Chapter 170: Good Luck?

Dean had heard my boots on the concrete long before I had reached the top, and he was already looking at me over his shoulder.

"Can’t sleep either?"

"M-hm..."

"That’s what Dad said about the chair." He grinned at the fields. "Mom bought a new one in March, and he still goes and sits in the old one in the barn when he thinks nobody’s watching."

We stood there for a while and looked at the Infected standing in the moonlight, eleven meters out, with their heads turned up at a house that wasn’t there anymore, while Dean talked about the farm.

About the summer the creek came over the road, and Walter drove the tractor through it with Toby on his shoulders, about the vet wing, which was two days off, and what he’d do in a valley with a few hundred head of cattle in it come spring, if there was still a spring, and if the cattle hadn’t all been eaten.

This was a guy who had watched a fifty-kilo sack of rice fall out of the air onto his boots, an eleven-ton helicopter disappear under my hand, and a house come out of a block of blue light, and in four days he hadn’t asked me a single question about any of it.

"Kara looked at Hank today," he told the fields instead. "Meloxicam when the wing opens, she says. Point one per kilo."

"She’s probably right..."

"She’s right." He pulled one hand out of his pocket and rubbed the back of his neck with it. "He hasn’t got till the wing opens, Nikki... He’s fourteen. He can’t get up the porch steps anymore. I carried him into the barn this morning, and he weighed about half what he should..."

I knew that dog, and I’d known him since he could still clear the paddock gate.

Hank had slept on my boots on that porch every morning of three university breaks, with his chin on the toe and one eye open.

The one time I’d tried to get up without waking him, he’d put his teeth on my ankle, not hard, and looked at me until I sat back down.

Dean used to say the dog had adopted my boots and tolerated the rest of me.

So I didn’t say anything to Dean. I opened the Shop instead.

-Ding!

{

Shop: Biologicals.

Recipient: Hank. Canine, 14 years, blue heeler.

Accelerated Healing Stim: 100,000.

Cognition Enhancer, first dose on the recipient’s ladder: 250,000.

Physiological Enhancer, first dose on the recipient’s ladder: 250,000.

Lifespan Stim, +10 years: 10,000,000.

Total: 10,600,000 Credits.

Observation: The Host is about to spend more on a dog than he spent on water for the entire farm. The System has no objection. The dog has never insulted it.

}

[Ten point six million... On a dog... A dog that bit my ankle... Heh, confirm.]

Four auto-injectors dropped into my hand out of nowhere, fat black ones with a safety cap on each end.

I turned around and put all four of them into Dean’s chest in one go, flat-handed, as hard as I dared with the hands I’ve got now, which rocked him back half a step anyway.

"Oof-" He caught them against his jacket with both arms. "What-"

"For the dog."

He looked down at them in the moonlight, four fat injectors lying across his forearms, a vet holding drugs he’d never seen a label for.

"Healing, brain, body, and ten years on the clock." I pointed at them one at a time. "Physiological and the lifespan one goes over the heart. Cognition goes over the temple... Accelerated Healing Stim goes where he’s hurt the most. All four, one after the other, with an hour in between. You’re gonna have to hold him down for five minutes, and they’re going to be the worst five minutes of his life... After that, he’ll start running around again... and you’ve got a dog that understands you when you talk to him. Which, from my experience, you’ll come to regret."

Dean didn’t say anything for a long time. He stood there with his arms full of a dog’s whole second life and looked at me. His eyes had gone wet in the moonlight, and he didn’t do anything to hide it.

"Nikki-"

"Don’t make it weird."

He laughed at that, and put the injectors into his jacket pockets one at a time, two to a side, zipped both pockets shut, patted them, and then stood there with his hands flat on his chest over them, keeping them in.

"Can I ask you one thing?"

That was the first question he’d asked me in four days, and I’d have given him a straight answer to anything on earth right then.

"Shoot."

"You and Nia." He looked at me sideways. "You’re together. Right?"

"...Yeah."

It should have come out faster than that.

There was no reason on this earth for it not to.

A month of her on the roofs and in the door of the bird and on the counter in June’s kitchen with her heels going, an entire shit-show together, and the word still took half a second longer to leave my mouth than it had any right to.

And I heard the gap, and I was angry at myself before the word was out.

[Half a second... What the hell was that? What was that for?]

"Good." Dean looked back out at the fields with his shoulders gone loose, a man with a thing settled. "Then I can say this to your face, and I want to."

He turned around and leaned his back against the lip of the wall, so he was looking at the house instead of the Infected.

"I like Kara... I have since the first break, when you three got off the bus, and she told Dad his gate hinge was upside down." He was smiling at the house. "It was so... Guess what I’m trying to say is... I never did a thing about it, because you two looked like a done deal... You looked so perfect together, man. Everybody on this farm thought so. Mom had the two of you married in her head by the second summer."

[...June did ask me about rings once. I was twenty.]

"So I backed off, and I stayed backed off, and that was all right." He shrugged, easy about all of it. "... And now you’re with Nia, which is good for you... She’s good. She’s terrifying, and I mean that as a compliment... What I’m trying to say is... I’m going to shoot my shot. With Kara... I wanted you to hear it from me first, because you’re Leo’s big bro, which makes you mine, and brothers don’t do that stuff behind each other’s backs."

There was nothing hidden in it.

I genuinely looked for it, with the enhanced senses and all, the whole time he was talking, and there wasn’t any.

No angle, no needle, no little test to see what my face did.

He told me for the plain reason that it was the decent thing to do. He was a decent man. I’ve always known that, and that was the entire story.

Then he pushed off the lip, stood up straight, and held his fist out to me, knuckles first, smiling, as though asking for permission.

"So... Wish me luck?"

I stood there and didn’t move.

For about a second, I didn’t do anything at all, with his fist in the air between us, the moonlight on the snow, the Infected standing below the wall, with my head gone completely, perfectly empty, as it does right before a Tank comes through a wall.

[...Okay. Okay... I need to clear my head. Maybe that hallucinogenic crap from the Revenant is messing with me again... That’s what this is. That’s all this is.]

I bumped his fist, knuckles to knuckles.

"Good luck, man."

"Thanks." He meant it, every letter of it.

He picked the shotgun up off the lip, patted his pockets one more time, and went on down the walk toward the corner, slow, with a jump in his steps.

And then I caught myself at it.

Standing on my own wall, at midnight, I heard what my own head was doing, and I stopped and listened to it as you would to a stranger at the next table, and the stranger was not a good man.

I told Dean Hart sixty seconds ago that I was with Nia.

I had no claim on Kara, had never made one, had never once spoken a word to her in two lives that gave me the right to one.

And I was standing up here in the cold, hating a good man for liking a woman I had just told him was free.

[...Hypocrite of the year... Get this man a trophy. Get him a plaque. Mount it on the wall he built so he could stand on it and feel sorry for himself.]

It didn’t go away, any of it.

I knew exactly what it was now, and I knew exactly what kind of man it made me, and that didn’t change anything.

I stood on the wall until two, then went back to the Ascender, lay down next to Tikki with my boots on, and looked at the roof of the truck.

At four in the morning I gave up.

I got up, took my M110A2 off its hook, and checked the tablet out of habit as I went past.

"System..." I pulled my coat on in the dark. "If anybody asks, I’m hunting."

-Ding!

{

Acknowledged.

Observation: The Host is carrying a rifle he does not intend to fire. The System will relay the lie as instructed.

}

Tikki climbed into the pocket on his own, without being asked, and rested his chin on my shoulder.

And with that, I went up the stairs, along the west walk to the corner furthest from the gatehouse, swung my legs over the lip, and dropped ten meters onto frozen ground on the far side of my own wall, down in the snow with the cat swearing in my pocket and no plan at all.

The Infected on the west side didn’t turn around.

I didn’t look back at them either.

I simply walked west, away from the house with the hot water in it and the beds and the people, toward the black line of the woods, with the rifle in my hands and no intention of using it.