Chapter 152: Injectors

Marlow came up under the nose twenty minutes later, and it was bigger than the map had made it look.

A river through the middle of it with three bridges, a ring road, a stadium on the east edge with a car park beside it the size of a small lake, and one long road running north off the river with showroom glass down both sides of it, which was the road I’d been thinking about since the porch.

No lights anywhere, no smoke, just towers going grey in the noon light with snow on every flat surface.

"Thermal’s ugly," Nia reported from the door, tablet in one hand. "One big warm smear along the water, both banks, and it goes for kilometers. I’m not counting that."

"A hundred and ninety thousand, give or take." I tilted my head.

"I’m not counting that."

I picked a residential block one street off the showroom road, twelve floors with a flat roof and a stairwell housing on top of it, and told the System to put us on it, and it did, in the snow, without a bump.

Everybody out, Tikki and I last, he in his designated pocket on my shoulder complaining the whole way about not being squished between two... well.

"Bird stays up," I told the System and the five of them at the same time. "... Go over the showroom road, pull everything off it, and walk them to that car park or the stadium... your pick. Nothing gets dropped until the lot’s full... And I mean full."

The Ghostbird lifted off the roof with nobody in it, dipped its nose, and went out over the city thumping, and inside a minute the siren started over the river and the thermal on Nia’s tablet began, very slowly, to lean.

[And that’s the bell rung... Now we wait for the dinner guests to leave.]

The apartment building’s top floor was a penthouse. Nia went through it first with the axe while the rest of us stood in the hall listening to her work. One shambler in the master bathroom, one swing, and she came back out wiping the blade on a hand towel with a pattern of anchors on it.

"Clear... Decent place. Somebody had money and no sense of taste."

We barricaded the front door with the owner’s dining table, and stood in a dead stranger’s living room with floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides and the city’s noise coming through it, the distant screeching of thousands upon thousands of Infected, and the rotors.

Norton put his bag on the coffee table, took the eight injectors out one at a time, and lined them up.

"Now?" Kara asked, not looking at them.

"Now." I sat down on the arm of the sofa. "We’ve got a few hours before that road’s empty, and you’re better off feeling like garbage in here than out there."

"Feeling like garbage," Leo repeated.

"Yeah..." I pointed at the black ones. "That one goes in at the heart. And you’ll feel like your heart’s going to stop, and you’re going to be awake for it, and it’s going to last five minutes... The other one goes in at the temple, and for five minutes it’s going to feel like your brain’s going to burst in your head... Then it’s over. Then you’re stronger than you were, sharper than you were, and hungrier than you’ve ever been."

Nobody said anything for a good moment.

Then Nora’s voice came out small, "How much stronger? Will it work the same as it worked on you two?"

"Yep... If you could lift fifty kilos before, you’ll lift seventy-five after the shot... Brain’s a fifth better. You won’t be me... You’ll be you, with the dial turned up a little."

"And you did this to yourself five times."

"Six, actually... I have one physiological enhancer over Nia..."

"Uh-huh... that’s why I’m handsome." Nobody laughed, which was fair. "Mr. Norton goes last... I’ll do his."

Norton had already rolled Kara’s sleeve up and then rolled it back down, it not being the arm, and he pressed two fingers to the left of her sternum, found the spot, and looked at her.

"Lie down flat... You’ll want to grab something, so grab me. And put this in your mouth."

She lay down on the bed in the master bedroom with her eyes on the ceiling and her face doing nothing as she shoved a handkerchief in her mouth while Norton put the injector against her chest and pushed.

It was not an easy thing to watch, to be honest. I had seen some messed up shit in two lifetimes. But still, looking at her, about to be injected with those enhancers, knowing the pain she would endure... I took every bit I had to not avert my eyes.

For about two seconds nothing happened. Then her back came up off the floor, and her hand closed on Norton’s forearm so hard I heard him breathe in, her eyes opening all the way and staying that way. She made no sound at all, none, for five minutes, while her heart began beating faster and faster and faster until it bordered on its biological limit.

Nora sat on the floor beside her, holding her other hand, crying without making a sound either.

I’d been through it six times now, and I remembered every second, and remembering didn’t help.

At five minutes, her back came down, her breath came in huge gulps, her face went from white to grey to a color a person has, and she lay there on a dead man’s bed and said, very quietly, to the ceiling, "...That’s the first one."

"That’s the first one."

"Do the second one."

Norton did the second one at the temple, five minutes with her hands over her eyes and her teeth together, and at the end of it she rolled onto her side and stayed there, her fingers moving on the bedsheets, testing what they could do now.

Leo went next, and Leo too did it in silence, flat on his back with his jaw set and his eyes going red and staying red, and around the third minute of the first injector his hand went to his ribs, came off them, went back, and when it was over he sat up far too fast for a man with two cracked ribs a few days ago, looking at his own chest with his mouth slightly open.

"They don’t hurt at all." He pressed on them. "Nikki, they don’t hurt."

"Lie back down, you’ve got one more," Norton said.

Nora tried to fight the crying the whole way through, too.

She lay there with her heart beating like hell, tears running into her ears and fury on her face the whole five minutes, and when she could breathe again the first thing she said was "I’m not crying."

The second thing was "Shut up," even though nobody said anything.

Then Norton lay down on the bed, an old man in a cardigan, put the injector against his own chest, stopped, and looked at me.

"I’d prefer you did it."

"I know."

I knelt beside him, placed the tip of the injector over his heart, while he took his own pulse with the other hand, two fingers on his wrist, and started counting out loud, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, and I pushed. He got to seventy-one and stopped counting, there being nothing left to count, or the mental bandwidth to count.

He didn’t grab anyone. He lay there with his eyes open and his lips moving, and a part of me believed he was still counting, silently, all the way through the five minutes out of pure stubbornness, and when it ended he took his pulse again, announced "Seventy-two," and closed his eyes.

I did the second one while his eyes were closed.

Forty minutes, four people, and I’d have taken all eight myself if the System let you take them for somebody else, which it doesn’t.

[Done... All of them... Now comes the funny part.]

The funny part took about an hour to arrive, and it arrived on Leo.

He got up to shift the sofa to make space so the others could stretch it out and see what they could do now.

He got his hands under the arm as he would have that morning, braced for the weight, and lifted, and the end came up so easy he took a step back with it and nearly sat down, the sofa leg thumping back onto the carpet. He stood there looking at his own hands, ears going red.

"...Right."

"Yeah."

"That was-"

"Yeah... Give it a day."

Nora laughed at him and knocked her own cap off swinging her head round, faster than she’d meant to.

Kara went to the balcony door for air, turned the handle with the twist she’d used yesterday, and it clacked so hard the latch bounced. She looked at it, looked at me, and turned it back with two fingers. Norton picked the full five-liter water can up off the kitchen floor to see if it was true, one-handed, held it out level at arm’s length for a slow count of five, and set it down again, revising a textbook in his head.

Then the hunger hit all four of them at once, and ten boxes of pizzas I had just bought from the System and set out didn’t survive the next ten minutes. Neither did most of a case of crackers out of the dry-goods trailer.

[Six of us now... Two super enhanced appetites... four mildly enhanced appetites... I’m gonna need a second reefer...]

While they ate, I opened the Shop and did what I’d been putting off for the noise.

Four Enhanced Universal Suppressors, sixty thousand each and ten to fit, one for Kara’s Gen-12, one for Nora’s SR-25, one for Leo’s Spear, and I did those three first while their owners watched me do it.

For the fourth one, I fitted it to a shotgun I had to open the Misc. Chest to get at.

It came up out of the chest with the wood furniture worn nearly smooth and the stock scarred from being used as a bludgeon by a man who hated being called Lexie.

I hadn’t touched it since day one, in an apartment, with the city screaming outside the window and a freshly rescued Kara, when I’d told it I’d get it a suppressor and put it away because the 1301 already had one. Three weeks, and it felt longer.

"Told you I’d get you one, old man." I pulled it out after the upgrade and racked it. "Took a bit..."

The Mossberg 590 gave no response, on account of being a shotgun.

"Who’s the old man?" Nora asked, through crackers.

"Somebody, I’m not sure I could beat even with the seven physiological enhancers and six cognition ones..."

-Ding!

{

C.R.E.D.I.T. Invoice Summary.

Enhanced Universal Suppressor ×4: 240,000 Credits

Fitting ×4: 40,000 Credits

TOTAL: 280,000 Credits

}

Then I handled the selling limit.

Ferrow Point had dropped three million nine hundred and fifty thousand into the account since yesterday’s panel.

And the balance did nothing, sitting still while the rotors turned nearly a hundred thousand infected into a queue.

"I’m putting in yesterday’s earnings into increasing the selling limit... the rest stays for emergencies," I told the room, and nobody asked why. They’d all seen what a week could cost. "... Everything above it goes into the limit. Nora, you want to tell them what the next five rungs cost, or shall I?"

"Three million seven hundred and twenty." She didn’t even look up. "One-twenty, two-forty, four-eighty, nine-sixty, one-point-nine-two... Limit ends at three point eight four."

"...She’s right." I chuckled.

"I know I’m right."

I paid it, five times, one panel per rung, each one flashing up in front of my face for half a second before the next.

-Ding!

{

Daily Selling Limit: 3,840,000 Credits

}

I felt exactly how I’d expected to feel about it: a little poor and very pleased.

[Millions a day by tonight... That’s the promise kept, and early. The next twenty-six million lives in that car park, and the bird’s already collecting it.]

The rest of the afternoon was a picnic in a dead man’s penthouse, and it was, honestly, one of the better afternoons I’ve had since the alarm clock.

Nia ate on the kitchen counter with her boots up on it. Leo asked what the suppressor actually did to the sound, and he nodded as though I hadn’t already told him about it back at our old penthouse.

In the middle of that, while nobody was looking at me, I went and sat by the glass wall on the north side with the city under it, took one 7.62 round out of a magazine, and set it on the carpet in front of me.

I hadn’t tried in a week, not since the lake.

Every time I’d so much as thought about reaching for it, a coal behind my eyes flared white at the thought alone, and I’d stopped thinking about it.

[One bullet. Ten centimeters. That’s all. Just... lift.]

I reached for it, same as I used to, and once again the coal went white.

I don’t remember going down. I remember the carpet against the side of my face and both hands on my skull, a noise coming out of me that I’d have been embarrassed about if there’d been room in my head for embarrassment, and I remember Nia’s boots landing beside me, off the counter in one jump, and her hand flat between my shoulder blades, not moving, just there.

Nobody else moved, and she’d have stopped them if they had.

It took about a full minute to pass. When it did, I lay there for another minute with my eyes shut, doing the only thing I’m actually good at: arithmetic.

At the lake and after that, it had put me on the floor for way more than just a minute, and I’d thrown up.

The day after that I’d stopped trying. Today was a minute, and I could already sit up and didn’t puke my intestines out.

To sum it up, it was progress.

[... It’s still the worst thing I’ve ever felt, and it’s less than it was. TK’s healing.]

I sat up with Nia crouching beside me with her hand still on my back.

"It’s less," I told her, quietly, so it stayed between us.

She looked at me for a second, and then she stood up and went back to the counter and picked up her crackers and said nothing at all, which was Nia being happy and worried all at once.

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: status.

Showroom road clear to the corner. Car park at 40% and filling.

No contacts on the street within 200 m of your position.

}

Four o’clock. I stood up, picked the Mossberg off the kitchen island, racked it, and the sound turned every head in the room.

"Alright." I looked at the four of them, at four people who’d had their hearts nearly leap out of their chests on a bed three hours ago and were now stronger than they’d been that morning and knew it. "This is the part you’ve been waiting for and dreading... I’m taking point... Nia’s at the back. Everybody else is in the middle, and nobody shoots anything until I say so."