One More Run (Roadhouse Chronicles Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Nothing you can give me.” She stomped past him. “Get rid of the Virus, undo nuclear war, you know… nothing big.”

  “Yeah. Do me a favor. Use that face on Wayne when I tell him I need ammo.”

  She scowled at him. A couple minutes of quiet walking later, she smirked. “I took a vow not to use my powers of cute for evil.”

  “Getting Wayne to knock a few coins off a sale isn’t evil.”

  “Hey.” She pointed at a mangled traffic light hanging from wires. “I remember that light. We went underground over there…”

  He squeezed her arm. “That means there’s Infected around here. Stay quiet.”

  Tris gestured at a side street. With no better ideas, he followed her suggestion. At the end of the next block, a compact car embedded in a bus stop struck him as familiar. He recognized the road they’d walked in on and followed it for about forty minutes to a grassy field outside the city. Between daylight, and the wide-open terrain, he felt confident no Infected were anywhere nearby, and allowed himself to relax. Adrenaline waned, letting exhaustion creep in. He stopped at the side of the road, hand pressed to his face, and found zen rubbing his eyes.

  “It’s in that barn, right?” asked Tris.

  “Yeah.”

  The thought of his Challenger gave him a second wind, and a long stretch of mild downhill road made the walk easier. Stiff muscles continued to protest; a night sleeping sitting up after an extended sprint and a near-bomb experience gave him fond daydreams about Wayne’s crappy beds.

  Kevin cut his way past waist-high grass between the road and the old barn. His padlock gleamed in the sunlight, a welcome sign no one had bothered his ride. Without thinking, he reached into the jacket’s inside pocket and grabbed the key. As soon as fingers touched metal, he shot a look at Tris.

  She smiled.

  “You almost had me with the sentimental shit. You remembered the key.”

  Tris folded her arms. “Happy accident.”

  “Bullshit.” He chuckled.

  She gave him a raspberry as he opened the padlock and pocketed it.

  “Who carries a padlock around?” She leaned out of the way of the opening door.

  The Challenger sat in a haze of light brown dust, exactly as he’d left it. Kevin flung the two large wooden doors to the side and drew his hands together like a meditating monk. “Someone with a car to protect. Never know when you’ll need one.”

  He traced his fingers along the fender to the driver’s side door.

  Tris glanced at him over the roof. “The rifle in the back is still jammed.”

  “Too tired.” Kevin fell into the leather seat and moaned. “Oh, yeah. I think I’m going to take a nap.”

  She pulled the other door open enough to peek in. “Are you sure you want to waste daylight?”

  He opened one eye. “Are you sure you want me driving right now?”

  Tris slid into the passenger seat and let her head lean back. Her jumpsuit flattened out as the cushioned seat absorbed her body, giving her the appearance of a deflated person-shaped balloon. From her expression and half-closed eyes, the padding had done the same thing to her as it did to him.

  “Sucks the will to move right outta ya, don’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “Nap sounds okay. Are we safe here?”

  “Probably not.” He punched buttons on a keypad secured to the dashboard by plastic wire ties. “Settin’ an alarm for two hours.”

  evin ignored the sharp buzzing for seven minutes before opening his eyes. A brief rush of panic subsided at feeling his car’s seat still under him. He glanced to his right. Tris curled up facing him, fingers in her ears. When he hit the button to kill the alarm, her pained grimace faded to a pleasant smile and she let her arms slide down into her lap.

  He remembered a roadhouse about three hours west along Route 76 and ran his thumb across the edge of the dashboard cowl over the console. The row of rocker switches lit up one after the next with a series of soft clicks. A subtle vibration in the frame provided the only indication other than the row of blue lights in front of him that the car was on.

  He closed his eyes, and for a few seconds, tried to remember what a gasoline engine sounded like, smelled like, felt like. A fleeting image of ‘Dad’ came and went, little more than a huge figure in silhouette against the sun smiling down at four-year-old him from the driver’s seat of a 2020 Camaro. Kevin inhaled the memory of burning gasoline. The last ride before the car got the electrofit conversion. The semi had been electric too. Kevin stopped trying to remember―he’d spent too long trying to forget the semi.

  I can’t remember what my damn father looked like, but I know it was a ‘20 Camaro.

  He grumbled, opened his eyes, and pulled out of the barn. Fortunately, the roads hadn’t suffered too much after fifty years and nuclear war. ‘Too much’ being a relative thing. He slalomed around potholes big enough to eat the Challenger whole and went off road for a quarter mile to avoid the aftereffects of a crashed airliner. No one had much idea what existed farther east than Harrisburg. Everyone he’d ever heard of going there to check it out never returned. Roadhouse gamblers laid odds forty-two to one it was disaster or utopia.

  “Damn place is probably still glowing…” he muttered.

  Tris shifted in her seat and yawned. “What place?”

  “The east coast.”

  Kevin leaned back, clenching a fist at the top of the wheel, and accelerated up to eighty-two over a stretch where the worst problem in the road was grass growing up from cracks. The hypnotic ka-whump ka-whump of tires passing over seams made it difficult to stay awake, even after a two-hour nap. He headed south along Route 15, heading for 76, a roadhouse, and a real bed. His stomach growled, a reminder he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in over a day. The canteens that would usually be in the passenger seat wound up behind him, out of reach unless he pulled over. A war raged in his head as he tried to decide between stopping for a drink or arriving faster. He’d come too close to Infected, and the urge to keep putting distance between him and them won out.

  “Where are we?” Tris sat up and faced forward, stretching as much as she could.

  “Almost to 76. ‘Bout two hours away from food and a bed.”

  She squinted at him under a veil of snowy, disheveled hair. “I need to find out what this data is.”

  “Probably ain’t no data. Or if there is, it’s bogus shit.” He changed lanes to avoid a cluster of debris from a collapsed overpass. “That pinhead on the monitor is full of shit.”

  “It’s gotta be real.” She sulked. “The resistance had a guy on the inside go over the data. He said it looked legit.”

  “How sure are you this guy wasn’t working for that needledick?”

  Tris picked at the folds in her jumpsuit leg. “He had radio contact with Doctor Andrews. If he was playing us, he’d fooled everyone.”

  “I still don’t see them letting the cure out of the Enclave so easy.”

  “So easy?” She yelled. “I had a fucking bomb inside me. What if Nathan spilled coffee on his computer? Or tripped and fell on his desk, or however the hell else he sent the kill signal.” Tris collapsed against the door, hands over her face, shaking again.

  “Sorry. Look, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s worth getting your hopes up. After a double-cross like that, I wouldn’t trust a damn thing from them. Gonna head to Wayne’s and find a run that’ll actually pay.”

  “Think, Kevin…” She slapped her hands on her thighs. “There’s got to be something to it. Why else would he have tried to kill me? To them, being stuck out here in the Wildlands is worse than death. If he wanted to be a shit to me, he would’ve let me live. He’s trying to destroy the data.”

  He slowed to take the on-ramp to 76 and pulled over once they were on the highway. “You’re more than welcome to walk anywhere you want, but I’m going back to Wayne’s. I’m too close to ten K. I can’t give up now.” Kevin reached around behind his seat and grabbed a cantee
n.

  Tris stared with lust in her eyes as he gulped the tepid plastic-flavored water down. Once the thought of taking another sip felt nauseating, he handed it to her. She held it in both hands like a baby with a bottle. When she choked, he pushed it down.

  “Easy, don’t breathe the water.”

  She slapped herself on the chest, gagging and crying, though she tried to smile. “I did that last time too.”

  “Yep.” He stared out at the wavering grass. “Sure wouldn’t mind a dust-hopper steak about now.”

  “Are they this far east?” She drank more, trying to peer out the window at the same time.

  “No idea. Dust hoppers are a meal for the desperate. When you start wanting it, you know you’re starving.”

  She laughed, shooting water out of her nose. Kevin caught the canteen as she lapsed into another choking fit.

  “You’re still here.”

  Her smile faded. “Yeah.” She stared into her lap.

  “Look, I know you don’t wanna hear it… but all that shit about the cure was to get you revved up to run out here as a meat torpedo.”

  “What?” She blinked.

  Kevin waved his hand around. “You know, a guided missile made outta person.”

  “Oh.” Tris glanced down, grumbling. “I think Nathan’s enough of an arrogant bastard to use real data. It would be more ironic for him.”

  “It’s stupid.” He wedged the canteen between seat and center console, checked the rearview monitor, and laid rubber.

  Tris waited for the g-forces of rapid acceleration to wear off before she spoke. “Is it? First, he’d never expect the ‘savages’ to have the equipment needed to synthesize a viable preventative vaccine or post-infection antiviral drug. Second, they invented the Virus to begin with, so they know it back and forth. To them, it’s no big mystery. It’s not like teams of doctors have been searching for the cure for thirty years and it doesn’t exist.”

  “Hmm.”

  She crossed her arms. “And, Nathan is apparently that kind of asshole.”

  Kevin leaned to the side to make eye contact in an exaggerated loll of his head. “Even if I believed the data was real, I don’t think there’s anyone out here with the tech to get it out of you. Can’t you like access it inside or something? The way you saw that glowing line?”

  “No.” She scowled. “They said it’s the kind of implant that low-level military intelligence operatives once used to transport classified information they weren’t cleared to know. It’s a memory fob embedded in my head. Only way to read it is by plugging a wire into the port behind my left ear.”

  “You probably don’t even have the memory implant.”

  “I do. I was there when they uploaded it.” She pointed at her neck. “Kinda had to be. I saw the storage interface.”

  “But not what’s in it?” He shot her a distrustful glare.

  “Have you ever used a computer? It was a file transfer bar, they didn’t open the file.”

  “Yeah. I used a computer once.”

  “Really?” She smirked.

  “Yup… for target practice. Damn thing exploded in a cloud of silver glitter.”

  “Cretin.” She moaned into her hands.

  Quiet took over the car for the better part of the next hour. Overgrown fields passed on both sides, as did the occasional wrecked vehicle. Most had been stripped all the way to the frame, leaving nothing worth taking. He grumbled. Even a little salvage would help. As it was, this excursion would set him back about forty coins in charging fees alone, never mind ammo. He glared at the striped yellow line pulsing into the bottom of the windshield, like a cheesy laser effect from some old movie he’d watched on a half-dead flat panel. Eventually, Kevin’s head grew heavy, the road became blurry, and he caught himself nodding off. Tris noticed too, and slapped him on the arm a second after his head snapped up.

  “Shit.” He grumbled. “I’m fried.”

  “You let me sleep a bit, want me to drive?”

  “Have you ever used a car?” He grinned.

  Tris picked at her eye with her middle finger. “No, but how hard can it be. You turn the wheel to go left and right and the pedal controls speed.”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s that easy.” He chuckled. “Hey, we’ve only got a little while left. Keep talking and I’ll be okay.”

  “What about?”

  He forced air out his lips, making a noise halfway between fart and angry elephant. “I dunno. Anything. Make sound effects…”

  “Do you think the resistance died in there? I didn’t see any bodies.” She squirmed in her seat. “Did you?”

  “Only the ones chasing us.” The red LED in the middle of the dash fluttered between eighty-eight and eighty-nine MPH. “Some of them were probably your resistance. All it takes is one drop of blood in a wound or a scratch from a tooth. One jackass that doesn’t admit what happened and everyone’s dead.”

  Tris stared into space. “The Virus is asymptomatic for up to twenty-four hours after initial exposure. After six hours, other Infected can somehow tell… and leave you alone. Between twenty-four and forty-eight hours, the subject appears to be suffering a common cold or flu. After forty-eight hours, second-order symptoms manifest. Initial signs are reduced intellect, disorientation, and fever, occasionally accompanied by muscle spasms. Ten to fourteen hours later, the subject appears to have an advanced case of dementia. By day three, higher brain function stops and they’re not a person anymore.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Kevin. “Morbid much? And why do you sound like you were reading that?”

  “Because I am reading it. Data implant. Got a little floating virtual screen in front of me now.” Tris continued speaking in a monotone. “The Virus is non-aerosolized. Transmission vectors consist solely of the exchange of bodily fluid. Blood. Sweat. Other secretions.”

  “I asked you to keep me awake for the ride, not give me nightmares for the rest of my life.” Kevin drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Subject change.”

  Tris seemed to snap out of the daze. “How’d you know cutting out the bomb would work?” She pressed her hand over the spot. “You could’ve run.”

  “You still owe me a grand.” He grinned. “So, what was detention like?”

  “You’re a lousy liar.” She almost smiled at him, but turned a sad expression out over the passing countryside. “They stuck me in a tiny little room. Everything was white or black except for the bed.” Her eyes twitched. “Grey sheets.”

  “What’s up with the tic?” Kevin helped himself to another swig from the canteen.

  She glanced toward him, the fingers of her right hand still at her temple. “Strange memory that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Dare I ask?” He offered her the canteen.

  Her right arm fell in her lap as she grabbed the water with her left. “I’d been in Detention for about eight months. All they let me do was access educational media from a wall terminal. Not once did I leave that little room. The day Nathan offered to help me escape, my hair was damp when I woke up.”

  “Why is that strange?” Kevin opened his window, hoping a blast of fresh air would ward off the sleep stalking up behind him.

  “It was me, a bed, and a wall terminal. No source of water. I can’t figure out how it got wet.”

  He squinted at her. “No toilet?”

  She shook her head while drinking.

  “You got some kinda cyberware that dries it all up to farts or something?”

  Tris glared, then looked confused. “I… don’t remember. The food was bland. Oatmeal or something. Porridge.” She stuck her tongue out. “It was probably high-utilization.”

  “You should’ve still had to piss.”

  “I have parents,” Tris yelled, hesitated, and slouched. “Had… I think.”

  He chuckled. “You think you had parents?”

  “No. I think it’s had instead of have.” She frowned. “I don’t remember my mother at all, and my Dad died when I was nine. The couple I g
ot assigned to acted like my Dad never existed. I haven’t seen them since I got arrested for refusing the pairing.”

  “Mmm.” He slowed, pulling as far left as the lane allowed.

  The Challenger rocked as he turned left onto a gravel-covered connector between east and westbound lanes. One small, white sign still read ‘For Official Use Only.’ He went right at the other end, bouncing onto what would have once been lanes full of oncoming traffic. Tris sighed.

  “Dad had it in his head that the Enclave’s mission should be to reclaim Earth. Spread out from the Enclave and take back our planet.”

  “Yeah. That’s what they want alright.” He shook his head. “After they kill us all.”

  “No.” She pouted. “Dad wasn’t like that. The Enclave is too small. They need a damn computer to tell everyone who they can have babies with already. It’ll never work. They need the survivors. Some of them know that… the Resistance.”

  Beautiful red-orange light bathed the wavering grass ahead on the left. Above a sprawling one-story building with four garage doors on the right, an attempt at a giant neon sign in the shape of an R glowed in all its glory. Kevin drooled, already imagining the taste of food.

  “Okay, maybe they’re not all assholes.” He pulled to a stop near the building’s small porch. The smell of meat blew on his face from the air vents. “Oh, that’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah.” She gazed down.

  “Sorry.” He flicked the switches off. “What makes you think he’s dead?”

  “Dad vanished. No one would talk about it. I got reassigned to a new family. Whenever I asked about him, they treated me as if I was making up people who never existed. I pretended to forget him, so they stopped acting like I was crazy.”

  “Damn.” Kevin traced his finger around the master switch for a second or two before pushing it. The console went dark. “That’s harsh.”

  “Hungry?”

  She didn’t look up. “No coins, remember.”

  Kevin mouthed ‘what did I do?’ at the roof. “Come on… And you can lay off with the guilt. I ain’t gonna let you starve.”