Black Rust (15 page)

Inspector Doggett, a chinless man with sagging gray skin and thinning hair, was pedantic about sticking to the agenda, which consisted of topics that were no more than a list of forms Blue Bean was mandated by the state to provide.  Being a corporate farm that serviced many state contracts and utilized degenerate labor as well as labor from a penal system work camp, Blue Bean Farms was required to submit a daunting list of forms, some monthly, many quarterly, and even more annually.  And they submitted them to Inspector Doggett in a series of meetings with various department heads according to Inspector Doggett’s agenda.

The meetings proceeded according to the same script each month, and the meeting with Sienna started going off the rails at about the same point every time they arrived at a particular agenda item—the review of reports on the methods spelled out in Blue Bean’s operations manual for training and disciplining degenerates, and the curricula Sienna had developed for educating the staff on those methods.  Sienna took to pointing out that having the materials in place and filling out the form—hence compliance, as defined by the law—was pointless.  Documentation was worthless if none of the procedures listed in the documents were being put into practice.

The first time Sienna voiced her concerns, Keith Workman’s face turned red under his generous coif of silver hair, and she thought he might be having a stroke.  That fear vanished when he let loose a tirade that embarrassed her but was ignored by both Inspector Doggett and his assistant, Mike Rafferty, both of whom looked at the papers on the conference table in front of them and pretended like nothing had occurred.

That had happened months and months ago.

Now it all proceeded according to a memorized script: Sienna told them the documents asked the wrong questions.  Keith Workman insisted Sienna’s concerns were good-hearted but founded in idealism rather than practicalities.  Blue Bean Farms did its utmost to meet all the aspirations listed in its official procedures.  Doggett always followed Workman with an admonishment directed at Sienna for trying to create the illusion of impropriety where none existed.  Blue Bean was in compliance with the law, and Sienna’s signatures on the documents proved it. 

Sienna’s protests grew weaker with each passing item on the agenda, each form submitted, each pointless meeting, until they got to the kill list.  That’s where Sienna made her stand.

“That brings us to the last item on the agenda, The Defect Retirement List.”  Mike Rafferty said it as he flinched at the words. 

“I have it,” said Inspector Doggett, dragging his bored gaze up and down a few of the sheets lying on the table in front of him.  “All seems to be—”

“No,” Sienna told him.  “It’s not in order.”

Mike Rafferty deflated.  He knew what was coming.

Keith Workman glared silent threats at Sienna, and Inspector Doggett heaved a great sigh.  “Oh, good God.  Do we have to do this today?”

Into Doggett’s disrespect, Sienna pointed at the papers and said, “That Defect Retirement List is not—”

“Every month it’s something with you,” Workman spat. 

He said it with such vitriol that Sienna was surprised into silence.  Her relationship with Workman had grown contentious, no doubt on that point existed, but the tension seemed suddenly to have escalated to a new level. 

“If you hate your job so much, why don’t you just quit?” asked Workman.

The question had been coming up between them with some regularity over the past few months.  Each time Workman brought it up, she’d made the case that she was determined to fulfill the goal of making Blue Bean Farms a model of productivity under humanitarian guidelines—exactly what she’d been hired to do. 

In the face of Workman’s animosity that Sienna now realized must have been brewing under the surface all along, she gave up on trying to push him in the direction of the aspirations he’d said he had.  “Why don’t you fire me?”

“Fire you?” Workman’s jaw clenched, and so did his big fists.  “I wish I could.”

“You’re the CEO,” Sienna told him, finding it easy to play it cool now that she’d decided she could live without Blue Bean’s paycheck and all the crap that came with it.

“The only damn reason I hired you was to settle the state’s civil suit against Blue Bean Farms.  Now I can’t fire you without having three million dollars in fines reinstated.”

Sienna opened her mouth to retort as Workman’s words sank in.

“Leaves you speechless, doesn’t it?” His face did something that was supposed to look like a grin but looked more like he was baring his teeth.  “You believed all that bullshit I told you about how you were perfect for the job, and you thought it was your qualifications and your passion I was interested in.  I could have lived without your passion, but you were the only goddamn one who applied for the job—hell, I still can’t find anybody else.  Well, the state told me what Blue Bean had to do to comply, and by God, that’s what we did, exactly what we did.  So here you sit.  All that documentation you wrote has been incorporated into our standard operating procedures manual, just like it’s supposed to be.”  Workman reached and tapped his big fingers on the stack of papers in front of Doggett, “And you sign the necessary papers for the monthly meeting.”

Sienna snapped her gaze over to Doggett.  “I’m retracting my signature from those documents.”

Doggett tisked and shook his head.  “That’s a new one, but you realize that’s not possible, don’t you?”

Mike Rafferty sat up straight and said, “The paper is signed.  It’s been submitted to Inspector Doggett.  Now it’s state property, Sienna, an official record, to do anything to alter or destroy it is a felony.”

“That’s right, little lady.”  Workman smirked.  “Tear it up if you want.  We can put you in the prisoner barracks up in the work camp.  You’ll get all the time you please in the company of d-gens.  You’ll love it.”

Ignoring Workman, Sienna told Doggett, “I was coerced into signing the Defect Retirement List.”

“How so?” Doggett asked.

“One of the trustees brought a Bully Boy to my cabin this morning and threatened to rape me if I didn’t sign it.”

Doggett didn’t respond except to look over his glasses at Sienna as if she were lying.

“In your bungalow?” Workman mocked Sienna with a booming laugh.  “In the residence compound, where only employees are allowed.  Is that what you’re saying?”

“That is what I’m saying,” Sienna told Workman.  “I just told you about it in the lobby.  Goose Eckenhausen and an oaf named Toby came into my house.” 

“Wouldn’t happen.”  Workman pushed out his lower lip and shook his head as though that would help his appearance of contemplation.  “Couldn’t happen.”

Sienna was dumbfounded by how boldly Workman lied.

Doggett took on a tone of a disappointed father, and he planted his elbows on the table and leaned across.  “Why do you put us through this, Ms. Galloway?” He spun one of the sheets of paper from the kill list and slid it across the table for her to see.  “It’s dated last week.  Why did you wait a week to bring up this fantasy about coercion?”

“That date was already on the paper when I signed it,” she told him. 

Workman harrumphed and took Doggett’s attention away from Sienna.  “I told you, she’s unstable.  She needs to be on medication.  Will you finally accept my request to have her removed without paying the fines?  I’ll find someone to fill her job eventually.”

“Mr. Workman,” Doggett said, sadly shaking his head, “If you were able to convince Ms. Galloway to bring in an assessment from a psychiatric professional that indicated she was incapable of handling the responsibilities of her job, then the state—”

Workman laughed again.  “I can’t even get her to quit?  How do you think I could get her to see a shrink?  Paranoid people don’t know they’re paranoid.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Workman,” said Doggett.  “Without a professional opinion from a psychiatrist, there’s nothing the state will do.”

Workman jumped to his feet, sending his rolling chair slamming into the wall behind.  “I suppose this meeting’s over, then.”  He turned and stormed out the door.

As Lutz got himself situated to trek through the trees, I examined the map on my phone, finding the landmarks I would need to guide me once the chase was on, and finding the tracts of forest I could run the Mercedes into when it came time to ditch it and disappear.

I got out of the Mercedes and went around to the driver’s side where Lutz was standing.  “Use your map.  It’ll take a while to get there, but you won’t have any trouble finding the road.  You good?”

Lutz looked at me, not shaking his head, not nodding.  I was pushing him down a path he didn’t want to take, but he wasn’t pushing back. 

“Alright.”  I got into the driver’s seat, belted myself in, and put the Mercedes in drive without giving Lutz another look.

I gunned the engine, gave the gas gauge a quick check, and sped forward.

I wondered how much time had passed since we burst through the trees and were spotted?  Ten minutes?  Something like that.

As the road curved through the trees, the break in the vine curtain came into view.  No trucks were coming down the overgrown road to find me.  That was one worry ticked off the list.  No vehicles were parked in the field just at the end of the road.  Another worry gone.  No band of d-gens and their foremen were standing in the sunshine looking in.  Tick.

I pushed the pedal to the floor to build speed.

Seconds passed.

I burst into the sunshine again, raging through the cotton at nearly forty miles an hour.  Bushes and bolls flew in every direction as I bounced toward the d-gens spread across the far end of the field.

Many of them stopped what they were doing and stared.  Others ran.  I tried to pick out the foremen as I scanned.  I knew they were ahead, probably raising their weapons.

I slid down in the seat, exposing only my eyes and the top of my head above the dashboard, just enough to see the general direction of where I was going.

A bullet hit the windshield, high up on the passenger side, sending a spider web of cracks across the glass.

Lutz wasn’t going to like that.

Looking for the guilty asshole who’d shot, I spotted a man holding up a rifle, standing a dozen paces from a parked truck, looking defiant and brave.

I swerved toward him and accelerated.

It took him all of two seconds to understand what was happening.  He’d missed his shot, and his prey was pissed.  He turned and ran for his truck.

So much for bravery.

A moment later I zoomed by the truck in a cloud of dust, leaving the cotton field and the harvesting d-gens behind.  I straightened the Mercedes onto a dirt road that ran in a straight line between two fields.  I mashed the accelerator to the floor and pushed the Mercedes up past fifty as I sat up in my seat and scanned the sky. 

No buzz bikes?

Maybe the police had backed off to let Blue Bean handle the problem of the black Mercedes.

Sienna walked away from the admin building, fuming, not sure whether she was walking toward her cottage to sulk, to her office in the training compound, or to her car where she might start it up and drive away, putting Blue Bean Farms behind her forever.  Her resignation, she finally understood, was exactly what Workman wanted.  He’d evidently wanted it ever since it registered in his mind she wasn’t a malleable stooge who’d rubber-stamp his forms for the chance to double her salary. 

Now what he wanted was of no more concern to her, except as a target for her defiance.

For Keith Workman, Blue Bean Farms had only one purpose to its existence, to fatten his bank accounts.  To that end, he treated degenerates, work camp prisoners, and employees like consumable resources—use one up and replace it with the next.

Employees came and went faster than the change in seasons.  He hired more.

Work camp prisoners were the dregs of society who needed to be punished into submission.  Workman had said on many occasions he wanted to grind them down with long, sweaty hours of work to fill the wormy holes in their souls with good character. 

Degenerates were nothing to him.  Actually, less than nothing, because they ate food he would otherwise have sold to fatten his profits.  They slept in barracks built on ground he otherwise would have tilled.  Left up to him, he’d work them all to death before their minds had a chance to deteriorate into uselessness.  And why not?  He seemed able to get any allocation of fresh d-gens filled from the state school and they didn’t cost him a penny—not counting the bribes he likely paid for Blue Bean’s spot on the state school’s priority list.  All Workman had to do was provide an executed kill list to the state school’s clerk to get a refill on the first of the month.

That’s why the kill list was such an easy thing for him to fill.  It provided him a convenient avenue to cull any degenerate whose productivity waned.  Workman hated Sienna because he wanted to turn that avenue into an eight-lane highway and she stood in his way with her loudmouth complaints and high ideals.

A subversive thought caught Sienna mid-stride and stopped her cold. 

She blinked at the idea as though the shimmering genius of it might hurt her eyes.  It was elegant.  It was perfect.

She glanced back at the admin building, as though the idea had been so brilliant, Workman behind his tall windows might have seen it from his desk chair.

The kill list was turned in.  Before lunch today, Goose Eckenhausen and his trustee thugs would herd the degenerates out of the training compound and into the pens for the Bloodmobile. 

But what if the degenerates weren’t in the training compound when Goose came for them?

Sienna couldn’t take the degenerates off the list, but she could still give them a chance to live.

She headed for the training compound, urgency in her steps.