NOVGO.NET Chapter 113: A Very Stupid Amount of Confidence
-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!
Thirty charges let go in one rolling line, and the boulevard picked itself up off the ground.
It ran from fifty meters off my wall all the way to the foot of the supposed anthill, crater after crater in sequence instead of all together, each one throwing a column of asphalt and shredded and burnt bodies twenty meters into the cold morning while the next charge caught them before they even finished coming down.
The pressure hit my chest half a second later, flat and heavy, while the roof gravel jumped under my boots, and every window still holding glass on both sides of that road quit its job at once.
I did not rig the buildings this time.
I wanted that road open, since I intend to keep selling tickets on it all morning, and a second rubble field would only block my own line of sight from the next gun.
The dust came up the same way it had at dawn: one grey wall climbing past my rail, and underneath it my credits climbed another four digits.
-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!
It stopped sounding like notifications and started sounding like a dial tone.
-Ding!
{
Report.
Session kills: 74,318.
Session earnings: 10,478,838.
Balance: 78,041,180.
Observation: Thirty charges. Approximately thirty-two thousand terminations. Efficiency noted, along with the state of your hands.
}
"My hands are fine..."
They were not fine.
Ten and a half million since sunrise, but I was still seventy-two million short of her, and the sun was climbing toward an afternoon faster than I had ever seen it climb.
Getting back before afternoon would be the most optimal result of this trip down insanity.
But then again, I have long stopped pinning my hopes on the most optimal result.
"System... status on the bird..."
-Ding!
{
Ghostbird: Airborne.
Standoff 400 m. Fuel nominal.
70 mm HE: 9 remaining.
Spike ER: 3 remaining.
Rockets expended since order: 8. Six confirmed impacts, lower limbs.
Assessed damage: Superficial.
}
[Six rockets into its knees and the tough bastard is still doing laps...] I clicked my tongue against my teeth.
So much for crippling it cheap.
-Ding!
{
Note: Target has begun throwing objects. Passenger vehicles, masonry, street furniture, one bus shelter.
Throws: Eleven.
Hits: Zero.
}
"Can you dodge them all?"
But for a good while, nothing came back. No chime, no line, while the minigun ticked as it cooled and the wind pushed the dust inland and I counted the seconds off my own pulse.
One.
Two.
Three.
-Ding!
{
Affirmative.
}
"...That took you a while." I let the breath out through my nose.
-Ding!
{
Amendment: Target has begun throwing infected.
Grouped throws: Ten to fourteen bodies per release. Dispersal widens with distance.
Main rotor strike tolerance: One body.
}
That wiped the smile off my face.
It had stopped throwing cars, since cars come one at a time and a helicopter only has to be somewhere else once, so it had started grabbing armfuls of its own and flinging them in a spread that opens the further it travels.
That thing had invented the shotgun in under an hour. Or rather remembered how to from our Round one.
[Fourteen at a time... you only have to miss with thirteen.]
"New orders..." I said. "Push your standoff out. Don’t trade with it, don’t get cute, and do not fire while it’s looking at you... Wait until its head is somewhere else, put one rocket in a leg, and make distance."
-Ding!
{
Acknowledged. Standoff increased to 900 m.
}
"And System..." I put my hands back on the spade grips. "You’re the only thing on this lake it wants to look at more than me... don’t take risks."
That’s the whole arrangement.
The rotor noise was a leash on a two-story monster, so the second that leash snaps, there would be exactly one noisy man left on this shoreline for it to think about.
[Whatever... Back to work.]
-BRRRRRRRRT-!
The three streets kept feeding, pouring Infected into the crater field where the ones I’d blown up were still trying to stand on legs they no longer owned.
And I worked in bursts of three seconds, lining the tracer rounds across the crater lips where they bunched up climbing out, letting the barrels breathe between, watching the counter roll and roll.
"Left or right?"
"Mea."
"You always say left..."
"Meah."
"That’s fair, it does keep working."
Out east, the Tank threw a fistful of Infected into the empty sky, and they came apart across nine hundred meters of nothing while the Ghostbird hovered a hundred meters higher than the throw before-
-Krump-!
The Ghostbird kindly returned the courtesy with a HE.
Back at my end, the barrels wound down through their own pitch, and the belt tail slapped up out of the feed chute empty.
[... there goes the second one....]
I put my palm flat on the housing and dropped a hundred-and-eighty-kilo minigun into Inventory; besides, by then, Tikki had already turned his head toward the stairwell door.
Awareness gave me the rest.
Thirty meters of it, straight down, and every meter of that thirty was full.
They were in the stairwell, in the corridors, packed into the elevator lobby four floors under my feet, and the ones that could not get in were stacking up the outside wall exactly the way they had stacked the last building; after all, the pile does not care which tower it is.
"Well..." I said, "At least something’s consistent."
"Mrrh."
"You’re right, it’s rude. Nobody even called ahead."
I walked backward to the rail with the detonator already out of my chest rig, thumbed channel one, and looked down at twenty drums of thickened fuel sitting in a ring around the foot of my own building, each one wearing a charge I had taped to it at four in the morning while my eyes burned.
-CLACK-!
-WHUMPFF-!
The bottom of my building put on a collar of fire as twenty drums exploded at once.
Thickened fuel doesn’t just flash off and finish; it clings, so the whole ring came up in one slow orange bloom that swallowed the courtyard, the entrance, and everything standing between them and the building.
And the heat it all let out hit my face even fifteen floors up.
But still, they kept coming.
A burning infected does not stop, since pain is not on its list of concerns, at least not until the fire shuts its body down. So hundreds of them came out of that ring already alight and walked straight into the crowd behind them, handing the fire along, spreading it back up three streets while my counter went to that dial-tone sound again.
-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!
Black smoke came boiling up the face of the building, past the tenth floor, past the twelfth, until even the gravel under my boots started giving off heat.
[Oh, that’s my exit lighting up.]
Tikki sneezed, hard, twice, and gave me an opinion at full volume.
"MEAH."
"Yes, I know, I’m going, hold your br-"
And that very instant, the stairwell door came off its hinges behind me.
I didn’t even look back before breaking into a mad dash, with the smoke pouring past my shoulders and the next roof somewhere out there behind a wall of my own making, no line of sight, no landing picked, nothing but a mental compass bearing and a very stupid amount of confidence.
Then I stepped off into it.