Chapter 157: Point Blank

-BOOM-!

The fifty cal went off half a second after it moved. Three streets across and thirty floors down is a terrible angle for a shot at a window facing to the right. Courtesy of exactly that, the round took the wall above the window instead of the thing standing inside it.

A chunk of old brick the size of my head dropped off in pieces, where the Witch’s head was less than a second ago.

[Missed... Clean miss... It looked up a scope, moved before the trigger broke... Great. Two seconds in and it’s winning.]

The muzzle blast knocked Tikki a full step back along the ledge. He came straight back to the edge, ears pinned flat and eyes on the block, growling at it into the wind, so I stopped staring at one window and looked at the whole building instead.

There were bodies standing around it. A loose ring of them lined both sides of the building and the alley behind it, all standing, their hands and heads jerking wildly as the whole city walked past them toward the bank.

And they had actual muscle underneath the armor.

[Sprinters... So that’s where they all went. It kept them...]

"System. Bird... Aim at every sprinter around that block with the chin gun, now. And if the Witch comes out of it, front, sides, roof, anywhere, shred it. Nia keeps everything else."

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: acknowledged.

Engaging contacts around residential block opposite Bank of Marlow, Head Office. Chin gun.

Priority / In-command: Nia. Missiles held.

}

I hadn’t had Awareness since the lake. That building was going to be exactly as blind for me as for any other idiot with a shotgun.

The Barrett went into the Inventory, and Tikki went into the pocket with his ears still flat. I took the stairs down a flight at a time until the third floor, where the stairwell below me grew loud with feet coming up, and none of them were mine.

But the landing had a window over the cross street with a bus parked right under it, and that was the whole reason for what I did next.

I went out through the glass.

I hit the bus’s roof, rolled the width of it, went off the far edge, hit the road on my back, and dashed, and for some reason, tripped.

"Meaa!"

"I know..." I coughed and got up again. "I know. Not my best."

Overhead, the bird had already started.

-BRRRRRRRRT-!

The chin gun came down the near side of the block in one long tearing line, and the ring went with it.

Fifty-cal at a hundred meters takes the middle out of a body and leaves the ends on the pavement, and the line walked from the corner to the alley mouth while I ran under it.

By the time I reached the block, nothing on that side of it was standing.

I didn’t go in through the front.

The front and both sides were open to the bird’s gun. The back was an alley between the block and the next one, narrow, roofed over with fire escapes and washing lines, the one place the bird couldn’t see into.

A thing that thinks about doors picks the one nobody’s watching.

And so do I.

The alley had its own share of the ring, a dozen of them between the mouth and the back door. They came at me all at once the moment I turned the corner, faster than anything human, and the Mossberg met them at the range where a shotgun does its best work.

-Dich-!-Dich-!-Dich-!-Thard-!

The suppressor gave up on the fourth shot, and I gave up caring.

A fifty cal had already told the whole city where I was. The tube emptied on the sixth slug, which is where the Inventory earns its keep. Four slugs came out of nothing into the web of my fingers quad grip, and they all went into the tube in two pushes, two more behind them, no more than a second for a full tube with the next one already a meter from my face.

-BANG-!

Chest, at arm’s length, and the slug went through it in a shower of blood, bone, chunks of flesh.

Every scrap of attention I had was on the door at the end of the alley, the steel one with the push bar.

And it burst open before I reached it.

The Witch stood in the doorway two meters from me. Thin, tall, straight-backed, a face that was still mostly a face, and eyes in it that found the shotgun before they found me.

And I grinned at it, shotgun already coming up, because I’d been right about the door.

-Thard-!-Thard-!

Two slugs into its chest at two meters. Hits like that would have nearly split a sprinter in half, and it took both of them and stayed standing, rocking back one step with two holes in it and its mouth coming open.

Then it was gone back through the door before the third shot cleared the muzzle, and the sprinters that had been coming out behind it came out over each other at me instead.

And what followed were the worst thirty seconds of the week.

They got hands on me in the doorway. One came over my back with its teeth working at the shoulder plate of the suit, and one got my belt with its face coming up at mine, and I did what a woman named Angelica told me to do two years and one whole life ago, the day she handed me my first pistol: pulled the Glock off my chest plate, put it under the first one’s jaw, pulled the trigger, and kept it there.

-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!....

Twenty rounds of ten-mil went out in a second and a half. The top of the first one went up the doorframe in a sheet; the rest went into the face of the one on my belt from two inches away, and both let go at once for the same reason.

Then a third hand came over my right shoulder into the pocket after Tikki. The booger jumped at it with a ferocious meow, sank his claws into the damn thing, and held on. It bought me the exact half-second I needed to turn and put the axe through its neck."

[Your pep talks are still terrible, boss... Thank you.]

A few more seconds of shotgun blasts, axe swings, and Tikki’s judgemental stares, the alley was mine, and I went in through the door with four slugs back in the tube.

A corridor ran the length of the ground floor to the front lobby. The lobby’s glass front was gone, all of it, the frames chewed to nothing and the wall behind them full of fifty-cal holes the size of my fist.

And the Witch was coming back down that corridor toward me at a run, bloodied down one side from the shoulder to the knee with an arm hanging wrong, and it was going for the stairwell door was halfway between us.

I knew in an instant it had tried the front door first, and the bird had been waiting for exactly that.

Before I could stop it, I laughed, out loud, in that corridor.

That damned thing was trapped between a chin gun and me, and it knew it.

So it went for the stairs instead of my throat, three steps at a time on legs with two slugs’ and fifty cal worth of holes above them.

Its guard came down those same stairs at me while it went up, and I put a slug into the first one’s chest and went up over it before it had finished sliding.

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: status.

Horde is converging on Host’s position: residential block, all approaches.

Estimated Infected count: 80,000+.

}

[It called them... to its own house instead of sending them to the bank... With it inside... With me inside... smart...]

But I laughed harder going up the second flight, in a voice I didn’t like much.

It was exactly what I’d have done. The last thing it told them would stand until they’d done it, and I had two floors of its guard between me and it, and a city on its way to the door.

The stairwell was doors, every landing a door, every door a mouth, nothing to aim at until it’s already on you.

Tikki’s growl went up half a note before each one, so I had the muzzle on it before it opened.

But I wasn’t running in blind. The Witch’s blood went up the steps ahead of me in a line I could have followed blind, which, being blind, I did thanks to my enhanced senses.

Second floor, four of them: and it went like chest, chest, chest, the axe for the fourth.

Third floor, a reload on the landing, then three at the top of the flight that I took at a walk.

On the next flight, the whole building shook once, hard. A long tearing bang with a lot of smaller ones packed inside it came through the wall from the direction of the bank, and I didn’t have a half-second to spend on a window, so I spent it on the stairs.

[That was the whole rack... Nia, what did you... Later. Later.]

The fourth floor had two that had been told to wait for me, and they did.

The top floor was one corridor and a roof door beside the stairs. The roof door had been opened and shut again, with the bird’s rotor noise coming straight down through it, and nothing that thinks goes onto a roof under a gun. So the blood went the other way, along the corridor and under the last door.

I kicked the door in with the Barrett already coming out of the Inventory.

It was a living room that had once belonged to a family, a sofa, a television, school photos up the wall, and in the far corner, between the window and the wall, was the Witch.

It backed into the corner as I walked in, one step, then another, until there was no corner left. It was bleeding onto a dead family’s carpet from two slugs and the bird’s fifty, and both hands came up, palms out, the good one and the ruined one.

Then it made a sound, high and thin, and I’ve heard scared kids make that exact sound.

[Intelligence comes with fear... and fear comes with hands up. It wants a second... It’s asking me for one second.]

I had watched what a thing that thinks does with a second more than once.

This one had spent the whole morning showing me. It waited until six people were underground with ten tonnes of gold, sent its best to our door and a city down every street, then called eighty thousand down here to protect itself instead of the target.

No way in hell I was giving it a second.

The muzzle stopped a meter from its face.

It looked at the muzzle with its hands still up, and I looked at it over the top of the scope. That scope was set for four hundred meters. I did it because it looked cool.

And then-

-BOOM-!

The face went into the corner, the corner went into the wall behind it, and the brick behind that took what was left of the round out into the street.

What was left of the Witch sat down in the corner with its hands still halfway up.

-Ding!

{

Variant Infected eliminated: The Witch.

Kill Reward: 15,000,000 Credits.

}

The claws came out of my shoulder, all four sets at once, and Tikki climbed out onto my collar to look down at the corner for about two seconds, with the flat look he gives a cage he’s finished with.

"Mea."

"Yeah... Fifteen million for one round." I put the Barrett back into the Inventory. "I should shoot smart things more often."

Then the floor started shaking under my boots and didn’t stop. A low grinding push came up through the whole block from the street, eighty thousand of them arriving at the walls at once, the last order still standing with nobody left to cancel it, while behind me the stairwell filled with the rest of the ring coming up.

[Yeah... I’m not taking them...]

"System, get the bird on this balcony. Now."

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: en route. ETA: 20 seconds.

}

Twenty seconds is a long time in a doorway, and I spent the first second putting eight slugs into the tube.

The first sprinter came through the flat’s door at about the eighth second, and I fired from the hip. The second came at twelve, the third and fourth together at fifteen, while the rotor wash came in off the balcony behind me, flattening the curtains against the ceiling. At twenty, the balcony rail had a helicopter a body-length past it, the cabin door open, the skid at chest height and moving.

"Pocket..." I told Tikki, who was already there, all four sets of claws through the jacket and into me. "Hold on."

"Mea!"

I dropped the shotgun on its sling, went over the rail, jumped, landed clean inside the cabin, and keyed Nia’s channel from the floor of the cabin and got static in return.

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: status.

All missiles expended on Nia’s order.

}

"Wai-WHAT?!"