Stairs along the far right wall in the living room led to an upstairs with two bedrooms, a tiny third room with nothing in it, and a bath, though he doubted any of the plumbing worked. I’ll probably have to get into a shootout with whatever’s living in the pipes. The house looked pre-war, but the town didn’t have much in the way of infrastructure beyond electricity yet.
After wandering for a bit, they all met in the living room. Abby hadn’t left it, still mystified by the feel of mushing her toes into pile carpeting.
“Got a septic tank, no idea what kind of shape it’s in though. Not much of an issue ’til we get the well pump working again.” Bill gestured at the north wall. “We’re still in the process of wiring up all the houses to the panel array.”
“There’s a lot of panels in Amarillo just sitting there.” Tris fidgeted. “If you think it’s worth the risk, a large enough force could hit it. There’s a flatbed right in the warehouse, but I don’t know if it works.”
Kevin shook his head, sighing. “If you’re going to make a run like that, you’ll need to do it soonish before someone else gets there.”
“Most people expect Amarillo to have thousands of people infected, but it’s not that bad. Hundred maybe.” Tris fidgeted. “They had a whole warehouse full of never-used solar panels sitting there. Even a giant flatbed truck to carry them.”
“Something to float at the next meeting.” Bill scratched his chin. “This is the nicest place we got left. All the other empty houses we built ourselves, and they tend to rattle in the wind.”
Kevin gave him a conspiratorial squint. “You were saving this one for us, weren’t you?”
Bill shrugged. “Not supposed to do that sort of thing, but I had been hoping you’d come around.”
Tris stared at Kevin, a small bite of her lower lip the only break to the calm on her face.
“Sounds good. So how’s this work? Do we buy it from the town or what?”
“There’s a fee, but we usually waive it as we tend to take in people who don’t have much but the clothes on their backs.”
“How much?”
Bill cringed. “Oh, this place? About 3500 coins.”
“What’s the town use money for anyway?” Tris blinked.
“Mostly trading with outsiders. Buying ammunition from Ween too.” Bill scratched his head. “Couple times we buy and trade with other settlements.”
She nodded.
Kevin faked a wince. “It’ll be tough, but I think we can swing that.”
Tris rolled her eyes out of Bill’s sight, and shot him a playful smirk.
ris leaned up and away from Bee’s chassis, coughing from the foul-smelling smoke that peeled up from hot wires. Someone worked at a machine on the other end of the workshop that kept making this high-pitched screeching while throwing plumes of orange sparks. Each time it went off, the noise crawled deeper and deeper into her skull. Being that the Nederland workshop occupied a giant metal-walled warehouse building, sound traveled.
“Ugh.” She rubbed her forehead, trying command the nanites to eat her headache. Not that they’d ever been able to do so, or even listened to her conscious control. “Come on, Bee.”
She’d been tinkering with the android for most of the morning after her meeting with a rather fastidious fifty-ish woman named Crystal who was apparently in charge of managing Nederland’s ‘technical people.’ Since the basic education Tris had received far outstripped what most in the Wildlands could even comprehend, the town council asked her to help out there. Which, of course, was fine with her. On some level, she missed her old roof full of solar panels, but Kevin did have a point. That place sat out in the middle of nowhere, and if anything bad came calling, they’d be on their own.
Thoughts like that didn’t make for restful sleep.
After a bathroom break and a refill of water, she returned to the workbench and dove into Bee’s innards again. To get her up and mobile again would require parts they didn’t have here, parts she’d only seen in one place… the airport outside Omaha. Kevin felt about Bee much the same as she did, so he’d probably be willing to take the ride if it offered a chance at salvaging the android. The bigger question being whether or not her memory core/personality matrix survived. Her efforts thus far focused on repairing the link between the power cell, which still appeared to be good, and the logic boards in her head.
“Good thing that idiot didn’t shoot you in the face.”
She soldered two more connections in the chest cavity and leapt back from a spark that hit her fingertip like a wasp sting. Something whirred to life deep inside Bee’s chest, and a bee-oop sound played from the speaker inside her mouth, reminiscent of an old PC hard-boot beep.
“Yes. I am glad,” said Bee. “My AI unit does not have a backup module installed. A projectile entering my head would have erased me.”
“Bee!” Tris squealed. “You’re okay!”
“I am not detecting a connection to arms, legs, or hip actuators. I am unable to move. Tris, I do not consider my current status to be… ‘okay.’” Bee blinked with a click.
“Sorry. Your capacitor blew out. I spent most of the morning cleaning lithium cobalt oxide off your guts. I’m completely stunned you didn’t explode or catch fire.”
“I am grateful you are repairing me. Most would not have bothered.”
“You’re like family. I’m sorry, but I can’t fix you all the way without parts that’ll take a long drive to get.” She leaned closer and whispered, “Don’t tell him I told you, but Kevin was pretty upset finding you injured.”
“I understand. It is good to be awake again. How much time. What day is it?”
Tris thought. “Uhm. 2073…” She faced the warehouse floor. “Hey, anyone know what day it is?”
Two men yelled “Thursday.”
“June, right?”
One of them nodded. “Twenty-second.”
“Tris.” Bee rotated her head to stare upward.
“Hmm?”
“Now that my operating system has completely loaded, I have performed a memory sweep and found orphaned sectors. Reallocating those sectors has allowed me to reclaim an event I was previously unable to.”
“I think I follow you…” Tris smiled.
“I forgot to tell you something. I just remembered.” Bee blinked with a click. Her voice shifted pitch at random with each word, making her sound more robotic than usual. “While you and Kevin were away, a transmission came in via the radio. A man who indicated his name as Terminal9 wished me to tell you the following:”―from the android’s mouth played a familiar nasal male voice framed in static crackles, as though she’d recorded the radio output―“Tris. There’s more to The Cure than I thought. We need to talk.”
Holy shit. Tris bent forward, hugging the prone Bee. “You’re amazing!”
“I am paralyzed.”
Tris looked left and right like a lost cat. “I… need to find Kevin.”
Unable to do any more for Bee without parts, Tris scooped her up and ran out, earning several odd looks at the sight of her carrying such a load with ease.
he idea that he’d be kneeling in mossy mud while working on water pumps feeding an enormous network of pipes going into a greenhouse would never have come up in Kevin’s imagination at any point over the last ten years. It didn’t involve cars, bullets, high speed, explosions, armor, or earning coins. Yet, as he knelt in the squidgy bog fighting with an old diesel engine, he smiled.
This isn’t so bad.
Two hours in, the problem became apparent: too much gunk. They’d been feeding it biodiesel, and from the looks of things, a crappy mixture that gummed everything up to heck and back. Of all the things that could’ve been wrong with it, breaking it down to clean it was low on the list of bad, but high on the list of tedious. A few hours after he’d started, he’d gotten it mostly back together when Tris came running around the corner of the greenhouse. She looked excited rather than angry or scared, so he kept on reassembling the engine as sh
e zoomed up beside him.
“Kevin…” She gasped for breath. “I…”
“Slow down. Breathe.” He set a series of bolts in place to hold down the cylinder head, and got to work ratcheting them down one after the next.
“Bee’s awake.”
“Awesome. Kinda feels like someone killed my favorite dog and you brought her back to life.” He grinned. Damn that stupid machine… “How’s she feel―uhh, doing?”
“I don’t know if she’d think of being compared to a dog as good or bad.”
He looked up at her. “If I had a dog, I’d be pretty damn upset if someone killed it.”
Her face brightened. “She had a message! She’s awake, but she can’t move. I can’t fix her without parts… remember that guy on the airplane?”
“Terminator or whatever?”
“Terminal9.” Tris nodded. “He sent us a message over the Roadhouse radio.”
“How the hell would he do that?” Kevin glared at the engine in front of him.
She swatted him on the head. “He’s a hacker… he hacks. He said ‘There’s more to the Cure than he thought,’ and he wants to talk to us.”
“Maybe he found a bonus track.”
“What?”
“You know, an extra song on the disc that’s not on the label.”
She growled. “Stop making jokes. This is serious! What if it is the cure?”
“It was The Cure. A band.” He stopped ratcheting the socket and gave her that same patronizing/sympathetic stare that usually got her ready to either cry or hit him.
“I know that.” She crossed her arms. “There’s a hidden message. He didn’t want to say anything in case they’re monitoring the radio channel.”
“I doubt it. Nathan wouldn’t let anything useful out.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “What if Nathan didn’t know?”
“How could he not?”
Tris stared into his eyes. “You said that Snow told you not everyone in the Enclave is a monster. What if there is some resistance left? All I’m asking is for a trip to the airport. Besides, I need parts for Bee anyway. It’s not like we need to run right out now… but…”
“Tell me you’re not happy here. This is safe.”
She stared at the engine for a while, long enough for him to resume tightening bolts. “You want to get revenge for Wayne’s death? Blame the Enclave. It’s all Nathan’s doing.”
The socket wrench stopped. “That’s a little below the belt. I’ve come to terms with it.”
Tris squatted at his side and put her arm around him. “I am happy here. I am happy with you… but they’re going to keep poisoning people and… Okay, I won’t get ahead of myself. It could be something stupid. It could be nothing at all but another slap in the face from Nathan, but I don’t think Terminal9 would’ve told me I had to see it if that was true. Even if it’s nothing, we still need to get parts for Bee.”
Kevin tossed the wrench and caught it twice. He glanced up at her, past her wavering snow-white hair to the vast sky spotted with puffs of cotton, and back into her gem-blue eyes. Behind every dead man is a woman with an irresistible stare and a good cause. “Yeah… I suppose someone really ought’a try and doing something about that damn virus.”
Thank you for reading The Redeemed – Book Two of the Roadhouse Chronicles!
I’d also like to thank Will Stanton (author of The Artful and Gears of Fate) for suggesting I write this series after reading the original short story version of the first book.
Special thanks to Mark Woodring for editing this book (and the whole series). It’s always a pleasure to work with him, even if he does loathe my puns.
Additional thanks to Eugene Teplitsky for the cover art.
Also, to everyone at Curiosity Quills, thank you for all the help in bringing this book to the world.
Originally from South Amboy NJ, Matthew S. Cox has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Since 1996, he has developed the “Divergent Fates” world, in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, The Awakened Series, and the Daughter of Mars series take place.
More recently, he has forayed into young-adult and middle grade novels.
Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour, and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it.
He is also fond of cats.
Now that you have completed this book, we hope you will leave a review so that other readers may benefit from your perspective. Authors like Matthew S. Cox live and die by your reviews, after all!
Please visit http://curiosityquills.com/reader-survey/ to share your reading experience with the author of this book!
Nascent Shadow, by Matthew S. Cox
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/nascent-shadow/)
Ever since escaping the inferno that claimed her childhood home, Brooklyn Amari has felt the conflagration pulling her. Now a firefighter, she rushes again and again into the inferno that almost killed her. During a blaze, a near-death experience explains her survival eleven years ago: she’s probably a demon. She’d always enjoyed having psychic abilities, but wings? Ill-equipped to investigate a fire with a magical source, the arson unit asks her to help, but things soon escalate over her head.
And oh yeah―she’s supposed to destroy the world.
Prelude to Mayhem, by Edward Aubry
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/prelude-to-mayhem/)
In the ruins of his world, Harrison Cody follows a mysterious voice on the radio as he and his pixie sidekick travel on foot across a terrifyingly random landscape. They discover Dorothy O’Neill, who has had to survive among monsters when her greatest worry used to be how to navigate high school. Together they search for what remains of Chicago, and the hope that civilization can be rebuilt.
The Actuator: Fractured Earth, by James Wymore and Aiden James
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/the-actuator-fractured-earth/)
The Actuator, a machine capable of literally changing reality, was created to make the world into a utopian paradise. Before it happened, a saboteur used it to transform the world into patches of every kind of genre fiction. Everyone alive found their lives radically altered and struggling against aliens, pirates, orcs, vampires and every imaginable creature. Many died. Only a handful of people on the planet, called Machine Monks, even knew why it happened or how. Now they have to put it all back before humanity is destroyed.
Pop Travel, by Tara Tyler
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/pop-travel/)
In 2080, technology has gone too far for J. L. Cooper. He avoids pop travel teleportation, until he stumbles onto a video of a pop traveler who turns to dust.
Sparking a series of murders and threats to his brother, Cooper wants to pass off the evidence but knows he’s being watched. And who would believe him?
With help from the neurotic genius “Creator” of pop travel and a beautiful Southern charmer, Cooper must expose the deadly glitch and shut it down or die trying. No problem.
Appetizer:
Book Cover
Title Page
Main Course:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
/>
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Dessert:
Acknowledgments
Closing
About the Author
Copyright & Publisher
More from Curiosity Quills Press
The Redeemed Page 42