Free Web NovelChapter 5: Onto The First Step
Bella let the silence sit for exactly one second, then graciously decided to be merciful about it.
"Look, I’m willing to forgive all of this. Just stop talking to this girl." Turning to Kara, she continued, "I know you, you’re Kara, right? Treasurer of the Anti-Ragging Committee... Let me tell you, girl, he’s crazy for me. He’s probably doing this to get a rise out of me. So don’t fall for that bike of his."
A small pause, and then, as though it were a completely natural addition, she turned to me and added, "Oh, and Alex needs your bike for a few weeks. We’re planning a road trip."
I stared at her.
Then I looked at Kara. "Get on the bike."
Kara blinked at me. "What?"
"Come on..." I chuckled, feeling a grin spread across my face. "Trust me."
"Don’t you dare ignore me!" Bella’s voice climbed fast. "Alex! Drag him off that bike!"
Alex did not move. Alex was, in fact, standing with his hands at his sides, having just recently updated his threat assessment, and was not looking to revise it again so soon.
Kara looked at me, looked at Alex, looked at the crowd, and then got on the bike, unconvinced but trusting.
"Helmet?" she asked.
"No need~" I said, and hit the throttle.
-WRRROM-!
And the very next second, the front wheel lifted, and Kara saw the sky. The crowd ahead of us did what crowds do when a twelve-hundred-CC hyperbike comes at them with a wheelie, which is panic in every available direction at once, while that grin on my face turned into roaring laughter
Kara’s grip went from polite to full-body immediately as her scream went past my ear.
"NIKKI!! Are you CRAZY!!"
I laughed harder, brought the wheel down, and we were already through the gap and into the campus road, weaving between the two security guards who had the extremely reasonable instinct to dive sideways rather than test themselves against the Diavel’s front wheel, and behind me I could feel Kara alternating between screaming and just making a continuous high-pitched sound that I chose to interpret as excitement.
Tikki, for his part, had both eyes wide open and his ears fully flat, having an objectively wonderful time.
I cut through the main courtyard at a genuinely inadvisable speed, threading between benches and clusters of people who scattered like birds the moment their ears caught the roar of the bike and my laughter.
-AAAHHAAAA-! NIKKI-!!! freēwebnovel.com
"Just hold on tight!" I laughed back at the screaming Kara as we came out the other side onto the internal road that ran the length of the faculty buildings, following it straight to the glass front entrance of the veterinary department and bringing the bike to a stop with a drift that I was quite pleased with.
Kara got off immediately and grabbed my jacket sleeve with both hands, not even bothering to fix the dishevelled hair.
"Do you have any idea how stupid this was! You could... WE could be expelled for this!"
"Doesn’t matter," I simply chuckled.
"What?" Kara was breathing like a dragon about to roar literal fire.
"In a week..." I calmly said, looking at her, "None of this is going to matter."
"What are you talking about?"
"Look." I glanced past her shoulder, where two security guards were already sprinting toward us. "Tell the faculty I forced you into this, trying to impress Bella. You’re an honor student, they’ll believe you. Just whatever makes sure you don’t take any heat for this."
"Nikki..."
"Bring Nora and Leo when you come home tonight..." I cut in, already in gear. "I’ll tell you everything. But not here."
And with that, I did a single tight burnout that left a satisfying black arc on the pathway, and then I was off, threading back through the campus the same way I’d come in while two security guards swung their sticks at me with absolutely no chance of connecting.
And less than half a minute, I was through the gate and onto the open road.
I wasn’t worried about Bella making trouble for Kara.
Kara was, after all, the treasurer of the university’s anti-ragging committee, which made her approximately the worst possible person to publicly target on campus, and Bella was many things, but she wasn’t that stupid, I think.
The park I stopped at was ten kilometers out, tucked between a residential block and a stretch of overgrown land that the city had been promising to develop for three years and showing no signs of actually touching.
I pulled the Diavel onto the grass near the entrance, killed the engine, and found a bench in the shade near the center path.
"Here, half-half..." I said, and broke half a sandwich off and set it on the bench beside me.
Tikki was off my shoulder and onto the bench, eating before I’d finished putting it down.
While I took my own half, leaned back, pulled out my phone, and went on to the first step of my plan: Securing Funds.
The market is flooded with instant loan apps that give out small loans to just about anybody, but with insane interest rates.
And I was going to apply to every single one of them. After all, the concept of money and credit, and whatnot, is going to become pointless in the coming weeks.
As the apps downloaded, I glanced around at the park.
A man was walking a golden retriever along the nearby path.
Two women shared a mat and a picnic blanket by the fountain.
A university-age bunch was playing something that involved a frisbee and a lot of shouting.
Further back, a father was trying to get a kite airborne while his daughter watched with her arms crossed.
Everyone was going about their Thursday morning like it was just another Thursday morning.
[Most of them are already carrying it...] I thought, chewing slowly. [Every single one of them. The virus has been airborne for weeks. It’s sitting inside of them...]
One of the women by the fountain sneezed into her elbow, and I felt my teeth clench before I could stop it.
My thoughts went back to how it all escalated. For the next week, nobody would connect into a pattern fast enough.
People would just go about their days, not thinking much about the road rage incidents tripling overnight, domestic violence calls downright flooding the police lines, the boardroom meeting of the largest company in the country that ended with a CFO putting his colleague through a glass partition.
Everyone had explanations. Work stress. Economic anxiety. The heat...
Then the turning started.
And the reason nobody was ready for it was that it happened everywhere at the same time.
Not city by city, not country by country. Everywhere, simultaneously, because the airborne strain had already done its work before anyone even knew what to look for.
By the time the hospitals understood what they were seeing, half their staff had already turned mid-triage.
I remembered a presidential address, the president himself was at a podium, urging people to stay calm in a voice that was already starting to fray at the edges, with yellowed eyes, and a face that looked like death-warmed over.
And then mid-sentence, that fraying became guttural growls, and he lunged at his own security detail. The camera stayed on him for three full seconds before someone cut the feed.
That had been the moment when most people’s last working theory about rescue had quietly died.
By the next minute, my phone vibrated.
[Okay... the first one in the queue is done. Let’s do this fast.]
Tikki hopped off the bench and immediately located a butterfly near the path and began stalking it like he was on the greatest hunt of his life.
While I opened the first app.
Two hours later, Tikki was asleep in my lap, and I had racked up so many loans that even the loan sharks had started rejecting my applications.
Looking down at my balance couldn’t help but let the grin spread across my face.
[That’s more than enough money to buy a house.]
It genuinely felt like I had robbed a bank in broad daylight.
Every single one of these apps had approved me instantly, basic background checks, no verification calls, just automated systems doing what automated systems did, and I had worked through them methodically until the ones at the bottom of my list started kicking back errors because my debt-to-income ratio had basically become a cesspool.
But then again, in two weeks, these contracts became pointless because the signatories would’ve either turned or were too busy surviving to care about repayment schedules.
[Really robbed them all in broad daylight] I chuckled.
Closing the last app, I looked at the total one more time and let myself enjoy it for a full three seconds.
"Time for step two..." I said, reaching down to wake Tikki up.
And just then-
-AAAAAGHRRRRR-!
An ear-piercing scream ripped through the air, coming from the path near the fountain, where the two women had been sitting, except now one of them was on the ground, and a middle-aged man with tears streaming down his face was above her, hitting her with both hands and screaming.
"I knew it!" He roared at the woman, "I knew, I had always known, you were having an affair. But with my own sister! I WILL KILL YOU!!"
When the first person ran up to pull him off, he turned and swung without hesitating, catching him across the jaw, and when two more grabbed his arms, he thrashed and bit down on one of them hard enough to draw a scream, while nails raked at the other’s face.
They pulled him down eventually, four of them on top of him while he kept screaming and thrashing from the ground.
I was on my feet, didn’t remember standing up.
Every muscle in my body had gone stiff as I stared at the man on the ground, still fighting against four people holding him, at the familiar wild-eyed, absolute, all-consuming rage on his face.
"What the fuck!" I breathed. "This wasn’t supposed to happen for a full week."
