Tin Road (The Metal Heart Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Tin Road

  Book 2: The Metal Heart Trilogy

  Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

  Independent Publisher

  Copyright © 2020 Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: Art Painter

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Dan Robertson

  You make-a da pasta.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  TIN ROAD

  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:

  A Sneak Peak at Iron Curtain, The Sequel To Tin Road

  Acknowledgement

  About The Author

  Books By This Author

  TIN ROAD

  Book 2: The Metal Heart Trilogy

  By Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

  Copyright © 2020 Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9798699965472

  Imprint: Independently published

  Chapter ONE:

  FORT COLUMBIA

  Rabbit Santiago wants me to shoot him. It’s only with a hand-held EMP, and only to obscure the signal transmitting from the band around his wrist. But considering tonight I already shot and killed his best friend, it’s a tall and brutal order. I’m rooted to the spot—finger poised on the trigger—when the sound of sirens stirs us. A hovercar is on its way.

  We hear the wails before we see it mount the horizon, floating above the ground like a flashing gray ghost. My finger twitches against the metal and the EMP gun kicks. Rabbit grits his teeth as a pulse sucks all the juice from his tech.

  “That hurts,” he grunts, rubbing at the glowing band.

  “It shouldn’t.” Aside from an unpleasant static cling, the EMP guns are harmless.

  “Well it does. Now get down.” He grabs my arm and pulls us both to the earth. My knees hit the dusty grass first, and then my chin grinds into the rough soil. I curse under my breath, but Santiago doesn’t seem to hear it. I wipe at my throbbing chin, smearing a crusted patch of blood I didn’t even realize was there.

  His instincts aren’t bad. The hovercar rolls about a thousand yards past our position, towards the signal emitting from Clinton Fuller’s band. The RFID called them here. Two flood lights attached to either side of the vehicle's windshield kick on and the body of our deceased friends are now bathed in eerie blue light. Beside me, still gripping my wrist with his fierce bony fingers, Rabbit sucks in a breath and blows it out. I catch a whiff of cinnamon, overridden immediately by the tang of sweat and metallic odor of blood.

  Eleni and Fuller’s blood. We’re covered in it.

  “We need to get out of here,” I say, my vision locked on the scene. Neither of us moves. We’re transfixed by the steady motion of the machine and the fact that two people died tonight because of what we did.

  The metal ramp rolls out of the bowels of the hovercar with a clinical thud and medical officers emerge, carrying a single stretcher and medical equipment. Half of them run to Fuller's inert body and the others cautiously approach the tarp we laid on top of Len. I don't know if I can watch this. I don’t want to see them lift her shroud. I can’t see her body again.

  “Let’s go.” I climb to my feet, dislodging the steel vice grip Santiago has on me.

  “Scarlett, wait.”

  “We can’t. We need to get to the water. Wash the blood off our hands. We’re covered in blood.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Maybe they’re still alive. Maybe she—maybe we can fix this.”

  “I shot Fuller in the head with your rifle. Nothing can fix that.”

  The medical officers far across the field have radioed for backup. More vehicles approach, wailing off in the distance.

  “Shit,” Rabbit says.

  “Let’s move.” I grab his arm this time.

  I don’t see or hear or feel anything for the next fifteen minutes except the reverberating thump of my heart, the pound of our legs over the dry grass, and the labored breath ringing in my ears. We hit gravel then train tracks, dashing over them and skidding down an embankment to the lip of the river. Rabbit sheds his pack—no, not his pack, Len’s pack—in one swift, almost graceful movement and plunges headfirst into the water. I stand on the shore watching him, my boots crunching in the silt. He’s gone for a while. He’s gone for too long.

  “Rabbit?” I send the question out over the undulating water. The current is fast and strong. He could’ve been carried far from shore by now.

  There’s only silence.

  Finally, after almost a full minute he explodes up from the water, gasping loudly. OK, he’s breathing. It’s my turn. I crouch near the edge of the water as he comes slogging out, his body dripping wet—heat and moisture steaming from his head. He unintentionally splashes me, but I hardly notice. He looks like someone took a bucket of water to a scarecrow.

  “You were under for a while,” I say.

  He doesn’t answer. He walks a few feet from where the water touches the edge of Oregon and he falls into a heap. I turn my attention to the bitter cold river lapping softly against the shore. Everything is moving. Nothing stops just because we fucked up. We can’t stop here either. Not for long.

  Once my fingers are submerged in the Columbia and I’m wiping the red from under my fingernails—I realize the cold is not that bad. Warmer than I thought it would be. The bare skin of my clean hands eases the tension in my neck and shoulders. I wipe my hands on the outside of the pack. There’s blood caked everywhere else on my body, but at least my hands are clean.

  “We’ve got to keep moving.” My eyes flicker over to Rabbit washed up on shore, nothing but a skinny pile of laundry.

  He makes an indecipherable grunting noise and drags himself up from the sand. He walks over to the embankment, crawls to the top, and peers over. I join him, elbowing up next to him and grinding my shoulder against his. His gaze doesn’t flicker away from the chaotic scene across the field.

  The hovercars still perch near the Salt patch. My Salt patch. I’ve spent an entire year cultivating that crop. My stash of Ecto and the remaining vials of Flash are hidden there. The sounds of the officers rummaging through the shed and their headset chatter drift across to where we sit. Rabbit’s breathing is labored. I shake his shoulder roughly.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know.” He doesn’t pull his
gaze away from the hovercars and officers. “I can’t breathe. Everything is fuzzy.”

  “Can you pull it together?”

  “Yeah, I can.” He runs both hands over his face.

  He notices the wet bandage and peels it from his head, dropping it to the ground. DNA evidence. We shouldn’t leave it here, but what does it matter? Rabbit’s DNA is all over Len. Their genetic material all mixed up. His saliva on her lips. I swallow at the hard snarl of grief building in my throat. Rabbit’s in shock. So am I. But not all my instincts have fled.

  “We can’t leave that here.” I poke him and pick up the bandage. “We’re fugitives now, dummy. Everything is evidence. Everything we do leaves a trail.”

  He says nothing in response, so I slide down the ravine to the river and toss the bandage in. He joins me at the shore.

  “It’s safer to walk down here, out of their direct line of sight,” he says.

  I shrug. I’m certain we’re leaving footprints behind us, but there’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t stealthily and quickly escape. We’re on foot. They have hovercrafts and thermal scanning and—oh shit, they have thermal scanning.

  “Thermal scanning Santiago. They’ve got thermal scanners on the drones. And we’re crawling with RFIDs in these Academy clothes. We are so screwed.”

  Rabbit surveys his clothes and our equipment in mute surprise, as if he’d never considered such a possibility before. Of course he hadn’t. He never planned to escape.

  “We’re not going to make it to Mexico. We’re not going to make it another 500 feet.”

  “Walking in the river would keep our core body temps down.”

  “But the cold and current might kill us.”

  “Prothero’s going to kill us. I’d rather be cold than—” his voice breaks and he stops moving to close his eyes—“dead.”

  He stopped to regain equilibrium. I stop with him. I need a little equilibrium, too.

  “We’re going in the water then?”

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  I veer off towards the river and hoist my pack up onto my head like we learned in field exercises, then wade into the water up to my neck. Rabbit follows suit. The water is so cold it momentarily steals the breath from my lungs. That’s fine. There’s not much to say at the moment.

  Ten minutes pass in silence as the current carries us from the dead and back towards the base.

  Rabbit interrupts the quiet. “Hold up. The band’s back on.”

  “Oh god finally, I can’t feel my toes.” I breathe a sigh of relief as we swim back to shore. I duck under the water before we hit the sand and feel the caress of the water pulling the blood and brains out of my hair. There were brains in my hair.

  I toss my pack to the ground and flop my water-logged head down on it. Stones and scrubby grass patches poke my back and provide an uneven cushion, but since I’m numb with cold from the neck down, it hardly matters. Rabbit grabs the EMP gun, fires another round at his wrist, and our tech goes dark.

  “We’re not moving fast enough,” he says, features set in a scowl. “The EMP is slowing us down. I’m slowing us down.”

  It’s true. Our progress through the water is a struggling crawl and the nearest train station is an hour away on the other side of Fort Columbia. We’ll have to travel past a heavily fortified military base to make it to the very first stop on our destination. With an entire arsenal of soldiers who will be looking for Rabbit Santiago, because according to the registration on the plasma rifle—he killed Clinton Fuller. Then again, according to the prints and DNA evidence also on the rifle, so did I. I killed Clinton Fuller.

  “What do you suggest?” I ask quietly. The thought of killing someone, even an asshole like Fuller, has a sobering effect.

  It doesn’t hardly seem possible, but Rabbit’s scowl grows even deeper.

  “Nothing.” He climbs to his feet, dripping wet. “There’s nothing we can do about it. At least, not right now.”

  Huh. He might not be a super telekinetic wizard like Len, but maybe he has a kernel of intelligence rattling around inside his shaggy head.

  “Back to the water,” I mutter.

  The thought of dipping a single part of my body back in the freezing river makes the teeth in my head chatter. Rabbit doesn’t hear or at least pretends he doesn’t. The only option left is to suck it up. Within the first few minutes of re-entering the water, my teeth clack together uncontrollably. My lips might be turning blue. Everything is numb and I can’t even form words. It’s just so damned cold.

  Our progress is painfully slow. Every fifteen minutes our tech resurfaces and Rabbit wipes them out of existence with the single pull of a trigger. The mood in our little party is sullen and soaked. Maybe it paints me out to be a terrible person, but at the moment the only thing driving me forward is the promise of a hot shower in one of the train Commons. And maybe a warm blanket to snuggle up in. It’s only half an hour away now.

  I’m envisioning my numb fingers closing around a steaming mug of hot chocolate when the sound of dogs barking breaks the silence off to our left. They’re probably a few thousand feet away but getting closer. It’s hard to tell if they could pick up our scent from each of our brief adventures out of the current.

  “Oh god. We forgot about the dogs,” I whisper hoarsely. The icy waters have closed their fingers around my throat. It’s difficult to breathe, let alone speak.

  “They won’t smell us out here,” Rabbit says, but his words are coated in doubt.

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, hell. What do we do now?”

  He stops and turns to look at me. At the same moment our bands thrum to life and throw dim splashes of light on our faces. His lips are dark and there are deep bags under his eyes.

  “You look awful,” I say.

  “So do you.”

  It’s my turn to scowl. “Let’s go back to shore.”

  We make another foray onto dry ground and it’s only once my body leaves the life-draining tendrils of the Columbia that I realize I can’t force myself back in. We’re gonna have to take our chances on land. Rabbit does his EMP business—the light fades—and we lay on the gritty edge of the river gasping air into our defrosting lungs. I take the opportunity to glance around and realize we’ve reached the far edge of the base. A guard tower climbs into the sky several hundred yards ahead of us. The docks lay beyond that.

  I nudge Rabbit and tilt my head towards the docks. The lights in the guard towers blink on, filling the night with a flood of white light. The illuminated circles sweep the river water in wide, arcing rotations. The sounds of the dogs and soldiers grow steadily closer. A siren peels through the muffled din, startling me. I grab onto Santiago’s shoulder and he glances over at me.

  “It’s OK,” he whispers. This time he actually sounds reassuring. “This is standard procedure. They don’t know where we are.”

  “Standard procedure,” I echo in a dull, unhappy voice.

  “Exactly.” He stands, catching my arm and dragging me up with him. His hand melts around mine. It’s warm—warmer than my own. He loops our fingers together and pulls me forward. It’s stumbling, fumbling progress over the earth.

  “We’re still a few steps ahead. We can make it,” Rabbit says.

  We make a bit more progress on land and then the docks emerge into full view. There are guards posted at each tower. The towers climb up out of the water—enormous metal and stone structures supported by huge concrete pylons—leaving about twelve feet of gap between the current crest of the river and the docks.

  Cargo containers sit piled up along the walk, between the base gate and the docks. They could provide some cover, but there's no way to bypass the electrified razor wire fence. Thermal scanners and security cameras are everywhere. This port is heavily fortified. There’s no easy passage through this part of the river.

  “I’m waiting for another bright idea.”

  “Back in the wa
ter. We have to swim under the docks. It’s the only way to avoid the tech and guards.”

  “I said a bright idea.”

  “It’s our best shot. Doesn’t get any brighter.”

  “Should we dump the packs? They’ll sink us like stones and we’ve got a long way to swim. They are probably crawling with RFIDs and nano tech anyway.”

  “I need to get something first.”

  He drops to his knees and unzips the pack. I do the same with mine. My stuffed dog, Toto is the only thing I can carry. He might get a little wet, but at least the drugs and stipend allotments inside him are sealed in a plastic baggie.

  I glance over to see what precious cargo Rabbit unearths from Len’s bag. There wasn’t anything personal left of hers to pack, aside from her tin box. Sure enough, when I turn, the hateful treasure is gripped tightly in his hands.

  “Oh hell no.” I reach to pull it away from him.

  He sweeps it out of my grasp and glowers at me.

  “I’m not getting rid of this. Eleni died for this box.”

  “She died because your best friend shot her but—you know—I guess that’s a minor detail.”

  “She died to protect the Contras. She died protecting us,” Rabbit says.

  “She died because of what’s in there. You wanna drag that around with you?”

  He doesn’t respond. Instead, he grabs out a large baggy of rations from the pack, dumps out the contents, then stuffs the tin inside. It pulls against the sturdy plastic but Rabbit persists. He zips the ration bag closed and stuffs it up inside his shirt, tucking the shirt material down into his pants and wrapping his jacket around it.

  “You’re such an idiot. You look like such an idiot.”

  “At least I’m not holding a stuffed animal.” He points at the fake terrier.

  “This stuffed animal is gonna save our lives. More so than that sad bastard box of yours.” I poke his chest.