Black Rust (7 page)

It’s interesting how cities lay themselves out—an art district here, a bar district there, restaurants clumped around this intersection or down that street.  Industrial parks and factories on this side of town, Asians in one part of town, Hispanics in another, whites racing each other out to the suburbs and wealthy people taking the biggest houses with the best views, most preferably, close to other wealthy people.

When the Brisbane strain came, property flooded the market as owners and heirs died or turned degenerate.  Property values cratered like never before.  The crash affected every neighborhood and every city in every country.  Supply and demand.  Some people made the move from little houses in bad neighborhoods to bigger houses in nicer neighborhoods with no impact to their family budgets.  Others didn’t go, locked in by sentimentality to their home or an ill-considered responsibility to a contract with a bank that wouldn’t be around in another few years anyway.

As Brisbane’s spongiform encephalopathy started to degenerate the mental faculties of a larger and larger percentage of the population, d-gens wandered away from their homes and went feral out into the woods.  Some of the mentally diminished banded together in single houses, clans of the simple-minded feeling comfort in being close to others of their kind.  Mortgages and every other kind of debt went unpaid and uncollectable.  The economy, locally and globally, followed the real estate market’s tumble into a black hole. 

For many people, the collapse of the monetary system was the end of the world.

But money is just money.  People still needed to eat.  They still needed a place to live.  As much as modern Americans thought they could throw a few beans and seeds in the lawn and start an instant farm to feed the kids, the ones who didn’t eventually starve realized they were better off producing something else of value to trade for food.

A new system emerged to replace the old.

A cynic might say the only difference was that the paper money got a new color. 

But there was more.

In the US, part of the new economic system came from a decision on how to handle improved properties, anything with a house or a building, especially those within the borders of the old cities.  Anything that didn’t have a living owner with any kind of claim under the old system was legally open to squatters.

That created a gold rush for anyone willing to take responsibility for a house, a block of houses, a neighborhood, a mall, an industrial park—anything they thought they could control.  Of course, the words
responsibility
and
control
weren’t sufficiently clarified in the rush to redefine property rights, so squatting eventually came down to the act of simply filing a claim form with the new bureaucracy and either living in or hiring an agent to live within the borders of any contiguous piece of real estate—that’s how Ricardo came into possession of his shopping center.

Every knucklehead quickly figured out that a warm body could be dropped on any piece of property to lay claim to it whether the property was a one-bedroom apartment or a depopulated county in Nebraska.  So by the time I was old enough to have to pay for a place to park my pillow, everything with a roof and a couple of walls was already owned by somebody else. 

In a city with a million houses either vacant or full of indigent d-gens, I still had to pay rent.

With no need to be downtown, where most normal people lived among the highest concentration of police and military, I rented in the suburbs, the part of the city with the highest concentration of my customers—d-gens. 

I lived in a mostly deserted golf course community surrounded by a tall wall with a gate that functioned well enough to keep stray degenerates from wandering in.  My house wasn’t a gem.  Well, it had been at one time.  In fact, it was what most people would call a mansion built right on one of the golf course’s greens.

Time had not been kind to it. 

A giant old pine had fallen on one end of my mansion, guillotining a three-foot gash through the roof and walls, cutting a third of the house away from the rest.  The open roof let the critters, crawlies, and rain through, making most of the house uninhabitable.  I stayed in what had been a maid’s quarters over the garage, far from the end of the house that had suffered the assault by the tree.  My little suite was self-contained with its own kitchenette and bathroom.  Not spacious, but it was all I needed—the electricity was dependable and the water ran almost every day.

What more could a civilized man want?

After forty-five minutes in the Mercedes, Lutz drove past an impressive stone sign that pretentiously told passersby that they were entering a special community of beautiful people who lived in shiny houses that sat on carpets of grass so thick and monochromatic green you might expect to see naked forest nymphs napping under clouds of butterflies.

But that was thousands of yesterdays ago, before Brisbane.

Now the bushes and vines growing around the big stone sign obscured the name of my community.  In fact, I had no idea what the place had been called back when people cared about such things.  I’d found it from a set of semi-accurate GPS coordinates after I answered an online ad for the rental.

Far ahead of us, the road that ran outside my community’s wall widened into a roundabout at a T-intersection with a non-functioning fountain at its center.  It had been built at the gated entrance to appeal to the egos of potential homebuyers.  Now it was a stinking concrete pond that manufactured mosquitoes by the pound.

Parked on the far side of the roundabout, off the road and in the trees, sat a black SUV that wasn’t normally parked there.  One got used to the derelict vehicles that sat along the roads usually traveled.  At least I did.  Anything out of the norm raised my hackles.

I pointed down the road and told Lutz, “Don’t go to the gate at the roundabout, drive past the entrance.”

“Is there another way in?” Lutz asked, perturbed.  He was often perturbed, though I guess at the moment he had plenty to be perturbed about.  The thought of a work camp life had loomed over us since we first saw those raccoons on the spit.

“Down on the south side, but we won’t be going in that way.”

“You’re running?” Lutz asked, making the wrong guess.  “Now that you’ve promised to pay Ricardo.”

“No.”  I clipped my rifle to my harness in preparation to get out of the car.  Was that the police in the black SUV, already here, staking out my place, or had the Camacho brothers finally found me?  Or nothing at all? 

Maybe that.

But I hadn’t managed to stay alive so long by taking a complacent attitude toward little things that didn’t seem right.

“What then?” Lutz put a foot on the brake pedal to slow.

“Don’t,” I told him.  “Faster.  Through the roundabout.  Don’t make it look like you’re worried, just in a hurry.”

Lutz groaned.  “How do I do that?”

“Speed up, dammit.”  We were nearly there.  “Do it!”

Lutz put a foot to the gas pedal. 

I slid down in my seat and raised the tinted window on my side just enough to hide from anyone in the SUV who might have an interest.

The Mercedes lurched right into a turn, following the curve of the roundabout.

I watched the SUV between the pines.  We passed within feet of its front bumper, and I saw nothing but black inside.  It could have been empty, but it didn’t feel that way, and that was what mattered to me.

“What now?” Lutz asked, coming off the roundabout to drive south on the boulevard outside the wall.

“There’s a cut-through in the median up here.  A quarter-mile.”

Lutz took his foot off the accelerator.

“No,” I told him.  “Keep going.  Don’t slow until we’re almost there.”

“I don’t see it.”

“I’ll tell you when.”

“What do I do when we get there?”

Knowing I only had a few seconds to give Lutz instructions, I quickly gave him the code to the keypad on the door of my house.  I said, “When you turn up here, slow way down, but don’t stop.  I’ll hop out.  After that, you head back to the gate.  You know the gate code, right?” He almost always picked me up at my house before we went out on jobs, he had to know the gate code, but you never know with Lutz.

He nodded. 

“Once you’re in, go to my house and—”

“Who was that back there?” Lutz interrupted.  “The cops?  You think it was the cops, don’t you?  You want me to go to your place to get arrested.”

“No,” I told him.  “The warrant is out for me.  When you get inside my house, go up to the second floor.”  He’d never been inside before, so he needed instructions.  “Go to the right at the top of the stairs.  Way down at the end of the hall around the corner and past the laundry is my room.  It’s at the end.  Go inside.  That door’s not locked.  There’s a black case under the bed.  Grab it and come back to pick me up.”

“Where?”

“I’ll call you when you get outside again.”

“What if the cops stop me?  What do I tell them?”

“Dammit, Lutz.  Make something up.  You’re good at lying.  We don’t have any more time.  Get the case.  If the cops are on your ass when you leave, and I can’t get to you, take the case to Ricardo.  Got it?”

Lutz grumbled something.

“Got it?”

“Yeah,” he yelled, “I got it.”

Lutz braked and turned the Mercedes into the cut-through. 

I swung the door open, and as soon as we were moving slow enough, I jumped out with rifle in hand and I ran into the trees.

I watched Lutz’s taillights shrink as he drove the Mercedes back toward the roundabout at the entrance.

Checking in both directions up and down the road, I didn’t see another car or anyone else moving.  I figured I’d slipped away undetected.  I ran across the street and made my way through the weeds and bushes to get to the eight-foot stone wall that surrounded my neighborhood.  The wall wasn’t a formidable obstacle to anything determined to get in, but it served to keep most d-gens out. 

Well-hidden from the road, I followed along the wall for a bit.  Rustling through the shrubs and vines, I found a tree growing right next to the wall, cracking the lower cinderblocks with its roots.  Using the tree’s branches like a ladder I climbed, and in a matter of moments I was over, coming down in someone’s backyard.

With the wall at my back, I knew I wasn’t more then a hundred feet from the nearest house.  I was completely concealed by the forest that looked every bit like the wild woods Lutz and I had done our dirty business in earlier that night.  Two decades prior, I’d have been slinking on a lawn of green grass bordered with colorful flowers, shaded by a handful of regularly pruned trees.  Lawn mowing and maintenance had been a commodity service in those days.  Now it was a luxury well beyond the means of the residents in my neighborhood.

I made my way quickly through the trees, and came upon a house that seemed to be empty.  No surprise, most of those in the neighborhood were vacant.  The seven-person partnership that owned the community—probably some of the original residents or their heirs—charged rents much higher than anywhere else around.  They still believed the price bought them exclusivity from the wrong kind of people.

How’d I get in?  Long story. 

I did not, however, pay the higher price for the exclusivity.  A system of solar panels provided electricity when the lines were down—as they often were—and a system of cisterns throughout the neighborhood kept water in the pipes.  Those were the reasons behind my choice.

Once at the street, I got my bearings and took off at a quick pace, weaving through the trees just off the road.  No point in making myself needlessly visible as I suspected the Regulator in the SUV at the front gate had a partner waiting at my house.

With no intent to come to my place from the front, I took a circuitous route down several blocks, between houses, and finally onto an oblong meadow that had once been the fairway for the golf course’s eighth hole.  A herd of deer froze when they spotted me.  After a moment of evaluation, they bolted into the trees. 

I jogged down to the end of the meadow and slowed as I walked through the knee-high grass on the eighth green.  At the remains of a metal fence that bordered my yard, I stopped. 

Across a murky pond that used to be a swimming pool, I scanned the back of the house and looked for movement in a cave that used to be a vast, covered porch.  Now it was laced with giant spider webs and humming with a nest of wasps or bees.  I never ventured close enough to find out which.  For that matter, I never got near the pool either.  A snapping turtle the size of Ricardo’s spotter drone had taken up residence there after one of Houston’s frequent floods.

Taking care to keep myself hidden in the trees, I skirted the stained-concrete deck around the pool and made my way toward the roots of a tall pine that had fallen on my house many years before I’d moved in.  The tree hadn’t broken when it fell—the saturated ground had given way, and the roots had let go.  Now, much of the root system was sticking up in the air, and the trunk of the tree lay angled like a ramp through the first floor on the backside of the house.  It stuck out through the second-floor wall in front.

I stopped and listened as I peered into the darkness through the windows I could see.

I heard no unusual sounds coming from inside the house, but I did hear agitated voices.  I listened longer and realized they were coming from out front—arguing.  One of the voices belonged to Lutz.  There were at least a few others.

I climbed onto the downed tree’s trunk, balanced on top and walked up, using protruding, leafless branches to keep myself steady. 

Halfway up the wall on the first floor, I passed from outside to inside through the three-foot gap cut when the tree fell.  I continued up until I reached the second floor.  I couldn’t immediately step off the tree, as it had come down through a couch that didn’t look safe to plant a foot on.  I moved on past the couch and got a little higher.  With a clear spot to my right, finally, I hopped off the trunk and landed in what had been a loft overlooking the foyer.  When my feet hit the old carpet, the rotted wood beneath gave way and one of my boots slipped through up to my ankle.  I fell forward onto more solid flooring.

In the room beneath me, pieces of the ceiling disintegrated and made just enough noise in hitting the floor below to bring the argument outside to an ominous halt. 

Damn!

I rolled farther onto the loft and came to a stop, looking between the posts on the railing and seeing out one of the giant broken windows on the front of the house.  I had a view down a sidewalk from the front door to the street.  There I saw Lutz, facing three armed men I didn’t recognize, backed by two beefy steroid junkies carrying cudgels shaped like short baseball bats. 

The armed men were Regulators.  No doubt.

But three working together?

Maybe they specialized in catching bounties on regular criminals like me instead of exterminating rogue d-gens.

Unusual.

And here already?  Front-running assholes.

The two brutes with the dull eyes standing behind the Regulators were d-gens—the worst kind—representing what I believed was the most god-awful idea to percolate through any greedy bastard’s brain in a generation.

D-gens of a certain stature and beastly temperament, who could follow basic commands, were sorted out of the state preschool system early on and trained for placement as muscle for the military and the police.  Bully Boys, that’s what they called them, old slang, repurposed.  The first crop of Bully Boys had gone to the Army six or seven years ago.  The police started utilizing them a few years later for riot control.  I’d heard rumors they were now available for use in the private sector.  I just hadn’t seen it, not until that very moment.

None of the three Regulators were looking at Lutz.  Their eyes were fixed on my house.  They’d heard the noise I’d made.

Before any of them moved, I pulled my rifle up, evaluated, and aimed. 

One of the Regulators had in his hand the black case I’d sent Lutz to fetch.  He was in the center of a rough arc arrayed in front of Lutz.  He was farthest in the street and a little behind the other two Regulators who were both up on the sidewalk, closer to Lutz.  A bullet in the middle guy’s forehead would buy me a few fractions of a second while his two buddies looked around to see what had happened to him.  Those smidgens of time would be all I’d need to take them both out.  As for the Bully Boys?  I could harvest them last.  They wouldn’t understand quickly enough what was happening to take any action.  Besides, they were trained for taking orders.  They weren’t any good at deciding on their own.  At least that was the rumor.

At this range, where my targets were standing, pale faces against a dark background, all stationary, I wouldn’t miss.

But three dead Regulators in front of my house, with the high likelihood a drone of some sort was up above getting the whole thing on video, it wouldn’t be a work camp for me if I got caught, it would be a death sentence.

And that made me miss Mexico a little bit.  It was nice not having a government around with its overbearing rules about when I could and couldn’t kill somebody.

The Regulators were looking at one another, and their lips were moving.  They were conferring in hushed voices.

Run out the back?

No.  I was a gambler.  I already had chips on the table, and I knew what some of the cards were. 

Without a doubt, Lutz had told them I lived in the apartment over the garage, at the far end of the mansion.  The guy with my black case in his hand, no doubt was thinking he had something valuable.  He wouldn’t risk coming into the house after me.  He had his payday already.  The Bully Boys?  They were wild cards.

Two of the Regulators started toward the house with their Bully Boys on their heels.