Only Survivors Give XP

Chapter 11 - Reciprocal Return

Chapter 11 · 1,513 words

The receiver screamed static for the first twenty minutes of walking.

Gavin cradled the thing against his chest as the group moved out of the office building and onto the street. Circuit board jutting from a cracked plastic casing, antenna fragments wired together with stripped copper. Every three steps he'd stop, twist a dial, press the assembly against his ear, and shake his head.

"Nothing. Just noise."

Nolan walked point, scanning the street ahead with his threat-detection radius. Thirty meters of empty nothing. The road was cracked and littered with debris: shattered glass, an overturned delivery truck, chunks of concrete the size of car doors. No monsters. No people. Just the wind pushing dust through the gaps.

Vera brought up the rear, her rebar crutch clicking against the pavement in a steady rhythm. Marcus leaned on Rin's shoulder, his burned legs wrapped in strips of cloth they'd torn from office curtains. Tom walked beside Derek, who was still pale but breathing without the rattling wheeze from yesterday.

Seven people. Moving east.

"Try the frequency again," Vera said. "The one you had before."

Gavin adjusted a wire with his thumbnail. The receiver crackled. He held it up.

"—peat, this is—"

Static swallowed the words. Gavin's jaw tightened. He twisted another dial, smaller, and pressed the casing against his ear again.

"—station four, any station, we have movement on Meridian, repeat, movement on—"

The voice cut out. Gavin froze.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, wait—"

He crouched on the curb, both hands on the receiver, and made an adjustment so small Nolan couldn't see what he was touching. The static thinned. The voice came back, broken but intelligible.

"—Meridian and Ninth. Pack of twelve to fifteen. Canine-type, big ones. They've been there since yesterday morning. Nobody's gotten past. If anyone's heading east, do not take Meridian. I repeat, do not take Meridian."

The broadcast dissolved into static. Gavin looked up.

"Got a location," he said. "Meridian and Ninth. Monster pack, twelve to fifteen. Canine-type."

Nolan stopped walking. Meridian and Ninth was three blocks ahead. Their direct route to the central district. He checked his threat-detection radius. Thirty meters of clear space. The pack was beyond his range, sitting right where they needed to go.

"How long ago was that broadcast?" he asked.

Gavin glanced at the receiver. "Could be live. Could be hours old. The signal was strong, though. Repeater station's close."

Vera limped forward, studying the street ahead as if she could see the monsters with her eyes alone. "Meridian's our fastest path to the school district. If it's blocked—"

"We go around," Nolan said.

"How far around?"

Vera closed her eyes. Nolan watched her work. She was mapping the city in her head, pulling up supply-chain routes and loading-dock connections she'd memorized over a career she'd never expected to use this way.

"Seventh to Eleventh, cut through the parking structures, come out on the far side of the commercial block." She opened her eyes. "Adds maybe forty minutes. Maybe an hour with the group's pace."

"Forty minutes beats fifteen monsters," Tom said.

Nobody argued.

The detour took them through a residential side street, past houses with blown-out windows and a minivan wedged into someone's front porch. Nolan kept his radius sweeping. Nothing. The city was quiet in a way that felt wrong. Empty. The kind of quiet that meant the monsters had already fed and moved on.

Gavin kept the receiver pressed to his ear as they walked, catching fragments. Another voice, different station, talking about water contamination near the river. A third signal, too broken to resolve. The technician was grinning by the time they reached the parking structure.

"This is worth the wire," he said. "This is actually worth it."

Nolan glanced back at him. Gavin's hands were steady now. The exhaustion from yesterday had given way to the focused energy of a man whose work had just proven itself. The receiver was intelligence now.

The parking structure was three levels of concrete, half-collapsed on the east side but passable through the lower level. They moved through it in silence, footsteps echoing off the walls. Nolan counted the people in his group, seven, all accounted for, and checked the countdown in the corner of his vision.

Fifty-nine hours, twenty-two minutes.

They came out on the far side of the commercial block onto a wider avenue. The school district was still miles east, but they were making progress. The direct route was open again, bypassing the monster pack entirely.

"Good work," Nolan said to Gavin.

The technician shrugged, but the grin stayed. "Just listening. Someone's talking out there."

They moved east for another twenty minutes before the group ahead appeared.

Five people, huddled in the doorway of a looted electronics store. Two were standing, three on the ground. One of the seated ones had a makeshift bandage on his thigh, dark with old blood. The others looked up as Nolan's group approached, and the standing ones shifted, hands going to improvised weapons, a length of pipe, a broken chair leg.

"Hold," Nolan said, stopping twenty feet out. He kept his hands visible. "We're not looking for trouble."

The taller of the two standing survivors, a woman with short dark hair and a jacket three sizes too big, studied them. Her eyes went over the group, counting, assessing. She looked at Marcus's burns, Derek's chemical-irritated skin, Vera's rebar crutch.

"You a medic?" she asked, looking at Nolan.

"Paramedic."

She nodded at the man on the ground with the bleeding leg. "He took a piece of shrapnel from a building collapse two days ago. We can't get it out. He's losing blood slow but steady."

Nolan's threat-detection radius flickered. Not the wound. The injury was old, not immediately lethal. But the group was depleted, dehydrated, and heading nowhere good.

Vera stepped forward. "Where are you people trying to go?"

"East," the woman said. "Toward the school. We heard there's a shelter."

"We're heading the same direction," Vera said. "What do you have? What do you need?"

The negotiation took five minutes. Vera ran it. Nolan stayed back and let her work. She was better at this than he was. The woman introduced herself as Nadia and gestured to her people as she talked. The man with the bleeding leg was Owen. The two standing with her were Jace and a quiet woman whose name Vera didn't catch. The terms were simple: Nolan would assess the injured man's wound and provide what treatment he could. In exchange, the group would share what they knew about the routes ahead. They had come from the northeast, and they'd seen things.

Nolan knelt beside Owen. The bandage was soaked through. He peeled it back carefully. The shrapnel was still embedded, a jagged piece of metal the size of his thumbnail, surrounded by angry red tissue. Not infected yet, but heading that direction. Not lethal. Not his class's problem.

But the man was pale, and his pulse was thready, and without cleaning and proper dressing he'd lose enough blood over the next day to become a problem.

"I can clean it and pack the wound," Nolan said. "Can't remove the metal without proper tools. But I can stop it from getting worse."

Owen nodded. His lips were cracked and dry.

Nolan worked through his kit. Saline flush, half of what was left. Clean dressing from the emergency supplies. He cleaned the wound, packed it, and re-bandaged it with steady hands. The man's breathing eased as the pressure was managed.

While he worked, Nadia talked to Vera. They'd come from a residential block near the river. The streets between here and the school were bad. Collapsed overpass on Twelfth, monster activity near the park. But they'd found a route through the industrial zone that was clear as of yesterday morning.

"The warehouses," she said. "Big open spaces, fewer places for things to hide. We made it through in about an hour."

Vera was already mapping it. "Which warehouses?"

"The ones along Canal Street. Big loading bays, open floors. We didn't see anything bigger than a stray dog."

Nolan finished the bandage and stood. Owen looked marginally better, still hurt, but the bleeding had slowed to a seep.

"We're sharing what we have," Vera told Nadia. "Water, some food. In exchange, you share the route details. If your group's heading east anyway, we can travel together until the industrial zone. After that, we figure it out."

Nadia considered it. Looked at her own group. Owen propped against the wall, Jace standing guard with his pipe, the quiet woman hovering near the doorway. Five people, one injured, all exhausted. Then she nodded.

"Deal."

Nolan handed over two of the nutritional supplements from their supply. Not much. Enough to matter.

As the two groups settled into an uneasy proximity, Gavin's receiver crackled again. More static. More fragments. But the technician just held it close and kept walking, pulling signal out of the noise like it was his job.

It was, now.

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