Black Rust Read online

  “No, goddamn it.” Futzing with his pistol, Lutz stepped over a writhing d-gen to get closer to the fire. “You get ‘em all?”

  “All I could see.”

  Lutz looked at a d-gen squirming on the ground near him. He holstered his pistol, switched out the magazine in his rifle, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Nothing.

  He was shit for taking care of his weapons.

  He hadn’t run the magazine dry. He had a jam.

  I scanned the dark forest for movement. Over the groans of the dying and wounded, I listened for the sound of anything running, either toward me or away.

  Lutz got his weapon unjammed and fired a round through the skull of the d-gen at his feet. Then he methodically and quickly pointed his rifle and finished off every wounded degenerate on the ground. “There. I killed more than you.” Lutz crossed the clearing, stepping over bodies, focused on something that had his interest.

  I was certain he was wrong on the count, but said anyway, “Good for you.” I heard a noise in the cornfield, coming from the edge of the clearing. I looked but couldn’t make out anything in the dark. I reached into my pocket to fish out my phone, hoping. “When I tried to get the Sanction ID for the mandated recording the case was still pending. They never approved the sanction.”

  “The hell they didn’t.”

  Lutz stared at me as I pulled out my phone. Only the crackle of the fire and chirping cicadas made any noise. I activated the device and looked at the screen, reading the details slowly, trying to confirm a mistake.

  No mistake.

  Lutz saw the truth on my face and ran to the other side of the fire for a look at the roasting kid.

  I cautiously stepped in that direction for a clearer view. Evidence of the dead toddler would undo the sanction mistake. The cops would flip the sanction to active. Lutz and I would get paid. No problem. Pretty much.

  Lutz came to a stop, staring. “These aren’t kids.”

  I took another step to get a view of what Lutz was seeing—carcasses on a spit, legs splayed, tiny torsos split open, roasting, crusted in black. I saw claws on feet but no fingers, and snouts, not flat faces.

  “They’re raccoons or dogs or something,” Lutz whined, looking up at me, worry drenching his features.

  Raccoons?

  What the hell?

  The d-gens are barbecuing little forest critters, not children?

  And where were those two kids I saw? Thought I saw?

  Lutz looked up.

  I did, too.

  A white spotter drone with flashing red LEDs, a pregnant Frisbee the size of a trashcan lid with a half-dozen little rotors around its circumference hovered over the tops of the trees at the edge of the clearing. It had led us to the kill site. It had gotten us into what was looking like a mess.

  Two more white drones, a little farther away, floated higher in the night sky. They were smaller—the voyeurs spying, recording video, witnessing.

  “These d-gens aren’t cannibals,” Lutz muttered. “It’s a dirty kill.”

  A dirty kill.

  One year mandatory in a work camp, per head.

  Every Regulator knew that. It was the wrinkle in the law that kept men like Lutz from joyriding through the d-gen neighborhoods and shooting down every one he saw because it satisfied his hate and filled his billfold.

  He looked at me and made a show of fumbling with his gun, raising it for the cameras on the drones to see, as he said too loudly for normal conversation, “My gun jammed. I only got off a couple shots.” He pointed into the darkness, arguing his defense for an invisible jury. “Into the ground. Over there.” He looked at me. “This is your dirty kill. You’re fucked.”

  Chapter 3

  I scanned the sky. The drones were usually white or neon orange, something easily spotted when they needed to be retrieved after an unexpected battery failure. The color didn’t help a lot through the spotty fog, but the flashing LEDs mounted on each did.

  Three. That was the count—one spotter, two voyeurs.

  One was already buzzing back toward town to get in range of a functioning cell tower to download gigabytes of video showing juicy, two-fisted, blood-spewing slaughter, the kind the violence fetishist would view a million times before midnight. Every insomniac cop in Houston would see an easy arrest and a quick conviction. Other Regulators would salivate at the chance that one of their own might be charged, might run, and give them a chance at a big payday. Fugitive Regulators might bring in ten thousand a head.

  “Give me your rifle.” I reached a hand out to Lutz as I watched the flashing LEDs in the sky.

  “What?”

  “Give me your gun, dammit!”

  Lutz stepped back.

  I spun on him. He was afraid. He was putting the pieces of our situation together, just not fast enough. Mostly he was a dipshit. “You’ve got a night vision scope on that thing.” I pointed at the sky. “I need to take down those drones before they get out of range—now give me your goddamn rifle.”

  Lutz fumbled with the clip attaching his gun to his harness.

  “Hurry,” I told him, taking the rifle as soon as it was off his harness and handing him mine to hold. I raised his rifle to my shoulder.

  “You can’t shoot the spotter,” Lutz protested.

  The spotter drone, shiny white composite, looking every bit like a flying saucer with its spinning propellers invisible against the night sky, was hovering about eighty feet up, over the trees, past the edge of the clearing. It was a fat goose of a target, hanging stationary in the cold, still air.

  “It’s a federal offense,” Lutz explained in a weak voice he knew was spilling out of his mouth more to cover his ass than to stop me from taking the shot.

  Pussy.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Plastic cracked and metal pinged instantly after the noise of the shots.

  The drone spun, flipped, and power-dived into the trees.

  “Goddamn,” Lutz whined. “We’re screwed now.”

  “The spotter drone is the only thing that can get bandwidth out here. It’s the only one of the three that can send anything back to town. The voyeur drones when they’re out this far just float around on autopilot trying to catch some good video. Dammit, Lutz. Don’t you know how any of this works?”

  Lutz looked like he wanted to punch me. People don’t like having their ignorance thrown in their face.

  I scanned the sky for my next target as I told him, “You said your spotter drone friend checks our video feeds and cleans them before they go back to the dispatch center. That’s what you told me, Lutz, to justify the share of our bounties we pay your guy. If that’s true, then as far as the cops know, we haven’t broken any laws, yet.”

  “Then why’d you shoot down his drone?” Lutz snapped.

  “Precaution.” I trained Lutz’s rifle on the voyeur drone. “We’ll work out a deal with your buddy. Pay him for the drone.” I pulled the trigger and sent a volley of three more bullets into the sky. The second drone shuddered from the impact but didn’t fall. I’d hit the drone with maybe one bullet, but probably missed twice. Damn! No time to screw up here. I fired again. The drone dropped.

  It was going to be hell finding these things in the trees.

  “Just to double check,” I said, “you got a cell phone signal?”

  Lutz dug his phone out as I trained my sights on the last drone skimming away over the treetops. It was pretty far away.

  I fired to no effect. “Shit.”

  Lutz looked up. “It’s getting away.”

  I bit back a response and fired again. “Crap.” The drone flew on. I futilely emptied the magazine.

  “No cell phone signal.” Lutz held his phone up for me to see, just about ruining my night vision in the process.

  “Good.” I slapped his hand away. The light from the fire was bad enough. Seeing the bluish light-shadows left on my retina by Lutz’s phone, I blinked and cursed. “We need to get that other drone. How
long do you think before it gets a signal all the way out here?”

  “We’re a good thirty miles from town,” said Lutz, finally taking a productive part in solving the problem. “Most of those drones cruise at about twenty miles an hour. You can probably get a signal ten miles from town.”

  Doing a little basic math, I said, “He might be an hour from getting in range of a cell tower.” I leveled the rifle at the trees and scanned the forest through the night vision scope. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just looking, evaluating the situation, taking all the unknowns off the table, looking for threats because my adrenaline was pumping at full bore.

  Lutz looked into the darkness. “The old highway is the fastest way back.”

  I looked across the field of brown, shoulder-high stalks of corn, waiting for harvest. “Shit.”

  “What?” Lutz froze.

  A woman was out there in the corn, long blonde hair hanging straight over bare shoulders. She was staring at Lutz and me. Or most likely she saw the fire and shadowy figures around it. But I knew I was kidding myself. That was an optimist’s view.

  I was tempted to pull the trigger. Hell, we’d already killed a couple dozen. Why risk letting one go who might be halfway smart—smart enough to give an eyewitness account of us actively working to destroy the evidence of our crime.

  She turned and ran.

  Did she see me pointing the rifle at her?

  I looked for another few seconds, knowing I could take the shot, knowing I could hit her—knowing, but doing nothing. Even through the rush of save-my-ass urgency, I’d made enough mistakes for one night. I lowered the rifle. “The drone doesn’t need to follow the roads. No onboard pilot. The operator sets the GPS coordinates and—”

  “GPS doesn’t work for shit anymore,” Lutz told me.

  “I know.”

  “Then they can’t autopilot. They have to—”

  “Dammit,” I shot back. “They adjust. Just like we do. We get the coordinates and go two blocks northwest or—”

  “That’s not right, we—”

  “Goddammit, Lutz! I don’t want to argue with you about this shit. They adjust. Just because we don’t have enough nerds anymore to keep the GPS system running right doesn’t mean we don’t have enough smart video drone operators to figure out where to send their drones. Maybe they have a software fix. Maybe they do it on the fly. I don’t know. I don’t care. Shit! They always show up, just like us. We use the GPS coordinates we get from your spotter. They probably get them the same way.”

  Lutz just looked at me and for the moment had nothing to say. So I ranted on. “Those video drone operators are probably front-running just like us. Your guy is selling the same information to them before it goes out on the public network. You ever wonder why the video drones always show up on time to record, no matter how quick we get to a job?”

  Lutz didn’t answer.

  He knew.

  “There’s a charging station,” said Lutz. “Just off the highway. It’s got a hardwired network link back to the city. Maybe fifteen miles from here.”

  “As the crow flies?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How far for us?”

  “Twenty. Maybe twenty-five miles.”

  “If he goes there, and it makes sense that he would—” I looked at Lutz. “Make sense to you?”

  “It’ll be the fastest way to upload.”

  I shoved Lutz’s rifle back into his hands as I took mine back. “We need to get to the car and catch that drone before it gets to that charging station. We’ve got forty-five minutes.” I ran into the trees.

  “What about the two drones you downed?” Lutz asked, as he lumbered after me.

  “Doesn’t make a difference if we can’t get to the one that’s flying back. We can come back for them.”

  Chapter 4

  One of the few things Lutz excelled at was driving.

  He owned a beast of an old box-shaped Mercedes that he drove like he was on a racetrack. It was black, three kinds of ugly, and built like an awkward tank that might roll over sideways as easily as forward. Lutz had paid someone to mod the 416 horsepower engine so it would pull over 600. When he first told me that, I figured it was pure braggadocio. Of course I’d thought that. Lutz was the type to tell such stories. Then I rode out with him our first night together. That was seven months ago. If anything, he’d underestimated the horsepower. The clumsy-looking black beast was ungodly fast.

  And beast it was, whatever color the machine had been when it was new—back when I was still playing with matchbox cars—that layer of paint was long gone, scraped off or sprayed over. Every angular piece of metal that had once been smooth or square, wasn’t. Every window was covered with metal rebar welded to the body. And on the front, a sturdy brush guard protected the engine from impacts. Through the years, there had been many.

  Lutz raced the beast up a dirt road pushing speeds that defied physics, at least my intuition of it. At every curve, I just knew we’d slide into the trees, but Lutz kept the Mercedes on the gravel. I didn’t look over at the speedometer. I didn’t complain. As much as Lutz didn’t like me, he trusted me to do my part when the shooting started. As much as I didn’t like him, I trusted him to drive.

  My belt was buckled. I had his rifle in my hands again, as I scanned the sky through the windshield, looking for a tiny flash of red LEDs.

  The tires rumbled over an old cattle guard across the road and Lutz smashed the brake pedal to the floor as he maneuvered the beast up an incline and around a tire-squealing corner. He accelerated as the tires found the old asphalt of a narrow country road. “Anything?” he asked, not taking his attention off the road in front of us that was illuminated by the bright headlights.

  I looked through my side window and then leaned over to look out Lutz’s side.

  The engine revved loudly.

  “Nothing.”

  We raced through a few fast miles before Lutz had to swerve the SUV off the road and into a steeply sloping ditch to avoid a giant piece of farm equipment that had been rusting in the road for what must’ve been a decade. Once past, he gunned the engine, rolled up the side of the ditch and took the Mercedes airborne for a fraction of a second before we bounced again onto pavement. He laughed.

  I laughed, too. Why not?

  Another mile passed before the road widened and I saw dilapidated gas stations and abandoned fast-food joints. We’d reached the highway. Lutz used most of the road to cut a turn onto the entrance ramp. The wheels protested loudly on the pavement and the Mercedes leaned way over to the driver’s side. Lutz righted the vehicle and straightened us out on the incline up to the highway lanes.

  A d-gen ran across the road right in front of us, so close I threw a hand to the dashboard to brace for an impact that frankly would have been minimal. Six thousand pounds of Mercedes reinforced with a huge steel brush guard would mow down any single d-gen. But it was moving fast, and just as I realized he was going to make it across without being hit, Lutz swerved onto the shoulder and caught the d-gen dead center on the hood.

  The Mercedes lurched but didn’t lose momentum. The body banged under the floorboards and the Mercedes bounced a wheel over the body.

  “Fuck ‘em,” Lutz yelled, checking his rearview mirror as we raced ahead.

  I looked back to see a sack of broken bones, formerly in the shape of a man, rolling and skidding on the asphalt. No doubt, dead.

  A dead d-gen in the road didn’t worry Lutz.

  It didn’t worry me, either.

  Lutz wasn’t worried because his hatred for the d-gens blessed him with a clear conscience whenever one died as a result of his doing.

  As for me, I was like most people—I had a hard time seeing degenerates as human, that is as long as I didn’t look too closely when I was busy killing them.

  Neither Lutz nor I had a worry about the legalities of hitting a degenerate with the car. A driver couldn’t help it when a stupid deer ran in front of his v
ehicle. It was much the same with a d-gen. No law was broken. And nobody gave much of a shit about it.

  The world had a lot of that in it these days—not giving a shit.

  Chapter 5

  I saw nothing but black sky and silvery twinkles above.

  Where are those damn red LEDs?

  Apparently getting nervous as the ramifications of everything sank in, Lutz said, “We should run.”

  “Run?”

  “One year mandatory for each dirty kill,” Lutz told me like I didn’t already know it. “I did maybe half of ‘em. I can’t do twelve years in a work camp. Not at my age.”

  Twelve d-gens?

  Lutz might have shot six or seven. I’d had to kill the rest to keep them from killing him. Or maybe just because my blood was running hot and I liked pulling the trigger. I wasn’t sure. It all happened so fast.

  “You want to do ten years in a work camp?” Lutz asked, as he swerved the speeding car onto the shoulder to get around a derelict semi tractor-trailer. “What if they pin all twenty-three on each of us? They do that, you know.”

  I knew. At least I’d heard talk about it. Rumors are as good as facts when you’re nervous.

  I looked for the drone’s red lights. It had to be up there.

  Lutz rubbed the sweat off his face. “It’s four miles more, maybe. Just off the highway.”

  Thinking about what lay ahead, I asked, “By that old mall?”

  “Tall building right by there,” said Lutz. “Five or six stories. Cellular phone antennas all lined up on the roof. None of ‘em work.”

  Five or six stories wasn’t tall by Houston standards, but way out here it was.

  I knew the building he was talking about. That’s to say I’d seen it a dozen times when Lutz and I chased sanctions into the piney woods northwest of Houston. Like every other building—short or tall—out this way, most of the windows had broken out long ago. Some of the structures were sagging under the weight of roofs crushing frames of rusty metal and rotten wood. This one was still sturdy, probably. If it weren’t structurally sound, it wouldn’t have a drone charging station built on the roof—made sense to me.