Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  “No, no,” Deke rubbed his face. “I’ll do it. I just ain’t never been on one—one like this before.”

  The other trustees were dragging their bikes out into the yard and mounting up.

  Goose told Deke, “I’ll show you.”

  He straddled Deke’s hover bike and sat down, placing his feet on the rails that served both as foot rests and supports for the bike when it was sitting on the ground. “See, just like a motorcycle.” He reached forward, rested his elbows on the padded supports, and put his hands on the controls. “Looky here, see?”

  Deke leaned in for a close look at the controls.

  “Easy as fuckin’ a chicken.”

  Deke chuckled.

  Goose fingered a button. “Turn it on and off there. Use this joystick over here to move right, left, up, down. This one here is the accelerator.”

  “Where are the brakes?” Deke asked.

  “Ain’t no brakes, you inbred peckerwood. You’re flyin’ in the air. What you gonna brake against?”

  “How do I stop?”

  “Pull back on the joystick, and pull back on the throttle.”

  “What if I do it too far, and I fall out of the sky?” Deke asked.

  “Software inside keeps you from killing yourself,” Goose told him. “Don’t you know nuthin’ ‘bout how these things work?”

  Deke shook his head.

  “It’s simple. Just do like I said. Take it easy at first. Don’t go racin’ or nothin’. Don’t go tryin’ to keep up with me. Just scoot along slow ‘til you get the hang of it.”

  Deke took a headset out of a small compartment on the side of the bike. He put it on with headphones over his ears and mic in front of his mouth. “We can all talk to each other on this. I’ll walk you through it if you got questions. You got me?”

  Deke nodded and pointed at the large, horizontal fans on both the front and the back. “Why’s all them other bikes only got two big ones on the front and two on the back? These two got these other small fans?”

  “Acceleration and steering,” answered Goose. “Them other bikes with just the big fans are more stable, but these two are fast as hell and can run little circles ‘round them others. So be careful with the accelerator. If you pull back too far, without expectin’ how fast this thing will take off, you’ll fly right off the back.”

  Deke grimaced.

  “Take yer time, like I said. It ain’t that hard.”

  The other trustees, all except Rusty Jim, had their bikes running, and two of them were hovering—one a few feet off the ground, one about ten feet up.

  “Kinda sound a bit like bumble bees,” said Deke.

  “Makes you wonder why they call ‘em buzz bikes.” Goose shook his head. Maybe Deke wasn’t as smart as Goose thought. Maybe he was just a liar and hadn’t ever ridden a hover bike. “Now you wanna git on this thing or not?”

  Deke took a big breath to reassure himself and said, “I’ll do it.”

  Goose got off Deke’s bike and showed Deke where to grab it to drag it out into the courtyard. He stayed close while Deke positioned himself correctly on the hover bike and got the engine started. Over the sound of the motor and spinning fan blades, Goose hollered, “Now keep that joystick straight up and down, and ease forward on the throttle.”

  The hover bike’s fan blades spun loudly, and Deke rose into the air. His worry turned into a grin.

  “Told you.” Goose gave the other riders a quick glance. Rusty Jim still wasn’t in the air. He seemed to be confused about the controls. Maybe Rusty Jim was a liar, too.

  Goose jogged over to where his bike was sitting, still in the shed. He dragged it out, mounted it, and put on his headset. “You boys hear me alright?”

  All acknowledged.

  “Good. Y’all listen to me once we git up there, ya hear? Any man don’t do what I say, and I’ll put yer ass on the ground and git somebody else to fly that thing. You got me?”

  More acknowledgments.

  Goose started his engine. Feeling the machine vibrating and humming beneath him, he couldn’t help but smile.

  During the eighteen months he’d been in the Army back before he turned twenty, he’d spent a lot of time on military model hover bikes. He’d never ridden one on any kind of military mission. He was assigned to a maintenance squad as a flunky in charge of changing the oil and handling the most routine of maintenance tasks. It was in the evenings after the sergeants and the officers went off duty that Goose and his buddies took the bikes out and raced them around the training courses. That’s when Goose earned his nickname. It was also when his buddy—a guy they called Mach 5—crashed his bike while racing drunk on a Saturday night. Mach 5 died. Goose earned two years in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge.

  That was the last time Goose flew.

  At nearly twenty feet up and hovering, Goose looked down on his men. All were in the air around the yard in front of the armory except for Rusty Jim. Goose called into his headset, “You comin’ Jim?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, as his bike lifted off the ground and started to spin. “Just takin’ a minute.”

  “We’ll all stick together at first…”

  Rusty Jim was drifting close to Deke.

  “Jim!” Goose snapped. “You give Deke some space. Deke, come this way.”

  Deke looked up, eyes wide, shaking his head. “What do I do?”

  Goose yelled, “Left hand, Deke!”

  Rusty Jim spun faster, getting dangerously close to Deke.

  “Down, Jim!” Goose hollered, “Go down.”

  Deke shouted something into his headset that Goose didn’t understand, and he started to jerk his controls too quickly for his machine to respond. The hover bike leaned left and right.

  “Sorry, Goose,” said Rusty Jim, agitated. “I got this. I just—”

  Rusty Jim’s bike pitched up just as Deke’s bike rolled in his direction and accelerated. The two collided. The men yelled, and Deke panicked as he gave his bike full throttle instead of backing off. His bike got hung up on Rusty Jim’s, and the two careened across the courtyard.

  “Let go of the throttle!” yelled Goose.

  Deke didn’t. His bike pushed faster until it violently rammed Rusty Jim’s into the chain-link fence.

  Chapter 41

  I passed a big, white, official-looking sign covered with rows and rows of blocky black letters and a State of Texas seal. The sign held way too many words to be read by anybody driving by but I did catch the gist of it, and that was the fenced compound a quarter-mile down a driveway was part of the state prison system.

  Buzz bikes were in the air down there, hovering over an interior yard, not organized, not ready to come after me. A section of the fence was down. Something, maybe one of the bikes, had crashed. Dust and smoke were in the air around it.

  So much for my lazy Sunday drive.

  I punched the gas pedal. It was time to see just how fast Lutz’s boxy beast would get me up the road to Blue Bean’s admin complex.

  Chapter 42

  The training compound covered an area the size of three football fields laid side-by-side. It was completely encircled in an eight-foot, barbed-wire-topped fence. Nearly half the ground was dedicated to cultivated rows of the crops grown on various parts of Blue Bean Farms. Those crops were used for training and retraining. There were also several large pavilions where Sienna’s staff of five employees and two-dozen work camp prisoners provided instruction to degenerates, either one-on-one or in groups.

  Along one side fence were the barracks where the degenerates each had a place to sleep while they were in her care. She didn’t, however, have enough sleeping space for all the degenerates Goose had dumped on her.

  Also in the compound was the training admin office where Sienna’s desk sat in the back corner of a tight room with the desks of her five direct reports. Three prisoners also had desks in the office, so there were nine in all. None of the rest of the prisoners needed a desk.

  Over the past
week, Goose had stuffed over three hundred degenerates into the compound, probably hoping the crowding would incite the short tempers and violent acts he said the degenerates had all demonstrated. One more thing to hate him for.

  Sienna sent her paid staff home as soon as she arrived at the training compound. It didn’t help any with their attitudes toward her. Not one had a kind word for her as they were leaving, even though she assured them they’d still get paid for the day. The consensus among them seemed to be that she’d been wasting time with a bunch of degenerates headed for the Bloodmobile and forcing the staff to waste its time on unnecessary work. After that, she told the prisoners to go back to their barracks. They had the day off as well. She didn’t intend to have any of her people helping Goose organize the d-gens for transport to the Bloodmobile’s slaughter pens.

  Once everyone was gone, Sienna unlocked the training compound’s main gate and propped it wide open.

  The degenerates in the yard didn’t catch on right away to the fact they were free. She moved quickly among them and herded them through the gate, but once she got some of them moving, the rest followed.

  She stepped out of the flow of bodies and watched as they left, some headed for the woods. Those might get lucky and evade Goose’s trustees. They’d have a chance at living. Most of them headed straight for the white admin buildings scattered in the distance. Why? Who knew with degenerates? Those would probably be rounded up by day’s end and find themselves in a pen near the Bloodmobile, unwittingly awaiting their turn for humane extermination.

  Setting the degenerates free wasn’t a solution to anything, but it was defiance, and deviance felt good. It felt like poking a finger into the eye of a bully and recapturing all that he’d tried to steal away from her. It was empowering.

  Chapter 43

  Bart said, “They’re both dead.”

  From atop his hover bike, twenty feet above the tangled bodies of Deke and Rusty Jim, Goose watched the black Mercedes pass by on the main road, heading toward the admin complex. He heard the SUV’s engine rev across the distance. The Mercedes was running away. That had to be them, the guys the cops said were coming onto the property, the Regulators who’d killed the d-gens last night without even doing everybody the favor of shooting that blue-eyed bitch, Galloway.

  “I said, they’re both dead,” Bart repeated from where he stood on the ground beside the wreckage. “What’re we gonna do, Goose?”

  Flores, one of the two corrupt cops, was descending and steering his bike toward the hangar he’d dragged it from minutes before. “I don’t want none of this shit.”

  Taylor, the other ex-cop, looked at Goose, looked at the bodies of Deke and Rusty Jim, and turned to Flores. “Wait for me.”

  “Wait!” Goose commanded.

  The three remaining trustees stopped talking and looked up at Goose.

  “Way I see it,” said Goose, “we’re all fucked here.”

  “Not if we stay quiet and get the hell outta here,” said Flores. “Then it’s just you.”

  “No, it ain’t,” Goose told him.

  “You gonna roll over on me?” Flores asked, a deadly threat lurking between his words.

  “Don’t matter,” said Goose.

  “Yeah?” Flores asked, sounding ready to pull his rifle up and shoot Goose right off his buzz bike. “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t matter which one of us Warden Smallwood and his boys drags into an interrogation cell, we’ll talk.” Goose cackled and then went on to explain, “We’re criminals. We ain’t saints. And if we don’t talk, them hicks the Warden hires will beat the hell outa us ‘til we do. It don’t take no mastermind to know what’s gonna happen. Just a matter of who spills a story first. Then the rest gonna take the blame.”

  “Speak for yourself,” spat Flores. “I ain’t rollin’ over on nobody.”

  “Shut up you self-righteous prick.” Taylor laughed mockingly. “I know why you got life. I’ve still got friends on the Force. You would have gotten the needle if it weren’t for everybody you turned on.”

  Flores stood up on the foot rails of his bike and stabbed a finger at Taylor. “You better—”

  “Shut up!” Goose shouted. “Both you fart suckers! You listen. Way I see it, we tell a story—the same story—and none of us takes a lick a shit over this. We still run this work camp the way we like it. We still eat steak. We still get all the pretty little cooter we want.”

  “D-gens,” Flores grimaced.

  “Never stopped you, that I saw,” said Bart.

  Taylor laughed.

  Goose took a hand off the joystick on his buzz bike and pointed at the dust cloud drifting over the road. “Any ah you boys see that black Mercedes pass by a minute ago?”

  “What?” Taylor asked. “The one we got these bikes to search for?”

  “One in the same,” Goose told him.

  “You’re lyin’.” Flores was always the contrary one.

  Bart said, “Shut up, Flores.”

  “Way I remember it,” said Goose, “them Regulators was drivin’ by just as we was gettin’ into the air. Didn’t see ‘em ‘til the last minute. They crashed that SUV through the fence, took out Deke and Rusty Jim before they took off again.” Goose pointed down at the bodies of his two friends. “Them Regulators murdered two trustees.”

  “That’s what I remember.” Bart looked at Taylor.

  “Yeah,” said Taylor. “Took us by surprise. Only it couldn’t have happened that way. That’s why you’re in jail, Goose. You’re a bad liar.”

  “You’re in jail, too,” Goose snapped. “So you ain’t that good yerself.”

  Taylor pointed at the fence, then quickly put his hand back on the throttle. “The fence is knocked down from the inside. If that Mercedes would have come through, it would be laying in the other direction. The story won’t hold up.”

  Goose looked at the fence, looked impatiently at the road. “The way I recall, they came in through the gate and tried to run us down as we were liftin’ off. Some of us got high enough to escape. Deke and Rusty Jim didn’t. They got smashed into the fence, and the Mercedes made a getaway.” Goose glared at Taylor, daring him to voice another objection.

  “Sounds right,” said Taylor. “That’s the way I remember.” He looked over at Flores.

  Letting his bike float and using only one hand on the controls, Goose put a hand on the butt of his pistol. “What do you say, Flores? Did one of them Regulators shoot you in the head before they drove off, or you remember it that the same way as the rest of us?”

  Flores glared up at Goose for a moment. He looked at the bodies one more time, took a resigned breath and said, “I don’t remember nobody getting shot. Just that black SUV ramming through the fence and you telling us all that if we tracked that Regulator down and put a few extra holes in him, then you were going to owe all of us a big favor.”

  “What big favor?” Goose asked, suspicious.

  “Maybe teabag your mother,” said Flores. “Don’t know yet.”

  “You’d like my mother,” said Goose, grinning. “She ain’t got no teeth.” He turned toward the road and saw the dust cloud left by the Mercedes starting to settle back onto the road. “Let’s go get them dirty Regulators.”

  Chapter 44

  I crested a rolling hill and spotted the admin complex—seven white stone buildings with lots of glass, spread over nine or ten acres of flat ground, people milling everywhere.

  My view of the building slipped away as I flew down the road into a shallow valley between hills. The Mercedes rumbled through a rugged low-water crossing, and I gassed it to keep my speed up the next hill.

  I leaned forward to get a good angle to view the sky behind me through my mirrors. That’s when I spotted the black dots against the blue. Buzz bikes. I’d almost started to hope they’d missed me when I’d driven by.

  Oh, well.

  If things were easy, they wouldn’t be interesting.

  I hit the top of the next hill, and it opened up t
o a grassy plateau sprinkled with the widely spaced admin buildings of various shapes and sizes, all single-story structures except one, the main building. Century-old live oaks dotted the ground between the buildings, spreading their boughs over a quarter-acre each.

  The loiterers I’d spotted from down the road were d-gens, Blue Bean agricultural workers wearing collars, matching baggy shorts, and dirty t-shirts. Most of them seemed to be going nowhere, just wandering.

  The main admin building, the sole two-story structure, was unapproachable without being seen. According to the information I’d gotten from Ricardo, that was one of the places Sienna Galloway might be.

  I turned onto a curved driveway I knew from Ricardo’s photos ran a circuit around most of the admin complex, the only grouping of buildings on the farm that had no fence. On the far side of the complex, nearly three-quarters of a mile away, out of my view, sat the residence compound, a second of the three places she might be.

  Taking a quick glance at the sky, I noticed one of the buzz bikes had crossed most of the distance from where I’d spotted it just moments before. Three were far behind. Three cop bikes and one military bike?

  Bastard!

  I was envious.

  It was time to get my reconnoitering into high gear.

  Don’t get in my way d-gens. I’ll run you down.

  I zipped along the curved road around the complex, looking for anything that might give me an advantage when I came back through on foot. I wasn’t planning on stopping the Mercedes and getting out while everybody on Blue Bean Farms could see me do it.

  As I came around the driveway on the far side from where I’d entered, I spotted a compound containing three rows of small cottages, well kept, shaded by dozens of big trees, all behind a fence topped—of course—with barbed wire.

  The residence compound sat on the top edge and down one side of the plateau, a topographical feature that hadn’t shown up at all on Ricardo’s map and exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to find. I caught a glimpse of forest stretching down at the bottom of the slope, and I instantly knew I had my access path. If I couldn’t find a way to get to Sienna Galloway before the end of her shift, then I’d catch her in her cottage when she came home for dinner.