The first thing the Ramp Truck did was go through a barricade.
Not an official barricade, the NYPD were not setting up barricades today, the NYPD were managing something considerably larger than traffic control. This was a civilian barricade, two delivery trucks pushed broadside across Hamilton Avenue by people who had decided that stopping things from coming down the street was better than nothing. He understood the logic. He drove through it anyway, the Ramp Truck's push bar taking the gap between the two trucks and widening it at fifteen miles per hour without the vehicle noticing the impact.
He felt her brace on the passenger side and then unbrace when nothing catastrophic happened.
"It does that," he said.
"I see that." She had her mask on and her hands braced on the dash and she was watching the street ahead with the full attention she brought to dangerous situations. "What else does it do?"
"You'll see."
Hamilton Avenue south was clearer than he'd expected, the swarm had concentrated in the denser parts of Brooklyn and the industrial corridor near the waterfront had fewer civilians to follow, which meant fewer of the insectoid soldiers hunting through it. He pushed the speed up. The Ramp Truck was not fast in any conventional sense but it was steady where most vehicles weren't, the weight eating the road rather than riding it, the whole machine moving with the assurance of something built to go through things rather than around them.
Three blocks from the on-ramp a cluster of soldiers came out of a side street. Eight of them, moving fast, the jointed chittering locomotion that he'd spent the afternoon learning to read. They saw the truck and two of them came straight at it, not fleeing, not hesitating, straight at it, and he hit the ramp release.
The hydraulic ramp deployed forward from the front of the vehicle in under a second, a forty-five degree wedge of reinforced steel that turned the truck's front end into a scoop. The two soldiers who'd been charging hit it at speed, went up the ramp's surface, and cleared the roof of the truck. He heard them hit the road behind. He didn't check the mirror. The remaining six scattered to the flanks and he was already past them.
"That's what it does," he said.
Felicia looked back through the rear window at the street behind them. Then she looked at him. "You bought this in May."
"Yes."
"And you've been keeping it in the warehouse."
"Yes."
"For what occasion."
"This one, apparently." He retracted the ramp and got them onto the BQE on-ramp. The expressway spread out ahead, six lanes, mostly abandoned, a scatter of stopped vehicles but nothing that blocked the road. He pushed the speed up to sixty.
The BQE south gave them two miles of relative clarity. The swarm was above them, he could see them through the windscreen, moving through the air over Brooklyn in numbers that hadn't decreased, but the expressway surface itself was mostly clear, the elevated structure apparently less interesting to creatures that preferred ground-level contact. He used the two miles to think forward. Goethals Bridge or Outerbridge Crossing, both of them in Staten Island, both of them potentially passable if the swarm hadn't reached that far yet. The invasion had started in Manhattan and was spreading outward. Staten Island was the far edge of the spread. Maybe.
Felicia had the passenger window down two inches and was watching the sky. "They're thinning," she said.
"South of the river they haven't hit yet."
"How do you know?"
"I don't." He checked the mirrors. Clean behind them. "But the portal was over Midtown. They've been spreading from there. Physics."
She was quiet for a moment, watching the sky. Then: "The list."
"What list."
"The one I'm keeping." She turned to look at him. "The weapon appearing from nowhere in the coffee shop. The magazine. The truck you bought in May for an unspecified occasion. The Rail Gun. The, whatever the thing was that launched those two soldiers off the hood." She paused. "I have been working with you for nine months and I have been with you for three weeks and there are things I clearly don't know about you."
He kept his eyes on the road. "Yes."
"Is it dangerous? To me specifically."
"No."
"Are you going to tell me about it."
He thought about the Panel. The respawn anchor. The Chrono Essence fragments. The Time Heist window sitting open in the Panel's notification queue. The full weight of the thing that had been running in his background since October and which he had never told anyone because there was no version of telling it that didn't require the other person to either believe something impossible or think he was lying. "Eventually," he said. "Not today."
She looked at him for a long moment. He felt the look, she was deciding something. Then she turned back to the windscreen. "All right," she said. Not dropped, accepted. She wasn't letting it go. She was filing it as a debt he owed her and she would collect when the time was right, and they both knew it.
He was fine with this. The debt was real and he intended to pay it.
The exit for the Gowanus came up and he took it, the Goethals approach ran better from surface streets through Bay Ridge than from the expressway at this point, and he wanted to stay elevated as long as possible to read the terrain ahead. The surface streets through Bay Ridge were quieter than anything he'd seen since the bridge. A few civilians moving fast with bags. No soldiers visible. The sky above thinning to single figures rather than the mass that had covered Manhattan.
He was starting to believe they were going to make it clean when the sound came from the side street on his left.
Not soldiers. Something else, a civilian vehicle, a white van, side-swiped by something large and pushed against the building wall, two people trapped inside it, the van's frame bent enough that the doors wouldn't open. He could see them through the windscreen, a man and a woman, the woman trying to push the door from inside, the man in the driver's seat not moving, hit by the impact, or worse.
He slowed the truck.
Felicia looked at him. He looked at the van. He looked at the street ahead, clear, for now, the Goethals approach two miles south. He looked at the van again.
He stopped the truck.
Three minutes. He got out with the EMP Launcher on his back and the pistol in his hand and crossed the street to the van. The passenger door took two pulls, the frame was bent but not beyond moving. The woman got out. The driver was conscious, a cut on his forehead, dazed but functional. He got him out. He put them both against the building wall and looked down the street and heard something coming from the east, the chittering sound of multiple soldiers moving fast.
He went back to the truck. Felicia had the passenger door open, standing on the running board, watching the east end of the street.
"How many?" he said.
"Eight. Maybe ten." She looked at the two civilians against the wall. Back at him. "We can't take them in the truck."
"No." He looked at the block. There was a parking garage on the south side. Solid concrete, single entrance. It would hold. "Garage. Third floor. Stairwell door, block it from inside." He looked at the civilians. "Go. Now. Third floor, stairwell, block the door."
The woman grabbed the man's arm and they moved. He watched them reach the garage entrance. Then he got back in the truck and pulled forward and turned it broadside across the street, blocking the approach from the east, and when the soldiers came around the corner they came into the Ramp Truck's front end and the EMP Launcher firing through the gun port and Felicia working the passenger-side port with what she had, and the street became very loud for ninety seconds and then quiet.
He pulled forward. He didn't look in the mirror at what was on the street behind them. He drove south.
Neither of them said anything about the van. It didn't need to be said. He'd stopped when he wasn't going to stop, and they'd lost three minutes and used ammunition they might need later, and it was done.
Felicia put her hand on his arm and left it there.
He drove.
The Goethals Bridge was two miles ahead when he saw her. A side street off 4th Avenue, the tail end of Bay Ridge, a figure on a rooftop, white and pink moving through a group of soldiers with the fast acrobatic violence of someone who had been fighting since the invasion started and hadn't stopped. He counted the soldiers on the roof: seven. She was handling them but the next wave was already on the building's exterior wall, climbing the facade, and when they reached the roof she was going to be dealing with fourteen instead of seven and the math would stop working.
He knew who it was before he saw the mask. He'd have known the movement anywhere.
He stopped the truck.