Chapter 74 More Death

Chapter 74 More Death
Dawn came gray and cold. I was awake before the light was good enough to be useful, running the day's logistics in my head. Vehicle first. Morning leveling run second if time allowed. Highway north by midday at the latest. The Sacramento broadcast had been running for eleven days. Whatever was building up there was building fast, and every day I spent south of it was a day I wasn't positioning the group properly. I pulled on my jacket and went outside. The street was quiet. A scatter of standard-class zombies two blocks east, too far to have registered our presence yet. No Scouts that I could see, which meant either the nearest hive hadn't mapped this block yet or they had and determined it wasn't worth active patrol. Either way, we had a window. I went back inside and started waking people. --- "Kira," I said, crouching beside her. "How are the ribs?" She was already half-awake. She opened her eyes and took a careful breath, testing the damage. "Better," she said. "Jade—" "I know." I had asked Jade to use her developing Spirit abilities on Kira twice during the night. It wasn't full healing — Jade wasn't at that level yet, and the skill was still fragile — but it had done something. The tightness around Kira's eyes when she breathed was less than yesterday. I looked at Jade, who was sitting up in the back corner of the van, watching. "Again?" I asked her. She nodded and moved to Kira's side without being asked. Her hands went to Kira's ribs — gentle, precise — and the faint light of the ability pulsed twice, soft and white, sinking into the injury. Yuan Ying was watching from across the van, her eyes wide. Mia beside her, slightly less wide-eyed but still focused. The new girls — Cora, Priya — watched in complete silence. This was still new to most of them. The system's abilities, the tangible reality of what the leveling process made possible. They had seen it work on Scouts and zombies. Seeing it applied to a person's broken bones was different. Kira exhaled after the second pulse. Something in her posture released — not fully, but noticeably. "Fifty percent better," she said. "Maybe more. I can move." "Can you fight?" I asked. She tested her shoulder. Rotated it carefully. "Light engagement. Nothing that requires full range." "That's enough," I said. "You're coming with me." She looked at me. "Where?" "Vehicle search. Jiangnan district, south perimeter road. There's a commercial vehicle lot out there — big trucks, the kind that can hit a zombie cluster without losing a panel. We need something to replace the bus." Kira sat up slowly. Her face tightened once and then smoothed. "Okay." --- I looked at the rest of the group. "Ryan, Nathan — you're with Kira and me. Ava holds the base with everyone else." I looked at Ava. "Same protocol as last night. Nobody in or out unless it's us. If something comes that you can't handle from the building, drive north. Don't wait." Ava nodded. "Chen—Sophie." I looked at her. She was already on her feet, looking like she had been waiting. "You're on internal command while we're gone. Anything that needs a decision, you make it. You know the priorities." Sophie blinked. Then straightened. "Okay." Zhang Li was standing near the door. "Be careful." "We will," I said. I looked at Kira. She had her submachine gun slung across her chest and her pistol at her hip and her face was the same flat, focused mask she put on when the work started. We went out. --- The route south took us through three blocks of commercial street and then a long stretch of residential before the city density thinned toward the outskirts. I had planned the path to avoid the main roads where the vehicle pile-ups were worst and where zombie concentration was highest. We moved quietly. Single file, three meters of space between each person, enough that a single ambush couldn't take more than one of us simultaneously. The zombies we encountered in the first kilometer were scattered — fives and sixes, not clusters. Ryan and Nathan handled most of them before they fully oriented. They had gotten genuinely good in two days of consistent work. The hesitation was almost gone from Ryan entirely. Nathan was still deliberate, still thinking between moves, but the thinking had gotten faster. Kira moved with me and said nothing. She was managing the ribs with every step — I could see it in the economy of her movement, the way she kept her left arm slightly closer to her body than usual to avoid the torque on the injury. She didn't mention it. She wouldn't. We killed eleven zombies in the first kilometer. Four more in the second. At the bend where the residential street opened into the commercial perimeter road, we stopped. Ahead, on the south side of the road, was the commercial lot. Three large trucks, blue, the kind built for freight — heavy frames, high clearance, wide enough that a zombie cluster couldn't close on the cab without being run over first. "Those," I said. Ryan looked at them. "Can we get the keys?" "Lot office," I said. "Or the lot manager, if there's one." There was one. He was standing in the lot office doorway — or what remained of the lot manager. Standard class, uniform still on, the keys still clipped to the lanyard on his belt. He had been turned for days and had stayed in the office because the door had been open when it happened and there had been nothing to draw him out. He registered us when we came through the lot gate. I went to him directly. Didn't wait for him to close the distance — cutting the approach time was always better. One strike, the skull, clean. He dropped and the keys swung on the lanyard. I unclipped them. Three sets. One for each truck. Nathan was already checking the nearest vehicle — cab door, engine compartment, the things you checked before you trusted your life to something. He came back nodding. "This one's good," he said. "Half a tank." I checked the second. "Full." Ryan checked the third. "Three-quarters." "We take all three," I said.