Chapter 175: The Door Out Back

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

I shut the Ascender’s door behind me a millimeter at a time, and Mr. Norton’s breathing on the other side of it never changed once.

It was fourteen minutes past one by my watch.

The camp was as dark as a camp with one diesel generator gets, which is mostly dark. The generator thudded away behind the parish hall, feeding a few bulbs inside the churchyard wall, the lanterns on their poles along the paths had burned down to orange smudges, and everything in between was tents, now, and a hundred and three people breathing in their sleep.

The guy they’d put on my truck sat on his crate six meters away with his rifle across his knees and his chin on his chest, out cold. He was still chewing, in his sleep.

I knew this camp better than the men guarding it.

Two of them walked the fence with a lantern between them, one full loop every twenty-two minutes, and they’d passed the north side four minutes ago.

A third sat in a camp chair by the gate with a blanket over his knees and a thermos. Nobody moved inside the churchyard wall after midnight until the tarp went up the tower at three, and three o’clock was an hour and forty-six minutes away.

That gave me eighteen minutes before the lantern came round the north side again, and the east end of the churchyard wall was sixty meters off.

Once, I’d have felt everyone within twenty meters of me, every heartbeat and every foot shifting in the snow. Now I had a pair of ears, eyes that saw in the dark, and a cat.

Tikki was in the pocket with his chin on the edge of it.

"Mea..." It barely came out of him.

"Yeah, I know, booger." I kept it under my breath. "Quiet now."

I went between the tents through the dark gaps where the lantern light didn’t reach, stepping into other people’s footprints on the packed paths wherever there were any.

Across the camp the patrol’s lantern bobbed along the far fence with two men humming a hymn under it, and neither of them looked my way.

The churchyard wall was old stone and came up to my chin. I went over it one-handed without so much as a grunt. On the far side, the snow was clean and untouched, and my boots went into it to the ankle.

[Tracks... Can’t help tracks. Fine...]

The church stood black against the stars with its tower at the far end, and I went round the near end of it, the east end, where the helicopter was.

The little R44 sat on its raised pad in the corner of the churchyard with a canvas cover over the cockpit and its blades strapped down.

Along the south wall of the church was the low side door the tarp came out of every night at three, the one I’d watched on Nora’s feed three nights running, and I didn’t go near it.

I was looking at the cable.

It came round the corner from the parish hall, black and as thick as my thumb, stapled to the stone at knee height every half a meter, and it ran the length of the east wall.

At the end of it there was a low stone hood built against the church, half buried in snow, with an old wooden door in the face of it, and the cable went in over the top of that door.

[The only power in this whole camp is one generator. It runs a few bulbs... and one cable that goes into a hole in the ground behind a church... Whatever they carry up that tower at three in the morning comes back down to a place... and the only light on in this churchyard at one in the morning is under the ground.]

Where else would anybody keep it?

Tikki went quiet on my shoulder, every muscle in him locking up against my neck at once, his ears up and forward and his claws coming through my coat into my shoulder.

He didn’t growl at it, and he didn’t know what it was any more than I did. He knew it was bad, and he was ready to fight it.

I put my hand on the latch.

-Clack-

The door came open a hand’s width, and a smell came up out of the dark and hit me in the face.

Strawberries.

Fresh strawberries, sweet and thick and warm, coming up a stairwell under a church at one in the morning in the snow.

My feet stopped before they ever crossed the threshold.

And every hair on my body stood up at once, from the back of my neck all down my arms, and I felt the blood go out of my face.

My hands started shaking on their own, then my knees, then all of me, standing there with one hand on that door.

Below me, the steps went down into the darkness, stone, worn hollow in the middle, and turned halfway.

At the turn, the wall was yellow with the light of a bulb I couldn’t see.

Down past the turn, a man was breathing slowly and heavily, asleep in a chair. And under his breathing, further down, a chain was dragging across stone, back and forth, back and forth.

[Fuck... we’re dead.]

That was the only thing that went through my head.

Then I shut the door again. I did it a millimeter at a time, with my fingers holding the latch up so it wouldn’t drop, until the wood met the frame without a sound, all the while the chain on the other side never once missed its rhythm.

I backed off it three steps, then five, still shaking all over, and the part of my brain that does arithmetic finally caught up with the rest of me.

The one that hunted us across three hundred kilometers in my last life had smelled like a strawberry vape, a chemical sweetness that filled your nose, stuck to the back of your throat, and stayed there for days.

I had smelled that for three hundred kilometers.

The one down those stairs smelled fresh.

And the air had been coming up out of that stairwell at me, warm, pouring out of the door into the cold. My smell hadn’t gone down there. All of it had been coming up.

[It didn’t smell me... The air was coming up... it didn’t smell me... it didn’t...]

A hundred and three people were asleep on top of it. A pastor was feeding it. Every Infected in this valley took its orders from the bottom of those stairs, and every one of them around the farm was standing eleven meters from Leo’s mother.

[We’re dead... we’re so fucking dead!]

I ran, I’ll be honest, I ran like a little bitech. And I didn’t stop running.

I went back over the churchyard wall in one go, through the camp, straight down the lit paths this time, and I didn’t care about the lanterns or the patrol or the snow.

The guy on the crate was still asleep, still chewing, when I went past him and into the cab.

I didn’t even think about waking Mr. Norton. I put my foot on the brake and turned the key.

-VRRRRRRMMMMM-!

The diesel came up like the end of the world, in a camp where the loudest thing all night had been a generator.

Lanterns came on in the tents, one after another after another. The guy on the crate fell straight off it into the snow, rifle and all.

A woman screamed in one of the tents, while the men started shouting their panic, and I didn’t care about any of it.

I put my foot to the floor.

The Ascender lunged off its spot, and in the back I heard Mr. Norton hit the wall, which was how he woke up.

"Nikki!" It came from the back, once.

I didn’t answer him, and he didn’t ask again.

The gate came up in the headlights, chain-link on a pole frame, and the man in the camp chair beside it threw his blanket off and dived into the snow.

Throughout it all, I didn’t go anywhere near the brakes.

-CRASSHHH-!

The ram wedge took the whole gate off its posts and folded it under the nose, the wheels went over what was left of it, and then we were out on the farm road.

On the rear camera, the camp shrank away behind me with its lanterns coming on all over it and people spilling into the paths.

In the middle of the main path, a big man in a long black coat stood with no hat on his white hair, watching the truck go.

I put my eyes back on the road.

The Infected stood along both verges in their rows, the front ones close enough to the road to clip, and I didn’t steer away from a single one of them.

-THUD-!

One went sideways off the ram wedge into the ditch.

-Ding!

{

Infected eliminated: 1.

Kill Reward: 200 Credits.

}

-THUD-! -THUD-!

-Ding!

{

Infected eliminated: 2.

Kill Reward: 400 Credits.

Observation: Host heart rate 171 bpm. The System notes that nothing is chasing the Host.

}

The dings kept coming after that, one on top of another, and I didn’t read a single one of them.

Tikki had climbed up onto the dashboard. He was standing on it with his back to the road and his fur up, staring past me at the church going away behind us.

That was when it hit me.

The drive, the day the wall went up. The pastor standing close enough to shake my hand, with this cat on my shoulder growling at him low and deep, the whole length of the drive, never stopping, when he had never once growled like that at a person in his life.

"You knew..." It came out of me in a croak. "On the drive... You smelled it on him. You smelled it on him, and you KNEW! You didn’t know what it was... but you know the threat..."

"Mea..."

"And you didn’t SAY anything?!"

"Mea."

[...He growled at the guy the whole time. He said it. I just didn’t listen... Maybe I’ve gotten a little too cocky...]

My teeth were chattering in my head. It wasn’t the cold, with the heater going full blast in the cab.

I had six Physiological Enhancers in me, and a heart that didn’t know how to get tired anymore, and my teeth were going anyway, so hard I could hear them over the diesel.

[We’re dead-we’re dead-we’re dead-]

Coldwater went past dark on the right, then the willows, then the white fields, and the shabby old log house came up out of the snow ahead of me with its cold chimney and its black windows, the house that wasn’t there anymore.

[We’re dead-we’re dead-we’re dead-]

I went up the drive through the Infected standing eleven meters off the wall and through the edge of the dome, and the log house was gone, and my wall was there instead, ten meters of grey concrete in the headlights.

And the portcullis was already going up on its own ahead of me before I’d asked for it.

I didn’t slow down for it.

[We’re dead-we’re dead-we’re dead-we’re dead-]