The Redeemed

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Not bad.” Willie greeted the three with a nod. “What can I do ya for?”

  “Charge on six and seven and a plate of whatever’s fast.” Kevin nodded toward the curtained doorway behind the bar. “Your radio workin’?”

  “Why? Need to call in a job?” Willie flicked two switches on the electronics panel behind him, activating the circuit to the charging ports. “Three apiece for the juice. Same for the food.”

  Neeley reached into his jacket, but Kevin held up a hand. He put down six coins for the charge and nine for food. “Haven’t been hearin’ you on the net.”

  “How’s you hearin’ the net?” Willie squinted at him.

  Kevin smiled. “Got my own place finally. Up on I-80, little west of Rawlins. Look. Can I”―he glanced over his shoulder at the News and three drivers―“have a word with you quiet like?”

  Willie unsnapped the leather holding a revolver in his holster, but nodded. “‘Mon ’round. No shit, you got your own franchise?”

  “As a fact.” Kevin grinned and pulled out the laminated card he’d gotten from the old guy at Amarillo six months and a few weeks ago. It looked hand drawn, like something a grade school kid made, but so did they all.

  “Well, damn.” Willie relaxed and brought Kevin past the curtain into the inner hall. From there, four open archways led to a kitchen with a man and two women in it, a storage room, a small living space, and the room where he’d set up the security computer and radio.

  “There’s been some problems lately. That’s why I’m down here and not behind my own counter.” Kevin put his hands on his hips.

  “Erin. Bring out three roadrunners,” yelled Willie toward the kitchen.

  “Fuck you, Willie.” The twenty-something sounded amused despite her language.

  Willie grinned. “Thanks.”

  Kevin let out a long breath, and explained a quick summary of everything that had happened. He paused a moment at the end to let Willie mull. “I still don’t know what’s going on, but these Redeemed jackasses killed Wayne, probably Nash too. And who knows how many others where the radios don’t work.”

  Willie raised a hand. “Hold on. You said Amarillo’s… gone?”

  “Well the city’s still there, but the only thing in it are Infected.” He gestured at the table full of electronics. “You ever use your radio? We’ve been talking about all this for days.”

  “Never had anyone mess with me.” Willie grumbled. “Never saw the need.”

  “I don’t really understand all that computer shit. Tris says the systems are burned out. Cameras are watching but the thingamafuckit that keeps the images doesn’t keep them.”

  “Oh. That ain’t that hard to understand. S’like talkin’ to mah wife. I say everything, but don’t keep in her brain.” Willie chuckled for three seconds before a tomato burst across his head. He reached up and pulled the larger mass of it away from his eye, glanced at it, and took a bite. “She’s a spitfire, that one.”

  Kevin glanced at a wild-eyed woman with black hair and a deep tan. She muttered something in Spanish before brightening up―a little―at Kevin.

  “Need ta trade ’er in for a model with a sense of humor.” Willie took another bite of the tomato, and winked at her.

  “Any of those Redeemed guys come in here, stay alert. They messed with Wayne first. Orderin’ an’ not payin’. Nash’s, they just came in shooting.”

  Willie wandered over to the radio, toggled a switch or two, but couldn’t get it to do anything. He looked somehow wrong tinkering with electronics, as if a man that big had no business coming within ten feet of anything technological. “Reckon yer right. Thing’s deadern’ my―”

  “She’s got another tomato,” said Kevin.

  “Car,” said Willie.

  The fortyish woman smiled at Kevin before returning to the kitchen, tossing and catching a tomato.

  “Figure them News’ll keep tabs on a rogue club.” Willie returned to the front.

  Kevin followed. “Careful tellin’ those guys you ain’t got Amarillo watchin’ out for ya. I don’t trust ’em not to just take the place.”

  Willie laughed. “They can try. ’Preciate the heads up.”

  “Somethin’ I gotta do.” Kevin nodded. “It’s all our asses in the fire.”

  They shook hands. Kevin walked back to the front room, joining Fitch and Neeley at a table. The ‘roadrunner’ turned out to be half a chicken with a portion of rice laced with beans, corn, and a bright orange spicy sauce he’d never run into before. Whatever it was, it tasted good.

  “Figure crash here a few hours?” asked Fitch.

  Kevin rubbed the bridge of his nose, only aware of the eye-burn of insufficient sleep after Fitch mentioned it. “Yeah. Be pretty damn stupid to roll in there half awake.”

  Neeley jumped up. “I’ll cover the rooms.”

  He ran off before Kevin could protest.

  Fitch leaned over the table, his voice low. “This isn’t an opinion, but if you want to head back any time, just say the word. We’d understand.”

  Kevin stared into the inch of cloudy beer he had left. “We’re already down here. Only a couple miles away from Santa Fe. Besides, feels like a jinx. If I don’t finish this out, something bad’ll happen.”

  “What like Wayne’s ghost getting pissed and comin’ after you?”

  Or goin’ after Tris. “Yeah, something like that.”

  Kevin drained his beer.

  Sunlight poured a haze over the terrain, swallowing the road with undulating heat blur. Kevin forced a hard yawn and shook his head to clear it. Exhaustion and worry had dueled for some time before he’d slept; it felt as though he’d spent hours staring at the ceiling and Fitch appeared out of nowhere, shaking him. They’d rolled out from Willie’s at 5:49 a.m. according to the clock in the Challenger’s dash. He drove into the dark horizon, munching on dust hopper (or something close to it) jerky. Meaty salt. Good enough for road breakfast.

  Soon after sunrise, they weaved through a section of paving riddled with tire-eating holes, and crossed a good mile and change where whatever had hit Albuquerque buried Route 285 under several feet of dirt. Wonder what was there that someone felt like lobbing a nuke at it? He glanced to his right as he drove past the city. Damn that’s gotta be like fifty or sixty miles away. Maybe the warhead wasn’t aiming for Albuquerque. He tapped his fingers on the wheel. “Wonder if Tris’d know if a nuke can throw dirt sixty miles.” Whatever. Not like me knowing matters. Whatever it was aimed at, it had to be a nuke. A radial pattern scarred the ground, gouged where heavier objects slid outward from a central point somewhere west.

  Fortunately, the rad meter on the dash hadn’t crept past 009.

  About four hours after leaving Willie’s, the Challenger rumbled over the well-cracked pavement of US-70 at the outskirts of the place once called Las Cruces, New Mexico. He stopped as soon as the first buildings came into view, a beige square across a lot from a trio of rusting silos. Several prewar cars lay in a tangle by an upside-down trailer. Seeing no one around, he rolled the car forward at walking speed, scanning the area. To the left, a scenic rise of mountains in varying shades of brown lent an air of placidity to the dry, dusty place.

  The beige square building looked like the corner of a formerly larger structure, which existed as a pile of scrap wood with a tangle of old power lines on top of it. Beyond it, a field of wild grass wavered in a slight breeze. Utility poles scattered randomly around dilapidated houses, as though some drunken god had been playing darts from on high.

  Amid the ruin of pre-war Las Cruces, a nest of rebuilt structures formed something of a town square about a quarter mile deeper in. One bore the familiar Roadhouse sign, though made of wood and red paint rather than metal and neon. Something itched at the back of his heart being here; sparse as it was, Las Cruces had been a population center before the war, but looking at it up close, he reconsidered his assumption it would have Infected. He glanced left at a couple house trailers parked by a fence of wh
ite plastic lattice. Old washing machines, televisions, tables, and the engine block of a V8 combustion engine lay scattered about by a dinged U-Haul trailer at the end of the larger double-wide.

  “Damn. I don’t think nuclear war changed this place much.”

  Some locals emerged from the tumbledown dwellings, more curious than wary. He led their ‘convoy’ down a tiny grid of streets, feeling a bit foolish at having expected the place to be larger… or at least feel more like a ‘city’ and less like an overgrown campsite. With no sign of The Redeemed obvious, he circled back to the supposed Roadhouse and parked by three coffee-brown jeeps.

  Fitch pulled the Behemoth to a halt behind him. “What’s up?”

  “Place seems small.”

  Neeley laughed. “This ain’t Las Cruces.”

  Kevin grumbled and pulled out his maps. He trailed his finger down their route, and found a note for a town called Organ. “Shit.”

  “Little anxious?” Fitch chuckled and backed up.

  “Yeah. A bit,” he muttered as he reversed out of the parking spot and got back onto Route 70 heading southwest.

  Soon after, the actual city of Las Cruces came into view, a sprawl of crumbling buildings and once-nice houses. Though it lacked the densely-packed nightmare of high-rises, it looked quite large enough to conceal a dangerous population of Infected. He pulled off the highway and slalomed a few wrecked cars on the ramp. Gonna stay in the car… Guess I’m looking for a cluster of e-bikes. He gazed around as he took a left at the bottom of the ramp, into the shadow of an overpass where 70 went overhead.

  A quick right brought him past crumbling houses and fields of dirt. This place is abandoned. No one in their right mind goes anywhere near a major city. Over the next half hour, he drove by whim, turning corners whenever the mood caught him. All the while, he debated the idiocy of running around the desert hoping to find the three men Neeley spotted.

  “What am I doing?” Kevin slowed to a halt and let his forehead bonk the wheel between his hands. “This is pointless.”

  He switched the drive system to park and got out. Fitch, unable to roll down his armored window, opened the door.

  “Yo?” asked Fitch. “What’s up?”

  “Give it to me straight guys.” Kevin, hands on his hips, stared at the road. “Is this a waste of time? Feels like we’re chasing a rabbit in the desert.”

  “Well.” Fitch scratched at his almost-beard. “If they got a ‘home’ ta go back to, maybe we’ll find ’em there. If they keep roaming all the time, then…”

  “Yeah.” Kevin grumbled. “Hell with it. Maybe we should―”

  “Incoming,” said Neeley.

  Kevin twisted to face back toward the Challenger.

  Two battered ethanol-eating pickup trucks, drab green, screeched to a halt about fifteen yards from the Challenger. Six men jumped out of the bed on the left, eight from the other truck. All looked Mexican and wore a generally similar uniform of plain brown fatigues. The group pointed an assortment of rifles―some bolt action, some automatic―at Kevin. The drivers of both trucks looked like teenaged boys barely past the need to shave, in the same uniforms, whose expressions held the kind of wide-eyed eagerness he expected on a kid ready to watch his dad beat someone up. A well-tanned man in his early thirties with a hairline moustache stepped out of the passenger seat of the truck on the left, adjusting a maroon beret before frowning at the Challenger. He lacked a rifle, and made no move to draw the pistol from his belt. The stare he shot Kevin almost made him miss Infected.

  Almost.

  Fitch sighed.

  “Well, shit,” said Kevin. “I don’t think the locals are too happy to see us.”

  ris wrung her hands around the steering wheel, as if doing so might squeeze a few extra MPH out of the van. Cassie’s sad little whisper begging for help played on endless repeat in her thoughts, along with Kevin’s opinion that she’d never make it in time. Optimism had made her take the van. The Challenger could tease out 200 miles per hour if the road allowed it, and this particular stretch of flat-open-smooth tormented her. Every time she glanced down at the speed display teetering between seventy-two and seventy-four, she had to suppress a growl.

  I’m driving a brick. She rehearsed in her head how to handle an attack on the road. Memories of being thrown around the passenger seat while Kevin swerved to evade bullets got her worked up. Reflex boosters only went so far behind the wheel. Maybe she could catch an overcorrection in time to avoid flipping the thing, or maybe they’d roll wheels up and die in a hail of bullets.

  According to the dash clock, she had about eight minutes to go until six in the morning. Almost six solid hours of driving. They’d need to stop for battery power soon; after that, Zara could take over.

  Once the road provided a nice debris-free straightaway, she wedged the steering wheel with her left knee and fumbled with the map. A tiny overhead light helped a little, but made the outside appear darker. Kevin’s notes suggested a roadhouse coming up soon along 287 south, a few miles past the Colorado/Oklahoma border.

  “Probably be dawn before we get there.” She yawned. “Maybe I’ll even be able to sleep.”

  A few minutes later, her head dipped and she snapped upright. Wide eyed, she white-knuckled the wheel for a little while until she felt herself sliding again.

  “Zara,” she yelled.

  “Mmm?” A yawn came from behind her. “What? You don’t have to yell. I’m up.”

  Tris yawned again, despite trying to stifle it with a clenched jaw. “I’m fading. Talk or something…”

  Zara squeezed through the little door in the partition between front and back. She failed to stifle another yawn and fell into the passenger seat. “Hey, it’s almost six… you were supposed to wake me up after four hours.”

  “Yeah, I know. Seemed dumb to take two hours of sleep. We’re almost at Mac’s.”

  “So, what should I talk about?”

  Tris shrugged. “I dunno… anything to keep me awake. Like that time Gerald tried to say you were cheating off him in electrical engineering class.”

  Zara laughed into her hand. “Tris… we’re twenty years old. You want to reminisce about when we were twelve? We barely talked to each other.”

  “Yeah I know. We sat next to each other for years though.” She tapped her thumbs on the wheel. “No one really talked to anyone, did they?”

  “Not much.” Zara rotated ninety degrees to face forward and let her head lean back, eyes closed.

  “They wouldn’t even tell us the teachers’ names.” Tris fought off another yawn. “You ever think it strange that they had kids older and younger in the same class, and we stayed together the whole time?”

  “How is that odd to you?”

  “You saw the same historicals I did. That one where they had so many kids they had to group them by age? Grades, they called it. They had twelve of those, and a separate umm… high school.”

  “Oh, yeah. That was before the war though. The Council came up with a better way.” Zara stretched and made a soft noise of contentment.

  “What if they did that because there were only nineteen children?”

  Zara looked over. “You’ve been absorbing too many rads. When I was in IFT, we used to run practice drills in the city core. There were dozens of children there.” She raised an eyebrow. “Usually running away from us and screaming, but they were there.”

  “IFT? I thought you went to university.” Tris pushed the button to open the window, forgetting glass had long-ago been replaced with an armored plate. “Damn.”

  “I did. IFT is the phase-one preparedness course for the military. Initial Force Training. They worked it in around classes. Five in the morning to seven, we did PT, seven thirty to three in the afternoon, classes. Three to six in the evening, IFT. Usually, I’d spend the rest of the day in my little octagon doing homework or sleeping.” Zara held up her hand. “Maybe going three knuckles deep.”

  Tris laughed. “I didn’t really need to know that
much detail.” She blinked. “Wait, did you say ‘octagon?’”

  Zara looked at her as though she’d called the sky green. “What planet did you go to Uni on?”

  “I didn’t. They paired me with this piece of shit. Three hours in the same room with the guy and he’d hit me twice. I was not going to spend the rest of my life being owned.”

  Zara gasped. “You refused the pairing?”

  “Yep.” Tris didn’t feel tired anymore. “Got put in Detention. Little white octagon for a room.”

  “Yeah… some days I think that would’ve been better than the dorms.”

  A faint haze of blue lit up the horizon to the left.

  Tris kept looking for signs that might help tell where she was. “Hey, Zar?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did your dorm room have a toilet?”

  Zara kept quiet.

  Tris spotted a ‘you are now leaving Colorado’ sign, and smiled. A minute later, she glanced over at her friend. “Well?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course it had a toilet.”

  “Why’d you hesitate?” Tris stared at her for two seconds. “It didn’t, did it?”

  Zara rolled her eyes. “What, you think I held it for two years?”

  “My cell in Detention didn’t have a toilet.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “I’m serious. Eight white walls, one monitor for e-learns, a small table, and a little bed.”

  Zara raised her head in a slow turn to face her. “You’re starting to creep me out.” She breathed hard for a few seconds. “I… I’m trying to picture the layout of my old room, but…”

  “You can’t think of where the toilet was.” Tris tried to stomp the accelerator pedal through the floor. “Come on you piece of shit, you can do eighty five.”

  “It’s too damn early for head games.” Zara flopped back, eyes closed again.

  “Think about the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror right after high school.”

  Zara’s lips curled into a small grin. “Okay.”

  “Compare to now. I think we’re still eighteen.”

  “You have definitely been eating some weird shit out here.”