Chapter 112: Anthill

Headfirst, arms flared wide, the boulevard swinging up to meet my face while twenty floors of glass and balcony rail smeared past my left shoulder in one grey streak.

Then TK.

The second grip came up out of the third-eye spot and took hold of my own body, hauling me off the world’s books until I weighed about as much as a feather, while the dive stopped being a fall somewhere around the eighth floor and turned into a long shallow slide through the cold.

Within an instant, the wind quit trying to kill me and started carrying me instead.

I put my arms out, feeling the jacket snap taut across my back, and traded every meter of height I had left for speed down the middle of a road I’d walked at two in the morning with two hundred C4 charges in my inventory.

Sixty-odd meters of altitude in the bank, six hundred meters of road to cross, and no amount of wanting closes that gap.

[Which is why we planned ahead, gentlemen...]

"Mrrh."

"Yes, I know it’s cold... I’ll buy a pink sweater later...."

Tikki rode the pocket at the back of my right shoulder with his paws dug into the seam, and his face against my neck, ears flat, nose scrunched into that expression he saves for anything over a hundred and sixty on the Diavel, offended more by the temperature rather than by the sixty meters of nothing underneath us.

I kept one thread of TK laid across his back the whole way, costing me a slow pulse of pressure behind the eyes that stacked on top of the one already living there.

Halfway across, the crane came up on my right exactly where I had seen it at three in the morning.

Forty meters of yellow lattice standing over an unfinished condo shell, jib frozen mid-lift since the day the crews stopped showing up, and I’d stood under it in the dark and thought, [that’ll do], then gone back to seating charges.

-Thwip-!

The hook shot out from the grapple gun, crossing the gap, bit the lattice, and the claws set their serrations into steel while the System took my mass, my speed, and my fall rate, then did all the arithmetic I’d never survive doing myself.

-Vzzzzt-!

And the very second, the cable hauled, and I came up off the bottom of that arc thirty meters higher than I’d started it, swinging out over the road at the top with the release timed for me.

The hook popped free, and I flattened out again into the second glide with the roof I wanted already growing under my toes.

Killing the speed, I crossed the last thirty meters, hit gravel, and let three long running steps bleed the rest of it into the tar.

The minigun sat under its tarp on the mount where I’d bolted it in last night, power pack green, six barrels already laid on the exact tower I’d resigned from, and I tore the cover off and got both hands onto the spade grips before I even looked up.

And then I looked up.

My old tower was basically an anthill somebody had kicked.

The Infected practically coated it, ground floor to fifteenth, bodies climbing, grey limbs stacking into ramps that hauled the next rank higher while the ones on top spilled over the balcony rail I’d been standing behind not even two minutes ago, and underneath the whole thing, those three flooded streets kept feeding it like drains running backward.

[Two minutes... and I’d have been under...]

Fifteen floors below my new boots, the drum ring I’d seeded around this building’s base sat quiet in the shadow of the wall.

And just thinking about it spread a tiny grin on my face, even as I began to fear every blink of my eyes. Some monkey part of my brain firmly believed that if I was even a fraction of a second too late, I’d drop unconscious from sheer exhaustion

[Later, gorgeous... you’ll sleep like a king... but later...]

My hands were still doing that fine tremor, which matters when you’re handling firearms, but at the same time, matters exactly zero on a weapon that spits fifty rounds a second.

[Alright... let’s begin.] I thumbed the trigger.

The barrels spun up with one rising electric note, and then-

-BRRRRRRRRRRRT-!

The roof came apart with a chorus of deafening roars.

A solid line of tracer left the muzzle, crossed six hundred meters faster than I could follow it, and went into the base of the pile while the Dings underneath fused into a single flat tone, climbers coming off that tower in sheets, the ramp they’d built out of each other collapsing back into the street it grew from.

And through it all, my thumbs never once left the trigger.

Six barrels have a service life, yes, but I didn’t intend to bill this entire lake just through them.

-BRRRRRRRT-!

The colony heard something louder than itself and dissolved off the walls; the three streets bent their currents, and half a district changed address at once, pouring down the road toward my new roof with the leading edge already having traversed the first hundred meters.

To my advantage, they were packed wall to wall the whole way, so nothing I fired missed, since there was nowhere left to miss into.

[Three credits a round... call it two rounds a body on my worst day, six credits spent, a hundred and forty-one back... See kids? That’s how you do business...]

Twenty-three to one, several thousand times a minute, while every forty-millimeter shell I’d burned since sunrise cost me seventy-five credits and came back four digits deep in a crowd this tight.

I was basically printing money.

Resupply could land wherever I’m standing through the Shop, so ammunition was never the bottleneck and never will be.

Meanwhile, over the other side of the meat grinder, the Tank threw something car-shaped into the sky, the Ghostbird slid off the line a full second before it arrived, and one stingy rocket went back the other way as a receipt.

-Krump-!

And just like that, three hundred meters of road was gone.

-BRRRRRRRT-!

While on my side, I started firing in bursts, letting the barrels breathe, and letting the Infected pack in tight, since charges under an empty road kill nobody, and I’d spent an hour of my night seating thirty of them onto that road at twenty-meter steps from their tower to mine.

The nearest one sat fifty meters out from my wall; after all, I was fond of this roof, and I’d like to keep standing on it

Tikki’s claws went in as the leading edge of the horde crossed my fifty-meter line with six hundred meters of boulevard packed solid behind it, building face to building face, one continuous animal wearing at least four thousand faces while my hands came off the grips as I pulled the detonator, and thumbed channel three.

-CLACK-!

-KABOOM-!