The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “Damn,” whispered someone to the right.

  “I’m not a Persephone,” said Tris. “Honest.”

  “As if one of those things would admit it.” A deep voiced man, pale but not snow-white, shook his head.

  “I met one who did.” Kevin smiled. “Seemed like a nice enough girl when she wasn’t throwing bikers through houses.”

  The small girl approached, bare feet poking out of too-long black BDU pants. She wore an immaculate white tank top that exposed her shoulders and showed off her lack of breasts. Aside from her height, she had the physique of a nine year old. “She’s right. Persephones are taller, look older, and actually have muscle tone.”

  “Look who’s talking.” Tris folded her arms.

  Some of the people laughed.

  “Your little sister’s adorable.” Kevin smiled at Naomi.

  The small girl sighed at the ceiling. “Right. First, I’m not Naomi’s sister. Second, I’m not twelve. You’ve heard of nanites?”

  “Yeah.” Kevin chuckled. “Tris has ’em. Kinda want ’em myself.”

  “Well, I got a slightly overtuned batch. I stopped looking older when they installed it, and sometimes I think I’m creeping backwards. I’m thirty-six. Most of these people call me Amaranth.”

  “Tris,” said Tris. “You must go through a lot of food.”

  Amaranth rolled her eyes. “Don’t get me started on that either. It’s annoying. Not fair to everyone else here how much I have to eat.”

  “Hey maybe you can give me some of those and between the two of us we wind up normal?” Kevin grinned.

  “Doesn’t work that way. The nanites are coded to my DNA. If we injected my nanites into your body, they’d treat your tissues as being invasive to me and destroy everything.” Amaranth winked. “Basically about the most intensely painful way to die you can imagine.”

  Kevin shook his head. “That would be getting stuffed face-first into Wayne’s toilet.”

  Tris shivered.

  Amaranth stared at him. “I don’t want to know. So…” She looked up at Tris. “Why are you here?”

  “My father told me to go to the Starbucks.”

  Kevin leaned over to Tris and whispered, “Hey, you’re not the shortest person in the room.”

  Amaranth frowned. “This guy’s original. Hope you pay him well. Your father? Doctor Jameson?”

  “So you know who I am?” Tris blinked.

  “You are well known among the Resistance, as well as certain circles within the Enclave.”

  Tris bit her lip. “How bad?”

  “Well…” Amaranth walked over to the tables, waving for them to follow. She took a seat, shifted sideways, and put her feet up on the bench, ankles crossed. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah.” Tris scratched at her stomach. “Quite.”

  “Food sounds good.” Kevin stepped over the bench and sat beside Tris.

  “On it,” said Zoryn. He had to duck to walk under a few pipes on his way to the hallway that led deeper into the place.

  Amaranth leaned forward, arms folded on the tabletop. “Okay… I’ll try to keep it simple and short. Your father was part of a movement that wanted to open the doors and reintegrate the Enclave with the outside world. Unfortunately, he found himself in the minority as most of those in power feared the result of nuclear war and were worried about genetic damage caused by the vast amounts of radiation let loose.”

  “I knew that already.” Tris raked her fingers through her hair. “What ‘circles’ are you talking about?”

  “Well, my people on the inside tell me that one of the First Tier administrators basically has your face on a dart board.”

  “Nathan,” muttered Tris.

  “Yeah. There are a small number of people within the biogenic science division who have secretly run progression models that predict the isolationist policies of the current Council will result in an unsustainable situation within thirty years or so.”

  “They needed computer models to understand that there’s only so many ways to match people before you wind up inbreeding?” Tris slapped the table. “I think it’s too late. They already did screw themselves into stupidity.”

  Amaranth smiled. “Perhaps. We’ve been trying to find a way into the city core, but so far, we’ve only been able to locate the quarantine district. They really did their homework. Doesn’t seem to be any alternate way into the core other than the main tram, not even vents.”

  Tris nodded.

  “Wait, what?” asked Kevin.

  “Shall I, or do you want to fill him in?” asked Amaranth.

  Tris looked at him. “The Enclave is split into two parts. There’s the city core, an underground metropolis built somewhere in the area around the University, where most of the people live. It’s got all the education, technical, training, and residence facilities… basically most of the Enclave civilization. On the surface, there’s a smaller outlying section of city they use for quarantine purposes. Basically anyone who goes outside, like the hovercraft pilots, or the patrollers, or in some rare cases, scientific survey teams, lives there for a few months after coming back. The security to get into the city core is ridiculous. The only way in or out that anyone knows about is a small magnetic tram line. The capsule seats four people at a time only, and it takes about twenty minutes to go between the zones.”

  “Wow… sounds like they’re paranoid.” Kevin shifted his jaw side to side. “What are they afraid of?”

  “A little paranoid, yeah. Disease and radiation mostly.” Tris smiled. “There’s a decontamination process before getting into the cab… a shower, and they make you wear these paper gowns, which they burn as soon as you arrive… and go through another decontamination shower.”

  Kevin glanced between the women. “These people do realize the world isn’t swimming with toxic shit anywhere near as bad as they think…except for the crap they’ve set loose.”

  “Paranoia isn’t supposed to make sense.” Amaranth leaned back and stretched. “The Council has convinced themselves that the outside world is deadly, and they’ve got everyone living in fear. That’s the first step to controlling a large population: make them afraid of everything so they trust the people in power the way children trust their parents.”

  “We have to stop the Virus.” Tris thumped the table with her fist.

  Zoryn returned with a pair of silver trays. Each held a pair of chicken pieces, a beige glop, a basin of little green pellets, a brown square in the middle, and a small reservoir of light brown liquid. “Here ya go.” He set one down in front of Tris and one by Kevin. “Oh…” He produced two plastic forks in clear wrappers from his pocket and handed them over.

  “What are those?” Kevin pointed at the pellets.

  “Peas,” said Tris. “Eat the brown one last, that’s dessert.”

  She attacked her food with almost as much ferocity as Katie had.

  Kevin stabbed the chicken and tore off a piece. As soon as he bit down, he blinked. Taste unlike anything he’d experienced flooded his mouth. Spices of some kind, it had so much flavor it almost hurt. “Wow…”

  “He’s never had purified food before.” Tris grinned. “It looks like chicken, but it never walked around. It’s basically the same… muscle tissue grown in tanks. Less messy than caring for live chickens. Takes less space too.”

  “Stop.” He raised a hand. “Let me enjoy this.”

  “Try the mashed potatoes with gravy.” She winked.

  Kevin scooped some of the beige goop, dipped it in the darker brown goop, and put it in his mouth. If I could sell this shit at a Roadhouse, I’d own the world. With great effort, he ate at the pace of a human being, and avoided the temptation to eat the tray as well.

  Amaranth watched for a few minutes without bothering them.

  “So…” asked Tris. “Everyone in the Enclave doesn’t know me or want to kill me?”

  “No.” Amaranth shook her head. “Only Nathan’s inner circle and a few of the military who’ve h
ad direct contact with you out in the Wildlands. Director Gerhardt issued an order to the military that promised exile for anyone who volunteered for a ‘special’ mission issued by Administrator Savros.”

  Tris flashed a sinister grin. “I bet Nathan loved that.”

  “Please tell me you have the data about the antiviral process. The cure you were supposed to be smuggling out?”

  Tris sighed. “I never had it. Nathan set that whole thing up. He loaded my implant with music… a band named The Cure.”

  Most of the people around them groaned.

  One man in the back screamed and bashed his head into a locker door. “That’s awful!”

  “Tell me about it.” Tris seethed.

  “You okay, Mark?” yelled Amaranth.

  The guy banging his head on the lockers waved dismissively at her and walked off rubbing his temples as if attempting to erase the memory of having heard that.

  Amaranth leaned forward, head in her hand such that her eyebrows stretched unnaturally wide. “That is a god-awful pun. Someone needs to do something unseemly to Nathan for that.”

  “Oh… I want to.” Tris scowled. “I don’t think I can get near him though. He’s too deep inside the city core.”

  “Don’t you have to go in there anyway?” Kevin smiled.

  “No… I should be able to do what I need to do from a terminal. I’m expecting this is going to involve uploading some kind of virus—software virus—into their system to turn the machinery that synthesizes and stores the biological virus against itself.” She poked her fork at the brownie. “It’s the only way that it makes sense for me to be able to have any kind of effect alone against the whole Enclave. I’ve got no chance of doing this up front and loud.”

  “So the cure was useless?” Amaranth grumbled. “We’re back to square one.”

  “Not entirely.” Tris bent forward, scooped the brownie out of the tray on the end of her fork, and pointed it at the smaller woman. “My father hacked a hidden message into the music files. Told me to contact him at an old phone number with an exchange in this area. Managed to find a working phone and… he said he needed me inside to help him, and then sent me to Starbucks.”

  “Hmm. I think we can help you with that.” Amaranth smiled. “The Enclave spends a lot of time being high tech, so sometimes they forget low tech. We found an old subway tunnel that used to have a stop at Stanford. If you don’t mind a climb, it connects via a ventilation shaft down a few stories and cuts over into the basement of one of the old university buildings. It’s tight quarters, but it should be possible to make your way up through there to the Quarantine Section.”

  “Wait, didn’t you say the Enclave city is underground?” Kevin scratched his head.

  “The core is.” Tris bit the corner off the fork-impaled brownie, and wagged the rest at him like a wand. “Quarantine is on the surface under a dome and several walls. There’s lots of guards, sentry drones, cameras, and such. Remember all those stories about ten thousand coins reward for bringing runaways back?”

  “Oh, so it’s like a fake Enclave city above the real one?”

  “The Quar isn’t fake,” said Amaranth. “It’s about one-eighth the size of the city core. It’s a staging area really, the interface between the city proper and the outside world. We haven’t been able to locate the exact geographic location of the core, but we’re starting to think it’s offshore under the San Francisco Bay, given the approximate angle of the connecting tram and duration of the ride.”

  Kevin squinted. “How the hell do they get heavy equipment like those hovercraft in and out of an underground city with a damn ocean above it?”

  “They don’t need them down there.” Amaranth smiled. “All of their Wildlands operations personnel are in the Quar.”

  “What about drones?” asked Tris. “Specifically the ones that distribute viral agent?”

  Amaranth shot a frustrated glare at the wall. “We’ve only seen a few drones big enough not to be local area patrols come and go. All from the Quar as well.”

  Kevin clapped once. “Sounds simple enough to me. Anyone got a spare nuke lying around? Just drop it on this quarantine area and we pull the coyote’s fangs right out.”

  “Great plan.” Amaranth frowned. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a nuke with you?”

  A blonde woman in a black Enclave jumpsuit walked up behind Amaranth, whispered a few words and handed her a silver cylinder about the size of a pen.

  “Thanks.” Amaranth nodded at the woman and offered the object to Kevin. “You’re probably going to need this.”

  “What is it?” Kevin took it, turning it around in his fingers. Aside from a small hole at one end, the device appeared featureless and smooth.

  “An automatic injector with one dose of a vaccine that will, after about four hours, make you immune to Agent-94.”

  “What’s―”

  “The Virus.” Amaranth exhaled. “You should take it and then I suggest you get some rest. We’ll give you some Enclave uniforms so you don’t stand out. Naomi and Zoryn will help you get as far as the tunnel. My people are more wanted than you two, so they can’t even set foot in the Quar.”

  Tris nodded.

  Kevin stared at the silver thing in his hand. Every momentary flash of terror he’d had at Infected from the day he’d first seen them as a child until an hour or so ago replayed in his mind as a rapid series of still images. One small device could eliminate all that worry.

  He spun it over his fingers, thinking about how it would feel not to have to worry about becoming Infected ever again.

  Tris’ wide-eyed, somewhat open-mouthed smile made her look like someone had mainlined sunshine straight up her ass. He had to look away, and found himself snickering. “What?”

  “That face.” He grinned.

  “You don’t understand.” Tris stared at Amaranth for a second. “He’s phobic.”

  Amaranth raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t everyone?”

  “I mean clinical phobia. Freezes up, blacks out, screams like a small boy.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Kevin flicked his thumb at the device.

  Tris grabbed his arm. “Why are you not jabbing that thing in your thigh?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m not in the habit of injecting myself with something a person I’ve only known for a half hour gives me…”

  “It looks authentic.” Tris squeezed his arm.

  “No one is forcing you to take it.” Amaranth smiled. “I should probably warn you that the tunnels may have a significant Infected presence.”

  Kevin gazed into the warped reflection of his face, stretched into a slender line of tanned beige upon the narrow cylinder. The woman seemed honest enough, and the injector looked ‘Enclave’ enough, that he felt inclined to believe her. Still, as he thought about taking it, he couldn’t help but picture Abby, and how terrified she’d been when the people in Amarillo believed she’d become Infected.

  “Hey…” He looked up. “You got any more of these?”

  “Not here. Everyone in the Resistance is from the Enclave. We’re already all inoculated. We didn’t have any pressing reason to stock up on it. We had a few on hand for outsiders who stumbled in and joined the cause, but… that’s the last of it.”

  “I think I’m gonna hang onto it then. Someone needs it more than I do.”

  Tris gawked at him. “We’re going into a tunnel full of those things. Take it.”

  He traced his thumb back and forth over the metal. “I’d rather give it to Abby. She’s got a lot more years ahead of her than I do… and hey, if we don’t mess this up, maybe no one will need it anymore.”

  Tris wrapped her arms around him and sniffled for a few seconds before she had to fight not to cry. “I don’t want to lose you. You’re too damn caring for your own good.”

  “Yeah.” He tucked the vaccine injector into his jacket pocket. “I got that from Dad.”

  20

  Survival

  A lone tree branch wobbled in
a patch of moonlight on the angled ceiling. Abby stared at the motion, swishing her feet back and forth under the blanket. Deep swirling shadows lurked at the edges of the loft bedroom, making her feel even more like a stranger in someone else’s home. Her stomach churned with the same heavy sickness that began as soon as she’d spotted the drone. Every time she tried to close her eyes, the horrors of her old home filled her thoughts. Her hands had barely stopped shaking since she’d been carried in from the roof.

  Fuzz, the teddy bear, remained tucked under her left arm where Zoe had put it hours ago, a matter-of-fact, ‘here, you need this’ gesture before she climbed over Abby to get in bed. Had she been able to peel her mind away from dreading what the drones were about to do to Nederland, she might’ve been insulted. Zoe meant well, but she’d basically called her a little kid who had to clamp on a stuffed animal to be able to sleep.

  Not that she could sleep.

  Amarillo had erupted into chaos in the middle of the night. Dad hauled her out of bed in such a rush he’d almost pulled her clean out of her dress. She didn’t remember the mad run to the shelter of the army building, or the old fire station after that. One second she’d been in bed, the next she sat on cold concrete clinging to her father’s side and shivering, not knowing why all the adults were screaming and shooting outside. The worst had been huddling with other children in a crawlspace for hours while her father went with about thirty others to take back the town. Seven returned.

  Over five hundred people became one hundred in two days. Fifty in another six hours. A week after being dragged out of bed, fourteen people remained… and they all thought her the next to die. She squeezed the bear.

  Any second now, she expected her dad or Bill or some adult to rush in, haul her out of bed, and drag her into the middle of Amarillo all over again. The second she closed her eyes and let her guard down, everyone would die.

  Nederland was doomed.

  Abby forced herself to cry in silence so the Infected wouldn’t hear her. All the kids from Amarillo had figured that out quick. Every thump in the floor or clatter outside became death on two legs coming for her. The more she tried to stop thinking about it, the more her heart raced.