Kevin found a few stacks of shopping bags behind the counter. For kicks, he bashed open the register and took all the coins, loose and rolled, while ignoring the paper currency. They spent a little while packing up anything that hadn’t fallen apart or that looked too frilly to survive life. He lugged five shopping bags per hand out into the street and turned to wait for her to follow.
“You know, this is the part where the Infected come after us… when our hands are full.”
Tris, carrying an equal number of bags, squeezed past the doorway and hurried toward the Challenger. “You know before the war, I think we would’ve been carrying enough money in clothing to like buy a house or something.”
“Who would pay that much for kid clothes?” He shook his head.
“Rich people.” She shrugged. “Hey, not like money matters anymore, right?”
They packed the trunk as well as the back seat, re-locked the car, and resumed their journey into the mazelike debris field. The utter lack of anything else moving got under his skin. By the time they reached the curb in front of the telephone building, his hands shook.
“What’s wrong?” Tris put a hand on his shoulder.
“This is too easy. It’s too quiet.” He looked left and right. “We’re going to walk in that door, and this entire street is going to be filled with Infected.”
“At least you’re optimistic.” She bit her lip and looked down. “And here I am worrying that this ‘number’ is going to be a dead end and I get to feel like a total failure all over again.”
“You are not a failure.” He walked up a short concrete path connecting the front of the office building to the street past a dead fountain and some curved benches. “Okay, so now’s the moment of truth.”
Tris chuckled.
The front doors had been reduced to metal frames so long ago that no trace of glass remained anywhere in sight. Something in the lobby moved; he froze and raised the AK.
“Careful…” Tris also aimed toward the doors. “Might be a kid or something.”
“This isn’t a grocery store with a huge stockpile of food. Some kid wouldn’t be surviving in there.” He crept a few steps forward, squinting to see into the dark.
“Scavver?” whispered Tris.
Another step closer, and figures became clear in the dim lobby: seven or eight people in bloody, tattered prewar clothes. Vacant stares, greyish skin, and the listless way that they all stood around staring into space got his heart slamming against his breastbone. One woman moaned at the ceiling; she almost glanced in their direction, but seemed to lack the motivation to do much more than stand there.
“Shit,” he whispered.
“Infected?” asked Tris, edging closer.
Kevin let off a nervous, whispery chuckle. “I think they’re customer service workers.”
Tris rolled her eyes.
“Oh, you’re right. Infected aren’t that bloodthirsty.”
“What are you talking about?” whispered Tris.
“How have I heard of customer service and you, Miss Went to School, haven’t?” He winked.
“I know what they are. I’m confused why you’re saying it. I think you’re mistaking them for telemarketers.”
“What?”
“Customer service people don’t call out. People hated telemarketers.”
“Never mind. Joke from a ‘historical documentary’ I saw once. You know, the whole zombie-like ‘someone please shoot me’ face?” He chuckled. “I’m trying not to think too much about what we’re looking at… though, they do seem a bit more, umm…”
“Unmotivated?” Tris moved up to the door, rifle poised. “They’re not even looking at us. No way they haven’t heard us this close. Hey, you’re right. That woman’s badge says ‘customer service’ on it.”
He cackled.
That noise made all seven of the Infected look at him.
“Oh shit.” He shot the nearest one.
Tris opened fire. He drilled two dark-skinned men in white shirts scrambling to climb over the reception desk. Scuffing outside made him whip around. A handful of Infected spilled out of a mostly-intact section of fallen e-tram tube and charged up the sidewalk past the fountain.
His first shot struck the lead man in the chest and killed an Asian woman with most of her cheek missing behind him as well.
“Inside. Bottleneck the hallway,” yelled Tris as she let off four rapid shots.
The Infected outside didn’t possess the same lethargic disinterest as the others, but Kevin still had enough time to take five careful shots and put them down before they made it to the door. He ducked in after Tris, who crossed the lobby to an interior hallway. A metal door slammed open a foot and change before it struck a metal desk, trapping a pudgy man in a blue shirt. He moaned, forcing his head and one arm past the gap while raking his fingers feverishly at the air, reaching for Kevin. His continuous effort to shove his way in repeatedly banged the door against the desk.
She shot him through the door. The Infected fell over backward with a low, gurgling wheeze. Kevin walked sideways behind Tris, swiveling his head side to side to watch the lobby as well as her. A screeching woman with no skin on her left arm from fingertip to elbow fell down out of the drop ceiling. Her blood-soaked shirt clumped up around her armpits exposing breasts, and she had nothing else on save for one high-heeled shoe.
Kevin shot her in the head before she got up. “Must’ve been one hell of an office party.”
“What?” asked Tris.
“Here come the nukes, I’m going to fuck someone.” He smirked. “Last-minute panic.”
“Kevin, the Infected didn’t happen for years after the war… She’s a survivor.” Tris sighed. “Was.”
“Explain the…” He glanced at a logo on the wall. “AT&T workers in the lobby?”
“Died in the war and survivors took their clothes? Probably thought the ID badges were jewelry.”
A moan preceded her firing twice into the hallway ahead of them.
Kevin jumped and almost screamed when the ceiling overhead gave out and a trio of Indian men fell on top of him, dragging him to the floor. Blind with panic, he used the rifle to shove them away and rolled to the side. He shot two as fast as he could move the AK, but the third lunged forward and grabbed the end of the rifle in one hand, his leg in the other.
“Nnnnngh!” roared the Infected, straining to bite him on the face.
Kevin stomped his free boot into the man’s shoulder to hold him back while reaching for the .45.
Teeth closed around the leather over his shin.
He put the tip of the .45 to the man’s skull.
Infected eyes rotated upward and crossed, trying to stare at the gun.
Boom.
Brain and gore spattered the wall.
He kicked the corpse away and scooted backward toward Tris who hadn’t stopped firing in slow, even single shots.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” he wheezed. After two breaths, he reached past his foot to grab the tip of the AK’s barrel, and pulled it into his arms.
A moan came from the ceiling. He snapped his head back, looking up. An oldish woman in a white shirt peered at him from the hole the three men had created. He raised the .45, aimed at her face, and fired. She rocked from the bullet strike; Kevin flung himself to the side, rolling out of the way as blood and corpse fell onto the carpet where he’d been a second earlier.
Tris grabbed his shoulder and hauled him upright, wide-eyed with worry. “You hit?”
“No.” He stared in horror at tooth marks in his boot, and made a meep sound. “Not that I noticed… You can check me thoroughly for scratches later.”
“Not now.” She gave him a hurt look.
“Obviously not now. I ain’t stripping in the middle of an Infected shitstorm.”
“You’re such an asshole.” She thumped him on the arm.
He grinned. “Thanks.”
That got a laugh out of her.
Tris kicked in a door, aimed, and l
owered the rifle. “What the hell are we looking for?”
“I have no damn idea.” He pushed a door on the other side open, finding an empty conference room. “You’re the tech person.”
She stormed down the hallway.
He started to follow, but turned back at a loud chorus of screeching moans. Another ten or so Infected spilled down from the second floor, heedlessly flinging themselves headfirst through the hole.
“Tris,” yelled Kevin, as he pumped rounds into the pile of bodies.
She lent a few shots to the purge. Only one of the writhing bodies made it to their feet. Tris’ last shot put a neat red dot in the center of a woman’s forehead and detonated the back of her skull. Blood ran out of her nose in two trails. Once a stunning straight-haired blonde in a pink blouse and black skirt, the Infected stared with a vacant look for a second or two before falling over backward onto the heap of bodies.
Kevin bowed his head, offering a moment of silence for the dead.
“It’s just not right,” whispered Tris. “Those people survived a nuclear war only to die because of the Enclave.”
“Uhh… none of them look old enough to have survived the war.”
“Don’t be an ass.” She kicked a plastic water bottle with an AT&T logo down the hall. “You know what I mean.”
“Think that’s the last of them?” He removed the magazine from the AK and repacked it with loose bullets from his right jacket pocket.
“Didn’t you load another mag?” asked Tris.
“Yeah, but I grabbed another fistful of bullets. If it didn’t weigh sixty pounds, I’d have strapped the whole damn box to my back.”
She moved up to another door. Office. “Damn.”
They picked through a number of offices, conference rooms, and a few large spaces full of cubicles before finding a cafeteria. Tris didn’t even go in, continuing past it down the hall.
“Maybe we need to go upstairs?”
“There’s gotta be a network room somewhere.” Her worry of Infected faded as she stomped along, checking door after door.
More offices.
Kevin followed, as wary as she wasn’t. Twice, he shot shadows, making Tris scream in surprise, but nothing bled.
“Here.” She pointed at a door that wouldn’t open. “This has to be something.”
“Can you open it?”
She pointed at a black plastic box on the wall. “RFID card reader. No physical key.” She threw herself against the door but couldn’t move it. “Probably electromagnetic locks.”
“That’s a good sign, right? Still power in the building.”
“A place like this probably had its own solar farm on the roof for redundancy’s sake.” She gave him a nervous look. “Guess I could go search the dead for a badge that’ll open this.”
“Can’t you fiddle with the wires?”
“No… it’s not directly connected to the lock. This reads a card and sends it off to a computer somewhere, which then sends a separate signal to the lock if the ID checks out.” She stared at the top of the door. “Assuming the security system is still operating.”
“So…”
“I think I’m going to vote brute force here. Back up a bit.” She shuffled about five steps left to create an angle, and aimed at the top of the door.
Kevin obliged, and stuck his fingers in his ears.
She put few shots along the top of the door, and the one on the left swayed forward an inch or so. The bullets had savaged a metal block near the ceiling that sputtered and sparked, and tore a matching plate off the top of the door.
Tris shoved it aside and walked in. “Well… this is something.”
Kevin shook his head to help ease the ringing in his ears while following her into a large room with nine long rows of technology crammed into rack mounts. The floor shifted under their feet, loose tiles in some manner of suspension. A missing panel revealed a two-foot deep space beneath the floor packed full of wires. Small workstation desks ran the length of the left wall, each with a pair of flat panel monitors. Two displayed screen savers of a bouncing AT&T logo, three systems had blue screens full of text, and the remaining seven appeared to be off―or dead.
Kevin glanced right at a poster on the wall. An athletic cartoon man in a toga emblazoned with UNIX rammed a sword through a pudgy man in a shirt-and-tie carrying a briefcase labeled ‘Windows.’
“Huh.” He scratched his head.
“What?” Tris looked up from one of the computers.
He gestured at the poster. “I remember reading something about there being Unix in ancient Rome, but I thought they were the ones who got fat.”
“Eunuchs,” muttered Tris.
“Right. They chop off a guy’s balls to make Unix.”
Her eyebrows formed a flat line across her head. “I have to assume you’re not making a joke you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“You’re right. I’m already lost.”
She poked around the tall equipment cabinets. “Well, I suppose this is telephone stuff… but how the hell. Argh. We’re right here and I still don’t know what to look for.”
“Such as?”
She held her arms out to the sides. “A way to connect to that damn number.”
“What?” He shrugged. “Like a phone?”
Her eyebrows furrowed again, harder.
Kevin grinned. “Like the phones that have been sitting on the desks of every office we kicked in so far?”
“Stop.” She sighed. “Okay, maybe I didn’t want to believe it was that simple and I’d need to crawl hip deep into some ancient mainframe.”
“What’s a mainframe?” Kevin scratched his head.
Tris dragged herself to the closest workstation and put a hand on the phone. “A big computer.” She closed her eyes, took a breath, and lifted the handset to her head. “Shit. Dead.”
“Sorry.”
She moved from desk to desk to the right, testing phones. When she got to a workstation where the blue ball logo bounced around the screen, her eyes shot wide as soon as the phone got close to her ear. Her entire body trembled.
“It… it’s on.”
Kevin leaned close enough to hear an odd noise emanating from the handset. “What the heck is that?”
She hung up, but didn’t let go. “Dial tone.”
15
Contact
Tris stared at her hand, stark white against the black plastic handset. The name ‘Bharat Sivakumar’ scrolled across the top of the phone’s screen, followed by ‘Systems Administrator II.’ Only a few button presses stood between her and finding out if her father had really died years ago, or if another Enclave lie had ruined her life.
Her knees weakened and she slid into the old grey office chair.
Kevin kept glancing back and forth from her to the door, as if he expected a thousand Infected to come rushing in at any moment. His desire to get the hell out of the city as fast as possible showed clear on his face.
I have to do this. She continued hesitating until the random worry about a drone strike on Nederland played out in her thoughts. Abby not knowing if she’d gotten sick, then Abby sick, and then having to tell her goodbye…
Tris growled and tore the phone off the handset, punching in 6505550447.
“We’re sorry. You must first dial a one before calling this number,” said a recorded female voice.
Tris slammed the phone down and screamed, “Go fuck yourself!”
“Nathan?” asked Kevin, trying to sound gentle.
“No… no… just a stupid architecture policy.”
“Something wrong with the building?”
Tris slammed her head into the desk. “I can’t. Please stop.”
“What?”
She huffed. “Sometimes you’re cute with that not knowing thing but right now I’m… I can’t.”
He looked genuinely confused. “What?”
“Never mind.” She dialed again, this time adding a leading one.
Ringing emana
ted from the phone. Her heart rate slowed and her throat tightened.
“It’s… ringing.”
The ringtone played three more times before a sharp click and silence. Her heart sank. Figures. What was I expecting? A phone call fifty years after everything fell apart? As if.
“Damn. It’s dead.”
Kevin walked over and grasped her shoulder.
“Tris,” said a voice from the phone, laced with age, confidence, and… familiarity.
Her mouth hung open.
“What?” asked Kevin.
“D-Dad?” rasped Tris. “Are you really there?”
“It is good to hear your voice, Sprite.”
She leaned into Kevin, shaking and crying. “Dad…”
“I’m sure you have many questions. I have so much I need to tell you, but right now there is not time.”
“They told me you were dead.” She sniffled.
“I need your help, Sprite. I’ll explain everything as soon as it’s possible. I cannot stop the Virus without your help.”
She scowled at the bouncing blue AT&T logo on the monitor. “I’ve been down that road before.” A crash of inadequacy clenched her gut. She had the cure. She failed. “I… want you to be real too much. How do I know this isn’t Nathan messing with me?”
“That is an entirely reasonable worry given what has happened to you.”
His voice seemed to flow out of the phone, warming her body as it saturated her muscles. The safety and comfort conveyed by his firm, but placid, tone brought her back to being little again, fiddling with some half-built toy robot while he sat behind her. Her need to have this be real made her wary.
“I… can’t believe you’d wait so long to tell me you didn’t die. I want to believe you, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“Much about the Enclave defies what you have been led to believe,” said Dad. “I promise you that I am no deception from that fool Savros.”
“Who?” asked Tris.
“Nathan.” Contempt rang clear in her father’s voice. “I am sorry, but I could not do anything to stop his plan to send you out to the resistance. I had hoped that either you or Doctor Andrews would find the cipher in the data.”
The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 106
