Chapter 153: A Fact About My Life

-Dich-!

The Mossberg’s suppressor turned the shot into a soft whisper that filled the stairwell, and it was gone. The slug took it between the shoulder blades, and the thing on the landing folded against the wall and slid down it, most of its chest staying on the paint, while behind me four people who’d been holding their breath let it out at the same time.

"Come here." I didn’t look round. "All of you... Look at it."

They stood on the landing around a dead shambler in a business suit that had been somebody’s neighbor, face and neck puffed up with the stuff under the skin, and I gave them the lesson I’d been given in a car park in my previous life by a woman currently standing at the back of the line eating a cracker.

"Chest..." I tapped it with the muzzle, and it thudded like a tire. "I’ve said it way too many times already... but I’ll say it again... Everything the movies told you about headshots? Forget it... The armor’s thickest on the skull, the head’s the size of a melon, it’s moving, and you’re scared... you’ll miss more times than you won’t... The chest is the size of a door. A seven-six-two or a twelve-gauge slug or buckshot goes through this stuff, or near enough, and even when it doesn’t, the hit goes in anyway, cracks the ribs, bruises the heart, and stops it... That’s why nobody in this line is carrying five-five-six."

I tipped the head back with my boot. "Eyes, mouth, nose, ear... That’s the axe’s list, or a pistol’s when it’s already got its hands on you."

"What about the neck?" Leo, crouched, studying it, which surprised me. I’d genuinely thought he’d be a classic anime protagonist about it.

"Better than the face, worse than the chest. And that Spear of yours is the smallest gun here, and it’s for people... Against one of these, it’s two in the face or a quarter of a magazine in the chest. You stay next to Kara."

"Neck’s for the axe," Nia offered from the top of the stairs, and swallowed her cracker. "Chest’s for everything else..."

"That’s the whole course. Let’s go."

The showroom road was two blocks over, the sun already going down behind the towers by the time we got there.

The road was empty to the corner, the screeching and the rotors still wailing over the middle of the city with the last stragglers shuffling away from us toward it, slow, in no hurry.

The leftovers, the ones too far gone to hear it, came out of the showroom doors and the alleys one and two at a time, and I let the four of them have every one that wasn’t a threat.

Leo took three: two in the face and a third when it kept coming, its face a mess, and he looked at the Spear afterward as though it had just told him what it was for.

Kara’s came out of a doorway on her side at ten meters, and she pivoted, put the Gen-12 on its chest, fired twice so close it was nearly one clap, and it sat down mid-step and went over sideways, and her face did nothing at all.

Nora’s was a mess: a miss at fifteen meters, a chest hit at ten, another at eight because she hadn’t seen it drop, and a fourth that came out of the can loud, the three-and-cool rule catching her, and went through a shop window on its way down the road.

"You got it, kid, and a mannequin too," Nia noted from the back. "And now we’ve been made. Good work."

Nora’s ears were the color of a ripe tomato.

Norton’s target walked out of an ATM’s revolving door straight at him, and he shot it once in the sternum at fifteen meters without any hurry, and walked on.

That was the first fifteen minutes. After that, I started touching cars.

Eleven Lamborghinis under a skylight full of snow, twenty-two Porsches across the road, thirty-one BMWs next door, every one of them gone with a chime as my hand came off it as I sold them before my hand was on the next, the offers stacking up in front of my face, a hundred and forty thousand, a hundred and sixty, ninety for the ugly orange one, the balance climbing and the limit falling.

Halfway down the second row of BMWs, the panel flashed red.

-Ding!

{

WARNING: Daily selling limit reached.

Daily Selling Limit: 3,840,000 Credits.

Remaining today: 0 Credits.

}

[Three point eight four million, gone in fifty minutes, on three showrooms... And the road’s got nine more.]

So I paid it, three million eight hundred and forty thousand straight back to the System out of what the cars had just put in, and the limit doubled.

-Ding!

{

Daily Selling Limit: 7,680,000 Credits.

Remaining today: 7,680,000 Credits.

}

[Oh...]

I read it three times, having been wrong about the System before, and it had never once been generous by accident.

[Oh-ho... The moment I raised the limit, the day started again... Sell to the limit, pay the limit, sell it again...Oh, you beautiful, greedy bastard.]

"That smile is creepy..." Kara noted from the showroom door.

I gave it to them in one sentence while I touched the rest of the BMWs, after all, that raising the limit wiped the day clean, that there was no such thing as a day anymore.

Leo gave me his classic "Right."

Nora went quiet and counted, and Norton said, "Then the only limit is the city," which was exactly it.

By the time we reached the jewelry district, the sun was gone, and the car park on the east edge read ninety-four percent.

-Ding!

{

Car park at 94%.

Requesting permission to release napalm.

}

"Burn it all."

We didn’t see it. We heard it, a low thump from the east edge that came up through our boots while the sky over the towers went orange along the bottom and stayed there. The panel started counting, thirty thousand, fifty, eighty, and stopped at fifty-four thousand and something.

"Seven and a half million... One drop..." I looked at Leo, who’d taught me the rule that made it work. "Open ground."

"...Right," Leo managed, and it came out strange.

[Dude’s becoming a Pokémon...]

The jewelry district was three streets of glass, and I went through it with the Misc. Chest open on a counter and my people at the doors, taking nothing that wasn’t in a locked case, since a locked case meant somebody had thought it worth locking, diamonds by the tray, rings by the tray, platinum by the handful into a wooden chest that never got fuller.

"This is so surreal..." Nora mumbled, holding a velvet tray in her hands.

The offers on those were a different animal to the cars. Seven point six eight went to zero in an hour and a half, and I paid it, and it doubled again.

-Ding!

{

Daily Selling Limit: 15,360,000 Credits.

Remaining today: 15,360,000 Credits.

}

[Fifteen point three six... That’s the low millions I promised them, and then some.]

The walk to the block we’d picked for the night was lit under the orange glow going up behind us as the lot filled and burned again, and I spent it emptying the Inventory into the limit, most of the useless rigs and trailers from two truck stops going off the panel at full price now that full price fit under the line.

After all, a limit you don’t use by midnight is a limit you paid for and threw away.

I saved some rigs and trailers simply because trailers made for good storage spaces, and rigs were basically apartments on wheels. And we could all use some privacy.

On that walk I asked for the count, because they’d earned it: fourteen from Kara, thirteen from Leo, twelve from Nora and one miss she was still angry about, eleven from Norton, with opinions about the sternum he was keeping to himself.

Fifty, between four people who’d never shot at anything living a month ago, and every one of them walking a little differently than at noon, not confident, just less afraid by about the width of one afternoon, and I told them so, since nobody had told me when it was mine.

The Ghostbird came down on the roof, six floors and decent, went into the Inventory under my palm, came back out with a full belly of napalm, fuel, and fifty-cal for two hundred and eight thousand, and lifted off again with nobody in it to park somewhere dark and wait for morning.

Nia cleared the building, all six floors with her axe in fourteen minutes, and one sleeve wet.

"Third floor’s nicest, somebody had a bathtub and a spice rack," she said.

And so we took the third floor, mattresses on the biggest flat’s floor, food out of the dry-goods trailer, watches in turns, me and Nia, four hours each, nobody else having the body for a night without sleep yet.

My watch was midnight to four.

At three in the morning, sitting by the window with the Mossberg across my knees and the city nearly pitch black under me, I heard a mattress creak.

Kara came and sat down on the floor beside me with a blanket round her shoulders and her hair down and told me, "I can’t sleep."

"New body... It doesn’t know when it’s tired yet."

"That’s a stupid design."

"It’s a very stupid design."

She looked out at the street with me for a while, then asked about the fish, whether they’d survive, that being the argument we were still having, and I said heated water and she said that wasn’t what she’d asked, and we did the whole thing again, quietly, and it was the easiest I’d felt in a week.

And then Nora, from a mattress behind us, half asleep, said it to the ceiling.

"She waited by the window every night."

Kara went still.

"In the penthouse. Every night you were out... She’d say she was reading. She wasn’t reading..." A yawn. "I’m just saying it. As a fact about my life."

Then she was asleep, or pretending to be, and I looked at Kara, and Kara looked at the street.

[...Oh.]

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

I thought that Nora was a kid who said things, and that the window in the penthouse faced the road, and that a person might sit by a road for a lot of reasons.

I thought that Kara had told me, by a pond three days ago, that the rock and the tomatoes were both me, and had said okay, and that okay is not the same as the rest of it.

I thought of the conversation we had back at the penthouse’s dining table with me shoveling the grilled chicken sandwich.

And I thought that if I said even one word wrong here, on this floor with her sister supposedly asleep behind us, I’d lose her for good.

So I sat there. She sat there.

After a while, she said, "Goodnight," went back to her mattress, and I watched the street until four.

[Coward...Yeah. But a coward who’s still got her. I can live with that for a while...]

Dawn came up grey over the roofs, and from the roof of that block, coffee in hand, I could see the Bank of Marlow’s head office three kilometers off, a black slab of a tower with the name still on it in steel letters, and under it, somewhere, a vault.

[Step three... The prize...I’ve never actually robbed a bank... I’ve watched films... I’m pretty sure the films don’t count.]

"System," I asked to nobody. "... How does a guy open a bank vault?"

-Ding!

{

Contract Mode available.

Terms to be discussed on site.

}