The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number

by Cox, Matthew S.

  The room behind the curtain held even colder air.

  Abby shivered, tucking her hands under her arms, and stared, open-mouthed at all the hentai posters on the walls. Tris wanted to cover her eyes, but after Amarillo, some cartoon tentacles seemed mild.

  “Whoa,” said Abby. “This dude needs to stop living by himself.”

  Terminal9 mumbled something too low to hear.

  Tris slipped around past Kevin and Abby, avoided the end of the queen-sized bed, and followed him into the next room where he had all his gear set up.

  “Uhh… Don’t leave me alone with this guy,” said Abby. “Those girls on the wall look my age.”

  “They’re eighteen,” yelled Terminal9. “It’s the art style!”

  “Uh, huh, sure.” Kevin smirked at him.

  “I’m serious.” Terminal9 gestured at one with breasts the size of watermelons. “They either have too much or nothing.”

  “If you think it’s stupid,” asked Kevin. “Why are they all over the walls?”

  “A) it’s all I had, and B) you gotta take it in the context it was intended. It’s stylized and shit, man.”

  “Is that tentacle going up her… Oh, god… it is.” Abby blushed, turned away from the wall, and buried her face in Kevin’s chest.

  Terminal9 fidgeted, looking quite uncomfortable. “Never planned on no kids bein’ in here.”

  “Yeah well.” Kevin put an arm around her. “Just as soon get out of your way. Hope your info’s worth the trip.”

  “Well… I don’t really know how good it is, but I figured you’d want to see it.” He scurried past the curtain.

  Kevin guided Abby along so she didn’t have to look at the walls. Mercifully, the former cockpit had little decoration beyond a mountain of tech. Duct tape and a couple of old trash bags sealed the window around the cable bundle snaking in from outside; thin plastic fluttered in the wind.

  Tris flopped on the same chair she’d used last time. This guy better not ask for a tittie pic again. Her hands shook; she continued to sweat rivers despite the chill. She rubbed the front of her throat for a few seconds while the hacker ambled over to the pilot’s chair and got to work tapping on a few keyboards. Flat panel monitors arranged around him, some hung from the ceiling, flickered to life.

  “So… what did you find?” Tris rasped.

  Kevin put a hand on her shoulder.

  She straightened. Resolve flooded into her from the spot where he touched her. I don’t care what it is. I will not let Nathan beat me down. Tris looked up at him with a grateful smile for a second before glaring at the back of Terminal9’s scraggly head. The way his light brown hair collected in cords reminded her of a poorly maintained fern.

  “Okay so, I’m listenin’ to those tunes you had, right?”

  She glared.

  “Hey…” He raised a hand. “I know shit was a kick in the balls and stuff, but, free music is still free music. Anyway, I hear these pops, right? Turns out the first ten tracks have shitty audio quality for exactly the same portion of the file. The front 32k of each track had a different sample rate than the rest.”

  “The hell language is that?” asked Kevin.

  Abby giggled.

  “There’s hidden data in the files…” Tris stared at him. “What was in it? Did Nathan make another bad joke?”

  Terminal9 grinned. “I’m gettin’ there. Building up to it and stuff. So, I went into the code with a sector editor. Turns out the files are as big as they would be if the entire mp3 had been sampled at the same rate. There’s padding data in among the music that the player mostly ignores, but here and there, it had dead space. No data, which made the sound pop silent for a split second. Sounds like an old analog track snapping.”

  “You are going somewhere with this, right?” asked Kevin.

  Abby fiddled with a red plastic shroud on the desk, lifting it to expose a button.

  “Hey!” yelled Terminal9. “Kid. Don’t touch that.”

  She pulled her hand back as if burned. “Sorry. You don’t have to yell at me.”

  “It’s wired to frag mines in the boarding tunnel.” He scratched at his head. “Defense system.”

  Abby gasped.

  “Against what?” asked Tris.

  Terminal9 grinned as he shrugged. “Against anything that wants my ass for lunch. Anyway… So I spent a couple days mining that slush data for anything, but didn’t find a damn thing.”

  Tris clenched her jeans tight about her knees and glared at him. “Look. I’m about to scream at you. Please just tell me what you found.”

  “There’s a point to this.” Terminal9 made a finger gun to his temple before tapping an LCD monitor. “Whoever put this data in the file went way far beyond your run of the mill attempt to hide some shit. It drove me nuts for weeks. Why would someone pad bogus data at the front of the files? It finally hit me that the nothing was everything.”

  Kevin pursed his lips. “You’ve been spending too much time in a sunbaked plane.”

  “No.” Terminal9 raised both hands, fingers splayed. “The blank spaces. That was the data.”

  “Blank?” Tris squinted. “The empty spots formed some kind of pattern?”

  “Exactly!” He pointed up. “Wow. Took me two weeks to think of that. Yeah. I had to count the file marker positions for each set of zeroes, and that turned into Unicode character codes. Like the first letter in the message is ‘T’ ’cause it was fifty-four spaces after the file header. The next one occurred seventy-two spaces later… and so on.”

  “Are you sure that message was even meant for her? How the hell would we have found that? It… would’ve been reckless for whoever sent it to assume she’d find it.”

  “You’re here right now, aren’t you?” Terminal9 winked.

  Tris’ heart hung in her chest like a lead weight. “How… do you know it was for me? Are you assuming that because you found it in the data I carried?”

  “Well the file has your name in it.” He tapped a few keys, and a message appeared on the blank monitor:

  Tris,

  Contact me.

  -Dad.

  650-555-0447

  She squeaked. What? Dad? Her gaze fell to the floor. She hadn’t noticed she’d been trembling until she looked at her legs. “No… that’s gotta be Nathan’s sick idea.”

  Kevin wiggled his finger at the screen. “What do those numbers mean?”

  Terminal9 flashed the smile of an ancient guru asked a most basic question on enlightenment. “It’s a PSTN number.”

  “Oh, of course.” Kevin raised his arm a few inches and let it fall against his side. “Obviously.”

  Abby took a step toward Tris and leaned into her.

  “Okay. Ever hear of a phone?” asked Terminal9.

  “Little things people used to carry around everywhere?” Kevin held up his hand. “’Bout the size of a, umm…” He traced a small rectangle in the air.

  “Sort of. Close enough. Those things used to allow people to talk to each other over long distances. Each device had a specific number assigned to it. If you typed that number in on your phone, you’d connect to the other person and be able to talk.”

  Tris shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s no phone network left. It all fried in the war from EMP.”

  “I don’t think your asshole friend did this.” Terminal9 tapped the monitor, his fingernail clicking on the plastic. “People like that are too proud of their own cleverness. He’d want it to be found so you could appreciate his bastardry, and that was not damn easy to find. I think whoever sent you that message knew what that dude was up to, and wanted to sneak it past him.”

  Could it be possible that my father’s gone into hiding somehow? She grabbed Abby like a big doll since she stood conveniently close. “I… never did see a body.”

  “Like they’d have shown it to you.” Kevin moved closer and caressed her hair. “I dunno, Tris. This isn’t much to work with.”

  “Okay.” Tris held
her hands up. “Let’s play a theory game here and assume that my father wasn’t killed by the Council of Four, and is somehow still alive deep in the bowels of the Enclave, and managed to sneak an encoded message into the fake cure that Nathan uploaded to my implant. What the hell am I supposed to do with a phone number?”

  Terminal9 smiled. “Now this might be worth that―” His stare moved away from her chest, to Abby, and back to Tris’ breasts. “Uhh, never mind.” He grinned. “I don’t have any way to connect to it from here, but I talked to a guy farther west who said the number looked like a Redwood City exchange. There’s still a fragment of the grid that survived over there on account of bein’ mostly underground. Accordin’ to Hec8-e, there’s at least one functional CO in that area you might be able to patch in from.”

  “CO?” asked Tris.

  “What the devil is heck eighty?” Kevin scratched his head.

  “Central office, and Hec8-e is another person like me, a techie.” Terminal9 leaned back in his chair. “A CO is a place where the telco had all their equipment that patched into the individual lines running to houses.”

  “Wait, they ran wires to people’s houses?” Kevin blinked.

  Terminal9 chuckled. “Yeah man. What do you think all them poles was for? Most of the wires either melted or got salvaged.”

  Kevin rubbed his chin. “So, in order to contact this father of yours that may or may not still exist, we’d have to go basically into the Enclave’s backyard and hope we find a working phone, and hope he’s still around to answer it.”

  “Yeah, basically.” Terminal9 nodded. “That’s about right.”

  “Heh.” Kevin laughed. “What could go wrong?”

  Everything. Tris exhaled. That sick gnawing feeling churned in her gut again. She couldn’t ignore the curiosity for long at all before the sleepless nights would get to her. On a rational level, it sounded so farfetched. So out there. Stupid. Foolish. Reckless. Run right back to the Enclave she’d escaped from. She looked left and up, into Abby’s wide, brown eyes. Nathan’s going to drop Virus on Nederland. The urge to do something about it took her with a full body tremor, as though she’d sucked down ten quadruple-shot lattes in ten minutes. She hadn’t had one of those since the day before they sent her to Detention. I just found out my father might still be alive, and I’m fiending for coffee. What is wrong with me?

  “That it?” asked Kevin. “Nothing more encoded?”

  Terminal9 pivoted his feet on the floor, making his chair swish side to side, and leaned his head against two fingers. “That’s all I’ve found so far. The rest of the files are uniform, without the extra data. I know it ain’t much.”

  Kevin leaned his head back, eyes closed. “Sometimes the tiniest detail will kill you.”

  “Your dad?” asked Terminal9.

  “Nah. Wayne.” Kevin chuckled.

  Did he really suggest we actually chase this down? Tris gawked at him.

  “We’ll talk. Let’s round up those parts for Bee and get going. Be nice to make it back to Ben’s ’house before it gets too dark.”

  “What do you think?” Tris stood, facing Terminal9. “Would someone go to all that trouble to mess with me?”

  “That’s why I gave you the long explanation.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers laced. “This Nathan motherfucker doesn’t seem like he’d have the patience to do something like that. Whoever put that message in there, I think they didn’t want the Enclave to find it.”

  A little warmth gathered in Tris’ cheeks. “Still want that payment?”

  The hacker glanced at Abby again before winking at Tris. “Nah. Don’t worry about it.”

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  “De nada.” He shut down a few screens and followed them out of the cockpit, crawling onto the bed in the next space.

  Tris took point, heading down the spiral stairs and back out into the airport building. As soon as Kevin shut the exterior door on the 747, it shook with a loud clunk.

  Abby looked up at Tris. “Did he want you to sleep with him?”

  “No.” Tris blushed.

  “Are you trying to be like tame or something ’cause I’m here? Payment?”

  “He wanted to see my chest. Take a picture of it.”

  “Oh.” Abby smirked. “The guy seriously needs to stop being alone.”

  Tris let out a halfhearted laugh. “Yeah.”

  They walked in relative silence outside to the car.

  Kevin pointed at the car. “I’ll drive a little closer to the junk pile so we don’t have to carry shit so far.”

  Abby removed the red armored jacket and handed it to Kevin before pushing the driver’s seat aside so she could get in back.

  “Okay.” Tris headed to the passenger door. A glint of metal caught her eye from the back seat. Two pairs of handcuffs.

  Abby crawled in and pushed them out of sight under a blanket.

  “Abby?” Tris slid into her seat. “Why do you have those?”

  “Huh?” asked Kevin.

  The discovery didn’t faze Abby. “I want you to teach me how to open them. ’Case I get grabbed or something.”

  “She’s got the cuffs I took off Katie.” Tris pointed at the back seat. “Thought she was terrified of them. She must’ve swiped them from the table when no one was looking.”

  “I am scared of them.” Abby looked down. “That’s why I wanna know how to get out of ’em. Will you teach me how to pick locks?”

  Kevin turned the car on and backed up.

  “It’s not quite the same as picking locks, but… yeah sure why not. Girl can’t have too many skills right?” She smiled. “Later though. I don’t want you messing with those things out in the Wildlands. Anything could happen at any time.”

  Abby nodded. “Okay.” She grinned. “An’ maybe you can teach me ’bout ’lectronics too.”

  Oh, I swear if we get home safe, I’ll teach you about particle physics. “Sure.”

  Kevin brought the car around to the narrowest point in the junk row the car could reach, and stopped. Tris looked down, overcome by a sudden wash of sadness at her memory of thinking he’d left her there for good.

  He reached over, placed his hand behind her head, and pulled her into a gentle kiss. “Can we forget we both acted like idiots?”

  She nodded. “Deal.”

  Tris hopped out and walked the last thirty or so yards to the left turn that brought her into the rounded area full of old android parts. Kevin wandered about grabbing anything he thought resembled Bee. Abby poked and played with random pieces of tech. Tris hauled the mostly-intact torso of a similar android out of a heap. Aside from missing its legs and head, the interior looked like it had most of the same parts as Bee, perhaps enough to get her going again… assuming they worked.

  Abby progressed from curious to passive to visibly bored. Tris spent a little more than an hour and a half collecting anything she thought might be potentially useful for future ‘Bee maintenance.’ As piece number twenty-two went into the trunk, Kevin raised an eyebrow at her.

  “I’m trying to gather a bit of a reserve so we don’t have to drive all the way out here again if something else goes wrong with her.” She dropped a hollow plastic head with some circuit boards in it into the trunk. “Try to find a couple arms or legs for spare actuators.”

  Eventually, Tris figured she’d collected a decent enough haul, and slammed the trunk lid. They sat in the shade of a towering collection of ancient kitchen appliances while gnawing on dust hopper jerky. When he finished his piece, Kevin wiped his hands on his pants and stood. Tris gave him a nod to acknowledge his desire to get going. He wandered out of sight behind a pile of junk while reaching for his zipper. Tris ducked into an opposite alcove in the scrap maze, in search of a clear spot of dirt to take a leak before the long ride. As she shoved her pants down, she eyed the surroundings, wary of a sniper.

  Abby startled her, appearing close by her side. She also assumed the position. “Why do you look so nervous?
”

  Having her right next to me is only a little uncomfortable… Tris forced a smile. “I, uhh, got attacked by a sniper once while I was peeing in the woods.” She chuckled. “Up till that moment, I thought ‘caught with my pants down’ was only a saying.”

  “Eww. I hope you killed him.” Abby kept quiet for a few seconds. “Did he at least let you finish before he shot at you?”

  “Actually, it was a misunderstanding. I trust her now.”

  “Her?” Abby blinked.

  “Zara. She’s from the Enclave too.”

  “Oh, wow. She shot you and you like didn’t kick her ass?” Finished, Abby stood.

  Tris cringed. “That hurt so damn much, but I knew she’d been manipulated.” She got up and hiked her jeans back in place. “And before you say it, yes, I am too forgiving.”

  “You get shot a lot.” Abby stared at the ground. “I wish my dad had those things that fix you.”

  Tris hugged her and rocked her side to side. “Me too.”

  Abby gave her a teary-eyed look that thanked her all over again for protecting her from Warren. Tris couldn’t think of anything to say back to her; guilt sat in her throat like a boulder.

  “You girls coming?” yelled Kevin. “Battery’s draining.”

  “Yeah,” croaked Tris. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Time to go home.”

  Abby nodded, took her hand, and walked at her side to the waiting car.

  6

  A Long Time to Fix

  Acrid fumes from the soldering iron wafted up past Tris’ face, making her squint. She waved at the layer of white smoke settling inside Bee’s open back. Clatters of metal, the occasional clonk of lumber, and the distant murmur of people talking echoed off the corrugated metal walls of Nederland’s ‘technical center.’ The large former factory building housed the extent of everything not covered by simple carpentry, plumbing, or automotive mechanics.

  Since she couldn’t move, Bee had spent most of the past few weeks chatting with other people in the technical crew, especially Crystal, the manager. Cassie, the head tech from Amarillo, had integrated herself among the locals as one of the more competent people for electronics despite being only twenty-two. Constant blue-eyed blonde jokes stopped once she fixed the central radio unit in a mere fifteen minutes, the same radio the militia had given up on ever being able to use again. In resurrecting it, she’d earned their respect.