Chapter 117: The Freeze

The world came back to me in smears.

Grey shapes swimming against brighter grey, a pale circle with light filtering in hung somewhere in front of me that might have been the hole I came in through, dust drifting across it in slow sheets while the ringing in my ears sat over everything, flat and total, the sound of a television left on in a dead channel.

My mouth was full of copper.

My body reported in from far away, one department at a time, the ribs filing their complaint, the shoulder attaching photographs, the spine submitting everything in triplicate, and I lay against the base of whatever had finally stopped me and let the reports pile up unread, since reading them required a brain, and mine was currently a single white-hot coal sitting in the middle of my skull where the third eye used to live.

[Get up...] The thought arrived without any authority behind it.

But I got an elbow under myself anyway, dragged my chest off the floor, and reached my right hand up across my body for the pocket on the back of my shoulder, for the weight that has ridden there through every stupid thing I have survived, for the claws and the warmth and the small fast heartbeat.

My hand found the pocket, flattened and empty, against my shoulder blade.

And everything in me stopped that very instant.

[No!]

I was up before the pain could vote on it, on my knees in the wreckage of somebody’s office with my head swinging left and right and left again. At the same time, the room gave me nothing but smears, overturned shapes and settling dust and that one pale circle, and my heart went up into my throat and began beating there, huge and wrong, while my hands started patting the rubble around me on their own, fast, graceless, like an animal digging.

"Tikki!"

The word came out of me crushed flat.

"TIKKI!"

The ringing ate my own voice halfway out of my mouth, my eyes dragged across the grey and found nothing, found nothing, found nothing, while the panic climbed out of my chest and into my arms until they were shaking, until I was hauling a chair out of my way without feeling its weight, until the entire world had narrowed to one missing two and a half kilograms.

Then the pale circle moved.

And from it, a small silhouette stepped up onto the broken edge of the hole I had blasted through this building, black against the light, tail low, ears forward, and every cell in my body leaped toward it at once.

[THERE, he’s there, he’s okay, grab him and-]

-CRASH-!

The roof came off the world.

One backhand, one single sweep of an impossibly massive arm somewhere above me, and the ceiling and the top of every wall left this floor all together, swept out sideways into the sky in a single sheet of concrete and rebar and dust, daylight falling straight down into the room like a dropped curtain while the pressure of the blow rolled over me and the entire building began groaning under my knees.

And through the new sky, filling it, came the face, leveled with my floor, claws the length of my body hooked over the broken edge, lake weed still roped across its shoulders, that enormous head lowering into the space where a roof had been while its breath rolled across the room, hot and wet and rotten, and its eyes, arterial red and wide open and burning, were not pointed at me.

They were pointed at the small silhouette on the edge of the hole.

At Tikki.

Standing between us, three feet from a snarling head bigger than a car, he stood, back arched, fur standing off him in a ridge, ears flat, tail rigid, every gram of him squared up against a thing four thousand times his weight.

He did not run.

He did not freeze.

He hunched lower and made himself the only wall between me and that thing.

And I froze.

My body locked from the jaw down, every joint welded, my knees bolted to the concrete while my heart slammed itself against the inside of my ribs, and my brain, my useless, brilliant, high-speed brain, kept right on working the whole time, running distances, running angles, running the reach of that arm against the three feet between its teeth and my cat, arriving at answers, screaming them down a spine that had gone deaf.

[MOVE.]

Nothing moved.

[He’s RIGHT THERE, he’s three feet from it, MOVE-]

And yet... nothing moved, and somewhere underneath the screaming, in the cold flat part of me that never stops taking notes, I recognized this.

I knew this...

I froze, just like this, in a doorway in month two of my last life while a sprinter took the man beside me.

I froze, just like this, in Nia’s nest when she came at me, and I froze in a parking lot not even two days ago while a seven-foot Revenant slid the respirator off my face with its claws while my hands shook on a raised rifle, and every single time... every time, it was somebody else who broke it.

Even in the previous life, Angelica had put a full-auto Glock on my chest plate because of this. She had looked me in the eye and said You have a tendency to freeze when things go south and got me a panic button because she knew my body came with a defect straight from the factory.

Nia had put the M110A2 in my hands and always parked me thirty meters back from every breach because of this.

Lexie had handed me his shotgun for the day I’d get jumped on overwatch, and my own spine betrayed me.

The entire arsenal of my life was a group of people building walls around one flaw.

But this time, there was nobody left to break it, no weapon that could break it.

The Tank’s jaw opened over my cat.

[Not.]

And that very second, something tore, low in my chest, at the root of my breath.

[Not him... NOT HIM! NOT THIS TIME!!!]

I did not remember standing.

I did not remember crossing the floor, and I did not remember my hand closing around the length of rebar sticking out of the shattered column beside me. But the next thing I remembered was the world already moving, my boots already driving through rubble, the rebar already back over my shoulder, my mouth already open and pouring out a sound I have never made in either of my lives, while above us, above Tikki, the hand rose to its full height and came down to smash us both into paste.

And I swung at it.

Eyes shut, throat tearing, both arms and my back and my hips and my soul, every gram of everything I have ever been, all of it thrown up the arc of one length of construction steel at a descending wall of flesh, and somewhere in the middle of the swing, in the place where the third eye lives, something that had been scraped down to nothing took the order anyway.

That muscle was empty.

But that muscle fired regardless.

And it ripped the sky asunder.

-KAAABOOOM-!!!

Force left me in one clean arc off the line of the swing, up, through, out, a single wave of pure shove that caught the descending hand.

It didn’t just slow it, or deflect it... it launched the whole damn thing, hurled that arm back up and away with the whole two-story body attached, claws ripping free of the building’s edge in a spray of concrete while the twenty tonnes Tank went backward off my floor into open air, and the sound of it, the sound was not an explosion arriving from somewhere else, the sound came out of the swing itself, one flat crack that split the morning from horizon to horizon and slapped every standing pane of glass out of the district.

And before I could make heads and tails of it, my mind flashed white.

The recoil arrived inside my own skull, like a flashbang set off between my ears, vision gone to one burning sheet, a spike of ringing driven straight through both eardrums.

My heart seized mid-beat, slamming twice and stuttering while my lungs forgot the very mechanics of drawing breath as I folded over my own knees on the shaking floor with the rebar still locked in my fist and my whole body convulsing around a single point of absolute agony in the center of my forehead.

And the very next second, I vomited.

Everything in me came up at once, bile and copper splashing the rubble between my hands while my arms shook under my own weight, while my heart hammered wrong and fast against a chest that could not feed it, while the white in my eyes broke apart very slowly into swimming grey.

And through all of it, through every second of it, the snarl never stopped coming out of me.

Low and wet and continuous, riding out over the vomit and the shaking, a sound with no plan in it... and no fear left in it either, since somewhere below my floor the world was roaring again, an enormous body was thrashing in the wreck of the street, and the building under my knees trembled with it.

Every single one of those tremors fed the sound in my throat.

[Up!]

The thought came through small and smeared.

But my body refused the order the way concrete refuses, and I roared at it, an ugly, tearing, animal sound aimed at my own arms, and pushed again, and came up off my hands, one knee, one boot, upright, swaying in the falling dust of a floor with no ceiling under a wide morning sky.

Then, something small landed against my back.

Claws found the torn seams of the jacket, found my shoulder, and two and a half kilograms slid into place at my neck, settling into the pouch, squared toward the same edge I was facing, and no part of me commented, since the part of me that commented felt everything was right in the world once more, but only for a fleeting moment.

And before I knew it, I had taken a step toward what made it fleeting.

As I did, the ringing peeled back off my ears, and under it arrived the roars, the fires, the screeching of bodies that no longer belonged to humans, all of it sliding into my head with an awful new clarity, arriving sorted, arriving cataloged.

I took another step, while the smears in my eyes drew together and sharpened, edges arriving where there had been fog, the broken edge of the floor coming into focus line by line, and I noticed it happening, noticed my own senses returning to a body that had nothing left to pay for them, one small cold observation sinking through me and gone, drowned under something rising that was hotter and older and did not care.

Another step, and the spike in my skull banked itself down to a coal.

Another, and the snarl coming out of me changed, dropping lower, going ragged at the edges, stripping out of itself everything that had ever belonged to a man making a sound and keeping only the part that meant kill, until what came off me in that ruined office was the same noise the things in the street below make, and Tikki rode my shoulder through every step of it and I never flet him flinch once.

I stopped at the edge, curled my fingers over the broken lip of concrete, and looked down.

Fourteen floors below, flat on its back in a crater of its own making with a collapsed storefront around its shoulders and at least a hundred infected crushed beneath it, the Tank was not getting up.

It lay still, one enormous arm flung out across the asphalt, and it was staring at its own open hand.

Then its head turned, slow, up the face of the building, floor by floor, all the way up to the broken edge, to me.

And its eyes went wide.