The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Bill bowed his head, some of the color faded from his cheeks.

  It’s gonna come. It’s gonna kill everyone if we don’t stop it. She clenched her jaw. The drones were only scary if they got close. We gotta stop it from getting close. I gotta stay alive ’til my… A tingle spread over her back, ran all the way down her legs to her feet, and bounced back up as a surge of determination. I have parents! I gotta stay alive ’til they’re back.

  She grabbed Bill’s hand. “Tomorrow… can you show me how to shoot a rifle?”

  He blinked at her, wordless.

  “I want to help. I know I’m not twelve yet like the mayor said’s gotta carry a gun… but I wanna help anyway.” Abby shuddered. “I saw it happen in Amarillo. I don’t want it to happen here.”

  Bill pondered for a second or two before nodding. “Alright. We’ll see if you’re comfortable with it tomorrow. Try to sleep. And let’s hope you’re a little more careful with it than a certain little girl who thinks she’s nineteen instead of nine.”

  Zoe snuggled closer and drooled a little on Abby’s shoulder. Somehow, she’d already passed out.

  “Okay,” whispered Abby, closing her eyes.

  Bill grunted; the chair creaked. A rough hand patted her on the forehead before the smack of a light kiss happened somewhere in Zoe’s vicinity.

  They just shot down the camera. The Virus won’t show up tonight. Little by little, the dread that the instant she fell asleep, Nederland would be wiped out faded.

  “Jesús, if you’re real. Please let Tris and Kevin come home,” she whispered before letting the air out of her lungs in a long, slow breath. “And tell Dad I love him.”

  25

  A Storm of Doubt

  Random memories of childhood flooded in still-image flashes through Tris’ mind. How old had she been when her father decided to use her as some kind of key? She couldn’t doubt that he’d loved her, but she found herself livid with him. More so for the tease of thinking him alive, only to find the voice from the other end of the phone had been a computer program pretending to be a dead man.

  The dark-brown face of Randall, the ‘Resistance’ contact who’d run all the training sims and watched over her while she lay helpless and naked in a tank, appeared in her mind. They’d gone all out with the act. He’d dressed in quasi-military rags, spoke with a hint of patois, and acted like he loathed the Enclave and everything they stood for.

  She almost felt his hands clutching the fabric of her jumpsuit at each shoulder. You kin do ’dis ’ting woman. You may be small, but ya got lot o’ ’art. Go out ’dere, show ’dem who’s da boss. Believe in yerself an ya kin do anyt’ing.

  “Right. Suppose this works.” She opened her eyes and looked at the mechanical thing pretending to be Dad. “Stopping the distribution of new Virus is one thing, but what about the symbiotes or the existing Infected that haven’t died off naturally?”

  “Yeah.” Kevin flashed a rogue’s smile. “Some of those things are well past their expiration date.”

  The ‘head’ on the end of the boom swiveled down to peer behind it while rotating to keep itself right side up. One of the distant monitors flashed a stream of data too fast for a human eye to read. “I will be able to initiate a self-destruct command to the symbiotes. There has always existed an ‘off switch’ per se. From the start, their end game”―its ‘head’ swiveled around to face her―“has been to retake the land outside. They would not have wanted to fight off the weapons they’d unleashed upon the world.”

  “What about the non-symbiote Infected?” Tris folded her arms.

  “Those, alas, would be left to Agent-94 running its standard course of progression. All should expire within three months. Preferably without contaminating more people.”

  “But they’re not dying in three months.” Tris stood. Dad-AI glided back as she approached. “Some of them have lasted far longer than that.”

  “I believe you are falling for an illusion, Tris.” Dad-AI moved around her, the boom arm holding its ‘head’ like a medical instrument running a 180-degree scan of her skull. “They expire but are replaced by new victims. I have found nothing to indicate they have managed to extend the terminal arc of the disease. It is hastened in cases where the victim is unable to find food. Reduced mental capacity also interferes with their ability to recognize some sources of nourishment. Canned food, for example, they would perceive as inedible slugs of metal.”

  Tris paced back and forth running her hands through her hair and grumbling. An idea sparked, and she stopped cold, pointing at the machine. “You’re an AI with some part of my father’s intelligence. His brain running at the speed of a computer would be scary to behold… Can you somehow reprogram the symbiotes to break down Infected instead of blow themselves up?” She waved her hand around in a circle near her head. “Like… like… reverse the process by which the symbiotes stall death. Speed it up instead. And set the symbiote to self-destruct if it fails to encounter an Infected in something like seventy-two hours.”

  “And disregard uninfected humans,” said Dad-AI.

  “Well yeah.” Tris stared into the largest lens-eye, inches from her face. “That kinda went without saying.” She sighed and bowed her head. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up that he’d be alive. “Of course. Programs need to state everything explicitly.”

  “Correct. I am already generating the necessary instruction code. By the time you initiate the Eden protocol, it should be ready.” The boom glided closer, iris lenses narrowing. “I am sensing an unusual tone in your voice.”

  “It’s… I… You should’ve told me you were an AI.” She looked around for something to punch. Kevin crept closer, so she settled for holding him instead. “I let myself believe you… I mean my father… might’ve still been alive.”

  “I apologize for becoming ‘Schrödinger’s Dad.’”

  Tris gasped a chuckle and wiped a lone runaway tear.

  “Who the hell is Shrow Dinger?” asked Kevin.

  “Maybe you’re right.” My father is dead, and this is his last message to me from beyond the grave. He grew old and left me frozen while the world collapsed and reshaped. She clenched her fist into the cloth at Kevin’s back. “He could’ve taken me out of stasis, kept me with him. Let me grow up with a father.”

  “Forgive me if I am being semantic, but you did grow up with a father… merely one who was not biologically related to you. The man believed you to be his child. Did he not treat you well?”

  “I…” She walked away from Kevin and got to pacing. “Aside from the whole almost putting me into a mental health path because I hallucinated you―I mean my dad.” She growled. “No. Once I lied and said I made my father up, Dad2 was okay.” I never had a problem with Mom2. I never even knew Mom1. “Do you know what happened to my mother?”

  “As far as I know, she is still within the Enclave, believing you are in Detention for refusing the pairing. They have been appealing, which may have succeeded had there been no need to cover up your disappearance.”

  Her face flushed warm with annoyance. “No, dammit. I mean the woman whose uterus I came out of.”

  “Oh.” Dad-AI leaned back. “Liliana Martin. She was quite a bit younger than my biological self. The human I once was believed she had fallen in love with him, though she dated him on a dare, and stayed around for some months later out of guilt when she realized the ‘scientist nerd’ wasn’t such a bad guy under the lab coat.” The boom arm drooped, digitized voice taking on a somber tone. “Eventually, she decided to move on. You weren’t even one year old yet. I suppose being nineteen, she figured it better to leave you with an ‘adult’ for a parent.” It sighed, all the lights in its lens-eyes pulsed brighter and fading with the sound. “If she were still alive, she’d be seventy-eight now.”

  “She died?” asked Tris, mildly ashamed of herself for not feeling much of any emotion about the idea.

  “I do not know either way. The day she told me she wanted to leave was the last day…
I correct myself―the day she told my biological counterpart that she wished to leave was the last time he saw her. He was at least pleased she gave him the news in person rather than leaving a note.”

  Her jaw tightened. “She didn’t seem too upset about leaving me behind.”

  Dad-AI swung side to side, a gesture perhaps meant as a head shake. “She believed herself too much a child to care for one.”

  At a mother that didn’t want her, a dead father who wasn’t… but was, fear of ten thousand Enclave soldiers overhead, and the need to protect Abby, a twinge of horrendous nausea overwhelmed her. She raised her hands, and stormed out. “I… don’t know. I can’t do this. I don’t know what the hell to believe anymore.”

  Dad-AI swiveled, extending after her as much as the boom permitted. “Tris?”

  Out in the hall, she leaned her folded arms against the opposite wall and rested her forehead on them.

  After a minute or so of silence, shoes crunched dust and concrete silt behind her. The approach sounded like Kevin, so she didn’t bother moving. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  She mumbled, “So I guess I’m not really eighteen.”

  “I can see no situation where me making any kind of a grandmother joke results in an ending other than your fist in my nose… or balls.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Besides, if you’re biologically eighteen, that makes me feel a little… odd.”

  “Nine years isn’t that much of a difference.” She turned away from the wall to wrap her arms around him. “Besides. I’ve been awake for twenty years… even if some of it was in virtual reality. I think I want to go home. I’ve got the worst feeling about Abby. I wanna hold her.”

  “You’ve gone super-mom.” He smiled. “Where’d that come from?”

  “I dunno.” She scratched at her stomach, again feeling like a nutrient packet that had been sucked dry and thrown aside. Longing for what I can’t have? “Maybe I’m still angry that they took my ovaries.”

  “That sounds kind of painful.” His sympathetic look lasted about four seconds before he grimaced. “What’s an ovary?”

  She chuckled into his shoulder. “I’m not explaining that now.”

  “Look.” He held her face in both hands, lifting her head so she made eye contact. “We’ve come all this way to stop these fuckers from dropping that green shit on anyone else. Maybe that electro-dad of yours is full of crap. Maybe he isn’t.”

  “Can you believe that?” One tear slid from each of her eyes and crept down her cheeks. “Could you believe you were born before the war? That the parents who you thought you were crazy are victims too? That your own father helped them―” Tris glared at the doorway. She pulled away from Kevin and stomped back into the room.

  Dad-AI, stretched to the limit of the boom toward the entrance, glided backward. The tilt of the ‘head’ and dilation of the irises seemed happy to see her return.

  “How could you have gone along with it?” Tris pointed up. “With making the Virus?”

  It bobbed. She imagined it shrugging if it had arms. “I, forgive me, he didn’t. That’s why they killed him.”

  “You keep slipping and saying I.” She squinted. “Are you really alive and speaking through this thing?”

  Dad-AI slouched. “No. I am sorry, Tris. Sometimes the illusion of being a human I never was feels too real. The memories appear to be mine, but they are not. I am sure, despite everything, he would have been very proud of the woman you’ve become.”

  “But, I know my father helped with some of the design. Doctor Andrews told me.” Tris folded her arms. “Why?”

  “I will be less obtuse. Yes. Your father did initially participate in the design program of a manmade virus. However, its initial concept came about as a mechanism to distribute vaccines and a restorative nanomedical treatment for radiation damage in the manner of a contagious agent. The early founders of the Enclave believed the population would not readily accept technological medicine, and so they sought to release a benevolent plague so to speak. A contagious virus that would carry with it a cure as well as inoculate those it infected from the usual array.”

  “Usual array?” Kevin slipped back into the room, and pushed the door closed.

  “The usual vaccinations. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Chicken pox, ad nauseum.” Dad-AI bowed its ‘head.’ “Alas, the paranoids won out. Before Agent-8 could be released into the world, opinion towards outsiders changed. The Enclave shifted toward weaponization of it. Rather than curing the people who had survived nuclear war, the First Council came to see them as contamination on the Earth, a disease in and of themselves that needed to be eliminated before we could re-emerge. They believed any who had not sheltered in here to avoid the worst of the radiation and environmental disasters would only introduce runaway genetic damage into the human genome―and had to be euthanized.”

  Tris scowled. “Who the fuck do these people think they are that they can arbitrarily make a decision like that? How are they that much better off after generations of breeding in closed quarters? I bet half these people are so inbred they’re their own fathers.”

  Kevin laughed.

  “I… rather your father… agreed with you. Hence… dead.”

  Hands balled into fists at her sides, Tris fumed. How many Amarillos had there been? How many families thrown into paranoia, torn apart by the fear of the Virus as much as the Virus itself. They were ready to murder Abby over a goddamned cold. A growl started deep in her chest and rose from her throat.

  “Okay.” Tris looked at not-Dad. “How do we blow the fuck out of this place?”

  “I do not think that is wise. I will guide you to do what you must do. I will explain more as you continue. You know the man for whom I was modeled. Ask yourself deep inside the nature of my intentions. I will not mislead you.” Dad-AI swooped across the room. A tiny claw arm extended from the underside of the ‘head’ and disconnected a USB memory stick from one of the computers. It whirred back over, offering it. “This memory module contains software code that emulates the function of a router. It is already configured with the appropriate data translation routines.”

  “You’re gonna clean a toilet with that?” asked Kevin.

  Dad-AI angled to face him. “A router is a computer networking device that provides a connection between two dissimilar networks and―”

  “Dad!” yelled Tris.

  It pivoted back to her.

  “Save the Networking 101. You just said we don’t have time.” She grabbed the USB. “Right, so I don’t think there’s going to be any 2020 era computers in the Quar. I’m going to need some kind of hardware connection too.”

  “Correct. There is a prototype Petafiber card in one of the labs. You should be able to install it in one of the computers, which is already connected to the Stanford network. Then, you would only need to run a fiberoptic line through the ventilation ducts. I have calculated the best path for you at 217.4 meters to a small office room. The storage closet there should have a cable long enough to make the run. They have not used cables in many years, so it will likely go unnoticed long enough to complete the upload.”

  “What upload?”

  “My consciousness,” said Dad-AI. “Once I transfer myself off the dying Stanford net and onto the Enclave system, I will be able to grant your wish.”

  “Great. And what happens if I get caught?” She looked at Kevin.

  “Probability scenarios take up quite a lot of resources that I need to allocate elsewhere at this moment. Will you settle for ‘that would not be wise?’”

  “No shit.” She bowed her head, took a breath to psych herself up, and looked up at the boom. “Okay. So how are you going to lead me anywhere?”

  The small drone glided into the doorway.

  “Consider that my finger pointing the way.” Dad-AI tilted a bit, as if trying to smile.

  Kevin pulled the .45 out of his pocket. “Be careful. If anything goes wrong, we haul ass back the way we
came and hope the subway’s still clear.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.” Tris walked at the drone, which glided away and zoomed down the corridor.

  “Be careful,” said Dad-AI.

  Tris paused in the doorway to glance again at the machine mounted to the ceiling. “I have no idea why I trust you, or why I’m inclined to believe what sounds like a massive load of bullshit… but… thanks.”

  The boom arm bowed.

  Whirring hung in the corridor about twenty paces away.

  “Tris, please follow,” said the drone.

  “Oh, I am going to shoot that thing.” Kevin hurried through the door.

  She grabbed his shoulder. “We need it.”

  “Right.” He pointed the .45 at it in a ‘your days are numbered’ gesture, and lowered his arm.

  The chuckle in her chest couldn’t quite lift the weight of duty and guilt sitting on top of it. By the time it reached her lips, it petered out from a laugh to a faint smile. She marched after the drone, which continued past the computer lab to another stairway. Since the window here remained intact, it waited for her to open the doors before gliding onward. It led them two stories up and came to a hover at another set of black-painted double doors. A sign on the wall referred to this floor as B1.

  “Damn, how deep was this place?” asked Kevin. “We’re still underground?”

  She pulled the door open. “I’m really going to stop asking how deep some rabbit holes go.”

  The corridor outside contained hundreds of old desks, chairs with an attached slab of some beige plastic-like substance that looked far removed from what anyone could consider comfortable. While the drone glided merrily along above them, Tris and Kevin struggled to climb over clusters of debris, jogged through short spans of passable hallway, and climbed again.

  Eventually, the drone stopped at a heavy wooden door with a tiny square wire-reinforced window. Tris crept up to it and grasped the knob. She stared at the ceiling, terrified at the thought a couple thousand Enclave military walked around less than twelve feet overhead. She’d been in the Quar before, but hadn’t remained there long enough to have learned about the old university below it. Then again, that sort of knowledge she imagined the Enclave wanted to keep secret. Above her might be a tarmac full of Hoplites as easily as a building where soldiers practiced hand-to-hand fighting.