The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “That looks just like the blasters in the historical doc―uhh, movie.” She smirked.

  “Tracers… every fifth bullet.” He cringed as the car thundered over what felt like an ocean of corpses.

  Infected slapped and smeared at the sides. A dull clank rang out as someone’s hand detonated on the driver’s side mirror. The pounding of his heartbeat in his skull drowned out the screeching and wailing. A mass of Infected filled the rear-targeting monitor, clambering over themselves in an attempt to chase a car on foot.

  He flipped the weapons toggle and let off a few short bursts from the rear-firing guns. He didn’t care what he hit. Firing at all right now was guaranteed to nail something. Something that used to be a someone. Sweat ran in sheets down his face, stinging his eyes.

  “Kevin?” Tris pushed on his arm. “Kevin?”

  “Yeah?” He squinted at the ash, fighting the urge to slam on the accelerator. Gotta stay slow. Can’t risk crashing into something I don’t see coming. “What?”

  “I uhh, think there’s blood on the car now.” She closed the center console. “You okay?”

  “I’ll be a whole lot better once I can see more than fifteen damn meters ahead.” He coughed. “So glad this is an electric… all this ash would choke an air filter. I hate that. What’s with the fog and the Infected. So freaky.”

  “They’re drawn to dark places where they can hide. There’s nothing supernatural about it.”

  He risked looking at her for two seconds. “Yeah, but I ain’t gotta like it.”

  Splat.

  Something bounced over the roof and thudded off the trunk.

  Kevin cringed. “We hit another one, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah.” She winced. “Juicy.”

  His stomach churned. His breathing grew shallow, and the taste of bile bubbled up into the back of his throat. After swallowing the urge to throw up all over her, he forced himself to look forward. Luckily, the highway remained clear. Roads and streets crisscrossed a blasted-flat area, littered with destroyed pieces of traffic lights and streetlamps. No trace of grass or green remained. The Challenger squealed around a cloverleaf as he rushed the turn onto Route 36. From an overpass up ahead, seven skeletons hung upside down by rope and chain wrapped about their ankles. Each one had a hatchet handle protruding from the skull. The gruesome totems wobbled in the wake of their passage.

  Tris gave him a meek look.

  “Horsemen.” He shook his head. “One of the nomad groups. Bet they’ve staked a claim on Boulder.”

  The wipers didn’t do much to the layer of red jelly on the windshield, but he ran them for a minute anyway. Tris kept the Beretta in her hands, clinging to it like a security blanket.

  “I thought you were vaccinated or something… you look like you’re ready to pass out.”

  She lifted her head, a meek look on her face. “Being immune to the Virus and not being freaked out by rotting zombies coming out of nowhere aren’t even close to the same thing.”

  “Since we’re splitting hairs… Zombies are technically undead.”

  Tris’s eyebrows shifted together. “They’re decaying, they moan, they want to kill us. Does it make that much difference?”

  “Oh, never mind that the Virus was set loose years ago, and it’s supposed to kill in three months. Any thoughts exactly what’s going on?”

  “Umm. Unexpected mutation probably. Viruses sometimes do that.” She shivered.

  Crap. Now she’s wondering if it changed enough to get her. “Maybe they lied. Maybe it’s doing exactly what they expected it to do.”

  She exhaled, fidgeting with the Beretta. “Maybe.”

  As far as he could see in the ash, the crumbling structures of Old Denver gaped in the wind. Thick haze gathered in narrow channels between some, masking the presence of who knows how many Infected. He imagined them all coming for him, as if a hundred thousand of them possessed a single mind. Kevin relaxed his grip on the wheel ten minutes later. His hands throbbed in time with his pulse. He jumped at every dense region in the cloud, mistaking it for another Infected. Tris remained silent as she stared out at the shattered remains of a once teeming city.

  Time seemed to stand still, until finally, the grey miasma thinned enough to see road. A manic grin spread over his face, and he sped up to 110 in seconds. When the air cleared a short while later, he pushed it to 150. The trappings of Denver gave way to open ground on the right and the shadow of the mountains on the left. Abandoned cars streaked by all around them, though were mostly along the edges. An occasional tiny sports car, motorcycle, or truck in his way was easy enough to see coming and avoid without having to slow down.

  Ripples formed in the goop on the windshield from the wind trying to push it up. Kevin squirmed in his seat at the thought of Virus covering his car. He drove along a stretch of highway with dirt and open space on both sides. A little less than an hour later, he slowed to a halt where a tangled mess of red and beige steel, glass, and wires had collapsed across the road.

  “Goddammit.” He stopped, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

  “Looks like some kinda bridge so people can walk across the highway between shopping centers.” Tris pointed left. “Try there.”

  He reversed, cut across the median, and took an off-ramp on the southbound side, which led into a lot with a handful of cars scattered about. He didn’t trust the large building, probably one of those ‘malls’ he’d heard talked about, and didn’t linger on thoughts of checking it out. Eyeballing the southern end of the pedestrian bridge, he navigated around a narrow, curving road and drove to within hand-grenade-chucking range of the stairs that once led to the crossing. As slow as walking, he drove over about sixty yards of dirt and eased the Challenger back down onto Route 36 on the other side of the tangled mass.

  “That’s going to be a major pain in the ass on the way out.” He grumbled.

  Tris shrugged. “We won’t be in a hurry then… maybe go way east and cut south?”

  “Maybe.”

  He enjoyed the car’s newfound ability to exceed 94 miles per hour, leaving it sliding between 120 and 140 for the next half hour on the way to Boulder. Much to his surprise, nothing moved―not Infected nor Horseman nor other manner of bandit nomad. An ominous-looking brownish red parking garage passed on the right, covered in tattered scraps of cloth someone likely meant as flags. People moved inside, hovering around burn barrels. Some approached the edge, drawn by the sound of their tires on the road, though they moved like normal people.

  Kevin didn’t feel like sticking around to find out.

  Wayne said something about 119 west. They shot under a still-intact concrete overpass, drove straight for a while more. He slowed to 72 mph by the time they reached the city. The place struck him as eerie in the first signs of moonlight. It didn’t look much as though a nuclear war had happened, more like all the people had up and vanished.

  Tris moved her head around on a swivel. “This is so creepy. This place looks…”

  “Abandoned… and normal.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. Why hasn’t anyone either settled here or scavved it to the bone? Aside from the lack of people, you’d never know there’d been a war.”

  “Maybe there are and they go to bed early?” She offered a nervous laugh. “Hey, you passed it. Sign saying 119 back there.”

  He turned around, following her pointing finger onto another stretch of road leading west. Numerous cars littered it, again as though everyone in them had disappeared at the whim of an angry god snapping its fingers. Kevin slowed to a pace he felt sure he could outrun on foot to squeeze between them. Temptation gnawed at him. So many cars… so much possible salvage. Whatever got these bastards ain’t getting’ me.

  Worry of the Virus overpowered worry of ambush when he spotted a white hydrant in the grass on the side of the road by a fenced area leading up to a short concrete stairway. He stopped near it and stared at the handle.

  “Hang on.”

  He pushed the door as wide
as it would go before doing the limbo out of the car, afraid to touch any part of it. Once outside, he turned on a flashlight and did a walkabout. The Infected had been so squishy they hadn’t dented any of the metal panels, though it looked like he’d driven through the middle of an enormous jelly doughnut. He gagged. As if about to poke a lion in the ass with a sewing needle, he reached toward the back end of the trunk and keyed in the code with one glove-covered finger.

  Once satisfied his fingertip had no tainted blood on it, he snagged a wrench, and after about five minutes of effort, got the cap off the hydrant. He snarled at it. No water.

  “Turn the nut on top,” said Tris.

  “Duh. I’m―”

  “Freaked out.” She rubbed his back. “It’s okay.”

  Soon, water burbled out of it, far from the powerful cleansing stream he’d hoped for. She hurried to the trunk, returning a few seconds later with a plastic bucket.

  “Might not be much left. Don’t waste it.”

  While she filled the bucket, he grabbed a smaller pail, and they spent the next half hour washing off the Challenger. Bloody water gathered in puddles on the road. By then, the moon had come up.

  “We are not going near Denver on the way out. I don’t care if we need to take a shortcut through fuckin’ Canada.”

  She took both buckets as Kevin shut off the still-spewing hydrant, and threw them back in the trunk. He stared at the road, terrified of going anywhere near the slime.

  “How long is this shit lethal? What if someone comes walking by tomorrow and finds this?”

  Tris bit her lip. “Umm. I want to say forty-eight hours in the wild before it deteriorates, but direct sunlight on the road might shorten that… especially when it dries out. You want to camp here and watch the puddle?”

  “No.” He half started at the car. “Dammit. Infected are walking around an hour away from here. A puddle won’t make much difference.”

  “I got it… stay back.” Tris pounced onto the roof, avoiding stepping in the water, and slithered in the window.

  She drove the car forward far enough to give him dry land to walk on and hopped into the passenger seat. He stared at the Challenger. Someone else had driven his car… and didn’t steal it. He trudged around and got in. For a few minutes, he sat gazing into the distance without driving.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You drove my car. That’s like… walking up to someone you never met and grabbing their dick.”

  “Well, you weren’t going to step in the goo.” She got ready to pout at him.

  He took her hand before her mood could darken. “It’s okay. I’m…” Their eyes met. “Trying to accept that it didn’t piss me off.”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “It’s dark. We should go. How much farther is it?”

  He reached under his seat and pulled out an old atlas, losing a few minutes flipping pages while Tris held the flashlight. Eventually, he found the area. Finger to the page, he traced the line over 119 west from Boulder into the mountains.

  “Looks like about 17 or 18 miles. Half hour, maybe more if there’s something in the way.”

  Tris yawned. “You’re sure the locals are friendly?”

  Kevin dropped the book under the seat and accelerated hard. Alamo’s strange smile lingered in his thoughts. “If they’re not, things are about to get real hot in Hagerman.”

  32

  Nederland

  Unease about what had happened in Boulder dogged Kevin the whole trip along a windy canyon route west. Perhaps a particular feature of the geography of the area shielded it from the effects of nuclear strikes as close as Salt Lake or even Denver. Granted, Denver hadn’t taken a direct hit… if it had, it’d be like Dallas―a couple of iron girders and some scrap in an uninhabitable slab of glass―but where were the survivors? Why did the place look like a pre-war town where everyone had vanished straight out of their homes and cars?

  Tris’s posture stiffened. “Roadblock up ahead, two people behind it.”

  He squinted. Damn her eyes are good. “Ain’t seein’ nothin’ but black.”

  He slowed to below ten MPH. Soon, a pair of large flashlights shattered the darkness up ahead. The Challenger lurched as he hit the brakes a little too hard, and came to an abrupt stop a short distance from the rear ends of two huge dump trucks lying on their sides. Their beds opened to full extension, touching in the middle of the road to form a barrier reinforced by slabs of scrap metal. Each truck had a single figure standing on the side of the cab, half-protected by a dented wall of angled steel welded in place. The person on the right seemed much smaller, though Kevin couldn’t make out a lot of detail past the glare of the monster flashlights.

  “Nothin’ here for you. Turn right on ‘round, and git gone.” A man’s voice, tinged with age, lingered in the chilly mountain air for a few seconds, echoing off the canyon.

  A tiny electric motor whined as Kevin rolled down the driver’s window. “This Nederland? Got a shipment via Wayne’s roadhouse.”

  “Oh, yeah,” yelled a higher pitched voice. They had a girl on the younger end of teen standing guard detail. “Wayne got us on the shortwave. You Earl?”

  “Earl’s the name’a Wayne’s dog what’s been dead six years. I’m Kevin.”

  The man chuckled. “Just checkin’. Give us a sec an’ come on in. Emma, git the gate.”

  In the seconds after the flashlights cut out, a streak of light brown zoomed out of sight behind the shooter’s nest on the right-side truck. A figure in a tan duster over flannel and jeans rose to his feet behind the other one. Scraggly, pewter-colored hair hung in spiral strands from under a battered cowboy hat. He offered a brief wave and climbed a ladder to the road on the inside of the gate.

  Kevin’s hand clenched around the wheel when a large truck engine roared to life. It revved up a second later, and loud scraping from the right side of the gate made him wince. Since the truck lay on its side, ‘lowering’ the dump bed equated to one of the two large ‘doors’ moving out of his way. Hydraulic pumps whined at a steady drone until the clunk of metal on metal announced it could move no farther.

  A slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair, also wearing a cowboy hat, sprinted through the headlight beams to the other side. Soon after another diesel engine grumbled to life, the second truck dragged shut across the paving, revealing the older man standing on the road. He waved Kevin forward. A light touch on the pedal got the Challenger creeping forward. Despite plenty of room between the two behemoths, driving in the Nederland gate made him nervous for his baby.

  He eyed the cab on the left. Someone had re-mounted the engine ninety degrees off axis, to sit upright in the flipped truck. Up ahead, the road curved down and to the right. Kevin leaned into Tris and peered out her window. A few dim red glowing spots drifted around a handful of buildings at the end of a dirt road on the right, up in the hills. About two car-lengths from the front bumpers of the trucks, he stopped.

  “What the…”

  Tris sat up taller. “Looks like people with red flashlights.”

  The elder sentry walked around the car, holding up a device that resembled a motorcycle headlight mounted to a battery the size of a canned ham. He completed a circle and stopped by Kevin’s window, patting a hand on the door.

  “Ya had a long ride.”

  “Yeah.”

  The engine on the left increased pitch, and the truck bed scraped open again. Kevin’s eyes tracked the maybe-thirteen-year-old girl as she killed the engine, crawled out of the cab, and sprinted to the other half of the gate. An AK47 swayed on a strap across her back, too large for its owner. She ducked into the red cab and reached toward the middle of the dashboard area. The second half of the gate bucked across the road with a staccato grinding noise for a few seconds before slamming into the other truck.

  “Well, the town knows we’re here now.” Kevin smiled. “Guess your neighbors ain’t the most friendly lot.”

  “Not rightly, no.” The old man
gestured. “Take the road ahead until ya hit the circle. Go past it ‘till ya see a big orange buildin’ on your left on a corner. Park near that.”

  The second engine cut out, leaving the mountain in deathly silence.

  “Got it,” said Kevin.

  He pulled away, following the same road into a small town that, like Boulder, seemed to have survived the war more or less intact. With only starlight and his headlights to see by, he drove ahead at a modest fifteen miles per hour. A building with a rounded roof similar to old aircraft hangars―though much smaller―passed on the right. The ‘circle’ the old man mentioned turned out to be a patch of grass in a round curb barely twelve feet across. Kevin chuckled and drove as straight as he could past the hangar-shaped building. A brass sign on the corner read ‘mining museum.’

  “That looks interesting,” said Tris.

  “It’s probably a pickaxe, a shovel, and a dirt mound.” He grinned. “Maybe a nugget of quartz or something.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Damn, I’m tired. An hour ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to live to see tomorrow, now I’m making fun of someone who figured mining was interesting enough to deserve a museum.”

  Tris sighed.

  They drove past a dirt lot on the right where some manner of rusting old crane sat. A little further down, on the left, a squarish building with a flattened corner looked like the one the gate man mentioned.

  “Is that orange?”

  “Uhh.” Tris shrugged. “Beige? Tan?”

  “Close enough.” Kevin turned left and pulled up in a parking space near the double doors. The sheer mundanity of parking in a designated spot made him laugh. “Well, damn.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  He pushed the door open and leaned on the button to roll the window up. “Look at this place? It’s so out of the way it’s like even the war didn’t want to make the trip.”