Chromeheart Read online

  Chromeheart

  ~ Travelers Series: Book II ~

  Alia Hess

  Copyright © 2018 Alia Hess

  All rights reserved.

  ~ Acknowledgements ~

  I am indebted to the following people for their incredible support and guidance: Essa Hansen, Melissa McNeice, Konstantina Bakavelou, Sera Taíno, P.K. Torrens, Cassie Greutman, Alexis Henninger, and Jennifer Lane. Thank you for putting up with Sasha’s jokes and keeping him out of (too much) trouble.

  ~ Contents ~

  1 Hangover

  2 Irina

  3 North American Hemorrhagic Shock

  4 Dusty

  5 Trade

  6 Triangle

  7 Aleksandr

  8 Parts

  9 Orphans

  10 Birthday Party

  11 Weak Heart/Strong Heart

  12 Corvin

  13 Cheesecake

  14 Womens

  15 Escorts

  16 Slaps and Kisses

  17 Bridge

  18 Buttons, Beads, Rings, and Things

  19 Reunion

  20 Mine

  1 ~ Hangover ~

  Sasha sat in the sun-kissed grass with his back to Truck One, his head pounding in a painful rhythm. He groaned and stood up, then jerked on the door handle. Locked. He patted his pockets, but the only things there were his apology list, some hard candies, and a handful of thin metal coins the Americans called “tins.” Sweaty curls of black hair hung in his eyes as he squinted at the grass. The keys had to be here somewhere. There was no way he was walking eighty kilometers back to Priyut—not with a weak heart and a nasty hangover.

  He’d played hooky many times, leaving work to get drunk and use his best American pickup lines on the ladies, but waking up hours later outside of town had never happened before. Hopefully he hadn’t left the keys in that woman’s bed—that is, if he’d even made it that far. The last thing he remembered was stepping on a head of lettuce in her garden and falling on his ass.

  Something had happened, to be sure. A lattice of scratches ran up his arms, his elbows were skinned, and his loud yellow tee shirt had a hole in it. He wiggled his toes, then pulled off one orange tennis shoe and shook out a pile of dirt.

  Sasha peered at his reflection in the truck’s window as rosy fingers of evening light spread into the sky. At least he didn’t have a black eye this time. He shoveled his curls away from his forehead and patted his pockets again. If he couldn’t find the keys, he would need to write Dr. Orlov’s name on the apology list—it would go right under Irina’s. He really should get around to talking to her eventually.

  Walking around Truck One, he stepped onto the buckled asphalt, hands on his hips. The electric lights of Burr glowed softly in the distance. All these quaint little American towns with their farms and brick buildings resembled places out of cowboy movies, but cowboys didn’t have keys to lose. The rest of the country—abandoned Old World towns, gas stations, and skyscrapers rotting into the earth for the past hundred and fifty-five years—echoed the settings for end-of-the-world movies, and were not nice places to walk through, day or night.

  Sasha scanned the road in the creeping twilight and cursed in Russian. He was going to be in so much trouble. Tall grasses whisked at his dirt-smeared jeans as he walked down the embankment to the ditch. Something clinked under his shoe. A wide grin spread across his face as he pulled the truck keys from the grass. He unlocked the door and took a water jug from the back seat, washing away the woolen sensation from his throat.

  Truck One, his preferred vehicle, already had a bit of character from his manic driving. Dents and dings covered the bumper. Comic books and solar tablet chargers sat in the passenger’s seat.

  He climbed in, revved the engine, and whipped the truck around. It bounced onto the cracked highway, heading south for Priyut.

  Travelers on the road, dressed in ragged cloaks and leather boots, looked unfazed as Sasha veered onto the shoulder to avoid them. Three years ago, seeing a working truck would have sent them fleeing in a panic.

  The shaggy blonde hump of a caravan’s boofalope materialized ahead. He slowed even more, not wanting to startle the huge pack animal. He nosed the truck farther into the weeds off the side of the highway, headlights limning the animal’s placid bovine face and huge pitted horns. The massive creature lumbered along next to a merchant and armed guards, the ornate wooden chalet on her back—covered in small drawers and laden with goods—creaked and clinked as it shifted with the animal’s stride.

  His tablet in the passenger’s seat chimed, a holographic envelope icon hovering above the screen. The email was likely an ass-chewing from one of the doctors for being gone all day. The excuse he’d given Dr. Orlov was flimsy at best. Next time, he would make sure to come up with something better than, “Drone C6 isn’t responding to commands and just hovering in standby.” Drone C6 wasn’t even active anymore—not after that idiot Mikhail crashed it into a tree and was transferred from survey to security. Thank God he was out of Sasha’s department.

  He clicked the email and his heart leapt into his throat. The message was from Irina.

 

  He typed a hurried, “on my way,” and tossed the tablet into the seat, heart pounding.

  Irina was waiting in his room? God, that place was a sty. And why? She hated him. Did she know about that video of them? He’d deleted it long ago (then recovered it once and deleted it again), but hadn’t resolved to tell her about it until recently. He hadn’t meant to record it in the first place. How was he supposed to know Irina would come to his door when he was recording one of his video diaries? They’d talked and interacted during their first couple months working at the facility, but he hadn’t expected her to seek him out when she was feeling homesick and lonely. And although he’d fantasized about it, he certainly hadn’t expected her to start kissing him.

  Sasha sighed and pulled a folded yellow paper from his back pocket. Most of the people he needed to apologize to were already crossed off. Several remained, the lines written in sloppy Cyrillic: Say sorry to Daniil for calling him a walking abomination; Apologize for lying to that blonde in Lindsey; Tell that old lady in Burr you’re sorry for almost running her over. At the very bottom, it said, Tell Irina about the video.

  His thoughts continued to fester as darkness deepened and the kilometers between him and the research facility decreased. Spears of metal girders, piles of brick and rubble, and collapsed farmhouses passed by on either side.

  Eventually, Sasha veered from the highway, bumping onto a dirt road toward the complex. Rolling green foothills flanked the facility, and a chain link fence with a high gate surrounded the clusters of white trailers inside.

  Security opened the gate and Sasha slowed, rolling through and nodding to the men; he wasn’t sure what their names were, but he and the guards didn’t have much in common and had little reason to speak to each other.

  Several people milled around outside while he parked the truck next to his trailer. He kept the keys in his pocket, not wanting to disturb Dr. Orlov this late to return them. The air-conditioner hummed a low tune in the empty surveillance office, the cubicles dark and computers shut down. Weak light spilled from under the door to his bunker at the base of the stairs. He clanked down and swung open the heavy metal door.

  A wall of paper-thin monitors frosted the cluttered room with a variety of colors, and the high-backed black chair at the desk swiveled, Irina facing him.

  Sasha forgot how to breathe.

  “There you are.” She flipped a lock of bright red hair over her shoulder and ro
cked back in the chair, gaze fixed on him. “What the hell happened to you?”

  He took a shallow breath. “Are the doctors pissed at me?”

  Are you pissed at me?

  “No. I covered for you. Told them you sent me an email about having car trouble.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  She shrugged. The chair creaked as she stood up.

  “Oh, don’t get too close. I need a shower.” Sasha took a step back, bumping into a bookshelf.

  “I’ll say. You smell awful. You look awful. I thought you stopped drinking.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, that’s working out for you, huh?”

  His eyebrows knit together, face hot. “What do you care, anyway? I could drink myself to death and it wouldn’t make a difference to you. Is that why you wanted to talk to me? So you can berate me about playing hooky? Just call me a disgusting pig, and let me take a shower.” He brushed past her, jerking open a desk drawer and dropping the contents of his pockets inside. “And you don’t need to cover for me. I’m a big boy. I can deal with the consequences.”

  Why did it have to be Irina, of all people, to see the aftermath of me screwing up again?

  As he pulled off his shirt and tossed it on the floor, he scowled, then looked back at Irina’s sullen face. “You just going to stand there while I undress? I know what a ‘mistake’ I was. What a ‘moment of weakness.’ ‘Lapse in judgement.’ Thanks, by the way, for scaring off all my other potential bedmates. Olga just got here, and she already thinks I’m a perv.”

  “You don’t seem to be having much trouble finding others. That is, if that’s what you were out doing.”

  He kicked off his shoes, grains of dirt skittering across the floor, then unbuttoned his pants. Irina’s mouth twitched and she looked away. “I’m here because I want to ask you something. I’m moving to Burr in a couple days and—”

  “You’re leaving?” Sasha stopped undressing.

  “Yeah. I’m done editing Dr. Orlov’s book and there’s not really a need for an assistant anthropologist now. No more new immigrants are coming. The facility is going to be nothing but a little town now—”

  “Yeah, I read Orlov’s emails and saw that he was thinking of having this new group be the last.”

  “You read his email?”

  “I told you that already.”

  “I thought you were making it up.”

  “Don’t you remember when I told you—several times—about Krupin’s crazy genocidal ramblings in his emails? How he wanted to kill off the world with the NAHS virus?”

  She sighed. “Yes, and I believed that even less. Dr. Krupin isn’t a mass murderer. And even if you did read that, he was probably just drunk and letting off some steam. You know how he gets on those tangents about hating Russia and the state of the world.”

  Krupin hadn’t been drunk, and he and Dr. Kuznetsov had exchanged dozens of emails about the insane plot, but there was no use in arguing with Irina about it. It was a non-issue, anyway. Dr. Orlov had talked Krupin out of it quite some time ago.

  Irina said, “Anyway, I really want to assimilate into the American life, and I feel like I can’t do that here. There’s this whole country around us, and we’re still stuck in this tiny research facility. When I talk to people in the towns, they don’t even know what a ‘Russian’ is. I’m ready to be an American. So I wanted to know if you’ll drive me to Burr on Thursday.”

  Sasha zipped his pants back up and took a step toward her. “You want me to drive you? But you hate me.”

  Irina ran a hand through her red hair and folded her arms. “If you don’t want to do it, I’ll get Mikhail to—”

  “No.” He shook his head vigorously. “I’ll do it. No problem, baby.”

  “Sasha, please don’t call me ‘baby.’ It’s demeaning.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. It’s a term of affection, you know? I just… love women.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Not just like that. I admire them. Some of the strongest people I know are women. Women are amazing.”

  Irina cocked an eyebrow.

  This is going nowhere, fast.

  “Y’know, I love having women as friends too. Although, most of them decide they don’t like me before I can ever become friends with them.”

  “That’s because you come off as sleazy, Sasha. Don’t tell me you don’t want to sleep with those women.”

  “Well… Yeah. But being friends is good too. I was friends with you for a little while, when I first got here.”

  Irina pursed her lips and looked away. Sasha shuffled his feet and said, “Anyway, you don’t want me to call you ‘baby,’ I won’t. Sorry.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for driving me. Now go take your shower, disgusting pig.”

  Tell her about the video. “Irina—” The words caught in his throat as he thought better of it. “See you then.”

  She nodded and left, jogging briskly up the stairs. He stood before the monitor bank, savoring her lingering scent of sugar and flowers.

  Why does she want me to drive her? She can’t stand me. And when the doctors had us travel together in the past, all we did was argue. Does she just want to get my hopes up and then break my heart one last time? Or maybe it’s all a trick. Maybe Mikhail put her up to it and the moment I go to get in the truck, he jumps out with his buddies and pounds me into a pulp.

  He stared absently at the drone footage, currently in night-vision. There was the nearby farming town of Lindsey, filthy highwaymen in a junkyard, the volcanic island of Nis, Old World city ruins, and slaver territory.

  He really needed a new name for that one—maybe Sasha territory. After all, he was the one who impulsively shot their leader, Winter, with a stealth drone and put an end to all that army-taking-over-the-Northwest nonsense. Bright grasses and flowers were slowly eating the charred stubble, blackened skeletons, and home foundations on the video feed.

  He was a hero—or should be anyway. Who knew how many slaves and townspeople he’d saved by taking Winter out of the picture? But here he was, only head of surveillance and resident creep.

  Maybe I should leave too, instead of just thinking about it. With Dr. Orlov’s book finished, he won’t likely need me after the map is done anyway. Everyone will be divvied up into farmers and construction workers. And then what? The great American dream of sitting in a rocking chair on a farmhouse porch for eternity? That’s not why I came to this country.

  Sasha sighed, turning toward the bathroom, then paused. The lower rows of monitors displayed footage of the Priyut complex—and one of the feeds was out. He frowned, flopped into the desk chair, and tapped in a series of commands. The view wouldn’t come back on, and another screen went black.

  “What the hell?”

  On the center screen, three figures ran between the trucks in the lot outside, then stopped at a trailer door and jerked the handle. The door didn’t open.

  Sasha sucked in a breath and jabbed a command into the keyboard. A deep siren wailed outside.

  Where the hell is Mikhail? Shit—Irina is out there.

  He tapped keys anxiously, changing monitor feeds. Irina’s trailer lay on the other side of the complex and it was unlikely she’d reached it yet. He shot up, knocking the rolling chair across the diamond plate floor into a pile of dirty laundry.

  Drone C6 sat on the desk, dents marring the black metal shell. He’d tested the newly installed screen wrapping the front, and it worked, but the software program wasn’t finished.

  Sasha grabbed a heavy superhero statue from the bookshelf and hurried up the stairs, pulse pounding. Irina stood between the cubicles, locking the door. She turned to him. “The siren is going. What’s happening?”

  He swallowed, head filling with fuzz. “Some guys are outside trying to open the trailers. Looks like highwaymen”—he held up the statue—“I was going to protect you.”

  Irina’s mouth bunched and she cocked an eyebrow.

  “C’mon! Com
e downstairs away from the windows.” Sasha beckoned.

  “Where is Mikhail?”

  “You don’t know? That guy hangs around you like a pathetic puppy dog.”

  “So do you.”

  Sasha frowned and headed down the stairs. He kicked laundry, computer parts, and soured towels into a nearby closet, then yanked the bed’s comforter over the twist of sheets. After swiping dirty dishes and porn magazines into a drawer, he rolled the chair back to the desk.

  Irina stood in the doorway, hands on her hips.

  He patted the vinyl seat, glancing nervously at the monitor bank. “You can stay in here with me until it’s safe, bab—er, Irina.”

  She frowned, then reluctantly sat in the chair. “I’m starting to wonder if there are really any men out there. Did you turn on the siren just to get me back in here and ‘rescue’ me?”

  His mouth parted. “What? No.” He bent next to her and pointed to the screens. “The feeds went out. See? And then I saw them here trying to get into Dr. Krupin’s trailer.” He picked up his tablet and dialed Mikhail. “Pick up, you moron.”

  Irina squinted at the monitors. “I don’t see anything.” She stood. “This is really pathetic, Sasha. I know you still have a thing for me, but scaring the whole complex just to keep me down here? I think I’ll have someone else drive me on Thursday.”

  “Irina, no. Don’t go. It’s not safe. This happened before, remember? Sometimes people see our nice shiny trailers and think we’ve got good stuff in here. Because we do.” He hung up and dialed Mikhail again.

  “Yeah, I remember. And Mikhail was right there to scare those guys off. Where is he now?” Irina started for the stairs and Sasha grabbed her arm. She scowled and jerked away. “You really do smell awful.”

  Sasha huffed, bottom lip pulled up. Irina stomped up the stairs and he followed. “This isn’t a good idea, but if you’re going out there, at least let me walk you back to your trailer.” He held up the superhero statue.

  “Bye, Sasha.”

  His narrow shoulders sagged as she unlocked the door.