The Redeemed

by Matthew S. Cox

  He patted her butt twice before drifting away. A moment later, he drew in a long breath. “Love the smell of morning.”

  Tris laughed, one eye popping open. The mattress hovered as an off-white blur a few inches in front of her face. Sweat and musk filled her nose. “Smells like sex over here.”

  The bed shifted from his weight settling at the edge. She crawled closer and rested her head on his thigh. Her limbs got heavy when he ran his fingers through her hair, her body losing what little urge she had to get up. For a while, she lay in blissful silence as he stroked her back, butt, and thighs in a continuous, gentle caress.

  “I never thought I’d ever really know what it’s like to be happy.” He continued running his hand over her head as though she were a cat. She half considered purring. “Every day, I wake up expecting it all to be a dream, but there you are.”

  Her brain sent ‘I love you, too’ to her mouth, but only a soft, “Mmm” came out.

  The next thing she knew, she lay on her chest, cheek on the mattress, a sheet covering her up to the neck.

  Tris pushed herself over onto her back, took a deep breath, and sat up, squinting at the room. The light hadn’t changed too much, so she figured she’d lost only twenty minutes to passing out again. After a yawn, she scooted to the edge and got up, stretched again, and reached for a shirt. The instant cloth settled around her shoulders, she got overwhelmed with ‘feeling sticky everywhere.’ Deciding to have a quick shower, she pulled it back off.

  She clutched a black tee with a faded ankh silkscreen and one of the new items she’d liberated from Wayne’s―a mid-thigh denim skirt with only one dried bloodstain―to her chest. After peering into the hall to verify it free of prying eyes, she streaked across to the little private bathroom they’d installed in what had once been a huge storage closet.

  Plastic tubing carried water in from the well pump to a bright orange nozzle with a butterfly valve. An upside-down spoon tied on with wire and bent under the spigot sort-of made it a showerhead. She set the clothes on a steel shelf and stepped over the edge of the kiddie pool up on cinder blocks. An improvised drain of radiator tubing ran through a hole in the wall.

  A few rapid breaths prepared her for the cold water, and she hurried the process of cleaning herself with some of the tiny soap bars Kevin found in an old hotel years ago. By the time she’d rinsed free of suds, her teeth chattered.

  Tris stepped into the skirt, pulled it up, buttoned it, and let go. It fell straight to the floor around her ankles. She leaned back and sighed at the ceiling. “Crap.”

  The tee shirt didn’t cover enough to act as a dress, so she held the skirt up by hand and scurried back to the bedroom. A few minutes of knife-and-thread surgery gave the garment a new buttonhole that kept it on. Two sneakers later, she added her gun belt with the Beretta and went downstairs to an empty room.

  Sang mumbled to himself in the kitchen, a usual sign that he’d lost himself in a novel. She poked her head in.

  “Going out for a little air. Been putting off checking that shack long enough.”

  “Okay.” Sang looked up and nodded.

  Tris wandered to the end of the inner hallway and into a small bare concrete room where a few stacks of old pallets had piled up against the wall. Two roll-top doors led out to a tiny loading dock. She went for the pedestrian door to the right, crossed the deck in three strides, and descended a short concrete stairway to the paved lot behind the building. Warm air rushed under her skirt, making her self-conscious about her lack of underwear. Not since leaving the Enclave had she even seen another pair to scavenge.

  Probably why all the other women I see have pants… or long dresses.

  Brown field stretched as far as she could see into the distance toward mountains, dotted liberally with green scrub bushes. Off to the left, a group of picnic tables held the ghosts of prewar travelers. A minute or two outside, and the sun had dispelled the chill from the shower

  She closed her eyes at a sudden pickup of dusty wind and flapped her shirt to let the moving air pull dampness away. Once the wind died down, she headed to her right along the back wall toward the west end of the property.

  The old central air unit supported a colony of brown and green beer bottles, likely there since before the nukes. She could almost hear the teenagers who’d worked here half a century ago complaining about wanting to get out of the middle of nowhere, or how poorly they were paid. The Enclave understood the concept of money as it had been before, and taught it to her as a child. She daydreamed about being eleven again, listening to the nameless instructor explain how foolish humanity had been for allowing a small minority to control most of the wealth instead of allocating it efficiently. Tris frowned. ‘Instructor’ had been the only name ever used to refer to the teachers, as if any dose of humanity in the classroom would’ve been some kind of terrible crime.

  Blaming money in large part for the nuclear war that devoured the civilization that spawned it, the Enclave didn’t use currency, per se. Everyone had a job and responsibilities. Everyone got what they needed. And the Council of Four got a whole lot more. Funny how that works. I wonder why Tier 1 ‘needed’ luxury. She felt a bit of the hypocrite as she walked past the corner of the building and hooked a sharp curve along a walkway of red patio tile to the parking lot out front. Her father―before she had been re-homed―lived well. While she couldn’t recall anyone in the Enclave being ‘poor,’ some people definitely had it easier. As she thought about her father, an odd realization leapt to mind. She remembered cars on the roads when she was six, but couldn’t recall seeing one much past that, not since the night he’d woken her up early, excited to be able to bring her to work. Some kind of company event where everyone got to bring their kids in.

  He drove us to work, but security drove us home…

  The walkway veered left, running along the inner edge of a massive parking lot that had to be at least a half mile from end to end, where ramps connected it to I-80. Two-thirds of the length of the rest stop had been devoted to the gas station. Near the far end, a modest beige shed stood next to the rusted hulk of a dump truck. For months, Kevin had been meaning to check out what was in it. Somewhere between the long walk and having so much other stuff to do, they’d never gotten around to it.

  She paused, fists on her hips, and twisted back to stare at the decaying pumps, the crumbling canopies over them bearing an Exxon logo. Much of the area taken up by the gas station appeared intended as a queue. She tried to imagine a society where so many cars existed that they needed that much space to let them line up to wait for fuel. Her childhood memories consisted of a small suburban street with infrequent traffic passing by.

  Her thoughts returned to the historical documentaries. A few sounded far too serious to have been fiction, as Kevin maintained. Some of them had scenes of cars upon cars, too many for the road to handle. “Oh, what did they call it? Grid… something.”

  She muttered to herself, grinning, remembering an argument between a married couple while they sat in standstill traffic behind a truck carrying a massive boat on a trailer. Wealthy people partied on the trailer-bound sailboat despite it being in the middle of a New York street.

  “Gridlock!” She called to the clouds.

  Her smile lasted only a few seconds before she let out a sad sigh. All those people… Again, she trudged forward, eyes downcast. Long skid marks on the blacktop traced lines from parking spaces. Some curved, some squiggly, some short, and some long. Ghostly travelers appeared in her daydream; parents screamed at small children to get in the car. The skies to the east and west turned orange with nuclear fire. Did they fight each other to get away faster? Where would they have gone? She crouched to pick up a corroded shell casing from the nook where parking lot met curb. It looked like a 9mm, but whether or not it had been fired that day, she couldn’t tell. Darkened to saddle-leather brown by the elements, it could’ve been a few years old as easily as forty.

  “Did you kill someone the day the nukes f
ell? Or did you show up later?”

  She turned the brass over in her fingers for a moment before dropping it.

  “Okay, that’s enough.” She stood and marched forward to the shack. “War happened. It sucked. They’re all dead, and I’m not going to change that.”

  She kicked at a rusted padlock for a little while without getting anywhere. The keyhole had too much corrosion for her to consider picking it. Out came the Beretta. Tris aimed, unable to decide if she wanted to shoot the shackle or the body, or if it would even be worth using ammo. Wayne had sold 9mm for two coins a bullet, highway robbery according to Kevin who wanted to let them go for one coin per two. She’d talked him into one each. It wasn’t as if they had an unlimited supply.

  She holstered the weapon and went left to the dead dump truck. The cab smelled like an old sneaker left out in the rain for decades. No glass remained in the rusting frame, bits of diamond-like sparkles shimmered in the dirt around it as well as the rotten seats. Its door let off a crunchy creak of protesting steel when she pulled it open. A brief look around yielded a tire iron under the driver’s seat, which she used to pry the old Master lock off with ease.

  Tris flung the two barn-style doors to the side and stared at a huge pile of whitish crystals, more than what could have fit in the dump truck. A hesitant sniff, and reluctant taste later, she blinked in astonishment, recognizing the substance. “What would anyone need this much salt for?”

  Bang!

  Tris flung herself to the ground, holding as still as she could while the echo of the heavy gunshot rolled off into the distance. The rapport sounded like a huge rifle; her mind leapt back to a sniper catching her with her pants quite literally down. Four seconds after the rumble faded to silence, ‘the sniper’ in her memory became Zara. Someone else from the Enclave who had been sent to kill her, and almost did.

  She picked her head up enough to look around. Rapid breaths echoed in her skull. After their last meeting, she doubted Zara would come after her again, but couldn’t imagine sniper rifles that big (or loud) being common. Then again, the soldiers defending Dallas had .50 cal sniper rifles too, so maybe a handful of them did exist out in the Wildlands.

  Arm over arm, she crawled against the rusted heap of dump truck. It might never drive again, but maybe that much steel could stop a bullet. She pushed at the ground and got her feet under her, squatting half under the fender. No motion broke the endless placidity of the barren land.

  On her third visual sweep back and forth, it hit her that the roadhouse’s windows looked too black. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the roof amid the solar panels. Not a gunshot―something exploded.

  Fear evaporated.

  “Shit.” She stood and rubbed her forehead. “Now what? Oh, please tell me that bang wasn’t the power controller blowing up.”

  Tris jogged back to the building, finding the restaurant area dead and silent. Nothing electric (including the charging panel) showed any sign of life. Grumbling, she trudged upstairs to the grey metal ladder leading to the roof. The hatch opened with a spine-wiggling squeal, and fell against the roof with a loud clang. Her next breath flooded her senses with molten plastic and charred meat.

  Beretta out, she stalked around the housing of an HVAC unit and aimed down the row of solar panels. The smoke appeared thicker one row to the left. She edged sideways until the remains of a flaming squirrel came into view, teeth still clamped on the half-inch cable it had chewed on.

  “Oh, son of a bitch.” She let her arms drop and shook her head.

  After shutting off the main switch, she took a knee by the dead, smoldering critter. Its right forepaw had fused to the housing of the adjacent panel’s electronics, teeth in the wire. She knocked it away with the Beretta before holstering the weapon. A three-inch patch of insulation had melted off, and one corner of the cabinet had blackened before the fuse had done its job. That appeared to be the extent of the damage.

  Hopefully, that bang came from the breaker going.

  She headed down the ladder to the kitchen, where Sang furiously worked a towel over a section of counter between the fryer and a sink.

  “Damn squirrel,” said Tris.

  Sang whirled around. “Sorry, miss. I spill water into the wires and it go bang.”

  She walked over and peered into a gap between the wall and the steel fryer. “Those are old wires… they don’t even have any power in them. Damn squirrel chewed one on the roof.”

  “Oh.” He smiled with relief. “I thought I’d broken things.” He gestured at the wall. “It went dark as soon as I spilled. This heart can’t take such a scare.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay.” For whatever reason, Kevin had appropriated a non-working industrial fridge as a storage cabinet for ‘various random shit’ that might be useful, including the box of spare fuses Amarillo’d soaked him another hundred coins for. She pulled the door open, inhaling a mixture of rubber, plastic, and must.

  “Can you fix?” asked Sang.

  She pulled two dented toolboxes―one red and one blue―out and opened them. “Probably. Depends on if the main breaker tripped or exploded. I also need something to reinsulate some wire with or the whole thing is gonna fry as soon as it rains.” When neither toolbox offered anything useful, she grabbed for a cardboard one she recognized from the Challenger’s trunk, and dragged it off the shelf to the floor. Among stray sockets and a bunch of spare cables for an e-car motor, lay a healthy spool of electrical tape. “Aha!”

  Tris jumped up to her feet.

  “How much of squirrel is left?” Sang raised an eyebrow.

  She shivered. “Not enough to cook. It’s char.”

  He snapped his fingers. That she couldn’t tell if he was joking caused a slight shiver as she hurried back to the ladder. Replacing the fuse took all of five seconds. Fifteen minutes later, she’d cleaned and wrapped the wire enough to trust. By the time she finished and bit off the tape, the char-squirrel had cooled to the point she could touch it without burning herself. She chucked it off the roof on the way back to the hatch.

  In the hall, she paused by the breaker box and meditated. Please don’t be fried. Please don’t be fried. The door emitted a faint metallic squeak when she opened it, exposing a giant four-span switch at the top, the main, which had flipped down. A sniff test got a nose full of plastic and dust, but nothing alarming.

  She shut off all the sub breakers and eased the main to the on position before heading back up to the roof to turn on the panels’ master switch. A few minutes of watching later, when nothing caught fire, she climbed down and flipped the smaller breakers on one after the next. On the fifth, Sang cheered.

  Tris shut the circuit box door, but left her hand on it for a few seconds, waiting for something else to go wrong, but everything remained quiet. No one had arrived out front, so after a brief glance, she headed for the office and fell into the chair by the security computer.

  “Okay, thing.” She poked the button to wake the screen. An OS desktop appeared for less than a full second before it flickered to a hand-drawn Roadhouse logo and the camera system came up.

  Expecting the same situation she’d found in Hastings, she broke out of the camera OS and hunted down the modified configuration file. Sure enough, it contained the same commands to always display the self-diagnostics as passing for all components. Tris un-hacked the file and started the diagnostics before leaning back with one foot up on the desk. When the progress ticked up to 4%, she remembered no one outside of the Enclave apparently had any idea what panties were, and anyone walking in the office would’ve gotten a hell of a show.

  She put her leg down.

  “I’m going to go back to the Enclave for no other reason than to get some god damned underwear.” She huffed.

  A sixty something year old cloth-cushioned chair with three out of five wheels broken wasn’t a terribly comfortable thing to sit in for twenty minutes. She pivoted away from the door and put her legs up on the desk in the other direction (away
from the entrance), ankles crossed.

  Error message after error message popped up.

  Twelve of the twenty two-terabyte SSD units in the memory box reported data sector failures, with a third of those having less than 15% of their sectors reporting writable. Two showed as completely dead. For each of those, another popup notified her that the system had auto-removed them from the ZFS RAID filesystem and adjusted to run on the remaining eighteen. She spent the next twenty minutes looking at frozen data, camera recordings from some other roadhouse where this hardware had been before Kevin’s place… unable to erase or write over it.

  “Crap.” She sat up, feet on the floor, and paged through the remaining diagnostics. One of the cameras showed ‘fault,’ and some of the RAM in the primary computer failed randomly. She ran the test four times, each one coming back with different bad memory addresses. She exhaled in frustration. “This thing is so flaky I should butter it. It’s gonna die any damn day.”

  “Hey, anyone,” yelled a male voice from the radio with gunfire in the background. “This is Nash, Roadhouse on I-10 west o’ Lordsburg. Under attack”―four loud gunshots came over the channel accompanied by screams of pain and howls that conjured image of drunken Viking raiders― “Bobby and Dan are dead. Lauren’s makin’ a run for it with the”―a loud male scream of anger cut off in a half-second with another tremendous gunshot―“kids.”

  Tris leapt from her chair and grabbed the mic. “Nash, this is Rawlins. Who’s attacking? Why?”

  Her heart sped up, though her breath caught in her throat. Five seconds of silence, timed in heartbeats.

  “No fuckin’ idea why,” yelled Nash. “Bunch of goddamn bikers. White fists on their backs.” He let off a garbled roar, and a rapid flurry of gunfire erupted over the speakers, followed by a heavy thud and gurgly wheezing.

  “Nash?” yelled Tris. “Nash!”

  “Mother of God,” whispered Clive, safe somewhere at his ’house in northwest Colorado.

  “Yo, Nash, man. What’s goin on?” asked Mac, amid a crackle of radio static.