"Good work," he said, his voice softer now. "Stay put. Stay quiet. I'll draw them away."
Static hissed for a heartbeat. Then Suzune: "We'll wait."
Riku keyed off their channel and slid back to the Ka-50's tactical screen. His HUD stacked the facts in clean green text:
FUEL: 68%
30MM: 298 RDS
S-8 ROCKETS: 34
VIKHR ATGM: 12
IGLA AAM: 4
FLARES: 22
Enough to make noise. Enough to erase a problem.
He pulled collective, easing the Black Shark into a climbing turn that pulled the thunder of his rotors away from the garage mouth. Noise was magnetism in this world; the dead moved on sound and motion. He'd use both.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's go fishing."
He crossed two blocks east and dipped the nose, letting the turbines spool a little louder than necessary. The thump of coaxial blades rolled down the concrete canyons, bouncing off glass and steel. His thermal overlay blood: figures levering themselves off sidewalks, pouring out of stairwells, peeling from alley shadows like grease being scraped from a pan.
He kept the bird moving, never hovering in one place more than a few seconds. The trick was to light the fuse without letting the fla touch the garage. He wanted the horde to chase him, not triangulate the girls.
A cross-street pooled with targets. He drifted through it at forty knots, low enough that downwash sent wrappers and loose paper into a cyclone. Dozens of mouths tipped skyward. Hands reached. He let them bunch, counted to three, and hamred a two-second burst of 30mm into a dead bus at the intersection's far end.
The bus detonated like a drum full of nails. Fire belched; shockwave slapped the Ka-50. The blast snapped every head on the block toward the fireball.
"Hook set," he breathed, already banking away.
Behind him, the whole column moved, drawn to the new thunder. He rolled out along the avenue that paralleled the bay—long sightlines, broad asphalt, no choke points that would force him to loiter over the garage's block. He ran the line like a shepherd, quick cannon taps on parked tal to throw echo farther ahead. The horde followed the chain of bangs like a dog follows treats.
A scatter of sprinters cut across a side lane on a vector that worried him—if they kept that bearing, they'd angle past his lure and drift back toward the office tower.
"Not today."
He flipped to rockets—pairs, low ripple. Two S-8s left the rails with a cough and a streak. They hit the pavent fifty ters ahead of the pack, bracketing the lane mouths. The blasts tore craters into the tar and threw a wall of debris into those side channels. Anything still moving in the gaps got a curt stitch of 30mm to put it down. Noise forward, silence to the flank.
He checked the garage again. The girls' block stayed cool and empty on thermal—no fast movers, no curious trickle. Good.
He dragged the tug farther. The avenue bent toward the river levee—a concrete slope up to a four-lane road that ran atop the floodwall. That was his corral: one way up, long fall either side, a straightaway he could work without back-splatter toward the garage.
He tipped the nose and climbed the levee, letting the bird crest the top so his silhouette cut the moon. The dead always surged at skyline shapes. Below, they clambered up the slope in a struggling wave, hands scrabbling on aggregate.
Riku hovered just long enough to be rude, then slid backward along the crown road, keeping his airspeed low so the pack could commit. They did—hundreds now, a black blot boiling up the ramp and onto the levee.
"Co on. All aboard."
He gave them fifty ters of road and then began the work.
The cannon sang. Not a spray—asured punches, lead walking chest-high along the crown, every three-round burst a trono. Bodies spun and dropped. Those behind climbed over them, screaming open-throat roars that wore no language. He inched back, always back, never letting them get within leaping distance of the parapet beneath him.
A fast cluster broke left and sprinted along the sidewalk, using lamp posts as cover. He cut them with a shallow skid and raked the curb line on the move. Posts shattered. Heads split. The pack behind stumbled on the torn concrete.
His ammo ticked down: 268… 252… 241…
He watched the numbers, not because he was worried yet, but because discipline was survival. No full-length hose unless he needed it. Rockets were his broom for the stubborn knots.
Half a block ahead, a jackknifed fuel tender lay on its side, nose crushed into the barrier. He didn't like lighting fuel in the open over a levee road—shrapnel, heat plu, unpredictable flow. But the tank looked dry, the skin already ripped. He'd use the carcass, not the contents.
He popped two rockets—one into the tender's cab, another into the barrier five ters beyond. Both strikes blew fist-sized chunks out of steel and concrete, throwing a hail of clanging debris down the crown. The noise rolled like artillery. Every head ahead of him snapped to the racket and surged that way. The pack compressed and tripped over itself. Perfect.
He slid right and worked the flank, trimming anything that attempted to peel back toward the city blocks. The levee road beca a treadmill of at—everything moving one way, none of it toward the garage.
The radio hissed alive on the girls' channel; Suzune's whisper barely carried. "We can hear you… far away now. Is that good?"
"Good," he replied, eyes never leaving the sight. "Stay dark. No doors, no lights. I'll call when I'm close."
He cut the transmit and rolled left to avoid a cluster trying to pour down an access stair to street level. Two short rocket pairs pulped the stair mouth. Concrete coughed dust. Nothing ca up those steps again.
He let the chase run three full blocks, long enough to put heavy distance between the horde and the tower district. When he reached a broad Y-split where the levee road joined a highway flyover, he made his pen.
Another glance at the board:
30MM: 209
S-8: 28
FUEL: 61%
Ti to cull.
He took altitude to 120 ters and trimd into a nose-high hover that let downwash blow forward against the pack. It pushed the front rank back a step, then another—a stupid, stubborn tide eting wind it couldn't understand. He eased aft and set the pipper forty ters in front of the mass. Then he let the cannon speak in long, ugly paragraphs.
The Shipunov's recoil trembled the airfra. Brass rained from the belly. The front two ranks disintegrated, the next three tripped over them, and the fifth slamd into the pile at a full run. The wall of bodies made a plug. Those behind climbed, and the plug climbed with them—up and up until it beca a sloped heap of bone and muscle.
He cut, drifted five ters, and started another seam. Then another. He stitched lanes across the crown until the heap had more holes than flesh. When the front tried to break sideways, he corrected with single rockets into the guardrail posts, detonations that penned them back into the kill zone without spraying shrapnel down into the neighborhoods.
Sweat crawled behind his ears. He blinked it off the eyebrow pad and kept the cadence. 186… 170… 153…
A flicker at his periphery—left flank, stair tower on the flyover, movent fast and clever. A cluster of sprinters had avoided the press and were trying to flank up a maintenance ladder. He slewed, tagged, and put a tight nine-round burst into the tower's midsection. The box cracked like a rib cage. Bodies tumbled out and pinwheeled into the dark.
He breathed once, deep. "Stay on ."
He finished the box with rockets—two pairs, rippled. The flyover shook. Segnts of parapet slumped and dumped dozens into the spillway. The rest, confused, turned back into the main flow.
Ammo check: 121 rounds. Rockets: 24. FUEL: 57%.
Enough.
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