Chapter 131: Sharpie

The snow I had pulled down with me was still settling when Nia turned her head and gave me a long, flat look.

"There’s a ladder, you know..." she said. "Right there... Some of us use it."

"Some of us are straight up superheroes now so they don’t need to..." I said, and then I stepped past her, picked Tikki up, and went toward that same ladder, because the rope line ran off the roof and not the balcony, and I was going to have to climb back up the thing I had just jumped off.

Her snort followed me all the way up the rungs.

Tikki had already come out to the balcony at the sound of my landing, took one look at the weather, and climbed my leg anyway, up the jacket and into the shoulder pocket, where he turned around twice and settled with his head out and his ears already flat against the wind.

Up top, the rope ran off the water tank’s steel frame in a long line down across the street to the roof of the eight-floor apartment block on the far side. I checked the anchor with one hand while I keyed the chest radio through the buds with the other, since the buds ran straight through the set on my rig and carried its full range.

"West, this is Home... Change of plans."

-Kzzzt-

"...Go ahead," Kara said, and I could hear the rest of the room go still behind her.

"There are soldiers sitting on the Ghostbird," I said. "Two helicopters’ worth. I can’t call it in with them on it, because fourteen armed men would follow a helicopter that flies itself straight to your fire... So I’m going to deal with them first. Then we come to you. Should have us there by evening."

Nobody on the other end said a word for a long moment, and I let them. After all, everyone on that channel knew exactly what dealing with them meant coming out of my mouth.

"...Understood," Kara said finally, quiet and even. "We’ll keep dinner warm."

"Home out."

Leo’s voice had been absent from all of it, which meant he was on his little perimeter walk, and I found I was glad about that in a small, shabby way I didn’t examine.

Nia came up over the parapet behind me with ’my’ Sr-25 across her chest and a backpack riding heavier than it looked, and she gave the rope one professional tug before she looked at me.

"You first, big guy~"

The last time I crossed this line I had done it hanging under a motorized ascender, the kind rescue crews use, with my whole weight trusted to its motor and my heart parkouring in my chest. This time I hooked the zipline trolley over the rope, swung my legs up, and let go of the roof.

The crossing took about four seconds of wind and faint snow with Tikki’s ears flat against my neck before the far parapet came up and I dropped onto the gravel without a sound.

Nia landed beside me two seconds later, already walking.

The fire exit took us down eight floors without meeting anything, and the moment my boots hit the street I put a palm out into the air and pulled the Cybertruck out of the grid nose-first, the steel wedge bolted to its face, the stainless mesh over every window.

And so, we were rolling before Nia had her door shut.

The truck runs electric, so it moved through the city like a rumor, and that was the whole reason I had it out instead of anything with an engine.

A pack of six stood in an intersection two blocks on with their backs to us, and by the time the first head came around at the whisper of the tires we were already past them, the wedge never even touched anyone.

As I drove, my mind couldn’t help but wander back to yesterday.

We had heard them yesterday afternoon, a thin mechanical whine circling somewhere south of the building, wide and slow and patient.

And looking out, I saw drones, four of them, working a grid across the southern districts with loudspeakers slung underneath, with a recorded message going in a loop.

Survivors were to mark their positions somewhere an aircraft could see them. Bedsheets on rooftops, bright colors laid against grey concrete, blankets, tarps, curtains, anything that would still hold its shape from four hundred meters up. Buckets and patio furniture dragged into letters.

An X, an arrow, an SOS, whatever a camera could resolve on one pass and a pilot could find again on the next. Fires during daylight, flashlights and phone screens after dark.

The whole point was: Hold your position. Make your position known to the drones. Do not attempt to travel on foot. Air recovery would follow.

By evening, the marks had started going up. Nia had spotted the first one through her scope from the balcony, a yellow bedsheet weighted down with paint cans on a low block eleven streets south, and after that we found four more before the light went, one of them an actual SOS spelled out in what looked like sofa cushions.

Last time around, those drones had flown for three full days before anything carrying people came near the city. Three days of mapping and counting and sorting, working out which marks were worth the fuel and which ones were just a dead man’s bedsheet still flapping on a line, and the helicopters had finally come on the fourth.

This time around, they had come on the second.

[Everything in this timeline has been accelerating... the outbreak, the Variants, and now this.]

The first strain had gone airborne and turned ninety percent of the country inside a single afternoon, and the armed forces had breathed exactly the same air as everybody else, so every base still standing two weeks later was standing on maybe a tenth of the people it had been built to hold.

That left them short on everything a fence actually needs. Medics. Mechanics. Electricians. Drivers. Cooks, engineers, radio operators, and warm bodies that could hold a rifle through a night shift.

And out in the cities sat the other ten percent, the immune ones, up on their rooftops with their bedsheets and their sofa cushions. Every civilian lifted off a roof was a straight trade, one more mouth in exchange for one more pair of hands, and every camp out there needed hands a great deal more than it needed the moral credit.

Rescue was the word on the loudspeaker. Recruiting was the word in the briefing room.

The part nobody riding in those helicopters had worked out yet was what came afterward. There was no government left above them anymore, no chain of command running past the man at the top of their own base, and nobody left anywhere with the authority to tell that man no.

Just an armory, a perimeter, a population, and whoever happened to hold the keys to all three.

By spring of the last timeline, every single one of them had turned into a warlord. Military commanders, mayors, police captains, a farmer with a big enough fence around his land, and it made no difference whatsoever what patch any of them had worn before the shit-show started.

Their entire world shrank down to the wire around their own camp, and everything outside that wire simply stopped counting.

None of them knew that about themselves yet.

But they would find out soon enough.

We rode a block in without speaking yet thinking about the exact same thing while snow ticked against the mesh, while the memory of the one exception sat between us without needing to be named, and then Nia named it anyway.

"Angelica’s probably already set..."

"Yeah... if the pattern holds true, then she came back before any of us," I said, eyes on the road. "She’s got the longest head start there is... By now the Bastion and whatever’s left of the fleet should be sitting off Ashport with rescue boats running on a schedule, and knowing her, that whole coast is already cleared."

The thought of it warmed the cab for exactly as long as it took to remember she was on the far side of the country.

-Ding!

{

Status...

Ghostbird: Secure.

Access attempts: 19.

Successful: 0.

Personnel on site: 14.

Perimeter established.

Activity: Search of surrounding structures for operator.

}

[Nineteen tries... Somebody up there is stubborn...]

"System got me a status... there’s fourteen of them... and they’re looking for whoever flew it," I said, and Nia nodded like that was the only sane thing they could be doing.

"And when you find them?"

"They die, and their gear goes in the Misc. Chest with the rest of the trade stock... Then the birds go in after it."

"You’re keeping two transport helicopters?"

"And why wouldn’t I? The more the merrier..." I shot back. "The big tandem-rotor is a Chinook and the other one’s a Caracal... neither of them is something I want to fuel, yes. And another yes, the token that made the Ghostbird was a reward, and I’m not buying another one for a taxi that costs a fortune to keep in the air... Now, if one of them had been an Apache..."

"You’d be a different man."

"I’d be a happier man."

"So... I’m on overwatch?" Nia shot me a teasing smile.

"You got the overwatch rifle... So obviously." I gave my SR-25 in her hands a sulking side-eye.

The northern district came up around us block by block, the towers thinning and the burn scar showing in the gaps between them, and when the System’s distance read one kilometer to the bird, I pulled the truck to the curb at the mouth of a side street and killed it.

The street went quiet around us, and Nia was out with ’my’ rifle up before I had my door open.

Walking around to the wedge, I laid a hand flat on the Cybertruck, and sent it back into the Inventory before reaching back in to grab my latest and most exciting purchase to date.

With a massive grin splitting my face, it came out surprisingly light in my left hand, a dull silver disc about the width of my shoulders, ringed and slightly domed, and in the dead center of it, drawn in black marker by a hand that had rushed the last point, sat a five-pointed star.

Nia looked at the shield.

Then she looked at me.

Then she rolled her eyes so hard her whole head went with them.