Black Rust (5 page)

We didn’t say much of anything on the drive back to the site of the slaughter. 

What were we going to talk about that was productive? 

I wanted to pistol-whip Lutz, and he wanted to cover his ass.  That much was evident to me in the way he emphasized it was me who shot down the drone.  He just couldn’t understand I was taking action to save both our asses.  It served to double-down on my conviction that corruption was indeed his only talent.  If not for that, he’d be a penniless transient one step ahead of a work camp detail.

I took advantage of the silence to think through my options.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with any that didn’t intimately involve Lutz.  Well, there was one—ditching him and getting out of Houston.  But what then?  Move out to Lubbock and sharecrop my life away on a dried-out dirt clod farm?  Go back on the road until I lucked into a place to land on my feet?  That would make me a transient, too.  Romantic?  Sure.  But the realities of going on the road with no money and no car in a world full of people who’d lost any inclination to charity two decades ago would be hard.  And could I find work?  The only job I was good at involved pointing a gun and pulling a trigger.  Only two kinds of organizations hired people with those skills: governments and cartels.  Well, glorified rent-a-cop jobs, I guess.  Bodyguard gigs. 

Maybe there were a few I wasn’t considering.

With a federal arrest warrant chasing me, getting a legit paycheck was out of the question.

With my debt to the Camacho brothers still outstanding, getting work on the bad side of the law would be putting my neck into a slowly closing noose.  Once back in criminal circles, my name would get back to the Camacho brothers, and they’d send somebody for me.

What did that leave me?  Skip off to Canada?  Try for Europe?  Asia?  They were all as tumultuous as the USA and not open for immigration, at least not for the likes of me. 

Lutz stopped the Mercedes on the dirt road near where we’d parked earlier in the evening. 

I got out and trudged through the underbrush, passing between the tall pines, using a map on my phone to keep moving in the right direction. 

Lutz bumbled along behind.

When we passed between an old riding lawnmower and an overturned dining table—part of the outer circle—Lutz asked, “Do you know where it is?”

“I can pick the direction to the downed drones from where I was standing in the clearing.”

“You sure?”

“Does it matter if I’m sure?”

“Yes.  I don’t want to spend all night in the woods.”

“You’d rather rush back to town and turn yourself in?” I asked.  “You want to go to a work camp?”

Lutz huffed.

When we got to the second of the concentric circles, Lutz came to a stop beside a precariously standing highchair.  “I don’t see the fire.” 

“It’s burned down by now.”  It was a simple deduction.  I knew it.  He had to know it.  He was being difficult.  I turned to face him.  “I don’t know what your deal is, but we’re both in this together, you know that, right?  It’s not just a picture of me aiming a rifle at a spotter drone that mysteriously crashed two seconds later.  If the cops have that picture, then they’ve got the low-res pics of the whole extermination.”

“Not necessarily,” Lutz argued.  “Those low-res cameras on the spotters only send back a pic once every couple of seconds.  Bandwidth restrictions.  Ricardo told me.”

“So what?” I asked.  “Are you honestly hoping all the incriminating shit you did happened between pictures?  Is that it?”

Lutz shook his head.  “Ricardo didn’t say the cops had anything on me.  Just you raising your rifle at the drone.”

“
Your
rifle,” I snapped, trying to put some solid guilt in his mind.

“Maybe the drone wasn’t snapping pics at the normal rate,” said Lutz.  “Maybe it had bird shit on the lens.  Maybe it was covered with condensation.  Maybe it was too far away.  Maybe the fog was too thick.”

“Is that the way you want to play it?” I asked.  “You want to hope that maybe you’re safe because Ricardo didn’t describe in detail every image passed back to the police?  Are you willing to bet your life on it?” I stepped up close to Lutz, eye-to-eye.  “What are you—fifty, fifty-five?  If they toss you in a work camp for this, say you get the max, one year for each dirty kill, twenty-three years and another handful for the drones we downed.  You’ll never breathe free air again.  You’ll die babysitting soybean-picking d-gens in a work camp.”

Lutz pushed his face close enough that his big hooked nose was nearly touching mine, and I could taste the onions on his breath from what he’d eaten for dinner.  “I’m not going to a work camp.” 

Raising my fists and trying to beat some sense into a well-upholstered old man in the woods wasn’t going to help the situation.  I stepped away, deescalating.  “Let’s find the drones, get the data cards, dispose of the evidence, and get the spotter drone back to your friend Ricardo.  Once we’re at his place, we’ll see what was passed back to the cops.  Okay?  He’ll be able to show us everything.  Then we’ll know where we stand.  Right now we’re just two pissed-off boneheads standing in the cold forest, thinking the worst is gonna happen.  Let’s do what we need to do here and get back to Houston.  One step at a time.  You okay with that?”

Lutz buried his face in his hands, rubbed his skin, and clenched his fists over his eyes as if trying to squeeze all the night’s bad choices out of his head.  He dropped his hands and kicked the highchair, sending it clattering into a tree.  “Shit!”

I stepped away to give him room for his tantrum and looked around in the moonlight, seeing only pine tree trunks, underbrush, and the long curved line of artifacts disappearing in the fog. 

Lutz jumped over to the high chair, picked it up, and beat it against a tree trunk until it came to pieces in his hands.  Still, with more frustration than he could bear, he turned and glared at me, panting.

I pointed at a folding table nearby and said, “There’s plenty of shit.  Break as much as you need.”

Lutz shook his head and looked at his feet, snorting as he breathed.  “Let’s find the damned drones.”

Good enough.

I led through the trees and Lutz stomped along behind, cursing under his breath, berating himself, and second-guessing.

Once at the edge of the clearing, I saw the fire had burned down to a pile of embers and flickering logs.  Everything seemed different.  Was it the change in light, the relative quiet?

I raised my weapon to my shoulder and scanned through the dark.  “Get your rifle up.”

Lutz grunted and came to a stop beside me.

“Look through your night vision scope.  You see anything in the woods?”

Lutz did as told.  Thank God.  Unfortunately, emotion usually won out over pragmatism with him.

“See anything?” I asked.

“Trees.”

I walked into the clearing, stepping over bodies, gazing across the cornfield, looking for anything out there that wasn’t corn.  I had a thought about the kids we’d seen, the live ones.  I hadn’t shot them.  I was sure of that, but I didn’t recall seeing their bodies either.  I looked over the corpses on the ground.  “You shoot those kids, Lutz?”

“No.”

“I’m not trying to pin anything on you.  I don’t know what happened to them.”

“I didn’t shoot any damned kids.”  Lutz huffed, lowered his rifle, and walked over to warm himself by the big pile of embers.  “The raccoons are gone.”

I looked at the fire.  The spit that had held the carcasses of the animals had indeed disappeared.  “Coyotes?”

Lutz shook his head.  “They’d be afraid of the fire, I think.  Degenerates would be my bet.”

That disappointed me, because as we were racing back to the kill site, I’d fostered the unrealistic, yet pretty sick hope, that in the frantic aftermath of the kill, we’d mistakenly identified the carcasses roasting over the fire.  I’d hoped we’d find that they weren’t animals but dead children, and their little corpses would convert our dirty kill into clean profits. 

It was maybe the most repulsive glimmer of hope I’d ever felt.

That didn’t stop me from looking around the fire for the possibility of finding partially eaten body parts, whether of children or other d-gens.  It wouldn’t matter.  If we could prove cannibalism, then the kill sanction could be reinstated—Lutz and I would be off the hook with a very good night’s work behind us.

“What are you looking for?” Lutz asked.

“Wait.”  I looked across the clearing again.  “Something’s very wrong here.”

“If you tell me you don’t remember where those drones are I’m gonna—”

“No.”  I pointed at the ground around the fire.  “Look.”

Lutz glanced at the ground but didn’t really look at it.

“No, really.”  I started counting bodies.  “Some of them are gone.”

Exasperated, Lutz said, “They were all dead.  C’mon.  Let’s get on with this before another drone shows up.”  He looked at the sky.

I looked up too, but saw only the glow of the moon through the thinning fog.  No red LEDs.  “Either they weren’t all dead, or somebody took some of the bodies.”

A mean laugh bubbled out of Lutz’s big belly. 

“Count ‘em,” I told him.  “There were a lot more here than this.”

“Doesn’t mean shit to me,” said Lutz.  “We can’t get paid, so who cares?”  He looked at the trees and pointed.  “Over there?  Is that the direction where you shot that drone?”

I nodded.  Lutz was right.  Mostly.  The count of bodies on the ground didn’t matter.  There were no signs of cannibalism.  No dead children.  I was wasting my time on pointless curiosities.  I took a long look at the trees, got my bearings, and started into the woods.  “The two drones can’t be far.”

With three disabled drones rattling in the back of Lutz’s Mercedes while the stereo blared hillbilly fiddles over a discordant gospel choir, Lutz raced south down old residential streets and along narrow thoroughfares.  The music was his favorite—gritty and despondent.  Not quite right.  Blaring it was his way of telling me he didn’t want to hear any more of my talk about possibilities and responsibilities, about what we needed to do, what we needed to plan.

He was afraid.  His venal life was clumped on the side of a swirling toilet bowl and he wanted to hide in his beer tunes while he pretended the water wasn’t washing at his feet.

We all have our teddy bears.

Just as well.  I needed time to think through the eventualities, because if things started to go bad once we got where we were going, we might not have a lot of time to sit around and debate.  We’d have to act.

A faster route could have been taken to get us where we were going, but we were avoiding the highways now that we were close to town.  The police, maybe the military, and especially other Regulators could be out there already, looking for two bonehead Front-runners. 

We didn’t know if we were on their radar yet.

Best not to be seen if being seen might lead to getting shot.

We passed a communal feeding trough, fifty feet long, running down the center of the street, and spotted a few more down the road ahead of us.  Lutz slowed the Mercedes.  Degenerates by the hundreds shared the houses near each feeding trough because they had the good sense not to want to walk too far three times a day for their free meals.  That meant the decrepit houses behind the thick trees on both sides of the road were full of d-gens, and though we were in the wee hours of the morning, some degenerates were out doing whatever stupid shit kept them occupied.

Wandering into the road was one of their favorite hobbies. 

All we needed was to hit one at a bad angle and unfortunate speed and get a broken femur stuck through the radiator.  Unlikely?  Sure, but weirder shit has happened.  Then we’d be stuck, or more to the point, Lutz would be stuck with a car full of vandalized drones.  Incriminating evidence that couldn’t be explained away. 

We neared Highway 10 somewhere near Katy, I think.  Generic sprawl had made it hard to tell one of the endless suburbs from the next before Brisbane had flipped the world on its head.  Now with all of the road signs and landmarks decomposing and being eaten by a slow tsunami of vines and shrubs, it was nearly impossible to differentiate.

Lutz drove the car off the road we’d been traveling for a mile and pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center.  Of course, in this part of town, all the businesses had long since closed.  Many of them had plywood over the windows, hammered in place by owners optimistic enough to want to preserve what they were leaving behind, thinking one day they’d return, reopen, and thrive.  Oh, the futility of optimism.  On other storefronts, only the broken metal window and doorframes remained.  No hindrance to scavengers and vandals, but anything worth stealing had been stolen long, long ago.  And bored teenagers didn’t kill their free time with vandalism anymore.  It was too much work to find anything that time and weather hadn’t already battered.

We crossed a street and drove along the backside of another shopping center.  I looked closely at each back door we passed, thinking we had to be nearing our destination. 

Lutz cut the wheels hard left and stopped the Mercedes at the base of a ramp that ran up to a rolling metal door on the tall back wall of a store that hadn’t seen a customer in twenty years. 

I turned the volume down on the music and pointed at the metal door.  “Your spotter friend?”

Lutz nodded, picked up his phone, and dialed. 

A moment later he had someone on the line.  “I’m here.  Open up.”

A few more moments passed.

The door rolled up, flooding us in yellow light.

Lutz drove in.