The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “Oh, no…” Kevin shook his head. “I am not escorting a little kid into an area overrun with infected.”

  Zoe sniffled, making noises like she wanted to sob, but fought to keep quiet.

  Tris leaned over and patted her back.

  “Of course not.” Bill scooted his chair back and stood. “She’s safe here. I’m not about to put her in harm’s way. Her dad and older brother are stuck in Chicago and looking for help getting out.”

  Kevin propped his head up on one arm and tried to force visions of city streets teeming with rotting bodies out of his head. Bill walked off, deeper into the house. Ann got up and moved around behind Zoe, also trying to comfort her.

  Tris gave him ‘the look.’

  “How long ago was that?” Kevin shrugged at her. “We don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

  Zoe lost her war with silence and sobbed.

  Asshole. Yep. That’s me.

  Bill returned carrying a sheet of blue-lined paper with several folds. “Found this note in her jacket pocket. Her dad’s in Chicago, offering a thousand coins to whoever protects Zoe… and another thousand for someone to get him and his son outta there.”

  “How long ago did you find her?” asked Kevin.

  Zoe shifted, and clung to Ann, sniveling.

  “‘Bout two months ago on my way outta Harrisburg. Came across a flipped bus on the far side of Des Moines, so we decided to check it out for anything useful. Was a goddamned bloodbath inside. Not much to see but a couple pieces of luggage. Found her hiding in a suitcase.”

  Tris gasped.

  “What happened?” Kevin blinked.

  “No idea.” Bill settled into his chair with a defeated look. Air flapped past his lips. “She won’t talk about it.”

  “You drove me to Harrisburg for a thousand…” Tris winked. “Chicago’s closer.”

  Kevin wrestled with the idea of Infected. Harrisburg still haunted his dreams, and the ride in through Denver hadn’t helped. “I’m not sure it’s worth it… and I don’t mean money. What if we get out there and…”

  Tris cringed.

  Zoe sniffled, and pulled her face out of Ann’s shoulder. She stared at Kevin for what felt like an hour and wiped her eyes. “Daddy said I hadda get on the bus. They didn’t even want me ‘cause it was full. Dennis made them take me since I’m small.”

  Bill blinked. He leaned over the table, wide-eyed, and took Zoe’s hand. “Dennis?”

  “Yeah.” Zoe continued to stare at Kevin. “He like tells everyone what to do. They all listen to him. Cody an’ Daddy couldn’t fit on the bus, but Daddy made me get on.” She succumbed to crying again. “I didn’t wanna.”

  Ann rocked her, making comforting sounds. It took the girl a moment to collect herself enough to speak again.

  “I was sleeping, an’ this man dumped all the stuff outta this box and put me inside it. He told me to be quiet and don’t move. He said they’d let me out when it was safe, but no matter what I heard, I wasn’t s’posed ta open it…” She gazed into nowhere. “There was shooting and screaming, and someone pushed me around, but no one never opened it.”

  Kevin looked at Bill. “Had to be Infected. Bandits would’ve checked for salvage. Surprised they couldn’t figure out how to open a suitcase.”

  Tris bit her lip. “They can’t climb ladders…”

  “I couldn’t get out, but I was too scared to yell. He opened it.” Zoe reached for Bill.

  He lifted the girl from Ann’s lap and held her. “I can’t say for sure what happened there. We found the bus, but didn’t see any bodies.”

  They got up and walked away. “I can guess.” Kevin ran a hand over his hair, trying to find a strand of courage… the kind of courage that got his dad killed. “Thousand coins huh?”

  Bill dropped the handwritten note on the table. “Yeah.” He kissed Zoe atop the head. “You can even have the thousand he offered to whoever took care of her if you’ll do it.”

  Zoe looked up at Bill, shock on her face, and clung to him. A few seconds later, she squirmed around enough to stare into Kevin’s soul.

  Kevin pursed his lips and studied his lap. “I just have ‘sucker’ written across my forehead, don’t I?”

  Tris squeezed his arm.

  “We’ll go to Chicago.” He looked at Zoe, thinking of saying something about there being no guarantee her father or brother still lived, but couldn’t bring himself to spit it out. “Gotta swing by Wayne’s first, and drop off the payment for the ammo.”

  “Of course.” Bill handed Zoe back to Ann. “Meet me at the town hall, I’ll bring it out.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Zoe.

  Bill walked out.

  Kevin trudged outside, two steps behind Bill, wearing a smile until the child could no longer see his face, then worry reigned. I’m walking into a goddamned death trap. Bill went for his bicycle. Kevin fell hard into the driver’s seat of the Challenger and pulled on his gloves. Tris got in, grinning from ear to ear.

  “What are the chances you’ll stop in Omaha?”

  He glanced at her with a mischievous grin. “About as good as the chances of me getting some head right now.”

  She stared at him, aghast.

  “Kidding.” He flicked the switches on, filling the car with the low hum of active electronics. “I love that face you made.” One hand gripped the wheel and he glanced at the rearview screen. “’Course, I wouldn’t object if you wanted to.”

  Tris punched him in the arm, laughing.

  “Two big cities…” He shook his head. “I dunno.”

  She stopped smiling.

  A short distance later, he pulled up alongside the orange building. Bill, Brett, and Pete waited with two cardboard boxes marked with red letters: “$25 Pennies.”

  Kevin stopped and hit the trunk release before getting out. They handed over the boxes one after the other and he set them in the trunk.

  “Bill… tell me about Omaha. How bad is it?”

  “Well, you only need to get to the airport. It’s on the northeast part of the city, mostly surrounded by water. Closest bridge is north a ways of it, but if I remember right, there’s a road that runs along the edge of the river that should let you skirt most of the interior. For what it’s worth, we spent a couple days at the airport terminal and didn’t see one Infected.”

  “They don’t like water,” said Tris, behind him. “Virus causes hydrophobia.”

  Kevin chuckled. “Well, it’s on the way. Suppose we can at least look.” He shook hands with Bill. “Assuming we don’t die in Chicago, see you in a couple weeks either way.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.” Bill winked.

  “Too late.” Kevin gazed up at the clouds. “Already agreed to do this.”

  Bill chuckled. Tris smirked.

  Zoe came running down the road, carrying a cloth bundle larger than her torso. She raced over and held it up to him.

  “What’s this?” Kevin accepted it; he peeled open a few layers to find what appeared to be dust-hopper jerky and a folded paper with childish writing on it.

  “It’s food for your drive.” Zoe took a step back, clasping her hands in front of her. Hope radiated from her eyes. “An’ a letter for my Dad an’ Cody.”

  “Thanks.” He looked at Tris. “Might as well get going.”

  After they got in, he took a breath and dropped it in gear. Zoe lingered in the rearview, a tiny staring figure growing ever smaller as the car approached the gate. The eager hope on her face crushed him; he knew he’d come back with bad news―if he came back.

  Kevin sighed. “This is what killed my dad…”

  “What?” Tris looked up.

  Kevin wrung his hands on the wheel. “This whole ‘conscience’ thing. Why am I even doing this? I’m an asshole.”

  Tris rubbed her wrists. “Yeah… you are.” She winked.

  36

  Terminal

  Much to Kevin’s surprise, the handoff of coins at Wayne’s came with no surprises
. Alamo kept true to his word. He’d restocked some 7.62 for the M60s, traded in the odd boxy rifle with the tiny bullets for more .45 ammo and some 9mm for Tris, as well as some provisions. With 9804 coins to his name according to the ledger, the notion of driving to Chicago felt like the worst possible idea in the world. Whenever he came close to forgetting the whole thing, Zoe’s face would appear, and he’d grumble. Bad enough he had Tris making doe-eyes at him about the Omaha situation… as pretty as she was, her powers of guilt-fu had nothing on a nine-year-old who’d managed to survive an Infected attack.

  By the grace of a suitcase. Maybe I should carry one around big enough for me…

  The ride from New Mexico to Nebraska had been quiet. Quiet being a relative term. Two buggies, a rust-bomb of an old Ford van, and a pack of five biker-bandits later, hints of Omaha started showing up on the mangled remains of street signs. He pondered the lack of bullet holes in the metal; the farther west one went, the more shot-up the signage got. People have more reason to save ammo in the east, I guess.

  Tris sat rigid, kneading her hands in her lap and looking as frightened now as she did in the moments after the Enclave guy eluded them. She’d put her leather shirt back on, as well as the original pair of jeans he’d bought her from Wayne’s. Her black shoes sat unworn on the floor in front of her. For most of the morning, she’d had her feet up on the dash, letting them ‘breathe.’

  He slowed as they approached the river. A grid of pea-green ironwork surrounded them, enshrouding both lanes of a split bridge spanning the water.

  “You okay?” He slalomed a maze of smashed cars repurposed into barriers.

  She slipped her shoes on. “Looks like someone started setting up defenses.”

  “Probably pre-Virus. Big cities used to have substantial survivor populations. Looks like they wanted to slow down approaching vehicles to make them easy targets. Not that unusual. Same thing at Glimmertown.”

  The road cleared after forty meters, letting him up to about seventy on the bridge. No defenses had been installed on the inside, leaving the road wide open.

  He squinted at a sign marked ‘Eppley Airfield’ over an off-ramp right after the bridge gave way to solid ground again. “Well, I don’t see any giant buildings yet… so maybe we have a chance.”

  “Thanks.” She grabbed his arm. “This means so much to so many people.”

  “Yeah…”

  He shook his head as he blew past a stop sign at the end of the ramp, turning left and zooming under an overpass. Twenty yards later, a little green ‘airport’ sign with a silhouette of a plane caught his eye soon after, and he hooked a left. A tall, narrow building passed on the left, brick red and shaped a bit like a barn. Numerous cars littered a grassy island between two lanes. All their windows had been smashed, doors taken and seats gone. Probably got all the engine parts too. As irritating as it was to see nothing he could scavenge, that people had been here to loot the wrecks at all made him feel better.

  He followed the road around a slight left, passing what appeared to have been an electrical substation on the right. Someone had already ransacked it and tore the place to scraps. The giant green metal shape of the bridge he’d crossed moments ago loomed up ahead, though the road he followed headed to a T intersection abutting the water. A left turn would take him under the span, but he had a feeling the airport was in the other direction.

  A huge silvery metal warehouse took up most of the view on the right as he accelerated down a two-lane road parallel to the river. The building had no windows and no signs of life or activity. His heart beat faster at the thought the massive structure might be full of Infected, who wouldn’t care much about the barbwire tipped fence around the place.

  The road continued for some distance, surrounded by the resurgence of nature overwhelming the remnants of humanity. Grass as high as the windows swayed on both sides, with the occasional house trailer visible on the left among thick trees. If anyone still tried to live there, he couldn’t tell. A small sign reading ‘J Pershing’ went by on the left, soon before the road took a sweeping left curve.

  A red and white gas station on the right attracted Tris’s attention. “There’s a little store there… petro something?”

  “I don’t want to waste battery. Last thing I wanna do is get stranded over a couple of damn Twinkies.”

  “What’s a Twinkie?” She blinked at him.

  “Accordin’ to Wayne, it’s some kind of alien ration. Back in the 1950s, the government made contact with aliens at Roswell, but they kept it all quiet. They gave us some technology stuff, like food that never goes bad. Sometimes you find them here and there and you can still eat it even a hundred years later.”

  She stuck her tongue out. “Eww. What the hell do they taste like?”

  He shrugged. “Sweet. They don’t taste like much but sweet.”

  “Sounds like nice aliens… they gave it away?” Tris raised an eyebrow.

  Kevin shrugged. “Wayne said they had a thing for cows. Took some in trade.”

  She frowned. “I think he was teasing you.”

  “What, you don’t think some civilization from another planet drove flew gajillion miles for a good steak dinner?”

  “Not really.”

  At the end of the curve, the land on the right of the road looked scorched to bare dirt. The rad meter ticked up all of a sudden to 055. Kevin stomped on the accelerator, going up to almost ninety past a structure resembling an old quonset hut, covered in rust. Smashed warehouses occupied both sides of the street as it opened into an industrial campus. Parking lots crammed with melted cars drew a gasp from Tris.

  “People were working when it happened. They never even saw their families again.”

  “Yeah…” Kevin cringed at the damage to the upper floor of the building; the second story lay exposed, no trace whatsoever of the roof. “At least they didn’t feel anything.”

  He slowed to fiftyish and skidded around a left turn when the road ended at another T. An ‘airline terminal’ sign pointing left was all the prodding he needed to pick a direction. The rad meter had ticked back to 018 by the time the airport field came into view on the left a minute later. He steered across lanes intended for oncoming traffic and drove over a collapsed chain link fence onto the tarmac. A handful of planes clustered by a terminal building covered in green leaves and weeds. Gaping holes in the walls brimmed with vegetation that seemed to be tearing the airport down in geological time.

  “Any idea where this guy is?” Kevin slowed to a jogging pace, leaning to the window to peer up at the tail ends of airliners going overhead.

  “Look at that…” Tris pointed.

  At the end of the row of planes, a massive quantity of techno-scrap gathered in piles. Airplane parts, computers, unidentifiable machine bits, and even a few android limbs jutted out of row upon row. Someone had organized a junkyard out of high-tech detritus. He would’ve been excited to find so much apparently-useful stuff, if not for most of the world having no use for anything of the sort these days. A giant airliner, the last in the row and closest to the scrapyard, showed signs of life―light in the windows near the front end.

  “There we go.” Kevin looked around, gut tightening at the idea there may be Infected waiting out of sight, ready to pounce as soon as he let his guard down. “This is… too easy.”

  “They’re not supposed to live long, remember? Maybe the Virus worked correctly here.”

  He studied the plane. The only way in appeared to be a boarding gate, which extended from the main airport building. Accordion fold sides had stretched almost to the point of tearing, but the cushioned collar on the front end kept a tight seal against the hull.

  “Shit. Looks like we’ve got to go into the building.” He stared at a white sign bearing ‘A9’ on the side of the boarding tunnel. “Remember A9.”

  “Okay.” Tris secured the Velcro fasteners on her shoes.

  A few minutes of driving later, Kevin found a side door into the terminal building by a p
ack of baggage carts. He parked, shut the car down, and grabbed his new rifle with the automatic scope. Infected weren’t so scary at three hundred yards.

  The door led to a room full of conveyor equipment. A jumbled pile of suitcases at one end lay where the machinery dumped them. Printouts, yellowed and wrinkled, adorned the cinderblock wall to the left. It took him a minute to grasp what the images showed, but soon he realized they were X-rays of strange or embarrassing items inside luggage. Phallic-shaped devices, handcuffs, live animals, and some unidentifiable things he couldn’t begin to guess at their purpose.

  “These people must’ve been bored.” He sighed and pushed open an interior door that led to a space behind a counter.

  Four ancient computers sat dead on the red linoleum, one monitor knocked to the floor. He moved left, through a white door on two-way hinges that let it swing in both directions. A few steps deeper in, a skeleton lay in a pile of rot. Recognizable vestiges of a blue uniform with a skirt bore the same logo as what adorned the counter behind him. Here and there in both directions, more skeletal remains lay. Though, so much time had passed, the air smelled only of sickly mustiness.

  “Panic…” Tris squatted by the dead employee. “I bet they trampled her trying to escape the fireball.” She sighed. “Can you imagine? Being thousands of miles away from home when the world ends…”

  “I don’t think there really is a good place to be in that case.” He looked around, trying to orient himself. After spotting a sign for terminal A, he walked in that direction.

  Tris caught up, AK held in one hand, and threaded her left arm around his right. “With the people you love.”

  Hey now… Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only putting up with having a woman around because you still owe me like 800 coins. He smirked. Okay, the sex isn’t bad. He sighed. Okay, maybe I would miss her. “Yeah… I guess.”

  The trail of trample victims continued along the length of a wide concourse that brought him to an area full of seats and huge, dark display boards. Painted letters mentioned ‘arrivals’ and ‘departures,’ but none of the parts that lit up with information held anything but dead flat panel monitors. Terminal A was easy enough to find from there, and the boarding tunnel of Gate 9 glowed yellow from the effect of the sun on the thin material.