Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  “That’s what everybody says about work they don’t understand—it can’t be hard.”

  I didn’t want to have to, but I reached into my pocket, took out my cash, counted out another twenty thousand and slapped it on the table to make it clear there’d be no more negotiations. “Two versions.”

  Lutz got off the couch and came over. “You might kill her then.”

  “I need to keep my options open.” That was my straight-up honest answer. If putting a bullet in apparently innocent Sienna Galloway’s head was the only way to keep myself out of a work camp for twenty years—who’s to say what I’d do?

  Chapter 24

  Sienna Galloway punched the code into the lock on the gate and let herself through the chain-link fence into the residence compound. After a harrowing night, she was home. Making sure the gate closed behind her, she felt relief. With her phone broken, she didn’t know the time exactly, just that it was still early with the sky now turning from gray to blue.

  She looked across the dew-covered grass on the slope up to the first of three rows of widely spaced cabins. Sienna’s was fourth from the end in the first line of fourteen, all matched. Hers, like all the others, was not large—one room that served as bedroom, living room, and kitchenette. Of course, each had a bathroom separate from the rest of the small house, an adequate front porch, and a decent-sized back patio with a view down the slope, over cultivated fields, and across the more distant forests.

  In those first months after she’d arrived on Blue Bean Farms, she’d spent her evenings sitting on her porch, drinking wine with her new coworkers, thinking they were turning into friends. It was a little more than a year ago, and for a time, she felt like she’d discovered an anachronistic oasis, a world apart from the slowly collapsing cities.

  But time has a way of eroding illusions from repugnant realities.

  By the time Sienna had been in her job six months, doing exactly what she thought she’d been hired to do and meeting nothing but resistance, she’d irritated or pissed off every one of her neighbors, not to mention dozens of others around the company. She was making Blue Bean a better workplace for everyone. They thought she was trying to drive Blue Bean out of business, put them out of their jobs, chase them out of their peaceful little bungalows and force them to go back to the dirty cities to dodge d-gen riots and scrape by with all the other unlucky shmucks.

  Dinner invites ceased.

  Drinking on the patio turned into a solitary activity of mixing despondence with alcohol to try and blur away the hateful stares from her neighbors.

  She crossed the jogging path that ran just inside the fence and saw a pair of runners far down to her right, moving away. They were too far off to identify, but it didn’t matter. In fact, it was preferable. Too many of her good morning greetings had been returned with, “Why don’t you just quit, cunt?”

  Outside of necessary work communication, she barely spoke to anyone anymore.

  Rather than follow the path along the fence, she started up the hill, toward the houses across the grass. Her jeans were streaked with dirt, and her shoes were caked with mud. Her shirt was ripped in two places where it had gotten hung up on broken branches as she ran through the woods. She was scraped, and her hair was a fright. She was afraid of what she might see when she looked in the mirror—a suburban d-gen, with no concept of hygiene. And it brought memories of a childhood nightmare that still haunted her on occasion, that of waking one morning to find that she’d lost her humanity to Brisbane’s prion disease.

  It was a lurking hazard nobody talked about, but everybody feared.

  But she was inside the fence now. It didn’t feel quite secure anymore, yet it was safer than being shot at in the woods by rogue Regulators.

  Sienna passed her back porch, but she had no key to her back door. She’d been assured on countless occasions that a maintenance man would come soon to rekey her locks to match. The more word of her complaints about Blue Bean got around, the less pretend-friendly those reassurances became.

  So she fished the front door key out of her bag and crossed between her house and the one next door. At the front corner of her house, she stepped between two bushes to come onto the side of the front porch. She was tired and looking for the shortest path to her front door and then to a shower.

  “Christ on a cricket, girl! Where you bin?” asked a shadowy man from where he sat in the dark morning shadows in a chair on her front porch.

  Sienna stumbled off the porch, coming down between the bushes.

  A man in a plaid western shirt with cut-off sleeves stood up from the chair. The side brims of his straw cowboy hat were scrunched flat against the top, giving the Stetson the look of a ratty canoe upside down on his head. A long-barreled revolver hung in a leather holster on the man’s hip. He held a sheath of papers folded in one hand. Sienna didn’t need to see his amateur tattoos and bad teeth in the shadows to know it was Goose Eckenhausen.

  “Where you bin?” he asked, in his East Texas accent.

  Sienna didn’t step back onto the porch. She wanted to stay out of Goose’s reach. “What are you doing in the residence compound?”

  “Ah asked you a question,” he persisted.

  Sienna took a step back onto the lawn. If Goose made a move, she could run in either direction. She could scream. Over forty Blue Bean employees—professionals just like her—lived in the residence compound. They would come to their doors if a woman screamed. The most hateful of them might turn away when they saw it was her, but rather than pin her hopes solely on the goodwill of others, Sienna knew most of the women despised Goose more than they detested her.

  Goose Eckenhausen was a trustee in the work camp interlinked with Blue Bean Farms. He was a lifer, a serial rapist who’d brutalized victims every time he’d been given a chance at freedom outside the penal system. And it wasn’t d-gen women who tickled his fancy, it was normal girls with fully functioning intellects who had the capacity to understand what it was Goose was doing to them.

  Sienna tried to mask the quake in her voice with a full measure of authority. “Trustees aren’t allowed in the administrative compound.”

  “There’s what you think ya know, and there’s how it is.” Goose showed off his ragged smile. “Unfortunately, fer you, Boss Man makes the rules. Ah go where Ah need to go. Ah do whut Ah need to do. Now tell me, where you bin ta git all a mess like ‘at?”

  “You get off my porch.” Sienna fished in her bag for her pepper spray. She found it, raised it, and pointed it at Goose.

  Goose cocked his head to the side, and he rested a hand on the butt of the gun on his hip. “You got ah meetin’ at eighth-thirty with Boss Man and the ‘spector.” He meant the State Inspector. “Boss Man sent me to make sure ya got these papers signed and to remind you to git to that meetin’ on time.”

  Getting to the meeting with the State Inspector was why she’d tried so hard to get all the way back, despite having followed the degenerates so far on foot the evening before. “What time is it?”

  “Told you. Eight-thirty.”

  “No. What time is it right now?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “My phone broke.”

  Goose shrugged. “‘bout seven-thirty. Get a replacement phone from Irene before the meetin’.”

  “I’ll be at the meeting.” She pointed toward the compound’s main gate. Most of the administrative buildings were generously spread over several acres outside the main gate, just a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from her front door. “I don’t need a reminder from you to get there and I’ll sign the papers when I deem it necessary for me to do so.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just it. Boss Man thinks maybe since you ain’t turned in yer papers for the Bloodmobile, the State ‘spector won’t be able to put them bad d-gens down.”

  “They don’t need to be put down,” Sienna snapped. “They’re not bad.”

  “Says you. But that ain’t the way it’s gonna be. You can pretend all you want that they g
onna wake up one mornin’ and start learnin’ how to do farm work again, but the Boss Man, he ain’t got time, patience, or money to waste on d-gens that’s too brain-rotted to stop shittin’ in their pants. He ain’t feedin’ ‘em for doin’ nothin’.”

  It was exactly the point that made Sienna angry. “You can’t put down degenerates just because they aren’t as productive as they once were. That’s the law.”

  “Oh now,” Goose smiled falsely as he took a step toward Sienna.

  Sienna took another step back and brandished her pepper spray.

  Goose leaned against the wall. “I seen ‘em myself. Ever’ one ah them I put on that list fer you was violent. They was mean. They was hurtin’ other d-gens.”

  “I took every one you listed out of the working population and put them in the training compound,” Sienna argued. “My people haven’t witnessed any violent behavior.”

  “Just cuz you ain’t seen it don’t mean it didn’t happen. They all got three strikes. My guys seen it. Them d-gens is all defects. They all need to be on the kill list.” Goose leaned forward and his false smile instantly disappeared, and his eyes looked as hollow as a shark’s. He waved the papers. “Yer signin’ this mornin’, fer every name.” He stood up straight and smiled through his bad teeth. He turned and walked down the length of the porch to the front steps. “Ah’ll wait out here fer ya. You take yer shower, but yer gonna sign before you go to that meetin’.”

  Chapter 25

  I sat in the passenger seat as Lutz drove the Mercedes down another dirt road illuminated in the morning’s slanted light. He’d complained through the first half hour of the drive out of town but had run out of steam when he realized I wasn’t going to argue with him. We both needed sleep. Griping about how tired we were wasn’t going to magically make time for us to get some.

  We’d gone to a lot of trouble, and I’d spent a lot of money to get our asses out of a sling. The video alterations were on track to finish up a little later in the morning. Ricardo would soon know how much of the low-res and high-res video of our crime had made it back to the world. Ricardo was hooking me up with an attorney he was acquainted with. Damn, I was putting a lot of faith in Ricardo, a man I’d known for less than twelve hours.

  I decided that didn’t bother me. If Ricardo chose to screw me, I’d get myself out of whatever mess he put me in, and I’d teach him a lesson in regret. I had a lot of experience helping people learn that lesson.

  After a long night of crossing items off a seemingly impossible do-list, all I had left was to find Sienna Galloway and convince her to tell a lie. I’d help her to see that it was her best choice. With her statement to corroborate our version of the video, the Sanction ID would be assigned retroactively, the police would rescind the warrant, and Lutz and I would avoid a work camp.

  Back to business.

  At least that was our thinking. Maybe the attorney would tell me different. Maybe he’d say everything we’d done was overkill. Maybe he’d say it was wasted effort as a warrant was tantamount to a conviction and that running had been my only option all along. Well, that or a work camp.

  Lutz stopped the SUV, skidding the wheels on the dirt road to make some kind of statement that was important to him. He squinted at the bright blue sky through the windshield as he tried to get a view above. “You see the drone up there yet?”

  I thought it was pretty obvious I wasn’t looking, but I understood Lutz’s meaning. I took a glance up through my side window then out through the windshield. “Ricardo said he’d fly it pretty high. We might not spot it.” I took the phone out of my pocket. We were well out of cell phone range, but if I could pick up the Wifi signal generated by Ricardo’s spotter drone, I’d know it was near.

  Lutz copied my action and took out the replacement phone I’d purchased for him. He turned it on and stared at the screen.

  Mine didn’t show a signal. I got out of the car and looked up.

  “I got nothing,” he told me. “Not a damn thing.”

  “Ricardo told us that was a risk.” I scanned the sky for the white disk. “When it’s high, the signal will be too weak for us to pick up.”

  Lutz turned off the engine and got out of the car. “Or he’s not here yet.”

  “He has drones in the area,” I told him. “One should have beaten us here. Don’t you listen?”

  “I listen.” Lutz shielded his eyes from the morning sun and looked east.

  I reminded him anyway, “Ricardo can’t legally fly his drones over Blue Bean property. They’ll shoot ‘em down, and they’re within their rights to do it. Ricardo’s got to stay up out of shotgun range. He’ll drop down from time to time to download some overhead pictures. That’s the plan.”

  Lutz looked up the road. “How far do you think we’ve got to go?”

  I looked back down in the direction from which we’d come. “What do you think? We’ve been on this road for what, maybe nine or ten miles?”

  Lutz shrugged.

  “Another half mile.” I pointed up the narrow cut. “There’s a crossroad. That’s all Blue Bean property north of the road. I pointed at the trees to the left. “There’s a creek in the woods a few hundred yards over there. That’s the boundary for their property.”

  “Every time we come out here you act like you know where all the property lines are.”

  “I do,” I told him. “When we have a job out here by one of these farms, I like to know where the lines are I can’t cross. We’re not allowed to kill on their property, and they like to shoot at trespassers like us.”

  “All these corporate farms are the same way.” Lutz looked back up the road. “We turn left at the T-intersection?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it’s what, five or six miles, trespassing with the risk of being shot the whole way?”

  “Ricardo said Sienna Galloway’s house is up there in a residence compound by all the admin buildings.”

  “She must be pretty important,” said Lutz. “Otherwise, she’d be out at one of the satellite compounds and not stuck in the middle of the whole goddamn place.”

  “It’s not the middle. That would be another twenty miles in. The admin compound is pretty close to the eastern edge of the property.” I thought I saw something move up in the sky, and I looked hard to try and see it again.

  “What?” asked Lutz. “You see it?”

  I pointed into the sky above the road, pretty high up. “There.”

  “Is that Ricardo’s?”

  I activated my phone again and stepped out in front of the truck as though the extra ten feet might help improve the signal.

  “Is he coming this way?” asked Lutz.

  I looked up again and then looked back down at my phone—it had to be Ricardo’s drone. At least I hoped it was, real hard. If it were somebody else’s, they’d likely be aware of the warrant out for me. And any spotter drone pilot who did his homework would know Lutz was my partner, and they’d know Lutz drove an old boxy black Mercedes.

  Lutz stepped up beside me, eyes fixed on the drone. “You got a signal yet? Is it Ricardo?”

  Chapter 26

  Sienna turned the shower off and dried herself with a towel as she looked at the bruises and scrapes on her skin that had been hidden by the dirt. She’d been reckless running through that cornfield and the woods to get away from the rogue Regulators who killed the farm workers—the degenerates she’d been informally studying.

  Sure they were all mentally diminished by the Brisbane virus and its prion surprise, but they’d still been capable of working productively on Blue Bean’s farm and they had enough depth of thought to imagine a life outside of the present, even to speculate about what might wait for them beyond death. Those dead degenerates, like other groups she’d read about in scientific journals, had formed a rudimentary belief system complete with a crude temple and simple rituals.

  Only a tiny, tiny percentage of d-gens did this, but just like fully functional humans, these relatively few degenerates gravi
tated toward religion.

  And those bastard Regulators had killed them for it.

  They’d almost killed her too, but for some reason, no bullet found her.

  Now, what was she to do? Report the Regulators? Admit she’d been out in the woods, breaking company policy by observing farm workers doing things they were forbidden to do during a time when the rules mandated they be in their barracks?

  Such an admission would mean she’d be fired at least. Given the depth of management’s animosity toward her, she’d probably get the blame for the deaths. They’d say she’d led the degenerates out there, that she’d put them in danger. The company would hold her financially responsible for the loss.

  And what could she do about it?

  She could hardly claim she’d come upon the group by accident. She would have had to follow them miles to the site of their ceremonies out in the woods.

  And even to do that, she’d had to win their confidence over the course of months, keeping company with them outside of the normal work routine. She’d befriended them. She had feelings for them.

  Goddammit! Degenerates are people.

  Maybe not all of them, but some were.

  Sienna didn’t understand how seemingly good people could flip some switch in their brains that turned off empathy when it came to degenerates.

  The group she was studying in her free time didn’t live in the same barracks. They were spread across seven buildings, males and females. They never all worked together on tasks. They didn’t eat together. Yet they’d somehow recognized one another for what they were—not normal humans, but not regular degenerates either. They communicated in a language of simple syllables and gestures and formed a community that depended on their ability to share simple ideas and coordinate actions.

  Sienna didn’t understand the nuances of the language. It was speculated that it spread in the state schools, devolved from whatever human language skills they learned before Brisbane’s prions did the worst of its damage to their brains. With the leftovers, these few were able to communicate effectively enough to sneak out of their barracks at the same time and meet at a remote location in the woods.