“Here.” Naomi pointed left and walked off to the left.
As Kevin passed behind her, a surge of worry, relief, and the need to hold him took her. She grabbed him and clung protectively, not wanting to let him go into this place that could kill them both. He flashed a smile, that cocky rogue’s grin that ten years of driving around getting shot at still hadn’t managed to punish out of him.
Unable to help herself, she leaned up and kissed him.
He brushed her hair away from her eyes. The intensity of his smile faded, changing its character. The look he gave her could’ve said it’s not too late to go back as easily as I’m gonna be right next to you.
The squeak of Naomi’s shoes on the tile pulled her out of the smoldering stare, and the enraging worry that Nathan would hurt Abby if she didn’t do… something… got her moving again. What’s wrong with me? How did I go from feeling sorry for Abby to feeling like she’s mine and I’d rip the testicles off anyone who even looks at her wrong? She grumbled.
Naomi exited the platform on the left side beyond the ticket booth, and headed down a corridor past two bathrooms on the right, an ‘employees only’ door on the left, stopping at a large plywood slab bearing a faded ‘We’re Improving!’ poster on it featuring a smiling construction worker.
The slightly taller woman took hold of the giant piece of plywood and tugged. With a grunt, she pulled it aside, swinging it flat against the wall to reveal a battered pair of elevator doors.
“Oh, they even installed an elevator for us. Nice.” Kevin grinned.
Zoryn crunched over broken tiles and coils of wire. He grabbed at the metal sliding door and jerked back with his body weight, moving it a few inches. Kevin approached to help. Tris handed the AK to Naomi, and lent a hand, and between the three of them, they forced the door open, bending the metal.
Tris stuck her head into the gap, inhaling the overwhelming smells of wet earth, metal, and a salty, biting aroma she assumed to be rat piss. About three stories overhead, rats darted around hanging hoses on the underside of an elevator cab. One leapt to the wall and scurried out of sight into a hole. A nimbus of infrared glare followed her gaze down the shaft to the bottom, about fifty feet further below.
“I guess we’re going down?” asked Tris.
“Correct,” said Zoryn. “This will take you to another tunnel that leads to a basement annex of the school. No one’s been in there for decades.”
“Why would a school have a secret tunnel to a subway station?” asked Kevin.
Naomi gave him an impressed eyebrow lift. “We think the tunnel was made later during the initial formation of the Enclave. Back when they were a mixture of intellectuals, scientists, and whatever government forces decided to use the shelter here. Our best guess is they wanted an escape route, but never needed it… and eventually forgot about it.”
“You should probably leave your rifles with us,” said Zoryn. “Enclave citizens aren’t allowed to possess firearms, and those things stand out as low tech. You might be able to hide your handguns in your pockets.”
“I’m not going in there without at least this.” Tris squeezed the Beretta.
“Good thing you left the katana in the car.” Kevin winked. He handed his AK to Naomi again. “Sorry about that ricochet.”
She grasped it, frowning. “Yeah… no problem. Just make sure you come back and get it.” Her glower softened to an expression of ‘be careful’ and she clapped him on the arm. “I don’t want to, uhh, you know, have to look at it since it caused me so much pain.”
Sensing the tease in her tone, he chuckled. “Yeah. That’s the plan.”
Tris shook Zoryn’s hand. “Thanks for the escort. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to find in there, but it feels like the right thing to do.” Does it, or is this part of my programming? What other personality alterations did they do while I was plugged in? All of it was so new at the time… One had to be eighteen or older to get an interface jack. She reached up and touched a finger to the little socket behind her left ear. Everyone had to get them installed after high school graduation. Some kids couldn’t wait and got them the day they turned eighteen. Others dreaded it and tried like hell to avoid it until the security forces dragged them to the clinic. Tris fell into the smallest group―ambivalent. She hadn’t cared enough to get it until the security people showed up to ask about her lack of patriotism, but she didn’t fight them either when they told her she had to have it.
Okay. Here goes. She stared at the elevator shaft. Why do I feel like I’m climbing down the rabbit hole? “I’m late. I’m late.”
She grasped the door and pulled herself in, searching for handholds.
“Late?” asked Kevin.
“A very important date.” She spotted a ladder recessed in the wall on the right and reached for it.
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Kevin.
Zoryn and Naomi snickered.
Tris grabbed a rung covered in dust. Speaking of late… it has been awhile since my ‘friend’ stopped by. She sighed, feeling a pang of sorrow. Stress. They harvested my ovaries already. With a contemptuous grumble, she leapt into the shaft and made her way down.
Kevin followed. The flare of his infrared headband danced around the walls, casting her long shadow out below. She glanced up; he eased himself down one rung at a time, his attention on her more than where he put his feet.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“This is careful.” He chuckled. “If I was being careful, we wouldn’t be sneaking into the bowels of the Enclave.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s… colorful.”
A few minutes later, the ground came into view. She hurried down the last few rungs and got out of Kevin’s way. The shaft bottom had collected a fair amount of small debris. Spongy matter underfoot likely contained at least forty percent rat turd, mixed with dust and other things she didn’t want to think about. Shiny steel slats glinted in the light from her headset as she examined a set of elevator doors. Much to her surprise, the seam along the top and bottom glowed as if the doors offered passage into the heart of a furnace, night vision exaggerating the light.
Kevin’s shoe crunched behind her. He overacted slipping off the ladder and grabbed on to her. She set her stance and held him up, giving him a ‘must you?’ smirk.
“Am I that obvious?”
She looked again at the door. “You didn’t trip.”
“Any excuse to hold you.”
She couldn’t let her heart melt. Not here. Not in the basement of the Enclave. Tris put her hand atop his where it rested on her stomach. A moment later, she patted him. “I love you too, but I’d like to get out of here alive so I can continue loving you instead of winding up a female version of Wayne with nothing but a bottle of hooch and a sad tale of broken dreams.”
“Ouch.” He hugged her tight for a second. “I’ll try not to get my ass shot off then. Oh, Wayne didn’t have broken dreams. That man was happy being alone.”
Tris leaned forward with Kevin’s arms still around her middle. She tested the struts and motivators on the inside face of the door until she found one she could force. Pulling it down disengaged a locking mechanism as if the elevator cab had arrived. That done, the doors slid apart from each other with ease, blinding them with an intense glow.
“Gah!” muttered Kevin.
She shut her eyes and pulled the goggles off. “It’s the night vision.”
It took a moment or two of blinking to adjust. Soon, the green and white checkered tile floor of a basement classroom hallway solidified out of the blurry glare. About one out of every six LED light tubes on the ceiling remained on. Without the goggles, the corridor looked dim… but compared to pitch darkness, it felt like daytime.
Three light fixtures dangled on wires, and about half of the drop ceiling panels had collapsed to the floor. A handful of beige desks with attached chairs stood against the right wall a short distance from the elevator by a door. The next door sat abou
t forty yards farther down on the left.
She shut off the infrared lamp on the goggles and pocketed them. Kevin took about ten times longer to find the power button. Once he had his optics put away, she crept forward, resisting the urge to pull the Beretta out. Yeah, right. If anyone finds me down here, they won’t buy any excuse I can think of; I’d have to kill them.
Tris peered in the first door at shelves covered with old pre-war desktop computers, keyboards, monitors, and many stacks of medium-sized grey slabs. It took her a moment to remember her technical history classes and recognize them as laptop computers. Fair bet none of this stuff would work anymore, not that anyone left in the world had a use for them even if they would turn on.
“Nothing in there we need.”
He peered into the room for a second before following her. “Lot of junk. Damn I’d have gone nuts if I found this stash a year ago.”
She walked for the next door at a brisk pace. “No one would buy any of that crap. What’s a Wildlander going to do with a computer?”
“Sit on it?” Kevin chuckled. “And hey, some of them still work. How do you think I’ve seen so many ‘historical documentaries’?”
Tris chuckled while peering at a label on the left-side door, ‘Lab F.’ A quick peek inside at black-topped work tables with small silver faucets and gizmos, as well as walls filled with periodic tables confirmed nothing of interest. ‘Lab E,’ a little ways ahead on the right had similar work tables but the walls held diagrams of dissected dogs, cats, frogs, horses, and some kind of rodent. She backed away and closed the door.
The hallway went another fifteen feet before an opening on the left revealed a small area where the floor tiles changed to black and white from the green-and-white of the corridor. Vending machines, two pool tables, and a row of arcade game cabinets took up most of the space not used by a snack counter and four tables.
Tris started to walk in, but froze, gasping at the sight of several corpses lying on the floor. All had desiccated into a semi-mummified state with skin the color of creamed coffee. Her jaw tightened when she spotted necrotic lesions that appeared to have set in prior to death.
“Don’t.” She backed up and put a hand on Kevin’s chest. “I think they’re Infected.”
He held her hand against his heart. “I’ve never seen them looking dried out like that. They’re dead, right?”
She picked up a chair and poked one of the legs into the nearest body. Skin crunched like chicken that had been fried too long. Darker brown dust dribbled out of the hole. “I’d say yes. Quite thoroughly dead. Probably for more than a few years.”
“When did they set that shit loose again?” Unease sounded clear in his voice.
“As far as I know, around 2056. These people had to have caught it before the symbiotes happened… The Virus is supposed to kill its victim in three to four months. Guess it worked here.”
Kevin’s expression shifted unusually somber.
She backed away from the break room and looked up at him. “What?”
“2056. Twenty-one years ago. I was just thinking… Abby’s never known a world without Virus in it. Shit, I was like six when they started. I dunno if we’re going to do anything here, but I think I understand why you’ve got that drive in you find the cure.”
“That’s a memory overlay.” She allowed a moment to hug him and close her eyes.
Kevin’s hand slid up her back, holding her tight. “If you believe your old man, the overlay is only removing your fear, making you feel invincible.”
“Heh. I guess feeling invincible proves I’m still eighteen, right?” She winked. “Come on.”
She glanced to the right at the open elevator shaft as she exited the café. Relieved not to see anything shambling after them, she continued straight down the next leg of the corridor past more classrooms and an offshoot labeled ‘Faculty Offices’ on the left.
“I wonder.” She backed up and went to a narrow hallway with drab brown carpeting and cheesy wood-paneled walls. Seven teachers’ personal offices, the doors adorned with schedules for student conferencing, surrounded her. “Damn this is cramped.”
“What’s up?” asked Kevin.
“Oh… I was half hoping one of these offices belonged to my dad. You don’t see one labeled ‘Doctor Jameson’ do you?”
Kevin slipped past her to check the three offices at the end. He cringed. “Nope. Another dead guy in here though.” He tilted his head, staring at a nameplate. “Kiran Vishnashitload of letters.”
A faint whirring noise grew louder. Tris slid her hand in her pocket and gripped the Beretta.
“What?” whispered Kevin.
“I hear something.” She took a step toward the ninety-degree bend left back to the larger corridor.
Shadows moved on the wall as a small light source approached. She scooted to the left, putting her shoulder against the wall, and pulled the gun. I’m only going to get one chance at this. A subdued buzzing quality infused the whir as it got louder.
“That sounds like the mother of all mosquitos,” said Kevin. He slipped the .45 out and gripped it in both hands.
“Tris?” asked a digitized voice, closer to male, but far removed from natural human.
She lifted the Beretta. How dumb do you think I am? She bit her lip. Pretty dumb… I came down here, didn’t I?
“Tris. Please follow,” said the voice.
A hovering drone with four little rotors slid sideways, peeking around the corner as if afraid to fully expose itself. Downdraft created a miniature dust storm on the floor. It looked like some manner of remote-controlled toy, barely twelve inches square, with two tiny spotlights on the forward face and a bevy of antennas sticking out of the back.
She pointed the gun at it but, for no reason she could fathom, held her fire. After a few seconds, she swallowed. “Who are you?”
“Tris, please follow.” The drone glided closer. “Doctor Jameson wants to see you.”
Are they listening to us?
The machine rotated and drifted off back the way it came. Seconds later, when she’d made no move to go after it, the drone returned.
“Tris, please follow.”
Kevin walked up behind her. “Is that thing like Bee, or does it only know three words?”
“It looks like 2020 tech… early drones. Probably a toy from before the war. A lot of people had them. Some kind of obsession about recording video of everything they did. Can you imagine an entire city where everyone had one of these things following them around?”
“Tris, please follow,” said the drone, before zipping off.
“What the hell for?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. Humanity probably recorded more of itself in the last five years before the war than it did in the centuries prior. Some people didn’t even work. They’d let their drones film them having sex, and charge people to watch it. Little kids playing sports would have drones chasing them. Some entertainment channels streamed it. Big money betting on nine year olds’ soccer matches. They used to even kidnap parents or siblings and threaten to kill them if the kids didn’t throw the matches sometimes.”
Kevin raised an eyebrow. “Wow. Guess the world really was screwed up. No wonder they hit the reset button. Are you sure that’s true, or is it more Enclave horseshit?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. It wouldn’t surprise me if people saw the nuke coming and just took pictures of it to post online.
Kevin blinked, thinking of the silhouettes on the Starbucks wall all holding their… phones up to the sky. “Yeah…”
The drone glided back into view. “Tris, please follow.” It zipped off again.
“I don’t know why they’d lie about the world before the war. That wouldn’t make people more fearful of the Wildlands.” She lowered the Beretta and put it back in her pocket. “Let’s see where this little bugger goes.”
“Why does anyone in power lie about anything?” Kevin concealed his .45 again. “To make reality seem not so bad compared to what c
ould be.”
“Tris, please follow,” said the drone, before zipping off.
She hooked a finger in the front of his jumpsuit and pulled him in for a quick peck on the lips. “Look at you, Mr. Wasteland Philosopher.”
“Nah. I don’t trust any kind of authority.”
Tris bit her lip. Like you trusted the Roadhouse?
“What?” He smiled, hands on his hips. “Go ahead, say it. I promise I won’t get pissed.”
She exhaled. “Amarillo?”
He hung his head. “Yeah, so I did… and look how that turned out.”
“Tris, please follow,” said the drone.
“Okay.” Kevin stared at it as it disappeared around the corner yet again. “That thing is getting annoying.”
Tris walked after it. “Let’s go see what it wants.”
23
Lock and Key
A thin nimbus of light glided down the corridor, projected from the little drone. It matched Tris’ cautious pace, seeming content that she followed it at all without concern for how fast she moved. It led them deeper into the basement to a stairwell. A pair of black-painted doors with brushed steel knobs, closed and reinforced by a pile of chairs, blocked the way. The drone slid through a broken out window that it cleared by less than an inch on either side.
Tris grabbed the knob and turned. Though unlocked, too much debris had been stacked up behind it to allow it to move.
“Tris, please follow,” said the drone from inside the stairwell.
“Hang on, you little shit.” She scowled at the door. “I’m trying.”
Kevin pushed at the doors. “What do you think? Shove it open?”
“Someone must’ve barricaded this against those Infected, but that doesn’t make sense. No one was supposed to have been down here for a long time.”
“Maybe those corpses were lab tests and they dumped them down here?” He scratched at his head. “That could explain why they’re so old. They died before the Enclave released it on the rest of the world.”
She looked up at missing panels in the drop ceiling. Solid concrete blocked off the stairwell. “Well, we’re not going over. Suppose should at least try to open it.”
The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number Page 29