Chapter 111: Just a Checkpoint

Late October morning came off the lake in a thin, steady push, cold enough to bite through the sweat on my neck, while the sun sat one hand above the horizon and warmed absolutely nothing.

I couldn’t see the street anymore through the dust of the collapsed buildings, so I shot at my memory of it instead.

Four lanes, twenty-five meters wide, six hundred meters long, and I shot in bursts of three, each around forty meters apart, going from corner to corner, the same grid I’d have used on a range.

-Thunk-!-Thunk-!-Thunk-!

-Boom-!--Boom-!--Boom-!

The dust swallowed the rounds whole, gave back muffled orange pulses deep inside itself, and paid me for every single one.

-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!...

"Call it, booger... left lane or right..."

"Mea."

"Left it is... see, this is why you’re management."

-Thunk-!-Thunk-!-Thunk-!

The lake wind kept peeling the dust column inland one sheet at a time, until the boulevard underneath started coming back in pieces, and what came back was a two-story rubble field stretching six hundred meters, crawling end to end with everything that had survived it.

Thousands of them, climbing broken slabs at a tenth of a sprinter’s pace, sliding into gaps, dragging themselves over rebar while the ones behind shoved them flat and climbed over the disagreement.

"Beautiful..." I fed the next belt in while my grin pulled at the dried candy taste on my teeth. "Crawl for me, sweethearts..."

-Ding!

{

Report.

Session kills: 41,662.

Session earnings: 5,874,342.

Balance: 73,436,684.

Observation: Sunrise to now. Most determined survivors require weeks for this figure. Most survivors also sleep.

}

"Flattery logged."

Not that it helped the sand grating behind my eyelids. The stim had eased up my torn flesh and, to an extent, the fatigue in my muscles, but it couldn’t buy me a functioning nervous system. My hands were shaking again, a fine, high-frequency tremor that made loading the belts a deliberate chore.

Seventy-six and a half million short, with one lake to squeeze it from, while the only clock that mattered climbed the sky behind me an hour at a time toward the afternoon Kara would unfold the page in front of everyone I love.

Far out over the water, a single rocket went in with a flat-

-Krump-!

And the Tank’s answer rolled across the shoreline like an approaching storm, while the Ghostbird’s turbines dragged the whole argument further east.

[Stingy singles... good girl...]

Then Tikki’s claws went through the jacket into my shoulder.

But not the settling grip. All eighteen of them, sinking straight through the jacket and into the skin while a low "Mrrrh" came off him at my neck.

His head turned hard past my ear toward the eastern side of the roof, and I knew in an instant what he meant.

Coming off the gun, I crossed the balcony, looked down the parallel street one block over, and my stomach dropped straight through twenty floors even though I knew what I’d find there.

Wall to wall, building face to building face, a second river of them flowed past my rubble field without ever touching it, and when I crossed to the western rail I found its twin, and the service road behind the tower had also disappeared under a third.

The shoreline was never small. And it was completely packed with Infected.

My beautiful boulevard was one drain in it, and while I’d stood here admiring my own masterpiece, the rest of it had simply gone around.

That was the thing about a horde: they’re like an ocean.

You cannot outsmart an ocean. You could build a dam, you could blow a crater, but water always finds the cracks.

And right now, half a million bodies were flooding the cracks of the luxury district, filling pristine courtyards and manicured roundabouts like a tsunami of flesh and snarls

[Left, right, back... faster than I had anticipated...]

Awareness ran thirty meters in every direction, straight down included, and straight down was where I felt the first wave of Infected rushing up through the stairs, at the pace of a floor every twenty seconds or so.

Call it two and a half minutes.

I let the breath out slow and rolled my shoulders, since panic is expensive, while two and a half minutes is a fortune.

"Well, booger... there goes our first checkpoint."

"Meah."

"Correct~"

That was the whole design: this tower was a checkpoint with a gun on it, never a castle.

Besides, they climb on top of each other.

That’s the entire military situation of the human race now, they pile like ants, flesh stacking on flesh until the wall stops being a wall and becomes a ramp.

Nobody holds ground against that, anywhere, ever, and I never once planned to.

Three more Mk 19s sat waiting on three more roofs, three miniguns on their own mounts, one hundred and sixty drums of thickened fuel seeded across this district, and every single position had the same job description.

Bleed them, bill them, leave.

I cranked the muzzle down onto the near edge I could see from my position, before giving them everything left in the last can, ten... fifteen... twenty rounds ripping through the corner edge.

Those forty-millimeter flashes and splitting explosions that followed threw climbers off the slabs in pieces while the Dings stacked into one long tone until-

-Clack-!

I sent it into the Inventory between heartbeats, not even leaving a tripod on an empty balcony holding the pose.

And the very next second, Awareness detected movement in the stairwell, five floors down.

I laid a thread of TK across Tikki’s back, a second grip running out from my forehead, insurance the size of a cat, and got a full "MEAH" with legal weight behind it.

"File it with the department... we’re jumping."

And with that, I stepped up onto the rail into the cold push of the wind with six hundred meters of open air between me and the next gun.

While four floors down, the stairwell started taking hits from hundreds of feet beating on it.

With a final breath, I tipped forward off the twentieth floor’s balcony.

The wind swallowed the sound of the horde instantly, while gravity grabbed me by the belt, dragging my stomach up into my throat as the concrete face of the tower blurred past my vision as I dove headfirst into the morning.