Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  “Yes,” Workman told Goose, decisively. “Do that. Make it a priority. Whatever it takes. I don’t want them disrupting the harvest, you understand?”

  “Yessir.” Goose glanced over at Sienna, anger clear on his face. “Dependin’ on how long this takes, I might not be able to git all them defects out of Dr. Galloway’s trainin’ compound and put ‘em in the pens in the retirement stagin’ area today.”

  Workman turned a pair of icy eyes on Sienna. “If you’d gotten your list approved on time, all the defects would be in their place already.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.” Workman leaned forward, towering over her, bumping her with his protruding trophy gut. “I’m clear with my expectations. I always am. I expect my employees to meet them.” He looked over at Goose. “You go get your security boys and get this wrapped up. I don’t want crooked Regulators on my farm killing the productive degenerates.” Turning back to Sienna and drilling her with a hard stare, he said, “We’re already at risk of not getting our allocation from the state school. If we don’t get our kill done by the end of business tomorrow and present the executed defect list to the clerk, we won’t be able to fill our allocation until next month. I don’t want to run three hundred workers short for a whole month just because somebody can’t stop themselves from hugging violent degenerates who aren’t any use to anybody anymore.”

  Three hundred?

  Sienna realized she should have taken a closer look at the list Goose had forced her to sign. He’d added a lot to it.

  Chapter 34

  I don’t know how long we drove—fifteen minutes, thirty—all on overgrown roads under a canopy of pine boughs that blocked the sky. Along the way, I spotted a few houses, a barn, and some pickups, well off the road, abandoned and slowly deteriorating as the forest consumed them.

  “You know where we are?” Lutz asked. “We gotta be on Blue Bean property by now.”

  “Probably not,” I told him.

  “How’s that possible?” he argued. “You said it was right by the road, way back there before we turned left.”

  “It was. Back there. It’s not like Blue Bean is one big square on the map. The property line is up and down, back and forth, all over the place. The road we turned on ran north of the property line for a while. Now I can’t say for sure. I looked at the GPS-enabled map on my phone. The road didn’t show. As far as the map knew, we were in a dense forest on a goat trail. The nearest marked road was miles away.

  “Is there a way out?”

  “I think we’re near some cleared fields,” I told him. “Can’t tell if it’s old cattle pasture or what. Maybe we can cross if the buzz bikes are gone.”

  The vegetation ahead of us suddenly seemed to grow thick with vines growing up the trees and hanging off branches, totally blocking the view of anything beyond.

  Having caught the spirit of our adventure through the woods, Lutz gunned the engine and rammed the Mercedes through the vines.

  We burst into bright sunshine. Lutz instinctively hit the brakes and brought the Mercedes to a skidding halt in a field of well-tended furrows with cotton in rows that ran to the horizon.

  And d-gens.

  Maybe a hundred. They’d been picking and hauling, but now they were all frozen, staring straight at the big black Mercedes that had burst from the trees.

  Lutz muttered, “Oh, shit.”

  “Reverse,” I told him as I took a quick scan of the sky. “Get us back in the trees.”

  Lutz fumbled with the shifter for a moment, stuck the Mercedes in park, and gunned the engine to no effect.

  “C’mon,” I told him, holding my voice calm to keep him from panicking.

  Lutz found reverse. He looked over his shoulder and spun the wheels as he rolled the Mercedes back through the car-sized tunnel we’d just blown through the curtain of vines. “Where do I turn around?”

  “Just keep going backwards.” I took a hard look at the d-gens scattered across the field. They weren’t the dangerous, feral ones, these were harmless farm workers, trained, sorted, and allocated by the state school. They might turn violent one day, but at the moment, they weren’t a worry. Near the d-gens, I spotted a handful of men, all wearing hats, all standing up straight, armed and staring at Lutz and me. Those had to be the trustees. They likely had walkie-talkies or cell phones connected to the Blue Bean private network. They were the danger.

  I refocused on the map, looking for an answer there that maybe I’d missed.

  Lutz bounced the Mercedes back down the path in reverse. “Anything?”

  I shook my head. Lutz was praying for another fortuitously hidden escape route.

  I couldn’t fault him for it. “Keep going.”

  Lutz kept racing backward as the road slowly curved into the woods.

  When I guessed we’d gone maybe a half-mile, I ordered Lutz to stop.

  Lutz mashed the brakes, looking at the trees on both sides of the road, looking for another road he just knew had to be there.

  “Have you got a full charge on your phone?” I asked.

  “What?” He looked at me like I was speaking nonsense.

  “Check.”

  Lutz huffed and dug his phone out of his pocket. “There’s no signal out here. Why the hell—”

  “Do you have a charge?”

  Lutz powered up his phone. “Yes. No signal.”

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “Does the GPS work on that phone? Can you open the map and see where you are?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Check, Lutz. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I—”

  “Just check.”

  Lutz grumbled, fingered his phone screen, and after a moment turned it and showed it to me.

  I reached over, pinched my fingers on the screen to get a larger view of the map and saw he had the same thing on his phone as me. “Okay. You’re not going to like this, but this is what we have to do.”

  Lutz’s mouth opened, but he was lost for words.

  “You need to get out of the car. Take your rifle, pistol, some water, whatever you think you might need.”

  “It’s my goddamn car! If anybody’s getting out it’s you.”

  “Dammit, Lutz! I’m trying to save your ass here.” That wasn’t my goal so much as it was a fringe benefit for Lutz. If I got busted, I needed someone on the outside who would take a bribe to do just about anything. And that was Lutz. But that was secondary to my primary reason for getting rid of him. With all the attention we were getting, Lutz would turn into a larger and larger liability. I had the ability to move fast and stay hidden when I needed to. Once out from behind the steering wheel, Lutz had no remarkable skills except in the way of making every situation worse. “I’m going to take the Mercedes.”

  Lutz put a hand on a pistol.

  “Don’t,” I told him calmly. “I’m helping you here.” I pointed northeast. “About three or four miles straight through the woods, you’ll come to a farm-to-market road. If you follow it east for a bit, you’ll come to a small town.”

  “I’m not hiking through the woods.”

  “Use your head here, Lutz. I’ve got a warrant on me. The cops are after us. Those guys we just saw in the field, they’re alerting their higher-ups about trespassers in a black Mercedes running over the cotton crop. We’re not going to get out of this in your car.”

  “I’m not losing my car.”

  “Go through the woods,” I told him. “It might take you the rest of the afternoon. Use your phone to keep yourself headed in the right direction. When you get in range of a cell tower or Wifi signal, contact Ricardo. Tell him to have one of his gopher guys come out and pick you up.”

  Lutz slumped. “He’ll charge me a thousand dollars.”

  “No, he won’t, but he’ll charge you something. I’ll pay, whatever it is.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to make a scene to draw them away from you. I need to get a lot closer to Blu
e Bean’s admin complex. All three places Sienna Galloway might be are over there. I’ll ditch your truck somewhere along the way. The cops will impound it. All you need to do is tell them I was driving it. Tell them you were back in Houston the whole time. I’ll cover the impound fee and towing, and you’ll have your truck back in a few days.”

  Lutz looked at the trees, gears turning inside his skull.

  “You got a better idea?” I asked, “I’m open.”

  “I could dump you here and go back the way I came.”

  “Up to you.” I shrugged. “If I have to hike, it might take me the rest of the day, maybe longer, to get to the admin compound and find Sienna. I think you’d agree with me, the sooner we make our deal with her the better off we’ll both be. You make the call.”

  Lutz stared at the trees for several long moments. “You’re an asshole.”

  “I know.”

  He opened his door. As he was stepping out, he said, “If I don’t get my truck back—”

  “I know.”

  Chapter 35

  Inspector Doggett, a chinless man with sagging gray skin and thinning hair, was pedantic about sticking to the agenda, which consisted of topics that were no more than a list of forms Blue Bean was mandated by the state to provide. Being a corporate farm that serviced many state contracts and utilized degenerate labor as well as labor from a penal system work camp, Blue Bean Farms was required to submit a daunting list of forms, some monthly, many quarterly, and even more annually. And they submitted them to Inspector Doggett in a series of meetings with various department heads according to Inspector Doggett’s agenda.

  The meetings proceeded according to the same script each month, and the meeting with Sienna started going off the rails at about the same point every time they arrived at a particular agenda item—the review of reports on the methods spelled out in Blue Bean’s operations manual for training and disciplining degenerates, and the curricula Sienna had developed for educating the staff on those methods. Sienna took to pointing out that having the materials in place and filling out the form—hence compliance, as defined by the law—was pointless. Documentation was worthless if none of the procedures listed in the documents were being put into practice.

  The first time Sienna voiced her concerns, Keith Workman’s face turned red under his generous coif of silver hair, and she thought he might be having a stroke. That fear vanished when he let loose a tirade that embarrassed her but was ignored by both Inspector Doggett and his assistant, Mike Rafferty, both of whom looked at the papers on the conference table in front of them and pretended like nothing had occurred.

  That had happened months and months ago.

  Now it all proceeded according to a memorized script: Sienna told them the documents asked the wrong questions. Keith Workman insisted Sienna’s concerns were good-hearted but founded in idealism rather than practicalities. Blue Bean Farms did its utmost to meet all the aspirations listed in its official procedures. Doggett always followed Workman with an admonishment directed at Sienna for trying to create the illusion of impropriety where none existed. Blue Bean was in compliance with the law, and Sienna’s signatures on the documents proved it.

  Sienna’s protests grew weaker with each passing item on the agenda, each form submitted, each pointless meeting, until they got to the kill list. That’s where Sienna made her stand.

  “That brings us to the last item on the agenda, The Defect Retirement List.” Mike Rafferty said it as he flinched at the words.

  “I have it,” said Inspector Doggett, dragging his bored gaze up and down a few of the sheets lying on the table in front of him. “All seems to be—”

  “No,” Sienna told him. “It’s not in order.”

  Mike Rafferty deflated. He knew what was coming.

  Keith Workman glared silent threats at Sienna, and Inspector Doggett heaved a great sigh. “Oh, good God. Do we have to do this today?”

  Into Doggett’s disrespect, Sienna pointed at the papers and said, “That Defect Retirement List is not—”

  “Every month it’s something with you,” Workman spat.

  He said it with such vitriol that Sienna was surprised into silence. Her relationship with Workman had grown contentious, no doubt on that point existed, but the tension seemed suddenly to have escalated to a new level.

  “If you hate your job so much, why don’t you just quit?” asked Workman.

  The question had been coming up between them with some regularity over the past few months. Each time Workman brought it up, she’d made the case that she was determined to fulfill the goal of making Blue Bean Farms a model of productivity under humanitarian guidelines—exactly what she’d been hired to do.

  In the face of Workman’s animosity that Sienna now realized must have been brewing under the surface all along, she gave up on trying to push him in the direction of the aspirations he’d said he had. “Why don’t you fire me?”

  “Fire you?” Workman’s jaw clenched, and so did his big fists. “I wish I could.”

  “You’re the CEO,” Sienna told him, finding it easy to play it cool now that she’d decided she could live without Blue Bean’s paycheck and all the crap that came with it.

  “The only damn reason I hired you was to settle the state’s civil suit against Blue Bean Farms. Now I can’t fire you without having three million dollars in fines reinstated.”

  Sienna opened her mouth to retort as Workman’s words sank in.

  “Leaves you speechless, doesn’t it?” His face did something that was supposed to look like a grin but looked more like he was baring his teeth. “You believed all that bullshit I told you about how you were perfect for the job, and you thought it was your qualifications and your passion I was interested in. I could have lived without your passion, but you were the only goddamn one who applied for the job—hell, I still can’t find anybody else. Well, the state told me what Blue Bean had to do to comply, and by God, that’s what we did, exactly what we did. So here you sit. All that documentation you wrote has been incorporated into our standard operating procedures manual, just like it’s supposed to be.” Workman reached and tapped his big fingers on the stack of papers in front of Doggett, “And you sign the necessary papers for the monthly meeting.”

  Sienna snapped her gaze over to Doggett. “I’m retracting my signature from those documents.”

  Doggett tisked and shook his head. “That’s a new one, but you realize that’s not possible, don’t you?”

  Mike Rafferty sat up straight and said, “The paper is signed. It’s been submitted to Inspector Doggett. Now it’s state property, Sienna, an official record, to do anything to alter or destroy it is a felony.”

  “That’s right, little lady.” Workman smirked. “Tear it up if you want. We can put you in the prisoner barracks up in the work camp. You’ll get all the time you please in the company of d-gens. You’ll love it.”

  Ignoring Workman, Sienna told Doggett, “I was coerced into signing the Defect Retirement List.”

  “How so?” Doggett asked.

  “One of the trustees brought a Bully Boy to my cabin this morning and threatened to rape me if I didn’t sign it.”

  Doggett didn’t respond except to look over his glasses at Sienna as if she were lying.

  “In your bungalow?” Workman mocked Sienna with a booming laugh. “In the residence compound, where only employees are allowed. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That is what I’m saying,” Sienna told Workman. “I just told you about it in the lobby. Goose Eckenhausen and an oaf named Toby came into my house.”

  “Wouldn’t happen.” Workman pushed out his lower lip and shook his head as though that would help his appearance of contemplation. “Couldn’t happen.”

  Sienna was dumbfounded by how boldly Workman lied.

  Doggett took on a tone of a disappointed father, and he planted his elbows on the table and leaned across. “Why do you put us through this, Ms. Galloway?” He spun one of the sheets of paper
from the kill list and slid it across the table for her to see. “It’s dated last week. Why did you wait a week to bring up this fantasy about coercion?”

  “That date was already on the paper when I signed it,” she told him.

  Workman harrumphed and took Doggett’s attention away from Sienna. “I told you, she’s unstable. She needs to be on medication. Will you finally accept my request to have her removed without paying the fines? I’ll find someone to fill her job eventually.”

  “Mr. Workman,” Doggett said, sadly shaking his head, “If you were able to convince Ms. Galloway to bring in an assessment from a psychiatric professional that indicated she was incapable of handling the responsibilities of her job, then the state—”

  Workman laughed again. “I can’t even get her to quit? How do you think I could get her to see a shrink? Paranoid people don’t know they’re paranoid.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Workman,” said Doggett. “Without a professional opinion from a psychiatrist, there’s nothing the state will do.”

  Workman jumped to his feet, sending his rolling chair slamming into the wall behind. “I suppose this meeting’s over, then.” He turned and stormed out the door.

  Chapter 36

  As Lutz got himself situated to trek through the trees, I examined the map on my phone, finding the landmarks I would need to guide me once the chase was on, and finding the tracts of forest I could run the Mercedes into when it came time to ditch it and disappear.

  I got out of the Mercedes and went around to the driver’s side where Lutz was standing. “Use your map. It’ll take a while to get there, but you won’t have any trouble finding the road. You good?”

  Lutz looked at me, not shaking his head, not nodding. I was pushing him down a path he didn’t want to take, but he wasn’t pushing back.

  “Alright.” I got into the driver’s seat, belted myself in, and put the Mercedes in drive without giving Lutz another look.

  I gunned the engine, gave the gas gauge a quick check, and sped forward.

  I wondered how much time had passed since we burst through the trees and were spotted? Ten minutes? Something like that.