Black Rust (14 page)

“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.” 

“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.” 

“Yes,” Workman told Goose, decisively.  “Do that.  Make it a priority.  Whatever it takes.  I don’t want them disrupting the harvest, you understand?”

“Yessir.”  Goose glanced over at Sienna, anger clear on his face.  “Dependin’ on how long this takes, I might not be able to git all them defects out of Dr. Galloway’s trainin’ compound and put ‘em in the pens in the retirement stagin’ area today.”

Workman turned a pair of icy eyes on Sienna.  “If you’d gotten your list approved on time, all the defects would be in their place already.”

“But—”

“No buts.”  Workman leaned forward, towering over her, bumping her with his protruding trophy gut.  “I’m clear with my expectations.  I always am.  I expect my employees to meet them.”  He looked over at Goose.  “You go get your security boys and get this wrapped up.  I don’t want crooked Regulators on my farm killing the productive degenerates.”  Turning back to Sienna and drilling her with a hard stare, he said, “We’re already at risk of not getting our allocation from the state school.  If we don’t get our kill done by the end of business tomorrow and present the executed defect list to the clerk, we won’t be able to fill our allocation until next month.  I don’t want to run three hundred workers short for a whole month just because somebody can’t stop themselves from hugging violent degenerates who aren’t any use to anybody anymore.”

Three hundred? 

Sienna realized she should have taken a closer look at the list Goose had forced her to sign.  He’d added a lot to it.

I don’t know how long we drove—fifteen minutes, thirty—all on overgrown roads under a canopy of pine boughs that blocked the sky.  Along the way, I spotted a few houses, a barn, and some pickups, well off the road, abandoned and slowly deteriorating as the forest consumed them.

“You know where we are?” Lutz asked.  “We gotta be on Blue Bean property by now.”

“Probably not,” I told him.

“How’s that possible?” he argued.  “You said it was right by the road, way back there before we turned left.”

“It was.  Back there.  It’s not like Blue Bean is one big square on the map.  The property line is up and down, back and forth, all over the place.  The road we turned on ran north of the property line for a while.  Now I can’t say for sure.  I looked at the GPS-enabled map on my phone.  The road didn’t show.  As far as the map knew, we were in a dense forest on a goat trail.  The nearest marked road was miles away.

“Is there a way out?”

“I think we’re near some cleared fields,” I told him.  “Can’t tell if it’s old cattle pasture or what.  Maybe we can cross if the buzz bikes are gone.”

The vegetation ahead of us suddenly seemed to grow thick with vines growing up the trees and hanging off branches, totally blocking the view of anything beyond. 

Having caught the spirit of our adventure through the woods, Lutz gunned the engine and rammed the Mercedes through the vines.

We burst into bright sunshine.  Lutz instinctively hit the brakes and brought the Mercedes to a skidding halt in a field of well-tended furrows with cotton in rows that ran to the horizon. 

And d-gens. 

Maybe a hundred.  They’d been picking and hauling, but now they were all frozen, staring straight at the big black Mercedes that had burst from the trees.

Lutz muttered, “Oh, shit.”

“Reverse,” I told him as I took a quick scan of the sky.  “Get us back in the trees.”

Lutz fumbled with the shifter for a moment, stuck the Mercedes in park, and gunned the engine to no effect.

“C’mon,” I told him, holding my voice calm to keep him from panicking.

Lutz found reverse.  He looked over his shoulder and spun the wheels as he rolled the Mercedes back through the car-sized tunnel we’d just blown through the curtain of vines.  “Where do I turn around?”

“Just keep going backwards.”  I took a hard look at the d-gens scattered across the field.  They weren’t the dangerous, feral ones, these were harmless farm workers, trained, sorted, and allocated by the state school.  They might turn violent one day, but at the moment, they weren’t a worry.  Near the d-gens, I spotted a handful of men, all wearing hats, all standing up straight, armed and staring at Lutz and me.  Those had to be the trustees.  They likely had walkie-talkies or cell phones connected to the Blue Bean private network.  They were the danger.

I refocused on the map, looking for an answer there that maybe I’d missed.

Lutz bounced the Mercedes back down the path in reverse.  “Anything?”

I shook my head.  Lutz was praying for another fortuitously hidden escape route. 

I couldn’t fault him for it.  “Keep going.”

Lutz kept racing backward as the road slowly curved into the woods.

When I guessed we’d gone maybe a half-mile, I ordered Lutz to stop.

Lutz mashed the brakes, looking at the trees on both sides of the road, looking for another road he just knew had to be there.

“Have you got a full charge on your phone?” I asked.

“What?” He looked at me like I was speaking nonsense.

“Check.”

Lutz huffed and dug his phone out of his pocket.  “There’s no signal out here.  Why the hell—”

“Do you have a charge?”

Lutz powered up his phone.  “Yes.  No signal.”

“That’s okay,” I told him.  “Does the GPS work on that phone?  Can you open the map and see where you are?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check, Lutz.  We don’t have a lot of time.”

“I—”

“Just check.”

Lutz grumbled, fingered his phone screen, and after a moment turned it and showed it to me.

I reached over, pinched my fingers on the screen to get a larger view of the map and saw he had the same thing on his phone as me.  “Okay.  You’re not going to like this, but this is what we have to do.”

Lutz’s mouth opened, but he was lost for words.

“You need to get out of the car.  Take your rifle, pistol, some water, whatever you think you might need.”

“It’s my goddamn car!  If anybody’s getting out it’s you.”

“Dammit, Lutz!  I’m trying to save your ass here.”  That wasn’t my goal so much as it was a fringe benefit for Lutz.  If I got busted, I needed someone on the outside who would take a bribe to do just about anything.  And that was Lutz.  But that was secondary to my primary reason for getting rid of him.  With all the attention we were getting, Lutz would turn into a larger and larger liability.  I had the ability to move fast and stay hidden when I needed to.  Once out from behind the steering wheel, Lutz had no remarkable skills except in the way of making every situation worse.  “I’m going to take the Mercedes.”

Lutz put a hand on a pistol. 

“Don’t,” I told him calmly.  “I’m helping you here.”  I pointed northeast.  “About three or four miles straight through the woods, you’ll come to a farm-to-market road.  If you follow it east for a bit, you’ll come to a small town.”

“I’m not hiking through the woods.”

“Use your head here, Lutz.  I’ve got a warrant on me.  The cops are after us.  Those guys we just saw in the field, they’re alerting their higher-ups about trespassers in a black Mercedes running over the cotton crop.  We’re not going to get out of this in your car.”

“I’m not losing my car.”

“Go through the woods,” I told him.  “It might take you the rest of the afternoon.  Use your phone to keep yourself headed in the right direction.  When you get in range of a cell tower or Wifi signal, contact Ricardo.  Tell him to have one of his gopher guys come out and pick you up.”

Lutz slumped.  “He’ll charge me a thousand dollars.”

“No, he won’t, but he’ll charge you something.  I’ll pay, whatever it is.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to make a scene to draw them away from you.  I need to get a lot closer to Blue Bean’s admin complex.  All three places Sienna Galloway might be are over there.  I’ll ditch your truck somewhere along the way.  The cops will impound it.  All you need to do is tell them I was driving it.  Tell them you were back in Houston the whole time.  I’ll cover the impound fee and towing, and you’ll have your truck back in a few days.”

Lutz looked at the trees, gears turning inside his skull.

“You got a better idea?” I asked, “I’m open.”

“I could dump you here and go back the way I came.”

“Up to you.”  I shrugged.  “If I have to hike, it might take me the rest of the day, maybe longer, to get to the admin compound and find Sienna.  I think you’d agree with me, the sooner we make our deal with her the better off we’ll both be.  You make the call.”

Lutz stared at the trees for several long moments.  “You’re an asshole.”

“I know.”

He opened his door.  As he was stepping out, he said, “If I don’t get my truck back—”

“I know.”