Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 84: I’m Here

Two Boreal bodies were coming at Sheila from either side of her.

The high coil was the one that had thrown Vivian into the next car. The low one was newborn and quick, still wet at the seams where they had cut it loose. She backed down the roofs a car at a time.

She had to face one of them. When the low coil folded in at her knees, she turned her full weight into it and drove her fist down through the new head. The roof stamped inward under her, a panel-wide dent, rivets shearing loose around the rim and pinging off down the car. The head split and sealed shut. The high coil attacked the back she’d offered, driving a jaw across her shoulder blades with spine-breaking weight behind it.

It didn’t break hers. The hit threw her flat and skidding across the frost. She came up still swinging at what was in front of her.

She set her heels in the dent she had made and hit the low coil again, harder, everything behind it. The roof gave instead, the panel buckling into a V and dropping her a foot before the frame underneath caught it. Dark fluid wept from the dimple her knuckles left and froze before it ran an inch.

The fourth hit told her what the first three already had. The Boreal’s plating didn’t dent the same place twice. Each strike had landed on a surface that had already started closing from the last one, the joints drawing tight, the tissue underneath reorienting to distribute the next load. She was training it. Every time she found the angle, the angle closed.

She put her back to the dead coupling at the end of the car and faced both of them down the roof and waited for one to move first.

That’s when she noticed Ash returning to the fight.

"It took you long enough," she said.

Sheila looked over at him, his right leg carrying half the weight it should, the knee fully popped in a direction she could only dream of. The blood that had dripped down him had gone black and stiff in the cold, gluing to his hoodie in a sheet from shoulder to hip. His left arm hung lower than the right. It didn’t look dislocated, but the muscle had definitely gone past the point of no return.

Ash looked at the two coils as he ran up to her. He dropped a gravity field onto the high coil mid-fold.

The plating groaned first, then sagged, the fold stalling out as three times its mass pulled back against the motion. It was a clean field, wide coverage, good depth.

She drove her fist through the seam of the stalled head in the opening. The head split and sealed, and she was already moving for the low coil when he set the second field.

"You’re slow," she said, feeling him place his back against hers.

"Yeah." He set the next gravity field down. "I’m here."

The weight dropped on the low coil and pinned its fold flat to the steel. He threw the weight; she spent the opening it bought. The high coil came down at her head. Ash caught it a yard off her scalp, just long enough for her to duck and drive up into the jaw.

The low coil swept for their footing. Ash stapled its tail to the roof while she stomped its head into the dent of the last one. They fought down the train as the cars died behind them. A coil folded an abandoned roof into the rail, windows bursting down the length of it.

The high coil finished regrowing and came back bigger.

The stump where they had sliced off the head was already full length again. It was taller than what had been there before, the new plate lay over the old one like a second set of armor. The plating had stapled itself at every joint, the gaps Sheila was mapping now sealed under a second layer. The spines had grown past arm’s reach, angling outward rather than back.

Sheila stood in front of it, working out exactly what she was looking at.

The new head wasn’t just bigger, and they hadn’t just given the Boreal a new body. They had been this one’s tutor.

She came in low anyway, adjusting without stopping, reading the new body as she crossed the distance, finding where the second layer overlapped the first. The new growth was not seated perfectly against old bone. Her knuckles found the seam a half inch off where she aimed. She drove into it with everything she had, feeling the joint buckle slightly before the plate began closing around her fist.

Sheila turned and aimed for the bigger head, low and tight. She threw a heavy jab up and under the new double jaw, crunching the joint in as her fist drove deeper. Dark fluid sheeted down over her arm and froze before she could pull the fist back.

A new length of the Boreal came out of a crushed car behind them.

"When did that happen?" Ash yelled out.

"Between you figuring out how to use your hands and learning to use your feet again," Sheila responded.

"And Vivian?" Ash said, looking around the car roofs.

"In between one of the cars." She shook her sleeves, the black stains shattering like a layer of ice that hadn’t fully set, revealing her clean white blouse underneath. Her fingers reached for her chin, then curled back into a fist.

Ash could only hold one gravity field in his current capacity. The moment he spiked the third body down, the one that had wound its way around had stabbed a spine through the meat on his shoulder. Ash recoiled in pain, turning his attention to the one that punctured him. He moved his gravity field on top of that one, just enough to stagger it and nothing more, allowing him and Sheila to run down to the next car over.

"You’re getting distracted," Sheila said, running beside him.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Pick one."

"The freshest."

His eyes found the youngest, the regrowth still raw and pale across its crown, and he gave it everything he had left. He braced against the dead car behind him, beginning to feel the last stretch of roof that hadn’t begun to peel, pouring his weight onto the body until his knees buckled and locked. The gravity field was past three times baseline and climbing.

His read of the roof guttered out, the other body on the roof turning into a smudge around the edge of his range. The field dragged and crooked as his grip slipped, but he held it bent anyway, keeping his shaking hand moving.

In the opening, Sheila drove her fist into the pinned head. The skull-plate split around her knuckles and folded inward, the crown caving into the roof. Eye-clusters were going out row by row as the whole head crushed flat under her hand.

Matter climbed the dark stump and hardened. The eyes came up lit before Ash had his second leg under him, and what was left of his range felt it finish before the old head had gone cold.

"Sheila," Ash said, his voice dropping low and uncertain.

"I know," she said, watching all three bodies orient on them. "I know."