Chapter 129: First Snow

-Thmp-Thmp-Thmp-Thmp-!

The sound ran through the penthouse floor at the cadence of a full-auto firearm, fast and steady and completely out of place in all that quiet, while beyond the panoramic glass the first snow of November came drifting down over a grey city and melted long before it ever reached the streets.

Those streets added their own noise every so often, screeches rising up between the towers without any timing to them, one from the east, one from somewhere close, one from nowhere I could place.

And every bit of the gunfire-sounding racket was coming from under my own two feet.

The treadmill sat in front of the glass pane between the living room and the balcony, aimed straight out over the city, its readout holding at fifty-five kilometers an hour for the past half hour.

This was the second treadmill of the past two days, an industrial model the System had sold me after the original survived exactly one hour of enhanced cardio before its motor died with a very sad smell.

My reflection kept pace with me in the glass pane in front of me, laid faint over the city, showing broader shoulders than the man I remembered from two days ago, a soaked grey shirt clinging to a stomach that now had packs on it.

And my hair, grown shaggy, somehow looking healthier than it ever did back when the world still had conditioner in it.

[If that city wasn’t crawling with Infected... this would just be a man living his best rich life.]

"Come on, dude..." Nia’s voice came from the sofas behind me, unhurried and half amused. "You’ve been at it for half an hour now..."

The treadmill wound itself down through the gears when I tapped the panel, and I hopped off the belt with my breathing running fast and shallow, but nowhere near panting, which after thirty minutes of sprinting past every world record in the book still felt like borrowed lungs doing the work.

Nia sat folded into the corner of the sofa with a plate of strawberries balanced on the armrest. She looked good enough that my eyes forgot their manners for a second, because the sling was gone as of yesterday, the last of the bruising had faded off her face, and the same unfair glow up that had moved into my skin had moved into hers too, leaving her looking less like a survivor and more like a wild thing that also happens to be an A-list celebrity.

She caught me looking, obviously, and popped a strawberry into her mouth with maximum ceremony.

"Eyes up, soldier~"

"Know what..." I said, crossing to the sofas, and on the way past I lifted half the strawberries off her plate in one pass, because my body had opinions about calories now and I had stopped arguing with it. "It’s about time... We should be heading west in a bit."

"HEY-" Her fork came up like a bayonet over what was left of the plate. "The pantry has lost a week’s worth of food in two days, Nikki. A damn week... I ran the inventory this morning out of morbid curiosity..."

"What can I say, I’m a growing boy," I said, and dropped onto the sofa across from her.

On the third sofa, Tikki slept flat on his back with all four legs in the air, entirely boneless, the picture of a creature with no stake whatsoever in human logistics.

The last two days had gone exactly as promised, which is to say they had gone terribly and worked perfectly.

Ten doses each, five Physiological and five Cognition apiece, alternating the lines on Mr. Norton’s schedule, one injector every hour or two with food between them and naps in the middle, while Kara timed every dose and every meal down the radio from seventy kilometers away.

The Physiological ones had felt like dying five separate times, my whole chest seizing around a heart that had stopped answering, while Nia counted the minutes out loud from the next cot over, and then the Cognition ones had traded the chest for a skull two sizes too small, and we took turns counting for each other until the schedule finally ran out.

And at the end of it, for all intents and purposes, neither of us was quite human anymore.

The world had gotten slower and lighter and quieter all at once, and my own body had turned into equipment I was still learning the specifications on.

"So that’s the plan, then?" Nia asked, rolling the last of her defended strawberries between two fingers. "West, today, just like that?"

"Just like that..." I said. "I call the Ghostbird in from wherever the System’s been parking it, and set it down on one of the adjacent rooftops, since ours doesn’t have the space... Then I bolt on the upgrades, the chin gun and the belly rack, top off the fuel and the missiles, and we load up and fly west... Door to door before dark, if nothing argues with us."

"Mm..." She bit the strawberry in half. "And we can afford all of that after your little shopping spree?"

We could, and I had checked twice this morning just to enjoy the view.

The balance sat at a hair over five point seven million now, because the east had kept right on paying while we were busy convulsing, close to four million over the last two days alone.

Ferrow Point meltdown had stopped being a wound on the map and turned into an investment, the best one I had ever made; eradicating a third of the country was going to keep paying dividends into that account for a very long while.

[Twenty-three days left on her clock... against a river that works weekends. I’ll take those odds.]

"We can afford it..." I said, and popped my last strawberry, and pushed up off the sofa. "I’m going to take a shower, and after we eat something real, we’re moving out..."

Nia threw me a lazy two-finger salute from the depths of the sofa, and I made it exactly four steps toward the master bedroom when Tikki’s head came up off the cushions.

He rolled from his back onto his feet in one motion, ears standing tall, eyes aimed at the glass a full second before there was anything for the rest of us to hear.

Then it arrived, through the glass and the floor and my own chest all at once.

-WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-!!!

And the moment it did, both of our necks snapped toward the glass in the same instant, and Nia came up off the sofa with the plate forgotten, while the panes buzzed in their frames and the infinity pool out on the balcony shivered into rings as two helicopters crossed directly over the penthouse from the south, low and loud enough to fill the whole sky.

Military tactical transports in flat grey paint, side doors shut, no lights showing anywhere on them.

They didn’t slow, and they didn’t turn, and they didn’t care about us at all.

They just kept going, north, straight over the city, until the glass stopped buzzing and the snow kept falling and neither of us was able to speak even a single word.