Chapter 47: Fixation
I sat at the lip of the roof with the M110A2 shouldered and my eye behind the scope, and Tikki folded into a loaf beside me, both of us watching the seven-floor building swarming with Infected six hundred meters out.
The building came together one layer at a time through the scope.
A middle-class apartment block. Open balconies running the full length of all faces, laundry lines still strung between a few of them, flower pots knocked over and shattered glass across the concrete railings all the way up.
The kind of building I would’ve barely been able to afford living in.
And every square inch of its first two floors had drowned under Infected.
The sound hit me a half second behind the sight, and it stopped being individual snarls a long time ago.
Hundreds layered into one animal roar that rose and fell across the block like water, never once stopping, only ever changing pitch.
Maybe over a thousand of them. But definitely more than I felt like counting from this far out.
They climbed over one another the way ants cover an anthill.
They clawed up the backs of the ones underneath; some got buried alive at the bottom and kept crawling regardless, and every few seconds, one lost its grip and dropped off a balcony, only to stand back up on the ground and start the climb over again.
The piles ran two full floors high in places.
Then I caught the interesting part.
Every balcony stayed packed to overflowing up to the fifth floor, Infected shoving each other over the railings by sheer volume.
But nothing spilled off the sixth and the seventh floor.
[Huh... intresting... dude blocked off the stairs... furniture, probably...]
"But he’s basically trapped himself..." I cackled behind the scope.
-Thard-!
The whole mass screeched louder the instant the rifle spoke, and I couldn’t help but let out a slow breath at it.
Because I could joke about the guy all I wanted.
But I knew I was walking into the fight of my life today.
C.R.E.D.I.T. had put a Healing Stim and a Cognition Enhancer on the table for this one.
The Stim ran 100K and cut recovery by ninety percent.
The Enhancer ran 175K and permanently bumped overall cognition by a factor of 1.2.
I’d given Tikki the Cognition Enhancer from my startup rewards on day one, back when he was already a frighteningly clever little bastard.
Now, he was most certainly the single smartest cat drawing breath anywhere on Earth.
Point is: Going by its previous track record, C.R.E.D.I.T. did not hand out quarter-million-credit payouts because somebody was mildly annoying.
Which left two options. Either the shooter was dangerous enough that I’d genuinely need those items after the Quest, or Kara had called it four days ago and I was about to meet another System user.
[Won’t risk walking up with my hands up... Take him down non-lethal... tie him up, then start talking...]
I could’ve glided to a better angle and shot him from half a kilometer away, but dead men answered no questions.
And I had a very long list of questions.
-Thard-!
I pulled the scope off the windows and dropped it onto the infected themselves, and now I got a proper look at what four days had done to them.
Thinner than Night One by a mile. Movement gone heavy and sluggish. Skin faded toward gray, hair fallen out in clumps across most of the scalps I could see.
But the thing that actually mattered was the swelling.
Their faces were puffed and rounded, cheeks blown out, foreheads thickened, the eyes recessed back into all of it.
Necks had gone thick. Shoulders and torsos bloated under the skin the way a body looks when someone’s been pumping it full of substances it was never built to hold.
That was the Non-Newtonian armor coming in.
A dense gel muscle under the skin, pale yellow-white where the flesh tore open enough to show it, a living shock absorber that locked rock solid the exact millisecond an impact touched it and went soft again the instant after.
From here, they looked like a whole building’s worth of people mid-anaphylaxis.
"Almost done cooking..." I muttered and right on cue-
-Thard-!
I squinted through the glass at a target I couldn’t actually see, because I was sitting on the back face of the building, and every shot he sent went somewhere past the block into an area I had no angle on.
But then again, he didn’t have an angle on me either.
[What are you even shooting at...]
I pulled the misc. chest out of Inventory, flipped it, and lifted the little drone out.
The rotors spun up near silent, and I took it straight up instead of toward the nest, because a drone drifting close to a sniper’s nest was a drone that got clocked, and a drone that got clocked ended the whole approach before it started.
I took it past the roofline of the seven-floor block, until the screen in the controller cleared the building and handed me the ground on the far side.
And two blocks out, a little to the left of the shooter’s building, the answer sat waiting.
[Interesting...]
A police station compound, its front and side faces pointed dead at the shooter’s building, handing the dude a clean look down onto the whole front yard and side yards.
Concrete perimeter walls ran around the property. Two wire mesh sliding gates for entrances, both blocked and barricaded with SWAT vans parked sideways across them.
Every front and side window was shattered. The front doors were chewed through with bullet impacts stacked on bullet impacts.
Nothing was moving anywhere on the screen.
At a glance, the whole place was dead.
Then the details filled themselves in.
Bodies across the front yard, most of them in leather jackets. A line of Harleys and other cruisers parked up near the front doors, chrome catching what little light made it through the overcast.
"Seems like some sort of biker gang took over the station somehow..." I said to Tikki, who’d already climbed half onto my lap and was covering a third of the screen with his head. "Probably killed somebody close to the shooter, and now the dude’s out on a suicide run... What’d you think?"
"Mea..." He looked up at me.
"Yeah... And if you think about it, the shooter’s position is actually pretty smart..." I tilted the drone for a wider frame. "Those biker guys can’t shoot back. Second, they open up, that horde piling around his nest turns and sprints straight for the police station..."
"Mea."
"Yep. Kills any retaliation... He’s free to keep shooting all day, and they can’t do shit about it..." I paused on the empty front yard. "But the plan was still stupid... They’ve already pulled back to the rear of the compound. His shots aren’t landing on anyone anymore..."
"Mea..."
"And now the dude’s trapped in that building... still committing to his supposed plan... for some reason."
I pulled the drone back, dropped it into the misc. chest, sent the chest into Inventory, and got up.
"Let’s go say hi."
Tikki was up my arm and into the pocket behind my right shoulder before I’d finished pulling the grapple gun out of Inventory.
Aiming it up at the elevated water tank on the roof of the building across the road, the one sitting opposite mine, I pulled the trigger and-
-Disssh-!
Hook bit, the System ran its stability check inside a second before clearing me, and then-
-Woosh-!
I zipped straight to it, disengaging the hook halfway through, letting the momentum sling me forward, a small Telekinesis push carrying me right, gliding down toward the back of the shooter’s building.
And halfway to it, I began losing ground.
The glide bled altitude at a steady forty-five degrees, the ground rushing up faster than the distance closed, and the infected on the lower balconies came up faster than either, close enough that I could see individual swollen faces snapping toward the motion, close enough that a reaching arm brushed the air a body-length under my boots.
And just as I got into the grappling range of the building-
-Disssh-!
I zipped up, disengaging this one well before halfway, because every balcony above me had Infected spilling off it, and I was not about to zip into a rain of falling bodies. And I immediately chained straight into the next ones.
-Disssh-!
-Disssh-!
I climbed the back face of the building in a string of hard diagonal zips, hook, release, correct and hook again, hauling myself up the outside of a seven-floor apartment block the exact way a certain caped crusader would have if he traded the cape for telekinesis that made him weigh about as much as a feather from the grapple gun’s point of view.
The last shot went into the parapet a few meters above the roofline, and I zipped over the edge, the momentum taking me meters above the roof before I slowly and softly landed on it.
[Okay... now the fun part...]
I sent the M110A2 into Inventory and pulled out Lexie’s shotgun, an old 5+1-shell-capacity Mossberg 590 pump-action used and abused across years on end.
"System, give me thirty bean bag rounds..."
-Ding!
{Purchased and stored in the Inventory.}
I pulled the shells out and thumbed the first one.
Bean bag rounds were basically a little fabric pouch of lead shot fired at low velocity, built to hammer a human being flat without punching through them.
They worked beautifully on people but did jack shit to the Infected.
Exactly wrong for every other problem in this city.
Exactly right for the one I had today.
I fed them into the tube within 2 seconds flat in a quad reload, racked the action, and moved to the edge of the roof directly over the top-floor balconies while Awareness bled down through the concrete under my boots.
The clarity dropped off hard through the floor, walls smearing the resolution, but still being more than enough to detect people, and below, one presence came through.
One person, seated at a dining table, eating out of a can.
[Turns out our he is a she...] I chuckled. [... Checks out. Only a woman out for blood can pull off this brand of insanity.]
She sat at the dining table in a 2 BHK on the other side of the kitchen wall, and I stood on the roof directly above her balcony.
And I was about to ruin her lunch.
I lowered myself off the roof edge with Telekinesis wrapped full around my body.
Feather-light the whole way down until my boots kissed the top-floor balcony without a whisper while every scrap of me locked onto the woman.
The balcony door stood open ahead, and I moved through it into the kitchen with the Mossberg up and my eyes fixed on her through the doorway into the hall.
She sat at the dining table set against the wall, right beside the gate leading through, a can of something in one hand and a spoon in the other, working through it with no idea that her little sanctuary just got breached.
The pistol rode on her right hip.
A revolver sat on the table within a hand’s reach of her plate.
A bolt-action hunting rifle leaned against the wall by the window that looked out over the police station, the barrel still warm, probably, from the last round she’d sent through it.
I ran the hall while I closed. Table by the wall, woman on the near side, revolver at eleven o’clock off her right hand, pistol on the hip, rifle a full lunge and a turn away by the window.
The kitchen counter to my left for cover if this got loud.
I was maybe four meters behind her back and closing with every slow step I set down, all my attention on her. Even feeling through Awareness the bead of sweat sliding down the nape of her neck, all the while my heart slammed against the plate hard enough to feel through the ceramic.
One more step and I could feel the wire running up the wall on my right. Electrical, probably.
Something dark fixed to the ceiling. A light, probably.
Her spoon scraped the bottom of the can.
One more step, slow, the Mossberg steady, everything in me narrowed down to the few meters between the muzzle and the middle of her back, and -
-Click-
The world stopped.
Something thin caught against my boot at ankle height, and my heart dropped clean through the floor while my eyes snapped down to it, and there it was.
A line. Far too thin to be anything but fishing line, running taut from the floor up the wall and across to the ceiling.
My stomach went to ice as my gaze ran up the whole length of it. Up the wall, across the joint before landing on the black flashbang duct-taped to the ceiling directly over my head.
Pin already gone.
The dark thing I’d filed as a light bulb.
Awareness had fed me that thing from the second my boots touched the balcony. But my brain had thrown it in the trash. Filtered it out. Deleted it as noise, because every last scrap of processing I owned had been poured into the woman and her pistol, the revolver and the rifle, and nothing else in that room had been allowed to exist.
The perception never once failed me.
I failed myself.
[Shit-]
My hand shot up to cover Tikki’s face and-
-Bang-!
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