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

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “Hey,” whispered Tris, pushing on his shoulder.

  Somehow, she’d teleported from curled up next to him to standing over him.

  He squinted up at her, fluorescent lights above her made her hair glow. “What?”

  “They’re ready to show us the way in.”

  I just got in bed. “What? What time is it?”

  “It’s a little after ten in the morning.”

  Kevin grunted, but sat up. “Okay.”

  “You didn’t take the vaccine, did you?” She bit her lip.

  He smiled. “Abby needs it more than I do.”

  Tris looked away, conflict plain on her face.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Is it?” She took his hand in both of hers. “I want Abby to be safe and happy, but we’re about to go through a tunnel with a high chance of Infected being there. Abby’s not in immediate danger. You are.”

  “And unless you want to sit around for four hours or so, I don’t have time to take it anyway.”

  She rested her forehead on his shoulder. “Dammit. If you get killed down there…”

  “Then you finish what you came here to do, go back to Ned, and do everything you can for Abby.”

  Tris sniffled and clamped her arms around him.

  “Hey… I’m not planning on tongue-kissing any Infected. That poor kid’s got enough nightmare fuel to last her till she’s old and grey. This vaccine thing might help her cope a bit more.”

  She gathered her composure and raised her head, staring into his eyes. “Okay. You are such an asshole, but you’re a good asshole.”

  He chuckled.

  “At least stay near me so I can keep them off you.”

  “Sure.”

  Kevin yawned and let her pull him to his feet. She led him down the hallway deeper into the base, hooked a left at a four-way intersection, and entered a space covered in tiny blue tiles. A row of lockers stood to the left in front of a battered wooden bench mounted on two steel posts. The other side of the room held six showerheads around the walls, each with its own drain, and no partitions whatsoever.

  Zoryn, and another man he hadn’t seen before, as well as a woman with waist-length black hair cleaned themselves, showing little reaction to the two of them walking in. Tris’ cheeks pinked, but she disrobed.

  Well, I guess this isn’t going to be a ‘fun’ shower. He piled his clothes up on the bench near Tris’ and followed her to the far-left showerhead. The heat in the water caught him off guard. In all his twenty-seven years, he’d never seen it come out of a tap hot enough to waft steam.

  “Whoa. Yowch that’s hot.”

  She smiled. “I’d almost forgotten what it’s like. Once we get home, I’m going to be working on proper water heaters so we can have showers like this.”

  “Hey,” said Zoryn. He didn’t quite turn to face them, but Kevin looked elsewhere. “I’m going to be with you guys in the tunnel. As far as the walk goes, it ain’t too bad. Should take us about an hour.”

  “Sounds good.” Kevin looked around for soap, but found only a small silver can. He patted Tris on the butt and whispered, “soap?”

  She took the can from its shelf and sprayed a lump of lime green foam into his hand. “You’ve never seen real soap before?”

  “Yeah… usually blocks of it.” Mint slapped him across the face, making him cough. “Damn.”

  “This is new soap. It’s antibacterial.” She sprayed some into her hand and lathered it over her chest.

  Nervousness and worry kept any playfulness out of her demeanor. He proceeded to wash himself, though froze two minutes later when Amaranth walked out from behind the lockers, naked. If she looked young before, she looked even younger with nothing on. Her presence made him feel awkward. He’d driven cargo to plenty of rural settlements where some of the people didn’t bother with clothes, many of them kids, but he’d never showered within five feet of them either. Knowing her true age of thirty-six didn’t take away from what his eyes told him.

  He stared at Tris instead.

  With no chance of the shower becoming anything more than a cleaning process, they finished in a few minutes and headed to a table nearer the lockers where a pile of towels sat folded safely away from the spray.

  Amaranth walked over as they dried off, casual as anything, and smiled. “Good morning.” She gestured at the lockers. “There’s some jumpsuits for you in number 19. Her shoes look Enclave already, so she didn’t need that. We got you some.”

  Kevin nodded.

  “Yes.” Amaranth put a hand on her hip. “I might have the body of a twelve-year-old, but I’ve got the brain of a dirty old woman. It is goddamn annoying. No one will touch me.”

  “Anyone that would, we’d kick their ass,” said the unknown man.

  Zoryn headed over and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around himself on his way behind the lockers.

  Amaranth sighed. “Yeah. Awesome nanites.” She swiped a towel from the shelf and draped it over herself. “Maybe they’ll turn me back into a zygote and I can forget about all this shit.”

  “Are you going backwards?” asked Tris.

  “I don’t know. Seems like I hold steady unless I get really hurt. Like they go into high gear and they keep going after they’ve fixed the injury. Took three bullets a few weeks back and I swear my boobs shrank.”

  Kevin opened his mouth to comment that she didn’t have any, but closed it. He pivoted on his heel and walked over to locker 19.

  “Your guy’s smarter than he looks,” said Amaranth.

  “What?” asked Tris.

  Amaranth laughed. “I know that look. A stillborn bad joke.”

  Kevin whistled innocently as he pulled on his boxers before opening the locker and removing a jet-black jumpsuit, which he put on.

  “Sorry,” said Tris, her tone quiet.

  “What for?” asked Amaranth.

  “What they did to you.” Tris toweled off.

  “Oh.” She followed her around toward the locker. “I wasn’t a science project. More of an oops. I’m not like ‘project Amaranth’ or anything… I used that as a code name when I got involved with the Resistance. Eternal flower or something.” She rolled her eyes. “I thought it was cooler before I realized these nanites are probably going to kill me.”

  “Maybe you’re not eating enough? Might’ve attacked fat reserves to rebuild tissue.” Tris tossed the towel on the bench and grabbed a jumpsuit. She held it for a few seconds, staring.

  Kevin zipped his up. “What’s wrong?”

  Tris smiled. “Just remembering you telling me to get rid of my old jumpsuit. Unwanted attention. Thought it ironic we’re putting them on for the same reason… to avoid attention.” She stepped in and zipped up.

  “Yeah.” He grabbed the red armored jacket, and sighed. “Feels stupid not wearing my armor… but I suppose being the only dude wearing red in a sea of black would be dumb too.” He packed it, and the rest of his clothes into the locker. The .45 he kept, stuffing it into the large pocket on his right hip, and two spare magazines in the opposite one.

  Amaranth ruffled the towel at her hair. “Yeah. You can leave it here. Assuming you make it out, no one will touch it. Our stuff’s way better.” She winked, dropped the towel, and pulled on a pair of white boxers a little too big for her before reaching for her tank top.

  “You’re not coming with us?” Kevin grinned, intending to tease. Of course, the Resistance leader would want to sit back here where it was safe. “Don’t s’pose you can spare any of that fancy armor?”

  “If it wouldn’t put you at risk, I would kick down the door for you. And no, all of our armor is hodgepodge, scuffed to shit, and dirty. If that didn’t get you questioned, being in armor would mark you as military and invite a whole host of other questions you wouldn’t have answers for. Better to look like civilians.” She wriggled into the tank top.

  “How are you a problem?” asked Tris.

  Amaranth glanced at her. “My real name is Lisa Yaro.”
<
br />   Tris coughed. “As in Dmitri Yaro?”

  “Yeah… he was my father.”

  Kevin held his hands up. “Savage boy is out of the loop. Who is this bad man?”

  Amaranth looked down. Her tiny delicate feet, white as new fallen snow, reminded him of a mannequin from that children’s clothing store they’d raided hours ago. A sad doll trapped in an even sadder tomb.

  Kevin’s smile died. Too much of Dad rubbed off on him. This woman looked so much like a child he wanted to comfort her. “Hey… sorry if it’s a sore topic. I’m… I have no idea.”

  “My father was the Prime of the original Council of Four. He’d have been almost eighty now if he hadn’t been assassinated.” Amaranth stood quiet for a few seconds, arms limp at her sides, a forlorn look on her face. “He voiced the idea that the Enclave wouldn’t be sustainable in a closed community and advocated opening up to the outside world. The only time the subject was ever discussed in front of the people. They had Council sessions about it, televised to everyone in the Enclave. The original Four were set to vote on it on a Tuesday, but someone shot him Saturday afternoon. Someone who had the backing of the other three Council members, because the killer walked right in and walked right out. ‘No one saw anything.’”

  “Sorry,” muttered Kevin.

  “They targeted me next. Would’ve been dead if it wasn’t for the nanites.” She sat on the bench staring into nowhere. For a few seconds, she looked every bit the tween she appeared to be. “Son of a bitch… I was twelve when…” She scratched at her chest. “Woke up on a gurney listening to two guys talk about how the ‘official story’ would be I’d been shot in the heart and killed. I almost sat up and told them I was alive, but they said they had to cremate me before anyone came to check. They were part of it. I played dead until they parked me and walked off to do something.”

  “Damn,” said Kevin.

  “I ran like hell. Been out here with the Resistance ever since.”

  Tris blinked a few times. “Your nanites… maybe they’re not hyperactive? Maybe they somehow imprinted on your body architecture the instant you took a bullet to the heart, and keep trying to put it back to that?”

  “I guess being twelve for the rest of my life beats shrinking until I stop existing. But yeah… if I get seen on any cameras, all hell will break loose.” Amaranth made a sad chuckle. “I could really use some dick though.”

  Kevin coughed, scratched his head, and kept his gaze on the floor. A cascade of uncomfortable grunts and mutterings emanating from the shower area suggested everyone else had about the same reaction to that as him.

  “So, uhh,” asked Kevin, “how’d a kid wind up in charge of the resistance?”

  “I didn’t start off leading a cell. I really was a kid when I first found them… twenty-three years ago. Harrisburg almost wiped us out. What you see here is it… managed to get a couple more bodies over the last couple months, but we’re still fewer than thirty.” She slapped her hands on her thighs and stood. “Right. You two should get going. Naomi and Zoryn are going to escort you to where you need to be. For what it’s worth”―she locked eyes with Tris―“I hope I’m right.”

  “About?” asked Tris.

  “I’ve got this feeling about you. I never trust anyone this fast.” Amaranth studied her for a moment. “I can’t explain it, but helping you feels like the right thing.”

  Tris narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  Zoryn led the way out of the Resistance hideout. Kevin followed deeper into the outer tunnel, away from sunlight, squeezing the grip of his AK47. At least the Challenger remained where he’d left it. Naomi opened a hip satchel and handed him a set of thin goggles with a wraparound elastic strap. Clear LED bulbs formed a line over the lenses, between two strips of black plastic. She handed one to Tris, who put it on without hesitating.

  Kevin shrugged and pulled it over his head. “If anyone wants to clue the caveman here on what this is, please do.”

  Zoryn cut his flashlight and turned. The LEDs over his eyes almost blinded him as he leaned close and flicked a switch on the side Kevin’s goggles. “Active night vision.”

  “Looks like you’re wearing flashlights on your head.” Kevin looked around at a world of monochromatic green. “Everything’s green.”

  “The LEDs are infrared,” said Naomi. “If you’re not wearing those goggles, you can’t see the light.”

  Kevin, being a twelve-year-old boy at heart, pulled the goggles away from his eyes to test. Sure enough, pitch black. He put them back on and the glowing green world returned. “Whoa.” He lifted and dropped them a few more times.

  “Infected, as far as we can tell, can’t see in the infrared spectrum. They’d spot normal flashlights.”

  “What about Enclave security?” Kevin adjusted the goggles so they didn’t press his ears to his head.

  Zoryn laughed as quietly as a seven-ish foot tall man could laugh. “They don’t come down here. They try to forget the school. It reminds them too much of where they came from.”

  “They prefer to feel like gods,” said Naomi.

  Tris hovered close by his right side as they got underway. For a time, they walked in a rough single file, with Zoryn in the lead, Naomi behind him, and Tris bumping elbows with Kevin. He amused himself amid the silence by panning his head around so the band of visibility swept over the old concrete. A few mattresses and sleeping bags littered the floor on the left, though whether they’d been dragged in by people before or after the war, he couldn’t tell.

  The goggles’ time display showed 10:49 a.m. when they started walking. By 11:20, Zoryn stopped and waved, indicating a broken hole on the right that led to a narrow dirt-walled passage with a slight downhill grade. Claustrophobia stiffened the muscles on his back; his arms touched both sides of the improvised tunnel, and his head bumped the ceiling every few steps. After a few agonizing minutes, he emerged from the side of a rounded tunnel covered in semi-shiny white tiles. Two sets of train rails ran along a trench in the middle. Kevin advanced cautiously, inhaling a musty, earthen scent tinged with oil or something industrial. Still, it felt good to stop hunching.

  Zoryn went left, jumped down the few feet to the tracks, and walked into the tunnel between the nearer set of rails. Kevin traipsed after, eyes on the rounded ceiling, noting the occasional missing tile exposing concrete and in one alarming case, dirt. Tris hurried along at his left and walked astride. She glanced at him, but the LED strip in her goggles blinded him when she tried to smile.

  “Ack.” He cringed. “Bright.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  At 11:39 a.m., the end of an old subway car came into view out of the murk up ahead. The pale green-on-black world of night vision lent it an eerie, spectral quality as though he peered into the world of ghosts. A clean skull staring at them from the left side window only made the otherworldly feeling stronger. More cars on the second set of tracks bent at an angle, having derailed and pinned the left side train against the wall.

  Skeletons hung out of broken windows too small to let anything more than a head and arm out here, a leg there. Kevin’s thoughts raced with a daydream of mass chaos… people trapped in the crashed trains losing their minds as the existing panic of nuclear war ramped up to the next level. Had the lights gone out before or after they’d all died? How many killed each other? Did any of them resort to cannibalism?

  Ugh. I’m turning into Tris… Freaking out about people who died twice my age ago.

  “You okay?” whispered Tris.

  He started to glance at her, but remembered the lights on his headband would blind her, so he kept facing forward. “Yeah. Feeling watched.”

  “Me too.”

  He smiled. “How many ghosts you think are here?”

  “It’s not ghosts I’m worrying about.”

  Zoryn checked the left side train, grumbled, and hurried to the other. After a moment of peering in the window, he took a small device from his belt and held it to t
he window. A scintillating speck of light appeared at the point of contact, and he traced it around as if drawing a line with a marker. Kevin lifted the goggles away from his eyes; the world became pitch dark save for a nimbus of bright violet where the cutter ate the train window. Nose-burning fumes followed seconds later.

  Naomi punched out a slab that clattered like plastic when it landed inside. She gave Kevin a nod and slipped into the car. Zoryn followed. Kevin tugged his goggles back down, slung the rifle over his back, and approached the opening.

  The car sat at an angle, one set of wheels on dirt tilting it toward him. A tangled pile of skeletons, luggage, and rotting clothes lay against the end door on his right. More skeletons occupied seats at random to the left, on both sides of a clear aisle that ran the length of about five cars.

  He hauled himself up and in. Zoryn again took point, moving with care to minimize noise. Kevin took the hint and tried to be silent as well. Tris held on to him from behind, hiding her face against his back.

  “What?” whispered Kevin.

  “I don’t want to see them. I couldn’t handle it if one of the skeletons is small.” She shivered.

  He hadn’t thought of it until she mentioned it. Curiosity battled with not wanting the sight of a child-sized skeleton burned into his mind. Kevin didn’t close his eyes, but he didn’t bother searching either. “Okay.”

  Zoryn stopped at the end of the last car, where another train had rear-ended this one. The door had been opened about two inches. He ignored it and used the energy cutter to open a hole in a window on the left. Naomi stuck a knife into the cut after the torch passed, and pulled the slab of resin back into the car so it didn’t make noise when it fell.