Free Web NovelChapter 24: Quagmire
The Ascender rocked hard enough that the suspension squealed beneath us while bodies covered every window with their hands slapping against the mesh from every direction.
The snarling outside had become a single sustained wall of deafening noise.
The passenger-side glass beside Kara spiderwebbed further with a sharp, brittle cracking sound.
Even on my side, the mesh bowed until it pressed against the glass behind it.
Kara had one arm locked around Tikki and the other gripping the seat edge with her knuckles gone white while her eyes remained fixed on the cracks spreading inches from her nose. Her breathing was too fast, not crying per se, somewhere past that.
Tikki remained pressed against her chest with his ears fully flattened and his eyes enormous and an expression that communicated he found the quality of this transportation deeply unacceptable.
I kept both hands on the steering wheel and closed my eyes.
Suppressed fire pulled infected from blocks away.
Unsuppressed fire pulled them from even further and faster.
And firing a rifle inside a vehicle this close to the slum’s building density was going to announce our position to every infected in a substantial radius, on top of the several hundred already conducting an extended stress test on the mesh from the outside.
The glass cracked again, sharper and closer to Kara’s face than the last one.
The mesh beside my window bent inward another fraction.
Something large slammed into the rear panel, and the whole vehicle jolted sideways.
[Know what? Fuck it.]
I snapped my eyes open and bought ear protection for Kara, the same ones I was wearing before shoving them straight at Kara without preamble.
"Wear this."
But she did not respond.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the cracking glass in front of her face, and I reached across, grabbed her shoulder, and shook it hard enough to actually pull her attention off the window.
"Kara! Wear this."
She looked at me. "Nikki, we..."
"Just put them on."
Her shaking hands took the ear protection, and before she even finished wearing them, I was already reaching for the DDM4 with one hand and accessing the System with the other.
-Ding!
{Purchase Successful.
100-Round Beta C-Mag Caliber: 5.56×45mm NATO Ammunition
Type: M855 Green Tip, 62gr
Status: Loaded}
Pulling the DDM4 off my back, I removed the 30-round mag and seated the drum with a solid click, and looked at Kara.
Credits had been ticking into my balance, tiny increments from every infected I had bashed through.
"Grab the wheel..." I said. "You’re steering."
"What?"
I did not repeat it.
She looked at me, then at the DDM4, then at the bodies visible through the cracked glass, then back at me.
And I watched her arrive at the same conclusion I had, which was that there was no option on the table that was not this.
Even suppressed fire attracted infected.
Unsuppressed attracted more and from further away.
Either I started shooting and drew in every infected within earshot while trying to move, or the glass finished cracking and stopped moving permanently.
[They don’t have the fluid armor yet, so there’s that silver lining...5.56 would punch through a few more days...]
Kara shifted Tikki into the crook of her left arm and put her right hand on the steering wheel.
"Ready?"
She nodded.
And I shoved my foot into the accelerator, raised the DDM4 at the windshield and the infected beyond before-
-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!...
The already fractured windshield came apart under the muzzle blast, holes punching through cracked glass, then through the infected plastered against the hood beyond it.
Each round ripped through the first body and into the one behind it.
Clearing the hood, I switched targets to the infected in the front. And within a few seconds, the Ascender lurched and moved, first an inch, then two, then a slow grinding crawl while Kara gripped the wheel one-handed with Tikki locked against her chest.
-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!... ƒгeewebnovёl.com
The vehicle moved another meter as more infected fell while the tires climbed over the dead, slipped in their blood and found purchase again.
The massive ground clearance kept the undercarriage clear while the 11 ton weight of the loaded vehicle converted the bodies beneath its wheels into road itself and kept grinding forward.
But speed was nowhere in the equation.
The dead underneath the tires became terrain.
More infected poured in from the side streets, drawn by the rifle fire, and I shot them, and their bodies joined the carpet under the tires and slowed us further.
And that allowed the infected running behind the extra seconds to reach the vehicle.
The whole situation had turned into a vicious cycle.
Shooting drew in infected and created corpses. Those corpses got under the Ascender and slowed it down. The slowdown let more infected catch up.
And those more infected required more shooting.
[This isn’t working...] The thought came through even with the rifle bucking in my hands.
Beside me, Kara had stopped flinching at every impact, but I could tell she was trying very hard not to puke her guts out while she kept the wheel straight.
"Uhh... It’s," she trying not to puke as she glanced at the crawling speedometer, "I think its working,"
"Don’t get attached to that."
The fourth drum ran dry on a burst that dropped three infected directly in front of the ram, and I bought another from the System.
Seating in the fresh one, I seized the shattered remains of the windshield and wrenched it out just enough to clear my view.
The covered-in-cracks windshield collapsed inward in chunks and powder, just as the foul wind flooded the cabin.
Noise doubled and blood sprayed through the mesh and onto us.
But at least the trapped, eye-stinging gun smoke had a way out.
Minutes ran together after that.
Casings bounced continuously around the inside of the cabin, hundreds of them, striking my jaw and cheek now and then.
Spent casings drowned my lap in, rolled beneath the pedals and pilled against the center console.
The suppressor had been glowing a bright orange red since around round 300, but I still pressed the trigger with a finger gone numb past the point where I could feel the reset.
Kara flinched each time a new horde bashed into the Ascender, but after the first dozen times she stopped flinching and just absorbed it.
Tikki remained pressed flat against her chest, watching everything around him with wide eyes, behaving surprisingly calm.
I cleared a jam. Fired. Cleared another jam. Bought a new double-drum mag, seated it one-handed and fired again.
The credits kept accumulating, and I kept spending them on the next drum while the infected kept accumulating, and so did the dead beneath the tires, all so we could cover another five meters before repeating the process for another five.
And before long, the DDM4 started jamming more frequently, heat and carbon fouling finally catching up with the bolt.
I cleared each jam by muscle memory while keeping my foot planted in the accelerator because lifting it meant losing the momentum I had, and at this speed any momentum loss was permanent.
The suppressor glowed orange-red in the airflow through the open windshield frame, bright enough that its reflection showed in the steel mesh in front of me while smoke rose from the barrel between bursts.
Even the transmission had been screaming under full load for long enough that I had started listening to it for sounds that meant something terminal was about to happen.
I ripped the charging handle back, cleared the jam, raised the rifle, and looked at what was ahead of us.
The street filled with infected, and behind that layer was another layer, and behind that layer the street stretched back into the dark with more movement coming from the alleys on both sides.
The infected were not going to run out before the rifle did.
The suppressor was already failing, and the DDM4 would follow soon after.
The Ascender’s engine had been at full load long against something pressing right back with no airflow long enough to become a problem.
But the greatest problem was that the city had more infected than any of those things had rounds or hours or tolerance.
Every round I fired told more of them exactly where we were.
[The infected won’t stop...]
Kara’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Tikki was pressed flat against her chest with his eyes tracking the infected on his side of the vehicle with an attention that suggested he understood the situation considerably better than his expression let on.
And the rifle jammed again.
Ahead, through the blood-slicked mesh and the carnage carpeting the road in every direction, the street kept filling from both sides simultaneously.
As I worked the charging handle, I looked at the suppressor glowing on the barrel, then looked at the transmission temperature gauge sitting way too high for comfort, and the glass planes on the sides of the Ascender that now had more cracks covering the surface than smooth glass. freewebnovёl.ƈom
And that’s when the realization floated up that we’d moved no more than two blocks.
