Chapter 169: Hot Water

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

"Don’t ever look at the Ark," Leo told me at the gatehouse, word for word, with the empty drive behind him. "Pastor says it’s death."

[...Ark. Okay... Tarp, tower, Ark. Three words for one thing, and I still don’t know what the thing is... though I think I have an idea...]

"From what I understand, he sent her to test us," Leo said, his hands still shoved deep in his pockets. "He wanted to see if we had medicine, or if we were cruel enough to turn away a dying kid. Either way, he wins."

"He thinks he wins," I corrected, leaning back against the concrete wall. "But he just gave us the keys to his front gate."

Leo frowned at me. "What?"

"You don’t kill a doctor in the apocalypse, Leo. You don’t even threaten one. They’re too precious... So whatever he’s been doing to make the Infected come closer each day... He’s gonna stop doing it." I tapped my finger against the portcullis’s frozen steel. "Tomorrow, Mr. Norton walks into that camp to save a kid’s life... Stroud is going to roll out the red carpet. And he’s going to put on a grand show of his ’holy land’ and try his absolute hardest to poach our medic."

Leo’s eyes widened slightly as he caught up to the math. "And while he’s busy trying to convert Norton..."

"I’m going to be right behind him, carrying the medical bag." I grinned, and it wasn’t a nice smile. "Stroud’s going to be so focused on looking like a savior to a doctor that he won’t be looking at me hard enough... I’m going to spend a day or two inside his fence, eating his food, mapping his night shifts, and taking a nice, long look at whatever the hell this ’Ark’ is."

I pushed off the wall, patted Leo on the shoulder, put the word ’Ark’ on the list in my head next to the other two, and then I went and bought a house.

That was the day’s job. The pastor could wait until I had a roof.

The house came out of its field at six that evening, right on the panel’s number, with the whole farm standing in the snow in front of it in a row, June in the middle of the row with both hands over her mouth.

It stood where the log house once stood, and the one was log too, five floors with a porch running right around the bottom one, facing south now, where Leo had turned it.

A stone chimney rose through the middle of the roof with smoke already pouring out of it. Behind the big barn, on the rise where Leo had dragged it with his finger, a water tower stood on steel legs with a purifier the size of a shed under it.

The bore had come back up at nine hundred liters an hour at four o’clock. The System had thawed it. I hadn’t asked how, and the System hadn’t offered.

-Ding!

{

Phase 3 complete: Residence (Hart), with Bunker (Nuclear, Class II).

Phase 4 complete: Water. Bore: restored.

Purifier: online.

Elevated tank: 40,000 L.

Lead Engineer: Leo Hart.

Revisions accepted: 9.

Revisions declined: 1 (the stair, which the Lead Engineer moved back to where the System had it).

}

[Nine out of ten... Not bad...]

"Mudroom’s on the left," Leo told his mother. "With a drain."

June didn’t say anything. She walked up the porch steps, opened her own front door, and stood in the doorway of a house that stood on the grave of her home, and then she went inside without her boots off, which was the first time in her life she’d done that, and nobody mentioned it.

To Walter and June, this wasn’t just a brand-new multi-million-credit house.

They’d buried their home that afternoon too. The place they’d raised Toby, Leo, and Dean. The place they’d gotten married. The place where most of the best years of their lives had happened.

The inside was everything I’d read off the panel and three things I hadn’t.

A kitchen you could have parked the Ascender in, with a cast-iron woodstove in the corner along with every other kind, after Leo told the System his mother didn’t cook on anything else.

A pantry behind it, with a steel door at the back that went down to the bunker, which Tikki opened by walking at it, then stood at the top of the stairs, looked down into the darkness for a long time, and decided it wasn’t his problem.

Rooms for everyone, each with its own bathroom.

A library on the third floor with nothing in it yet but shelves, a comms room beside it with a bank of dead screens along one wall, and a game room on the top floor with a pool table in it that I stood and looked at for a while, I’m not going to lie.

[Pool table... In the apocalypse... I’m twenty-three years old, and I bought a pool table with a nuclear bunker under it. Angelica would’ve... no. No, she would not have.]

Nora had NORA’S taped to the comms room door before anyone else had even found the stairs.

Then the showers started, and the house went quiet in a different way.

June went up first. Walter, Dean, and Leo all stood in the kitchen and refused to go before her, so she went up with a towel over her arm, telling all three of them they were ridiculous.

We heard the water come on through the floor. Then, after a minute, we heard her crying in there, loud, the crying you can’t do anything about.

Walter went up the stairs and stood outside the bathroom door with his hands at his sides and didn’t knock.

"I’m not crying," June called through the door. "It’s the steam."

"I know," Walter told the door.

She came down twenty minutes later with her braid wet, her face pink, and her eyes red at the rims, and she put a pot of water on the woodstove for no reason at all, with the taps working, and nobody told her.

Walter went up after her and stood under his for twenty minutes by my watch, and came down with his hair combed flat and his beard dripping and told nobody anything, and went and sat at the table with his coffee the same as he did every night.

"They’re happy... trust me. They just-" Leo told me, low, at the stove.

"I know..." I whispered, "I wouldn’t have taken it as well as they had..."

I went to my room last, after Mr. Norton and the girls and the Harts.

And I went straight for a bath, with Tikki sitting on the bathmat judging the water pressure.

It was good, and I’m not going to write a poem about it.

The Enhancers mean I eat like a demon and sleep hard, and ten minutes under water that came out of the wall hot on its own, with nobody shooting at anyone and the pastor kilometers away in his church, was the best I’d felt since the bank.

[Hot water... A bunker... A pool table... Nikki, buddy, you built paradise in four days, and you did it with gold you dug out of a bank... Enjoy it. For once in two lives, just enjoy the thing.]

At dinner, at the first table in the new house, Kara put a plate in front of me without a word, then sat down next to Dean, and he made her laugh twice before the bread had even come round.

I’d heard that laugh from the wall the day before, right out of her chest, and I’d turned my back on it, at twenty-three, on a wall.

So I wasn’t enjoying the thing as much as the thing deserved, and I knew it, but I ate three plates anyway.

Everyone slept in a bed that night, everyone except me.

At eleven, with the house gone quiet, I went out the mudroom door, across the yard in the snow, and climbed into the Ascender in the RV row, because it was mine, and it had been home longer than anything with a foundation.

Tikki was already on the bed, almost as if he was waiting for me.

"Mea."

"Yeah, I know," I told him. "The house has a pool table, and you’re still here... That says a lot about you, booger."

He didn’t think so, and he told me so, and then he went to sleep on my pillow.

I didn’t sleep for three hours. Can’t say I tried either. So before I hit the fourth hour mark, I went up to the wall at midnight, with the snow stopped, the sky clear, and a half-moon lighting the fields.

And I found Dean already up there, on the south walk by the gatehouse, with his pump shotgun leaning on the lip beside him and his hands in his jacket pockets.

He had the midnight wall watch, by his own brother’s rota, with my name next to his on it, and he looked like he’d volunteered.