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

by Cox, Matthew S.

  An explosion of light welled up in a banner over the Council’s desk, dozens of holographic panels streamed with text data, pictures, charts, and video. A few screens enlarged, bearing emails among members of a ‘planning council’ discussing the need to modify Jameson’s bio agent into a weapon that could ‘purge the filth’ from the world so ‘we can take it back.’ Images flicked to later emails and a video message showing a fiftyish man with a strong familial resemblance to Gerhardt detailing the need to eliminate Jameson as he ‘cannot see the necessity in the plan.’ One called him ‘too idealistic.’ Another screen enlarged with a chain of emails to select ‘replacement parents’ for Tris, who they would have simply killed if not for their worry that Jameson somehow buried things in the system that would require her later on down the line. They expressed quite clearly the selection process for ‘extremely loyal’ individuals to serve as surrogate parents.

  “I have all of it, Helena. Your father was nothing if not thorough in his record keeping.”

  Gerhardt gasped and stared at Kuroyama. “Is this true? The files I was given on Jameson when I took office… They were falsified.”

  “Women are prone to being too idealistic and emotional.” Kuroyama scowled at Tris. “We expected you to hesitate on certain matters. The Enclave couldn’t afford to have a Primus who let emotion get the better of them. You were presented with the information you needed to function in the best interests of the people.”

  “Which people?” snapped Tris. “The three of you or the half a million dead because a handful of assholes in lab coats couldn’t read a damn chart and thought the world toxic?”

  “It was you.” Gerhardt pointed at Kuroyama. “No wonder Nathan got away with half the things he did. You were helping him… and continuing to send Agent-94 out into the world after I ordered that program shut down. It was… too indiscriminate.”

  “You never should’ve seen those recon feeds.” Kuroyama folded his arms. “Video of a handful of farmers with children doesn’t prove the world is survivable. They’ll probably grow third legs or blow up with tumors by the time they hit puberty.”

  Gerhardt bowed her head. “I’ve been… lied to.” She lifted her head with the apparent effort of moving a boulder, and made eye contact with Tris. “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. You’re right. We cannot keep on going like this. We’re breeding ourselves into extinction.”

  “You’re being foolish, woman,” said Kuroyama. “We are the Enclave.”

  “Now you’re sounding like the jackass with the exploded head.” Kevin pointed his pistol at the Japanese man. “One more remark about women out of you, and it’s going to be the Council of Three.”

  Alex chuckled.

  A window popped open on the desk in front of Director Khan. A man in a military helmet, bulky, ponderous, and bedecked with hoses connected to his nonfunctional Hoplite appeared.

  “Directors… We are unable to hold the perimeter as ordered. Half of my personnel are defecting. There are thousands of people coming out of stasis. They’re not listening to orders.”

  “Probably a bit pissed off at being lied to and kept frozen against their will.” Tris smiled as the roar of rioting crowd at the top of the auditorium grew even louder. “It probably no longer matters what the Council wants. Your power is gone.” She lowered her rifle and took Kevin’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Kevin cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t want to kill them?”

  Tris sighed. “They deserve it for what they did, but no… I think being exiled into the Wildlands is going to be far worse for them than the instantaneous justice of a bullet. More poetic too.” She looked at Gerhardt. “Your dread of the outside world is all in your head. You might even like it out there.”

  Kuroyama eyed the ISF men. “You traitors plan to simply stand there doing nothing?”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Alex. “I’ve been debating placing you all under arrest for war crimes, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the paperwork.”

  Tris slung the rifle over her shoulder and pulled Kevin into a long, deep kiss. The fear that had taken her while strapped to the chair came back, and she clung to him tight to chase away the dread she’d felt at the idea of never seeing him again. Basking in his presence calmed her. Her body wanted sleep, craved a few hours of ignoring the world, and went limp. She let him hold her up, moving only enough to keep kissing him. Soon, tears of joy ran down her cheeks, and she clung to keep from collapsing to the floor.

  “Is this real? Am I in VR? I can’t believe we really did it.”

  His arms squeezed tight around her. “You did it… I only twisted a few valves and gave some crazy, idealistic woman a ride to Harrisburg.”

  36

  Reunion

  A sudden clamor of activity by the chamber’s main entrance stole the laugh from Tris’ throat. She peered over Kevin’s shoulder up the aisle. An army swarmed in; more than half of them wore only the dried residue of stasis tank slime streaked with blood from wounds that nanites had already healed. All had armed themselves. Most appeared to be around eighteen, likely frozen as soon as they ‘went off to University.’ Here and there, those without white hair stood out as if someone had thrown colored paint at random into the crowd.

  “Uh oh,” muttered Kevin. “Nothing good ever happens when a huge crowd of armed, bloody, angry, naked people storm a room.” He chuckled. “Didn’t this used to be a college? Probably not the first time a mob like this has run around.”

  “What?” asked Tris.

  “Uhh, movie I saw.” He overacted an innocent face. “I may have been too little to be allowed to watch that particular movie.”

  Tris pulled away from Kevin, raising a hand to the crowd in a gesture she hoped they’d take as greeting. In seconds, the auditorium had filled with citizens. The mass of people swelled wide at the bottom, surrounding Tris and Kevin before spilling up onto the dais. Tris resumed breathing as the ones nearest her aimed their weapons at the Council.

  “It’s her,” said a young woman near the middle. The shape of her small body vanished amid a black jumpsuit much too large for her. “Tris?”

  The ISF men by the curtain exchanged a few tense words with the nearest citizens, but soon tensions between the two groups faded. None of the crowd pointed weapons at the ISF, who remained hesitant to aim theirs at the Council.

  “Yeah.” Tris nodded at the girl. She looked at a nude man within arm’s reach. “Guess you’re in a hurry?”

  “Most of us haven’t been out of pods for a full ten minutes yet,” said a man a little deeper in the crowd.

  “Kill them!” shouted a female voice near the middle of the room.

  “No!” yelled Tris.

  A hush swept over the citizens.

  Dammit. I hate being stared at by two people much less two hundred. Grumbling, Tris pulled herself up on the dais, and faced the room with her arms raised.

  “You’ve grown up being fed lies about the supposed barbarians of the Wildlands. Don’t turn into them. Before the war, humanity had a system of law and government that we should attempt to preserve.”

  “Yay, politics,” whispered Kevin.

  “We can’t arrest them,” said the same girl in the oversized jumpsuit. “There’s no jail here… you showed us Detention was really VR. And you burned out that system.”

  Tris nodded. “It had to be done, or they might’ve put you all back in prison. That’s what it was.” She lowered her hands. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. I have no interest in remaining here. I have a home I want to get back to. You’ll need to decide for yourselves where to go from here, though I sincerely hope that you listen to my father’s ghost and open the Enclave to the world.”

  “If we’re not going to kill them or freeze them, what do we do with the Council?” shouted a man.

  “Either build a prison or… exile them. I think that would punish them more.” She paused to breathe. “And I don’t mean the Council’s definition of
exile as a euphemism for murder… I mean real exile.”

  Director Kuroyama leapt from his chair, hurling himself at Tris from behind. He got a hand on the rifle slung across her back as he came down on his chest and slid forward over the desk. She stumbled to the right, knocking a flat panel monitor into Gerhardt’s lap and two others to the floor. Kuroyama’s momentum sent him spilling past her. She twisted to the right, tearing her rifle from his grip.

  About thirty people shot him the instant he hit the floor.

  Kuroyama’s body convulsed under a hail of bullets; he gurgled and went still, lying atop an expanding seep darkening the pale grey carpet.

  Director Khan screamed.

  “Idiot,” said Kevin.

  Tris sighed. “No… He knew what would happen; he committed suicide.” She glanced at the remaining three elders. For some reason, she almost felt bad for Gerhardt. Almost.

  “Exile,” said a muscular woman on the dais.

  “Exile,” repeated a man next to her.

  The word swept over the crowd like rain, two or three, ten, then a deafening chorus.

  Gerhardt bowed her head, calm and reserved, though dread showed clear in her eyes.

  Director Khan burst into sobs. “Please don’t. At my age… You can’t send us out there.” She calmed, blinking as sudden inspiration took her. “The old legal system had an appeal process. I wish to appeal.”

  “I’m sure the half-million or so who died to the Virus would’ve liked an appeal too,” said Tris. “If I were you, the first thing I’d do is get rid of that fancy Enclave suit and never tell anyone out there who you are. I don’t think it’s possible for you to meet a single person who wouldn’t jump at the chance to kill the ones responsible for setting that horror loose on the world.”

  “How’s this gonna work, then?” asked Tarl.

  Tris looked from him to Alex to the front row in the crowd. “I don’t know why everyone keeps asking me questions. I don’t have the answers. The only thing that differentiates me from you is that I saw through the bullshit first. Don’t trust anyone from the administration.”

  “And she’s got a combat package,” muttered Kevin. “And a great ass, awesome legs, perfect boobs…”

  She blushed.

  “Good advice,” said Not-Dad from the speakers. “I believe I can provide some assistance in that regard.”

  Most of the citizens looked up with expressions of awe.

  “It’s not God. It’s an AI,” said Kevin.

  “Wait,” asked the girl in the too-large suit. “You’re just going to leave?”

  “Yep.” Tris jumped down to the floor and walked up to Kevin. “We can stay a bit longer to talk about the outside world. I’ll help as much as I can, but this isn’t my home.” It never was.

  “Tris?” yelled a familiar sounding woman.

  “It is her,” said a familiar sounding man.

  Oh, crap. Tris closed her eyes. If there is a God up there, please let Mom2 and Dad2 have clothes.

  She opened her eyes as a hand grabbed her forearm.

  Mom2, Yana according to the AI copy of her real father, stared at her as if looking at a dead person back from the grave. Mercifully, she had appropriated a jumpsuit, blood soaked from the waist up. A few spots of chalky skin showed from bullet holes in the torso, and the five or six inches of her snow-white hair that hung past the shoulders had soaked it up, turning pink. Despite having to be fortyish, the woman didn’t appear much older than Tris.

  “Tris…” She let go of her arm to cover her mouth.

  “Hey kiddo,” said Dad2. He had no blood on him, though his clothing consisted of a pale blue bath towel held around his waist by a closed fist. As soon as she looked up at him, he threw his free arm around her back and squeezed.

  The AI had called him Marcus, but she’d sooner call him Dad2 to his face. After she gave up insisting that she’d been adopted, every time she’d called him ‘Dad’ had made her feel guilty, like she’d kicked Doctor Jameson deeper into his grave.

  “We’re sorry.” Yana looked down. “For not believing you.”

  Tears brimmed across Marcus’ eyelids. “We… thought you were ours.”

  Ugh. “It’s not your fault. I’m not angry with you anymore. The AI showed me how they set you up to believe I was really your daughter. I don’t know why they ran it in real time without compression… normally sixteen weeks of VR pass in one real week.”

  “Nine years is too long for a single session to be time compressed. The brain can’t handle the rapid influx of data. It would’ve felt false and might’ve caused brain damage.” Marcus slid his hand from her shoulder up to cradle her cheek. “I realize what happened, but I can’t help but think of you as mine.”

  Tris slung the rifle from her shoulder and handed it to Kevin before embracing her foster parents. “You basically were my parents for nine years. I used to think you were part of the conspiracy, but you really did believe I was crazy.” She sniffled. “I don’t mind continuing to think of you as my parents, but you should know…”

  Yana smiled and cried. “We wondered what had happened to you. You’d been so sweet up until nine… and then every time you smiled at us it felt like you were hiding something. Like one day you all of a sudden couldn’t stand us and… were afraid.”

  Tris looked down. “That’s the day we left VR. The daughter you thought you had was a computer program.”

  The ISF, and a handful of armed citizens, herded the remaining three members of the Council out through the crowd at gunpoint. Kevin shook hands with Alex and the youngest as they passed close enough.

  “They tried to give me a memory overlay that would’ve made me believe I’d grown up with you my whole life. The AI blocked it… as far as I knew, you were adoptive parents they put me with less than a day after they told me my dad died in an accident at his lab.” She sighed. “I took in a kid, and… even if you weren’t conditioned to believe you’d given birth to me, it doesn’t matter. You’re my parents.”

  Marcus smiled and wiped a tear or two.

  “Tris…” Yana clamped onto her and sniffled.

  “She does kinda resemble you,” said Kevin. “Almost the same shade of blue eyes.”

  “Umm… Mom… Dad… this is Kevin.” Tris put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him closer. “He… uhh… we…”

  Kevin’s face showed a little red.

  Her parents exchanged glances.

  Say it. I can say it. “We’re… well… married.”

  Yana gasped. “No…”

  Tris’ eyebrows furrowed. “Yes. We are.”

  “I mean…” Yana looked at Kevin. “You haven’t had any kind of ceremony have you? We weren’t there. I don’t know what you did. Where were you? They said Detention and the next thing we know you’re out and everything is going crazy. Where did he come from?”

  Kevin laughed.

  Oh… maybe it was better being an orphan. She flashed a cheesy smile. “It’s a long story. I’ve spent about nine months out in the Wildlands. I’ve got a daughter”―she held up a calming hand―“adopted. Who I feel ten shades of awful for leaving behind to come here. I’m going home soon.”

  “Home?” asked Marcus. “I suppose we could make room.”

  “No, Dad.” She leaned on Kevin. “We’re going to Nederland. This place is… a little too crazy.”

  “But what about the pairing? Dovarin seemed like such a charming man.” Yana blinked, looking confused as to why she wouldn’t want him.

  “That program was only needed because the Enclave is so isolated.” She scowled. “And if Dovarin comes within five feet of me, he’s going to wind up missing something rather critical to his anatomy.” Tris stared at her hand for a second before making a fist. “As a matter of fact, I’m not quite the same weak little flower I used to be. Maybe I’ll pay him back for that mark he left on my face.”

  “What?” asked Yana. “Mark? What happened?”

  “Okay, Mom. I guess if I’m going to acc
ept you as my parents, I should open up with you. I had trust issues after that whole ‘she’s crazy’ situation.” Tris looked down. “I thought I’d say something wrong and you’d ship me off to a padded cell or something.”

  “We had no idea,” said Marcus.

  “I know that now.” She held a breath for a second, exhaled, and made eye contact with Mom2. “Dovarin… that son of a bitch hit me within a half hour of being alone with him. He didn’t want a wife, he wanted a toy.”

  Yana gasped. Marcus glowered at the crowd. “I thought I saw him outside somewhere… It was a complete mess. ISF shooting at soldiers. Soldiers shooting at soldiers…”

  “The First Tier Administration and the Council had about two hundred military personnel who somehow decided to remain loyal even in the face of the truth,” said Not-Dad from above. “The fighting is ebbing at this point. A handful of holdouts have fled into the Wildlands. I counted twenty-eight of fifty members of the first through third tiers gunned down by a vengeful mob. People are starting to calm.”

  “What about asshole?” asked Kevin.

  “I’m sorry. There are no residents of the enclave with that name,” said Not-Dad.

  Kevin gave Tris the side-eye. “And you say I’m a literal bastard.”

  “Dovarin? He is not dead.” The AI paused for a second. “He was wounded, but he’s filtered in among the crowd, acting like one of those freed from the pods.”

  “They’ll recognize him eventually.” Tris frowned. “He’s not worth the effort… though I would like to give him a good shot across the jaw.”

  Yana gasped. Marcus blinked with a surprised grin.

  “I told you, I’m not the same little timid thing I used to be.” Tris hugged Marcus and lifted him off his feet for a second.

  “She’s had some work,” said Kevin.

  Tris smirked at him.

  Marcus patted her on the back and laughed. “I’m glad to see you smiling. I… we’ve always wondered what we did that you turned into this gloomy, sorrowful little wraith.”

  “Sorry.” Tris bowed her head. “I thought you were part of the lie. Well, I mean you were, but not for wanting to be. And… I think some part of me remembered before the war. I was so little, but the Enclave never truly felt ‘real’ to me. More like I’d been trapped in some strange, future-techno dream that I couldn’t wake up from. I didn’t feel like I belonged here. I still don’t. I’m going back to Nederland. You two can come with us if you want, but I can’t stay here.”