Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  “The Mobile Retirement Unit,” Mike corrected. “The Inspector doesn’t like it when people call it the Bloodmobile.”

  “It’s better than Murder Wagon,” Sienna spat. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  Mortified, Mike said, “Don’t call it that in front of him or you’ll never get his help.”

  “Why do I have to be nice to him to get him to do his job?” Sienna shook her head in disgust. “I should go to the media.”

  “You can’t,” said Mike. “I told you that. Not with what you have. At least not with what you’ve shown me. It’s not proof.”

  “I’m the one who certifies degenerates for retirement.” Sienna felt dirty just for using that word. Retirement was a euphemism for euthanasia. Hell, what they were doing wasn’t even euthanasia. It was slaughter.

  “The Mobile Retirement Unit only retires defective degenerates—the violent ones—on the list you’ve signed.”

  “I’ve told you before,” said Sienna, “They’ve been lying to me about violence and cannibalism. Ninety percent of the retirees they ask me to sign for aren’t guilty. They lose their training because of the progression of the encephalopathy. Ongoing training makes them more expensive to keep around. That’s why Blue Bean and every other farm in the area lies and sends them to the Bloodmobile for you to slaughter.”

  Mike glared at Sienna, taunting her by stuffing half a cream-filled donut in his mouth and speaking through the mush. “Mobile Retirement Unit.”

  Sienna bit back her anger. She’d had hope when she’d first contacted Mike, but not because he had any love for the degenerates. Like her, she thought he recognized the degenerates had a right to life if they could still fill a productive roll. She thought Mike held the same view. “Last time we talked, you told me to get proof. Well, I did that. I sequestered every degenerate in the training compound and my staff scrupulously observed them for days. We didn’t witness one single savage act. Not one.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” said Mike. “You can’t know they weren’t violent before they were put on your list.”

  “Exactly,” said Sienna. “How am I supposed to prove something didn’t happen? Goose Eckenhausen is Mr. Workman’s gopher boy, and his trustees will say anything he tells them to say. They all lie.”

  Punctuating each slow word, Mike told her, “You have to have proof they lied.”

  “I’m going after the Inspector when he comes in here.” Sienna was tired of having the same discussion over and over and over again with Mike. “I’m tired of asking you and nothing happens. I’m tired of him looking the other way. My proof might not hold up in court, but if I put this out on the Internet for the whole world to see, enough people will care, Mike. Because whether you like it or not, whether all of the inbred hillbillies running these farms believe it, mankind will perish from the face of this earth if we kill too many degenerates. Plenty of us still understand that. We need the degenerates to sustain the species. The Inspector better come around. I’m not making threats. He needs to do his job, or I’m calling him out in public along with Keith Workman and all the others.”

  “Don’t,” Mike warned.

  “As soon as he comes in here,” she said, “you’ll see.”

  “You’ll regret it if you do,” said Mike. “You know he and Workman go back a long way. They were in the Army together back in the day. Inspector Doggett won’t side with you.” Mike put his donut on the table and leaned forward. He was serious. “He’ll see you fry.”

  “What about an investigation?” Sienna pointedly asked. “You keep telling me you’re going to tell the proper authorities to come here and do a real investigation.”

  “These things take time,” said Mike. “You have to trust me on this. This isn’t easy. I have to be careful who I talk to.”

  “No,” Sienna nearly shouted. A long night, two dozen killed right in front of her, threats in her own house, had pushed her past her ability to control her frustrations. “Another two hundred degenerates are going to die today with my signature on the paper and all they need is to be retrained. I’ve got that on my conscience, Mike. I’m tired of the guilt. I’m tired of trying and getting nothing done to save them. If Inspector Doggett won’t do something, I’m going to the media and telling them everything I know.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t do that.” Mike was nearly pleading when he said, “Blue Bean is a powerful company.”

  They both ran out of things to say and they sat in silence. Sienna stared at the table. Mike fidgeted with the remnants of a pastry until he said, “You know what the most popular show on TV is right now?”

  Sienna didn’t look up. “I don’t watch TV.”

  “Bash.”

  Sienna shrugged. Despondently she asked, “What’s Bash?”

  “Reality crap. They show video from spotter drones and voyeur drones of the funniest sanctioned kills they can find each week.”

  “The funniest?” Sienna didn’t believe it. “It’s not funny when anything dies.”

  “They run it to music. They run it fast-forward and in reverse. They add graphics. The hosts of the show make snide comments.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Most people find it very funny.”

  Sienna shook her head and stared out the windows on the back wall of the conference room. She should have quit a long time ago, as soon as she’d suspected what was happening. But the money had been good. Mr. Workman’s lies and promises were still believable when she tried hard enough. She’d thought he was a good man managing bad people.

  And Goose Eckenhausen was Workman’s right-hand man when it came to dealing with the trustees and other prisoners. As unthinkable as it was, he was Workman’s foreman, Keith Workman’s dog. If Workman could keep a predator like that on a leash and not recognize—or not care—what he was, then Keith Workman wasn’t worth any faith she’d put in him.

  Chapter 31

  The conference room door opened, catching Sienna’s attention, and freezing Mike Rafferty’s jaws mid-bite. Sienna recovered quickly, just as a blob of purple jelly dripped off Rafferty’s lip.

  Sienna pushed her chair back and jumped to her feet.

  Inspector Doggett stopped in the doorway, startled at Sienna’s sudden animation.

  Sienna saw the sheath of papers in Doggett’s hand, the kill list Goose Eckenhausen had forced her to sign. She looked up at Doggett’s wide eyes. She pointed through the door. “I need to speak with Mr. Workman.”

  Doggett made an indecipherable sound as he stepped aside, allowing Sienna to rush past him, out of the conference room and into the lobby.

  Once past Doggett, Sienna spotted her boss—a tall, wide-shouldered man with a thick wave of silver hair on a melon-sized head, steering his big round gut toward Irene’s desk. He wore cowboy boots made from the leathered hide of some animal so exotic and expensive its identity couldn’t be guessed. His jeans were ironed with a crease and he wore a linen shirt starched stiffly enough that one couldn’t help but guess he had the means to afford domestic help that tended his laundry. He wore a gaudy gold watch and ridiculously large gold rings. His appearance told anyone who saw him that he was a man who never lost at anything.

  Irene stood up, leaned over the counter, and softly spoke to Workman while looking at Sienna.

  Workman’s face turned to a frown.

  Trouble. Sienna turned back to Doggett, smiled sweetly—she hated having to kowtow with false niceties—and said, “We’ll be there in a moment. Go on in.” She turned back to her boss.

  Workman looked Sienna up and down as he put his smile in politician mode. “Dr. Galloway, what’s got you running outta there like a wet cat?”

  Sienna ignored Workman’s good-ole-boy bullshit as she marched up to him and pointed at the door to the small conference room. “May I have a moment of your time before our meeting with Inspector Doggett starts?”

  Workman looked up at the clock on the wall over Irene’s chair. Turning back to Sienna, he sa
id, “We’re already late, little lady.”

  Yeah, because you and Doggett were in the other room reminiscing about drunk girls you banged back in your Army days. “It’ll just take a moment.”

  “If it’s just a moment,” said Workman, reinforcing his grin and nodding to encourage the answer he wanted, “just tell me right here.” He glanced over at Irene. “We’re all family. We’ve got no secrets.”

  Total crap.

  Sienna chose her words carefully, “The retirement list, I need to get it back from Inspector Doggett. I’d like to make some revisions.”

  Workman’s smile disappeared instantly. “I’ve been asking for that list all week long. You were supposed to have it to me on Monday.”

  “I know,” said Sienna. “I was running tests on the defects. I wanted to confirm—”

  “There’s nothing to confirm. Goose’s boys witnessed their behavior. That’s why they’re on the list.”

  “I—”

  “If you had doubts about the degenerates on the list,” he said, “you should have taken off the names you weren’t sure of.”

  “I didn’t,” stuttered Sienna. “I couldn’t.”

  “It’s done.” Workman took a step toward the conference room.

  Sienna put a hand on his arm to stop him.

  Workman scowled.

  “Mr. Eckenhausen came into the residence compound this morning.” Trustees were not allowed in the residence compound. It was an unbreakable rule—or so Workman had told her when she first started. Sienna wrestled with what more to say. Anything she said would get back to Goose through Irene, if not Workman himself. Then what would happen?

  “I’m afraid that’s my fault, Ms. Galloway. I needed that report for Inspector Doggett. I had Goose stop by your residence.”

  “But—”

  “I take full responsibility for him, Dr. Galloway. I know why he’s a permanent resident here. He’s a little rough around the edges, but you have to admit he’s a good man. He works hard for Blue Bean.”

  A good man?

  That knocked Sienna’s anger off track.

  Goose had threatened to let his drooling Bully Boy rape her in her own kitchen. Mr. Workman needed to know. She only hoped Workman hadn’t stooped so low as to order Goose to do what he’d done.

  As she opened her mouth to lay her accusations out, the front door swung open, and Goose came hurrying through, his Bully Boy right on his heels.

  Chapter 32

  “How many are up there?” Lutz asked, frantic as he looked through the windshield.

  Our first sighting of the hover bikes could have been coincidence, but they kept showing up in the sky above the road. They were looking for a good place to make an arrest or they were tracking us until reinforcements arrived in wheeled vehicles.

  “Watch the road,” I told him.

  Lutz swerved past a tree that would have put a dead stop to our getaway.

  “Three, I think.” In the glimpses I’d gotten of hover bikes through the pine boughs overhanging the road, it was hard to tell how many exactly.

  “Cops?” Lutz asked. “Can you tell for sure?”

  I nodded. I was pretty sure.

  The road straightened out in front of us, but it was rough. I said, “Go as fast as you can.”

  “Cop buzz bikes can do eighty,” Lutz bawled. “We can’t go that fast on this road.”

  Calmly, I told him, “Do it. As fast as you can.”

  “Dammit!” Lutz floored the accelerator and the Mercedes bounced over rocks, holes, and gravel. He wrestled to keep the wheels straight.

  I angled the side mirror so I could get a jittery view of the sky above and behind us. After a lag, the hover bikes accelerated over the treetops to keep pace. Through the jostling, I managed to keep my focus on the bikes and got a count. Three. Definitely three. Definitely police. They’d apparently connected me to Lutz and Lutz to the black Mercedes.

  Somebody in downtown Houston had a woody for Regulators. What other explanation was there for them to be so far out?

  I asked, “How fast are we going?”

  “Forty,” Lutz answered.

  “Give me another twenty if you can.”

  “On this road?” Lutz glanced at me, his eyes burning with fear. “We’ll break an axle.”

  “Faster.”

  Lutz hollered something that had no meaning, and the Mercedes lurched to a higher speed.

  We careened over a series of rocks, and I hung on tightly as I expected the Mercedes to bounce sideways and roll.

  To Lutz’s credit, he kept us moving forward.

  “Shit,” I grinned. “I thought you’d lose it.”

  Lutz laughed loudly in total-crazy mode. “Seventy. We’re gonna die.”

  Spotting what I’d hoped to see, I pointed. “See that cluster of old mailbox posts up there?”

  “No.”

  “No worries.” I took another glance at the sky. “When I tell you to, brake hard and take a sharp right. Don’t roll us.”

  “Are you crazy?” Lutz shouted. “Turn into the trees?”

  “There’ll be the remains of an old driveway there.”

  “Just say the—”

  “Brake!”

  Tires skidded over the rough dirt road bouncing us even more than when they were rolling. I was thrown forward against the seatbelt. Lutz grunted at the deceleration as his seatbelt drove all the air from his lungs.

  I pointed at the remains of the mailbox posts and shouted, “There! Turn!”

  Lutz cut the wheels, and the Mercedes leaned way over before running down saplings and bushes to get into the trees.

  Lutz hollered. “Where’s the goddamn road?”

  Pointing straight over the hood, I shouted, “Right in front of us. Slow down now. The road’s overgrown, keep us moving between the old tree trunks on the sides. Look at the tree trunks—you’ll see a corridor that marks the road below.”

  We moved into the bushes as branches snapped and limbs dragged along the sides and bottom of the SUV.

  Lutz hollered, “I don’t see shit!”

  I kept pointing, “That way, keep it straight. Slower.”

  Lutz brought us down to twenty as the forest engulfed us. “What the hell are we doing? We can’t run from them in this!”

  “Cop buzz bikes aren’t maneuverable,” I told him. “At the speed they were going it’ll take them a half mile to slow enough to make a turn to come back and find us.”

  “Shit!” Lutz grinned. “You’re right.”

  “Keep going this way,” I said. “The road angles to the left up here. See?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you when to bear left.”

  “You better,” he told me, “because I still don’t see what you’re talking about.”

  “We haven’t hit a tree big enough to stop us yet.”

  Lutz looked in the rearview mirror. “Look behind us. Some of the saplings are popping back up straight.”

  I shrugged. The dense pine canopy overhead would keep us hidden from the hover bikes above. The trail we were leaving wouldn’t matter until the cops got a wheeled vehicle after us. We needed to be on Blue Bean property before that. The cops wouldn’t chase us there. Probably not. They’d likely let Blue Bean security handle us.

  “You know where this leads?” Lutz asked.

  My guess was probably nowhere, except deeper into the woods with no way out but the way we’d come. Back when people lived out here, the narrow road through the forest probably led to their houses and nowhere else. “Let’s hope we come across another road. Maybe a field we can cut across.”

  “If we drive into a field they’ll see us.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But we bought some time with those cops back there. It’ll be a while before they figure out where we went into the woods but that will only give them a general direction. They’ll have to search randomly from above and hope they get lucky.”

  Lutz seemed awed. “You’re good at this shit, aren
’t you?”

  Of course, I was. “Veer right. Past that big tree.”

  Chapter 33

  “Boss Man,” Goose said, out of breath as he came to a stop beside Sienna.

  “What is it?” Workman asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “The police,” he went on, pointing through the glass wall on the front of the lobby, “they’re out past the eastern edge of the property, investigating that dirty kill from last night.”

  Sienna took a step back. How did Goose already know about that?

  “Yes?” Workman prompted.

  Did Workman know as well?

  Goose said, “They think the Regulators who did it are here.”

  “What do you mean?” Workman asked.

  “Police called the Warden. Warden Smallwood called me and said the police came across ‘em Regulators sneakin’ down an old road, headin’ for the cotton fields just north of here.”

  “Why would they go there?” Workman asked.

  “Don’t know. Police don’t know either. They’re chasin’ ‘em now.”

  Workman rubbed his chin. “Why do you suppose they’re still around after what they did?”

  Sienna couldn’t help but notice the way Workman had asked Goose that question. Workman wasn’t looking for speculation, he’d expected Goose to give him something concrete.

  “Can’t say.” Goose rubbed his chin, too, copying Workman’s gesture. “You want I should round up the d-gens and put ‘em back in the barracks?”

  “Can’t see why we’d need to do that,” said Workman.

  “Warden says the police is askin’ whether they should come on the property to chase ‘em down.”

  “Is the Warden going to handle it?” Workman asked.

  “Warden and his boys is on one of them huntin’ trips they go on or somthin’ like that,” said Goose. “My boys can handle it if you want. We keep a thousand inmates and thirty thousand d-gens from gittin’ out with no help from the Warden and that lazy bunch of his. Ain’t no reason we can’t keep two dirty Regulators from gittin’ in.”