Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  It was time to hurry and get away from the hover bikes. I sped so fast the wheels started to slip on the gravel as I rounded the expansive curve.

  Heading back toward the main road, I spotted another fenced compound on my left and well away from the admin complex. Its front gates were wide open. It was immediately obvious I’d found the source of the wandering d-gens. Some were still coming out. That’s when I realized it was the training compound—the one run by Dr. Galloway—the most likely place I might find her during work hours.

  Best of all, the forest started just on the other side of the training compound.

  However, the open gate was a concern. Something was going on I might need to get an understanding of. Or, Galloway might be in her compound, sitting in her office, possibly with a little less company than might normally be around. Her staff might be out wrangling d-gens. Hopefully she wasn’t with them.

  Opportunity?

  Possibly.

  I needed to find a suitable place to ditch the Mercedes and lose the hover bikes.

  Easy.

  I was nearly back at the road when I spotted several trucks racing up the dirt road, coming from the direction I’d driven to get to the admin complex.

  Up in the sky in that direction, the trio of slow buzz bikes was getting near. That meant the fast one—the military one—had to be close.

  I stuck my head out the window for a glimpse above.

  Fucker!

  He was above me.

  Chapter 45

  In a rush of words and wind, Flores called Goose over the headset wirelessly connected to his bike, “D-gens are all over the place down there.”

  Goose had already seen them, but he was too busy to pay them much attention. The d-gens were a problem for later. Later would likely come as soon as Mr. Workman noticed them. Once that happened, the yelling would start. The threats would follow. Workman wasn’t a bad guy for a Boss Man, but when he got pissed, he could holler for an hour before he wound down.

  Now with the screw-ups starting to stack up on Goose’s head, he knew a hollerin’ was a comin’. He just needed to get something in the win column before Workman called him in.

  At least he was close to taking care of the Regulators in the black Mercedes. Once the Mercedes got back out to the road that ran in front of the admin complex, he’d have to turn right or left. Only two choices. And Goose had trustees in trucks coming from both directions. Lots of men. Lots of rifles.

  “Hey Goose,” Bart called over the headset.

  “What?” Goose asked.

  “Look over there at the training compound,” Bart told him. “These d-gens are coming from there. The gate’s open.”

  Goose glanced and immediately saw Bart was correct. “Dammit. Who the hell did that?”

  “I got one guess,” Bart answered, “but you don’t need my guess to know who done it.”

  Bart was right. No guesses were necessary. It was Sienna Galloway’s doing. Goose was certain. “Bart?”

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “You peel off, gather up a coupla fellas and get to work roundin’ up them d-gens before Boss Man has a fit.”

  “You want I should put ‘em back in the training compound?” Bart asked.

  “No,” said Goose. “Bloodmobile is here. Get ‘em to the staging pens. Boss Man wants ‘em all taken care of before tomorrow so he can get a new allotment from the state. Otherwise, we gonna hafta wait ‘til next month. Flores and Taylor, you git over here with me. Let’s git these assholes in the Mercedes taken care of and be done with it. Head for the intersection up there. He’s gonna figure out in a second he can’t escape in either direction.”

  With the Mercedes moving at a quick, but steady speed, Goose took his left hand away from the throttle, drew his old revolver, and took aim. With the motion of his buzz bike through the air, swaying and bucking over invisible currents, and with the Mercedes drifting back and forth on the dirt road, Goose realized it would be difficult to hit anything. Still, he had nothing to lose by trying. He fired, and couldn’t tell where the bullet hit. He fired again to no effect. “Damn.”

  He couldn’t reload while flying. He didn’t shoot again.

  With the intersection coming up fast, Goose holstered his pistol and throttled back. The nimble bike slowed. He prepared to make a turn in whichever direction the Mercedes chose.

  Goose glanced right to see Flores and Taylor finally closing in. They were heading for the intersection and slowing. They expected the shootout to occur there.

  “Git ready,” Goose told them.

  The Mercedes waited until the last moment before braking. Tires skidded on the dirt, throwing up a cloud of dust. The SUV drifted and started to spin. Goose thought for a few fleeting seconds the Mercedes was going to flip onto its side, maybe roll.

  It was leaning.

  Leaning.

  Dammit!

  The Mercedes’ wheels spun, and it started to accelerate around the turn to head down the road to the left.

  “He’s runnin’ south!” Goose hollered into his headset as he looked down the wide dirt road. Three trucks and eight or nine trustees were coming up that way, and he couldn’t figure why the guys in the Mercedes hadn’t seen them. Well, they were in for a surprise in a couple of seconds.

  Goose grinned. He leaned hard, sacrificing altitude to sharpen his turn to the left to follow the Mercedes.

  At just that moment, the trucks carrying his men from the south crested a small rise. There was no way the Mercedes driver didn’t see them. Goose let off on his throttle, expecting the SUV to brake.

  It didn’t. It accelerated.

  “Damn!” Goose shouted.

  The first of his guards’ trucks swerved off the road. The second and third veered off to the other side, sending them bouncing across tilled ground. One of the men riding in the back of a truck got bounced out of the bed and landed in the dirt.

  The Mercedes raced by.

  “He got past ‘em!” Goose yelled into his headset.

  Flores and Taylor both cursed, and Goose heard their engines whine as they throttled up.

  Goose pushed his throttle all the way forward to close the growing gap between him and the Mercedes. “Mover yer asses!” he yelled into the headset. “We can’t let him get away.” The road the Mercedes was on only had one ninety-degree turn and a few bends, but in eight or nine miles, it would leave Blue Bean property. Ten minutes, max. Once the Mercedes got off the farm, Goose and his men would have to break some pretty serious rules to follow.

  Sneaking off the farm to visit a bar and look for some cooter on a Friday night was one thing, but going off the property with thirty or forty armed trustees was a whole ‘nother thing.

  The trucks that had swerved off the road were getting turned around to give chase, but Goose saw immediately they’d have no chance of catching up. The Mercedes was driving too fast.

  Goose was going to have to do something himself. And that was okay.

  He descended further, down into the danger zone where trees and road signs would be collision dangers.

  He jockeyed with his throttle to come up slowly on the Mercedes.

  The Mercedes crested a hill and started down a long piece of flat road with a slight decline. Goose knew it ran for a couple of miles. He took a hard look ahead to make sure the right side of the road was clear of anything taller than a cornstalk.

  He bumped the throttle to close the gap with the Mercedes while he dropped down a little more.

  Twenty feet off the ground, fifteen.

  He wanted to bring the Mercedes up on his left side. He had to keep his right hand on the steering joystick which meant he had to fire with his left. He didn’t want to have to shoot across his body, so he had to be on the right side of the Mercedes.

  He was gaining quickly, knowing the driver had no chance of seeing him, coming down into the blind spot on the passenger side.

  With any luck, both Regulators would be surprised when the bullets explode
d their skulls.

  Nine feet. Eight feet.

  Warnings were blaring through the headset telling him he was too close to the ground to be going so fast.

  And it felt fast as hell with the ground rushing by just below him.

  Nevertheless, he kept his hand on the accelerator.

  He flew right beside the Mercedes, just a dozen feet right of the passenger window.

  He looked into the SUV and saw only one occupant, the driver. He let go of the throttle and reached across to his right hip to pull his revolver.

  Just as the gun came out of its holster, the driver of the Mercedes glanced over at him, and in what seemed like an impossibly short instant—not even enough time to give it a thought—the Mercedes swerved off the road and into a fallow field, leaving Goose to zip away up the road.

  “Shit!”

  Goose stuffed his gun back into its holster, and he nosed the bike skyward and pulled left to trade speed for a turn. That’s the way it was with these bikes, you trade altitude or speed for a tight turn.

  As he came around, Goose saw the Mercedes racing for the cover of a patch of forest that spread out south and back north. He knew the woods covered thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of acres.

  If he gets there—

  Goose only got half that thought process through his brain before the Mercedes careened through the underbrush and disappeared under the pine canopy.

  “God dammit! God dammit!”

  Chapter 46

  I hadn’t seen a buzz bike since I rammed the Mercedes through the undergrowth to get back among the concealing trees. They were still up there, zipping this way and that, their riders hoping to get a glimpse of me to guide the growing posse of noisy trustees to my position.

  They’d found the Mercedes—there was no way they could have missed it. They knew I was on foot, and the trustees had spread out in groups of three or four, across a wide front, driving me, trying to encircle me.

  I wasn’t running like a panicked animal, I was moving stealthily, dashing from one hiding spot to the next, stopping, trying to gauge the distance and direction of my unseen pursuers, trying to move toward my goal, the training compound which was well north of my position.

  A bike buzzed directly over the tree I was crouching beside, blowing a burst of rushed air through the branches and knocking off loose pinecones and needles that rained down around me.

  He was down too close to the trees for safety, thinking that might enhance his chance of seeing me. It didn’t, but it did show me his path as needles fell to the forest floor as he rode away.

  He wasn’t a worry. He was an idiot.

  Or not.

  What if he was trying to make as much noise as possible? What if he wanted me to know exactly where he was?

  If so, then he was hoping to put a scare into me, trying to herd me in a direction.

  I looked around. I couldn’t guess which direction that was.

  Another buzz bike came riding just over the treetops, not following the same path as the one that had just left, but following a parallel arc, dropping pinecones, needles, and bark as it flew.

  I had a guess on the direction—unfortunately, the direction I wanted to go. Crap. They were herding me off to my left. It was probably a tactic that worked perfectly when the Blue Bean goobers were trying to corral stray d-gens who’d wandered into the forest.

  It wasn’t going to work on me.

  It was time for a sprint. I got up and ran at full speed along the wide arc the bikes were tracing.

  After covering several hundred yards, I stopped.

  The bikes were moving much faster than I could run. Their sounds mixed as they flew around in the distance and I couldn’t pick out the individuals to follow.

  I knelt by a tree, looked, and listened.

  Nothing of any size was moving that I could see.

  I heard another truck racing out on the road. They were calling in the reinforcements to catch me.

  Doubts started to tell me I may have put too much confidence in my woodsman skills. Perhaps I’d silently disparaged too deeply the capabilities of Blue Bean’s work camp trustees. Or maybe I’d pushed my luck a little too far.

  No.

  That’s how I am when I get in these situations. Sure, I have doubts like anybody else, but they don’t tend to hang around long.

  How many trustees were out there? I slowly turned, focusing for a moment in each sector surrounding me. If I had to shoot my way out, could I kill enough of them to make a getaway?

  Probably.

  No, who was I kidding? I knew I could kill enough to make my escape. The question was whether I should kill all of them. They were inexperienced. They were spread out in the woods in small groups. They were noisy. It was tempting to make a statement, to teach these overconfident butt-scratchers a lesson about chasing strangers into the woods.

  But that choice would seal my fugitive status.

  I was starting to wonder whether all the trouble of trying to stay on the right side of the law was worth it. Would it be easier just to go down to Mexico and kill the Camacho brothers and their henchmen?

  That would be one solution.

  It wouldn’t be nearly as easy to do in reality as it seemed in my imagination. But then, what ever was?

  I decided to try stealth a little longer. But at some point, I’d have to make a decision. I couldn’t let the trustees box me in and get an insurmountable numerical advantage. I had no intention of being killed by a bunch of goobers who weren’t even smart enough to keep themselves out of jail.

  Chapter 47

  Keith Workman said his goodbyes, passed his best wishes to the other three people on the call, and watched the animated face in each video window on his computer screen wink to black. He smiled and exhaled a relaxed breath. The contracts would be emailed over by the end of the day on a deal he’d just negotiated with the City of Dallas. Blue Bean was locked in to supply its surplus corn yield to them for the next three years. All at a profitable price.

  Now to find out what had Irene so irritated that she kept trying to break into his videoconference with messages, calls, and emails. He opened one of her messages, and it took only a few seconds to understand her urgency—degenerates were apparently running wild through the admin complex.

  Workman grabbed the remote control for the blinds that kept his office in shade during the part of the day when the sun beat down on his side of the building. He pushed the button to raise the blinds on all the windows. Motors whirred, and the blinds over the floor-to-ceiling windows raised.

  Workman spun in his chair, stood up, and looked out, waiting the thirty seconds for the blinds to slide from bottom to top. The office slowly flooded with a glare from the Texas sun that was harsh even through the tint on the windows.

  Outside, around the other buildings on the grass under the trees, in the fallow fields across the road, wandering in an out of the trees in the distance, degenerates loitered, strolled, and ran.

  That was money out there. Man-hours—hundreds of them—going to waste right before his eyes.

  Workman grabbed his phone, dialed Goose Eckenhausen’s number, and waited.

  Rings.

  Voicemail.

  “Goddammit!” Workman hung up and dialed again.

  Rings.

  Voicemail.

  “Goddammit!” Workman waited for the beep to tell him when to speak. “Goose, I got d-gens all over the goddamn place up here. You better get your ass up here and get this mess straightened up, or you’ll be picking cotton with the d-gens come this time tomorrow. You better call me, goddammit!”

  Chapter 48

  Putting my ass into high gear, I ran, I squatted for a moment, I listened, and I sprinted again. The noose was closing around me—the trustees were easy to hear. If I could slip past them before they got too close, I’d get away. If not, bullets would have to be my answer.

  With a handful of men making a little too much noise a hundred yards behind and at
least a few trying to be quiet as they stalked in my direction from somewhere off to my right, I stepped out of the tall pines and saw a river of ruddy water with steep, red clay banks.

  It was wide for a Texas river, swollen by heavy rains somewhere far north and west. A current rippled the surface, warning me away from attempting a swim across.

  That warning was for regular folks.

  The current didn’t worry me.

  My worry was that being exposed in the water with hunting guards coming at me from two directions and buzz bikes zipping around above, I’d be spotted and earn a few bullet holes for the mistake.

  Looking up and down the river, I couldn’t help but notice huge mounds of broken trees, washed against the banks in spots. There’d been a flood, earlier this season or last, a big one.

  The trees would make a good hiding place. But I couldn’t get there, not without leaving footprints or a big skid down the steep bank to show my pursuers I’d gone into the water.

  Dilemma.

  Run balls out along the top edge of the bank, only to get to the first clump of trees and still have the same problem, no way to get down to the water’s edge without leaving a sign?

  Jump from the bank to one of the downed tree trunks and hope I could land without spraining an ankle or worse? Doable, but algae on the tree trunk, loose bark, rotten wood, any of a dozen possibilities could skew that bet out of my favor. With my life as the stake in that bet, it wasn’t one I was willing to take.

  The noise of one of the buzz bikes suddenly grew out of the background as it passed overhead.

  While it was zipping across the river and starting a wide, slow turn, inspiration showed me the path to my next step.

  I leaped off the bank, pushing as far from the shore as I was able.

  I splashed into chest deep water. The noise of my splash was partially drowned out by the sound of the bike still close enough to mask it.