Chapter 110: Done Dumber On Less
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
Two kilometers behind me, on a rooftop I’d left in the dark, a pair of turbines began winding up out of nothing.
I heard it carry across the district as a thin, rising whine under everything else, while I stood behind the Mk 19 with both thumbs resting on the butterfly trigger, my head dipping forward again with another wave of dizziness without asking me first.
I caught it, hauled it back up, and blinked until the balcony stopped swimming.
[Two days... You’ve done dumber on less...]
Below me, half a million bodies did not roar, they just breathed, but those five hundred and twelve thousand sets of lungs working at once came up the front of that tower as one long wet shuffle, patient and enormous and in no hurry whatsoever.
But even so, the loudest thing in the world right then was me, inside my own helmet.
"Last count, booger..."
"Mea."
"Five hundred and twelve thousand at a hundred and forty-one a head... seventy-two million, and that’s if not one single body of them gets to stay standing anywhere on this shore."
Sixty-seven and a half million sat in the corner of my eye, still crawling upward off a poisoned river and a city two hundred kilometers east.
Which still left me ten million short of the woman sleeping under a staircase, even if this entire lakeside cooperated perfectly, and that is assuming nothing in either of my lives ever has.
And by evening, if I wasn’t back, Kara would open three yellow pages in front of everybody.
"Right..." I rolled my jaw, steadied my shoulders against the mount, and grinned into the morning. "Let’s ruin somebody’s lie-in."
"Meah."
"Yeah, well, you didn’t say that when we bought it."
-Thunk-!-Thunk-!-Thunk-!
The Mk 19 stepped in my hands three times, slow and heavy and nothing like a rifle, and I walked those first three rounds out to six hundred meters into a crowd packed so tight that a miss was still a hit.
-Krump-!-Krump-!-Krump-!
Forty millimeters of high explosive opened three holes in that mass and filled the air above them with what used to be shoulders, and grey bodies ripped apart in rings while the ones behind stumbled into the gaps and got dragged under by their own feet.
And then the entire shoreline turned around. All of it at once, half a million heads coming off the water and rotating up the hillside toward one balcony on one tower, and the shuffle I’d been listening to for three hours climbed into a single flat scream that hit the concrete around me and came back louder.
"Good morning, fellas~"
The road below started moving, the whole four lanes of it filling from the waterline up, and out in the shallows past all of them, even the mountain rolled over.
Water slopped off its chest in sheets, one arm came up through the surface and slapped back down hard enough to throw spray twenty meters, but the arterial-red slits under that brow stayed shut.
Then it settled again.
I stood there with my thumbs off the trigger and my heart straight up back flipping.
[Not yet... but you’re waking up today either way, aren’t you...]
Because I was about to make more noise on this shoreline than this city had heard, and there is no version of that where a Tank sleeps through it. Every infected on this lake had already proven that noise is the only argument any of them respect.
Which meant the only thing left to choose was who it was looking at when it opened its eyes.
"System, put the Ghostbird on the eastern approach... hold her at eight kilometers."
-Ding!
{
Ghostbird: Airborne.
Bearing: East. Standoff maintained.
Note: Left door, right door and rear ramp M3M mounts remain manually operated. No crew aboard.
}
"I know..."
Three .50 cals bolted onto the best aircraft I have ever owned, and not one hand in this world to run them.
"One Spike ER... to the Tank’s face."
-Ding!
{
Spike ER: Launched.
Range to target: 7,940 m.
Time of flight: 45 seconds.
Guidance: Man-in-the-loop. Operator feed enabled.
Remaining: 3
}
And then something happened that had never happened to me before.
A window opened in the corner of my eye, small and square and grey, and inside it the lake came rushing at me from a meter off the deck at four hundred kilometers an hour, whitecaps blurring underneath, and I understood that I was looking through the nose of a missile.
[...Okay. That’s new.]
I kept firing, thumbed the trigger and walked rounds up that road while in a corner of my vision flew a warhead across eight kilometers of open water.
"Thirty..."
-Thunk-!-Thunk-!
"Twenty..."
-Krump-!-Krump-!
"Ten... booger, don’t look at this part."
"Mea."
"Suit yourself."
The shape in that little grey window stopped being a shape and became a face, filling the frame, a jaw the size of a car, growing until-
-KRAKOOM-!
The window went white and died, and a heartbeat later the sound arrived across the water and hit me in the chest through a plate carrier.
A column of steam and lake and pulverized meat stood up out of the shallows about eight meters tall, and inside it something enormous came off its back and got its feet under it.
-GRRAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!
Two stories of purple hide rose up out of the water with half its face covered in soot, and every muscle in it locked rigid, arms flung wide, claws longer than my whole head opening and closing on nothing.
A tandem HEAT warhead drills through steel, and I’d just learned exactly how little that means to something that would take an armored platoon a very bad afternoon to kill.
Beside my ear, Tikki went very quiet and set his claws.
"Yeah..." I breathed. "Me too."
Then the head came around.
Slow, dripping, blind with fury, sweeping the hillside for the noise that had been beating on this shoreline for a full minute straight, and it swung toward the tallest building on the water.
-Fwoosh-!-KRUMP-!
A seventy-millimeter HE rocket came in off the eastern sky and took it square in the chest, and the Ghostbird came over the lake behind it low and loud enough to be a second sunrise, eleven tonnes of turbine noise dragging across all that water.
The head snapped up, onto the sky.
"Oh, thank you very much," I said to a machine that couldn’t hear me.
And as I had hoped, the Tank went straight after the bird, wading, throwing bodies out of its path in every direction.
A good slice of the Infected on the shoreline also peeled off and stampeded after the rotor noise, thousands of them, running away from my guns.
I let them go without a single regret, because that helicopter is a noise with wings, and it would be walking every last one of them back across this street anyway.
Besides, the street was almost ready.
It had filled from the waterline up, four lanes of boulevard packed wall to wall with no asphalt showing anywhere, the leading edge already at the base of my tower and clawing at the lobby. And all of them were standing exactly on top of two hundred charge sets I had spent an hour seating by hand.
I made myself wait, feeding the gun so it never went quiet, letting it pack tighter than was comfortable.
[Now the good part~]
Then I pulled the initiator and thumbed channel two.
-CLACK-!
-BABABABOOM-!
The road went first, the whole length of it erupting in a straight line of orange that threw bodies forty meters into the air, and half a second behind it the load-bearing corners let go on both rows and twelve floors of luxury apartments came down inward on top of the survivors.
The whole thing happened a good block downrange from my building, because I am stupid, but not that stupid.
The sound of it flattened everything, and then the dust came, boiling up the boulevard in one grey wall that climbed past my balcony and kept climbing, as the entire street just stopped existing.
-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!
Since the very first burst, the count had been running like a fuel gauge on a dead sprint, thousands at a time, and I couldn’t see one meter of what was paying me.
"System, target the Tank’s legs... lowest armor on it, and if we, somehow, against the will of the universe, cripple its legs... well..."
-Ding!
{
Order acknowledged.
70 mm HE: 17 remaining.
Spike ER: 3 Remaining.
Reminder: Rearmament requires the airframe to be present in the Inventory.
}
"...Seventeen and three..."
"Mea."
"I heard me too, booger."
-Click-!
"Damn... that fast?" I looked down and found I had already used up an entire belt.
[Here’s to a hundred more~] I hauled the next can up onto the mount, dropped the belt in straight, slammed the top cover down on it, and put both thumbs back on a street I could no longer see.