Chapter 139: ... Goes Unrewarded

"...and you told us to go west."

For about three seconds, nobody in that junction said anything at all.

While I stood there with my mouth slightly open, because the last time I had thought about that basement was the day I walked out of it.

[The container... She’s from the container.]

Day zero.

Kara had been taken that day. Not by the Infected, not by riots, but by men working for a mafia boss she had turned down for months, who had finally decided he was done being turned down.

And in my first life, that was simply how her story went.

She got taken on day zero. She got used. She got turned. And eight months later, I found what was left of her wandering around naked and mutilated, and I had to put my best friend down myself.

That was her canon ending. That was the thing I had died knowing.

The second time around, she got kidnapped ahead of schedule.

The second time around, I had a System in my head, a shotgun in my hands, Tikki on my shoulder, a lifetime of skills, and my very first System Quest telling me she had been taken.

[God, I was angry.]

That’s the part I remember most, honestly. Not the plan. There barely was a plan. I rigged the ground floor with proximity charges so nobody could follow me up. I took one bullet along my side and another one to the chest. I burned every drop of TK I had until the Awareness just quit on me, and I killed every single person who pointed a gun in my direction.

I was soaked in other people’s blood by the time I was in the basement. Soaked from head to toe. It was in my hair. It was in my mouth. It was everywhere.

And I remember thinking, very clearly, that if she wasn’t in this building, I was going to burn the whole thing down with everybody still inside.

Then the basement.

Five shipping containers lined along the wall, fluorescent lights, and a smell I still cannot describe in a way that’s fair to it. Three men by a pillar. One of them dying on the floor with his throat open, one on his knees slamming his own forehead into the concrete, and one crying and holding his hand.

And the one on his knees looked up at me, and for one second he was a person, and the next second he wasn’t.

I shot him. He was the first one I ever saw turn.

And then I put the shotgun in the crying one’s face and made him take me to the newest container, and he cried the whole way there. His mother was sick. He needed the money. He didn’t want any of this.

I didn’t say a word back to him.

He tried three wrong keys before the door swung open, and the smell came out, and there were ten women inside, pressed together in the dark, and every one of them flinched away from the door when I stepped into it.

Because to anyone with eyes, I looked like a demon straight out of hell. And I was acting one like too.

"Kara! Kara, it’s me! Nikki!" Face after face. I had gone through all ten of them twice, screaming her name.

But she wasn’t there.

"You’re only here for one girl?" one of them had said, near the back. "You’re not police?"

I didn’t even answer her. I turned around and put the shotgun in the crying man’s face again and asked him where she was.

It had turned out she was on the third floor. She’d caught the boss’s eye, and he’d had her brought straight up to him.

And I shot that man in the face, in front of all ten of them, while he was begging me not to, and they screamed, and I stood in the middle of the screaming with the gun hanging in my hand.

Then I turned to them.

"You lot are on your own," I’d said. "Riots are happening everywhere. Rescue whoever you want and get out of the city. Head west."

Then I reloaded, went up the stairs to get Kara while screaming ’Fuck’ at the top of my lungs, and never once thought about that container again.

Not once. Not in two weeks.

I had written those women off the second I walked out of that basement.

And those very same women just saved my folks with hunting rifles.

"...How many of you?" I asked, and my voice came out a lot smaller than I wanted it to.

"Thirty-one." The woman lowered her rifle the rest of the way. "The house is four kilometers up the state road... I’m Vera."

"Thirty-one," I repeated.

[Thirty-one... Five containers. I opened one... They opened the rest.]

Then I noticed what she was doing.

She was looking at me. At the gold-rimmed specs and that same black jacket I wore that day, and the neat hair, and then at Nora still hanging off my arm, and then at Kara standing there with the cat and her wet eyes, and then back at me, and her face could not make any of it fit together.

The other five were doing the same thing.

Because the last time they saw me, I was a thing that walked into a basement soaked in blood, with a suppressed shotgun and frozen eyes and a cat riding my shoulder, and shot a begging man in the face without blinking.

And now I was standing on a snowy road getting yelled at for being late, with a five-foot-two girl in a baseball cap wiping her nose on my rig.

"You look..." Vera tried, and stopped.

"Different?" I offered.

"...Smaller."

[Ouch.]

"I’ve had a shower since," I said. "Two, actually."

"He cleans up okay," Nia said from behind me, coming up with the SR-25 across her chest. "Wait till you see him eat, though. Then you’ll see the demon again~"

The tall one in the barn coat let out one short laugh before she could stop it, and then looked horrified at herself.

"THE WHAT COMPOUND?"

Nora’s head came up out of my chest, and her whole face lit up as she smelled a story with her name nowhere in it.

"Later," I said.

"Nikki...!"

"Later, kid. I mean it."

Because behind Vera’s shoulder, the highway ran east into the snow toward a few hundred infected that had been walking west since three o’clock, and every second we stood here talking was a second they spent getting closer.

Leo hadn’t said anything. He was standing by the truck’s nose with his hand on his chest, looking at me like a man rereading a page he thought he’d already understood.

And Kara hadn’t said anything either. She just held the cat and looked at the ground, because she had been the one upstairs that day, and she knew exactly what I’d looked like when I got there.

[Okay. Okay. Move... Horde first. Feelings after.]

"We’re taking this on the road," I said. "Leo. Can you drive?"

"I can drive."

"Wrong answer, but noted... Nia. The truck."

She was already peeling her jacket off and handing it to Nora, which was Nia’s entire way of saying yes while messing with Nora.

"Which corner?"

"Front right. The wheel’s sitting on the sedan’s roof."

"Boring, but fine~"

She walked over to the front corner of eleven tons of expedition truck, in the snow, in front of six women with rifles, set her feet, and got both hands under the frame rail.

And then she lifted it.

The Ascender’s front end came up off the crushed sedan with the suspension groaning, forty-odd centimeters of daylight opening under the tire, and Nia held it there with one hand while she waved at Leo with the other.

"Any time~"

Leo did not move for a second. Then he hooked the tow strap onto the sedan and dragged the wreck clear with the pickup, and the whole time he kept looking back at Nia, holding his truck up with one arm before putting it back down onto the road.

The women weren’t even pretending not to stare. The gum one had long stopped chewing.

[Yeah. That’s the other thing. Sorry, ladies. The demon’s girlfriend lifts trucks now... and yes, she is asserting dominance on you guys...]

I began walking the junction and started cleaning up.

The crushed sedan and the pickup, however, stayed exactly where they were. No point wasting two precious slots on these.

So I went for the loose loot.

Reaching my hand out over the snow, I pulled the Misc. Chest from the Inventory, and it materialized with a heavy thud, taking up its single, ever-expanding slot in the grid. I popped the heavy lid and went to work, gathering what was left of the ambush.

Four rifles. Two shotguns. A revolver. Eleven magazines. One pry bar.

All of it went straight into the chest.

Kicking the lid shut under the absolutely flabbergasted gazes of the six women, I laid my palm flat against the chest and sent the whole thing back into the Inventory.

[Trade stock... not worth much to the System, but worth a lot to anybody standing in the snow with a deer rifle and four rounds.]

And then there were the men.

Two of them lay where my people had put them: one against the driver’s door and one by the passenger side, his coat gone black. I stood over the second one for a moment. About thirty, with a wedding ring around his finger.

I didn’t say anything over him. There was nothing to say that wasn’t a lie in one direction or the other.

So I just looked and moved on.

And when I turned around, Leo was watching me not say it, and Kara was looking very deliberately at the treeline, and neither of them said a word about it either.

[We’re all going to be doing this for a while, I guess... But then again, was I any different back then?]

Norton had Leo’s plate carrier off and his shirt up before anyone asked him to, revealing a purple-black bruise the size of a dinner plate that sat across Leo’s ribs.

"Breathe in." he said.

Leo breathed in, stopped a third of the way before going a shade whiter.

"Cracked. Possibly two." Norton’s hands were already moving. "It will hurt for six weeks, and you will not lift anything.."

"...Yeah. I-"

"Don’t."

"Yeah."

Then Norton did his own neck one-handed in the truck’s wing mirror, made Nora sit still while he shone a light in her eyes for a full minute, and let nobody fuss over him at all.

The Ghostbird went into the grid too, because its rotors were a dinner bell for ten kilometers and the house was four away, and Vera watched a helicopter vanish under my hand with her mouth open.

"I’m a wizard..." I told her with absolute sincerity.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"... then no wonder you managed to fight them at the compound..."

And with that, we rolled out with the light already going, the Ascender in the middle, the women’s pickups front and back, and a horde forty minutes behind us on a highway we weren’t on anymore.

And four kilometers up the state road, at the end of a long straight drive, the farmhouse came up out of the snow with light in every downstairs window, and people came out onto the porch to see what the noise was.

At the top of the steps, an older woman with grey in her hair and a double-barrel shotgun broken open over her arm stopped dead, and she wasn’t looking at the truck in the middle.

She was looking at the cat sitting on the dashboard.