The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  He glanced back toward the rug, where the passports and the rest of it sat.

  “So maybe he did,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

  “Why?”

  I felt a warm trickle down one cheek and wiped it away with one hand while I kept the gun on him.

  “He wanted fake passports,” he said, “and passage to Duongroi for four.”

  “Four?”

  “Himself, two women, and a kid.”

  “Who was with him when he came?”

  “Nobody. He was alone.”

  “Why did he want to get to Duongroi?”

  “He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

  “Why did he leave his wet drive with you?”

  “For safekeeping, in case he got pinched before he got back.” His face changed then, as something clicked. “Wait a minute, I know who you are.”

  Another tear ran down my cheek and I wiped it away.

  “You’re the girl,” he said. “I made your passport.”

  I put both hands on the grip of the pistol to hold it steady while I aimed at his chest.

  “How did they know?” I asked.

  “How did who know what?”

  “Dragan was still deployed. He snuck back early. How did they know he’d be home?”

  Eng didn’t answer.

  “He left here, and by the time he got home, they’d already caught up with him. How did they know?”

  He still didn’t say anything, but I could see it in his eyes. More tears came, blurring my vision and making my throat burn.

  “There was a reward, wasn’t there? When he came you checked the security feed, and saw they were offering—”

  “I don’t turn clients in for money, or rations.”

  “I should kill you,” I said. “They came to our apartment, and they ... they ...”

  I had my finger on the trigger, and I wanted to pull it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. The gun wavered as I lowered it a little.

  “I should kill you,” I said again.

  Eng lashed out and grabbed my wrist. I struggled, but he was a lot stronger than me and he forced the gun away. Once he was in the clear, he didn’t try and hit me or anything. He just took the pistol from my hand and tossed it down onto the bed next to him.

  “Quit crying,” he said. When I looked up at him, I saw his face and neck were flushed. His gruff face looked sheepish and guilty.

  “He trusted you,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t know he was a Pan-Slav agent. What was I supposed to do? This doesn’t exactly help me, you know.”

  “He didn’t do what they said.”

  “Sure, kid. Okay.” He wiped his brow and sighed. “Look, it’s all over the feed—whatever he brought back with him is still out there, and the rumor is it’s something bad this time, something biological. I’m on the first transport to Duongroi until this blows over. If you’re smart, you’ll come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “I still got your passport and ticket. I’ll take you, if you want.”

  “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

  He shrugged.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “The wet drive stays with me, though.”

  “I’m taking it.”

  “No way, it’s too valuable. Besides, you want those people coming after you next?”

  “I said I’m taking it....”

  I sensed her before I saw her. The mite cluster lit up suddenly and sent an ugly vibe deep into my head. The intensity of it triggered an adrenaline surge, anger and aggression building up in response.

  Eng frowned. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Something moved behind him, up near the ceiling. Something big that had somehow remained hidden even while I’d passed through the room just moments before. His face changed as he watched my attention turn away from him, instincts warning him that there was trouble before I even knew what I was seeing.

  He turned in time to see a female form decked out in full combat armor unfold from the shadows of the corner ceiling behind him, a few feet from the open window behind her. Her long legs swung down and she dropped with a thud and then lashed out and clamped one gloved hand down on his throat.

  “What the fu—” he managed before the armor whined and his voice was cut off. She swung him around, then let go, shoving him back against the closet door so hard that a framed picture above the bed dropped to the floor. When she stepped into the light, I could see the red stamp on the armor’s shoulder plate.

  Eng didn’t hesitate as he pulled open the closet door and reached inside, hauling a shotgun out from where he’d had it propped. His eyes flashed surprise for just a second when he spotted a woman who was sitting on the floor there, pressed back into the hanging shirts and pants with a zombielike stare stuck on her bruised and battered face.

  He swung the shotgun around and fired at Red-stamp almost point-blank, the boom thumping through my chest as my face caught a blast of heat and burned powder smell. Red-stamp staggered, but the armor absorbed the pellets and she swung back around to clamp her fist down around the barrel, pushing it away as he fired again.

  The wall next to her exploded in a shower of wood splinters and drywall powder, and that seemed to wake the girl stuck in the closet. Her eyes snapped fully open and she backed farther into the hanging clothes, pushing with her feet.

  Red-stamp wrenched the gun out of Eng’s hands and threw it away behind her as she closed in on him again and grabbed his wrist. When they moved out from in front of the closet, I caught the woman’s attention and reached out one hand to her.

  “Come on,” I hissed.

  She kept her eyes on the two struggling outside the door as she stumbled out. A blond wig had slipped halfway off to reveal a black pixie cut underneath, and mascara had run down both cheeks. She wore a fake leather mini and a half shirt that was a size too small, sporting a silvery iron-on decal that said Fun Girl.

  “Hand over the wet drive,” Red-stamp said, moving the empty shell of her hidden face close to his while he struggled futilely to twist out of her grip.

  “Fuck you,” he grunted.

  She squeezed and I heard the bone crack. Eng’s mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged as his hand jutted off at an odd angle. She stifled his scream by grabbing his throat with her other hand.

  “One more word,” she said in a low voice, “and I’ll eat you right here. Alive.”

  Fun Girl lunged toward me, her stiff legs giving out at the halfway point and causing her to fall forward into my arms. While the struggle continued by the doorway, she began to sob.

  “You’re okay,” I said in her ear, pulling her back away from the other two. “Take it easy.”

  I heard another crack of bone and Eng gasped, his face dark. He didn’t dare speak again, but his bulging eyes moved toward me and stared as he raised one shaking finger to point.

  Red-stamp let go of his wrist, then shoved him back against the wall with a crash that knocked a picture frame down onto the floor. She grabbed his head in both her hands and wrenched it around with a meaty pop that left his chin pointing down at the small of his back.

  Fun Girl shrieked as his arms fell to his sides like deadweight and he crumpled to the floor. Red-Stamp turned toward us, and her head cocked barely little as she focused on me. A low buzz whined as a big scalefly flew around her head like a halo, then lit down on her chest plate.

  “You,” she said. “You’re alive.”

  There wasn’t any time to think. As she closed the distance I reached into my backpack and pulled out the stun gun, fumbling the business end around just as she reached to grab me. Electric blue light flashed as the prongs snapped and she jerked back, crashing into the wall.

  She recovered almost right away and came at me again, so I cranked the voltage up to maximum and jabbed her ribs a second time.

  The bang sounded like a gunshot, and I actually saw light flash under the combat armor as she flew back into the wall ag
ain, this time hard enough to crack it. An end table collapsed under her as she fell, then went facedown onto the floor in front of me. Her scaly, gloved hand groped for me feebly and then went still.

  I scrambled over and heaved her onto her back. I patted her down, looking for anything that might be useful, anything that might tell me who she was.

  “What are you doing?” Fun Girl mumbled woozily. “Is she dead?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just take off. Get going.”

  A little dark shape flitted toward me and I slapped down hard on the side of my neck as a sharp pain jabbed it.

  “Ow!”

  I looked at my hand and saw the mangled body of a scalefly, its hooked forelegs broken and plaque-colored guts poking out of its cracked body.

  “Stupid thing ...”

  The word fizzled out as a strange sensation overcame me. It started like a bad head rush, but three heartbeats later it was if I’d just OD’d on Zen oil. Darkness rushed in like the cold black of the ocean bottom, and my legs buckled. I felt myself fall, crashing into a table and knocking over the lamp there. It shattered, sounding far away.

  A signal surged through the mites and caused a flicker in the darkness. It flashed brighter and then an image formed around me all at once like a waking dream that shunted out everything else. In an instant I was somewhere else, and everything I saw had a ghostly, washed-out quality to it. I was in a room that had partly collapsed, where steam drifted from sheared pipes that stuck from a ruined wall. My field of view turned, and I realized that I could see through the concrete rubble to where the pipes extended into blackness. The tiled floor was buckled and covered with a film of greasy black powder, but I could spot movement underneath, blobs of heat and the tiny skeletons of several small creatures. An array of computer consoles stood on the edge of a huge hole in the middle of the floor, thick bundles of wire trailing down into the pit. I could see flickers and pulses of light as power and data traveled along the wires.

  It’s coming from her, I realized. The haan. It’s a dream, or a memory. I’d get the occasional flash from a surrogate, a stray image here and there that were sometimes strung together, but nothing like this. It felt completely real.

  She moved to the edge of the hole and looked down into what looked like the mouth of a huge fluke, but as I stared I realized that the inward-pointing teeth were actually rings of beds bolted around the inner wall of the pit. Lying motionless in each bed was a person. They appeared as skeletons surrounded by the phantom gauze of soft tissue. I could see their hearts pulsing behind rows of ribs, and their brains resting behind their translucent skulls. Specks, tiny electric impulses darted through, making the brains appear to shift behind the staring white orbs of their unblinking eyes.

  We look a little like haan to them. The thought popped into my head as I watched them through her eyes. She leaned forward to peer down on one of the men, and when she did I saw a bulbous shape on his chest come into focus. It looked like a huge, fat tick perched there, legs spread around it and its swollen abdomen sticking up in the air. Its insides were throbbing, and she watched as little blobs of fluid traveled through a tube that connected it to its host. It wasn’t sucking blood out, though. The little pulses were traveling in the other direction, into the man.

  She turned her gaze to the others. Everyone there had one of the strange constructs sitting on them, pulsing, and inside the bodies below them was something else. Something else was in there, something moving, but I didn’t get a good look before she moved away.

  She crossed to some kind of console, electric impulses coursing through its guts, and opened a panel there to reveal rows of glass jars sealed at both ends with swarms of little specks buzzing around inside. What looked like two long tentacles moved into view, placing a new one at the end of the bottom row, while scaleflies flitted past, and crawled down the length of each wormlike appendage, crawling in and out of deep, black pores ...

  The images snapped away, and I found myself back on the hotel floor surrounded by broken plastic and fluorescent bulb powder. Red-stamp sat up on the floor as I shook my head, trying to shake it off so I could shock her again, but before I could she swatted the stun gun out of my hand. I hadn’t even seen her move.

  “You should have run,” she said.

  I backed away, waving at Fun Girl. “Go!”

  Another fly flew over and landed right on her face, causing her to wipe at it with both hands as Red-stamp thumped one hand down onto my chest and shoved me back like a rag doll. I crashed into the wall, and then fell down hard onto my butt. She rose one foot over my right leg, and I managed to roll away just as I heard the suit’s pneumatic pop. Her heel crashed down onto the floor where my knee had been a second before, crunching through the wood beneath the carpet.

  Fun Girl tried to skirt past to the door but hesitated at the last minute. Red-stamp ripped her foot from the hole and turned to face me again as I grabbed the girl’s bloodied wrist and pulled her away, back toward the window.

  “Come on!”

  I climbed up over the air-conditioning unit and stuck one leg out the window, looking back at Fun Girl, who shook her head. Behind her, Red-stamp was closing in fast.

  I slipped out onto the narrow ledge outside, then reached back in and held my hand out. “You can do it. Hurry up!”

  She grabbed the window ledge and began to pull herself out as I scrambled back to give her room.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, her voice shaking.

  “Just keep your eyes on me,” I told her. Down below, people on the street were starting to look up. She got her other leg through the window and kicked off her high-heel shoe as she pressed herself against the outside of the window. Someone shouted below us as the shoe fell.

  “Hurry,” I said. “Come on—“

  “I can’t—“

  The blinds were yanked down in a clatter of metal and plastic. Fun Girl cringed as a scaly, black-gloved hand reached through the window and grabbed one of her wrists.

  She screamed. I reached out to try and steady her when the glass between us shattered as an armored fist punched through. It grabbed her throat and squeezed until her face turned dark and veins bulged at each temple. Before I could do anything else, she was hauled back through the window in a shower of glass.

  Shit... shit, shit, shit...

  I looked down at the street four stories below as an airbike flitted by underneath me, and my stomach dropped. On the other side of the street, people at the windows were beginning to gawk and point. One guy pointed to the back corner of the hotel a few windows down from where I was. There was a fire escape there.

  Red-stamp’s head appeared through the hole in the window, looking down the ledge after me. Keeping my chest to the brick wall, I stood up and started a quick shuffle until I was close enough to lunge for the metal railing of the fire escape.

  When I did, my foot slipped off the ledge and my fists slid down the slick metal bars until I was dangling. Back toward the hotel window, I heard glass crunch as Red-stamp stepped through after me.

  I swung my legs up until the soles of my sneakers touched the grate, and I felt something slide out of one of my pockets. Hanging upside down, I watched Dragan’s collapsible baton fall end over end and then clatter off a parked car below. A few people looked up as I managed to scramble over the railing and then start down the stairs.

  “Hey!” someone yelled.

  At the bottom I slid down the ladder and landed hard on my feet down below. A bunch of drunks who’d been whooping it up before the festival backed away. One pointed up toward the window, a bottle wrapped in a paper bag clutched in his dirty hand.

  When I looked up, I saw she’d reached the fire escape and her heavy boots thudded down onto the landing. She looked down through the grate at me from the empty shell of the dispersion field. She began to climb down after me, and I made a break for the nearest gate.

  As I ran, I stumbled past a lone gonzo who knelt before a chintzy shrine s
et up next to a rusted rain gutter. She stopped praying long enough to turn and watch me go.

  “Only He can move the stars,” she called as I clipped a pile of water warped cardboard, lurching out of the alley and into the moving crowd.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Seven

  19:41:43 BC

  A cough of static crackled through an amplifier as I scanned the street ahead, trying to see through the crowd to the intersection’s gate hub. I couldn’t make out where the haan soldier was exactly, but I knew I needed to get lost, and quick.

  “A gold sheet to the person who stops this girl!” Red-stamp’s voice boomed over the amp.