Chapter 176: Down There

/Nia’s Third Person POV/

The Ascender sat parked in the front yard, its engine ticking and its cab light on, ten meters inside the gate where it had stopped, and nobody on the farm went anywhere near it.

Leo was the one who had seen it first. He’d had the night watch at the kitchen table with the System’s tablet, and at twenty-five past one the drone’s feed had shown him the Ascender coming out of the church camp at a speed nothing that size had any business going, with the camp’s gate going under its nose as it left.

He had banged on every door in the house before it was halfway up the farm road.

"He didn’t stop at their gate." Leo had told all of them in the hallway, holding the tablet up so they could see it. "He went through it."

So by the time it came up the drive, the whole house was standing in the yard in coats and boots over whatever they’d been sleeping in, while the portcullis went up on its own to let it in and came down again behind it.

It was a clear, bitterly cold night, the stars out over the wall and everybody’s breath going up white in the light from the house.

Out past the wall the Infected stood where they had stood for two days, eleven meters off, and none of them had moved for the truck.

Walter had his lever-action, and June stood beside him in her green coat over a nightgown with her braid down her back.

Dean had his shotgun, and Hank was at his heel, alert and silent, ears up, staring at the truck.

Leo held the tablet against his chest with his eyes gone red. Nora had her cap on backwards and both arms wrapped round herself.

Kara stood off to one side in her coat over her white pajamas, with her hands pulled up inside her sleeves.

Nia had come down with her rifle and her boots unlaced, and she was the first one to see her father.

The side door of the Ascender opened, and Mr. Norton climbed down out of the back with his bag in his hand, and his glasses crooked on his face.

Nia went over every inch of him with her eyes before she did anything else, looking for blood, as the army had taught her, and found none.

"I had a man on a drip." He told it to nobody, looking back at the truck.

Nobody answered him, and nobody was looking at him anymore.

Through the windshield, in the light of the cab, Nikki sat in the driver’s seat with both hands still on the wheel.

His chest was heaving, fast and shallow, much too fast, his mouth open, his eyes on nothing at all straight ahead of him.

There was sweat on his face on a night cold enough to freeze it there.

Tikki stood on the dashboard in front of him with his fur still up, looking at him.

He was hyperventilating, and the look on his face also made sure nobody went near the truck.

Until June took a step toward it with her hand out, and Walter caught her by the arm without looking at her and held on.

"Walter..." June didn’t take her eyes off the truck.

He didn’t let go of her. Kara took one step toward it herself and no further.

Nia looked at him through the glass, and her eyes went wide.

She had seen Nikki with things coming through a wall at him, cracking jokes at it the whole way.

She knew he’d gone up a stairwell in Marlow after a Witch with a shotgun and come out the other end of it with the kill.

She had seen what the Revenant’s breath did to him, and even that had been the drug talking.

She had never seen him afraid like this. Afraid until his own body stopped listening to him, at least not in this lifetime.

There were few things in this life that could do that to Nikki.

Nia could count them on one hand, and every one of them was a nightmare worse than anything the people standing in this yard had a picture for.

She didn’t let the worst of them into her head yet.

She watched the cat instead of him. Tikki didn’t puff up for anything, and he was standing on that dashboard with every hair on his body still standing straight out from it.

It was four minutes by her count before the driver’s door opened.

He climbed down into the snow, and for a second his legs didn’t hold him, and he caught himself on the door.

Then he straightened up and stood in the yard with all of them looking at him, while Tikki climbed down off the dashboard onto his shoulder.

The Enhancers had put good weight on him this last week, the healthy kind, and cleared his skin until he looked as though he slept eight hours a night. Tonight his face was grey down to the lips. His pupils had gone so wide that his eyes looked black in the light from the cab, even the sweat had frozen white at his hairline.

Nia was the first one to step close.

She didn’t say a word to him, and she didn’t need to. She stood in front of him and looked at him, and he looked back, knowing exactly what she was asking.

Instead of talking, he pulled a cigarette out of his coat with a shaking hand.

-Click-! -Click-! -Fwsh-!

The lighter took him three tries. He took a drag that went down to the bottom of him and let it out at the sky.

"I sneaked out to find out what their little Ark was..." He was out of breath, standing still, with six Physiological Enhancers in him. "It’s in their basement... When I opened the door to it... I was hit with the stench of strawberries..."

Nobody in the yard moved at all.

The Harts looked at each other, and Leo looked at Nora.

And for a second nobody understood what that was supposed to mean, the only sound on the whole farm being the Ascender’s engine ticking as it cooled.

"Wh-what does th-" Nora started, and never got to the end of it.

Nia went down in the snow before she could finish.

Her knees went out from under her, and she was squatting in the snow right there in front of him with both hands clutching her hair.

He had said strawberries, and Nia knew that smell better than she knew her own name.

It had been the last thing she ever smelled in her first life.

Sweet and chemical, the sweet of a strawberry vape, filling her nose and sticking to the back of her throat while the thing that smelled of it took her apart.

It had hunted the four of them across three hundred kilometers, and the smell had always come first, every single time, before anybody saw it. It had come for Angelica first, then Lexie, then her.

She had woken up three days before the outbreak with the taste of it still in her throat.

"Nikki..." It came out of her in a whisper.

Off to the side, Kara’s lips were moving.

Nia knew what she was saying before she heard it. Nikki had written his notes on the Variants for Kara, every one of them, and Kara had read them more than once, in the penthouse, on the bird, in Marlow, with a highlighter.

Kara’s hands came down out of her sleeves.

"Smells like strawberries..." Her voice was barely there at all. "If you can smell it, it can smell you."

Her face went white.

"...Alpha."

Leo had read the notes too. So had Nora and Nia’s father, and the word went through the three of them like a Nuke.

Nora’s hands came up over her mouth. Leo’s eyes went redder than they had been.

Her father’s face went grey, while his hand found the side of the Ascender and held on to it.

Fifteen minutes ago he had been asleep a hundred meters from it. He had spent the whole day in that camp treating forty-one people who lived on top of it, and he had drunk the pastor’s tea.

"What’s an Alpha?" Dean looked from one face to the next, his shotgun hanging forgotten in his hand.

Nobody answered him, and that was the answer.

Walter looked at every face in the yard, one at a time, and when he got to the end of them, he put his hand flat on June’s back.

Nikki looked at Kara and gave her one nod, and that nod did more damage to the people in that yard than anything he could have told them.

"Yeah..." He drew on the cigarette, and his hand still wasn’t steady. "Don’t know how... but those idiots are keeping an Alpha down there..."