Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  “He’s tall,” she said. “Wide-shouldered. Old guy. Big gut. Looks like a politician.”

  “Anybody else look like him who works there?” I asked.

  “No.” She thought about it for another moment before shaking her head emphatically. “No.”

  “Where will he be?”

  “He’ll probably be in his office on the second floor.”

  “How do I get there?” I asked.

  “Elevator at the back of the lobby. Stairs in the corner.”

  “If I ram this thing through the glass wall on the front of the building, will I hit anything? Concrete support poles, that kind of shit?”

  “No,” she told me. “Nothing in the lobby but furniture and Irene’s desk.”

  “You like Irene?” I asked. “She might get hurt.”

  “It won’t break my heart.” Sienna almost smiled.

  I laughed.

  “You should know,” said Lutz, “there are guys outside with rifles. Six or seven.”

  “Really?” I glanced over at him. “Is that where you and Workman made your bullshit plans? In his office?”

  Lutz nodded.

  “Any gunmen inside?” I asked.

  Lutz shook his head.

  I jiggled the gun in my lap. “Let’s be honest, now.”

  “None were inside when I was there.”

  I glanced back at Sienna. “When we get there, you get down.” I grinned. “Behind Lutz’s seat might be your safest place.”

  Chapter 68

  I pulled off the main road and followed a narrow driveway that curved gently among the oaks before spreading into a small parking lot in front of the admin building’s glass face. Across the front of the building a giant sign proclaimed, ‘BLUE BEAN FARMS, HAPPY PEOPLE, HAPPY FOOD.’ Several cars were parked in the lot, off to one side, not in my way. Four hover bikes were parked on the asphalt, not really in my way, but not out of it either.

  One of the riflemen Lutz mentioned was leaning on a hover bike, smoking a cigarette, looking into the distance, rifle in his lazy hands. Another rifleman stood in front of him, talking and gesturing. I spotted two more at the front door and another walking around the corner to the side of the building.

  Not one of them had noticed the black Mercedes speeding up the driveway.

  That would change.

  No matter how lazy a man, it’s hard not to notice a three-ton box of black steel bearing down on him.

  I figured I’d screw with Lutz. Sometimes I get bored when I’m keyed-up to fight but things aren’t yet happening. “What do you think, forty?”

  “For what?” he asked, pressing his feet against the floorboard as if an extra set of brakes were on his side.

  “For parking inside.”

  “Shit.” Lutz braced himself against the dashboard.

  Sienna shuffled in the back, getting ready for the impact.

  “Fifty?” I asked. “Sixty?” I wasn’t going to go in that fast but it was fun seeing Lutz squirm.

  We were maybe a hundred yards out when I saw a muzzle flash. A bullet pierced the windshield dead-center and broke the back window as it passed through the SUV.

  Gunmen ahead started to scramble.

  The one who’d been leaning on the hover bike was too cool to jump and run when his buddies started to panic. He took an unconcerned look over his shoulder as he flicked the ash off his cigarette. His mistake. His hand-waving buddy dove to the left.

  The Mercedes smashed into the pair of buzz bikes on the right, sending pieces flying in all directions. The guy with the cigarette went under the wheels, and the Mercedes bounced but didn’t lose much speed. The carbon-fiber bodies of the bikes were light.

  More guns fired, but the shots were wild. Nothing hit us.

  We smashed the lobby’s glass wall, and it turned instantly opaque with cracks before shattering.

  I mashed the brakes.

  Tires squealed.

  The support framework for the glass wall shrieked as it bent.

  The Mercedes skidded sideways into the lobby through an explosion of glass shards and came to a stop with the passenger side butted against the back wall.

  I unbuckled my safety belt, flung my door open, and stepped out, scanning for targets.

  The furniture that had been on the floor was broken and scattered. The reception desk, built against a side wall, came through unscathed except for a layer of broken glass. Lucky Irene.

  I holstered my pistol and raised my rifle, pointing it at the SUV-sized hole we’d just made in the front of the lobby. Four targets were still out there, possibly more behind the building.

  Out on the asphalt, near the two remaining buzz bikes, a man with a rifle was getting off the ground. He seemed dazed.

  I fired three rounds. He dropped.

  No confusion now, buddy.

  Nothing else moved that I could see except d-gens, some wandering over the lawns in the distance, most of them staring at the shattered glass on the front of the admin building.

  I didn’t see the two armed men who’d been by the front door, but I knew they couldn’t be far out of my view. I rushed to the hole I’d made where the door had been to get a glimpse from side to side. I needed to get a bead on the two door guards before they recovered from the shock of what had just happened.

  Scanning right to left, I spotted one hollering at his buddy across the parking lot. Misplaced priorities with that one. He should have had his weapon pointed at me. I fired. He died.

  The buddy getting yelled at had apparently bumped his head while avoiding the Mercedes’ front bumper. He died with three bullets in his chest.

  I looked to my left. A guy had been walking around to that side of the building. He’d had the most time to put the pieces together. He’d know he was in danger. He’d be more careful.

  I heard a man yell from that side of the building. I heard another voice from over there. Two guys, at least.

  I pointed my rifle, saw the barrel of a weapon come around the corner, a hand on a stock, an arm, a shoulder, and then a head. I fired, turning the head into a spray of blood, brain, and bone.

  The next guy on that side would be a lot more careful before peeking out. The sight of his dead buddy would keep him neutralized for a few moments.

  I ran to my right, staying close to the cube-shaped building. It wasn’t large. I had a plan that would work if I executed it quickly.

  I took the first corner wide, keeping my rifle pointed down the side of the building. It was mostly bare concrete, painted white with few windows. I spotted someone rounding the corner at the far end, going in the other direction to get to the back of the building. He was in a big enough hurry I wasn’t able to squeeze off a shot.

  I sprinted to the far end, once again taking the corner wide, keeping my aim down the side of the building as it came into view. A steel door just at the corner was closed. Plenty of windows on the back gave me pause, but only for a second. I was going to run by too quickly for a real danger from within.

  Guessing the guy I was chasing was already around the last corner, I sprinted toward it. I slowed slightly as I stepped out from the wall and took the corner wide.

  Down at the far end, just near the body of the man I’d shot from the other direction for trying to point his rifle at me, three armed men stood huddled, pointing toward the front of the building. They were making a plan.

  Sorry, dipshits. The time for planning was before the first shots were fired.

  I pulled my trigger. All three died.

  No more armed men on the admin building’s perimeter.

  I took a hard look across the empty spaces between me and the other buildings, the nearest a few hundred yards away. Nothing except a few d-gens, most of them running, frightened by the gunshots.

  More trustees had to be around, and I knew they’d be coming soon.

  As I ran down the side of the building, I carefully rounded the corner to the front again and didn’t see any dangers. I had some time.


  Running back into the lobby, I saw Sienna and Lutz were out of the Mercedes.

  Sienna pointed at an elevator against the back wall and then an open staircase up to the second floor.

  I ran toward the stairs.

  She shouted, “Double doors at the top. You can’t miss them.”

  I bounded up. Lutz and Sienna followed.

  Once on the second floor I immediately spotted the doors on one side of a nicely appointed waiting area. More office doors opened off the waiting room. A hallway led away from one corner. Panicked voices came from that direction. I crossed the lobby and took a look down the hall just in time to see a closing door at the end beneath an exit sign.

  Office workers fleeing? Probably.

  Back to Workman’s double doors, I bet on speed and surprise. I ran and hit the pair of doors dead-center with my shoulder and bounced back.

  The doors shuddered but didn’t break.

  I backed up and took another run.

  The doors burst open, but I stumbled, fell, and rolled, coming up on one knee with my rifle pointed at Workman’s empty desk chair. I spun around and saw the office was empty, though a closed door on one side might hold danger.

  I ran over, kicked it, and as it flew open, I leveled my rifle inside. A plump, middle-aged woman with puffy black hair cowered in a glass-door shower stall. No Workman. Damn!

  “Where is he?” I growled.

  Holding her hands over her face, the woman pleaded, “Don’t shoot me. I’m just the receptionist. Please.”

  “I won’t ask again.”

  “He…he ran out the door when…when…”

  I had all the information I needed. I ran out of the office, past Lutz and Sienna, and down the hall toward the exit sign, toward the back stairs.

  I flung that door open to see two empty flights of steps. I bounded down. Workman couldn’t be far.

  I burst through the door at the bottom of the stairs and saw people running across the grass trying to get as far from the admin building as they could. I aimed my rifle, pausing as I scrutinized each target. None matched the description of Workman Sienna had given me.

  Next guess, back out front. I ran down the side of the building toward the front, hearing a familiar sound as I went.

  With my rifle up, I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of a silvery coif of hair blowing in the wind as it raced away from me on the other side of the parked cars. In the second it took me to understand what I was seeing, a big man on a blue and white hover bike rose up and disappeared behind the boughs of an oak.

  “Bastard!” It was Workman, awkwardly huge on the bike. He was getting away and I couldn’t shoot because I couldn’t see him for the trees.

  Chapter 69

  Slinging my rifle over my back, I dragged a ragged piece of a hover bike off the top of another that looked to be in one piece. Knowing Workman was getting farther away with each passing second, I gave the bike a quick look for damage. Scratches and chips, nothing else. It was a military model, built a bit more rugged than the cop bikes. I figured I’d chance it. I started the engine, checked the fuel, and spotted Sienna running toward me as she hollered, shaking her finger in the direction Workman had escaped. “That was him! That was Workman!”

  “Got it.” I looked into the destroyed lobby. I didn’t know if Lutz’s Mercedes would be going anywhere soon. “You have a car?”

  Sienna nodded and pointed, I guess to wherever it was parked.

  “You should get out of here. You don’t want the blame for any of this falling on you.”

  “What about your partner?” she asked.

  “Nobody gives a shit about Lutz.” I pushed the throttle, and the bike floated up. “Because Lutz doesn’t give a shit about anybody. Get your car and go.”

  I shot up to thirty, forty, then fifty feet. I was drifting southwest and climbing. Just because Workman started out fleeing in that direction, didn’t mean he kept going that way. If it were me fleeing, I wouldn’t have.

  I scanned the sky as my bike clawed for more altitude.

  I saw no buzz bike.

  The century-old oaks stood like giant broccoli florets on thick trunks under sprawling hemispherical crowns. Most were separated by plenty of space to fly a hover bike through. It was a maze that stretched for nearly a half-mile in each direction, and he was staying down between the trees to keep hidden.

  He was proving wilier than I’d expected.

  But every choice comes with a list of pros and cons. On that cop bike—a bad choice of the two who were left—he could maneuver between the widely spaced oaks if he didn’t go too fast. That meant he couldn’t get far away from the admin building very quickly. Once he got out of the oaks, he’d either have to make his escape across open fields or over the treetops of the pine forest where the trees were too densely packed for his hover bike to fly safely through.

  That meant I had an excellent way to catch him.

  I flew in a lazy spiral, going higher and higher. The white stone and glass buildings of the admin complex all came into view among the oaks. I saw Sienna’s training compound a half-mile to the south, and I saw the rows of cottages another half-mile to the east. No shiny blue-and-white bike with an old man on top, though.

  I’d leveled off at about three hundred feet and continued in circles. I spotted the employee parking lot. People were running toward it. Some were in their cars, already on an exodus down an eastbound road. I didn’t see any of Blue Bean’s pickup trucks driving toward the admin complex, though I saw some in far away fields, parked near bands of d-gens hard at work.

  Lutz’s black Mercedes wasn’t on the road below me. I wondered if the SUV was stuck in the lobby—maybe it wouldn’t be moving again under its own power. If Lutz wasn’t such a 24/7, two-faced prick, I might have felt guilty about it.

  I hadn’t yet spotted Workman, and I started to worry. How long had it been? A minute, three? Could he have parked the hover bike and disappeared into the forest in a car? Could he be holed up somewhere close by with a gang of trustees? Could he be hiding in one of the other buildings, or even in the woods?

  The list of possibilities was long. But would a man running for his life—as he surely had to think he was—with a bike under his ass, flying away from danger, second-guess himself into abandoning his buzzing savior for another plan?

  A flash of movement across my peripheral vision answered that question.

  He was indeed a wily bastard.

  The river’s surface flowed along ten feet below the high banks. Dense pines on both sides of the river grew to a height of fifty or sixty feet, making the river a near-perfect getaway route. Any hover bike flying along close to the water’s surface would be invisible from anyone flying over the forests until they were directly over the river. The only flaw—rivers snake across the landscape in every direction.

  I spotted Workman because he’d just zipped down a stretch of river that ran for a quarter-mile directly away from where I’d pinned myself in the sky. My position gave me a full view of that section of the river’s surface.

  I throttled up to max speed and raced to the spot where I’d seen him for that fleeting second.

  I kept my altitude. In moments I was over the river, slowing so I could follow its course.

  I looked up and down the course of ruddy water, paying particular attention to the lengthening shadows thrown off the pines on the banks. That’s where I expected a sneaky man to fly.

  Almost immediately, I was rewarded when I spotted him hugging the bank, flying low and slow at a speed that allowed him to maneuver the cumbersome cop bike along the river’s winding course.

  Too bad my military bike had been stripped of its armament before being sold into private hands, I could have strafed Workman for an easy kill. He’d never have seen me coming.

  Flying down from above and shooting at him with a pistol was a plan that would work only through luck. Hell, Goose Eckenhausen had missed a whole car when he tried to shoot me earlier—at least, I
think he missed. The problem was that the air was turbulent enough to make a steady aim impossible. And it was impossible to match speed and course with only one hand on the controls.

  Following him until one of us ran out of gas was a wager I didn’t want to make.

  I needed a better alternative. I looked down the course of the river and an attractive possibility presented itself.

  With no idea how Workman’s plan of escape would change once he saw the shelter of his tall pines go away, I figured I’d not give him any time to think about it.

  Chapter 70

  The forest ended at an expanse of soybean fields, which looked to stretch for miles to the south. Through that flat, cultivated ground, the river flowed straight out of the forest for half a mile before cutting a long snaking path for as far as I could see. But I didn’t need to see that far.

  Making a judgment on how long it would be before Workman’s hover bike passed out of the trees, I peeled off my course over the river and dove down a long circular turn that sent me over the forest. By the time I reached the edge of the pines I was just above the treetops, still descending, and still turning my bike back toward the river.

  At a meager altitude of five or six feet, in the danger range of ground clutter, I was flying parallel to the line of trees, perpendicular to the river and heading toward it.

  I throttled back. My timing didn’t have to be perfect, but reaching the river early would ruin my surprise.

  Seconds ticked. Ground slipped by beneath me.

  And though I was watching for it, anticipating it, I still felt a little surprise when Workman flew out of the forest. From my perspective so close to the ground, I didn’t see his bike, which was flying above the water but below the top edge of the bank. I only saw him, looking like a man soaring magically across the landscape.

  I accelerated toward him, coming from the side and a little behind. He was less than a few hundred yards in front of me. I was closing the gap quickly at over thirty miles an hour.

  A handful of seconds passed as I zeroed in.

  He looked to his right, surprise on his face. Maybe he’d caught sight of a blur in his peripheral vision. Maybe he sensed something. Maybe he was skittish, being suddenly out in the open and looking around for threats.