Free Black Rust by Bobby Adair Page 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