Black Rust (2 page)

Lutz shouted through my earpiece, “They heard you!”

I looked up from my position, still squatting behind a bush, too far out for a clear shot at any more than a few of the degenerates.

Some of the dancers had stopped.  A woman—a young, blonde-haired d-gen—was staring into the dark, right at my position.  Only, she couldn’t have been staring at me.  With the light of the fire ruining her night vision, she had to be seeing nothing but black.

A rifle shot cracked.

“Dammit, Lutz!” He should have waited for me.  I raised my rifle and started to run.

Lutz answered me by squeezing his trigger and emptying what sounded like a full magazine into the dancers.

D-gens screamed. 

Lutz yelled. 

I heard the sound of his pistol shooting.

D-gens were running in all directions up ahead and their shadows were strobing black through the trees, making it impossible to tell exactly what was happening. 

I lost sight of the blonde, staring woman.  I couldn’t see the two kids.

Lutz yelled something I couldn’t make out and I feared he might have a d-gen’s teeth at his throat.

I burst into the clearing, planted my feet, leveled my M4, and started shooting at a handful of d-gens who were charging Lutz.

The degenerates all tumbled to the ground at his feet.

He looked over at me with a silent pistol in his hand.

“Reload!” I shouted at him as I aimed and shot at other d-gens.

They were standing, running, attacking us, or already on the ground, trying to die.

They fell.

They screamed.

They scattered.  But not fast enough.

I shot down three running into the woods on the far side of the clearing.  One crawling away got a bullet in the back.  Two more were in the trees but still visible.  I dropped them both.

And just that quick, it was over.

No d-gen was on his feet though many were still moving. 

I scanned the ring of light around the fire, looking for anything that might still be a danger.  Once you started shooting them, they tended to take a violent dislike to you. Go figure. You couldn’t leave any alive.  That’s just the way it was, regulating degenerates.  “Lutz.  You okay?”

Lutz grumbled.

“Are you hurt?”

“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.”

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.”