The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Kevin’s heart fluttered. “Oh, please tell me that’s good crying.”

  She sniffled. “Red marks, but it didn’t break skin.” Limp, she clung to him to keep from falling over. “Dammit, why didn’t you take the vaccine? You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “I’m an overconfident asshole with a soft spot for our little girl.” He grasped her cheek and stared into her eyes.

  Zoryn gave them about thirty seconds before he cleared his throat. “Sound travels down here. We need to go.”

  Kevin zipped up his jumpsuit as soon as she let go.

  “I don’t understand anything anymore.” Tris hovered at his side. “Why the hell would Nathan arrange for me to get so many boosts?”

  “Well… either he wanted to make sure you’d stay alive long enough to carry that surprise firecracker to the resistance in Harrisburg… you know what they think of the Wildlands.” Kevin counted three rounds left in his magazine and decided to swap it for a full one.

  “I suppose.” She looked down. “Speaking of overconfident assholes… I bet he never imagined I’d survive and come anywhere near him again.”

  Zoryn cleared his throat.

  “All right, all right.” Kevin put an arm around Tris and hurried after their escorts, who walked as though they hadn’t been injured at all. “Damn. I gotta get me some nanites.”

  Tris chuckled. “Would you save those for Abby too?”

  He tapped his chin. “Yeah… probably.”

  She gave him an adoring look. “Those don’t come in an autoinjector. It’s a surgical process to implant the control node.”

  “Or…” Kevin held up a finger. “Maybe Nathan didn’t do it. Maybe he doesn’t even know you have all those boosts.”

  “Huh?” She squinted at him.

  Kevin shrugged. “Dear old Dad?”

  22

  Please Follow

  Light flared from the rails, whenever a clean spot caught the infrared lights from Tris’ goggles. She walked with her head down, burdened by the weight of doubt. Kevin’s attempt at a wisecrack got her wondering. Would Nathan have really initiated―or even approved―her augmentation? She couldn’t remember being told about the surgery, which meant they’d likely done it to her while she floated in a tank in the ‘hidden Resistance safe house.’

  She’d believed Nathan a hacker who opened the door to her Detention cell and walked her step-by-step through an escape, telling her when to hide in an alcove and when to run so the guards didn’t see her. The entire event replayed in her mind, the worst forty-something minutes of her life sprinting barefoot down hallways in the middle of an Enclave prison before crawling into a filthy ventilation system. One day she’d been looking forward to going to college—the next, a fugitive escaping prison for refusing to marry.

  By the time she’d emerged in the maintenance conduit, her Detention jumpsuit had turned black. Or had it always been black? She wanted to say it had been light grey, or even white… but in her memory, she looked down at herself and saw black… like she wore at that moment. She hadn’t kept it for long. A man supposedly working for the Resistance met her in the conduit and brought her to a room filled with glass-top tables loaded with terminals and CPU cases. Everything had looked so haphazard, she had immediate doubts about her odds of survival, but anything seemed better than sitting in prison until she agreed to marry that abusive shit.

  Not ten minutes after arriving in the ‘Resistance safe house,’ she’d stripped and climbed into a tank. With a facemask holding an air hose to her mouth, an IV in her arm for nutrition, and a plug behind her ear, she spent two weeks unconscious… which had felt like closer to eight months in virtual reality. How many of the men and women who’d taught her to fight, shoot, hide, pick locks, and survive had been real? How many might have been computer programs simulating people?

  They must’ve loaded me up with implants while I was in the tank… nanosurgery.

  She furrowed her brow while poking at the dusty scratch lines on Kevin’s back. By the luck of whatever higher power may or may not exist, the Infected hadn’t drawn blood. He had to hate not having his jacket.

  Maybe Nathan did arrange it. We’re all taught how dangerous the Wildlands are… She thought about that poor boy from the Boatmen compound. How long had he been kept chained to the wall, let out only to run food to other caged unfortunates? How many people had he witnessed forced to murder each other for sport? She didn’t even want to consider how many had died there… or that the Enclave appeared to be perpetuating the mindless violence.

  They could do so much to help humanity. Why do they want it to burn? She stared at her left hand, opening and closing her fingers. Sure, she’d been made strong, but no more so than a human could be. A bigger person, a man, could’ve been boosted more… her frame could only take so much. Still, if the numbers on the fake Resistance man’s equipment had been correct, her physical strength hovered near the upper five percent of human potential, not counting outliers.

  She shivered.

  “Here we are,” said Zoryn.

  Tris blinked at the time display showing 12:08. Damn, my head’s not here.

  Their two escorts had stopped by the edge of a platform. Over a span of about thirty yards, the right side of the train tunnel opened out to an area with columns, benches, and ticket vending machines. Several doors and corridors branched off from it. She walked over to them and leaned forward to peer around. The metal-capped edge of the station floor came up to her chest while she stood in the recessed tracks. Lettering on the distant wall read ‘Stanford.’

  Ancient papers in various shades of light and dark clung like a coating of tatter to columns; some offered tutoring, some announced concerts, a handful showed a picture of a lost dog. About a third of the seats in a waiting area had collapsed, and rat shit dotted everything. A handful of rodents scurried around, their eyes glinting in the night vision panorama before her.

  Zoryn climbed up and reached down to help Naomi. Tris pulled herself up before giving Kevin a hand. Naomi shot her a look part amusement part playful jealousy. In the middle of the innermost wall, a four-escalator wide hallway led up at an angle, presumably to the surface, but a yellow collapsible barrier closed it off, secured with chains and padlocks.

  Kevin pointed. “That way?”

  “No,” said Naomi. “They’ve got sensors in that tunnel and a stronger barricade at the top. Nothing we have on us can dent it, and they’d know someone came up that way.”

  Tris crossed the platform to the ticket booth. Bulletproof glass offered a view of a small office, long-dead computers, and one small door into a dingy office. No way through here. She glanced back at Zoryn and Naomi. “So where are we going?”

  “Here.” Naomi pointed left and walked off to the left.

  As Kevin passed behind her, a surge of worry, relief, and the need to hold him took her. She grabbed him and clung protectively, not wanting to let him go into this place that could kill them both. He flashed a smile, that cocky rogue’s grin that ten years of driving around getting shot at still hadn’t managed to punish out of him.

  Unable to help herself, she leaned up and kissed him.

  He brushed her hair away from her eyes. The intensity of his smile faded, changing its character. The look he gave her could’ve said it’s not too late to go back as easily as I’m gonna be right next to you.

  The squeak of Naomi’s shoes on the tile pulled her out of the smoldering stare, and the enraging worry that Nathan would hurt Abby if she didn’t do… something… got her moving again. What’s wrong with me? How did I go from feeling sorry for Abby to feeling like she’s mine and I’d rip the testicles off anyone who even looks at her wrong? She grumbled.

  Naomi exited the platform on the left side beyond the ticket booth, and headed down a corridor past two bathrooms on the right, an ‘employees only’ door on the left, stopping at a large plywood slab bearing a faded ‘We’re Improving!’ poster on it featuring a smiling construction wor
ker.

  The slightly taller woman took hold of the giant piece of plywood and tugged. With a grunt, she pulled it aside, swinging it flat against the wall to reveal a battered pair of elevator doors.

  “Oh, they even installed an elevator for us. Nice.” Kevin grinned.

  Zoryn crunched over broken tiles and coils of wire. He grabbed at the metal sliding door and jerked back with his body weight, moving it a few inches. Kevin approached to help. Tris handed the AK to Naomi, and lent a hand, and between the three of them, they forced the door open, bending the metal.

  Tris stuck her head into the gap, inhaling the overwhelming smells of wet earth, metal, and a salty, biting aroma she assumed to be rat piss. About three stories overhead, rats darted around hanging hoses on the underside of an elevator cab. One leapt to the wall and scurried out of sight into a hole. A nimbus of infrared glare followed her gaze down the shaft to the bottom, about fifty feet further below.

  “I guess we’re going down?” asked Tris.

  “Correct,” said Zoryn. “This will take you to another tunnel that leads to a basement annex of the school. No one’s been in there for decades.”

  “Why would a school have a secret tunnel to a subway station?” asked Kevin.

  Naomi gave him an impressed eyebrow lift. “We think the tunnel was made later during the initial formation of the Enclave. Back when they were a mixture of intellectuals, scientists, and whatever government forces decided to use the shelter here. Our best guess is they wanted an escape route, but never needed it… and eventually forgot about it.”

  “You should probably leave your rifles with us,” said Zoryn. “Enclave citizens aren’t allowed to possess firearms, and those things stand out as low tech. You might be able to hide your handguns in your pockets.”

  “I’m not going in there without at least this.” Tris squeezed the Beretta.

  “Good thing you left the katana in the car.” Kevin winked. He handed his AK to Naomi again. “Sorry about that ricochet.”

  She grasped it, frowning. “Yeah… no problem. Just make sure you come back and get it.” Her glower softened to an expression of ‘be careful’ and she clapped him on the arm. “I don’t want to, uhh, you know, have to look at it since it caused me so much pain.”

  Sensing the tease in her tone, he chuckled. “Yeah. That’s the plan.”

  Tris shook Zoryn’s hand. “Thanks for the escort. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to find in there, but it feels like the right thing to do.” Does it, or is this part of my programming? What other personality alterations did they do while I was plugged in? All of it was so new at the time… One had to be eighteen or older to get an interface jack. She reached up and touched a finger to the little socket behind her left ear. Everyone had to get them installed after high school graduation. Some kids couldn’t wait and got them the day they turned eighteen. Others dreaded it and tried like hell to avoid it until the security forces dragged them to the clinic. Tris fell into the smallest group―ambivalent. She hadn’t cared enough to get it until the security people showed up to ask about her lack of patriotism, but she didn’t fight them either when they told her she had to have it.

  Okay. Here goes. She stared at the elevator shaft. Why do I feel like I’m climbing down the rabbit hole? “I’m late. I’m late.”

  She grasped the door and pulled herself in, searching for handholds.

  “Late?” asked Kevin.

  “A very important date.” She spotted a ladder recessed in the wall on the right and reached for it.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Kevin.

  Zoryn and Naomi snickered.

  Tris grabbed a rung covered in dust. Speaking of late… it has been awhile since my ‘friend’ stopped by. She sighed, feeling a pang of sorrow. Stress. They harvested my ovaries already. With a contemptuous grumble, she leapt into the shaft and made her way down.

  Kevin followed. The flare of his infrared headband danced around the walls, casting her long shadow out below. She glanced up; he eased himself down one rung at a time, his attention on her more than where he put his feet.

  “Be careful,” she whispered.

  “This is careful.” He chuckled. “If I was being careful, we wouldn’t be sneaking into the bowels of the Enclave.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s… colorful.”

  A few minutes later, the ground came into view. She hurried down the last few rungs and got out of Kevin’s way. The shaft bottom had collected a fair amount of small debris. Spongy matter underfoot likely contained at least forty percent rat turd, mixed with dust and other things she didn’t want to think about. Shiny steel slats glinted in the light from her headset as she examined a set of elevator doors. Much to her surprise, the seam along the top and bottom glowed as if the doors offered passage into the heart of a furnace, night vision exaggerating the light.

  Kevin’s shoe crunched behind her. He overacted slipping off the ladder and grabbed on to her. She set her stance and held him up, giving him a ‘must you?’ smirk.

  “Am I that obvious?”

  She looked again at the door. “You didn’t trip.”

  “Any excuse to hold you.”

  She couldn’t let her heart melt. Not here. Not in the basement of the Enclave. Tris put her hand atop his where it rested on her stomach. A moment later, she patted him. “I love you too, but I’d like to get out of here alive so I can continue loving you instead of winding up a female version of Wayne with nothing but a bottle of hooch and a sad tale of broken dreams.”

  “Ouch.” He hugged her tight for a second. “I’ll try not to get my ass shot off then. Oh, Wayne didn’t have broken dreams. That man was happy being alone.”

  Tris leaned forward with Kevin’s arms still around her middle. She tested the struts and motivators on the inside face of the door until she found one she could force. Pulling it down disengaged a locking mechanism as if the elevator cab had arrived. That done, the doors slid apart from each other with ease, blinding them with an intense glow.

  “Gah!” muttered Kevin.

  She shut her eyes and pulled the goggles off. “It’s the night vision.”

  It took a moment or two of blinking to adjust. Soon, the green and white checkered tile floor of a basement classroom hallway solidified out of the blurry glare. About one out of every six LED light tubes on the ceiling remained on. Without the goggles, the corridor looked dim… but compared to pitch darkness, it felt like daytime.

  Three light fixtures dangled on wires, and about half of the drop ceiling panels had collapsed to the floor. A handful of beige desks with attached chairs stood against the right wall a short distance from the elevator by a door. The next door sat about forty yards farther down on the left.

  She shut off the infrared lamp on the goggles and pocketed them. Kevin took about ten times longer to find the power button. Once he had his optics put away, she crept forward, resisting the urge to pull the Beretta out. Yeah, right. If anyone finds me down here, they won’t buy any excuse I can think of; I’d have to kill them.

  Tris peered in the first door at shelves covered with old pre-war desktop computers, keyboards, monitors, and many stacks of medium-sized grey slabs. It took her a moment to remember her technical history classes and recognize them as laptop computers. Fair bet none of this stuff would work anymore, not that anyone left in the world had a use for them even if they would turn on.

  “Nothing in there we need.”

  He peered into the room for a second before following her. “Lot of junk. Damn I’d have gone nuts if I found this stash a year ago.”

  She walked for the next door at a brisk pace. “No one would buy any of that crap. What’s a Wildlander going to do with a computer?”

  “Sit on it?” Kevin chuckled. “And hey, some of them still work. How do you think I’ve seen so many ‘historical documentaries’?”

  Tris chuckled while peering at a label on the left-side door, ‘Lab F.’ A quick peek inside at bl
ack-topped work tables with small silver faucets and gizmos, as well as walls filled with periodic tables confirmed nothing of interest. ‘Lab E,’ a little ways ahead on the right had similar work tables but the walls held diagrams of dissected dogs, cats, frogs, horses, and some kind of rodent. She backed away and closed the door.

  The hallway went another fifteen feet before an opening on the left revealed a small area where the floor tiles changed to black and white from the green-and-white of the corridor. Vending machines, two pool tables, and a row of arcade game cabinets took up most of the space not used by a snack counter and four tables.

  Tris started to walk in, but froze, gasping at the sight of several corpses lying on the floor. All had desiccated into a semi-mummified state with skin the color of creamed coffee. Her jaw tightened when she spotted necrotic lesions that appeared to have set in prior to death.

  “Don’t.” She backed up and put a hand on Kevin’s chest. “I think they’re Infected.”

  He held her hand against his heart. “I’ve never seen them looking dried out like that. They’re dead, right?”

  She picked up a chair and poked one of the legs into the nearest body. Skin crunched like chicken that had been fried too long. Darker brown dust dribbled out of the hole. “I’d say yes. Quite thoroughly dead. Probably for more than a few years.”

  “When did they set that shit loose again?” Unease sounded clear in his voice.

  “As far as I know, around 2056. These people had to have caught it before the symbiotes happened… The Virus is supposed to kill its victim in three to four months. Guess it worked here.”

  Kevin’s expression shifted unusually somber.

  She backed away from the break room and looked up at him. “What?”

  “2056. Twenty-one years ago. I was just thinking… Abby’s never known a world without Virus in it. Shit, I was like six when they started. I dunno if we’re going to do anything here, but I think I understand why you’ve got that drive in you find the cure.”