Black Rust Read Online Free Page B

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