The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Cox, Matthew S.

  She turned the knob, pushed the door in, and gasped.

  Before her lay the same room as depicted in the photograph of her at five years old. Within two breaths, the smell of old technology, older paper, and a faint wisp of pipe smoke weakened her knees. She stared at the same desk her father used to work at, standing in front of the same worktable that once held his prototype android limbs.

  As if on autopilot, she walked to the spot where she’d always sat on the floor, and sat on the floor. The room seemed wrong when viewed from the height perspective of a grown woman. Maudlin thoughts, wishing the world had never gone crazy, squeezed her throat closed.

  Kevin approached, looking around with a whistle of awe. “Wow. This is that room. Hey look, a 2019 calendar. It’s still there.”

  “I don’t want to look.” She wiped sadness from her mind and stood. “If we don’t screw this up, I’ll have years to cry into my beer over what my life might have been. I can’t do it now.” She scurried to a table near the back right corner, where a handful of PCs sat dormant.

  The drone glided to land on Dad’s desk, and bounced a few times.

  Tris looked at it. “Is it resting or is it ‘pointing’ at the desk?”

  The drone bounced a few times.

  “I’d say pointing.” Kevin crept over.

  She changed course. “Oh, the prototype card.”

  A moment of rummaging drawers turned up a locked metal case about the size of a book. As soon as she raised it from the drawer, the drone slid back a bit and powered off. She set the case down on the desk, pulled out her smallest lock picks, and got to work. Kevin paced around, drawing and concealing his handgun as if he couldn’t decide if their odds of bluffing exceeded their odds of needing to shoot their way out if someone found them. It was unlikely, but possible. But if anyone saw a firearm, especially an old-tech one, Kevin would have to use said old-tech firearm.

  Nine agonizing minutes later, the diminutive―though sturdy―lock yielded and popped open. She stuffed the tools back in her shoe, closed the sole, and flipped open the case.

  Between two slabs of dark grey foam sat a green PCIe card with a silver metal frame around the entire circuit board. The outer-facing edge contained small socket in the middle.

  “Wow. Back when I was five years old, this card was probably more valuable than a shitty house.” She blinked at it and set it back in the case. “Right… need to find a working system.”

  Kevin sat at the desk and put his feet up while she went from computer to computer until one turned on. When she found a ‘winner,’ she shut it off again and flipped the tower on its side.

  “Why’d you turn it off again?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “I can’t put the card in when it’s on. Antiques were touchy like that.”

  A minute or four of searching turned up a screwdriver from the worktable, and she made short work of installing the prototype card. The system already had an Ethernet line connecting it to the Stanford net, so she had only to run a fiber line to create a bridge to the modern network.

  “Great.” She looked around at the walls. “He said vent. Do you see a vent in here?”

  Kevin pointed.

  All the way on the left end of the room, as opposite to the entry door as one could get, a three-by-three foot air filter covered an intake duct. She studied the upper walls as well as the ceiling. A few other openings, exhaust ducts, looks about eight inches tall and a foot wide. She doubted even five-year-old her would’ve fit through those.

  “Well, I guess the choice is kinda obvious.”

  He nodded. “What’s the plan?”

  She jogged over to the empty worktable under the vent, climbed up, and pulled the cover off. A dusty, square metal shaft proceeded in a few feet before curving straight up. “This is going to suck. You’re not going to be able to bend enough to fit. Wait here. I’ll scream if I get stuck or need you to come after me.”

  “You sure?”

  “No, but you’re not exactly quiet.” She kissed him. “Give me fifteen minutes before you come looking… unless you hear any strange noises.”

  He held her tight for a few seconds. “I don’t like this, but if you think it’s best.”

  “None of this is ‘best,’ only necessary.” She kissed him again before crawling up into the shaft.

  A short distance ahead, a curve in the duct bent vertical. She braced her shoes on the half-inch seams between sections of ductwork and shimmied up. Hopefully, this doesn’t turn into a maze. She crawled to the curve and stood inside it, pulling herself upright with a hand on each side. A crosswind lofted her hair as soon as she peered over the top. The duct to her right ran back over the lab, and ended at a fan unit about where the wall would be. Not going that way. To the left, the shaft extended about forty yards before reaching a ninety-degree right.

  Tris crawled as fast as she could go without making too much noise in the flimsy metal tunnel. The passage after the turn stretched even farther, with a left offshoot a decent ways off. She shimmed ahead, biting back curses whenever something on the top of the vent scraped her back, or she put her knee down on a flange between sections.

  When the duct firmed up, as if embedded in dirt, she picked up the pace as it made little noise. As she neared the offshoot, her hair pulled forward and trailed out in front of her face. Devoting one hand to holding it out of her eyes slowed her somewhat. Roaring of fans grew louder as she neared the opening on the left.

  She peered in as soon as she could, finding a curved duct blasting air into the section she crawled along, aiming it in the same direction she’d been moving. Not wanting to go face-first into a turbine, she continued straight with a stiff tailwind.

  Some minutes later, light stretched into the duct from the left. Her best estimation had put her a little past 217 meters, but she gave that up to nerves. This had to be where the not-Dad wanted her to go. She edged up to a square grille, smaller than the intake, but still not too difficult to squeeze through.

  The room on the other side reminded her of Detention. Black gloss tiles and white walls. From the floor-level opening, she got a glimpse of a few desks and strong daylight. An antiseptic smell swirled in her nostrils and brought back memories of home. Her whole house reeked of the same chemical when she was nine. I’d been thawed. That was the Enclave… Maybe it’s not a smell, but the absence of stink? Everything’s constantly being cleaned here. Her stomach churned at the memory of her first night in the Wildlands sleeping in an old sewer. And those bastards who’d captured her had been so foul. Maybe Kevin had a point. They hadn’t raped her because they worried the Enclave wouldn’t pay them if she’d been ‘contaminated.’ But that didn’t stop them from squeezing and groping.

  She grumbled, stopped, and listened.

  Two minutes of silence exceeded her patience threshold. She grasped the vent and gave it a light push, popping it out. The room had to be air conditioned, but it felt warm, likely from her being in the AC vent for the last eight minutes or so. She crawled behind the nearest desk and peered over. The space resembled a tiny classroom containing six desks facing a single, larger one. Each desk had a computer terminal and a set of storage drawers. The sight of school desks drew a sad sigh from her. It felt like only yesterday she’d been a high school senior looking forward to University and a future far removed from one where a day without being shot at wound up in the ‘great day’ column. The walls held clear panels with glowing text detailing inventories of everything from clothes to toiletries to weapons and armor… even ordinance for Hoplite or Guardian hovercraft onboard weapons.

  Weird. This is set up like a classroom, but it’s some kind of quartermaster’s office.

  The door behind the large desk looked too much like an exit compared to the one four steps behind her. She opted for the nearer door and found a decent-sized storage room full of metal wire shelves packed with stuff. Folded black jumpsuits, shoes, boxes labeled only with alphanumeric codes… random tech. She raced up and down the
aisles for a little while before remembering not-Dad said they hadn’t used cables in ages.

  To the back she went.

  In a dust-covered box on the bottom shelf, she found bundles of Petafiber cabling. Powder blue ran only twenty feet. Pastel orange, fifty feet. Dark blue, a hundred meters. Finally, she grinned at a fat donut of bright red cable. Three hundred meters. She grabbed it while offering a prayer to the gods of technology that the optical fiber inside hadn’t broken in however long it had been left here.

  She ran back to the office, closed the door, and froze glancing at the clock: 12:21 p.m.

  Oh, shit. No wonder no one is in here. They’re in the cafeteria. She chuckled. I guess for once having everything scheduled to the minute worked out to be a good thing. She hurried to the desk closest to the vent cover she’d come in from, set the cable bundle down, and snapped off the plastic tape holding it in a donut. Whoever worked there had a lot of kitsch in―probably her, judging by all the cat-themed items―workspace, which made hiding the wire atop the desk possible. Tris threaded it around various knickknacks, penholders, and whatnot before plugging it in to a Petafiber port on the all-in-one terminal that had likely never been used.

  Most of the Enclave tech ran off exabyte wireless… they had no need to bother with the wires anymore except for long runs, like connecting the Quar to the Core City. When civilization consists of one city… Well the Quar wasn’t quite part of it. Okay, one-point-two cities. She shoved the bulk of the cable spool into the vent and took a moment to tape the wire in place to the side of the desk, in hopes whoever worked here would assume it had always been there. She moved the wastebasket to cover the cable on the floor a little.

  “What are you doing?” asked a young sounding voice.

  Tris popped up, eye-to-eye with a white-haired, twig-thin girl in a kid-sized version of the ubiquitous all-black Enclave jumpsuit. The child’s ice blue eyes narrowed with suspicion at the open vent and wire leading out of it.

  “Oh, just fixing a technical problem. I’m almost done.”

  “You’re lying. You’re not supposed to be in here.” The girl pointed at her. “I’m gonna get security.”

  26

  A Hollow Echo

  Tension built in the muscles along the back of Tris’ legs. She summoned her most innocent smile. The girl took a step back, seeming about to run for the door. Time appeared to slow as her combat boosts kicked on; she sprang to her feet and grabbed the wrist behind the pointing finger.

  “Wait,” said Tris. “You don’t need to bother the ISF. I’m part of a test scenario to evaluate operator awareness. It’s supposed to be secret.”

  The girl struggled to pull her arm away, wincing as Tris tightened her grip. “Ow! Let go of me. You’re not supposed to be here. I can tell you’re lying.” She grunted; her shoes slipped forward. “Wires don’t go into the wall like that. Stop! You’re hurting me!”

  When the child sucked in a breath, Tris pulled her in by the arm, spinning her about, and grabbed her from behind with a hand over her mouth. The girl struggled, trying to scream. Panic sent her into a brief frenzy, but Tris held on, unable to comprehend how she’d wound up attacking a little girl. She pinned the kid’s arms to her sides and tried to hold her as gently as possible, but the vast difference in their strength set off a nuclear detonation of terror in the small body. Hot breath blasted in rapid pulses over her fingers from the girl’s nose.

  “Shh. Please calm down.” Tris cried as well. What am I going to do with this girl? I can’t hurt her… I can’t let her go. She considered leaving her in the storeroom hogtied and gagged, but didn’t see anything useful to bind her with―nor could she get the concept of doing that to a child past her conscience. Overpowering the girl already made her feel like a horrible, horrible person. That, and if the workers or students came back at 1:00 p.m., they’d most certainly hear her struggling.

  Tris’ stomach churned with guilt, but this kid screaming or getting away could doom the only hope she had to stop the Virus… and protect everyone she loved. Before her brain could think, she pushed the girl around behind her and sent her stumbling into the wall by the vent. With her right hand free, she drew the Beretta from her pocket and aimed an inch to the left of the kid’s ear, hoping the girl didn’t notice she wanted to miss. Firing a gun would be as bad as the girl screaming anyway. A faint pinkish handprint on the girl’s face shamed her into looking down. I don’t deserve Abby. What am I doing?

  “That’s…” The girl’s eyes widened and brimmed with tears as she whispered, “That’s a gun…”

  I’m not going to hurt a child. I just need to scare her a little. “Please listen to me. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry I had to grab you like that, but too many people’s lives are at stake.”

  The kid shrank against the wall, hands cradled together at her chin. She went from looking twelve-ish to closer to nine. “Why are you doing this? Why do you have a gun? The ISF is gonna shoot you.” She whimpered for a few seconds before her knees buckled. “Please don’t kill me.”

  Tris sucked air in her nostrils, trying not to let the ninety-ton boulder of guilt crush her into the floor. She glanced at the wire. That’s about as concealed as it’s going to get. I need to clear my ass out of here before anyone else shows up. “Stay quiet and do what I tell you, and we can both go about the rest of our day without anyone getting hurt.” She pointed the gun at the vent. “Crawl in there and go to the right.”

  “But… but… it’s dirty in there.” She gulped. “My name’s Aura. I’m eleven years old. I like cats. I have two… Yinyang and Lily. I’ve got a little brother Alan. He’s seven. Dance class and robotics are my favorites.”

  Tris let a sigh leak out of her nose without making noise. “Aura… That’s a pretty name. You’re a smart girl. I know what you’re trying to do by telling me all about you, but you don’t have to. Look at me.” She wiped at her face. “I’m already upset. I promise I won’t hurt you, but I can’t let you run off and alert the ISF to what I’m doing. They work for the Council, and the Council is killing thousands of innocent people. I’m not the bad guy here. I’m doing the right thing.”

  “B-by pointing a g-gun at me?” Aura trembled.

  Nausea clenched her stomach. Do raiders ever feel this bad when they abduct people the first time? One loud noise, this kid’s gonna wet herself. She kept her voice slow and calm. “I don’t have time to debate right now. I’m really, really sorry, but please get down and crawl into the vent.”

  Aura sniveled as she lowered herself to kneel. Tris didn’t react to a long, pleading stare. The girl bowed her head and leaned forward onto all fours. She hesitated two more seconds before crawling into the duct, crying. Her snowy hair hung within an inch of the floor; as soon as she got into the vent, it lofted to the left, fluttering in the air-conditioned wind. The hesitance of the child’s motion and look on her face made Tris feel as though she forced a little girl to dig her own grave before shooting her. She put the Beretta back in her pocket and stifled a few tears.

  Once the kid cleared the opening, Tris shimmied in behind her and eased the ventilation cover in place, careful not to crush the petabyte-fiber cable. Aura’s sniffles and whimpers echoed in the shaft, loud in Tris’ ears as if broadcast over a PA system. The small body ahead of her shuddered.

  “Please be quiet,” whispered Tris. “Look at me.”

  Aura shifted left, pressing herself against the wall, and peered around past her shoulder at Tris.

  Holding eye contact, Tris spoke a touch above a whisper. “I will not hurt you. An hour from now, you’ll be home or wherever you want to be. Not a scratch on you. I promise.”

  “Why are you kidnapping me then?” Aura whimpered.

  “Crawl forward.” Tris picked up the donut-shaped bundle of cable. The fear in the girl’s eyes―fear she caused―cut deep. As much as it hurt, she couldn’t let guilt kill thousands of people. If any truth existed in Not-Dad’s plan, if he could stop the Virus, scaring a
kid for a little while was a necessary evil.

  Shaking and crying, the child crawled. She didn’t move with much urgency, though Tris couldn’t blame her. “I promise I won’t tell if you let me go.”

  “Aura… If I was in your position, I’d say the same thing. And as soon as I got away, I’d run straight to the Internal Security Force. I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not, but it’s not easy for me to do this to you.” She bowed her head for a second. “I’ve got a daughter your age. She’s eleven too.”

  The vent crinkled and popped under their weight. Aura took the brunt of the incoming wind, though crawling into the breeze pushed her hair back and didn’t whip it around her face as it did during the inbound trip. Tris unspooled wire as fast as she could, taking care not to lay it over anything too sharp.

  “You can go a little faster,” said Tris.

  “I’m scared. I don’t know what you’re going to do to me when we get… wherever you’re taking me.”

  Tris grumbled to herself for a few seconds. “The worst thing that will happen to you is being bored for an hour or so.”

  “But you have a gun and you’re not ISF. Only dangerous people have guns.”

  “I guess you won’t believe me if I tell you it pained me to have to threaten you with it.”

  Aura kept quiet for a few yards. “No… not really.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What?” Aura stopped short to look back, and Tris bumped her head into the girl’s backside. She made a noise part chuckle, part sob. “You’re sorry for kidnapping me at gunpoint?”

  Tris nodded. “Yes. Actually, I am.”

  Aura resumed crawling. “Then why are you doing it?”