Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  That was important because I’d soon be running through it to get to the roof just as fast as I could. If that drone we were chasing arrived and docked, it’d take only seconds to get a connection and start downloading the incriminating video.

  With the destination and a plan in mind, I urged, “Get us there as fast as you can.”

  Lutz pressed the pedal to the floor, the engine revved. The beast sped faster. “Three years for shooting down that spotter drone. That’s on you.”

  Are we still talking about this?

  I was working to cover my ass and his. He was busy divvying up the blame.

  Where are those damn red LEDs?

  “We should go to Old Mexico,” he told me. “Get a gig doing security for a cartel boss. Maybe those Camacho brothers. I bet they’d hire a couple of gringos.”

  We were driving over a hundred miles an hour, a risky speed on roads that hadn’t seen any maintenance in twenty years.

  “There is no Old Mexico.” I pointed at a green exit sign with its weathered white letters barely reflecting our headlights through the tall grasses growing around it. “Is that where we get off?”

  “Next one.” Lutz told me. “You’ve been there, to Mexico. You know people.”

  I huffed but said nothing. Going on the run into a failed state with Lutz in tow was just about the last thing I wanted. Chasing the Old Mexico dream, a dream I knew didn’t exist, wasn’t on my list.

  “I’ve seen the pictures,” he said. “Beaches. Palm trees. Girls.”

  Poverty. Lawlessness. Shortages worse than here, unless you worked for one of the cartels. And plenty of people down there who wanted me dead.

  I pointed up the highway. “If we get the drone, we can shake this. No arrest, you hear me? We’ve got a good thing going here.”

  “Canada, then.” Lutz looked at me to gauge my interest. “We head north. Get there in three or four days.”

  “Across Oklahoma?” I laughed. “Kansas? They’re as bad as Mexico. We’d never make it. You’d need to go around the long way. Run up through Denver, maybe. Or head east and go up on the other side of the Mississippi.”

  “So, Canada?” Lutz turned the wheel slightly and took his foot off the gas as the Mercedes rolled onto a long exit ramp.

  I pointed across the highway at the black silhouette of a building standing next to the old mall. “There.”

  Still no damn LEDs.

  If that drone had already docked and had downloaded its data, maybe I’d have to try for Canada with Lutz.

  Lutz careened around a turn at the end of the ramp to run the SUV across an overpass.

  “When we get there,” I told him. “Get me as close to the door as possible. “I’ll run inside and get up to the roof. You might be able to get a cell signal and call your spotter friend if you can. We need to find out how much video made it back through the network.”

  “He’ll be pissed about his drone,” Lutz told me.

  “We’ll pay him for it.”

  “I can’t afford that.”

  “How can you not afford half a drone?” We’d been making a lot of money working together.

  “I got bills.” Lutz bounced the Mercedes over a curb into an expanse of old asphalt surrounding the mall. His voice turned angry. “You know that. I got kids to pay for.”

  Yeah, a dozen. Because you’re so in love with your DNA, you can’t imagine a future without your progeny there pissing in the gene pool.

  Just like everyone, Lutz was trying to beat the odds. And the odds had been badly skewed since the Brisbane strain of H5N1 burned its way through the global population back when I was just learning how to spank it to Internet porn. Seven percent of everybody died. That doesn’t seem like a lot when you figure ninety-three percent of the population survived. But a nearly one-in-ten kill rate puts the kind of scare into people that changes the world. Every precarious social institution shattered. States collapsed. Wars festered. Treaties were forgotten. Churches dissolved and new religions formed. Then more people died. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  It was that damned Easter egg the virus left in a gene called PRNP that remade the world.

  Like ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine-nine percent of everybody in the world, I’d never heard of PRNP and in a year of guessing wouldn’t have come close to landing on the right answer.

  Everybody with a normal PRNP gene knows what it is today, and they know a mutated PRNP gene produces protease-resistant prions. Very few have any understanding of what that means, but we all know the words because we hear them everywhere.

  “Mommy, why are there so many mental degenerates in the world?”

  “Prions, honey. Now go to bed. Be a good girl and stay quiet or the prions will turn your brain into a hunk of Swiss cheese.”

  That’s exactly what happens, one gene mutates, it produces a misshapen protein, the protein rots holes in the brain turning it into spongy Swiss cheese and eventually—a long eventually—kills.

  It doesn’t take much of an education to guess that a brain full of cheese holes doesn’t work as well as a normal brain.

  Degenerates have Swiss-cheese brains.

  How all of this relates to Lutz’s excessive offspring problem comes down to math. If a man and a woman with normal PRNP genes have a baby, it’s born normal. But the Brisbane strain of H5N1 and its descendant strains became the most common influenza strains on the planet. Unfortunately for us, they all infect many species of birds and all humans. Almost all those strains mutate the PRNP gene. In short, we all catch some strain of that flu eventually. Some of us recover with no gene mutation. Over ninety-five percent of us get the Easter egg.

  So, having a kid is a matter of rolling the dice and hoping to win against really shitty odds. Produce twenty kids and one might grow up normal.

  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a one in twenty normalcy rate is the road to extinction for humans.

  Out in the feral d-gen population, a baby has a fifty-fifty chance at being born with normal genes. They all catch the flu. For the half born with the mutated PRNP gene it doesn’t matter. For the half born with a normal gene, ninety-five percent mutate because of the flu. So of all the babies born to the d-gens, roughly one in forty has a chance to grow up normal.

  It’s not intuitively obvious to anyone who’s uncomfortable with word problems, but d-gens ultimately produce most of the babies who grow into normal, intelligent adults. It’s true because there are so many more d-gens than normal people in the world.

  As distasteful as the thought is, they are the hope for our species. Not to mention Lutz’s hope of having a normal little version of himself born into the world.

  And that’s why killing otherwise healthy d-gens of childbearing age is a really bad thing.

  Chapter 6

  As the Mercedes was rolling to a stop, I swung my door open and jumped out. I adjusted Lutz’s rifle at my shoulder and took a peek through the night vision scope for a glimpse into the building’s lobby.

  Nothing moving.

  I leaned back into the car and laid a hand on my rifle, which was pointed at the floorboard and leaning on my side of the console. “Use it if you need it. Don’t muck up my gun. Call your buddy. I’ll be right back down.”

  I stepped away from the Mercedes and scanned across the sky, once without the night vision scope, once with. It was always possible the drone was up there, and I hadn’t seen the flashing LEDs. Too far away. Too dim. Burned out. Disabled intentionally. Anything was possible.

  God, I hate that phrase.

  It’s damned disempowering when trying to formulate plans to save your ass from a work camp.

  I ran up the stairs in front of the building, crossed under a pretentious portico, and jogged through a metal framework that a decade or two ago had held panels of glass to separate the building’s air-conditioned lobby from the humid mosquito soup outside. I paused and used the night vision scope to scan what I could see of the first floor, looking for dangers
and looking for a stairway door. It wasn’t uncommon to find individuals or clans of d-gens in these old buildings. I guess they liked having a place to call home just as much as a normal person did.

  The thing with the d-gens this far outside the city was that you never knew if they were going to be hostile or not, territorial or not, deadly or not. The ones who filled the rotting suburbs and fed from the troughs tended to be predictable.

  Maybe a regular meal schedule makes mammals lazy.

  I spotted a door hanging from a rusted hinge and saw through the gap.

  I hurried across the lobby and stopped outside the door to peek inside the stairwell. It wouldn’t do any good to surprise any d-gens bedding down there. Startled animals don’t always run away.

  Seeing nothing at the bottom of the stairs, I went in and started to climb.

  The stairs were fairly clear, which told me I was on the right path. The stairwell had probably been used by the maintenance personnel when they came out to repair the charging station on the roof.

  Sneaking and stepping, quiet in the dark, I made my way from floor to floor, around a landing and back up again, thinking about the problem, thinking through the solution—get the memory cards from the three drones, disconnect their backup batteries so the locator transponders wouldn’t function. Maybe dispose of the remains in a pond somewhere and get back to Houston to spin up a good lie to fit whatever facts had found their way back to the bureaucracy.

  So many of life’s speed bumps could be smoothed over with a well-told lie.

  I just needed to get that last drone.

  At the top of the stairs, I found a hollow steel door with a chain running through a hole big enough to stick an arm through. The chain looped back through the stair’s handrail. A padlock held the chain together and kept the door mostly closed, but closed enough to keep me from squeezing through the gap.

  Crap.

  The maintenance people must have had trouble with d-gens sneaking up onto the roof and messing with their equipment.

  I looked at the lock and chain for a moment, mentally inventorying my equipment, wondering if anything on my person could break the lock or chain.

  Shit. Nothing.

  Shoot the lock? No. That only worked in old movies.

  Did Lutz have something in the car? Probably. How quickly could I run down five floors and get all the way back up?

  I looked at the door again. It was in sad shape and banged all to hell. The paint had long since flaked away, leaving only layers of rust. The chain and lock, though, were in good shape. I’d not be breaking those without tools.

  But the door—

  The rusty hinges had to be in worse shape than the surface.

  Why not give it a go?

  I took two steps back to the edge of the landing and threw myself at the door.

  I’d surely have a bruise wrapped over a sore shoulder in the morning, but I felt the door give. I guessed at least one of the old hinges had bent. I stepped back and slammed the door with my shoulder a second time.

  The top hinge broke away, and the door leaned out.

  I slammed into the door a third time, and the middle hinge broke away, leaving the door hanging on the chain and one hinge.

  I climbed through, got a foot hung up, and tripped as I tumbled out onto the roof.

  Getting quickly to my feet and panting from the exertion, I looked around and saw old cell phone antenna clusters standing up on three sides of the building’s roof. A much newer construction stood at the roof’s center, a cylindrical metal framework twelve feet tall with two layers of docking stations running around the circumference, with one layer for the large spotter drones at about shoulder height. The ring above that was made up of smaller docking ports for private video drones, and those operated by corporate farms and work camps in the area.

  Jogging over to the charging cylinder, I circled it, seeing two big white spotter drones, dormant and charging. Neither of those concerned me—the only spotter drone that contained video of my crime was sitting in the trees fifteen miles west.

  No other drones were docked.

  Good? Bad?

  Hell, how was I to know?

  I ran to the edge of the roof and looked east in the direction of the city, and I scanned the sky.

  Where’s that damn drone?

  Chapter 7

  “All I’m sayin’ is the last video image transmitted by my spotter drone shows your golden boy Christian aiming his rifle at it. Then I lost the signal.” Ricardo was not happy.

  Lutz couldn’t gauge whether Ricardo was angry enough to do something vindictive. “Are you recording this?”

  “If I was, would I tell you or would I lie about it? It’s a stupid question, Lutz.”

  Lutz tried a half-truth. “We saw your drone go down.”

  “Shot down,” Ricardo clarified, “by that new guy you run with. You know how much drones cost these days? Parts aren’t easy to come by, and I’ve got to pay for it out of my pocket because you morons will be in a work camp.”

  “What?” Lutz took offense. “After all the business we’ve done. You’re gonna throw me to the cops over one goddamned drone?”

  “The low-res signal went straight through to the clearinghouse.” Ricardo paused, adding a bit more clarity. “The police have it.”

  “You cheese-brained asshole!” Lutz yelled into his phone, no longer caring if he was being recorded. “What do I pay you for?”

  “You pay me to send you the coordinates of the good kills before I send them to the clearinghouse so you and your partner can get there before anybody else. And I did that. I always do my part.”

  “No,” Lutz snarled. “I pay you a premium price to not only send me the coordinates but to delay the return video feed so you can make sure nothing incriminating ever gets through to the police. I pay you that because I don’t want to get fined and I sure as hell don’t want to go to a work camp. If all I wanted was to front-run kill coordinates I could pay any dumbass spotter for that.”

  “You watch your tone, Lutz.” Ricardo’s voice turned acid. “I can give the police a lot more than they have right now.” He paused, giving Lutz a chance to understand the threat. “You could wait for approved sanctions like everybody else but because I front-run the sanctions to you, you get them before they finalize. You know you can’t pull the trigger until you have an ID on an approved sanction. Everybody knows that. This sanction got cancelled. I never sent the ID through the spotter drone to you guys. How the hell was I supposed to know you were going to go in there and kill the whole herd anyway?”

  Lutz wasn’t listening now so much as thinking through the implications of what Ricardo had already told him. “Did all that video go out? Do the police have everything?”

  “They have the low-res feed from my drone,” answered Ricardo.

  “Why didn’t you intercept?” Lutz was thinking this would rile Christian up and push maybe push him to murder. Then it was down to Old Mexico for blue water and cheap whores. Who cared about the stories he’d heard about the cartels? Lutz knew how to take care of himself.

  “I didn’t intercept because I didn’t think you morons were going to kill them. I thought you were done for the evening. I have other guys out there, Lutz. You’re not the only one who pays for the services I provide.”

  “You screwed us,” said Lutz with a lethal edge in his tone. “I can run. You know that. But I don’t know what Christian will do. He did all that work for those cartels down in Mexico. You’ve heard the stories. He’s a wicked bastard.”

  The phone went silent. Ricardo drew an audible breath, but still sounded confident when he said, “I didn’t know you guys were going to go through with it, that’s why I stopped monitoring your feed. I was trying to find you another job while you were all the way out there. Do you know where my spotter drone is?”

  “We can find it,” said Lutz.

  “Look, if you can bring me the drone, maybe I can fix this. I’ve got a video guy, we used
him on that thing last year.”

  Lutz knew exactly which thing Ricardo was referring to—that thing was the reason Lutz had suddenly found himself without a partner and had to team up with Christian. That problem had been expensive to get out of. “You better make me a good price.”

  “Just bring in the drone. Do it quick. If we get the video altered and out to the cops before they get into the office in the morning, nobody will ask any questions. The low-res will look incriminating, but we can alter the high-res to make you look innocent.”

  “Will it be good enough to get the kill sanction retroactively reinstated?”

  “For enough money, my guys can give you a video of Joseph Stalin humping Mother Teresa.”

  Lutz ignored the attempt at humor. He was too stressed for the silliness. “There were two video drones on the scene.”

  “That’s shitty luck,” said Ricardo. “Might be there’s nothing I can do.”

  “We’re working on that problem.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Ricardo.

  “One of those drones is down in the woods. We’ll have the other one in a minute.”

  “How do you know they didn’t already upload their videos?”

  “We don’t,” Lutz told him. “You need to find that out for us, you understand?”

  “That’s not what I do.”

  “You’re doing it this time,” Lutz commanded. “I’m not going to get screwed on this. We’ll be at your place in a few hours.”

  Chapter 8

  Before seeing anything, I heard the familiar whispery buzz of a drone’s spinning rotors.

  I looked away from my view of Houston ten or fifteen miles to the east and ran back to the charging tower. Just as I was rounding the structure, looking in the sky for the drone I expected to see there, I saw it maneuvering to line up with the dock.

  Surprised into action, I smacked the drone with the barrel of Lutz’s rifle, sending it colliding into the charging station’s framework. The drone bounced away and hit the roof, throwing up small stones where the spinning rotors ran through loose gravel. It rose back into the air as I reached out and grabbed one of its rotor arms. I spun it around and smashed it into the tower’s frame.