Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  How did I miss that?

  Ricardo said, “All those d-gens were Blue Bean Farms’ workers. Every one except the girl.”

  Neither Lutz nor I had any response. Somehow, with all that had been going on, that detail never stuck with either of us.

  “There’s a phone number here.” Ricardo pointed at Sienna Galloway’s information sheet.

  Time to get back on task.

  Having already disassembled my phone, I came back around to my place on Ricardo’s desk. “Can I use your phone?”

  Ricardo opened a drawer that contained a half-dozen phones among other random pieces of junk. “Pick one. A thousand each.”

  I looked at the phones. A thousand dollars?

  “Clean,” said Ricardo. “Use it for a week or two then toss it. Better yet, toss the SIM card and sell the device.”

  New phones were impossible to get outside of government, but old phones like these were a dime a dozen. “I’d be lucky to get fifty bucks for it.”

  “Without a SIM card and an active account, that’d be exactly right,” Ricardo confirmed.

  I’d already put too much risk on myself by stupidly not pulling the SIM card out of my phone the moment I found out I had a warrant. I wasn’t going to risk putting the SIM card back in. I reached into my pocket and took out two thousand dollars and laid the money on the desk. “If I buy two, can I get a third for free?”

  Ricardo laughed. “Why not?”

  I took three phones, dropped one in my pocket, tossed one to Lutz, and flipped the third open. “I’ll need the number off that phone, Lutz, so you and I can call each other.”

  Lutz grumbled something as he fumbled with his overpriced, used phone.

  I looked at the number on Ricardo’s screen for Sienna Galloway, and I dialed as he looked on approvingly.

  The phone took a moment to connect, but once it did, it didn’t ring, it went straight to a generic voicemail account.

  “Crap.”

  Ricardo raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Her phone’s dead,” I told him.

  Ricardo looked back at the screen. “It was working when she threw it back in the bag.”

  I dialed a second time to confirm the result. Still nothing but voicemail. Damn. An expeditiously placed bribe could do so much to remedy my problems. Ten thousand dollars for a few little lies from Sienna Galloway and I’d have flimsy but sufficient proof to keep myself out of a work camp.

  Chapter 22

  Sienna Galloway sat among tightly packed trees at the top of a red clay bank that plunged steeply down to the river. Fog floated thick over the channel, hiding the soupy, reddish-brown water flowing beneath.

  She’d just finished putting on her jeans, blouse, sweatshirt, and boots. In her hands, she stared at her smashed phone. While running through the woods she’d tripped and fallen. The phone was beyond repair.

  The phone had cost her nearly a week’s pay back when the best job she could get with her Ph.D. was at the state nursery, trying to sort the thousands upon thousands of preschoolers by intellectual aptitude, turning the incorrigible ones loose—eventually—and funneling the others into roles of graduated complexity. The least-complicated jobs for degenerates were often on the corporate farms where they labored at simple, repetitive tasks, many of which had been done by machines back in the days when there was sufficient skilled labor in the country to keep the tractor factories open.

  Degenerates with a few more smarts and a degree of social skills were trained for domestic help for those who could afford it. Many wound up in janitorial roles, some in food service.

  The brutes—the trainable ones with a penchant for terrorizing their peers—were earmarked for roles that matched their talents. Some went to the military as backup muscle for the regular soldiers. Many wound up with the police, attached to the riot control squads.

  Degenerates beating their debilitated brethren into submission, that was an idea the thinking public loved. In truth, they’d have embraced anything they thought might curb the d-gen riots that incessantly plagued the cities.

  Sienna hated that requirement of her job, sentencing young boys to a future of progressively worse violence. She believed most of those boys could have been put into productive roles in other places, but she had quotas to fill. The military and police quotas took priority over all others. The quotas that irked her the most were those for the private security firms. Every year, they took more and more boys. Every year they lobbied for a higher priority until, by the time Sienna left, they got whatever the military and police didn’t take.

  It was a waste of the country’s scant semi-intelligent manpower. So many industries that could otherwise be rebuilding America’s economy were bridled by a lack of workers.

  And most degenerates simply couldn’t work.

  They sat on the curbs in decaying suburbs, trying to catch rats and scratching their genitals. Wasting their days staring at the empty food troughs in the street, waiting for the trucks to come and fill them. The most their brains were capable of was eating and procreating. Even basic hygiene was too taxing for their minds. They couldn’t put a square peg in a square hole if square was the only choice.

  Hell, even a chimp could do that.

  And a degenerate who couldn’t consistently master a simple task was useless to society except in the role of producing more humans.

  Unfortunately, nearly every degenerate wound up useless no matter how much aptitude they seemed to start with. For instance, a degenerate who grew into his late teens with the ability to harvest strawberries, pull weeds, and cultivate a field, might—by the time he was thirty—be unable to tell a strawberry from a snail. By the time degenerates were thirty-five they were completely useless in an industrial sense.

  That was the spongiform encephalopathy at work. Prions never stopped eating away at the cortex. Few degenerates lived past the age of forty.

  Those were all old frustrations that burdened Sienna when she worked for the state.

  The offer she’d received from Blue Bean Farms had saved her from that. At least, it seemed to at the time.

  She’d been reluctant to accept the offer at first. Blue Bean, like many of the corporate farms, was constantly being fined and continually under federal investigation for their abuses.

  But Keith Workman, Blue Bean’s CEO, had assured Sienna they were hiring her as a way to become the industry leader in humane farming methods. He’d explained to her that Blue Bean, like so many other businesses in so many industries, lacked the expertise to humanely maintain degenerate productivity. It was that simple. Sienna would help solve that problem by redefining Blue Bean’s standard operating procedures and retraining employees to follow those procedures.

  It sounded like a wonderful job to help Blue Bean become a better corporate citizen and by extension make the world a little bit better place. Oh, and she’d make a lot more money.

  Such are the effects of the rose-colored glasses everyone wears into new employment opportunities.

  Blue Bean Farms owned a parcel of land measured in square miles rather than acres. It covered the westernmost parts of Harris County, a corner of Montgomery County, and more than half of small Waller County.

  Mr. Workman was notably tight-lipped about operational information, but as near as Sienna could figure, Blue Bean had maybe a few hundred paid employees overseeing the whole operation, and most of those had little to do with direct farm production.

  The farm work was supervised by work camp detainees serving sentences that ranged from a few years to life. There were nearly a thousand of those. Stealing from a tradition dating back to Deep South prisons from over a hundred years ago, some of the lifers were selected as trustees. They were armed and given responsibility for keeping the rest of the work camp prisoners in line and to keep them from escaping.

  The work camp inmates oversaw Blue Bean’s degenerate population, nearly thirty-thousand of them. The inmates were the ones responsible for productivity. They were
the ones who handled the degenerates on a daily basis. And they were the ones Sienna most needed to retrain.

  Unfortunately, Sienna came to learn that she had no authority over the inmate population. She could only make recommendations to the Warden, a state employee who oversaw the work camp facilities on five separate corporate farms. He spent little time on Blue Bean property. Sienna suspected he and his two-dozen guards spent most of their time fishing and hunting, only showing up in force when an inmate escaped. Even then they did little except drink beer in the admin building while the trustees tracked the runners down.

  Despite all that, Sienna tried. She filled out her forms. She cajoled trustees. She pleaded with the Warden, and she continually begged Mr. Workman to back her up in something. That, and she filed whistle-blower complaints with the Texas State Degenerate Oversight Board.

  Those complaints went ignored as far as she could tell. And the longer she stayed at Blue Bean, the more she grew to hate her job—as much as she’d hated the previous one at the state nursery.

  Sienna realized tears were silently tracing down her cheeks.

  She sniffled.

  She wasn’t a crier.

  She wiped her eyes, got to her feet, and scanned the foggy night. She had miles to go to get back to her bungalow in Blue Bean’s admin compound, and she had an early meeting with Mr. Workman and the State Inspector. She couldn’t be late.

  She started walking.

  Chapter 23

  I turned my attention to Ricardo. “Does Sienna have any convictions or warrants?”

  “I can find out,” he told me with a smile full of meaning.

  I sighed. More money.

  He pointed at the screen still showing Sienna Galloway’s work identification papers. “I did this one for free. Blix charges me, too.”

  I pulled another three thousand out of my pocket, wondering if the extra fifty thousand I’d taken from my safe would be enough. I laid the bills on the table. “Three thousand, but that’s for everything I might need until this is over.”

  “Everything?” Ricardo asked, leaning back in his chair and looking at the money. “That’s a big risk for me.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Might be this is the last thing I ask for, and then you make a good profit for not a lot of effort.

  “Or I end up spending another ten thousand fulfilling pointless requests,” countered Ricardo.

  “You’ll know if they’re pointless when I ask,” I said. “If so, don’t fulfill.”

  Ricardo looked at the money for another moment before he said. “Okay, but make it five.”

  “Jesus. I work for a living. I’m not rich.”

  “Four.”

  I heaved a sigh and pulled another thousand out of my pocket. “Deal. Find out if Sienna is clean.”

  Lutz asked, “Why do you care if she’s clean?”

  Ricardo looked over, “Because he wants to bribe her to back your side of the story, to get you off. If she’s a credible, upstanding citizen, it’ll work. If she’s a screwup like you, Lutz, the police won’t believe her.”

  “Keep it up,” Lutz threatened. “You just keep it up.”

  “Blue Bean is a huge operation,” I told Ricardo. “I need to know where to find her out there.”

  Ricardo typed up a quick email and sent it out. “I’ll have an answer in an hour. Maybe less.”

  “Good.”

  Lutz said, “If you’d shot her when you saw her in the corn, we wouldn’t have to do this now.”

  “Shoot a citizen?” I asked in a tone that said, “You’re an idiot.”

  Lutz shrugged and pushed a pair of duck lips out from under his mustache. “You saw her, naked like a savage. Nobody’d think twice about one more body. Now you’ve got a witness on top of the video.”

  “And a death penalty case,” I told him, “that would be investigated because the police get kinda pissed when you start gunning down citizens.”

  “How would they know?” Lutz asked.

  “The same way we figured it out.” I had to try to keep from yelling at him. “You saw the video. You know what they would have found when they came across her body—clothes, a charged cell phone, probably a purse, and an ID. Car keys. You know, all the stuff normal people carry around with them, the kind of shit that’s a dead giveaway that she’s not a d-gen.”

  “We coulda took the bag,” Lutz argued. “We’d just have to go back out there one more time, find the body in the cornfield and pick up the bag. Easy.”

  “Well,” I huffed, “I didn’t shoot her, so there’s no point wasting time arguing about what we could have done.”

  “You can still kill her,” Lutz told me.

  “I don’t work like that.” Not anymore, I didn’t add.

  “Bullshit!” Lutz jumped to his feet and marched toward me. “I know what you did down in Mexico.”

  “You don’t know shit,” I told him. Outside of me, the Camacho Brothers, maybe a handful of other guys who had no reason to talk, and a whole bunch of people who’d never open their eyes or breathe again, nobody knew what I’d done down there. “Rumors.”

  “Oscuridad,” Lutz pushed. “Oxido Negro.”

  “The Darkness?” Ricardo asked, interpreting the Spanish.

  “The Blackness,” Lutz crowed. “Black Rust.”

  “What does that even mean?” Ricardo asked.

  Lutz glared at me. “Why don’t you tell him?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I told him. “It’s stupid Mexican boogeyman bullshit. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “The Camacho brothers?” Lutz threw that one out and stood triumphantly in the center of the room. It was his trump card, one I hadn’t known he was holding.

  “What does this have to do with the Camachos?” Ricardo asked, warily. It was hard to run the most powerful cartel in the failed states of Central America and not have a widely known name.

  With a hand on one of my pistol butts, I stepped up to Lutz and fixed him with a hard stare. “That’s who you think I am, that guy the Camachos are looking for?”

  Lutz must have seen the killer in my eyes because his words suddenly had trouble finding their way out of his throat.

  I stepped in bad breath range and leaned closer. “Answer me, Lutz.”

  He turned his head and stepped back. “I hear rumors.” With a few paces’ distance between us, he turned and tried to pump up his confidence again. He looked at Ricardo and pointed at me. “I’ve seen him kill. Hell, you’ve seen the videos. You know what he can do. Everyone who’s seen that stupid TV show, Bash, knows what he can do.” Lutz looked back at me. “You didn’t learn that shit in a state school, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe the military?” Ricardo suggested. “CIA?”

  The CIA? That agency didn’t officially exist anymore, but everybody believed it was still out there, lurking nefariously in the shadows.

  “I checked,” Lutz told Ricardo. “He was never in the military. I’ll bet that dude, Blix—”

  “Blix is a girl,” said Ricardo.

  “Okay, Blix the girl hacker, could get the answer. She’d dig up the truth about Christian Black, if that’s even his real name.”

  Ricardo looked at me with a little trepidation on his face that hadn’t been there before. “Information costs money, Lutz.” Ricardo reached over and tapped the bills I’d just laid out to pay Blix for info on Sienna Galloway. “Near as I can tell, you can’t afford it.”

  That was satisfying enough. Ricardo was telling me he wasn’t going to get any info about me for Lutz. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to dig himself. I didn’t know where that might lead but no matter where it led, I felt better keeping Lutz in the dark.

  Lutz looked at Ricardo with a silent plea stretching his face, but seeing Ricardo was unreceptive, Lutz gave up. He went back to the couch and dropped his weight on the cushions. Talking for his own benefit, he muttered, “You shoulda killed her. You still can.”

  With that settled, for the momen
t anyway, I turned back to the bank of computer monitors.

  “He’s got a point,” said Ricardo.

  “I can afford a bribe.” I pointed at the screens. “Where are you guys at with the video alteration? Will they get it done on time?”

  “The girl’s a complication,” said Ricardo.

  “I know.”

  “It’s more than you know.”

  One more thing. Always one more thing. I seated myself on the desk again. “Explain it to me.”

  “One of Lutz’s friends, one of the video drone operators has a low-res version up on the web. Terrible quality, very low frame-rate. It’s more a series of bad still shots. But it gets the point across. He’s teasing his customers and getting some traffic.”

  “Great.” Sarcasm, of course.

  “You’ve brought me the high-res version of his video, so you’re probably going to be good in that respect, but if the low-res got through, it’s possible portions of the high-res did too. That’ll be a problem. Like I said, my guys can doctor all the video, but there’s going to end up being a couple versions out there in the world—the doctored version we put together and their version, the original, at least what they have of it. The girl becomes important because she can be a witness who says which one is real.”

  “Or if she’s dead,” Lutz called across the room, “there’s enough doubt that we can get off.”

  “Those are the choices,” said Ricardo. “But if you plan to kill her, then we need to edit her out of the video altogether. If not, then it’ll be too incriminating having the lynchpin witness to a dirty kill video turn up dead. You’ll get the death penalty without a doubt. Juries aren’t sympathetic when you kill a citizen these days, and they don’t care if there’s a little doubt in the mix. Houston is a hangin’ town.”

  “Can you do two versions of the video?” I asked. “Both fixed so it looks like Lutz and I were justified—”

  Ricardo said, “The raccoons are already altered to look like toddlers.”

  “—and make one version with the girl and one version without. Shouldn’t be that hard, right?”