards here, because a belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher doesn’t just kill an infected; it kills the eleven other infected around it too.
Six hundred meters of range, sixty rounds a minute, and every single one of them landing in a crowd packed so tight that a miss is still a hit.
I put one on the boat club roof covering the shoreline frontage. One on a villa roof looking straight down the main boulevard. One on an apartment block over the northern roundabout, and one on the lakefront tower.
The three miniguns went up second, an insurance, not as planned. 7.62 is what I reach for when they’ve closed inside two hundred meters, and the 40mm starts being a bad idea for the man firing it. It’s the thing that keeps a roof clear while I’m still standing on it, and nothing more than that.
And I seated every mount by hand.
Every ammunition can hauled up by hand, every belt laid straight so it wouldn’t foul on the third burst, because there is no such thing as a jam I can afford today, and I checked every single feed twice before I moved on.
And the whole time I worked, I was picking my roads.
Aix blocks of luxury housing meant hundreds of rooftops, and rooftops don’t have infected on them, and I had a grapple gun and a glide and a skull full of TK, which made the entire upper level of that district a highway with exactly one commuter on it.
Roof to roof, balcony to balcony, tower to tower, hopping gaps they’d have to spend twenty minutes walking around.
That was the day.
Open a street, let them pour in, hit them from six hundred meters with 40mm until the belt runs dry or the leading edge gets bored of dying, then blow the walls, light the fuel, and grapple to the next roof three hundred meters over while t. At the same time, le mass turns around and starts the long stupid walk toward wherever I made the next noise.
Rinse. Repeat.
[Kite, kill, collect... and never once stand on the ground.]
And I saved the last forty charges for the buildings themselves.
Because a Tank doesn’t use streets.
That thing gains in curves by refusing to be in them, cutting straight through whatever stands between where it is and where I am, and in a district like this that meant it would come at me through the villas, through the garden walls, through the apartment blocks, taking the shortest line between two points regardless of what was standing in it.
So I rigged the shortest lines.
Load-bearing corners on four buildings along the seafront row, the ones any straight run at that lakefront tower would have to pass through, and I did that part slowly and carefully and hated every second of it.
And when it was all done, I did the one thing I’d been putting off since I landed.
I grappled up the outside of the lakefront tower, because the ground floor was standing on the leading edge of half a million bodies. I had absolutely no business walking through it, and I came in over the balcony rail onto the top floor of a building with no ceiling left on it.
The bedframe still lay where it had been the last time I was here, while down the hall stood a long wooden table with three dead infected around it and dried drool cracked across the top. I stood there a moment looking at the exact patch of floor where I’d stopped being conscious with a two-story monster leaning over.
[Home sweet home, I guess...?]
"Mea!"
"Yeah, I know, you did all the work that night... You’ve mentioned it."
The last MK 19 went onto the balcony rail, and I bolted the mount down myself, because this roofless apartment thirty floors above the shoreline was where the whole thing started today.
Then I went out to the rail, cracked the second energy drink of the last hour, and drank half of it in one pull, even though it tasted like cheap liquid candy.
But my head dipped anyway.
It dipped hard, chin toward chest, and I caught it and jerked upright and blinked the burn out of my eyes. Two days without sleep doesn’t care if you’re standing a few street distances from half a city’s worth of Infected.
The stim fixed my calf, my hand, my face, and my nose, but did nothing for the single thing behind my eyelids.
[Stay up... just a few more hours... then you can sleep for a week... Or forever. Whichever comes first, honestly. I wouldn’t mind either way...]
Out past the rail, the black was starting to lose.
The first grey came up along the far east, thin and cold, and it crawled out across all that water until the lake stopped being a black hole in the world and started being a lake again, and one by one the details came up out of the dark without any help from the goggles.
Around half a million bodies, packed together all the way to the waterline.
And in the middle of them, that chest going up and down, slow and enormous and steady, water breaking over it in small ripples with every breath.
I flipped the goggles up onto the helmet rail and finished the can.
"Alright..." I said, my voice coming out flat and calm and not even slightly tired, which was a lie my mouth told all by itself. "Booger... claws in."
Tikki’s claws went in.
And I racked the Mark 19’s charging handle before-
"System, wake the Ghostbird."