Black Rust (19 page)

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.

I submerged, let the weight of my guns pull me down to the bottom, and opened my eyes to mere inches of visibility.

I grabbed hold of roots and rocks and dragged myself downstream with the current.

With forty or fifty yards to go to get to the first large clump of washed-out trees, I wanted to make the whole distance underwater while I prayed that I didn’t stick my fingers near the mouth of a snapping turtle the size of the one that lived in my swimming pool.

My other problem—one I’d created for myself when I jumped in—was that the two phones I’d overpaid Ricardo for and kept for myself were ruined. 

I held my breath and swam.

Time seems to drag slowly when there’s no air in front of your face to breathe.

When I bumped into a mess of branches under the surface I knew I’d come to my goal.  I reached forward, grabbing wood, and pulled myself further into the jumble, feeling thicker branches as I went, knowing I was getting closer to a tree trunk. 

When I came up for air, I breathed deeply, filling my nose and lungs with the smell of a dead armadillo’s ass.  A lot of crap was caught in the tree limbs and was rotting.  Looking up, I saw spots of sky through a dense mess of broken limbs and twigs.

I’d made it.

I glanced around, got an idea of how deeply I’d worked my way into the pile, submerged, and crawled further before coming up between two logs.

Another buzz bike made its noisy way over the river before starting a long turn.

No worry of mine.  I was invisible from above.  In fact, no one would know I was there except the catfish in the water and the crickets in the branches.  Nobody would have a chance of finding me unless they jumped in the river and came up inside the jumble of logs like I did.

I was safe. 

All I needed to do was wait out the searchers, and I’d be golden.  That, and I needed to find a comfortable position to lie in the water.  A branch was poking me in my back, and being between the logs, I couldn’t move to either side.

My solution?  Pull myself along between the half-submerged logs to find a spot—

Holy shit!

What’s that?

I jerked my hand back, convinced I’d just grabbed a huge, slimy water moccasin.  I lost all sense of my situation and scrambled away as fast as my confined space and poking branches let me.

When my heart settled to a normal rate, and I realized I hadn’t been bitten, I struggled to turn myself over on my belly so I could look up the gap between the logs and see where that giant fucking snake was.

Relief was quickly followed by surprise.

There was no snake.

An arm of a corpse was wrapped over a trunk.  That’s what I’d grabbed.  A head lay face down in the water.  Around the corpse’s neck was a leather collar—a Blue Bean collar.  I didn’t need to see the rest of the submerged body to know it was wearing a d-gen’s shirt, shorts, and work boots.

I stared at the body, not because it made me feel one thing or another.  It didn’t.  The dead are the dead.  What I saw in the body was an idea.

Grousing for no one but the polecats and the opossums to hear, Lutz scratched at his arms and rubbed his eyes.  Somewhere along his hike through the woods, he’d put a hand on poison ivy or poison oak, or something.  He had welts on his arms now, and they itched like mad.  Mosquitoes were buzzing his ears, and those big-ass black horseflies kept biting his neck. 

Lutz hated the woods, and he hated Christian for convincing him to give up the Mercedes.

He took out his phone to see if he had a signal.  “Damn.”

Lutz screamed at the forest.  Nothing reacted.

He looked at the map to guess how far he still needed to go.  He couldn’t tell. 

He started trudging again but stopped.  He heard something.  He turned his head, held his breath, and listened.

An engine.

A car.

Thank the heavens!

The car was far away.  It was hard to pick the direction with the sound bouncing off the tree trunks.

Off to the left somewhere. 

Getting louder.  Maybe.  It wasn’t the sound of a car on pavement.  It was a truck on a rough road, taking it slow.

There had to be a dirt road close by, one not on the map.  He’d had it with the woods.  He needed to get a ride.  Lutz picked a direction he hoped was right, and he ran.

Groups of men passed by on the bank so many times I stopped counting.  The first group tried to be quiet and sneaky.  They were hunting for me, believing I might be hiding behind the next tree.  I overheard them talk about the riverbank and how it would be a dead giveaway if I’d gotten into the water.  The bank was too muddy not to have some sign of me passing by.  I guess not one of them considered I might have made the jump to the water.

Good for me.

A little later, the squad that passed talked about a splash someone had heard and they were eyeing the water and paying particular attention to the mounds of trees and brush deposited by the floods.  But they only looked in from the bank.  Not close enough.

As time passed, my pursuers gave up any pretense of staying quiet.  Some of them believed I’d given them the slip.  Others believed I’d gone into the river and drowned.  There was talk of a big gator that had been spotted several times downriver.  They even joked about it eating a couple of the d-gens who’d been stupid enough to get into the water to cool off. 

I couldn’t tell if they were serious or ribbing a new guy.  Mostly they were tired of marching through the woods and one-upping one another on how pissed they were about it. 

After I first hid in the clump of washed-out trees, I heard hover bikes pass overhead with some regularity.  A few were the cop models that had chased Lutz and me earlier in the day.  One made a different sound when it zipped across the sky.  It made tight turns.  It was the military model, the one ridden by the goober who’d aimed that big cowboy revolver at me when I was driving the Mercedes before racing into the woods.

But I hadn’t heard a buzz bike in a while, maybe an hour.  It had been at least thirty minutes since I last heard a handful of trustees pass by.

It was time to execute my plan and get on the move. 

In the mess of branches, it took me a good half-hour to strip the rotting d-gen of his clothes, boots, and collar.  Once finished, I wriggled my way carefully out through the maze of branches and maneuvered myself into obstacle-free water.  I swam around to the downstream side of the pile of wood, spotted the place I wanted to get to, and started climbing. 

The branches at water level were slimy with algae, but that didn’t prove a major obstacle.  After a few careful minutes, I made my way to the end of a broken log that jutted above the rest of the pile. 

I was totally exposed.  Had a buzz bike flown over, or had another patrol come out of the woods, there’s no doubt they would have seen me.

Still, I paused.

When I’d spotted the jutting tree trunk from down below, it looked like the perfect place to stand prior to a jump across the steep part of the bank to the flat, top edge.

Standing up there, though, looking down at a jumble of broken limbs, many of them looking like sharpened stakes laid there to skewer me if I misjudged the distance, I had second thoughts. 

The gap looked too long, the fall too far.

But time to fret the situation or time to find a better way to get to the top of the bank without leaving evidence of my passing wasn’t a luxury I had.  In fact, time was distinctly against me.  Every minute that ticked by brought me closer to a work camp sentence that would last into my fifties.

In that light, the spikes below didn’t seem so bad.

I drew a deep breath, crouched, and leaped across the gap.

Goose had been up and down the river a dozen times, flying high on some passes, skimming over the water on others.  The Regulator had to be in the river.  It couldn’t have gone any other way.  Goose’s men had searched the woods until they were all frustrated and cussing him.

That Regulator just wasn’t in there.

It didn’t make any sense.

And now he’d put off Workman too long.  It was time to accept his medicine.

Goose told Taylor to send the men back to their duties around the farm.  He flew over the training compound and saw d-gens still scattered among the admin buildings.  He cursed Bart’s name.  Those d-gens had been Bart’s responsibility, and it looked like Bart had done nothing.

As Goose’s hover bike floated down in front of the admin building, he saw a scowling Keith Workman standing behind the windows in his office on the second floor.  Goose had given half a thought to parking the bike elsewhere and driving up, but with everything on the farm seeming to be running down the crapper all at once, what was one more thing?

Workman was going to yell however long he was going to yell, whether it was about that bitch, Galloway, and the damn d-gens she’d let loose; the slippery Regulator who’d parked his Mercedes SUV in the trees; dead Deke and Rusty Jim—if he even knew about them yet—or the buzz bike Goose had commandeered.

It was a long list of screw-ups, the longest Workman had ever had to deal with in one sitting.

Sure, there’d been things in the past, an abused d-gen girl from time to time, maybe dead, maybe not.  There were some failed inspections from Doggett, some bullshit about d-gens with too many bruises and scabs in places their work couldn’t have put them.  But those weren’t Goose’s fault.  Goose knew if Workman had paid his bribes at the right time in the right sums, there’d have been no trouble with the state, but Workman was always looking for a way to cheap-ass his way out of everything.

And that’s why he’d wound up with those civil fines he’d only been able to have commuted by hiring that damned woman. 

Every goddamn thing that was going to shit on the farm at the moment, every bit that Goose was going to get the blame for, was rooted in Workman’s choice to weasel out of paying his bribes.  And there wasn’t a damn thing Goose could say about it.  Mention one word and Workman would have him transferred to one of those starvation camps out in West Texas. 

That was Workman’s favorite threat.

On slow feet, Goose reached the lobby doors, and he let himself inside.

Irene peered over the top of the reception counter in front of her desk.  “I hope it’s not you he’s pissed at.  He’s been stomping around up there like a bull wearing a flank strap.

“‘Fraid it is,” Goose drawled.  “‘Fraid so.”

“Well, you better get up there and settle him down,” said Irene.  “He’s likely to stomp a hole right through the floor.”

Goose stopped by the counter to lean across it with a grin for Irene.  “Don’t you worry, honey.  I’ll straighten thangs out.”  He glanced out the window at d-gens on the lawn.  “Galloway let ‘em out.”

“On purpose?” Irene’s mouth hung open as she shook her head.

Goose nodded.  “She’s a bitch.”

“I can think of dirtier words than that,” said Irene, “but I’m too much of a lady to say them.”

“You are,” Goose confirmed.

“I’m not the kind of person to wish ill on other people, but sometimes, I just wish she’d get hit by a truck.”

Goose cackled and headed for the elevator.  “You and me both, honey.”