The Redeemed

by Matthew S. Cox

A short burst of automatic gunfire came from behind him, followed an instant later by a sharp yelp of surprise from Tris. He pivoted on his heel and sprinted into the main room, finding no trace of her or anything else.

  “Tris?” he yelled.

  “Downstairs!” Her shout sounded equally strong below the floor as it did from behind the camouflage curtain.

  Hearing her alive got his heart beating again. He ran through the curtain into the back room, almost wiping out on a bunched up throw rug. Inches from flying face first into an open rectangular hatch about the size of a normal doorway, he caught himself on the side of a desk. Tris curled up in a ball on the floor at the bottom of a handmade wooden stairway, covered in a light dusting of splinters. The steps had blood all over them, continuing in a trail past Tris into the underground space. A matching bloody drag trail continued deeper into the room past the hole in the floor, to a door that opened to the outside along the left side of the building.

  “Shit,” he muttered before raising his voice. “Wayne’s got auto-turrets down there.”

  Tris looked up at him. “I noticed.”

  He hadn’t seen inside the back room of Wayne’s except for once when he’d been seventeen and too ballsy to care going in here might get him shot. As best he could remember, the place hadn’t changed at all. The concealed stairs, however, caught him off guard. He’d known Wayne had a basement, but had no idea where the access was. He’d expected something sneakier than a trap door under a rug from Wayne.

  Tris sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. She looked up at him, her face drawn with worry. “I think Wayne’s in there…”

  Kevin eased himself down the stairs, took her hand, and pulled her upright into an embrace. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t get much of a look before my neuralware kicked in and I had to duck. If I wasn’t boosted, I’d have been dead. He’s behind the turrets. I think he’s hiding from something.”

  The stairwell led down to a small room about the size of a prison cell with a corridor to the right at the corner. Cinder block walls covered in moisture and moss flavored the air with dirt. A scattering of shell casings littered the ground, most of which appeared to be 9mm. He started toward the corridor, but Tris yanked him back at the same instant he noticed the bullet-gouged wood support column at the corner.

  “Don’t poke your head out there or it’ll get shot off.”

  “Is Wayne alive?”

  Tris offered only a helpless look.

  Dammit, Wayne… what the hell? “Did you see enough to get an idea how to shut it off?”

  “Aside from shooting them?” She stooped to pick her Beretta up.

  “What if we kill the master circuit breaker?”

  Tris raised her arms and let them flap against her sides. “If I designed turrets like that, I’d make damn sure they had battery backups. Killing the power is the first thing anyone would try.”

  Kevin leaned up to the corner but didn’t go past it. “Wayne?”

  Tris came up behind him. “I’ll shoot them out. If he’s hurt, we can’t waste time.”

  “Don’t get shot.”

  She smiled. “Now that I’m ready for it, I’m good.”

  “If I have to choose between you or Wayne, there’s no choice. You don’t have to do this.”

  Tris sniffled. “I love you, too. I’m not… too worried.”

  He shrugged off his armored jacket and held it up, open. “Just in case.”

  She put it on, looking smaller for wearing it. “When I hit the ground, drag me back.”

  Kevin took a knee by the corner.

  After a psych-up breath, she blurred sideways into a leap. The Beretta burped like an automatic weapon, a blinding/deafening flash, and she landed on her side. Dust exploded from the wall behind her at the corner. Kevin grabbed her ankles and yanked her away from the corner while flinching from a cloud of cinder block bits and dirt spraying around them.

  “Damn!” shouted Tris. She sat up clutching her right arm. Blood oozed between her fingers.

  Sputtering servo noises and the buzz of electronics came from the deeper portion of the basement. One .45 slug stuck to the jacket over her hip. He peeled her hand up enough to look at a fray of Kevlar fibers sticking up from the red leather sleeve. A matching hole on the back of her arm was cleaner, as though a drill bit had made a perfect circle.

  “Five-five-six,” said Kevin. “It hit the armor segment and glanced.”

  She sucked air between her teeth. “I don’t think it hit bone. It’ll heal. Oh, damn this burns.”

  “Maybe a tracer?” He brushed the jacket off her shoulder and eased her arm free. A clean through-and-through wound in her bicep had already shrunk to a pin dot; the bruising around the spot looked worse than the actual penetration.

  She winced at it for a second before biting his shoulder and grumbling. “Ugh, the small wounds always sting the most.”

  “I need me some nanites.” He kissed her on top of the head.

  Laughing, Tris got to her feet

  Kevin took a small satchel from a nail on the underside of the stairway and waved it at the corner. When nothing shot at him, he risked looking.

  Beyond a ten-foot section of irregular cinder block-walled corridor, a larger room had filled with silicon smoke. Flickering orange light kept time with the bzzt noises, giving away the position of one turret. Two boot-covered feet appeared in the haze on the ground near the far wall, another twelve or thirteen yards farther in.

  Kevin crept around the corner, advancing with his .45 out. At the edge of the room, he waved a hand about to clear smoke. Four sentry-gun style turrets lay in disarray around metal shelving, one on fire, two knocked over, and one smashed open and sparking. Wayne slumped against the back wall, shotgun still in his hands across his lap. His vacant expression, open mouth, and three bullet wounds in his upper abdomen said more than Kevin wanted to hear.

  “Wayne…” He slumped against the shelves on his left. “You were such an asshole sometimes.”

  He sniffled.

  Tris’ hand slid over his back and gripped his shoulder. He didn’t want to look at her, not with tears gathering in his eyes. As much of a prick as the man had been sometimes, Wayne was the closest thing to a father figure he really knew. Aside from one blurry memory of a semi-truck cab from twenty-three years ago, he couldn’t remember his real dad.

  “Aw, dammit, Wayne.” Kevin lowered his head. “What happened?”

  ris backed up, deciding to give him some room to grieve. She kept her mouth shut. Though the man had been mostly civil to her after Harrisburg, he’d been fully ready to leave her tied hand and foot… and probably wouldn’t have stopped anyone from abducting her had Kevin not stepped in. If not for the apparent effect the death had on Kevin, she couldn’t have cared less about Wayne eating bullets. One less opportunistic bastard in the world.

  “I’m, uhh… gonna.” Kevin gestured at the corridor. “You know.”

  “Want help?”

  He shook his head before stooping to move Wayne’s shotgun off to the side, leaning it against the wall. Tris crossed her arms and ducked behind the shelf on the right, giving him room to lift and carry Wayne’s body out of the basement.

  Once the sound of his passage up the stairs faded, she looked around. The shelves held a lot of MREs, as well as some large ten-gallon drums of homemade beer, magnesium flares, a couple coils of nylon rope, one pack of bright fluorescent orange tent spikes, and a pair of old Coleman lanterns that probably didn’t work.

  Blood spray on the walls in the narrow corridor suggested someone (or some people) had followed/chased Wayne down here, and found out the hard way about the turrets. The absence of shell casings and blood (other than the puddle under where Wayne had been) in here convinced her whoever attacked him hadn’t made it past the hail of bullets. The old man likely had a transponder on him somewhere marking him friendly, but it didn’t matter much as the turrets couldn’t kill anything but time now.<
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  She snagged one of the MREs and headed upstairs to the office. Wayne had thrown a grey tarp over the security console, though whether he’d meant it as a dust cover, concealment, or a ‘this crap is worthless’ statement, she couldn’t tell. Tris flopped in a wheeled chair with grey cloth cushions and put her feet up on the plyboard desk before opening the MRE.

  “Hmm. Turkey and gravy.” She tore the main entrée packet open and sucked on some of the sludge inside. It didn’t taste bad, a bit like the cat food she’d eaten two days after first leaving the Enclave.

  While taking small ‘sips’ of food, she tapped at the keyboard connected to the security system and got a password prompt. She looked around for papers or anything where he might’ve scribbled the password, but didn’t find anything by the time she eaten all the mush from the entrée packet.

  Well that’s kind of stupid. This whole thing is to tell Amarillo who to go after if something happens… password makes no sense. She scratched at her lips with the empty foil. Course, the attacker could wipe the data if they left it wide open… there’s gotta be a master password.

  She tossed the packet on the desk and typed ‘Amarillo,’ which didn’t work. She tried ‘amarillo2061,’ but that didn’t work either. Tris stared at the command menu pondering the idiocy of having their master password emblazoned on the back of their agents’ jackets. She tried a few variations of mixing the words ‘Amarillo’ and ‘roadhouse’ with 2061, as well as ‘1234’ and ‘password,’ ‘roadhousemasterpassword,’ ‘letmein,’ and a few other random phrases.

  Frustrated, she typed in ‘fuckyou’ and stabbed the enter key with her middle finger.

  It worked.

  Tris pressed a hand to her face, moaned, and peered one eye between her fingers at the command menu. “Ugh. Guess we’re dealing with adolescent boys.”

  Hitting 1 for status, she got five small boxes showing the view out of individual digital cameras arranged throughout the building. Three on the main room from various angles, one in the corridor by the bathrooms, and one in the corridor by the bedrooms. All five showed a green dot and ‘recording.’

  Option 2 from the menu led to the logs. A stream of filenames in green-on-black appeared. For a few seconds, they struck her as random strings of letters and numbers until her brain caught up and she recognized year, month, day, time mashed together. She tapped the screen for the most recent file and waited. Ten seconds later, she felt like an idiot since this old terminal had no touch screen. A few key taps highlighted the line and opened the file, which gave her white snow in a box.

  The next file had more white snow, and so on.

  “Shit.”

  Tris spent the next hour or so gnawing on the empty MRE packet while diving into all the diagnostic modules. Everything she ran came back indicating all systems functional. Eventually, she CTRL+ALT+DEL’ed the machine and sifted down the processes list, hunting for anything unusual. She killed a process titled ‘CCOS64.exe,’ which broke into the base operating system beneath the ‘overlay OS’ of the camera control software. With full access to the computer, she soon found some configuration files. Hundreds of lines of ‘plain English’ setting parameters scrolled by. A long string of # marks caught her eye and she slowed the scroll enough to read.

  From the look of it, someone had commented out the paths to the diagnostic executables and replaced them with ‘allsgood.exe.’ Tris smirked. She opened a command window and ran ‘allsgood.exe,’ which produced an output display that appeared to be the diagnostics module providing a perfect passing report on every component.

  A scowl deepened across her face as she got into a robo-clicking frenzy on the keyboard, down arrow, delete, down arrow, delete, over and over again to remove the # marks from the config file. She added one―to cancel out the redirect to the fake result generator. With the de-edited file saved, she reopened the user-level software and ran the diagnostics.

  This time, it showed failures in all of the flash memory storage modules. The cameras were recording, but the system attempted to write the video data on silicon shit. She grumbled. No way Wayne hacked the system. Within minutes, she had the case open and examined the individual flash drives hidden under a thick layer of dust. The newest one had a manufacture date of September 2017, several years before the war. They might have worked initially, but burned out after too many overwrites.

  “Shit.” She dropped the drive in the case and leaned back in the chair with a hand on her forehead. “All this tech is ancient. Of course… what else would it be, not like they’re still making stuff.” Tris bit her lip. I thought Amarillo was a big tech center. Her mind filled with a fleeting memory of driving down a street past four and five story squarish buildings topped with armored soldiers. Neon lights, lots of people out and about almost as if the war had never happened… a big Roadhouse-themed office where once had been a car dealership. A guy with a pea-green bowtie. “That man was so cheesy.”

  The entire experience did feel like a scam at first. She’d been truly surprised when the flatbed truck showed up at Rawlins with their solar panels, cameras, wiring, and charging hardware a week later. A specter of doubt resurfaced. She tapped her fingers on the desk while thinking, then hunted around for anything else of use.

  To the left of the terminal, on an adjacent desk (this one metal and an actual desk as opposed to plyboard on top of cinder blocks), she found Wayne’s ledger. A few minutes of looking it over, she realized old, benevolent Wayne had been skimming coins out of the accounts he held in trust for his frequent drivers. Nothing too noticeable, somewhere between three to six coins per transaction. She flipped to Kevin’s pages, and read over the history of his account growing from 108 coins over a series of hundreds of deposits until he’d reached the 9918 he had when they met.

  She opened the job logbook beside it and compared the payouts for each run Kevin had done to the amount he put in trust. After factoring out an overestimate of six coins for food and charge each day he stopped in, she found a missing 1247 coins over the years it took him to save up. Another driver, someone with less money than Kevin had collected, showed a similar pattern but that man had been cheated out of 800 some odd coins in only nine months. Guess he liked Kevin.

  A large safe, tall enough to hold rifles, caught her eye in the back corner. Amateur safe cracking killed about a half hour with little success. With nothing else to do in here, she headed down another cramped hallway to the store. Whoever had attacked Wayne didn’t bother robbing the place, something she thought odd, especially considering the padlock wasn’t secured.

  “Hmm. Guess old Wayne had some enemies.”

  After helping herself to the bag of 9mm bullets, she headed to the kitchen.

  “No sense wasting food.”

  evin carried Wayne’s body down the hall past the bathrooms. He paused for a few seconds by the display case, contemplating taking the old armor out and putting it on him, but decided to leave it as a memoriam. About forty paces behind the roadhouse, he set Wayne down and returned to the building in search of a shovel. A while of rummaging and cursing later, he headed back outside with a smallish spade from the maintenance closet where Bee kept cleaning supplies.

  He grumbled, dreading the thought of having to dig a grave with it… but he couldn’t find anything better and he couldn’t leave Wayne sitting out for the vultures or whatever else might wander along. By the time he got about a foot and a half deep with a grave-sized outline, he stopped to remove his jacket and shirt and take a few breaths. He kept working for another hour or so before squinting skyward, sweat running into his eyes. The horizon in all directions blurred with a day that had to be past ninety.

  Feeling a dry tickle in his throat, he gathered his armored jacket (too valuable to leave unattended) as well as his shirt, and headed inside. He left them on a table and helped himself to two large cups of water before filling a jug. Tris busied herself with the computer in the office, typing away furiously. Still not quite ready to talk to anyone, he to
ok his water jug and returned to the gravesite.

  “Sorry it’s takin’ so long, Wayne. You got a shitty shovel.” Kevin sipped more water and set the jug down by the old man’s boots. “Tris is pullin’ up your security system. I’ll get ’em for ya. This just got personal.”

  An hour or two of miserable digging later, a silhouette caught his eye. A figure appeared in the north, approaching the roadhouse from behind. Kevin stood straight, shielding his eyes with a hand to get a better look. The indistinct outline took on a feminine shape, soon followed by the line of a large shovel over one shoulder. Her teetering gait became obvious, and he knew at once who (rather what) was coming.

  “Bee!” yelled Kevin.

  The android stopped for a second, adjusted facing toward him, and speed-tottered over. She had on a fuchsia bikini top and black miniskirt with combat boots. A few scuffmarks on her abdomen betrayed the artificiality of her skin, assuming the seams around her mouth and eyes didn’t. “Kevin… Oh, it is positive to see you.” Her head pivoted downward with a whirr. “You have located Wayne.” She simulated a noise somewhere between weeping and a microwave on high. “I am sorry.”

  Kevin crossed his hands on the spade handle. “What the fuck happened?”

  Bee looked up at him and blinked with a click. “Nine men in similar apparel entered in a group. They took tables and ordered food. They showed coin, but after they ate, they refused to pay. Wayne experienced heightened levels of emotional distress at the situation. He increased the volume of his voice by thirty two point nine decibels and repeated his request for payment.”

  Imagining Wayne’s reaction to a bunch of idiots trying to stiff him tightened a lump in his throat.

  “The men did not display elevated levels of stress indicators when Wayne pointed out they were in violation of the Code. One man experienced a rhythmic, intermittent exhalation with an opened glottis and vocal cord vibration.”

  “What did you just say, Bee? Was that even English?”

  The android tilted her head. “Oh. My apologies. You may be more familiar with the colloquial term ‘laughter.’”