Black Rust (3 page)

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 vehicle.  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.

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. 

That was important because I’d soon be running through it to get to the roof just as fast as I could.  If that drone we were chasing arrived and docked, it’d take only seconds to get a connection and start downloading the incriminating video.

With the destination and a plan in mind, I urged, “Get us there as fast as you can.”

Lutz pressed the pedal to the floor, the engine revved.  The beast sped faster.  “Three years for shooting down that spotter drone.  That’s on you.”

Are we still talking about this?

I was working to cover my ass and his.  He was busy divvying up the blame. 

Where are those damn red LEDs?

“We should go to Old Mexico,” he told me.  “Get a gig doing security for a cartel boss.  Maybe those Camacho brothers.  I bet they’d hire a couple of gringos.”

We were driving over a hundred miles an hour, a risky speed on roads that hadn’t seen any maintenance in twenty years.

“There is no Old Mexico.”  I pointed at a green exit sign with its weathered white letters barely reflecting our headlights through the tall grasses growing around it.  “Is that where we get off?”

“Next one.”  Lutz told me.  “You’ve been there, to Mexico.  You know people.”

I huffed but said nothing.  Going on the run into a failed state with Lutz in tow was just about the last thing I wanted.  Chasing the Old Mexico dream, a dream I knew didn’t exist, wasn’t on my list.

“I’ve seen the pictures,” he said.  “Beaches.  Palm trees.  Girls.”

Poverty.  Lawlessness.  Shortages worse than here, unless you worked for one of the cartels.  And plenty of people down there who wanted me dead. 

I pointed up the highway.  “If we get the drone, we can shake this.  No arrest, you hear me?  We’ve got a good thing going here.”

“Canada, then.”  Lutz looked at me to gauge my interest.  “We head north.  Get there in three or four days.”

“Across Oklahoma?” I laughed.  “Kansas?  They’re as bad as Mexico.  We’d never make it.  You’d need to go around the long way.  Run up through Denver, maybe.  Or head east and go up on the other side of the Mississippi.”

“So, Canada?” Lutz turned the wheel slightly and took his foot off the gas as the Mercedes rolled onto a long exit ramp.

I pointed across the highway at the black silhouette of a building standing next to the old mall.  “There.” 

Still no damn LEDs. 

If that drone had already docked and had downloaded its data, maybe I’d have to try for Canada with Lutz. 

Lutz careened around a turn at the end of the ramp to run the SUV across an overpass.

“When we get there,” I told him.  “Get me as close to the door as possible.  “I’ll run inside and get up to the roof.  You might be able to get a cell signal and call your spotter friend if you can.  We need to find out how much video made it back through the network.”

“He’ll be pissed about his drone,” Lutz told me.

“We’ll pay him for it.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“How can you not afford half a drone?” We’d been making a lot of money working together.

“I got bills.”  Lutz bounced the Mercedes over a curb into an expanse of old asphalt surrounding the mall.  His voice turned angry.  “You know that.  I got kids to pay for.”

Yeah, a dozen.  Because you’re so in love with your DNA, you can’t imagine a future without your progeny there pissing in the gene pool.

Just like everyone, Lutz was trying to beat the odds.  And the odds had been badly skewed since the Brisbane strain of H5N1 burned its way through the global population back when I was just learning how to spank it to Internet porn.  Seven percent of everybody died.  That doesn’t seem like a lot when you figure ninety-three percent of the population survived.  But a nearly one-in-ten kill rate puts the kind of scare into people that changes the world.  Every precarious social institution shattered.  States collapsed.  Wars festered.  Treaties were forgotten.  Churches dissolved and new religions formed.  Then more people died.  And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

It was that damned Easter egg the virus left in a gene called PRNP that remade the world.

Like ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine-nine percent of everybody in the world, I’d never heard of PRNP and in a year of guessing wouldn’t have come close to landing on the right answer.

Everybody with a normal PRNP gene knows what it is today, and they know a mutated PRNP gene produces protease-resistant prions.  Very few have any understanding of what that means, but we all know the words because we hear them everywhere. 

“Mommy, why are there so many mental degenerates in the world?”

“Prions, honey.  Now go to bed.  Be a good girl and stay quiet or the prions will turn your brain into a hunk of Swiss cheese.”

That’s exactly what happens, one gene mutates, it produces a misshapen protein, the protein rots holes in the brain turning it into spongy Swiss cheese and eventually—a long eventually—kills.

It doesn’t take much of an education to guess that a brain full of cheese holes doesn’t work as well as a normal brain.

Degenerates have Swiss-cheese brains. 

How all of this relates to Lutz’s excessive offspring problem comes down to math.  If a man and a woman with normal PRNP genes have a baby, it’s born normal.  But the Brisbane strain of H5N1 and its descendant strains became the most common influenza strains on the planet.  Unfortunately for us, they all infect many species of birds and all humans.  Almost all those strains mutate the PRNP gene.  In short, we all catch some strain of that flu eventually.  Some of us recover with no gene mutation.  Over ninety-five percent of us get the Easter egg.

So, having a kid is a matter of rolling the dice and hoping to win against really shitty odds.  Produce twenty kids and one might grow up normal.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a one in twenty normalcy rate is the road to extinction for humans.

Out in the feral d-gen population, a baby has a fifty-fifty chance at being born with normal genes.  They all catch the flu.  For the half born with the mutated PRNP gene it doesn’t matter.  For the half born with a normal gene, ninety-five percent mutate because of the flu.  So of all the babies born to the d-gens, roughly one in forty has a chance to grow up normal.

It’s not intuitively obvious to anyone who’s uncomfortable with word problems, but d-gens ultimately produce most of the babies who grow into normal, intelligent adults.  It’s true because there are so many more d-gens than normal people in the world. 

As distasteful as the thought is, they are the hope for our species.  Not to mention Lutz’s hope of having a normal little version of himself born into the world.

And that’s why killing otherwise healthy d-gens of childbearing age is a really bad thing.