Chapter 50: The Biggest Concern
The mirror had bad news and no interest in softening it.
Both my eyes had gone black, ringed in deep bruise-purple that faded yellow at the edges, and the rest of my face sat pale and drawn between them.
"I look like a panda..."
The swelling was gone, at least. The stim had done its fastest work on my face, since that was where I’d put the needle, so the puffed slits had shrunk back into eyes that now opened all the way, along with a jaw that closed clean.
But everything else still filed complaints.
My jaw still ached at the hinge whenever it opened too wide, so I’d brushed my teeth in small, careful strokes, while the one tooth on the lower left let me know that it was not yet ready to forgive me.
The split in my lip had scabbed into a tight line that pulled when I talked. My chest still turned every deep breath into a negotiation. Twisting my torso woke the bruises the beanbags had stamped across my back and ribs, five overlapping continents of purple that my hand found and regretted finding.
[It is what it is...]
I sighed, and even that pulled at something before I walked away from the mirror.
I walked into the morning light coming through the windows, and the smell of coffee, the whole apartment feeling quiet, warm, and almost aggressively normal.
Tikki was passed out on the sofa. Flat on his back, all four legs pointed straight at the ceiling, mouth open and completely unconscious.
While Nia stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me, pouring coffee into two cups, constitutionally incapable of occupying a room without moving through it.
"So that’s your master?" She thumbed over her shoulder toward the sofa without turning around.
"Might as well be..." I chuckled, crossing to take the cup she slid down the counter toward me.
"Now..." She scooped up her own cup, crossed to the sofa, and dropped onto it beside the wreck of the coffee table, patting the cushion next to her. "Let’s talk. And let’s talk quick, because there’s something else we need to get to."
"How’d you even get here?" I said as I sat and took a sip. It was good coffee, which was honestly its own small miracle. "... You lived two cities over, if I’ve got that right."
"Woke up about three days before the shit-show..." She pulled one leg up under her. "Just came to in my own bed. By that evening, I was already on the highway to your city. Got here the same day it started... Went to your apartment... Waited hours..."
"I-"
"What about you?"
"Woke up the same day it kicked off," I said, leaning back. "Didn’t even have time to grab groceries. Thought I had fifteen whole days to... well."
"Same..." She shook her head at her coffee before chuckling to herself. "I figured with that kind of runway I’d get you head over heels for me and make sure you were glued to my side when it all went down... And we’d be sitting on enough supplies to last us a year, minimum."
"I had pretty much the exact same idea..." I said, and a laugh came up despite my chest’s opinion on the matter. "I mean, it’s not like either of us could’ve walked up and gone, hey, crazy story, completely true though-"
"Hi," she said, deadpan, "I’m from the future. The world is about to end. And you need to come with me..."
"Sounds like the premise of a pretty interesting story, doesn’t it?"
We both cracked up, and hers ran into a groan halfway through because her ribs weren’t in much better shape than mine, but the absurdity of it still sat there between us, funny only to the two people alive who understood exactly how badly that opening line would have landed.
Then the math clicked, and I froze with the cup halfway to my mouth.
"Wait a second..." I said slowly. "Last time... You died three days before I did. And you regressed three days before me."
Her eyes went wide over the rim of her cup.
"Holy shit." She lowered it. "If the pattern holds... then Lexie should’ve woken up a full week before the outbreak. And Angelica about eight days out... Assuming they remember too."
"Yeah... assuming they remember too," I echoed. "Angelica would’ve come to on that aircraft carrier. Lexie back in that little town of his...."
"Old man’s probably got a fortress up already."
"Probably has a moat too..."
She snorted while I turned the cup in my hands and let the next part arrive on its own, because it arrived wistful, whether I wanted it to or not.
"The Bastion," I whispered.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t need to.
"Last time, the carrier crew took the ship back off the infected and docked her near Ashport’s west coast..." I said, eyes glazed at the ceiling above. "Navy stood up a camp on the docks, running power to it straight off the reactor. The biggest fuckin safe zone across half the country... Angelica was a huge part of what held it together."
"But it fell," Nia said quietly. "Once the variants showed, it fell... Humanity itself lost when the Variants showed up..."
She put her cup down on the arm of the sofa, and then she was up, on her feet, one hand dragging back through her messy hair, while the ease drained out of her posture between one breath and the next.
"Look, Nikki." Her voice had gone sharper, faster. "My biggest concern isn’t us... It’s the timeline."
"Yeah."
"The outbreak was supposed to need the better part of a week to really get rolling." She’d started pacing the narrow strip of floor beside the broken table. "... This time we got hours. Fucking hours."
"And if that ratio holds," I said, and the coffee had stopped tasting like anything, "... we’re looking at variants inside a month... Maybe sooner."
Neither of us laughed at that. There was no version of it that was funny.
Fifteen days of preparation, gone. That was the number that mattered, and it was countable, and it was zero. Everything that was supposed to give people time to fortify, stockpile, and learn the rules before the truly bad things arrived had been deleted from the schedule. But that was fine too, neither we nor humanity as a whole was that fragile.
But if even a single Variant shows up...
"We’ve gotta get our shit together while we still can." She stopped and looked down at me. "I keep getting this feeling things are about to get a whole lot worse."
"That makes two of us," I said, standing up. "And I’ve got a plan. We firs-"
"Before that." Her hand came up, and her eyes cut to the window that looked out over the police station. "We need to handle that."
And I switched tracks without an argument.
"Right..." I set the coffee down. "So what did they do to you?"
"They kidnapped my dad."
"Well... shit."
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