The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”

  “Is there any food left?” he asked.

  “One ration.”

  He nodded. “Get it.”

  “Didn’t they pay you a new ration sheet?”

  “It’s gone,” he said distantly.

  “What?”

  “It’s gone. Get the ration.”

  I crossed over to him, and when I touched his arm he flinched.

  “D, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and for just a second whatever else it was that was on his mind shifted to the background. For just a second, he looked at me the way he had that day he found me, and still did whenever he stopped thinking about himself and there was only me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  My voice had turned hoarse all of a sudden, and my face began to get hot. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

  I saw the security part of him tick off that I wasn’t in any immediate trouble, and then his eyes drifted over the apartment. For just a second, irritation flared up on his face, but it died just as quick, even as he spoke.

  “What the hell did you do to this place?” His voice sounded far off, though, his words forgotten as soon as he said them. He wiped his face with his hand and stared out the big window, off toward the force field dome and the ship on the other side.

  “Dragan...”

  “She’s dead,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Who?” I asked, but he just shook his head.

  “We’re leaving. Now.”

  “What?”

  “Now,” he said. “Take only what you need.”

  “We can’t just leave, D. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Listen,” he said, raising his voice. “Take just what you need and—”

  Tānchi squawked from the other side of the room, and at the sound Dragan’s eyes went wide. He stepped back, crashing into the wet bar and knocking glasses down to shatter on the floor. He turned to the crib, and I saw his hand move toward his gun.

  “Dragan!”

  He eased his hand back down, still not taking his eyes off the kid.

  “Now,” he said. “We’re leaving here in five minutes.”

  His boots crunched through the broken glass as he crossed to the doorway and down the hall to his bedroom. I went to Tānchi and stroked his cheek, humming softly until the mewling stopped. His slack limbs twitched as he metabolized, still warm to the touch, but when he looked up at me from the crib, his flame orange eyes were alert. His growing fear seeped through the mites, like a spastic electric current that sent jolts through my forehead.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. Dragan came tramping back into the living room, and I saw he had a second gun in his hand, which he slipped into his belt just behind the first.

  “Leave it,” he said.

  “What... Tānchi?”

  “Leave it.”

  “Dragan, we can’t just leave him here. If he doesn’t get fed he could die—”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sam!”

  The front door’s knob turned, and the door thumped as the bolt kept it from opening. Dragan spun around and drew his pistol as something pounded against the other side, hard.

  “Dragan...”

  “They tracked me,” he said to himself.

  A loud boom shook the apartment and sent an avalanche of paper trash sliding off the kitchen counter. A second crash came as the front door’s bolt tore loose from the jamb and it blew open in a shower of splinters and drywall powder. Tānchi screamed as Dragan grabbed my wrist and pulled me close, hissing into my ear.

  “When I say run, you run,” he said. I nodded. “If you don’t hear from me in an hour, I’ve arranged a transport out of the country to Duongroi. Go to Central Transport and-”

  “Duongroi? D, why?”

  “Please, Sam, just—”

  He stopped short as several figures came tromping through the doorway.

  “Nobody move,” a woman’s voice said from behind him.

  Dragan put his hand on my cheek.

  “You’re going to hear some things about me,” he said. “Don’t believe them. I love you like you were my own flesh and blood, Sam. Remember that.”

  A lump rose in my throat as two men and a woman, all dressed in black body armor, came marching into the room with us through a haze of dust. Their scaly, formfitting combat suits hummed, creating static that made my hair stand on end, and their faces were shielded by light disruptors, giving their hooded heads the look of empty black eggshells.

  Dragan turned, standing between us and facing them. He aimed the pistol, but before he could get a shot off, the closest soldier lashed out in a blur and clamped down on his wrist. Dragan fired twice, the bullets thudding into the far wall before the suit whined and I heard the crack of bone. He grunted, and the gun clunked down onto the floor between them. The goon stomped on it and kicked it back behind him with his boot.

  Still pinned, Dragan reached back with his free hand and drew the second pistol he’d tucked in his belt. He plowed into the guy who had his wrist, and fired two shots into his side while the other soldiers piled on.

  “Now!” he yelled. “Sam, Go!”

  Across the room I could see the front door hanging from one twisted hinge, offering a clear path to the hallway outside.

  “Go!”

  The two men held Dragan while the woman stepped in. A round red stamp stood out on her armor’s right shoulder plate, marking her as the ranking soldier. She took two steps toward Dragan, and as he struggled against the men she fired the heel of her boot into his chest. His eyes bugged, and his face turned purple as blood coughed from his mouth and his legs dropped out from under him.

  I looked to the open doorway again and then back at Dragan, bouncing between decisions like an ignition that wouldn’t quite catch. Fear cut deeper and deeper through the Zen fog until my brain felt like a fuse inside was threatening to trip.

  Do something.

  Spotting Ling’s bottle of shine on the floor in front of the wet bar snapped me out of it. I snatched it up and stormed toward the woman, wielding the bottle like a club. She looked over just as I swung the bottle into the blur that covered her face. The glass broke, splashing liquor, and several scaleflies buzzed away from her shoulder plates as she staggered back. I whipped the jagged neck around, spraying alcohol and blood as I slashed at her again.

  Dragan spat and managed to suck in a breath. He ripped one arm free from the guy behind him and then turned and delivered a vicious head butt. His forehead disappeared into the dispersion field and I heard a solid crunch. When the soldier fell back, blood squirted from out of the blur.

  “Control them!” the woman barked.

  One of the soldiers unclipped a graviton emitter from his belt and aimed it at Dragan. A low hum made the furniture vibrate as the field washed over him and he staggered, legs folding underneath him. The hum went up in pitch, and Dragan fell to his knees, struggling to keep his head lifted.

  I dropped the bottle neck and took the knife out of my pocket, flicking the blade out as I made a beeline for the guy holding Dragan with no idea what I would do when I got there. I used the little blade to scrape stubborn residue off windows; it would never penetrate combat armor----

  The guy used the emitter to drag Dragan toward him, ready to hit him once he was in range, and I stabbed the point of the knife through the seam at his knee. It didn’t go all the way in, but enough to make the guy yell and spin around. When he did, the emitter’s field moved off Dragan and sucked the end table next to him across the room. It crashed against the wall as he reached down and jerked the knife out.

  “You little—”

  Dragan was back on his feet and hammered the guy in the face with one fist. He had reached back to hit him again when an armored fist closed around my arm and jerked me away.

  “Stop,” the woman said.

  Dragan stopped in mids
wing, his eyes going wide as she put her other hand over my throat and squeezed, just a little.

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Dragan gasped. “Just let her go ... please.”

  She stepped toward him and I followed desperately, toes barely touching the floor.

  “Get his wet drive,” she ordered. Two of the soldiers held Dragan, one of them pushing his head down until his chin touched his chest while the other parted the spiky hair at the base of his skull.

  “It’s not there,” he said. “He ditched it.”

  “Search him. Find the twistkey.”

  One of the soldiers stood back and aimed a scanner, running it down the length of his body. I caught a glimpse of bones and soft tissue moving across the screen, along with buttons and equipment standing out in sharp relief.

  “He doesn’t have it,” the soldier said. “Just the standard-issue security override.” The hand squeezed my neck a little harder.

  “Where did you take him?” she asked, her voice an electronically altered crackle. Dragan looked around the room at the soldiers.

  “Is this how it is?” he asked them. “You’re going to just turn on one of your own?”

  “Watch your mouth, traitor,” one of them said.

  “Don’t talk to him,” she said. She turned back to Dragan. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Where did you take Alexei Drugov?”

  Dragan shook his head, a single bead of sweat dropping from his stubbly chin.

  “That place was destroyed,” Dragan rasped. “How can it—”

  She clamped her black, scaly glove down on my neck hard then, and I gasped. I tried to squirm free, but the combat suit gave her incredible strength.

  “Tell me where you took him,” she said, the armor making a low whine as she slowly tightened her grip.

  “Don’t let her do this,” Dragan said to the other soldiers. My throat felt the size of a straw as I gasped air in. “You know me. This isn’t—”

  She lifted me up until my toes brushed the floor and I choked. Grabbing at her wrist to hold myself up, I tried to pull in another breath but couldn’t. I struggled, trying to peel her fingers back, and felt a flood of emotion surge through the mites as suddenly as a shock of cold water to the face ... anger, hatred, and disgust bled through my brain like chemical poison. Underneath it all hunger simmered, a desperate, driving hunger that made my stomach clench into a painful knot. It wasn’t coming from Tānchi. The signal was a million times stronger. It was coming from her.

  She’s a haan, I thought, staring down into the empty hood created by the dispersion mask. The thought buzzed in my head…But they’re so delicate. How can she ...

  The room seemed to get darker as I struggled to stay on my tiptoes. As dark clouds bloomed in front of me, I saw a fat scalefly come crawling down the length of her arm, then out of sight below my chin. A sound like water rushed in my ears as the world around me began to fade.

  “Wait,” I heard Dragan say. Through the slits of my eyes I found his face, and when I did I barely recognized him. I’d seen what he could do the day he found me and in the days since, but now the fierceness and strength that I’d always associated with him were stripped away. There was only fear in his eyes, just raw fear. Not for himself, but for me. I’d broken him.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said again. The room seemed to be tilting, and he sounded far away.

  I glanced right, swiping the 3i icons away in a streak of hot pink hearts and neon that left trails across the blurry backdrop of our ruined apartment. My friend list scrolled up until I spotted Dragan’s name and grabbed it. When I tapped him, he’d already begun to move, and I saw metal flash as the knife at his belt came free from its scabbard.

  love u 2.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” I heard him say.

  The knife came down in an arc as he launched toward us, and the blade struck the soldier next to him. The soldier staggered back while groping for the blade’s handle, now jammed into the meat between his shoulder and neck. He struck the wall and left a streak of blood as he slid to the floor.

  Dragan seized on the 3i connection, his desperate reply stopping almost as soon as it started.

  Forgive me—

  The other soldier crashed his plated fist down on the back of Dragan’s head, and his 3i connection dropped as he went down like a stone. He wasn’t moving, but the soldier knelt over him and hit him again.

  “Don’t kill him, you idiot!” the woman shouted.

  He hit Dragan again, casting dots of blood across the wall next to him, and my feet came up off the floor as Red-stamp stormed across the room, colliding with the coffee table and shattering the glass top. Before I could even get my bearings, she’d swung me around in a complete circle and then hurled me away. The room tilted, receding as I flew through the air.

  My back hit something hard enough to force the air out of my mouth and nose in a spray of snot and spit. Then the surface behind me gave away with an earsplitting crash.

  Everything slowed down, and I saw a million sparkles fly away from me as I passed through the cloud of glass. Shards and chunks spun end over end through glittering powder as the living room curtains rushed out after me on a wave of cool, canned air. For just a second, it formed a faint, smoky fog as the hot, humid night breeze outside washed over me.

  The balcony rail passed underneath me as the inside of the apartment fell away. Back through the broken window I could see Dragan lying crumpled and still. My momentum slowed and I fell back, staring up through the sparkling glass bits as the stars wheeled by in the night sky above. Then I plummeted away from the balcony, and the windows of hundreds of apartments whipped past in a blur while my clothes billowed and snapped around me.

  Hot summer air roared in my ears as I narrowly missed the huge metal frame of a building sign and neon lights began to streak past in a stream of liquid color. Fifty stories below, past the crisscrossing streams of air-cars, the lights of the street were quickly rushing up to meet me. I screamed over the racket of graviton engines and honking horns.

  Something tugged at me from behind, and my skin suddenly began to tingle. The tug grew stronger, and the rushing wind let up until the traffic sounds swallowed it. I’d begun to fall more slowly somehow, like I was connected to an invisible elastic band that had stretched taut.

  The graviton emitter, I thought. One of them ...

  Hanging facedown, I dangled in midair sixty stories above the street, the tingle from the field increasing even as I felt it begin to lose its grip. I was too far away, and I was too heavy. Any second now, I’d fall again and this time nothing would be able to stop me.

  Below, something flashed. A white point of light appeared, and then a second later the lanes of speeding air traffic directly below me were blotted out by a floating patch of empty space. A thin, bright white outline surrounded it in a perfect hexagon while the inside resolved into a view of an alley that appeared to float in midair.

  What the fu—

  The tether holding me snapped and I plunged, arms and legs pedaling, into the opening. All at once the city around me disappeared and all sense of movement stopped. For a minute, there was no up or down, no frame of reference at all. I just hung in limbo, like I’d been frozen in time.

  My ears popped and then just as quickly as I’d gone into the hole, I’d come out again, still screaming, as I tumbled out the mouth of an alley and skidded a few feet before crashing into the side of a parked car. When I looked up, I saw a crowd of people who were standing under a streetlight look over in surprise.

  What the hell?

  I stood up, gasping as I took stock of myself. Stinging scratches crisscrossed my face, shoulders, and arms, and one palm burned with road rash, but that was it. I was alive, back on the street just outside our apartment building.

  Spinning around, I looked down the sidewalk behind me. A stream of people there had stopped to look back, wondering what was happening. I did a complete turn and saw nothing but staring faces looking down at
the girl who’d just appeared out of thin air.

  Across the street, a scrawny boy sat on the neon fiberglass bug shell of an airbike he’d just started, gaping at me. I looked back up the sheer building face toward our apartment, too high above to pick out.

  A gate, I thought. Someone gated me down safely. Was it one of the soldiers? The haan hadn’t shared free-floating gate tech with us yet, but there was no way she had done it—it had to have been one of them.

  Something tinkled onto the pavement, and then bits of glass began to rain down onto the sidewalk and street as the falling debris caught up with me. I shielded my head, ducking under an awning as someone hollered. A loud pop echoed down the street as a metal rod trailing one of our living room curtains speared through the windshield of a parked car in an explosion of glass dust.