Chapter 35

Express Truck Rental, an amalgamation of adjoining corrugated steel buildings comprising several garage bays and the leasing office, sat on a four-acre paved lot, nestled between the interstate and the frontage road. Ironically, the sprawling parking lot next door belonged to none other than a FreshVale grocery store, whose once-overflowing shelves now stood empty.

While Cpl. Ibarra and PFC Skansi kept watch from the Humvee, Mike and Eric walked the rear parking lot, past lines of box trucks, to where a dozen tractor units, the big rigs, sat parked. Mike carried with him a steel lockbox full of keys, recently liberated from the leasing office.

His cock ached from his long night with Charmagne and Kali. It took a while for Kali to warm up to the idea of a threesome, and overcome her initial inhibitions, but once she did, she was insatiable. She also proved to be quite the exhibitionist, riding Mike’s cock for Charmagne’s enjoyment, as well as a voyeur, masturbating herself while he fucked Charmagne.

Charmagne. Jesus. She lost her fucking mind. Mike abused her asshole, destroyed her pussy, and throated her repeatedly. He spanked her ass raw and gave her a headache from gripping her hair so tightly. She could hardly walk the next morning, and she absolutely loved every second of it.

Too exhausted to go anywhere else, the three of them slept together in her king-sized bed that night, with Kali on one side and Charmagne on the other. Kali was gone by the time he woke up, so he and Charmagne had a quiet and surprisingly tender session before they both departed for their respective duties.

She wanted to make out with him, and asked him to sixty-nine with her. She jacked him off while looking into his eyes, and wanted to be fucked face to face. She was falling for him, and he wasn’t sure how that made him feel.

Despite how crude she could be, and her murderous tendencies, he respected her immensely and held her in high regard. But he could never see himself in a relationship with a woman like her. He didn’t consider himself elitist, or a snob, but she was too low-brow, even for him.

Still, there was something exhilarating about her unabashed attitude. She grabbed life by the fucking balls and tore them right off that motherfucker. And she was a fearless fuck. She would try absolutely anything. Anything at all. That same part of her essence that left her without a filter, also made her fearless. She had no limits, as far as he knew.

Even though he doubted he could ever truly love a woman like Charmagne, he could absolutely see himself fucking her for as long as they both found enjoyment from it. He’d have to be very careful with her though. If she did fall in love with him, and he rejected her, who knew how she might react. He needed to set clear boundaries and expectations with her now, before it escalated to that point.

Set boundaries with Charmagne? Yeah, right. Good luck with that.

As expected, most of the trucks refused to start at all, though a few turned over and idled, only to belch thick, black smoke, before they quickly sputtered and died. One that started and ran, a beat up old Kenworth, gave them hope, until it too died as soon as they put it into gear. It didn’t start again.

Eric took Mike back to one of the trucks that started but died. A newer model Peterbilt.

“It’s got an automatic transmission,” Eric pointed out, toggling the column shifter between neutral, drive, and reverse. “I’ve driven this truck a lot. You know, in the game. It’s dead simple, though. I think if we can get it running, this is our best bet.”

The truck, though capable of starting, ran extremely rich, producing thick, black smoke, and its rough idle caused the cab to shudder before it finally stalled. A strong indicator of an incorrect fuel-air mixture.

Mike brought along all of his diagnostic equipment in the police cruiser, plus several bins of electrical and electronic tools and components from his lab. Eric’s experience with this particular truck model, albeit virtual, proved invaluable in quickly diagnosing the source of the problem when he noted irregularities in the electronic dashboard display, and the absence of certain automated checks the truck usually goes through on startup.

“It’s gotta be the ECM,” Mike concluded. Shit.

They yanked the module, and he put it on both his multimeter and his oscilloscope that he plugged into an AC outlet in the cab. When he isolated the damaged portion of the ECM, he scoffed and laughed to himself.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he muttered. “What is it with these diesel motor control modules?”

“What is it?” Eric asked.

“It’s the fucking fuel injector drivers. Again. Same as on the Humvee.” Mike examined the surface-mounted components and traces on the board. “Only difference is ... I don’t think this one is repairable. At least, not with the equipment I have. Fuck.”

“We can try and find a replacement,” Eric suggested. “There has to be another Peterbilt around somewhere.”

“Unless that one’s fried too.”

Mike thought for a while, then examined the printed circuit board more closely, following the thin, copper traces snaking between the various components. Could that work? he wondered. Why not? It’s just timing pulses. How hard could that be?

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, then bolted from the truck to the cruiser. He rummaged through several bins until he found what he was looking for. “Gotcha.”

“What is that?” Eric asked of the small, credit card-sized component in Mike’s hand.

“An Arduino. It’s a programmable microcontroller. I might be able to program it to mimic the basic functionality of the injector drivers, controlling the opening times of the fuel injectors.”

“How long do you think that will take?” Eric asked.

Most of the day, it turned out. Working out a suitable map for fuel injection based on the engine’s RPM and throttle position took a ton of trial and error, and even though it worked well enough to keep the truck from stalling, it still idled roughly. Even so, with a little fine tuning over the next couple of days, he figured he should be able to get the engine to run smoother, without the rough idle and black smoke.

“That’s some Frankenstein looking shit, right there,” Ibarra remarked when he saw the rat’s nest of circuitry and brightly-colored alligator clips littering the passenger-side floorboard.

“But it fucking works!” Eric said with a huge grin, squeezing the back of Mike’s neck. “Goddamn, it fucking works.”

“Ms. Cabrera, come here. I want you,” Marcus said, clearly enunciating each word.

Izzy, who stood right next to him, snickered. “Alexander Graham Bell. Nice reference.”

Two seconds later came the hissing audio playback.

“Msh Cabebrarora ... comeer ... I ... aunt you.”

She stared at the laptop as the audio played through the speakers and the animated waveform danced on the screen, and her smile grew wider and wider, until she was grinning. Marcus couldn’t take his eyes off her twinkling brown eyes, and her glinting braces, and the tiny dimple in her cheek.

“I could totally understand that!” she said, putting her hands on his shoulder and pushing on him. “Here, let me try.”

Marcus reset the transmission queue and turned the laptop to face her. When he clicked the transmit button, she leaned forward to get closer to the microphone.

“Coming, Mr. Bingham.”

They both waited while the neural network processed the transformed radio signal and played it back.

“Cm ... ing mishht ... Beenum.”

They looked at each other and shook their heads.

“How come that didn’t sound as good?” she asked.

“It makes perfect sense, actually. It’s been trained on audiobooks, so the only voices it knows are theater performers, voice actors, and broadcasters.”

“Yeah, and you totally have a voice for radio,” she said.

“If you think that’s something, you should hear me sing opera!” he intoned in a rich baritone, flourishing his hand toward the ceiling and trilling the final R.

Izzy giggled. “Maybe I should have you tuck me in at night and read me bedtime stories.”

Marcus’s smile faded. “Uh ... yeah. Sure. If you want.”

She laughed, but only because she thought he was making a joke. After a moment’s thought, she furrowed her brow.

“Shouldn’t we be training it to recognize all voices, though?” she asked.

He shook his head and said, “No, not necessarily. Where are we right now? Epoch twelve? We’re only just barely starting to plateau. We’ve already progressed from a one-hundred percent word error rate to only twenty, but I think we’ll reduce that to ten percent in another ten or twenty epochs, which means it’ll be twice as good as it is now.

“But remember, that’s comparing the speech-to-text output to the original transcript. So, one application trying to understand another. As humans, we have the benefit of contextual understanding because we’re native speakers, so we can use the context and surrounding words to infer anything that’s missing or garbled. We’re very good at interpolating patterns this way. Here, check this out.”

He slid a tablet of graph paper in front of himself and quickly wrote the following:

MS CBRR CM HR WNT Y

“What does that say?” he asked her, spinning the tablet so she could read it.

She interpreted it instantly. “Ms. Cabrera, come here. I want you.”

“You see? Even if the message wasn’t as clearly transmitted as it should have been, I would hope that you’d still be able to understand exactly what it is I’m trying to say to you, Izzy.”

She nodded, and then looked at his face and tilted her head. “Is everything alright, Mr. Bingham?”

He looked into her eyes, but seeing no recognition there, he sighed. “Sure,” he said, forcing a weak smile. He wiped his face. “I’m just tired.”

She positioned herself behind him to give his broad, soft shoulders a rub. Her touch sent a jolt of electricity racing up his spine.

“When do you think it’ll be ready to use for real?” she asked over his shoulder.

He hung his head and groaned as she dug her thumbs into the base of his neck. “It might actually be good enough right now. At least for day-to-day, non-emergency use. Now we have to turn it over to Mike, so he can do his magic and figure out how to stuff our huge neural network into those tiny little radios.”

Izzy gave his shoulders a final squeeze, then stood beside him, resting her elbow on the table and propping her chin in her hand.

“When do you think Adrián’s getting back?” she asked.

Whatever warm tendrils of feeling connected them instantly evaporated, and Marcus turned his attention to his laptop. He opened his code editor and started typing loudly.

“Who knows?” he said after a very long delay.

“He knows so much about radios. I bet you he has some ideas about how to integrate the system.”

Marcus’s lips twitched in a fleeting smile, and he harumphed. “Sure. Maybe.”

A mix of emotions swirled within the nurse’s office as Kali reviewed the patient charts with Renata. There was good news and bad news. She started with the bad.

“Three more deceased this week. That leaves six patients remaining in the terminal ward.” Kali only used that term with Renata. To everyone else, is was the palliative care unit. “The three patients we just moved back from the general ward to the ICU, plus the three others from last weeks, gives us a total of ten ICU patients.”

Renata leaned forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees, and sagged her head in exhaustion.

“Sixteen high-risk patients still. Jesus, Kali. I feel like a ghoul, but I just wish they’d either get better or fucking die already. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“I know, but don’t forget we started with thirty-nine. And here comes the good news. We’re going to clear out the general ward today. I’m discharging the two remaining student patients. That soldier, Haylee, too.”

She reached for a handful of prescription medicine bottles, grouped together in a clear plastic tray.

“I want to keep them on a regimen of immune boosters and give them some gastrointestinal support, so I’ve got some, uh, filgrastim here, which should help with raising white blood cell counts, and some probiotics. For Haylee, I have...” she hunted for the bottle and read the label, “epoetin alfa. I’m a little worried she might be suffering anemia, so this should help stimulate her red blood cell production.”

“Besides that,” she said, sifting through the tray, “I’ve got some NSAIDs, antioxidants, calcium, and vitamin D for all of them, to help support general health and recovery. I figure we can taper them down over the next month or so.”

Renata lifted her arms in a weak cheer. “Yay,” she said unenthusiastically. “Three healthy patients. Whoopie.”

Kali wanted to say something to her, but let it go. She was just venting. Renata had carried half the weight of the clinic on her shoulders, with nothing more than a nursing degree. Kali could cut her a little slack.

“They’re our very first discharges, Renata. We should be happy. Every single other patient under our care is either dead or dying.”