Chapter Four
One Way Only
Forward. Forward. Forward.
Kyle had always been a driven sort of guy. It'd started when he'd been barely able to walk and had since affected every aspect of his life. His hobbies as a kid. His grades at school (good ones when the subject had tickled his brain, terrible when it'd bored him). His assignments in (and then out of) the military. Shit, even his downtime lacked inertia, as everyone he'd ever bothered down-timing with had eventually pointed out.
Now?
Now wasn't any different.
With nothing but find her looping in his head, Kyle's forward momentum had carried him off a willow-loaded roof, through infested streets, down into a tunnel which saw even less daylight than the dearly departed Alfie's back pants pocket, and finally into the slimy and gory mouth of a Volatile nest.
Like a God damn rookie.
The irony of it—of how he'd gone off at Aiden for doing the exact same shit only a few days ago—was not lost on Kyle. Especially after he'd gotten double-teamed by a pair of frothing Speedsters (Shame on you, dude.), lost his balance (Seriously?), and ended up on the floor, with his only good arm trapped between his chest and the aforementioned frothing assholes.
But, hey.
At least he had time to reflect down here. While teeth snapped at the air not an inch from his face, no less. And the Speedster's tattered armour pieces poked at him. And both of their collective ass-scented breaths wafted into his face. And not to forget, all the gear Kyle had been lugging around digging into his spine.
Fuck my life, I guess, he thought, lamenting how the universe had decided to afford him way more attention than any single person should ever be getting. The kind of attention where it turned a magnifying glass at his life like a sadistic kid trying to find out if it could set an ant on fire.
Well.
Yeah.
Kyle felt plenty scorched.
He screamed and head-butted (Gross.) the bottom-Speedster, right as a hatchet flew by and bit into top-Speedster's skull. Or that was what Kyle gleaned from the crunch of metal against bone and the hectic movement beyond the teeth still snapping at him. It was hard to make out details from down here.
"Careful!" Hakon said, sounding plenty worked up. "You nearly took his head off!"
Whose? Mine? Kyle liked his head attached.
"Least I'm helping!" Aiden snapped back.
. . .
Yes, Kyle liked his head attached, but he also liked being helped. Sometimes being a grown-ass independent man just didn't cut it.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" Hakon. Still worked up.
No clue. I can't see shit, he thought, not yet willing to open his mouth lest zombie spittle got into it.
Aiden must have pulled the hatchet out of the shrieking Speedster (which kept fucking shrieking because why be considerate and die if you can keep trying to eat Kyle's face), which made its neck snap forward, effectively pushing bottom-Speedster further down and nearly giving it a clear shot at Kyle's nose.
"Getting in my fucking way!" Aiden bit back. "That's what you're doing. Move!"
There was a lot of jostling. And huffing. And puffing. And, finally, enough was enough. Yeah, the Speedsters were being pulled off him, he could tell, but they kept kicking and screaming and clawing, their teeth making passes at Kyle wherever they saw an opening. Any second now and his last good arm was going to give out, and he could really do without a new set of bite marks.
"Guys." Kyle strained. "Less talking. More helping. Pretty fucking please."
"You've got it, boss," Hakon said.
The weight on Kyle continued to ease up, but the universe's Fuck You ray was not budging; as Aiden's sudden, "What is that?" stood to prove.
"What?" Kyle blurted. "What is what?"
"Don't you worry," Hakon reassured him. "As long as it isn't attacking us, we don't care."
"But it's moving! Jesus—"
"Come back here and help me pull!"
Pull they did, until, finally, Kyle regained enough ground to awkwardly shove the last Speedster aside. What followed was a messy, uncoordinated effort. Hakon wailed at the Speedsters with a baton he could swing inside the small space. His swings were enthusiastic. Much as his kicks, some of which came with a crude word in French here and there. Aiden, in the meantime, did his best to get a blade in edgewise, which was easier said than done since, yeah. Hakon did get in the way. A lot.
But it worked out in the end, leaving the tunnel void of Speedster screeches and filled only with the exhausted panting of a bunch of tired dudes. Did that mean the proverbial coast was clear? Probably not, but when no one made any move to panic, Kyle allowed himself a good long moment to sit and run an inventory on himself.
He was still in one piece. No teeth had managed to snag on him, and he'd miraculously failed to cut himself open with the machete trapped against his chest. But his pride? That'd been sliced and diced.
Bowled over by a pair of run-of-the-mill Infected?
What the hell.
Aside from that—
—his busted arm throbbed like mad. His good one shook when a muscle in it contracted with a few unhappy spasms. The back of his head stung where he'd cracked it into the floor. His right knee creaked (nothing new about that), and there was a small supernova going off between his eyes.
But none of that rivalled the ache bullying its way into his chest when he glanced at the two Speedsters dead at Aiden's and Hakon's feet. The ache ran deeper than his fucked up arm or his banged-up everything. And it was just as physical. Just as real.
They'd all been right.
Of course they'd been right.
Aitor. Hakon. The tiny voice at the back of his head he'd choked out and kicked to the curb the second it'd piped up. All of 'em. They'd seen it. He hadn't.
The state he was in, Kyle had no business going after Waltz.
I'm sorry, baby. The thought gnawed at his heart like a jaw tipped in razor blades. I'm so fucking sorry. I'll come for you, alright? But you gotta hold on for a bit.
Kyle squeezed his eyes closed. There were biting, hot tears waiting for him; tears he couldn't afford wasting time on right now. They'd have to wait. Just like Fi. He exhaled slowly, the breath coming out a stutter, when a hand landed on his shoulder. A voice followed quickly.
"Did they get you?" Aiden sounded as threadbare as Kyle felt.
"I'm good," Kyle croaked and got his eyes open. Aiden knelt next to him, a harried look on his face, underlined by twinges of pain from how he'd stooped down like this.
Great. Kyle had been so damn swept up in his anger, he'd been about to take Aiden down with him, even if the kid was just as unfit for his crusade as Kyle was himself.
Jesus Christ, man. Do better.
"I'm great," Kyle added.
He didn't offer any objections when Aiden helped him up, even if maybe he should have. For Aiden's sake, who grunt-winced his way through the entire ordeal.
Remind you of someone? whispered a ghostly Fi from the warm spot under his heart where he'd stashed her for the time being.
Kyle grimaced.
Aiden hadn't hesitated when Kyle had told him they'd rush after Waltz. Not for a second, even with Hakon giving him all the ammunition he might have needed. Shit, the kid had just gotten his ass kicked by the very same man, giving him a perspective Kyle sorely missed.
But, no.
Aiden—driven by loss or anger or shame, whichever—had gotten right down to limping his way to his death.
Yeah. Reminds me of someone, shush.
With his knees creaking, Kyle straightened himself up. "Well, shit," he said, even as he leaned onto Aiden for a second, waiting for his body to figure out if it wanted him back on the floor or not. "What a pair we'd have made waltzing up to… Waltz."
Aiden's chin came up in surprise. "Huh? What do you mean? We're not—"
"—we're not," Kyle cut in before Aiden got the chance to protest. Or, you know, change Kyle's mind. That'd have been hilarious. And tragic. "Not right away. I think we need a plan."
Hakon clapped. It was a slow, deliberate (and really fucking phony) clap and it kind of made Kyle punch the guy's nose in. He refrained.
"You have no idea how happy I am to hear you've come to your senses, Crane."
Kyle kept on refraining and carefully pushed himself off of Aiden's shoulder. "Yeah... yeah…"
"No, really. I am." Turning away from them, Hakon pointed down the tunnel, where the nest they'd walked into narrowed the walls and choked out the light. "Now. Come look at this."
Kyle carried himself, along with all the gunk and gore he'd picked up bench pressing the Speedsters, deeper into the nest. He walked slowly, setting his feet carefully on the uneven and slick ground, and had his eyes focused forward, at the thing he was supposed to look at.
The same thing that'd agitated Aiden earlier: a Volatile.
It moved near the end of the tunnel. The second GRE shunt was right behind it. Kyle squinted. The glow falling off the door's light strips did one hell of a job illuminating the Volatile, jerking its shadow around like some grotesque shadow-theatre display and lending it a bulk it didn't actually have.
The Volatile moved. But it didn't attack.
It couldn't.
His breathing shallow, Kyle picked his way through the reeking nest, every step a squelching adventure. That was to say, the ground under him squelched. Repeatedly.
The Volatile—or what desperately tried to be a Volatile—was suspended in a ropey mess of gore growing from the wall. It had no legs. Instead, a pair of lumpy stubs protruded down from a deformed collection of tumors growing from its hip. The stubs looked like they'd been wrapped in raw meat, with flaps of grey, hardened skin dangling at their back.
The rest of it wasn't off any better.
Its back was fused to the mass growing on the wall with no hope of pulling free. Its own muscles and the pod it should have grown out of were hopelessly knotted; often so tightly, Kyle couldn't tell where the Volatile ended and the pod started.
But, oh boy, was it alive.
The Volatile drew in a rattling breath, which came with the exposed bottom rungs of its ribs peeling apart like they wanted to chomp down on something. Exposed and broken ribs, Kyle noted. Some were snapped off entirely, while one looked like it'd been used as a chew toy. Teeth marks pressed into the bone.
Kyle's eyes skipped up again. He stepped in front of it.
It was shorter than him, missing legs or not, but at the height at which it was suspended from the wall, its head was level with Kyle's.
Torn arms—the skin raw in places, in others entirely missing—reached for him. They had no hope of landing. One was fused to its side by the elbow. The other missed a hand, with the stump that remained textured by lacerations that looked suspiciously much like… yeah. More teeth marks.
"What the..." Aiden said as he sidled up next to Kyle. Kyle glanced at him. The kid was the perfect amount of wide-eyed, all things considered. Smart Pilgrims stayed away from the deep, dark recesses of the Post-Fall world, after all; the ones with a will to live, at least. Which meant Aiden hadn't likely ever laid eyes on the inner workings of a Volatile nest, let alone seen one mid-incubation.
Or, well. This.
Drawn by the sound of Aiden's voice, the Volatile turned its head. It was blind. Hard not to be, with its eyes a pair of ruined blobs. Thick, black secretions oozed out from around its shapeless eyeballs, but besides the eyes, its head was relatively intact. As intact as a Volatile's raisin head with its meat grinder attachment for a mouth could be. Its mandibles flared, parting around a series of hungry ticks stuttering from its throat.
"Okay." Aiden pointed at it, though he kept his finger well out of touching range. "I've seen some shit out there, but this is messed up. What happened to it?"
Hakon answered with a vague grunt, just as he slid past Kyle's back, leaving him, Aiden, and the Volatile behind in favour of inspecting the GRE shunt's locking panel. More precisely, the lack of one. It was buried in gunk.
"They didn't let it grow." With a misplaced drop of sympathy splashing around in his gut, Kyle raised his machete and placed the flat end of the blade against the Volatile's cheek to turn its head back to him. It chittered at him.
"You mean these two?" Aiden glanced over his shoulder at the dead Speedsters.
"Yeah." Kyle shifted the blade, coaxing the Volatile's 'chin' up. "Right. Quiz time. Why do Volatiles nest?" He regarded Aiden with a brief look, catching the kid's expression right in the middle of a battle between irritated and stumped.
Irritated, because how dare this greying bastard question a seasoned veteran Pilgrim, never you mind that vet couldn't even grow a beard yet?
Stumped, because (as we'd already covered), Pilgrims didn't make a habit of surviving the territories by delving into nests, meaning all those quirky Volatile Facts bouncing around in Kyle's head weren't as widespread as you might think.
Aiden's initial expression quickly mellowed out, replaced by something else. Curiosity, maybe. With maybe a side of understanding, like he'd figured out how Kyle was fucking desperate to talk about anything—anything at fucking all—to keep his mind from circling the drain.
"Besides the obvious," Aiden started, "where the sun hurts them more than any other Infected?"
"Mhm."
"They're vulnerable while they turn?"
"Yep. You've got two types of Infected out there: three are nesters, while everything else will mutate gradually, no matter where they're parked. The Hulks, for instance. The Goons, the Boomers, Speedsters—"
"One second." Aiden folded his arms. "I get Hulk. I get Goon. But what's a Boomer?"
Kyle blinked. "Shit, you never seen a Boomer?" He looked up. "Yo. Hakon. You got any of those exploding pals here?"
Over by the locking panel (which Hakon had begun to slowly excavate from under all that gore), Hakon raised his voice to a cheer-adjacent tone. "We have two. If you know where to look. Not that I recommend looking." He dropped a chunk of meat. His tone followed, as if he'd only just remembered what happened when you did go looking. "One variant is fat and slow and likes to get stuck in stairwells. They hardly ever make it out of the high rises. The second one likes it wet. Nasty fuckers, those. They're quick, they swarm, and when they blow, they cover a good amount of ground with bone shrapnel. I advise staying away from them, though that's not too difficult unless you fancy a trip to the Sunken City."
Kyle's sense of adventure stirred meekly. Sunken City, huh? It sounded neat. Or would have. If he hadn't had his ankles tied down by all five stages of missing Fi.
"Anyway, they explode," Kyle said and forced his attention back to the Volatile. "They bloat, over time, just like a Hulk gets bulkier, but they don't have to nest, unlike, you know, Witches. They kinda… cocoon? It takes a few weeks, which they'll spend up high in a house, like in an attic or squeezed in the corner over a wardrobe, covered in some shitty, sticky, film. You even get them out in the wilds, long as the trees got thick enough foliage and they find a branch that'll support them."
"We call them Banshees," Hakon interrupted.
"Yeah, yeah. As I was saying." Kyle finally dropped the machete away from the Volatile's head, resulting in it flapping its mandibles in the air. Like it missed the cold touch of steel. "Witches start out scrawny as hell, so they want to stay away from anything that can harm them. Like, you know, a pack of dogs. Hell, I've seen a badger chomp down on one. Feisty little fucker. Problem is, though, unless you kill the Witch right away, it will wake up. They aren't immobilised by their cocoon and can break out of it if they have to, so, RIP badger buddy, you made an effort."
Kyle nodded to the Volatile.
"And then we've got our apex friends, the Volatiles and Night Hunters. Now, those, they can't do shit while they're incubating. Can't move. Can't bite. Shit, you leave one alone with a bunch of rats for the night, I'll bet on the rats. To get around that, they start nesting and divvying up guard duty to their buddies once there are a few of them, which is why nests aren't ever empty. Gotta leave one or two behind to make sure nothing sneaks in and ends your friends before they had a chance to grow out of their pod. This fella here didn't have buddies, though. Did you?"
The Volatile offered Kyle a sightless stare.
"Instead, it had two hungry Biters for company that figured out how the shit a Volatile grows out of doubles as food. Like a never-ending supply of self-replicating meat patties."
"Hurk," said Hakon.
"Precisely." Kyle readjusted his grip on his machete and took a small step back. "One dude gets shafted by his genetics. He's Volatile material, they say, and he starts incubating. The other two, they're starving, so they eat most of his pod. I mean, these two fucks were beefy, right? Well fed. You don't see that often these days. Anyway, the pod keeps regrowing. They eat it some more. Then one samples the poor fucker growing out of the pod and thinks, 'Hey, that's not half bad', and they start snacking on him, too. What does he do? Yeah, he keeps growing, tries to repair the damage they do. And they keep snacking."
Kyle took a swing. The machete sunk deep into the Volatile's neck, killing it.
"Yeah," he said, circling back to Aiden's original question. "You're right, kid. It's messed up."
You know what else was messed up?
The entirety of this situation; a situation Kyle knew he could have avoided if only he'd listened to Fi and had gone south, where they could have pulled enough Windfall out of any number of GRE labs in Geneve to last them another two years. Or maybe even longer. But, no. He had to aim higher. Always higher, shooting right for Waltz and thinking the Fall would have convinced the fucker to ditch his evil GRE scientist routine.
Have him grow a conscience, maybe.
Yeah, no. Of course not.
And that was the sort of shit that filled Kyle's mind to the brim once they'd left the dead Volatile behind and exited out into the subway. He walked in silence, quietly stacking and shuffling his priorities, desperate to find a plan hiding somewhere in-between all his half-baked knee-jerk reactions.
But at least the trip through the subway was uneventful.
No more Speedsters. No mangled Volatiles.
No Church flunkies, either.
And no Fi.
Just a one-way tunnel and a lone train sitting on the tracks. They'd gotten in at the back and had been walking from cart to cart since then, their shadows chased off by a steady supply of light, UV and otherwise. The carts themselves were roomy. They'd been cored out, their seats tossed, allowing two men to walk easily side by side. Didn't mean there was any side-by-side for Kyle right now. He's taken point and marched on as if his life depended on it (hey, it did). Eyes forward. Head buzzing. Heart squeezing. Body, hurting.
He couldn't even get himself to appreciate the art all around; the murals and graffiti which covered the cart's walls and windows in a never-ending layer of colour.
Villedor's history past the Fall, Hakon said when Aiden commented on a particular piece involving buildings getting bombed to shit and tormented souls rising along pillars of yellow fumes. The murals were a record of Villedor's heights, its lows. And a symbol of how important this tunnel was, since, without it, the city might have died a long time ago.
Which was nice and all, but Kyle's mind refused to latch on to their chatter.
Fi was just through here, some vile piece of shit voice at the back of his mind reminded him. Maybe if you take a good long breath, you can catch a whiff of her, the last one you'll ever get.
Shut the fuck up… Kyle bit back at himself and, his frustration swelling, kicked at an abandoned spray can chilling in his path.
Villedor's history lessons and the cart only lasted so long. Soon after Kyle's assault on that innocent can, the train ended, and his feet were back to touching the tracks.
"We're almost there," said Hakon, indicating the end of the tunnel and the platform waiting up ahead.
The platform was well lit. Could even argue that it was clean, with its floors swept and the walls lacking any and all post-apocalyptical grime. It was also guarded, though not by a squad of PKs as Kyle had expected. Two men sat by an upright UV bar, a game of chess on a squat table between them. They wore padded cloaks that lacked the PK's blue (or the Church's red and black), and their weapons looked handmade, rather than divvied out at an armoury.
And since neither Kyle, Aiden, or Hakon, looked like Infected at this particular point in time, the two guards didn't bother them. They didn't ignore them either though, and once Kyle and Co had gotten onto the platform, they both raised their heads from the game and stared. Especially the dude on the left, giving his buddy time to rearrange to chest pieces.
Kyle wanted to smile. Christ, if he'd been in a better mood, he'd have waved. Said hi. Asked for directions.
God.
He could use directions.
But as it were, he looked away and kept going.
"What's going on?" he heard one of them whisper once he'd thought they were out of earshot. "First the Church rolls through, now these guys? Is the blockade lifting?"
"No clue," said the other. "Hey, did you—" His protest continued, but Kyle felt a tap at his arm, demanding his attention away from accidentally eavesdropping.
Aiden.
He'd come up next to Kyle, and the stare he levelled up at him spoke volumes of what was about to come. Kyle wasn't quite sure he was ready yet for the conversation, but then he figured he'd never really be.
"What do we do now?" Aiden asked. "If we aren't going after Waltz, what is it we're doing?"
Kyle swallowed the answer he wanted to give, which was: I changed my mind, let's go. It took a while to get the damn thing down, giving them the time to reach the stairs leading to the exit. They began to climb. Aiden matched Kyle's steps, one by one.
"I can go, you know," Aiden insisted, prompting a groan from Hakon. "I mean it. It's not like we have to— I mean, we can— Look, we don't have to go head to head with him. Not right away. But I'm ready, Crane. I've been ready for ten years."
Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Convince me. Shit.
"There's nothing I'd rather do, kid. Believe me. But if we want a shot at Waltz, then I need my arm back, and you need time to heal. Plus, I'd like to get the PK off our backs. If at all possible."
"The PK? What do they have to do with this?" Aiden's brows kicked up in confusion.
"Ah, you are in the deepest of shits I've ever seen," Hakon said. "They've set the whole outfit on you, haven't they?"
"Yep."
"Great." Aiden threw his arms up. It coaxed a wince out of him and had him fall back a few steps. He steeled himself, his face set in a pained grimace, and caught up again.
"I've got a plan, though," Kyle halfway lied. "First, we find a place to lay low. Then, we find out where Waltz took Fi. Next, we go there, we break her out, then commit an act of general breakage on Waltz's face before you ask him where he's got your sister, and we all get what we came here for. Sound good?"
It didn't. Not to Kyle. Not to Aiden, either, judging by the way his lips pressed into a thin line. But, Jesus, as far as plans went, this one at least had direction.
"Which brings us to step one, where we lay low. Hakon?"
"Boss?"
. . .
They'd reached the top of the stairs. Fresh (as in, stinky city-full-of-zombies-and-broken-sevage-systems) air rolled down at them, and Kyle brought the whole procession to a halt. "Can you point us to the Fish Eye?"
"The what?" Aiden asked.
"The Fish Eye," Hakon echoed, followed by a moment of hesitation. His eyes turned down, and a frown pulled at his mouth, the gesture subtle and quick. But Kyle did not miss it. There was a story there. Obviously. "It's run by Frank and what's left of his Nightrunners. And, yes, you'd be safe there, permitted Frank allows you to stay."
"Let me worry about that."
Hakon nodded. "Alright. Then I'll do you one better than point you at it. I'll take you there."
"Great," Kyle managed, even as the ache he'd been trying to keep at bay rose with a vengeance. It nearly knocked his heart askew. "Thanks."
No, Villedor's patch of neutral ground wasn't where he wanted to go; it wasn't the forward he needed. What he needed was a straight line leading him to Fi. But failing that, maybe he'd play it differently. Maybe he'd seize the universe's shitty magnifying glass and he'd turn it onto Waltz and his shitty Church.
See how they'd like it.
See how they'd get on with catching fire.