The soldier was at a loss for words. His lips stammered behind his helmet’s visor.
Nina’s father turned to her older brother.
“Quatémo,” he said.
Quatémo stiffened in attention. Unlike Lopé, Quatémo took after their father. Now in his mid-twenties, he was almost the spitting image of their Dad, only shorter and a little pudgier. The mini-goatee on his chin made his gaze softer than their father’s.
“If something happens to me,” Garço said, “you gotta rise up. Be the man. Don’t let anyone push you around. Don’t be weak. And do the right thing; stand up for your mother and your sister. I’m counting on you.”
And then, to everyone’s astonishment, Garço Broliguez walked down to the bus’ doors and stepped outside.
Nina had absolutely no intention of letting her father get himself killed, least of all because of his fucking machismo. Her mother yelled and her brother reached as she stood up, but Nina didn’t stop. She bolted out the door before Sergeant Hess could even respond.
She’d use her powers if she had to. Nina already felt guilty enough for losing her brother to the “Paul” persona those ‘Demptist asshats had wired into him. It wasn’t just that she blamed herself. It was literally her fault. Lopé had only taken up that idiot Professor’s offer to go with him to Church because she’d been running late to pick him up that day, arguing with her father.
Could her Dad be an idiot from time to time? Yeah. But that didn’t mean he deserved to become zombie chow.
Least of all because I’m being a pussy, Nina thought.
This whole episode is a wonderful example of the principle “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” at work.
Her father turned around as she ran up behind him. Nina was belting out her defense before he’d even opened his mouth.
“I’m not gonna let you do this alone,” she said. “You’re not the only one with honor, Papa.”
Nina knew she had him by the short hairs, and she knew he knew it, too. There wasn’t time to argue, not anymore. There was barely even time to get things done.
Up ahead, another crowd of zombies was percolating onto the street. Some of them went down the Boulevard, toward the Crusader Hill tunnel, but others lumbered toward the bus with savage intent.
Time was ticking. The bus’ red paint had sloughed off. The underlying metal was starting to buckle.
“Fuck…” Nina cursed.
Her father ran, and she followed him. He’d been right, the abandoned fire truck was close—barely a stone’s throw away. He yelped in joy at the sight of a hydrant only a couple feet away from the truck, and then dashed up to the curb and tried his luck again, swiping his hand over the hydrant’s built-in chip scanner.
“That’s not gonna work!” Nina said.
Her words didn’t stop him from cursing at the hardware when it angrily blared at him.
“Papa,” she said, “you’re not a registered emergency worker.”
To prevent abuse—and to conserve water—you had to either be registered as an emergency worker or first responder, or some kind of public servant—police officer, fireman, etc.—in order to turn on a fire hydrant. Registering as a first responder was open to everyone. It was a simple matter of filling out a form and watching the mandatory information video twice per year.
Yes, I know that sounds bad, but when 90% of urban fire incidents resolved themselves thanks to automation in one form or another, the system worked out surprisingly well.
For a so-called handyman, he wasn’t even a member of the Trenton Handyman’s Association.
But stuff like that had never stopped him, and it certainly wasn’t gonna stop him now.
Turning around, her father ran back to the fire truck. “We’ll do it the old fashioned way!” he said.
Up ahead, the zombies were closing fast. Nina tried her best to drown out the moaning pleas she heard—zombies begging for their own deaths. She arrived at the side of the fire truck just as her father emerged from its open door, bearing a mean-looking wrench. He leaned against the vehicle’s side as a coughing fit struck him.
“Please, Papa,” Nina said, “let me do it.”
He wiped his cough-ooze on his sleeve and stood up straight. “You don’t have the strength, miha. Go get the hose.”
Though Nina doubted her father had the strength to open the hydrant, she didn’t dare challenge him. She didn’t want to die because she and her Dad were fighting again. So, instead, drawing on her days of non-stop training, she surreptitiously wove a cap of mind-light around the hydrant’s valve at the same time as her father was working on it with the wrench. Through her mind’s eye, she saw the cap turn as she willed it to spin. The metal groaned at first, but then slid open, releasing a torrent of water from the hydrant.
“Look at what your old man can do!” Garço said, cackling with delight as the water sprayed high.
Nina had no problem letting him take the credit.
Overhead, the air thrummed with the escorting aerostat’s engine noises. The aircraft had circled back. Judging by the angle of its approach, it had to be coming in for a run on the zombies on the boulevard.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Nina’s heart leapt like the spraying water.
The aerostat started firing at the zombies, mowing down their front ranks with white-hot bullets that left flashes on Nina’s eyes. But then the aircraft wobbled, and then, a split second later, it careened off to the side, nose-diving into an old brownstone across the street.
The explosion was massive; a fiery copy of the spraying water.
Nina screamed. “No!”
But her father wasn’t deterred. Though Garço was clearly winded, he lumbered over to the fire truck, yelling, “Why didn’t you get the hose?” in between his labored breaths. Then another coughing fit seized him—worse than any before. Stumbling, he fell, but, thrusting her arms forward, Nina managed to push him toward the fire truck’s front hood with a burst of unseen energies. It stopped his fall, sending him staggering onto the side of the hood.
But Nina didn’t have time to pat herself on the back. Sure, she’d stopped him from toppling over and splitting his skull on the pavement, but the zombies were only a couple yards away, and she could see them eye to eye as they clambered over the abandoned cars by the side of the street.
He wasn’t going to make it in time.
Well, shit, Nina thought.
It was all up to her.
As she ran back to the fire truck to help her father, Nina kept telling herself it would be just like with the faucet in the sink at home, only bigger. She kept looking over her shoulder to glance back at the fire hydrant, to keep her mind’s eye on the weave as she shaped it over the hydrant, giving her divine blessing form. It was as easy as pressing her thumb on the faucet, only here, the spout was the fire hydrant, rather than a measly bathroom sink.
Eventually, she stopped moving toward her father, and just focused on the hydrant. The hydrant’s water sputtered and frothed as Nina’s magic compressed it under high pressures, concentrating it into a deadly stream. Nina guided the stream with sheer will. She sliced her arm through the air, and the stream did the same, sweeping out in a broad arc—a slicing spear—that started at the sidewalk and turned to the left, toward the buildings. The stream cut through the zombies like their bodies were grass, and they fell like grass, too, their heads, limbs, and torsos toppling over, along with cars and lamp posts and parking meters, all of them cut clean through. Further behind, where the pressure abated, the water fell short of slicing the zombies into pieces. Instead, it knocked them back, scattering them like leaves.
Nina was clearing the way.
Unfortunately, keeping the pressure high was easier said than done. Her arms trembled, teeth digging into her lips as she struggled to keep her power flowing. It was like squeezing toothpaste out of an empty tube, only she was the tube. She held it for as long as she could before she started to feel the weave buckle, its strands coming undone.
The stream blossomed, spreading like a trumpet as the magicked pressure let up.
Turning from her hips, Nina loosened her power’s grip on the stream, letting the water do what it wanted to do—widen—and instead focused on bending the spray away from the scattered zombies and toward the convoy bus.
“Yes!” she said, hissing through clenched teeth.
The water blasted the corrosive ooze off the bus like smoke in the wind.
Eventually, it was too much. Nina reached her breaking point, and had to let go. Staggering back, she stumbled into the fire truck’s front hood just as her father came rushing out, fired up on his second wind, and with a fire hose in his hands.
A few of the zombies kept on advancing, struggling to stand on the wet, slippery street.
Garço didn’t seem to notice that the number of zombies trying to kill them had suddenly plummeted. Nina figured it was because he was either too sick or too dense to notice it. Fortunately, it didn’t matter one way or the other. With a tired grin on her face, Nina let herself fall on her bottom as her father hooked the hose up to the hydrant and took control of the flow, blasting down the last few zombies, much to his delight. He even led the hose over to the bus, to spray away the remaining gobs of acidic gunk.
Garço staggered toward his daughter. “Miha,” he said, “help me turn it off!”
Nodding, Nina rose up, first on all fours, then on her own two feet, and scampered toward the hydrant. Turning it off was a simple matter of squeezing the drenched wrench and pushing hard.
So she fucking pushed, groaning with effort, but it was worth it, because it made the metal squeal.
“The water’s off!” Nina yelled.
Garço coughed and coughed, but not even the pain wincing through his face could blunt his joy.
“We did it!” he said. “We did it!”
Propping herself up—her hand pushing down on the top of the hydrant— she panted for breath. Her heart felt like it was about to leap out of her chest.
“Let’s go get Lopé,” Garço said. He walked off to the bus, but not before picking up the wrench and carrying it with him.
Nina was halfway back to the bus when another group of zombies came out from the alleyways behind them, accompanied by spats gunfire. Nina could hear military transports growling around the corner of the intersection..
She stopped and coughed, swooning for a lightheaded moment.
“It never fucking ends,” she muttered.
But then screams shot out from the bus.
Nina whipped her head up in attention.
Sergeant Hess ran out of the bus, limbs flailing, his fingers clawing rabidly at the air.
“I can’t stop!” he screamed. “I can’t stop!”
The soldier’s body spasmed, his back hunching back as his neck cracked and his chest puffed out and he hacked up a spray of black, sporey ooze and shot it straight at Nina’s father. Garço reacted by rushing at the zombie, slamming the wrench into the soldier’s head. His strike deflected the ooze at the last moment, sending it off to the side, where it landed, sizzling, in the middle of the street.
The zombie staggered, stunned by the wrench. Nina’s father pulled back, but then the feral soldier snarled, charging at Garço like a wild animal, aiming for his midsection.
He’d knock the man down and gouge out his throat.
Nina barely had time to draw on her power. Sticking out her hand, she wove divine energy around the zombie soldier.
Sorry, Sergeant Hess, she thought, as she threw her arms to the side, which threw him to the side, casting him away like a broken doll. His head and neck smashed into the corner of the bus’ doors.
Nina’s vision swam as she vomited: stale bread and days-old rice-pudding.
Her breakfast had sure picked a bad time to pay everyone a visit.
As Nina fell to her knees, she heard shouts from the folks on the bus.
“Praise the Angel!”
“It’s a miracle!”
Did they find out? Nina thought, hazy and weak. Please, no… I…—
—The next thing she knew, her father had wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up. Father and daughter stumbled into the bus.
“The Angel was protecting you!” the Munine woman said, after Garço had made it inside. The icon in her hands trembled. “He is protecting all of us.”
“Drive, Quatémo!” Garço shouted. “Drive!”
Lifting her head, Nina saw her older brother in the driver’s seat. His face was mere inches from the bullet-shattered windshield, and the former driver’s corpse had been shoved onto the floor behind him, along with the shards of glass.
Mr. Broliguez collapsed in a coughing fit. Nina fell out of his arms, onto the floor, the aisle’s corrugated metal biting into her knees through the fabric of her jeans.
She gasped; she felt sicker than ever.
But at least I’m not dead, she thought
The bus’ engine revved. The driver’s corpse rolled back as Quatémo drove the vehicle down Merchant Street, toward Crusader’s Hill Tunnel.
Spotlights meandered through the street in front of them—the searchlights of approaching aerostats.
Rising to her knees, Nina crawled over to her mother and grabbed the family console. She dove into the family’s contacts list, and before her mother could react, picked one and started up a videophone call. The battery was nearly empty, so she had to be quick. Fortunately, she knew exactly what she was going to say.
The console screen went black as it displayed the name of the call’s recipient: Dr. Genneth Howle.