by Bobby Adair
The group had been fascinating. Watching them was like looking through a time machine window to see prehistoric humans invent culture.
There was so much to be learned.
They’d been her only reason for remaining at Blue Bean Farms, the one thing still worth doing.
Now they were all dead.
Having toweled her body as dry as she was likely to get in the steamy bathroom, Sienna wrapped the towel around herself, tucked in the top edge to form something of a dress, and reached for a comb to run through her hair as she opened the bathroom door.
A guttural chuckle frightened her into stopping.
She screamed as she saw a hulking bruiser of a man, standing droop-shouldered by the wall, staring at her.
“Hush!” Goose Eckenhausen ordered.
Sienna stepped back into the bathroom and reached to shut the door.
Goose jumped over to stop the door with a foot as he grabbed her by the wrist. “You settle down, honey.”
Sienna’s eyes burned with fire as she spat, “If you and your friend don’t leave right now I’ll—”
“He ain’t my friend,” Goose laughed, letting go of Sienna’s wrist. “That’s Toby. He’s my Bully Boy. Just got ‘im a coupla weeks ago. Used to be in the Army. Did some fightin’ down in Columbia or some such shit. He’s a war hero.”
Drool ran down Toby’s chin as he leered at Sienna.
“You get your friend Toby and get out of my—”
“Nope.” Goose stepped in close to Sienna. “Mr. Workman wants them papers signed.”
“I told you—”
Goose put one of his dirty fingers on Sienna’s lips. “Don’t say nuthin’. You been refusin’ to sign yer paperwork and Boss Man is tired of listenin’. We talked ‘bout this on the porch.” Goose looked over at his Bully Boy. “What do you think, Toby? You think maybe Dr. Galloway needs to stop protestin’ and do what she gets paid to do?”
Sienna jerked her wrist out of Goose’s hand. “Mr. Workman will hear about this.”
“Why would ya think he don’t already know?” Goose pointed at some papers spread out on Sienna’s small dining table. “Sign ‘em.”
Sienna hated Goose so much she could taste it. She looked at the papers. Those papers, if she signed them, would put over a hundred debilitated farm workers in the queue for extermination. And it would happen today.
“Ya know,” said Goose. “Toby’s got needs if ya know what I mean. I don’t think they let him, you know, get any satisfaction when he was in the Army. You see the way he’s lookin’ at you standin’ there in that towel.” Goose took a step back to make it clear he wasn’t going to be in the way should Toby decide he couldn’t control his urges. “Toby’s a big boy. Not sure I could do nuthin’ to stop him should he decide you were too purdy not to have a go.”
“You’re going to let your goon rape me if I don’t sign those papers?” Sienna wished more than anything she had a gun to shoot them both. “Is that it?”
“I ain’t doin’ nothin’ of the sort.” Goose feigned innocence. “I’m just tellin’ you we’re stayin’ ‘til you sign them papers. If it takes a long time for you to git ‘round to it, well, so be it. I’m just sayin’ I can’t be responsible for keeping a handle on old Toby boy with you struttin’ your purdy stuff ‘round in that towel. That’s all.”
“You’re a pig.”
“No, I’m a goose.”
Frustrated and angry, Sienna wanted to scream her rage. But she was afraid of what Toby and Goose might do. Looking at Toby’s dead eyes and drooling mouth, she feared a lot worse than rape.
She looked at the papers. She had no choice, at least not in the moment, but she had every intention of fighting this once she got to the meeting with Mr. Workman and the State Inspector. She cut a glance at Toby and then focused on Goose. “You tell him to wait outside, and I’ll sign the papers.”
“Sorry, can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Can’t let him outa my sight,” said Goose. “Rules.”
“Bullshit. He wasn’t with you when you were on the porch. How’d he get here?”
“He was on your neighbor’s porch. Right behind you the whole time we was talkin’. You just didn’t see ‘im.”
Was that true? Had the steroid giant really been there? A shiver ran up her spine.
She took one more glance at the oaf and pushed her way past Goose as she gripped the top edge of her towel to keep it in place.
She bent over and shuffled through the papers. “What’s this?”
“What you askin?”
“There are at least a hundred more names here.”
“More defects,” Goose told her. “You want I should step outside while you and Toby talk about it?”
She hated Goose Eckenhausen more than ever.
She scrawled a fast, angry signature on each page, pushing so hard the paper tore beneath the pen. Once done, she scooped up the papers and shoved them at Goose. “There. May I get dressed now?”
Goose stepped back and looked her up and down.
Sienna suspected that was the same look all of his rape victims had seen.
“You sure are a purdy one.”
“Get out of my house,” she ordered. “Get out. I gave you what you came for. Leave.”
Goose smiled and nodded as he let his eyes linger on her visible bare skin. “C’mon Toby. Let’s go.” To Sienna, he said, “We’ll be outside waitin’ for ya.”
It was against the rules, but Sienna decided in that moment she was going to buy a gun. She’d never again be on Blue Bean property unarmed.
Chapter 27
“I got the signal.” I looked up and scanned the sky that I was able to see between the tall pines on both sides of the road. I spotted the drone, nearly a hundred feet up, directly overhead. I pointed.
“How’d it get there?” Lutz asked.
The spotter drones were harder to see than it seemed like they should be. With the Wifi connection established between Ricardo’s drone and my phone, messages started to pop up. I read and summarized as I went. “The road is clear. Two turns. We take the left turn twice. Should get us within a mile or so.”
“Nobody out there?” Lutz asked. “Nobody to catch us?”
“I’m reading,” I told him. “I don’t know yet.”
“So what’s the plan, then? I drop you off. You do your shit, and I drive you back out again?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “You stay with the car.” I read more. “Shit.”
“What?” Lutz asked, panic rising in his voice as he looked around. “Did Ricardo see something?”
“We’re safe for the moment.”
“What then?”
“Buzz bikes.”
“Army?” Lutz asked. “What are they doing here?”
I shook my head.
“Police? Already?”
“Ricardo says maybe police. Maybe private. Too far away. He can’t tell.”
“Private?” Lutz scoffed. “Not likely.”
“If the Army or the police are surplusing them out, Blue Bean would probably be able to buy them,” I speculated. “They’ve got the money.”
I’d seen plenty of cops riding the things, hovering over the streets, avoiding all the crap in the roads, zipping across the suburbs at eighty miles an hour. That’s how fast I’d heard the cop versions flew. People said the military versions could carry up to five hundred pounds and hit a hundred and ten.
The buzz bikes, or hover bikes, were a natural evolution of drone technology. Four ducted fans—two in front, two in back—engines powerful enough to get a man off the ground and software built in to keep the things stable. I hated them because I’d heard about all their shortcomings, but now with the possibility of them being available in the private sector, my jealousy turned practical. I looked at Lutz. “Sell the Mercedes. We need to get our hands on a couple of those things.”
Lutz shook his head. “No way.”
“Think of it,” I said. “N
o more roads. No more obstacles. No more having to reroute to get around a riot and missing our sanction. How many times has that happened? Once a month at least. Hell, forget that. We’d get to our sanctions quicker every time. I bet we’d get twice as many kills.”
“No,” said Lutz. “We can’t afford them.”
“You don’t even know what they cost.”
“We just spent five thousand on a goddamn spotter drone,” Lutz spat as if it had been his money I’d laid on Ricardo’s desk. “I’ll bet you’d spend fifty or sixty on one of those, at least.”
“It’d pay for itself in a few months,” I argued.
“Not if we’re in Mexico.”
“Christ, Lutz. Are you back on the Mexico thing?”
Lutz pointed down the dirt road. “Buzz bikes. You said it yourself. There’s no way they won’t see us.”
“They’re not up there for security,” I told him. “It’s not like we’re trying to sneak on to an Army base. Maybe they’re private. Maybe Blue Bean uses them to wrangle stray d-gens. They’re not going to be looking for a Mercedes on a dirt road minding its own business.”
“They’ll see us.”
“What if they do?” I asked. “How big is this place? How many people work here? Normal people, I mean. Several hundred, you think? A thousand?”
“Don’t know.”
“How many does it take to manage all those d-gens?”
“The work camp prisoners manage the d-gens,” said Lutz. “That’s the way the work camps function.”
“But there are employees too, right? Like Sienna Galloway. They’ve got their own cars. Everybody working this far out from town has to have a car.”
“What’s your point?” Lutz spat.
“Those guys riding the hover bikes can’t know every car owned by every employee. That’s all I’m saying. We just drive on in like we belong there, and it won’t be a big deal. Like I said, this isn’t exactly Fort Knox. It’s a corporate farm spread over three counties. Hell, you could probably shoot Roman candles off from the top of your Mercedes and drive through in the middle of the night, and nobody would ever notice. That’s how big this place is.”
“I doubt that.”
“That’s because you have a cloudy disposition. Lighten up and smile for a change.”
Lutz looked at me like I was screwing with him.
I was.
I walked to the passenger door and got in. Lutz followed my lead and got into the driver’s side as he started the engine with an exaggerated sigh. “I don’t like this.”
“Drive,” I told him, as I went back to reading the messages from Ricardo.
The Mercedes started to roll. Lutz said, “I’ll keep it under twenty so Ricardo’s drone can keep up.”
“He’s not coming.”
“What?”
“The hover bikes,” I told him. “Ricardo thinks those bikes can take out his drone?”
“Can they?”
I shrugged. Military bikes might be armed, but not the cop bikes. They didn’t have the payload for that.
“So we’re going in blind?” Lutz asked.
“We know what’s ahead of us.” A long, narrow country road. We were at least five miles from the nearest cultivated field.
“This is bullshit.”
Chapter 28
In a country accent, Irene said, “Hey Goose, how’re you this morning?”
With Toby breathing too close behind her, Sienna followed Goose through the building’s glass doors, glaring at the receptionist, a plump hag with a syrupy voice and dull mind. She presided over the sterile lobby of Blue Bean’s central administrative building.
“How you doin’, Irene?” Goose stepped up to the receptionist counter and leaned his elbows on the polished granite. “Got some papers here for the Boss Man.”
Irene glanced toward a door at the back of the lobby. “Mr. Workman is in the small conference room with the State Inspector.” She reached out for the death orders Sienna had signed. “I can give these to him when he finishes.”
“Sure,” said Goose, passing the papers to Irene. “Before his eight-thirty meeting.”
“Of course.” Irene took the papers, took her flirty eyes off Goose, and turned them cold for Sienna. “Your meetin’s in the executive conference room.” She pointed at a door across the lobby as though Sienna didn’t know where the room was.
Sienna stepped up to the counter. “I need to speak to Mr. Workman before the meeting.”
Irene turned and made a show of looking at a big clock on the wall behind her. “I’ll tell him, but I doubt he’ll have time.”
Sienna held firm. “It’s important.”
“You run along and take a seat in the conference room.” Irene pointed again. “I’ll let him know.” She turned her doe eyes and coffee-stained smile back at Goose.
It was puke-worthy. Irene knew Goose was a lifer. She had to know what he was in for. Still, she seemed to want little more than to drag him beneath her cloying sheets to entertain him between her lumpy thighs.
“I need to run,” Goose told Irene before exaggerating a wink. “You make sure Boss Man gets those.” He gave Sienna a glance and a snort. “I gotta get all them defects to the Bloodmobile. Shoulda been done yesterday but somebody got lazy ‘bout signin’ their paperwork.”
Sienna didn’t rise to the taunt, satisfying herself instead to see Goose head for the door with his drooling Bully Boy in tow.
“The conference room,” Irene reminded Sienna before turning her attention to some papers on her desk. “Coffee and pastries inside.”
Chapter 29
“Did you see that?” Lutz asked, pointing into the sky above the road.
“No.” I looked up from the map on my phone.
“Hover bike. I think it was a cop.”
“Ricardo said they were Blue Bean’s buzz bikes.”
“Looked like a cop bike to me.”
“By himself?” I asked as I stared at the narrow strip of sky I was able to see between the trees that bordered the road in front of us. “Just one?”
Lutz took his foot off the accelerator as he craned his neck to look above us through the windshield.
“Keep going,” I told him. “We need to get to Sienna Galloway.”
“If that was a cop up there, you’re not going to be seeing anybody.”
“Speed up,” I told him. “If the guy on the hover bike saw you, going slower isn’t going to help anything.”
Lutz shook his head but pushed his foot on the accelerator anyway. “I can’t get caught with you.”
“You can say you didn’t know there was a warrant,” I told him, guessing the root of his worry. “It isn’t even twelve hours old.”
“How are we going to explain being on Blue Bean property?”
“Lie.” I laughed. “Say we got lost. It’s not hard. No road signs. All these dirt roads look alike. Besides, we’re not on their property yet.”
We were racing along over fifty, and the Mercedes was bouncing and rattling everything around in the back not strapped down. Thankfully, the dirt was moist in the shade of the trees, and we weren’t throwing up a dust plume. That would be a hard thing to miss from above.
“What do I do at the turn coming up?” Lutz asked.
“Left,” I told him.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
A dark streak crossed over the road above the trees ahead of us.
“You see that?” Lutz shouted.
I did.
“Cop bike?” he asked, making no effort to hide his anxiety.
“Looked like a cop bike to me,” I agreed. “But it was moving too fast to tell.”
“It was a cop bike.” Lutz looked around at the trees. “The kill site isn’t far from here, I bet. Maybe ten miles that way.”
Lutz was wrong about that. By my guess, we were three or four miles away. “What are you getting at? Why’s that important?”
“Maybe they’re investigating. Maybe t
hey’re out here looking for us.”
That was possible.
Chapter 30
Sienna was tempted to lean across the wide table and slap the jelly-filled donut out of Mike Rafferty’s mouth. “The Mobile Retirement Unit is here, on the property. Today.”
“I know,” Mike mumbled through the sugary mush filling his cheeks. “We brought it in with us.”
“That’s not the point.” Sienna crossed her arms and clenched her jaw. She glanced at the closed conference room door and then turned back to the State Inspector’s assistant. “You’ve been telling me for months that we can’t do anything right now. When can we do something? Blue Bean is murdering degenerates the moment their productivity slips so they can get an allocation of fresh ones out of next month’s class from the state school.”
“Kill and fill.” Mike swallowed the rest of what was in his mouth as he lifted the donut for another bite. “Everybody does it. Impossible to prove.”
“It’s illegal.” Sienna didn’t yell it, but she’d wanted to. “They all get away with it because they’re all a bunch of inbred cousins running the corporate farms out here. They collude to make sure they put similar percentages on the kill list every month, so nobody looks like they’re sending too many, so nobody looks like they’re guilty.”
“Or nobody is doing anything illegal, and the similar stats prove it.” More donut into the mouth.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“I know what you keep telling me.” Mike tried to stuff more on top of what he was already chewing.
“Don’t,” Sienna told him.
Mike looked at the donut. “Blue Bean makes a lot of money. You might be used to getting donuts. But me, on a state salary, you know how often I eat anything but grits for breakfast?”
“I don’t care about the damn donuts and grits!” Sienna realized she was starting to yell, and she made an effort to bring her voice back down to a conversational level, or at least one that Irene out in the lobby wouldn’t hear through the door. “You know how many you’re going to run through the Bloodmobile today?”