She grabbed an overhead baggage rack, pulled herself up, and threaded her legs into the opening before letting go and dropping out. Zoryn shifted sideways and stepped through the hole. Not being seven feet tall, and not wanting to smash his balls on the windowsill, Kevin exited via the baggage rack grab like Naomi.
Tris jumped down behind him, rifle up.
They walked along the tunnel, past the train that had apparently caused the derailment. Except for the first car crumpled into the one they’d emerged from, every door on the second train was open, no sign of any skeletons.
“That’s so fucked up,” whispered Kevin.
“What?” Tris looked at him, making him cringe away from the IR glow.
He wagged his AK47 at the empty cars. “The people who caused the wreck all walked away… poor bastards in the other one never got out.”
“I don’t think it was their fault,” said Tris. “If anything, blame the engineer—but they’d likely have died on impact.”
Kevin continued to look around as they walked. The tunnel’s condition didn’t do a whole lot for his confidence. Perhaps their guides had been keeping quiet to avoid triggering a cave-in rather than any worry about Infected hearing them. I bet I could fart and kill us right now. He grinned at a dark metal door on the right wall by a tiny porch, more than likely a fuse station or whatnot.
The idea of ripping ass and having it actually be deadly leapt upon his nervousness and made him laugh.
Tris glared at him.
Clank. A metallic ring echoed from up ahead, like a tire iron striking one of the rails.
All four of them froze.
An unmistakable moan followed.
Fuck. He grimaced at Tris and whispered, “My fault. Totally my fault. Sorry.”
The ground in front of Zoryn and Naomi came alive with bodies moving.
Kevin squeezed his rifle. “Or not… We almost walked right into that.”
“So much for quiet.” Zoryn raised a handgun and opened fire.
Intense flashes of white muzzle flare snapped in the monochromatic green world. The enclave pistol made a squidgy, muted pop that didn’t sound anywhere near lethal. Exploding heads and sprays of liquid from human silhouettes up ahead said otherwise.
A moan echoed from behind.
Kevin whirled.
Scuffing footsteps came from a maintenance door thirty feet or so back; it bumped open with a slow creak of rust as a nearly naked man stumbled out onto a tiny concrete platform. He wore a chain around his waist for a belt with two license plates hanging over his crotch. His one boot, black leather with rough armor plates made from old traffic signs, made Kevin think of the Boatmen. He shambled in a beeline toward them, but failed to notice the four steps from the platform to the ground, and fell flat on his face. More figures emerged behind him: a thin woman in leather riding armor, a fat guy in a dark-colored skirt down to his shins, two large metal Chevrolet symbols gleamed from his nipples. Both of them walked heedless off the tiny stairwell and crushed the former Boatman harder into the ground.
The skinny woman raked at the gravel, emitting a series of high-pitched eager grunts.
A ripple of fire that sounded full automatic came from Tris. Five heads exploded simultaneously. Kevin fired once into the chest of the already-dead fat guy. Behind them, the muted pops of two Enclave handguns went off in a continuous, but controlled barrage. He risked a glance over his shoulder, wondering why their escorts weren’t going all ‘superTris’ on the Infected. They fired, aimed, fired, aimed at a normal human pace.
Kevin walked backwards, covering the rear. More Infected, these clad only in filth and dark black tunnel grime, scrambled out of the same door and walked over the dead, which had piled up into a ramp from the little porch down to the tracks. He didn’t look at the pale night-vision-green shapes long enough to tell man from woman as he fired at anything moving.
Round after round barked out of his AK as he backed up. He might’ve been screaming, but couldn’t hear himself over all the gunfire. He stopped shooting for a second when he couldn’t spot any motion. His ears throbbed from the pounding of firearms going off in a confined space.
Naomi shrieked. Kevin looked back. A scrawny, teenage-looking boy had clamped his teeth around her left leg, right above the knee. Blood smeared his cheeks; his ‘no-one-home’ eyes stared at nothing as he grunted and tore while she bashed him in the head.
Kevin pivoted and aimed. The instant his finger squeezed the trigger, a body hit him from behind, forcing his shot low. It struck the rail with a spark and a clank; a soft fleshy thump came from Naomi, who screamed again.
Tris roared a battle cry. A hand slapped into Kevin’s back and pulled down. Fingernails scratched over the jumpsuit; he forced himself to hold steady, taking careful aim. When he fired again, the boy’s head splattered like an overripe melon. Naomi staggered to the right and fell to one knee, grabbing for a new magazine.
“Come on,” yelled Zoryn. He took the head off another infected with a sword, his empty pistol in his left hand.
Kevin spun to the rear as Tris hurled a nude, bald man to the ground by a hand around his throat. She straightened in a blur, foot on his chest, and shot him point blank with the AK in the face.
A shrieking elderly woman, her distended breasts bouncing off her stomach as she ran, came out of the dark at his right, a flash of pallid green on black. Kevin let out a yelp of surprise and cracked her across the face with the butt of his rifle. The old woman’s body whirled to the left, following her skull. Something fleshy and altogether too hard to be what he thought it was hit him in the face with enough force to knock him stumbling.
Tris roared and stomped the old one in the middle of the back, sending the spindly body flying, arms windmilling. Kevin recovered his balance and fired at the old woman as soon as she landed on her chest. Tris’ AK spat a bullet as well, which tore apart the side of the Infected’s head.
“You okay?” asked Tris.
“Just took a petrified tit to the face… I think. Nothing’s broken.”
Naomi yelled, “Look out!” and fired four or five times.
Zoryn let off an “Oof!” as a thick-bodied man a head shorter than him grabbed him in a bear hug and lifted him off his feet while biting at his shoulder. The Infected’s outfit of tow-chains, a stop sign, and leather suggested he’d also been a former Boatman. Zoryn grunted and groaned, struggling to break the hold, but had all the success of a toddler held by an adult.
Tris’ AK blurred from pointing behind them to aimed forward. A shot rang out, crashing into Kevin’s eardrums, before his brain fully processed that she’d moved. The bullet hole appeared above the Infected’s right eye and most of the back of his head blasted out into a cloud of gore. Zoryn flung the corpse away and staggered.
Another naked body pounced on Tris from behind. Kevin smashed the butt of his AK into a head of long hair that could’ve been a skinny dude or a flat-chested woman. Arms grabbed him from behind, but Tris had her Beretta out and fired before anything pierced his skin. Ears ringing, Kevin shot the skinny one and spun to aim at the Infected behind him.
A wet, crunching splatter preceded a grunt of exertion from Zoryn. Metal rang against metal, and the unpleasant squelch of a blade stabbed into meat brought silence to a steady, low moan Kevin hadn’t noticed until it stopped.
At the twitch of a hand in the pile of dead behind them, Kevin fired. His shot kicked up a spray of blood, but he couldn’t tell if he hit the one that moved. He froze, weapon still trained on the spot until he trusted all the corpses would remain still.
Naomi grunted and screamed past clenched teeth. Kevin looked from side to side over his rifle. Since nothing had yet tried to move, he rushed over to her.
She half sat on the rail, struggling to remove a metal spar from her left shin. He couldn’t tell if she lacked the strength or if the pain proved too great for her to dislodge it.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“Thanks for shooting me, j
ackass.” She stared at him.
“Sorry. Aiming for the kid biting you… something hit me right when I fired.”
“Kevin!” Tris yelled as she ran up and grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t touch it. The blood could be tainted. I got it.”
He nodded and took a step back.
Tris put her right hand on Naomi’s shoulder and grabbed the metal shard with her left. “On three, okay?”
Naomi nodded.
“One…” She tore it loose.
Naomi’s scream melted into a stream of obscenities.
Tris held up the metal rod, the lower two inches coated in blood. “Only two inches… that shouldn’t have hurt that much.”
“Let me stab it into you and see how bad it hurts,” rasped Naomi.
“I took a .50 cal through the lung.” Tris dropped the metal. “Guess that threw off my pain scale.”
“Ouch,” said Zoryn.
Kevin glanced around at everyone. “That was… a bit less smooth than I’d expected.”
“How’s that?” Zoryn sheathed his sword and chuckled.
“Looked like every other time I’ve seen settlers deal with Infected… except you two don’t seem to care you got bit or scratched.”
“Ahh.” Zoryn nodded. “Well… we’re vaccinated, but we’re no better at this than you are.”
Naomi glanced back at the pile of dead Infected in the rear. Perhaps eighteen lay littered around by where everyone stood, more than thirty had come out of the maintenance door. “Damn… how the hell did you two take all them out without a scratch?”
“I got three or four.” Kevin offered a sheepish smile.
Zoryn gestured at Tris with his pistol before sliding another magazine in. “She’s boosted. We’re vaccinated against the Virus, and we have nanites, but we don’t have any augments.” Awe took over his expression. “I thought you went full auto… That wasn’t, was it?”
“No,” muttered Tris. “Single shot as fast as I could aim and fire.”
“Daaamn.” Naomi shook her head. “I wish I had dex boosters. What’s it like shooting these things in slow motion?”
“Still scary as hell.” Tris eyed Kevin. “Especially when little boys don’t take their vitamins.”
“Oh, I figured all you guys had ’em.” Kevin tried not to think about the feeling of fingernails sliding down his back. “‘All you guys’ being Enclave, not resistance.”
“Nah… only the military gets the dex boosters.” Naomi picked at her leg, watching the wound close. “Most citizens only have the nanites.”
Oh, makes sense then why Amaranth stays behind… She’s only as strong as a kid. Can’t really fight. “She’s stronger than I am too.” Kevin laughed in a whisper.
“So you got the full combat package.” Zoryn grinned at her.
Tris shrugged. “I guess.”
Kevin leaned over to her and whispered, “Check my back. Please tell me the fabric didn’t rip.”
She slapped him, knocking him three paces left and almost sending him to the ground.
“Fuck,” he mumbled, cradling his jaw. After straightening on his feet, he looked at Zoryn. “See?”
“You bastard.” Tris ran over and yanked the zipper on his jumpsuit open. After peeling it down to expose his back, she forced him around and looked him over. A moment later, she grabbed him and bawled on his shoulder.
Kevin’s heart fluttered. “Oh, please tell me that’s good crying.”
She sniffled. “Red marks, but it didn’t break skin.” Limp, she clung to him to keep from falling over. “Dammit, why didn’t you take the vaccine? You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“I’m an overconfident asshole with a soft spot for our little girl.” He grasped her cheek and stared into her eyes.
Zoryn gave them about thirty seconds before he cleared his throat. “Sound travels down here. We need to go.”
Kevin zipped up his jumpsuit as soon as she let go.
“I don’t understand anything anymore.” Tris hovered at his side. “Why the hell would Nathan arrange for me to get so many boosts?”
“Well… either he wanted to make sure you’d stay alive long enough to carry that surprise firecracker to the resistance in Harrisburg… you know what they think of the Wildlands.” Kevin counted three rounds left in his magazine and decided to swap it for a full one.
“I suppose.” She looked down. “Speaking of overconfident assholes… I bet he never imagined I’d survive and come anywhere near him again.”
Zoryn cleared his throat.
“All right, all right.” Kevin put an arm around Tris and hurried after their escorts, who walked as though they hadn’t been injured at all. “Damn. I gotta get me some nanites.”
Tris chuckled. “Would you save those for Abby too?”
He tapped his chin. “Yeah… probably.”
She gave him an adoring look. “Those don’t come in an autoinjector. It’s a surgical process to implant the control node.”
“Or…” Kevin held up a finger. “Maybe Nathan didn’t do it. Maybe he doesn’t even know you have all those boosts.”
“Huh?” She squinted at him.
Kevin shrugged. “Dear old Dad?”
22
Please Follow
Light flared from the rails, whenever a clean spot caught the infrared lights from Tris’ goggles. She walked with her head down, burdened by the weight of doubt. Kevin’s attempt at a wisecrack got her wondering. Would Nathan have really initiated―or even approved―her augmentation? She couldn’t remember being told about the surgery, which meant they’d likely done it to her while she floated in a tank in the ‘hidden Resistance safe house.’
She’d believed Nathan a hacker who opened the door to her Detention cell and walked her step-by-step through an escape, telling her when to hide in an alcove and when to run so the guards didn’t see her. The entire event replayed in her mind, the worst forty-something minutes of her life sprinting barefoot down hallways in the middle of an Enclave prison before crawling into a filthy ventilation system. One day she’d been looking forward to going to college—the next, a fugitive escaping prison for refusing to marry.
By the time she’d emerged in the maintenance conduit, her Detention jumpsuit had turned black. Or had it always been black? She wanted to say it had been light grey, or even white… but in her memory, she looked down at herself and saw black… like she wore at that moment. She hadn’t kept it for long. A man supposedly working for the Resistance met her in the conduit and brought her to a room filled with glass-top tables loaded with terminals and CPU cases. Everything had looked so haphazard, she had immediate doubts about her odds of survival, but anything seemed better than sitting in prison until she agreed to marry that abusive shit.
Not ten minutes after arriving in the ‘Resistance safe house,’ she’d stripped and climbed into a tank. With a facemask holding an air hose to her mouth, an IV in her arm for nutrition, and a plug behind her ear, she spent two weeks unconscious… which had felt like closer to eight months in virtual reality. How many of the men and women who’d taught her to fight, shoot, hide, pick locks, and survive had been real? How many might have been computer programs simulating people?
They must’ve loaded me up with implants while I was in the tank… nanosurgery.
She furrowed her brow while poking at the dusty scratch lines on Kevin’s back. By the luck of whatever higher power may or may not exist, the Infected hadn’t drawn blood. He had to hate not having his jacket.
Maybe Nathan did arrange it. We’re all taught how dangerous the Wildlands are… She thought about that poor boy from the Boatmen compound. How long had he been kept chained to the wall, let out only to run food to other caged unfortunates? How many people had he witnessed forced to murder each other for sport? She didn’t even want to consider how many had died there… or that the Enclave appeared to be perpetuating the mindless violence.
They could do so much to help humanity. Why do they want it to burn? She
stared at her left hand, opening and closing her fingers. Sure, she’d been made strong, but no more so than a human could be. A bigger person, a man, could’ve been boosted more… her frame could only take so much. Still, if the numbers on the fake Resistance man’s equipment had been correct, her physical strength hovered near the upper five percent of human potential, not counting outliers.
She shivered.
“Here we are,” said Zoryn.
Tris blinked at the time display showing 12:08. Damn, my head’s not here.
Their two escorts had stopped by the edge of a platform. Over a span of about thirty yards, the right side of the train tunnel opened out to an area with columns, benches, and ticket vending machines. Several doors and corridors branched off from it. She walked over to them and leaned forward to peer around. The metal-capped edge of the station floor came up to her chest while she stood in the recessed tracks. Lettering on the distant wall read ‘Stanford.’
Ancient papers in various shades of light and dark clung like a coating of tatter to columns; some offered tutoring, some announced concerts, a handful showed a picture of a lost dog. About a third of the seats in a waiting area had collapsed, and rat shit dotted everything. A handful of rodents scurried around, their eyes glinting in the night vision panorama before her.
Zoryn climbed up and reached down to help Naomi. Tris pulled herself up before giving Kevin a hand. Naomi shot her a look part amusement part playful jealousy. In the middle of the innermost wall, a four-escalator wide hallway led up at an angle, presumably to the surface, but a yellow collapsible barrier closed it off, secured with chains and padlocks.
Kevin pointed. “That way?”
“No,” said Naomi. “They’ve got sensors in that tunnel and a stronger barricade at the top. Nothing we have on us can dent it, and they’d know someone came up that way.”
Tris crossed the platform to the ticket booth. Bulletproof glass offered a view of a small office, long-dead computers, and one small door into a dingy office. No way through here. She glanced back at Zoryn and Naomi. “So where are we going?”
The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number Page 28