Chapter 52: Just A Little Road Trip~
"We’re going on a little road trip~"
"You wanna head straight to Lexie’s?" Nia frowned.
"Nope..." I pulled the misc. chest out, lifted the folded map from it and spread it across the cabinet, over my gear. "His place is too far... Gonna take a week just to reach him. And I’m not leaving Kara, Nora, and Leo hanging that long..."
"Here, look, Lexie’s out west." I tapped the spot, then dragged my finger in the other direction, across the city, before going out past it. "I wanna go east."
"Explain." She bent over the map, both hands flat on the cabinet, while I put my finger down east of the city, on the knot where four separate highways crossed each other.
"That’s a big truck stop, about ninety klicks out from us, right on that intersection... The kind the long-haul rigs use, hauling everything from produce to meat to dairy to furniture and everything in between too... Most of it riding in temp-controlled trailers."
"Yeah, that’s a stupid amount of loot just parked there." She was already nodding, eyes moving over the map faster than I was talking. "Truck stops run convenience stores too... Fuel pumps. Maintenance garages..."
"Yeah."
"But here’s the problem." She looked up. "We can’t haul a stupid amount of loot. It’d be just you, me, and Dad. That’s three semis, tops. And there are truck stops out west anyway..."
"That’s where you’re wrong. Remember the Inventory?" I grinned because this was the good part. "I can stack ninety-nine of the same item in a single slot."
And her bright green eyes flashed.
"Which means ninety-nine massive semis, most of which are already running RV conversion... with their trailers attached, in a single fuckin slot... And I’ve got ten slots." Straightening up, I crossed my arms while the grin on my face widened, "I’ve already got an off-road expedition RV and a Cybertruck sitting in there right now."
She didn’t laugh, like I thought she would.
Instead, her eyes moved off me and back down to the map, then to the gear stacked on the cabinet, then back to the map, and I practically could see the number running behind her eyes.
Ten slots, Ninety-nine each. That’s nearly a thousand fully loaded semis, if we ever found that many.
"Holy shit..." she finally breathed.
"And that’s not all..." I let it hang before moving on, because watching her brain catch fire was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I was going to savour it. "... The highways aren’t clogged this time. The outbreak hit in hours, remember? Nobody got the chance to pile onto the interstates and die there in a hundred-mile traffic jam, creating those massive hordes. Roads are mostly clear right now..."
"We’d be set for a whole year!" She looked up at me, eyes bright and wide, with a glazed smile, "More than a year! We could feed an entire settlement!"
"It’s not all sunshine, though..." I chuckled. "A place like that is pretty much guaranteed to be an armed camp by now... Truckers all carry, and they’re a hardy bunch. Not to mention... the nearest city is ninety kilometres away, which is ours. So they didn’t have hordes to deal with either... Which means they got every chance to dig in, and they got the resources to hold that spot for a good long while."
Her excitement noticeably dropped a notch as she nodded slowly, eyes back on the truck stop.
And the very next second, she looked back up and grinned.
"Then we do what we do best."
"Yep, that’s the plan~"
"But we’re still not done... Once we’ve had our way with the truck stop, we’d have enough storage to strip a small town clean..." I said, tracing the finger further east before hooking hard south, and stopping on a small square. "So that’s exactly what we’ll do. This is Brackenfield... A little farming town."
Her eyes were already moving over it, catching the shape of the plan before I even said a word.
"Silos full of grain..." I said anyway, because the butterflies in my own gut wanted to hear it out loud. "Full of corn, wheat, barley... Storehouses packed with vegetables like potatoes, cabbages, whatever else they had in cold storage when it all went down."
"Damn, Nikki." She said softly, almost to herself. "If you’d had this System thing before-"
"Then we wouldn’t have died," I said, and the grin slid off my face. "And we’d still be the exact same miserable thugs for hire who got no one waiting for them back home."
She turned and looked at me.
"Now, we’ve got back the people we love, exactly because we didn’t have the system and died... We’ve come back knowing what was coming and how to protect our people. The system’s just a bonus..."
I looked down at the map, then back at her.
"Without those three years, even with the System, I’d still be that sniveling little shit I was the day before the shit-show. Just a university kid with a magic pocket and a shop and no idea how fast everyone he loved was about to die, and no balls to stop it... The System’s not the blessing, Nia. Coming back is."
She was quiet for a second. Then she nodded, slow and certain.
"You’re right..." She nodded after a long second of silence before immediately getting her head straight back in it, the way she always did, feeling the thing and then setting it down and moving.
"Same deal as the truck stop, though..." I went back to the map. "Good odds Brackenfield’s got survivors dug in too."
"Obviously..." Her finger touched the square. "Low population... farmers are almost always armed. And they’ve got a lot of open farmland in every direction."
"Yeah... We’ll deal with it when we get there. Now, onto the last stop..." I dragged my finger down south, then curled it west before pausing on a patch of blue.
"That’s a small fishing village." She leaned in over it. "Lake Adler... And that big resort."
"This’d be a quick one. We nab a boat, and then some fish before cutting west and coming back into the city from the south... The penthouse my folks are in sits right on the southern edge. So we collect them, and then we start heading west for real... Toward Lexie."
"Huh... Your whole loop’s four, five days minimum." She said, eyes on the map, already running the numbers. "Three, four hundred klicks... And that’s assuming we don’t blow the whole weekend fishing."
"I’m fishing with telekinesis... Twenty-meter radius, remember? I can manipulate three things at once," I chuckled, arms crossed, "Picture us sitting on the boat and me just hauling fish straight up out of the lake."
She let out a breathy laugh while I stepped back from the map and turned to face her, and I couldn’t help the grin spreading ear to ear.
"The resort’s also got a cruise ship... One of those big party boats. Now picture our little fishing boat pulling up alongside it and Me leaning over the side... reaching out and touching the hull."
"And whoop~" I flicked one finger. "It’s in my Inventory."
Nia just stared at me in absolute silence, and in her bright green eyes, I watched her brain detonate.
I could practically see the cruise ship replacing cargo ships.
Cargo ships replacing ferries.
Ferries replacing tankers, barges, and then a goddamn nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, all of it vanishing into a pocket the size of a stray thought.
Her mouth hung open, nothing coming out of it for a good three seconds before finally-
"You’re basically cheating at this point..."
"Yeah, no shit," I couldn’t help but laugh, "So... What d’you say?"
"I’m in." And there was not one ounce of in hesitation in it.
"Good."
[Time to burn that Custom Firearm Token and make myself the most insane rifle on the planet.]
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