The Redeemed

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Damn, they’s tiny.” Neeley squatted and picked at one of the holes with his finger.

  “Looks a bit like 5.56 to me.” Kevin felt around the edges of the domed metal disc, locating the release catch in about eight seconds. The hatch opened, letting out a billow of darker smoke and the choking dry-sand flavor of burnt silicon. Fragments of circuit board rained onto the road. “Shit.”

  “Bad?” asked Neeley.

  “Dunno yet. What kind of insanity are you mounting on this thing?”

  “Huh?”

  “That gun.”

  Neeley grinned. “Oh, that.” His body shook with his donkey laugh again. “20mm machinegun.”

  “What?”

  Neeley nodded like a cocaine-addled rabbit.

  “Jebus able cripes. Do not point that at me. Findin’ ammo for that’s gotta be a joy.” He sputtered.

  “Tha’s why Fitch so pissed off. Saw the motor indicator go red, so he got mad ’nuff ta use Mama. Then he get madder ‘cause he spent three rounds. So’s, it bad?”

  “Dunno yet.”

  Kevin poked around inside the wheel. The stator looked okay, the wire coils hadn’t been hit either. The hatch had to be almost a half-inch thick; the three holes resembled tiny volcanoes rising from the metal. One of the bullets went straight through the housing and out the back without hitting anything. The other two crushed a circuit board responsible for controlling the magnets’ timing.

  Neeley got up and wandered off. He returned before Kevin finished brushing circuit board bits out with his fingers. “Them bikes got space guns. Never seen bullets like ’at ’afore.”

  Kevin caught a small object, which turned out to be a bullet that resembled a 5.56 with a shorter, fatter case, necked-down to match the slug. “Five-seven. It’s not from space, it’s from Europe.”

  “Ain’t that orbitin’ Jupiter?” Neeley scratched his head.

  “Might as well be. Almost ain’t worth scavving that gun. You’d have an easier time finding 20mm shells.”

  “20mm bullets?” asked Neeley.

  “Shells.” Kevin pointed at him. “Anything big enough to fuckin’ liquefy a man is a god damned cannon. Cannons take shells.”

  “Oh.” Neeley bared his teeth while chuckling and scratching his head more. “Thems ’splosive rounds. Air force base had a bunch of ’em.”

  “So they’re rare and old.” Kevin cringed. “Be glad they actually fired and didn’t just blow up like bombs.”

  Neeley blinked and went pale.

  Out of breath, Fitch plodded over and leaned on the door.

  “Feel better?” asked Kevin.

  “Little.” Fitch closed his eyes and appeared to be practicing meditation. “How bad is it?”

  “Controller board’s smashed. Best thing be to disconnect the power lead and run it as a dead wheel.”

  Fitch grumbled. “Nah, damn thing’ll pull ta the side and I’ll be stuck doing fifty. You’re bitchin’ enough how slow we are now. Pretty sure I got a spare board in the back.” He walked around to the tailgate. “C’mon.”

  Kevin followed him up into the bed, where a housing built out of the back of the passenger cabin likely held the ass end of a single-barrel 20mm machinegun. He’d wondered what it contained before, but assumed extra battery like the other large boxes. Now it made more sense. A weapon like that had to be six feet long or more, and for it to be concealed under the hood, it’d have to pass straight through the passenger cabin and protrude into the bed.

  Fitch unlocked a toolbox, stuffed the key back into his pocket, and rummaged. It didn’t take him too long to find a spare board, and three more besides. “Here. Got ’em.”

  Kevin studied them: dusty, scuffed, one scratched. “Are you sure any of these work?”

  “Pretty sure.” Fitch smiled. “Got four chances, right?”

  With Neeley perched sitting on the Behemoth’s roof, Kevin and Fitch got to work disassembling the forward of the two rear wheels on the left side enough to replace the boards. The rearmost wheel ran off the ‘spare’ ethanol motor, but the Behemoth didn’t carry enough fuel to use it for long… only enough for a boost. They found over a dozen copper dots in the tire band where five-seven slugs stopped in the solid rubber.

  “Damned inconsiderate.” Kevin worked a socket wrench on the wheel mounting at the same time Fitch worked a jack.

  “What’s that?”

  Kevin smiled at Fitch. “Idiots who designed this wheel never took into account field repairs. Gotta take the whole damn thing apart to replace this board. Like they never expected anyone to shoot your ride out from under you.”

  Fitch laughed, continuing to pump the jack handle.

  “Umm… weren’t they designed a’fore the war?” asked Neeley, scratching his head. “They’d not be expectin’ ta get shot at.”

  Fitch laughed harder.

  Kevin didn’t like the way everything creaked as the corner of the Behemoth left the road. Then again, with as much armor as they had on this thing…

  “Never imagined I’d be back out here,” said Kevin. “Once I signed on that dotted line… had my own ’house. Figured I’d grow old and happy. Thought I’d be done with this.”

  “I dunno.” Fitch twisted the jack handle to lock it. He took a knee and another socket wrench and attacked the left side of the wheel. “Both got their ups and downs. Seems like the ’house is dangerous, too, these days.”

  “That guy in Silver City didn’t care too much,” said Kevin.

  Fitch chuckled. “Maybe it’s not roadside stops… maybe it’s the Roadhouse?”

  “There are no ‘roadside stops.’ Past ten years, anyone opens an independent, Amarillo shut them down.”

  “Except for that one.” Fitch dropped a nut in a plastic cup. “How many more are out there?”

  “I’ve been all over the damn west half of the continent, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen one other independent. Couple ’houses mysteriously changed owners, but they was still official ’houses.”

  With all the bolts removed, Fitch grabbed the tire band. Kevin did the same on the other side.

  Fitch nodded. “One… two…”

  They yanked it off the axle, let it bounce once, and guided it to lay flat. Kevin took a screwdriver to the inside face, extracting ten-inch bolts that held the interior ‘cage’ together.

  “You like it out here?” asked Kevin. “Most drivers I ran into, they all said the same thing. ‘Can’t wait to get a ’house. Tired of bein’ shot at…’ ‘Course, they never saved their coin. Gambled it away, fucked it away, drank it away… all the while they’re talkin’ about how they’re gonna buy in.”

  Fitch laughed. “Yeah. I embody that particular situation. That’s too much damn money. With my luck, I figured I’d live like a goddamned monk for years, save up all this coin, and die within sight of it. So, I decided to drop all that damned stress and live. Earn enough ta keep the Behemoth runnin’ and food in my gut. Ain’t bad, though. Maybe someday, I’ll get bored o’ drivin’ all over creation, and find some nice settlement or some shit.”

  Kevin set the screwdriver down and flipped the wheel over so the outside hatch faced up. Fitch helped, and they lifted half of a metal shroud out, which included the mounting point for the armored dome.

  “Shee-it. All that just to change a board.” Fitch grumbled.

  “Oh, that’s not the best part.” Kevin winked. “If we put in a bad one, we won’t know ’til the whole thing’s back together and turned on… unless you got a component diagnostic in the back too.”

  Fitch held up his hands in surrender. “Nope.”

  “You think it’s worth it?” asked Kevin.

  “What’s that?” Fitch raised a steel-wool eyebrow.

  “Running a roadhouse or driving. People with vehicles that work are either driving something for someone, or trying to steal something from someone. Half the time, the lines ain’t too clear. Figure one in three will turn around and try to take what’s yours.”

&nb
sp; “That’s a whole lot worse than yer average person.” Fitch tapped his chin. “Maybe the freedom of havin’ a workin’ vehicle brings out the worst in people… or could be, just thems the sorta people who go outta their way to get a car.”

  “That’s a fellatio,” yelled Neeley. “You’re mistakin’ cause for kincidence.”

  “Fallacy,” muttered Fitch. “Don’t mind the boy; he whacked his head on the window too many times.”

  Kevin, hands on his hips, chuckled at the wheel. “Well, let’s get this lump of shit back on and see if we gotta do this all over again.”

  Between Fitch and Kevin, they hoisted the ponderous truck tire back in place. The older man reached for the wrench, but Kevin waved him off.

  “Hold off on that. All we gotta do is plug it in to see if it works. No sense puttin’ all those bolts back on only to take them off again. In fact, bolting it down before testing it will guarantee it won’t work.”

  Fitch nodded, dropped the socket wrench, and walked left to lean into the cab. A subtle change in the air hinted at the power running through the system, a sound too low for the human ear to register consciously. A pang of loss squeezed Kevin’s throat at the memory of Wayne once comparing it to the way a person could stand in a room with an old TV set and ‘sense’ it was on, despite a blank screen. The only televisions Kevin had ever seen had been flat panels, which didn’t do that.

  “Flashing orange. Never saw that before,” yelled Fitch.

  Shit. “Board’s blown. It’ll run, but your batteries will go like an ethanol tank with six bullet holes.”

  The strange quality in the air ceased as the power cut off.

  Fitch returned to the back end, grumbling. “Got three more tries.”

  They spent the next hour unscrewing, disassembling, and replacing. With sweat running down his face, and his armored jacket on the road beside him (against his better judgment), Kevin sat back on his boot heels and panted.

  Neeley brought canteens over. After a short water break, they mounted the wheel again. Kevin swayed back and forth, waving his hands at the tire while chanting in his best approximation of a Native American… something. He wasn’t sure what that old shaman had been asking his spirits for, but at this point, anything seemed worth trying.

  “Ready?” yelled Fitch from the cab.

  Neeley raced over and hopped around on one leg behind Kevin, who stopped chanting and gave him the finger.

  “Here goes.” Three seconds later, Fitch cheered. “We’re back!”

  “Woooo!” Neeley howled at the clouds.

  “Well…” Kevin eyed the tire. “One thing about runnin’ a ’house: won’t leave ya stranded in the middle of nowhere.”

  Fitch twisted the jack handle; the Behemoth glided down, accompanied by soft hissing. “You so sure ’bout that?”

  Neeley laughed for a few seconds before his face went serious. He shifted his gaze back and forth between the men. “Wait, what?”

  “Nah.” After replacing all the nuts to secure the tire, Kevin picked up his jacket and put it on. “I ain’t sure about a lot of things these days.”

  “I hear that.” Fitch patted him on the back.

  Kevin trudged to the Challenger with the clatter of a hydraulic jack rolling over the road behind him. He considered pulling out in a 180 and going back to Rawlins. For the few minutes Neeley ran around like an over-caffeinated rat-dog picking up tools, Kevin looked back and forth along the road, debating if any of this trip had been worth it. He jammed his fingers into the handle and yanked the door open.

  Aww hell. We’re already here. Another couple miles won’t kill me.

  assie’s directions led Tris along a street lined with cars turned up on their sides, reinforced with sandbags and razor wire. All of it seemed as though it had been that way for years, making her wonder if its purpose had been defense or illusion. The old man’s wounds continued closing after his death, though dense scar tissue formed around each bullet hole. Nanites, she assumed, though a version a few generations inferior to the ones she and Zara had crawling around their bloodstream.

  She remembered enough of her historical documentaries to understand an Army Ranger had been some kind of major badass before the war. For him to be alive still, even as an old man, either put him at barely eighteen when the nukes fell or he’d lived a lot longer than people should. Tris examined her hands, wondering if Zara could’ve been right about her aging. She looked no different from when she posed for her high school graduation picture. Still eighteen. Am I not getting older at a normal rate or was I in stasis? Somewhere, that picture of her existed in a memory stick, a hard drive, or maybe even an optical disc. Did the people who claimed to be her parents keep it when she’d been arrested for sedition or, like her real father, had she simply ceased to exist because she stopped conforming?

  Tris had never really loved them. Hell, she barely trusted them even though they’d been nothing but nice to her, if not creepy with their insistence that her Dad wasn’t real. Why, then, did she feel hurt at the idea they could’ve so easily discarded her? Perhaps she had loved them in a way she’d never realized and had been lying to herself. What had Nathan told them of her? The sudden idea that these parents she’d always kept at arms’ length might be devastated at the news of her death caught her off guard.

  Zara squeezed her shoulder. “You okay?”

  “It’s too damn quiet.” Tris sniffled and wiped at the corners of her eyes, tears that hadn’t had the guts to fall. “My mind is wandering.”

  “Well, don’t let it run away.” Zara gestured. “Is that it? Looks like they’re ready for a long siege.”

  Tris peeled her gaze up from the blacktop. A short distance ahead, a large building at the back end of an empty parking lot sat surrounded by walls of sandbags, corrugated metal, razor wire, and even some pallets. A hint of a ‘United Market’ sign peeked over the barricade around where the front doors would be.

  “Yeah.”

  Zara glanced at the MP5. “Might wanna go loud. If we’re going to try and extract people, the more Infected we kill now, the better.”

  Tris sheathed the katana and shrugged the AK-47 off her shoulder. “True, but I’d rather sneak them out. That old guy said two hundred. We don’t have that much ammo.”

  The MP5 drooped a little. “Good point. Street looks clear.”

  “We’ve got about fifteen minutes before it’s pitch dark.”

  Tris sped up to a jog across the parking lot. Whoever had barricaded this place appeared unconcerned with minor things like gates or doors. All the windows on the front had been blocked off, and even if there hadn’t been razor wire, the gap at the top was too narrow to squeeze through. She diverted left, hurrying past a shopping cart holder and around the corner. The side street had plain brick walls, no windows. The alley beyond that led to a loading dock with five steel rolling doors big enough for semi-trailers to back up to, but none moved.

  The person-sized door at the left end of the dock had been welded closed from the outside.

  “Damn. Whatever’s in here must be worth a shitload.” Zara whistled between her teeth.

  Tris jumped down to the pavement again and peered around the final wall of the building, a narrow channel between the United and what had once been a gun store. The thought of Kevin getting distracted by the hope of salable weapons (as futile as it was) made her smile. She stared at a mismatched assortment of dumpsters, some blue and some green with ‘recycle’ logos. Her brain juggled a quick game of Tetris.

  “Zara…” She ran to the nearest dumpster and shouldered the AK again. “Help me.”

  Sometimes having strength around that of a large, athletic man came in handy for the shock factor in such a small package. Sometimes, like right at that moment, being strong came in handy for being strong. Tris and Zara, who had her by an inch or so and about twenty pounds, lifted and repositioned six dumpsters like building blocks. They arranged three end to end before hauling two more on top of those. The most gr
ueling part entailed getting the sixth up to form the third tier of the stack. For that, they used one of the lighter plastic recycling bins.

  Winded to the point of feeling dizzy, Tris forced herself to climb their improvised stairway and made the jump to grab the roof edge. Zara, equally as tired, shoved her by the feet before following. Tris rolled over onto her back atop the building, panting for two breaths before the fear in Cassie’s voice got her moving again, despite the burn in her lungs. Some Warren asshole wanted to kill a little girl.

  Fortunately, a way in took only a quick glance around to locate. A small outbuilding on the roof with a blue-painted door was free of barricades. Infected weren’t known for their ability to climb. She’d even seen some trip over curbs.

  Tris ran to it, finding the steel knob locked. She took a knee, opened the sole of her sneaker, and extracted her lock-picking tools. It had been quite some time since anything had entered that keyhole, requiring a little scraping before she perceived the tumblers. A short game of tap, bump, and wiggle later, she twisted the knob open.

  After repacking her tools, she pulled the Beretta and crept down a switchback staircase that led to an employee-only section of the store. A dingy white-tiled corridor had doors to a manager’s office, two bathrooms, a lounge area, and an alcove filled with lockers. No thoughts of salvage or looting delayed her. She gave each room only enough attention to determine if people were inside before moving on through a pair of red plastic flapping doors to the store proper.

  The main area of the supermarket didn’t look much different than it had prior to civilization coming to an abrupt halt, aside from having been looted to death. Row upon row of empty shelving stretched from wall to wall. Someone had (probably long ago) smashed out the glass in the deli counter. A few scraps of cold cuts remained, though they were quite far from the color she expected they should be, and looked rock hard.

  It had been so long, they didn’t even smell.

  “Hello?” asked Tris at a normal volume.

  “Why aren’t you shouting?” whispered Zara.

  “Same reason you’re whispering. Infected have great ears, and I don’t know if the twenty minutes it took us to get in here was twenty minutes too long.” She found herself still breathing hard from moving dumpsters.