The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  The tank thumped and the hiss of water ended in a muted dribble. I climbed in and stood under the shower-head, rubbing alcohol gel over my bare skin even when the cuts lit up like fire. The slice from when I’d picked up the glass shard burned so bad it made my nose run as I wiped my hands off in my hair, then turned the faucet and let the liter of hot water dribble down over me. I rinsed the cleanser away as best I could and scrubbed the funk out of my hair until the last drops patted down on top of my head. Then I leaned against the wall for a while, looking down my flat chest at the ridges of my ribs and feeling dizzy.

  When I stepped back out into the hotel room naked, I saw an arc of blue lightning flash over the top of the skyline through the mist outside. Way off, another building lit up and began to fall as fat drops splashed off the window. I kept the light off and grabbed the bottle of shine from my backpack. I cracked it and took a big gulp, then let out a long breath and crooked my neck to reactivate the 3i feed.

  Vamp, it’s me.

  Sam, are you okay?

  Yeah.

  I took another swig off the bottle, and fished the pistol out of the backpack.

  You’re all over the news.

  I know. I’m okay.

  Where are you?

  Someplace safe. Don’t worry.

  Don’t worry?

  I headed over to the window and sat on the sill with my head against the glass, peering through the rain toward my apartment building. I pointed the gun up toward our balcony, then squinted through the scope, trying to frame it.

  They took Dragan, I said.

  He paused, his heart icon beating several times before answering, I know. Did you hear what they’re saying?

  No. What who’s saying?

  The feeds are already buzzing. Word is he got picked up for smuggling some kind of weapon into Hangfei. Something bad.

  I clenched my jaw. That’s bullshit.

  I’m just telling you, that’s what they’re saying.

  What do they mean “weapon”? Like a bomb or something?

  No one knows. It sounds like it’s worse than that.

  It’s bullshit.

  I know.

  You better know.

  I found the edge of the shattered glass through the scope and followed it to our balcony, where one of the curtains flapped in the open air like an ugly flag. There were lights on inside, and I could make out movement.

  Where are you? I’ll come over.

  You can’t, security’s got Tùzi-wō locked down. I’m going to hole up for tonight and lie low. I’ll message you tomorrow once things have cooled down a little. Another pause.

  Okay.

  I wanted to tell him what happened, to tell someone what happened, but they might actually be scanning the feeds for keywords and I didn’t want to risk it. Not until I was ready to put some distance between me and Tùzi-wō.

  I put a call in to Kang. I can trust him. Hopefully he’ll get back to me soon.

  Isn’t he with security? What if he just comes after you instead?

  He doesn’t know where I am. I know it’s not perfect, but I need info, Vamp. I need to know something, anything.

  Okay, I get it.

  Dragon isn’t a traitor.

  I know.

  Peering through the pistol’s scope, I adjusted the zoom until I could see past the mangled railing and through the hole the airbike had left. Something moved inside again, and I spotted a shadow cast on one wall as whoever was there stepped in front of the light. It was someone big, someone tall, but there was something weird about him, like he had a sheet draped over him.

  “What in hell?” I said under my breath. The shape moved, and seemed to come apart as a series of ropy silhouettes undulated slowly across the drywall.

  I blinked and rubbed my eye, but when I looked again the shadow was just the shadow of a man wearing a helmet and poncho. I sighed, lowering the pistol before tossing it on the bed. All the adrenaline had burned through whatever meds were left in my system, and all I had in hand was the shine. It was going to be a long night.

  Can you come tomorrow? Once things have cooled off? I asked him.

  You got it.

  Thunder rolled as I took another swallow from the bottle. It burned going down, but it helped keep my hands steady. I took another one and leaned against the window. Below, clusters of rain-slick, helmeted heads moved down the street through an alternating blue and red strobe while the whoop of a siren occasionally drifted up. I brought up the eyebot again and watched the orange markers move in time with the officers on the street.

  The eyebot works really well, I sent. Are the security guys tracked by people who are running the app, watching from windows?

  Mostly. Some are on the street. If you’re watching now then your feed is part of the model.

  You realize they’re going to crack down on this, right? Hwong isn’t going to like people being able to track any officer or soldier who...

  I perked up a little suddenly, wiping breath fog from the window. As the helmeted heads moved, so did the markers.

  What?

  Does this thing keep a log?

  You mean like a history of troop movements? The users can’t access it, but yeah, I store it so we can see how operations like this play out.

  How many people are running it?

  Actively running it, I’m not sure. Downloads are in the tens of thousands, though.

  Then could I use it to track Dragan maybe?

  Someone has to see the guys who took him. He’s wherever he’s going by now.

  Not track where he is now. I want to know where he was between the time he came back to Hangfei and the time he got to the apartment.

  The app only tags security, though. A person only gets painted if he’s fitted with a security transponder.

  Dragan was still kitted when he came home.

  Vamp thought about that for a minute. Okay, yeah. He’d get picked up for sure then.

  Can you find him?

  Problem is, with the sweep and now the mess at your place, he’d be like a needle in a haystack.

  Can you do it?

  He wasn’t part of the sweep, so he might have been out of the main jumble. I don’t know if I can pick him out of the general noise of regular patrols, but I’ll see what I can do.

  Thanks. See you tomorrow?

  Tomorrow. Be careful, Sam.

  I logged off and took another swig from the bottle. Good guys like Vamp didn’t come along every day.

  He was kind of famous online, but that wasn’t why I liked him. I mean, I used to think he was cool, and when I kicked in a yuan to his pet project I was psyched when my name actually got picked. I wasn’t his first contest date, but he was my first real date ever, which was kind of funny because it was a complete disaster on almost every level.

  I smiled, remembering it. Afterward I really didn’t expect to ever hear from him again, but he wouldn’t leave me alone until I let him apologize and try again. Our second date wasn’t really a date, but that was when we clicked for some reason. He became the first real friend I ever made, and we’d been close since.

  I sighed and stared up at the ceiling. I forget when I first noticed the change, but now his voice dropped when he talked to me, and his eyes had started to linger. He sat closer to me these days, and smiled more. I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I mean, it wasn’t like I totally couldn’t see myself with him, but I didn’t want to ruin things, and it seemed like moving either way could do that now. I’d been avoiding the whole thing so far, but it had gotten worse and now he was too ready to go out on a limb for me. I was going to have to deal with it sooner or later.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight I didn’t have the strength left to think about anything. In the morning I’d figure out what to do next. Until then, I just wanted to get numb. Fuzzy wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to be numb enough to sleep through the night.

  With half the bottle gone I got pretty close, but I still didn’t get my wish.
>
  ~ * ~

  Chapter Five

  23:45:21 BC

  “I’ll help you, but first you have to help me....”

  Sleep came, but it was a fitful sleep full of sweat, jitters, and bad dreams. It dredged up murky clouds of half-remembered voices and faces. Memories of being woken by gunshots and groping fingers.

  “Touch me....”

  In my dreams I smelled human waste, engine smoke, and cooking meat that made me salivate even though I knew it was the flesh of men. A low rumble filled the air, and a faint hiss bubbled up over it while a child sobbed from a few feet away. I shifted on the slick concrete floor to try and wake my leg up, and winced as my back pressed against the grimy wall. My throat was so dry it ached, and when I turned my head toward the water bottle hanging next to me, the hand’s length of cable connecting my nylon collar to the eye screw above pulled taut. The edges dug into the raw chaff around my neck as I licked the ball bearing at the end of the bottle’s metal tube, careful not to let any of the warm, foul-tasting water dribble away. Through the wire mesh basket that held it in place, I could see there was only a tiny amount left.

  The men were back. I could hear their footsteps as they came closer, and then the squeal of a rusted bolt being turned.

  “No!”

  The child, a boy, screamed suddenly and pulled at his collar as the heavy metal door groaned open across the room. We’d been brought in together, he and I. He’d been in a blind panic ever since, quiet only when he slept, or when they finally got fed up and shocked him into unconsciousness.

  I didn’t bother to try and shush him. It didn’t work. When I looked in his eyes, I could see he’d gone over the edge. He was next now, the row of collars next to his dangling bloody from their hooks. They’d hung the last woman to bleed out earlier, and the drips had finally stopped maybe ten minutes before. Two figures came through the door, indistinct shapes in the haze of steam. They clomped across the wet concrete floor as the door slammed shut behind them.

  “No!” the boy shrieked. “Please no! Please!”

  The two dark-skinned, tattooed men approached the woman who was still hanging by her ankles over the trough. One of them guided her over to the platform of butcher block, while the other worked the controls. Her head thumped on the wooden surface as the winch began to lower her.

  “Please! I want to go home!”

  “Gonzo, please tell me he’s next,” one of the men muttered.

  “He’s next.”

  He unhooked the cable from around the woman’s bony, broken ankles and moved it off to the side. His partner grabbed a heavy apron and slipped it over his head, then yanked a machete out of the block.

  “Don’t!” the boy cried.

  “Shut it,” the man with the machete said. “You don’t, you get the prod again. Get me?”

  The boy went quiet, but he was clenching and unclenching his fists frantically, eyes bugging from hollow sockets. He slid across the wall behind him, away from the men until the collar tugged at his bloodied neck and he almost knocked over the shallow, shit-stained bucket next to him. The man cursed as he went back to join his partner, who had spread out the dead woman’s arms and legs. They’d chop her up next, like they did the others.

  That’s going to be me. The thought used to send me into a panic, as bad as the boy’s, but now it just crawled around in my brain like an ugly certainty. That was going to be me. They’d do the boy, and then they’d do me. They’d winch me up and cut my throat, then leave to go have a cigarette while I dangled.

  My empty stomach turned, bile threatening to creep up on me. I swallowed hard and squeezed my fists until the nails cut into my palms. I was shaking, shivering even in the heat, and I couldn’t stop.

  “Don’t watch,” the old man said from my right. I didn’t look over at him, but I could sense him there, head lolled against the taut cable. I reached down behind me with one hand and found the length of wire I’d managed to work off the water bottle’s mesh basket. I poked the point I’d sharpened with one finger. It seemed puny next to the blades the butchers used.

  The man with the machete looked down at the woman, and his eyes lingered on her breasts. He reached down with his free hand, and cupped one, giving it an experimental squeeze.

  “Kind of a shame, huh?” the second man said, shaking out a cigarillo and sticking it in his mouth.

  “They’re real,” the first one said.

  “Well,” the second one said with a yellow-toothed grin as he sparked his lighter, “the taste is in the fat.”

  “Why do you watch?” the old man rasped. I didn’t answer. I poked my finger with the wire again, the jab of pain waking me up a little. I might be able to surprise them, but I felt so dizzy now I could barely hold my head up. I told myself one of them would have to reach down to unfasten the collar. If I went for the eye ...

  The old man opened his mouth to speak again, but he froze, like he was on TV and someone paused him. His image flickered.

  “...receiving this transmission, listen carefully,” a voice said, Mandarin with a heavy Western accent. “What you are experiencing is not a dream. You’re— “

  The old man flickered again, and the strange voice cut out. The butchers laughed, one of them spreading the dead woman’s arm out across the block while the other got into position. He hoisted the machete, and then everything froze again.

  “... attempting to reach you... if anyone can...”

  The voice crackled out again. Everything jumped forward a few seconds, and the sounds and smells all returned as the man brought the machete down hard on the woman’s shoulder.

  I jerked awake and crashed into the wall behind me as I scrambled back. In the seconds it took to register that I was back in the hotel, and that it was just a dream, I’d retreated from the mattress and stumbled on all fours into the corner of the room. My body was covered in sweat that made the cuts sting, and my breath came in fast, shallow hitches.

  A dream. Just a dream. Calm down. Dim sunlight shone in through the window. It was day It was just a dream.

  I hadn’t had it in a while, but it had been waiting. It had been just waiting for me to miss a dose or two, to sleep too lightly, so it could seep in and take me back to that place. Why hadn’t I... ?

  The events of the night before were still tangled in cobwebs, and for a few seconds I listened for the sound of Dragan in the shower or Tānchi keening from the crib before I realized where I was.

  I wiped drool from the side of my mouth and tried to blink the dryness out of my eyes. I’d passed out the night before, and the bottle lay capped on its side on the end table next to the lamp. One of the 3i’s chat windows blurred off in the corner, where a string of text still sat.

  Sam, forgive me, I couldn’t—I jerked upright as I realized the message was from Dragan. I seized on the chat window and dragged it to the foreground, firing off text as fast as I could manage.

  Dragan, where are you? Are you okay? He didn’t answer.

  Dragan?

  His contact icon was gray. The message had been sent hours ago and I’d missed it, although it looked like he hadn’t managed to even finish a sentence before he got cut off.

  Forgive me, I couldn’t... what? I stared at the text, trying to make something out of it, but I couldn’t. It couldn’t tell me what happened to him, only that he was alive. Or he had been, a couple of hours ago. It couldn’t tell me where they’d taken him.

  Or could it? I pulled up the message details, fingers crossed, and smiled when I saw a location tag was included. At the time Dragan sent the message, he was in...

  Shiliuyuán Station.

  My smile shifted to a frown. That didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t any Shiliuyuán Station, not anymore. It was destroyed in the Impact. Did it mean the location where the station used to be? Had she taken him to the ship?

  On the tray underneath it, another message indicator flashed. That one was from Vamp, sent maybe an hour or so before Dragan’s message.
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  Still pulling the eyebot data but got you something else. Check your phone.

  I rubbed my eyes, making the holodisplay warp as I pawed around for my cell phone. He’d sent me a mail with a single link to somewhere on one of the Channel X servers, and when I touched it, a long string of text appeared. I squinted, head pounding, as I tried to focus on the scrolling characters.

  It took me a second to realize what I was looking at, but when I did, a weak smile spread over my face.