The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  “Vamp, no, I’m sorry.”

  “Sam, I’m coming with you.”

  Before he could push any further, I broke away and sprinted to the mouth of the alley.

  “Sam, wait!”

  I stopped and turned back, just for a minute. “Don’t follow me! Look ... I’ll call you in an hour.”

  “You’re going to get pinched. They’re not coming out with it officially, but the buzz is the weapon they’re looking for is still here in the city. Security is through the roof, Sam.”

  “I know. Wait for me?”

  He didn’t answer, but he’d wait. Once I was around the corner, I lost myself in the crowd and kept one eye on the main drag. When I saw a taxi approach, I darted out into the street from between two parked cars and tires chirped as the cabbie laid on his horn. Before he could squeeze by, I opened the back door and jumped in, slamming it behind me. A pair of tired-looking eyes in a wrinkled brown face glared back at me from the rearview mirror. I peeked out the window and saw a couple of cops waiting outside the apartment go back to talking.

  “Hey,” the cabbie said while someone leaned on his horn behind us. “What’s the—” He stopped when I held up the cash card where he could see.

  “The gate hub to Hăiyáng-Gāodù,” I said. “Hurry.”

  He shrugged, rolling the car forward just as the line behind us started trying to sneak around on his left. He picked up speed, closing the gap ahead and then breaking with about an inch to spare between his grille and the guy in front’s back bumper.

  “What’s in Hăiyáng-Gāodù?” the cabbie asked over his shoulder as I thumbed in the hotel name and pulled up the exact address.

  “The Pink Bull.”

  He raised his heavy eyebrows. “You a hooker?”

  “Just drive the car.”

  He shrugged again as we passed a couple more security guys standing on the corner. I rode low in the seat, watching the people and buildings cruise past, and risked a glance out the back window once we were past them. Neither of them bothered to look up. When we hit the tunnel I sat up again and put my forehead to the window next to me, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

  I couldn’t believe it was true. I wouldn’t believe it was true until I saw it for myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to check the news feeds. I didn’t want to know for sure, not yet. I wanted to hold on to uncertainty, or even denial if that’s all it was, just a little longer.

  My stomach felt hollow again, clenching and unclenching like an anxious fist. I slid one hand into my side pocket to make sure I still had the ration sheet, and felt its rough edge under my fingertips. It had a full five punches left. I leaned back to nurse my throbbing head, turning my face into the cool current dribbling out of the cab’s vent. The streets were already thick with people, and they got thicker the farther on we went. By the time I could see the Heights off in the distance, the sidewalks were swarmed, bodies brushing the side of the cab as we passed. Through the front windshield, all I saw were chains of cars and an uneven blanket of bobbing black-haired heads sprinkled with the occasional shiny smoke-gray dome as the road sloped down and away. Arms waved in the air as people crowded around the rows of street kiosks, buying and selling. They were like a huge, surging organism with a steady, babbling voice that rose over the distant sound of the surf beyond. Even through the vent a wet, salty musk had started to simmer under the street smells.

  “Don’t bother pulling up,” I said. “Here is fine.” The cabbie rolled to a stop and shut off the meter. I handed my cash card through the partition and grimaced a little when I saw how much it was.

  He swiped it and took a tip without asking. The machine spat out a receipt and he tore it off before handing both back.

  “Thanks.”

  I stepped out into the sweltering heat, feeling the breath of hot methanol exhaust against my leg as the engine rumbled and he pulled away from the blue-gray cloud.

  I joined the throng of people queued up in front of the hub, and even through the gate I could see the Pink Bull sign: a half pinwheel of turquoise arched over a blazing pink bull with a phallus the size of an airbike’s sidecar.

  I pushed my way into the current, following a chiseled guy with a zebra-pattered bandana that held down a nest of home-perm frizz. When it was my turn to go through, I sensed something behind me, something moving toward me, and a shot of adrenaline made my skin prickle. Before I could turn and see who or what it was, though, my momentum carried me through the gate and I stepped into the bustle of downtown Hăiyáng-Gāodù. The exit gate had brought me right up to the corner of the hotel where that obnoxious plastic dong pointed down at me from above like Gonzo’s pink fist.

  The funky surf smell was a lot stronger there, and the humid sea breeze carried with it the chemical stink from the offshore feedlots. Down at the far end of the street, I could see through to the muck gray expanse of the tidal flats and mountains of waste salt. Way off in the distance an irregular, speckled dark cloud hung low to the ocean surface—scaleflies, swarming their way down the coast where most would get harvested, and the rest sprayed.

  A little pink heart blinked on in the corner of my eye as a friend request came in on the 3i.

  NIX.

  My face got hot at the sight of his name.

  Denied.

  I approached the hotel, weaving between the tricked-out cars and rowdy pedestrians that filled the street. A lot of festival masks and costumes were already on display, and splashes of red dye were fanned out across the blacktop. The party was already starting, and the odd firecracker popped here and there over the din.

  The outside of the hotel was wall-to-wall people, but no one paid me too much mind as I squeezed through to the front door and into the lobby. I passed through a cloud of smoke, cologne, and perfume and made my way to the front desk.

  “Can I help you?”

  The hotel clerk sat behind a faintly rippling force field, eyes staring up over a pair of bodega-rack purple sunglasses. A little fan sitting on the desktop next to him didn’t quite dry the sweat on his bronze skin.

  “Yeah, I need to get into a room,” I said.

  “You need a room?”

  “No, I’m visiting someone.”

  He turned the handset on the desk around deliberately with one finger. “So call him and have him ring you up.”

  “It’s a surprise,” I told him.

  He didn’t smile. “You working?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then call up.”

  “It’s as—”

  “Nobody likes surprises, kid.”

  People around us had started to take notice, and a couple of tall guys with gold chains around their necks laughed. I leaned in closer, until my nose tingled from the force field.

  “Look, he knows me.”

  “Then have him let you in.”

  Appealing to him wasn’t going to work; I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know what my problem was, and he didn’t care, not even a little.

  “What’s it going to take for you to give me a room key and let me up?”

  He shrugged. “What do you got?”

  “I’ve got some credit.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” He was serious. I didn’t have anything close to that.

  “That’s too much,” I said.

  “Then beat it.”

  “I can’t.”

  He stared at me a few seconds longer, and then his heavy brow came back up just a hair. He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice.

  “You think I’m stupid?” he asked. “I can see what you got in your pockets, right down to the panties you’re not wearing.”

  The ration sheet. He had some kind of scanner aimed at me, and he’d seen the ration sheet. Wherever the emitter was, the angle must not have let him see into the backpack, at least, not yet.

  “I’ll give you two punches,” I told him.

  “Three.”

/>   “Two, plus fifty yuan. That’s my final offer.”

  He sucked his teeth for a minute before a faint smile crept across his thick lips. “What’s the name?”

  “Eng, 423.”

  He sighed, reaching under the desk and fishing out a key card. He held it between his fingers.

  “The tickets,” he said.

  I fished out the sheet and tore off two tickets. I passed them under the field, where he made them disappear. I swiveled the desk reader around and touched my card to the scanner, then punched in the amount. The LCD flickered green, and I snatched the key from his fingers.

  “Watch your ass. Like I said, people around here—”

  “Don’t like surprises. Got it.”

  The two guys with the chains were still watching as I backed away, keeping me between the backpack and the front desk until I could turn and push back through the crowd to the elevator. The one on the left opened and a tired-looking woman with red hair stepped out. Fishnet stockings clung to her wiry legs, disappearing up under a miniskirt that barely cleared her crotch. She gave me a knowing glance as I passed her and stepped into the cramped car with a cloud of perfume fumes thick enough to catch fire. I tapped the contact for the fourth floor with one knuckle and held my breath as the car rattled its way up.

  “Sam?” a voice said from the ad box speaker in the door.

  “Not now.”

  “If you want to opt out, you can present your card to the—”

  “Look, I don’t want any plastic surgery, okay?”

  “I hear that,” the door said, “but the question is, can you afford not to have any? I’m just a virtual construct, but even I can spot at least fifteen correctable imperfections and that’s just your face.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Maybe not, but it matters. Believe me, it matters. If you don’t care about your appearance, then how—”

  The car stopped and I slammed the button to open the doors with my palm. As soon as they parted enough for me to sneak through, I was out of there.

  “BeauVisage!” the elevator called behind me, hammering my 3i with contact info as I stalked away. “The company is BeauVisage! They can fix you!”

  The hallway upstairs didn’t smell much better. I passed a few more guys in the hallway, but nobody bothered me as I turned the corner and found the door marked 423.

  I waited until the coast was clear, then slid the key card through the slot and waited for the click. The second I heard it, I slipped through and shut the door behind me.

  The room was dark except for slits of light that shone in through the closed window blinds on the far side of the room. The air stank of heavy cologne mixed with something else, something edible that hung just underneath it.

  The room was empty, and the bed still made. On one nightstand I could see a cell phone, so he hadn’t gone far, but it looked like I had the place to myself at least for a little while. I looked around and saw a pill sheet with six double-cross tabs still in the blisters on the nightstand next to a woman’s handbag. Wherever he was, he wasn’t alone.

  I tore one of the pill tabs off, and as I slipped it in my pocket I looked back and saw light coming from under the bathroom door. I hadn’t even thought to check the bathroom.

  Holding my breath, I crossed past the closet and back toward the closed door. I shouldered off the backpack and unzipped it, taking out the stun gun before knocking three times.

  “Eng?”

  No one answered. I opened the door and peeked inside. The overhead light had been left on in there, one of the two exposed tubes faded to a soft gray, and I could see little bottles of man products lined up along the back of the sink along with a stick of women’s deodorant.

  As I stepped into the room, I smelled the food smell again and my stomach growled. There was food here, or there had been, and not just ration packs either. The smell came from real meat. Street meat.

  I’d lived in a hotel room on the Row for a year before I got grabbed and eventually rescued, and I’d worked cleaning rooms for the old super, Wei, for most of it. I knew where to stash stuff. I lifted the porcelain back of the toilet off with a hollow scrape and laid it against the wall next to the sink. Sure enough, a little metal cooler sat just under the surface of the chemical soup there. I pulled it out warm and dripping, then laid it down in the shower basin and popped the latches.

  Inside were more pill sheets, passports, forged ration sheets, and a handwritten order list he’d crossed some names off from. I quickly scanned down the column of names, until one of them caught my eye near the bottom:

  Shao, Dragan (sec).

  Like a lot of the others, his name was crossed off, maybe indicating he’d already picked up the passports. He had been here.

  I thumbed past the stacks of paper and found the edge of a plastic bag with my finger. There were six vacuum-sealed packets in there. Each was filled with cubes of meat, each topped with a square of browned, fatty skin, all suspended in a stew of stock, spices, and rendered fat. Each was labeled with a handwritten sticker.

  Scrapcake. Human meat.

  “Fucking creep ...”

  I didn’t even think before I used my pocketknife to slit open the first bag, and then squeezed the glop into the toilet bowl. When I’d pressed out the last of it, I stopped myself a second before unconsciously sucking the grease off my thumb. The smell was intoxicating, making my stomach growl, and making me hate myself for not being able to help it.

  I dumped them all, and dropped the empty bags in the trash. One cube floated on top, the edge of someone’s tattoo still visible on the attached skin, and I had one hand on the chain when I noticed something else in the toilet’s basin. There was another bag in there that had been tucked under the cooler. It didn’t have food or drugs in it, though. It was tightly wrapped around some kind of little cylinder.

  I reached in and pulled out the bag, unraveling it and then shaking it dry. Down in the bottom was a little white plastic cylinder with a tiny, hair-thin plug on one end. It was a wet drive. What had the soldiers said? “Get his wet drive.” They had been looking for Dragan’s.

  I broke the bag’s seal and carefully removed the drive. It was Dragan’s; I was sure of it. He’d come here before going back to the apartment, and he left it here, just in case.

  The lock at the front door clicked as someone fed a key card into it. I wrapped the drive in a sheet of toilet paper, then stuffed it in my pocket just as the hotel room door opened and a gaunt, middle-aged man, Eng, no doubt, stepped in carrying a small plastic shopping bag in one hand.

  He spotted me immediately, and his free hand reached into his jacket before he got a good look at me. Once he did he relaxed a little, his watery eyes peering down at me from under the brim of a panama hat. He stepped under the air conditioner vent, and the current blew down his unbuttoned neckline, inflating the silk and flashing a patch of sinewy chest and greasy black hair.

  “Jesus, you want to get shot or something?” He looked at me more carefully, and grinned a little. “What happened to you? Cut yourself shaving?”

  “Look, I’ll cut you a break. Put back whatever you took and beat it before I cut out your—”

  “Are you Eng?”

  His eyes narrowed a little. “Who wants to know?” He looked toward the bedroom. “Where’s Kala ...”

  His voice trailed off as his eyes went to the floor and saw all of his contraband spread out there. Color crept into his face, a vein beginning to bulge in his neck as he looked down into the toilet bowl.

  “Don’t you fucking dare—” he started, and I flushed it.

  He dropped the bag in the hallway and shoved past me to drop down on his knees in front of the toilet. His hands were poised over the meat gray swirl like he meant to go in after it, but he was already too late.

  “You stupid little cun—” He turned to me, his ugly face twisted in fury.

  “That was twenty thousand yuan you just flushed,” he growled, standing and glaring down at
me. I backed out of the bathroom, and he followed.

  “You owe me,” he said, “big-time.”

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out the gun, sticking it out in front of me. He stopped short, his chest only a few inches from the shaking barrel.

  “Whoa,” he said, holding his hands up in front of him. “Hey, take it easy, kid.”

  “A man named Dragan Shao contacted you,” I said.

  “That name doesn’t sound fam—”

  “His name is on your list!”