Kevin shifted his weight back onto his left leg, and surreptitiously flicked the snap open on his holstered .45. Tris reacted to the change in his body language and took a step left, hand on the Beretta at her hip. “You both know I did my time behind the wheel. Roadhouse makes it possible for you boys to operate. Not like Reaper’s gonna dry hump the car to charge the batteries.”
Ajay’s grin ran off to a scowl. Bull glanced off to the side for a second, failing to hide a smile.
Kevin counted the coins out of the hip pouch and sectioned sixty-five out of the five hundred. He pushed sixty to Bull, tossed five in his cash box, and put the remainder back in the hip pouch for the merchant to pick up. He handed it over to Tris. “Put that in the safe, hon.”
Bull’s smile flattened. “What if I say I think you should give us all sixty-five?”
Kevin offered an appraising frown. “Then I’d say you’re forgetting the Code. You’re gettin’ twelve percent on a milk run. Most operators’d leave you forty.”
“Yeah. You right about that.” Bull brushed his leather jacket aside to expose a pair of .44 revolvers. “Maybe it’s time for a change, and I’m thinkin’ that change looks like sixty five coins.”
Kevin raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got a strange sense of humor. If I didn’t know you, I’d think you’d just threatened me in my own roadhouse. Of course, I know you’re just messin’ around. That ain’t how the Code works.”
“You hear ’bout Spring Grove?” Bull flicked his thumb around the hammer of his still-holstered weapon. “Someone shot up a ’house in South Dakota, and ain’t no one do nothin’ about it.”
Ajay flashed an opportunistic grin. “Yeah, man. Maybe they don’t know who did it. Maybe they don’t care.”
The group from the big rig shifted in their seats; everyone but the teenaged boy holding the infant pulled weapons into their laps.
“I call the runt,” whispered one of the tweens.
Her sister nodded and eyed Bull.
“Sounds like a load of BS to me,” said Kevin. “Five thousand coin bounty’s a heavy weight to carry. If someone ‘hit’ Spring Grove, it’d be all over the airwaves. How many people drive a bright red Tahoe with black bull heads on the doors?”
“Those are supposed to be bull heads?” asked Tris, eyebrow cocked. “I thought they were cow spots.”
Ajay’s eyes shifted back and forth between Bull and Kevin.
Bull hovered his hand over his pistol, fingertips barely touching rubber. “What if I think that’s all a load of crap?”
Kevin hardened his stare. “Then I’d think I’m about to collect a stupidity tax of sixty-five coins, plus have a bunch of shit to sell.”
Bull’s moustache twitched.
“Bullet’ll be coming out the back of your skull before the tip of your barrel clears leather.” Kevin leaned his head to the left until his neck popped, and did it again to the right. “Shame to spoil a good working relationship like that.”
Bull met his stare for a moment, glanced at Tris, eyed the people at the big, round table, and relaxed. “Heh. Just fuckin’ wit’ yas.” He grinned and dropped ten coins on the counter. “Beer and burger each and a bunk.”
Tris cocked an eyebrow. “You boys sharin’ a bed or does the little guy get the floor?”
Ajay glared at her.
“You know what I mean.” Bull grumbled. “Two rooms.”
Kevin swept the coins into his hand. He could squeeze twelve out for the order, but didn’t feel like cleaning up after a gunfight. He banged on the wall twice and yelled through the hole. “Sang, need a pair of burgers.”
“No problem, Boss,” shouted Sang.
After filling a pair of mason jar glasses, he set them on the counter and indicated the seating area with a nod. “Pick a table. Food’ll be out soon.”
The group in camo relaxed somewhat, though they continued to watch Bull as he headed for a table in the back corner and sat facing the door in. Ajay leered at the youngest of the adult women among them, a girl of perhaps seventeen or so with straight black hair. The twins leaned against their mother, edging away from where the two men sat.
“What was that?” Tris pressed up to Kevin. “You trying to start a fight over five coins?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Bull or Ajay, not the way ‘Stubblefield’ stared at them. Whatever his real name was, the man looked like he could be the twins’ father or older brother. “Shit. Somethin’s gonna go down. And it ain’t the coins. It’s the Code.”
She jabbed him in the side. “The Code isn’t gonna help you if you get shot.”
He broke his stare at Bull and tapped one finger on the tip of Tris’ nose. “They were just testing me. Not even Bull’s got the balls to risk bringin’ Amarillo down on him.”
“Yeah, but you’d still be dead.” Her gaze fell to the floor.
“Everyone knows there’s cameras. He’d have to kill everyone in here and burn the whole place down, and hope that the black box melts. This guy Holloway killed the man who’d been runnin’ the Hagerman Roadhouse before Wayne got it. Poor bastard couldn’t show his face anywhere near a road or settlement. Bounty eventually got up to eleven grand. Site inspector carried his severed head around for a couple years as proof too.”
She squeezed her fingers through his shirt on both sides, pulling him against her. “I don’t care about the cameras. I want you alive, not avenged.”
Scuffing boots made him look up at ‘Stubblefield,’ who approached the counter. “What’s the deal with those two? Wasn’t expecting them to go for that badass act.”
Kevin glanced to his right, over the counter at the man in camo. “Just a pair of drivers in from the road. And it ain’t an act.” He patted Tris on the shoulder. “She would’a killed him ’fore his gun left his hip.”
“Heh. No doubt.” The man gave Tris a head-to-toe glance. “Where’d you find one of those?”
Her smile flattened. “I’m not an android.”
“No shit… Mind?” He reached as if to give her bicep a squeeze.
Tris lifted her arm an inch.
“Hmm.” He let go after a few seconds. “You’re right.”
Kevin blinked. “You can tell that easy?”
“Sure.” Stubblefield smiled. “Arm’s too spindly and soft. Damn odd how much she looks like one though.”
“How do you know that?” asked Tris.
“We’re from Fort Missoula. Spend the winter inside, summer caravanning. They had a pair of those Persephone units in shipping cartons like big ass dolls. Larry got it in his head an extra pair of hands wouldn’t be a bad idea, though f’ya ask me, he’d been fixated on how, uhh, ‘anatomically correct’ they looked. Anyway, thing wakes up and goes on a rampage. Headed straight out; killed anyone who got in its way like we’d ‘captured’ it or something. Needless to say, we demoed the other one.”
Tris gulped. “I’m a person.”
“And she’s anatomically correct,” said Kevin.
Tris punched him in the side, but grinned.
A ripple of gunfire erupted from the seating area. Kevin startled and whipped his head around to find Ajay lying dead on the floor and Bull sliding lifeless from a bench seat into a heap under the table. His huge Ruger .44 slipped out of his fingers and hit the tiles with a clatter. Henderson and two of the women held smoking M-16s. The twins had pulled their Glocks, but didn’t seem to have fired. The teenage boy lay on the floor, shielding the infant.
“I was expecting something like that.” Kevin grumbled.
“What the fuck happened?” asked Tris.
“Don’t care.” Kevin glanced at the hole in the wall. “Sang, never mind those burgers.”
Tris gawked at Stubblefield.
“No problem, Boss,” yelled Sang.
ith a heavy grunt, Kevin rolled Bull’s underwear-clad body into a grave about three hundred yards north of the roadhouse. He entertained a moment of grim humor that Bee would’ve taken the underpants as well. Some things just wer
e not worth two coins.
It’d take another damn nuke to get rid of those stains.
Stubblefield and Henderson helped dig, cutting the task down from ‘all night and into tomorrow’ to ‘the rest of the night.’ According to Henderson, ‘don’t sleep’ was not the correct thing to say back to a woman after her family refused to sell her. The whole thing sounded like Ajay’s mouth wrote a check Bull’s reflexes couldn’t cash. Kevin wondered if Bull had been in on it or if the skinny idiot set off that bomb as a surprise. Not much point wondering about it now.
“Well, Bull… sooner or later, you were gonna wind up on the wrong side of the argument.” Kevin took a moment to catch his breath before reaching for the shovel again.
The men helped, tossing dirt over the bodies.
“‘Preciate the help.”
“No problem,” said Henderson. “Least we can do.”
“And thanks for havin’ your girl check our panels. Didn’t look the type.” Stubblefield chuckled.
“What type?” asked Kevin.
“You know… smart.” Stubblefield shrugged. “She’s cute. Didn’t expect her to be a tech too.”
Henderson chuckled. “Don’t mind him. He’s been hit in the head too many times.”
“No problem.” Kevin laughed, but it rang hollow. Not that he objected to the man’s apparent belief that pretty equated to dumb, but a firing squad had gone off in his roadhouse. That’s what it had been. Really, when he ran it back and forth under the rolling pin of his mind, ‘firing squad’ was the only way to call it. Five automatic rifles opened up on Bull and Ajay over a threat that might not have been anything more than a toothless attempt to salvage a bruised ego. Any one of those bullets might’ve caught someone off a chance ricochet. It could be Tris lying at the bottom of a hole in the ground. Any day might see bullets flying around the room; at least on the road, he expected danger at every turn. The roadhouse offered the lie of safety. I gotta trust in the Code. “She okay?”
“Yeah. Nothin’ we haven’t seen before. Jaime’s tough.” Henderson patted down dirt. “That shifty bastard threatened her and she wasn’t gonna risk it.”
Henderson shook his head. “She ain’t takin’ shit from no one since she had a baby.”
Kevin exhaled, sputtering his lips. “Dumb bastard. Girl’s got a rifle in her lap and he runs his mouth.”
Stubblefield snickered. “Darwin at work.”
“Huh?” asked Kevin.
“Oh… survival of the fittest. The dumb weed themselves out.” Stubblefield swung the shovel up and rested it over his shoulder. “That should about do it then.”
Kevin looked around, surprised at how dark it had gotten. “Yeah. Time to pack it in.”
He led the way across the desert to the back door, past a pair of dumpsters, and through a cinder block-walled corridor running behind the stores-turned-private rooms. An offshoot led to the main area, emerging between the counter and the bathroom hallway. The men went to their table while Kevin stowed the tools in a closet. By the time he reached the counter, the group had left. Lights in the side windows of the giant semi cab implied they’d retired to their bunks.
Tris’ butt protruded out from under the table where Bull died, shimmying back and forth in time with the scratch of a brush on the floor. At the clonk of Kevin’s boot heels on the ceramic tiles, she sat back and looked up at him. “This is my least favorite part of this, you know.”
“You’re still cleaning up blood?” He grabbed a rag and got down on one knee to help.
She harrumphed. “I spent a few hours on top of their trailer, remember. Couldn’t do anything for the two shattered panels. I doubt Amarillo could either. That rig’s got gallium arsenide multi-junction units; don’t see that anywhere but old satellites and military bases. I did manage to get them back up to seventy-two percent. Half their array went down due to a slug that hit the fuse cluster. Skimmed the underside and embedded in the roof. Didn’t look damaged from the outside, but a line diagnostic led me right to it.”
Kevin wiped traces of Bull from the facing seat. “I won’t even pretend I know what you said.”
“Amy gave us a couple bottles of wine to thank me for the repairs. They can probably get home now without needing to stop again.”
He cringed. “How old is it?”
“They make it themselves at the fort. Plum wine?” She shrugged.
Kevin rubbed his gut, imagining the kind of shits that would give him. “S’pose someone will buy it.” He stared at her, watching her hair wave about as she scrubbed the floor. Gratitude that she’d not taken a bullet left him speechless.
“Added thirty seven rounds of .44 to the shop. Two .44 Ruger revolvers, five sets of jeans, three pairs of boots, two jackets…” Tris scrunched up her face in thought. “Found a .308 rifle in the truck, about ninety rounds for it… didn’t count yet. Couple knives. What’re you gonna do with their ride?”
“Put the word on the radio. Someone’ll buy it. Could get four grand for it if I pushed, but I’ll say two just to get rid of it.”
“Alternating clusters.”
“What?” Kevin, stretched forward to dab blood from the wall, glanced at her.
“They’ve got two batteries. One charges while they drive from the other.”
“Ah.”
She gave the seat another once-over. “At least they shot him in the chest. No brain matter.”
“You are such a romantic.”
“I know.” She hugged him. “You’re sweaty.”
“Shower?” He grinned.
“Nah.” She hooked a finger under his shirt collar and tugged him into a kiss. “Bath.”
Dreams of driving along an endless desert road came and went. A world rendered in washed-out sepia tones reassured him sitting behind the wheel again―and not the past six months running his own roadhouse―belonged to the realm of imagination. Kevin awoke on his back with Tris face down on his chest, head tucked under his chin. She’d switched up the old wives’ tale and fell asleep within seconds of their finishing. The hot bath of hours ago had soothed the soreness from grave digging; he’d almost passed out in the water. After almost an hour of sex, half of which happened in the tub, he couldn’t tell if he was too tired or too worried to sleep.
Nerves had been Tris’ thing over the past few months. Virus, Enclave, Nathan, random drunken idiots with guns. She didn’t have the same kind of faith in the Code. She hadn’t grown up around it, seen it work, seen the fear in men’s eyes when they realized they’d breached it. Some things, a person just didn’t do: steal or damage a car parked at a roadhouse, steal from a roadhouse, attack the proprietor of a roadhouse, get smashed on moonshine and drive a pickup truck through a roadhouse…
He slipped his hand up to the curve where her ass sloped down into her lower back. Worrying about someone like Bull giving Tris a hard time never much occurred to him. She could handle just about anything the Wildlands threw at her… if she saw it coming. A stray bullet was another story.
The yellowing drop ceiling didn’t have any answers lurking in its tiny, black holes. Somewhere around the time he’d turned fifteen, he’d got it in his head he’d be happy forever as a driver. Adventure, glory, shooting ‘bad guys,’ and going anywhere/doing whatever he wanted. At twenty… four―or somewhere around that age―a bullet changed his mind, both about spending the rest of his life on the road as well as thinking of armor as ‘too heavy.’ The spot twinged, but he didn’t feel like moving Tris’ breast away to scratch himself. He’d frequented Wayne’s ever since he’d been about seventeen and on his own, and now he’d become Wayne―or at least a bad imitation thereof.
He glanced at the wall by the door. I can’t remember if Wayne locked up at night. No, of course not… he’s got Bee. Androids don’t sleep. His sigh fluttered her snowy hair. Maybe I should hire a night guy. Their bedroom occupied what had been a small management office on the second story, right above the dining area. His door had a lock. The store full of gear had a l
ock; all the bedrooms downstairs had locks, and Sang usually locked himself in the kitchen at night. At worst, someone might steal his chairs.
For some time he lay still, eyes closed but wide awake. Even the gentle motion of her breathing failed to offer the solace necessary to pass out.
What am I worrying about?
A creak and jangle emanated from the hall outside.
Crap. He suppressed a cringe at the scrape of the front door on the tiles. Kevin rolled to his left, easing Tris onto her back and covering her with the blanket as he slipped out into the chilly night air. “Yeah, yeah…” He mumbled and hurried into his pants, shirt, and boots.
The door rattled again.
“Fuck’s sake, I’m coming,” he muttered. He got three steps to the door before he reversed to grab his .45 and stuffed it in the back of his belt.
Ten feet of hallway led to a cramped stairway. Kevin descended and squinted at dim room where a male figure in a long duster coat leaned against the door. The man pushed the door open and pulled it back against himself in a continuous motion, like a teenager trying to fan shit fumes out of a bathroom. Scraggly black hair hung down from a brown cowboy hat. With each pull or shove at the door, he let off a soft grunt. He leaned so far to the side, his grip on the door might’ve been the only thing keeping him from collapsing.
A good distance out in the desert, the wavering beams of headlamps illuminated the scrub. Whoever he was, he’d parked a quarter mile or more away.
“Hey, buddy. You awright?”
“Ngh,” said the man. “I…”
“You shot?” Kevin approached, left hand raised, right creeping around behind his back for the gun.
“Ngh!” The man snapped his head up, tossing hair away from his face. Bulging bloodshot eyes locked onto Kevin. Dark bloody slime seeped over his teeth and dribbled down his chin.
“Fuck!” shouted Kevin.
He yanked the .45 and brought it around; the Infected pounced at him, too fast for a human to move. The gun went off before his back hit the chilly floor, a useless bullet out the window into the night sky. Hard red tile met Kevin’s skull with a dizzying jolt. He swung his left arm up in an elbow strike, more to get something in front of the thing’s chest before it got close enough to bite.
The Redeemed Page 4
