The Redeemed

by Matthew S. Cox

  He snarled. “Son of a bitch.”

  “I am unaware of the man’s parentage.” Bee blinked again. “Wayne produced a firearm as did the nine men. They exchanged shots. Wayne inflicted fatal injuries on two of them before retreating to a position of tactical advantage. I believe he attempted to increase his odds of survival by leading the men into the defense system in the basement while I moved to obtain a superior firearm. The remaining attackers were unaware of the turrets. Five of the nine men left. I interrupted the life processes of one on the porch with a shotgun. Two appeared to have moderate injuries requiring ambulatory assistance from their companions. I have completed cleaning the main room and burying the four dead men, a process which took me fifty-three hours nineteen minutes and eleven seconds.”

  Kevin’s heart picked up speed. “They… just shot him? No hesitation at all?”

  “I was not in the room when hostilities began, but my auditory analysis did not detect noticeable signs of hesitation or fear in their voices.” Bee glanced again at Wayne. “I would like to provide assistance with burying Wayne.”

  He watched her waist-long black hair waver in the breeze for a minute, still trying to wrap his brain around the concept of people shooting up a roadhouse over something so trivial as paying for food… especially when they had the money. Stupid as it sounded, it felt like they tried to provoke a bounty on purpose. “Uhh, yeah. Sure. This is ass busting work.”

  Bee tilted her body to examine him. “Your posterior does not appear to have sustained noticeable damage.”

  Between sorrow and rage, he had no room for even a half smile.

  At his lack of response, Bee stepped into the hole he’d started and got to digging with her real shovel. Kevin shook his head and attacked dirt once more with the spade, though between human muscles that got tired and poor tools, he wound up feeling more like a spectator than a helper. Bee didn’t even need a pickaxe to force her shovel into the denser earth farther down.

  “So who were these dead men that walked away?”

  Bee paused to look up at him. “Only four of them―”

  “Not now, Bee. Not fuckin’ now.”

  She blinked. “I am sorry, Kevin I do not understand.”

  “I mean I’m going to find and kill the other five bastards. They’re dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

  Bee emitted a series of whirring sounds, which he imagined as gears in her head turning. “I do not know who they are. They had not been here before. All of them had the same type of jacket with the same symbol on the back.”

  That should make it easy enough to find something… biker gangs aren’t exactly subtle. “What symbol?”

  The android grasped the shovel midway along the length and held her arm up with the handle horizontal. “A white fist holding a sword by the blade like this with a circle around it.” She resumed digging.

  “Hmm. Never heard of that before.”

  Bee blinked. “How does one hear a symbol?”

  Kevin screamed in frustration. He grabbed his .45 but couldn’t quite draw it on Bee, so he settled for kicking a clod of dirt into the distance.

  “I am sorry for causing you emotional distress.” Bee hung her head.

  He sighed and patted it on the shoulder before remembering ‘she’ was a machine. “Uhh… it’s okay.”

  Tris appeared at the back door and ran over with her Beretta drawn. “What happened?” She did a double take. “Bee?”

  “Hello, Tris.” Bee smiled. “It is positive to see you.”

  Kevin picked at the dirt under his nails. “You ever hear of any Enclave units having a symbol of a white hand holding a sword sideways by the blade?”

  Tris shrugged. “No. Not like there’s thousands of them… Their military doesn’t really have different units or divisions. All one group.” She bit her lip. “Well, the hovercraft pilots kind of have their own little club or whatever.”

  “Bee, did you see their cars?” asked Kevin.

  “Yes. They arrived on e-bikes.”

  Kevin glanced back at the roadhouse, sure that the front had been empty when he’d arrived. “How did five men drive away on nine bikes?”

  “They did not.” Bee, neck deep in the ground, peered up at him. “The five left in a hurry. A few minutes after, some of the News came and took the bikes. They did not go inside the building.”

  Kevin looked at Tris. “Anything from the cams?”

  She shook her head. “No. The system hasn’t worked for a long time. The flash drives were shot, and someone hacked it to hide error messages and make the diagnostic look like everything was working.”

  “What?” Kevin’s throat dried up again. “Dead?”

  “Probably for years. I can’t tell when they last successfully preserved data. The oldest filename is two months ago, but I’m sure those drives have been worthless for at least a decade.”

  “Drives?” He really wanted to hit something, but neither Tris nor Bee deserved it. He settled for pulling Tris tight to his chest and squeezing. “This is beyond fucked up.”

  “Think of it like someone talking to you, and you writing down what they say in your notebook.”

  He nodded.

  Tris clung to him, trying to be comforting. “Well, in this case, someone was talking to you, but your pen didn’t have any ink in it, so everything you wrote never appeared on the paper.”

  He sent an apologetic stare at Wayne’s lifeless body. “Okay, so it gets a little more difficult. Guess I’ll just have to kill everyone I find wearing that damn symbol if I can’t tell who did it.”

  “Best I can tell, they didn’t steal anything. I think these guys showed up specifically to kill Wayne.” Tris glanced at Bee. “Did she see anything?”

  Bee repeated her explanation of what happened as Kevin moved Wayne to the hole and folded his arms over his chest. Tris reached down and helped him up out of the ground. Bee got started filling it in.

  Kevin shoveled in silence at Bee’s side until they finished covering the grave. He stuck the spade in the dirt and crossed his arms over the handle. “Doesn’t make any sense they’d start a gunfight with a proprietor over eighteen coins when they had the money to pay. You’re right. I think they wanted a fight.” He exhaled. “No idea why. Wayne was a good man. Bit of a stubborn bastard at times, but good.”

  Tris looked down.

  “What?” Kevin glanced at her.

  “Uhh, nothing important.”

  He moved away from the spade, leaving it stuck in the ground, and grasped her shoulders. “Tris?”

  She stared at his stomach. “You’re going to think I’m being bitchy or trying to talk you out of the stupid idea of going after this gang.”

  He almost smiled. “I figured you would.”

  Tris lifted her head; her gem-blue eyes locked on his and widened with guilt. “Look, when I was in the office, I started looking over the books. I think Wayne was skimming coins off everyone he kept money for.”

  Kevin blinked. “You’re accusing him of being a thief?”

  “I went line by line over every job you ran for him, over every deposit he put in your ‘account,’ and estimated a few coins spent here and there for food and ammo. There are regular discrepancies on how much he recorded in your balance. Couple coins off each time.”

  He squinted. It took him a few seconds to glare his anger away from her. “I’m not pissed at you. How much?”

  She managed a weak smile. “Somewhere between nine hundred and twelve hundred coins over the years you were working for him.” Kevin flinched. “He didn’t write down how much you spent on ammo or other crap, so there’s a lot of variability possible.”

  Kevin kicked at the dirt. “No.”

  Tris looked up. “Huh? I’m sure… I’m not just saying that to make you not want to go off and avenge him. The ledger shows it.”

  “Not that.” He grabbed the spade and stomped toward the building. “There’s no way anyone would’ve been able to read that book while Wayne
was alive… and even if they could, I doubt anyone would’ve found it.” He stopped, gazing at the ground between his boots. “Maybe it was interest or some shit… a service charge for holding our money.”

  “Hmm.” She shrugged. “Could be. Did he ever tell you he was going to take a couple coins off each transaction?”

  Kevin smiled. “Nah. Knowing Wayne, he just decided to do it figuring no one would notice.”

  She followed him to the door. “You don’t seem too upset over it.”

  “Wayne could be a bastard.” He chuckled, pulling the door open. “Out here, a guy does as much as he can get away with. I’ve only known two people who didn’t look for every opportunity to get one over on everyone they met… one of them was my father. That attitude got him killed.”

  “Who was the other one?”

  He kept walking. “You.”

  “You missed one.” She tugged on his arm so he stopped half in the doorway. When he looked back at her, she smiled. “You’re surviving okay.”

  “Yeah…” He let his head hang, and sighed. “I suppose I am.”

  “So now what?” She glanced over her shoulder at Bee tottering over with the shovels.

  “Now…” Kevin patted her on the back and eased her inside. “Now I’m gonna go see if Alamo remembers.”

  ayne’s Roadhouse hung in silence, save for the faint sizzle of the grill in the kitchen. Kevin hovered in the doorway, gazing out over the front porch at the dusty emptiness of Hagerman. A dark band of ominous weather spread across the sky at his right, lit by the occasional flash of horizontal lightning. The tempest amid the clouds remained as silent as the room behind him, far enough away not to rumble. A steady wind from the northwest carried a hint of rain and ozone.

  Tris slid a mason jar back and forth between her hands across a round table near the middle of the room. She’d salvaged a short-sleeved black tee shirt with a faded print on it of some pre-war music group. The name had long since flaked off, but the spiked skull graphic between her breasts suggested something dark. Her new (relatively) black leather skirt stopped at less than a hands’ width below her crotch, so she’d added a pair of fluorescent green leggings. Despite her slender build, they clung so tight it looked like her legs had been dipped in paint.

  Her still-wet hair lent her expression a forlorn quality, as if she’d blown in out of a rain that hadn’t started yet. A shared shower had brought back memories of their last time here. She’d respected his grief over the old man; neither had been in the mood for doing anything more than cleaning up. A long, soapy embrace had managed to make him feel better. Tris caught him glancing back at her and offered a somber little version of a smile.

  He fired off one last, long look down the road in the direction of the Bobcat market. As he expected, it didn’t take long for the News to show up once a car appeared out front. The last he’d seen of them prior to an hour or so ago, they’d not given him the feeling of continued trouble. It’d been Juan and Rash rolling up on their e-bikes… the two with the biggest grudge. Most guys didn’t react well to having their asses kicked in front of their friends, especially not twice by a little woman, once with her hands tied behind her back.

  Kevin shook his head with a chuckle and meandered to the table.

  Within a second of his grasping the chair to pull it back, Bee entered from the kitchen area carrying two plates loaded with dust hopper burgers and fries. Wayne was nothing if not consistent. Variety, at least in terms of menu, had been a dirty word. His ass hit the seat in time with the plates touching down on the table.

  “Thanks, Bee.”

  The android nodded at him. “You are welcome.”

  “That leg looks good.” Tris leaned around to examine the artificial woman. “The actuator giving you any trouble?”

  Kevin gathered the burger in both hands and raised it to his mouth. It smelled the same as he’d grown used to. Meat, pepper, salt, a hint of metal, and an indefinable quasi-chemical aftertaste not quite sweet or sour. He’d always thought Wayne had some special recipe, but it had been Bee all along. The fifteen-year-old in him slunk off to a corner to hide tears while the last twelve years kept his face stoic and his mind focused.

  Bee faced Tris, hands on her hips. “If I bend at a greater than ninety degree angle, it sticks. The brief period of increased resistance prior to resuming full mobility suggests a burr or imperfection in the servo rotator.”

  Kevin took his usual measured bite, chewed three times, and tossed a fry into the mix. The hot starch, drowned in salt, combined with the meat-bread mush and hit that flavor point he used to spend hours behind the wheel dreaming about. Having his own roadhouse and six months of not driving runs anymore hadn’t struck him with how he’d never wind up looking forward to one of these meals like that again. In truth, he hadn’t thought once about the food here in all that time. Finding Wayne dead put him right back in the driver’s seat, thirteen hours away from food and a real bathroom.

  Well, as real as ‘not sling-assing it over a guardrail’ can be.

  “I’m not sure how long we’re going to be here, but I can check it.” Tris took a pinch of black pepper from the bowl at the side of the table and dusted her fries. She looked at Kevin and paused, no doubt at the faraway stare he knew he had. “You okay?”

  A few seconds after she spoke, he broke eye contact with nothing and glanced down at the burger before looking her way. “Ain’t no amount of feelin’ bad gonna bring Wayne back or make it right what was done.”

  Bee swiveled her head to look at him. Even without the thumb-sized hole in her cheek exposing steel, she looked too artificial to think of as female. Her skin had a not-quite-right shade and a somewhat-rubbery quality to how it moved over the metal underneath. He almost smiled remembering a few times some random driver had gotten blind off moonshine to the point of mistaking Bee for a real woman, and forcing Wayne to physically separate them.

  The android looked at the door and back at him; a quick whirr-whirr noise emanated from her neck. “Will you be operating this place now?”

  Kevin stared at the tip of a fry an inch from his lip. He leaned his arm back, raising the potato shard vertical. “Bit sentimental. This place doesn’t do bad, but I’m up in Rawlins now. Lot more traffic there. Easy I see in two days what Wayne got in a week.” He nibbled on the fry. “Don’t feel right not to, but don’t make sense either.”

  “Bee, did Wayne ever give you the combination to the safe?” asked Tris. “The ledger’s got six drivers he’d been keeping accounts for.”

  “You’re not?” Bee slow-blinked with a click-click. “I had not anticipated that outcome.” She shifted to face Tris. “Wayne did not provide me with the numeric sequence.”

  She slouched.

  “Sounds like Wayne. He didn’t even write it down, I bet.” Kevin ate another few bites. “If anyone shows up for their money, they can worry about how to get it.”

  “However.” Bee held up one finger. “I may be able to open it given proper analysis of the rhythmic acoustics. The mechanism is old.”

  “What’s the Code say about those coins?” Tris shifted her gaze to the side. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Since I’m a proprietor, I’m supposed to keep the accounts active. Different if a site inspector finds it.”

  “Oh?” Tris took a huge bite of her food.

  Hard boots tromped over the wood of the front porch, reverberating in the floor.

  Bee spun, wobbled, and teetered off in the direction of the back room. “Site inspector would declare all assets Amarillo’s.”

  Tris grumbled into her burger.

  Kevin popped the last bit of meat and bread into his mouth and glanced at the door.

  Alamo strode in, belt-long, straight, black hair trailing after him. Plain white tee, jeans, and cowboy-style boots matched the other three News behind him. A silver .44 revolver wobbled at his hip as he sidled up to the table. High cheekbones lent an air of imperiousness to the expression aimed down at Kevin, tho
ugh the mood behind it could’ve been amusement as easily as scorn.

  The head of the New motorcycle club hooked his thumbs in his jean pockets and nodded at Kevin, then Tris.

  Weed, the same height though probably half the weight of Alamo, kept a decidedly unhappy stare leveled at Tris. The skinny man scratched at a couple days’ worth of dark beard stubble. Four well-worn handguns, two on his belt, two on his chest, clattered with his motion.

  Juan, the short-but-thick New, hung back a step or two. He crossed his arms, making his leather cut creak from strain. He had a combat rifle across his back and a 1911 on his hip, but didn’t reach for either one. Like Weed, he kept a dour frown locked on Tris. Kevin hadn’t seen the fourth man before. Later twenties, dark skinned and pudgy, but the kind of pudgy that hides a shitload of muscles. The lower three-ish inches of a hairy, dark stomach poked out from under a stained tee shirt. He had a serious look, a square, nearly cube-shaped head, and a neck wider than his jaw.

  Kevin found himself grinning. The compulsion to throw stuff at the new guy’s afro to see if anything would stick in it proved too tempting to resist. Pity he had nothing but a plate in front of him; throwing that would start a fight. He stood, shifted to face the four men, and raised a hand to shake. “Alamo.”

  The tall Native American gripped forearms and shook once. “Kevin.”

  The ‘I just slept with your sister and you don’t know it yet’ smile that had gotten him in so much trouble reappeared. “Looks like those two want a rematch with Tris.”

  She glared at him. “Do we really have to get into a fight with these guys every single damn time we’re in Hagerman?”

  Alamo’s rock-melting stare broke apart as he leaned back with a window-shaking belly laugh and slid into the seat to Kevin’s right. “So, I hear you got your own roof these days. You ain’t been ’round here for a while now.”

  Kevin sat, made eye contact with the other three News, and gestured at the adjacent table. “You boys hungry? Beer?”

  Weed and Juan murmured to each other, seemed to relax a tick, and moved around to sit. The dark roadblock followed, but kept the same intensity. He looked like he could go from zero to ‘beating-a-face-in’ at a finger snap. Kevin fidgeted, trying to mask his unease with a smile.