Chapter 162: Holy Land

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

June’s kitchen was the warmest room I’d been in for a month, and by the time I came in off the tractor’s roof with snow on my boots, every chair in the house had been dragged up to her table.

It was a big farm kitchen with log walls, a long wooden table down the middle, a woodstove in the corner, and a black window over the sink looking out at the fields.

A big pot of snow sat melting on the stove for water, because the bore had frozen solid in the second week, while a single lamp burned in the middle of the table off the solar batteries.

Walter sat at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled up, while Nia sat on the counter beside the woodstove, eating rice straight out of the pot with a serving spoon, one hand pressed to her stitches.

Tikki had his own chair and his own plate of June’s roast, which was more than Dean got, with Dean eating his standing up by the sink.

"Whose helicopter was that?" I asked the room.

Every fork at the table stopped, and every face turned to Walter.

Walter took his time chewing first. "The pastor’s."

"The pastor has a helicopter?"

"Dale Pruitt’s..." June put a plate down in front of me before I’d even sat down, with enough roast and rice on it for four people, which these days was about right. "He used to spray our barley... He flies for the church now."

"They took everyone in." Walter cut himself another piece of roast. "Coldwater first... Then the farms."

"Then whoever Dale’s helicopter brought back from Dunmore..." June wiped her hands on the dish towel over her shoulder and kept wiping them after they were dry. "There’s near a hundred of them in a camp round the church now, with a fence round the camp."

"They call them demons... those things out there," Walter pointed his fork at the black window, at the fields out there in the dark.

"He tells them the church is holy land..." June’s mouth went thin around the words. "God’s grace in this Armageddon, he says, and the demons won’t dare set foot on it."

"And they don’t." Walter set his fork down beside his plate.

That was what bothered him. A man who never used ten words when two would do had spent three.

I’d seen it myself from the air, a church lit up at the far edge of the village, a fence around it a kid could’ve climbed, and not one Infected within five hundred meters of any of it.

[... in a valley this full of them... Yeah, that’d bother me too.]

"So why aren’t you lot over there singing hymns~?" Nia asked through a mouthful of rice, swinging her heels against the cupboard.

June looked at Walter, and Walter looked down at his plate. "Toby."

Nia’s heels stopped swinging against the cupboard.

"I called him that morning..." June turned back to the stove so we couldn’t see her face, and her voice went small. "I didn’t know who else to call... He walked up the road the same day, and he wanted Toby in the churchyard, with everyone else-"

She’d been blaming herself for that phone call for three weeks, and you could hear it in every word.

"Buried my own boy..." Walter’s hand had gone flat on the table, and for Walter Hart, that was shouting.

"He’s been back twice since." Dean put his plate down in the sink and folded his arms. "Three visits, three no’s... And every morning after a no, those things outside... they’re closer."

I put my fork down too. "Closer?"

"First week they were down at the road." Dean jerked his chin at the window. "This morning I counted eight fence posts between them and the wall, and the posts are three meters apart."

[Twenty-four meters... from a hundred and forty, give or take... in three no’s... Crowds don’t wander that politely...]

Tikki stopped eating and looked up from his plate at Dean, ears flat.

"Mea."

I took my plate upstairs, climbed out of the window at the end of the landing, and sat down on the porch roof in the snow, because I figured I’d think better with a cold butt and food in my hand.

[Tikki stayed downstairs with his roast... Traitor.]

Nia came out of the window behind me a minute later, with the axe in her hand and the pot of rice wedged under her other arm, and sat down beside me without a word about her ribs.

From up there, the whole valley lay dark under the snow, but both she and I could see everything as clear as daytime.

The Infected stood in it in their loose rows, every one of them facing the house, and not one of them making a sound.

East, past the willows along the brook and the roofs of Coldwater in the distance, there was nothing of the church at all, only the glow of the camp’s lights on the bottom of the clouds.

"It’s a Witch..." I muttered, watching the fields.

[A witch can have a whole city standing around exactly like this, not giving a crap about rotors.]

"Witches eat people, big guy." Nia scooped another spoonful out of the pot without looking at me. "Nobody in either of our lives ever saw one running a protection racket..."

[Fair... Stupid, but fair.]

"Then what...? Drugs in the water? A smell? A dog whistle we can’t hear?"

"Or God really does like those ones~" She licked the spoon clean and pointed it at the glow.

None of it held up for more than a second. What did hold up was simpler: whatever the pastor had, it kept the Infected off his church, and it pointed every last one of them at Leo’s mom.

That made me angry, the cold kind, and my hand had gone so tight on the fork that the handle bent.

[Okay... New plan. Same plan, actually... just way, way more of it.]

"System..." I put the plate down in the snow. "The most insane base you can sell me."

-Ding!

{

Base Building: Consultant Mode.

Request: "The most insane base you can sell me."

Result: System-Exclusive Blueprint, Hart Farm.

Integration: System-linked. Cannot be hacked, copied, or overridden. Terminates upon the Host’s death.

Contractor Mode: Available.

The System will build each phase in any order the Host approves, as funds allow.

Recommended order: Defenses first.

Observation: The Host asked for insane. The System has complied.

}

[Hundred and fifty-two million. That’d be the budget... Thirty-five bars a day at eight hundred and fifty-six grand a bar... that is thirty million a day... Five days of selling... which is one of Nia’s doses... Okay. Okay okay okay...]

For reference, I had spent no more than five or six million back at Ruth’s place. And they called it Sanctuary.

Then the yard below me filled up with a building site only I could see.

Walls came up out of the snow around the whole farm, ten meters high and nine meters thick at the bottom, with a walk along the top wide enough for three people to run side by side.

The log house was gone, and in its place a new house stood where it had been.

Under it, the System had drawn me a green cutaway of a nuclear bunker going down into the ground.

Past the barns stood a three-story hospital with a red cross on its roof and a whole wing with a paw print on the door.

That was the first draft System made me.

"You’re making the shopping face~" Nia leaned in to look at nothing.

"LEO!" I yelled down through the window. "Get up here!"

He came out onto the roof a minute later in his socks, ducking under the window frame, and stood there looking at an empty yard while I pointed at things he couldn’t see.

"Only I can see it..." I told him. "Walls, a new house, a bunker under it, a hospital over there. Where’s it wrong?"

Leo didn’t laugh, and he didn’t ask if I was crazy. He looked where I was pointing, and then he looked at the ground under it for a long time.

"Is the hospital in the bottom paddock?" he finally asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Bottom paddock floods every April." His breath smoked in the cold. "Anything heavy down there sinks."

In front of me, the whole hospital picked itself up and slid uphill, and a new line came up on the panel.

-Ding!

{

Revision accepted. Site drainage: corrected.

}

[Dude went to university to build stuff with his name on it... so.]

"System... put his name on it."

-Ding!

{

Lead Engineer: Leo Hart.

}

"It says you’re the lead engineer," I told him.

Leo looked out at the empty yard, at walls he couldn’t see, and his ears went red in the light from the window.

"...Right."

We did the rest at the table, all nine of us and the cat, with the phases read out loud while Nora wrote them down.

"The dome goes first, no vote," I told them. "It hides light... Nobody flying over at night, including a certain pastor’s helicopter, sees a farm full of giant blue construction boxes going up... Grey Man Strategy."

"And then guns~" Nia raised the serving spoon over her head. "The System agrees with me."

"The System doesn’t get a vote." Kara didn’t look up from her plate. "A roof, water, and a hospital. People first."

Mr. Norton’s hand went up first, and every other hand at the table followed it for people first, Walter’s by one finger, while Tikki put his paw flat on Kara’s wrist, which made it everyone except Nia.

Leo’s family, somewhere between the trailers full of food, and seeing a NH90 disappear under my touch have made peace with the fact that I’m apparently a genuine wizard now.

"Boooo~" Nia ate the spoonful of rice in protest.

Nora held her page up for everyone to see: the dome, the walls bare, the new house on its bunker, an elevated water tower connected to the bore well and a purifier, the hospital, the farm, and the guns last, with THE ORDER (AGREED) (NORA’S) written across the top in capitals.

"System... the dome."

-Ding!

{

Phase 1: Concealment Dome (System-Exclusive).

Coverage: Hart Farmhouse.

Sound and smell remain fully detectable.

Effect breaks within 10 meters.

Cost: 12,000,000 Credits.

Confirm?

}

"Confirm."

Nothing happened, at least from the inside, but I could feel the System being smug about it.

So I climbed over Walter’s gate and walked down the drive to the road to look at it from outside, with Tikki in the pocket and my bearded axe in my hand, straight through the Infected standing in the dark.

Not one of them turned its head to watch me go past, not even the one Tikki hissed at from two meters away.

At the bottom of the drive I turned around, and the farm I’d just had dinner in was gone.

The log house was still standing, but it looked like nobody was living in it.

Its windows were black, its chimney was cold and smoke-free, and there wasn’t a single light anywhere.

The field where the Ghostbird had been sitting was just snow, and even the drive was clean, my own footprints starting partway down it, like I’d walked out of thin air.

It honestly looked like the Harts suddenly decided to pack up and leave.

Tikki climbed up out of the pocket onto my shoulder, stared at it for a long second, and then turned his whole body east, toward the glow over the willows.

"Mea."

[Yeah, booger... From out here, nobody lives there anymore... So come and have a look, Pastor.]