Chapter 25 - Greed Before Need

  I gotta say, the applause felt really good. It was more than nice. It was like validation for all the shit I’d gone through since this whole mess started. Holy crap, was that really just earlier today that everything went to hell? It felt like it must have been weeks ago, so much had happened. So much had changed.

  But there Alex and I were: we’d stepped up, stopped the threat, saved the lives of tons of people. Then, when the ants hauled Gary into their nest, we had the guts to go in after him, and we’d brought him back alive.

  Yeah, it felt good. Saving him felt good, and the recognition was nice, too.

  There was one person who wasn’t clapping, though—Tom. He stood there on the edge of the crowd, arms crossed over his chest, scowling in our general direction. He’d told us not to go. Said he wasn’t coming after us if we did. We went anyway, and now he was going to be pissy about it?

  Fine. Let him. I decided I wasn’t going to worry about it. If he wanted to let his people die in some hole in the ground, that was on him. I didn’t have to follow his orders. Suddenly I was very glad I hadn’t taken his offer to work for him. If he was the sort of person who didn’t even attempt to rescue his people when they were in trouble, I wanted no part of working for the guy. How could you trust someone like that?

  The applause was petering out, so I sketched a little bow. “Glad to help. Gary saved my butt—and a bunch of kids I had with me—earlier today. He’s a good man.”

  Two young men had the still-unconscious Gary hefted up on the back board. One of them glanced over. “We’ll get him inside and let the docs look him over, but most of these injuries look superficial. He ought to recover just fine.”

  Then they were off. I turned back toward the hole in the ground, wondering how we were going to deal with this latest menace. We’d gone in and gotten Gary out, but the ant nest was still going to be a problem. As long as it was there, they could pop back out and attack any time they wanted.

  “I don’t suppose you can Create enough water to flood the whole thing?” I asked Alex.

  He shook his head. “No way. That sphere was the best I could do. Flooding the whole nest will take far more than that. It’s a good idea, but we’d need to, I don’t know…siphon the Charles River, or something? That might work, if we had a long enough tube.”

  I filed that away under ‘possible, but impractical.’ I hadn’t thought it was something Alex could handle with his magic, at least for now. His crystals were only tier one, after all. If he ranked them up, he might be able to generate a whole lot more water, eventually.

  Behind me, Tom clapped his hands. “All right, everyone! We need to get this area cleaned up. I want four volunteers to help fill in this hole, and we’ll keep the area under guard.”

  I turned toward him. “You sure burying this is the right plan?”

  His face flashed a little red as he rounded on me. “You have a better idea, Castle?”

  I shook my head. “No, not really. But these are ants, right? They dug this hole. If we fill it back in, how long will it take them to dig it back out again?”

  “Fair point,” he replied. He stroked his chin. He still wasn’t happy with me, but I was glad he was at least willing to listen to reason. “We’ll set a watch over the site. Two guards. If the ants come back, one runs to alert the hospital while the other slows the ants down.”

  I winced. I couldn’t help it, and I know he saw it on my face; the light from my glow stick was shining close enough I knew he could read my expression. Tom let out a long-suffering sigh. “What’s the problem this time?”

  I just shrugged. There was no point in making an enemy of the guy if I could avoid it. He met my gaze, and I just gave him a nod, then turned away. That seemed to mollify him some. Tom went back to passing out orders to his people.

  The problem with his plan was obvious to me: there had been people out in the courtyard when the ants erupted out of their hole the first time. They’d run for it, and one of them died trying to get inside. That’s how the doors ended up propped open in the first place. If the ants came back, whoever was on guard was going to have to flee or die. The one who stayed behind to ‘slow the ants down’ was definitely going to die.

  That was probably the point. One of the guards was a sacrificial lamb, out there to give the ants something to kill while the other escaped to warn everyone else. That was cold. Way colder than I was comfortable with.

  I decided this was my last night staying at MGH. This place might feel secure, might look safe, but it was already fraying on the inside, where it counted most.

  “…and that goes for you, too, Castle,” Tom said, finishing whatever order he was passing out.

  I’d been lost in my thoughts, not really paying attention to whatever he was telling his people. The sound of my last name brought me back. I glanced his way.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Huh?”

  Alex came to my rescue, stepping in close so he could speak softly. His eyes looked angry, and as he spoke, I found out why. “Tom wants everyone to pool any crystals they got during the fighting. The hospital will take half, and then the rest will be divided evenly by everyone who fought.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.

  “Something funny, Castle?” Tom asked. He sounded for all the world like he was trying to be a Hollywood drill sergeant.

  “Yeah. What you said,” I replied, chuckling some more. “I mean, that was a joke, right?”

  “It most certainly was not. If we want to get everyone up to fighting strength, we need to share the risks and rewards equally.”

  I wanted to point out that we most certainly hadn’t shared the risks equally, so I didn’t see any point in sharing the rewards Alex and I had obtained while risking our lives to save Tom and his people, but instead I kept my answer to one word.

  “No.”

  “What?” Tom sputtered, striding toward me. “You want to be a part of this community, you need to share. This isn’t optional; it’s an order.”

  “I am not under your command,” I replied, forcing myself to keep my voice calm. I wanted to shout in the guy’s face. The anger in my gut was rising, and I wanted nothing so much as to let it out.

  But that wasn’t the sort of person Amanda would have wanted me to be. Frankly, it wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to be, either.

  Beside me, Alex whispered softly. “I’ll back whatever play you make. I’ve done the math; they can’t take us together.”

  I glanced around the courtyard. Tom only had himself and six other people out there. All of them had only makeshift weapons, and only Tom was tier two. The rest were tier one or had no tier at all, meaning they hadn’t even acquired a single crystal yet. Alex was right. If it came to a fight, we’d tear them apart. I didn’t want to fight them, though. I didn’t want to hurt people. I wanted to help.

  But not like Tom wanted me to help.

  Tom walked straight up to me, stopping about a foot away. “I thought you’d be a team player, Castle. Thought you’d be one of us. I even saw you rising to a position of leadership here, if you wanted it. But it doesn’t look like you have any sort of team spirit at all.”

  “I had enough to go after your man when he was in danger, even after you abandoned him,” I shot back. Were we really talking about team spirit? How old was this guy, anyway? He didn’t look fifty, but he acted like it.

  “Yeah, by disobeying another order,” Tom replied.

  “You keep forgetting I’m not under your command,” I told him.

  “You’re turning over those crystals,” he snarled.

  I just replied with the same one-word answer I’d given before: “No.”

  “Yes!” Tom said. Then he tried to push me in the chest with both palms.

  It was a good shove. Tom was no pushover, and I was betting he had a Strength crystal of his own socketed, maybe even up to tier two. But a tier two Strength stone was two crystals worth of strength, and my tier five Strength was sixteen.

  Tom shoved me with all his weight and Strength.

  I didn’t budge.

  Didn’t move an inch. Didn’t fall backward or even shift my torso. His impact just sort of bounced off me. It was like a toddler had shoved me with all his might. That’s when I first saw fear enter his eyes. Right up until that moment, Tom still thought his crystals gave him the upper hand over me. He was only tier two, so he had no idea what my tier level was.

  Well, now he had some idea. He knew I was a hell of a lot stronger than he was, so I was higher tier than him.

  Tom backed up two steps, the fear not leaving his eyes. He turned to the six guards he still had in the courtyard with him. “With me, everyone. We’re taking them both into custody.”

  “Alex, behind me, eh?” I whispered.

  “Yes.” He slipped sideways and fell in two steps behind me and one to my left.

  Then I looked each of Tom’s people in the eyes as they shifted their glance from their leader to me. “Folks, let’s not do this. Alex and I just helped stop the ants from killing a lot of people. We just went down into that hole there to rescue one of you. Someone Tom here was going to abandon. We brought him back. You really think that the two of us can take down scores of those ants and be worried about the six of you? Don’t do this. Please.”

  They all looked scared and confused, and who could blame them? The whole world was falling apart. They’d found one semi-safe corner to hide out in, and their ‘leader’ was an asshole willing to sacrifice them one by one to keep himself alive. If I’d been in their shoes, I’d have been terrified.

  We held each others’ gazes for a long moment that seemed to stretch out. I said a quiet little prayer that they’d do the smart thing.

  One of them dropped his steel club. “Sorry, boss. I’m good with fighting monsters, maybe even bad people if we have to. But these aren’t bad people.”

  The woman beside him, the one Gary saved earlier, dropped her sharpened mop handle, too. “Same here. They’re heroes, not enemies.”

  One by one, the rest of them dropped their weapons, too. I let out a huge sigh of relief. Yeah, Alex and I could have made short work of them if it had come down to a fight. But the last thing I wanted to do was hurt people who were just scared and trying to survive.

  I turned to Alex. “Let’s go get our bags from upstairs. I don’t think we’re going to be welcome here anymore, after this.”

  “I don’t think I want to be welcome here, after this,” Alex replied. His voice shook a little with anger. He was more pissed off than I’d seen him. He glared at the six guards. “You lot may think you’ve found a safe place to ride out this storm, but you’ve given up your freedom for security. Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that, you know.”

  I remembered the quote he was talking about: ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’ It was a good quote, although if I remembered right there was some discussion about whether he’d actually said that, or if it was someone else.

  Whichever the case, Alex was right. It felt appropriate for the moment.

  We stalked past the whole bunch of them and made our way back to the doors, then inside. From there we went directly to the stairwell, back up to our room so we could grab our bags.

  “We’ll head over to my place,” I told Alex. “My apartment is right across the street.”

  “Sounds like a workable plan. Tomorrow we can figure out what to do next.”

  I nodded, then hefted my backpack, and we marched our way back down the stairs to the ground floor again. From there I used my glow stick to shine the way as we started tracing the path through the MGH complex that Tom had led me on earlier, when I was escorting the kids. We snagged my bike from where we’d stored it earlier as we went past.

  We made good time, but I wasn’t shocked to see Tom waiting by the exit door when we got there.

  “You’d better never come back here,” Tom snarled. “After all that, you sure as hell won’t be welcome.”

  “I think you’re going to regret that more than we will,” I replied. “Goodbye, Tom. Good luck.”

  Then we stepped back outside into the night, quickly dashing across the street.