The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  I glanced back, and saw an image floating in the air above the heads of the crowd. It was my face, scratches and all, looking wide-eyed and scared. Information streamed across the holographic screen below it, giving my name, physical description, and ID. Above it was the word wanted, and as I backed away I saw the word cannibal scroll past underneath it.

  “Got her!” a man behind me yelled. A hand grabbed my elbow, and then the street erupted around me.

  Someone swung a fist over my head and struck the man who’d grabbed me, hitting him square in the throat. His grip loosened and I tugged free as the man who’d thrown the punch made a grab for me. Everyone tried to move in on me at once, and in seconds the whole street was a tangle of surging bodies, fists, knees, and flying elbows.

  Someone grabbed my backpack and pulled while someone else got their fingers hooked in the waist of my pants. I slipped and went down onto the sidewalk, crossing my arms over my face as the tangle of people clashed above me. Whoever had my waistband dragged me across the blacktop, and I reached in my pocket for the stun gun. I managed to dig it out and jabbed the prongs into his hand with a loud pop that made him let go.

  A woman fell down near me, feet stomping over and around her as people reached down to grab at me. I zapped the closest one and he jerked back, taking two more with him as he fell. In the small break, I scrambled between a pair of legs and slammed into the side of a building at the edge of the crowd. Keeping my head down so they couldn’t see my face, I slipped behind a metal trash bin and squeezed through to the other side. Traffic was stopped, bodies clustered in around the honking vehicles as uniformed officers tried to get them under control.

  In the chaos, I made a run for the intersection. People had started to pile up to find out what the riot was all about, and I squirmed my way through the human wall toward the gate behind them. As I came out the other side, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.

  There was no time to answer it. An electronic sign mounted on the building across the street flickered, and an image of my face appeared as I plowed headlong into a woman carrying an armload of shopping bags. Something smashed as she fell back onto the pavement and I spun off into the side of a boxcar idling at the curb.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry!”

  My phone buzzed again as I pushed off the truck and stumbled toward the gate, falling as I passed through. For a second, everything stopped and I hung in weightless space. The hiccup passed and I continued my fall, landing on the sidewalk on the other side. The sounds of the riot turned distant, coming from somewhere several blocks away off to my left. Back through the portal I saw people being shoved aside as Red-stamp stormed after me. Behind her, high up above the crowd in the street, two aircars had appeared with their emergency lights flashing.

  Immediately the gate buzzed, an angry red light twitching on to demand payment. The crowd clustered around the gate watched as I jumped back to my feet then cut the line and bolted through the gate directly next to it with no idea where it went.

  The next time my feet touched the ground, I was somewhere uptown. Once the gate klaxon stopped, I couldn’t even hear the riot anymore, though I could hear faint sirens in the distance. Red-stamp had been right behind me, though. My little double-back wouldn’t fool her long, not with every gate I used squawking about the skipped fare.

  I looked around as the people coming through behind me shoved their way past. Ahead, the queue waiting for the direction to change were eyeing me, wondering if I’d still be blocking the way when they got the okay to head in.

  I reached into my pocket and found Dragan’s twist-key. I didn’t know what destinations it was programmed with, but neither did Red-stamp. When the light changed and the last of the people moving through behind me had passed, I turned and jammed the key into the socket on the gate’s frame. I twisted it, and the view on the other side changed. It was now looking into some kind of garage or hangar. Two military men in jumpsuits looked up suddenly, frowning as I twisted the key again.

  “Hey!” someone called from behind me. The crowd was starting to grumble.

  I turned the key three more times before I spotted a sign for the metro on the other side. I jerked the twistkey out of the socket and stuffed it back in my pocket.

  “Sorry!” I called, and jumped through.

  On the other side, I turned back and saw the men and women in the crowd glaring after me. One was trying to flag down a cop, but in less than forty seconds the gate would revert to its original setup and I’d be long gone.

  I took the first metro tunnel entrance I spotted. Slipping by a clot of people, I vaulted over the pitted metal rail and down onto the gum-spotted concrete steps below.

  I jumped the turnstile just as a businessman in the row next to me presented his pass to the scanner. An alarm went off and when I looked back I saw a security guard headed my way, a scowl on his ruddy face.

  “Hey!” he barked.

  I scooted through the crowd on the other side of the turnstiles and ran until I spotted a platform where a train sat with its doors open. I slipped in and headed toward the back of the car, past rows of commuters. There, I leaned forward as best I could with my hands on my knees to try and catch my breath. My legs felt ready to buckle.

  My forehead tingled, like a gentle tug at my sleeve, and I looked down to see a male haan looking up at me from his seat with his big yellow eyes. He stood and made a graceful gesture toward the empty chair.

  “Oh,” I said. “You don’t have to-”

  “I know,” he said, the light on his voice box fluttering. He gestured again, and I felt another tingle, a cool, soothing calm.

  “Thank you,” I said, giving his arm a gentle squeeze and then plopping down in the seat. When I looked back through the window, I saw the guard staring back at me from the top of the stairs. He looked angry, but he didn’t bother to follow. He must not have gotten word about the bounty, at least, not yet.

  The haan stood in front of me with his back turned, holding the bar and letting the material of his suit form a makeshift privacy curtain for me. I tried to stop shaking, but my whole body just didn’t want to stop, even when I hugged my ribs and squeezed. I made myself take a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  “You’re okay,” I said to myself. I’d lost her. I was safe, for now.

  A bell chimed, and out on the platform a voice began to rattle something off over the loudspeaker. I remembered the pill tab I’d nicked from Eng’s hotel and dug it out of my pocket. I pushed the double cross into my mouth and crunched down on the chalky pill, grinding it into a bitter paste.

  “You’re okay,” I told myself again.

  The little pink heart appeared in the corner of my eye again. Another friend request from Nix, this time with a message:

  I spoke with Ava. You can stay in the program.

  I sighed, feeling annoyed and relieved at the same time. The pill acted superfast, and my jitters were already smoothing out.

  Accepted.

  He appeared on my list and I sent a quick reply.

  Thank you, Nix. Very, very much.

  We need to meet—

  No time to chat, though.

  I signed off as the doors slid shut, and the intercom chimed followed by an unintelligible stream of babble. Sucking the last of the pill grit from my teeth, I swallowed, watching out the train window as the buildings peeled away to reveal the expanse of tidal flats and blue-green ocean beyond. Off in the distance I could see waves crash against the platform housing the desalination derricks, steel-frame pyramids around pumps that sucked up seawater twenty-four-seven.

  Six hexagonal shadows appeared in the sky in a tight formation, and a low sonic boom sounded as the ships rocketed past the shoreline toward the foreign fleets in the distance. Foreign jets scrambled in response, rising off the carrier like little scaleflies, but our guys wouldn’t start anything. It was just a message, a reminder that with the haan tech on our side their ships were powerless against ours.


  The opiate synth kicked in for real, slowing my heart as it eased me toward a mellow pharmaceutical calm. The adrenaline throttled back, and the alarm bells in my head grew muted as I watched the world pass through the window.

  My phone buzzed again, three quick pulses that said I had a message. I reached into my pocket and felt a wad of toilet tissue with my fingertips as I grabbed the phone and checked the screen. It was a text message, from Kang.

  Don’t call this number. I’ll try you again in ten.

  “Damn it,” I muttered.

  I slipped the phone back into my pocket and grabbed the wad of toilet tissue, then coaxed it apart to reveal the wet drive nestled inside.

  “Gonzo, Dragan. What did you do?” I whispered.

  I pinched the lanyard that dangled from behind my ear, and a little notification popped up on the 3i’s display as I pulled my drive out. I unclipped it from the lanyard and swapped in Dragan’s, then reached back and nestled it into the port.

  Initializing...

  Some music files got pulled into my library, and two new contacts were read and added to my 3i list as the drive was scanned.

  Alexei Drugov.

  Innuya Drugov.

  I knew those names. Innuya was the Pan-Slav woman he’d been e-mailing right before he went AWOL, and Alexei was her son, the one the soldiers were looking for. The status icon for each of them was gray.

  “He wanted fake passports and passage to Duongroi for four... himself, two women, and a kid.”

  Himself, Innuya, Alexei... and me. According to Eng, Dragan was alone when he stopped at the hotel, so he had to have dropped them off somewhere beforehand. If it was true and one of them really did smuggle something back with them, they might still have it.

  I checked the drive’s contents. Other than the stray cached stuff, Dragan had wiped it except for one file, some kind of video file. I dragged it down to the tray’s media player and dropped it in.

  When the player window first popped up, it was mostly dark. Shadows shifted at the edges, like the frame was moving.

  “This is Specialist Dragan Shao.” His voice was tinny in my ear through the 3i’s audio tap. “I am making this recording in the event I am captured or killed. If anyone finds this message, it is critical that you deliver it to Military Governor Jianguo Hwong immediately. Do not hand it over to security, only to him.”

  A flashlight snapped on, lighting the way ahead of him. He was in a dimly lit corridor, water-stained cinder block scrolling past at the right edge of the screen as the view jostled a little in spite of the image stabilizers. He stopped, and turned to look down at a woman in tattered clothes. She was obviously Pan-Slav, with round eyes and thick eyebrows.

  Scaleflies buzzed back and forth through the flashlight beam as he turned back and moved quickly toward a dim light at the far end of the hall. They weren’t in the PSE; the graffiti was a mishmash of hanzi, so they had to be back in-country, but wherever they were, it looked like no one had been there in years.

  “I have evidence that a major attack is under way,” he said quietly as he hurried on. “The attack involves an engineered bioweapon that violates international law, designed to wipe out human life on a massive scale.”

  “Dragan,” a woman’s voice whispered on the audio tap. “Gde zhe my? Chto takoe jeto mesto?”

  The screen flickered as he looked back at the Pan-Slav again. Her eyes were wide, and terrified.

  “Dvigat’sja, dvigat’sja ...,” he hissed. His hand moved into frame, gesturing for her to follow, and then the scene reeled as he turned and began to move again. As he did, I saw a sign on the wall, just for a moment, before he passed it. An arrow pointed in the direction he was moving, next to the words Shiliuyuán Station— Platform N.

  “Shiliuyuán,” I said under my breath. That was the old metro station where the haan ship was now. It was destroyed in the Impact.

  “The delivery system for this weapon is the haan scale-fly,” Dragan said. “The specifics are encoded in this file along with the names I’ve been able to dig up, but just know that carrier flies have been engineered with a genetic fuse that shortens the life span of each generation until they die out. Given their very predictable reproductive cycles and migration patterns, it’s possible to chart the zone where they will be active within fairly rigid boundaries. During that time, they and their offspring will spread the bioweapon to every human living inside what has been termed the Burn Zone.”

  The scene moved through an underground metro station, the concrete platform cracked to expose jutting re-bar. Off to his left a train was visible, crushed in a collapsed tunnel.

  “If these projections are true,” he said, “the Burn Zone will cover over ten million square kilometers... big enough to wipe out an entire continent.”

  A window blinked on in his field of view, showing a map in glowing white vectors. Their location was marked, and a little ways away to the north another marker pulsed. He was tracking something.

  The scene moved faster as Dragan ducked through a doorway at the opposite end of the platform and followed a string of battery-powered emergency lights to the end of a hallway where an exposed stairwell was half-covered in rubble.

  Dragan followed the flashlight beam down into darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, Dragan pushed open another door and I caught a glimpse of hanzi, stenciled onto the rusted metal:

  DEEPWELL BIOT—The woman behind him gasped as the flashlight beam settled on a young boy, maybe ten years old, with the same Pan-Slav features as the woman. He was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the cinder block wall behind him while some kind of black membrane held him stuck in place. His eyes were closed.

  Dragan moved toward him and immediately used a knife to cut through the sticky stuff, which peeled and shrank away. The boy twitched, and his eyes opened.

  “Shh,” Dragan warned. The boy’s eyes widened, but he nodded.

  Dragan took his hand and guided him to the woman before moving through another doorway off to their left and then quickly through a large, dark room on the other side where beds were lined up in rows. I caught glimpses of people lying on some of them as he sprinted toward a dimly lit doorway on the far side of the room. On the other side, I could see shadows moving.

  “Kto tarn?” the woman whispered. Dragan shushed her, then responded, whispering even lower, “Ja ne znaju.”

  I dug up the Web translator and kicked it off, causing pinyin to pop up onto the feed.

  The view stopped at the edge of the rusted doorframe and he peeked carefully around the corner. As it panned, it showed the tiles cracked and broken around the edge of a black hole that had consumed almost the entire floor.

  Across the chasm, the camera caught movement through an open double doorway on the opposite side of the room as a metal cart of equipment moved into view there. Just before Dragan moved to duck behind something, I saw the figure pushing the cart, blazing red eyes leaving trails of light in the shadows.

  It’s a haan.

  Once the way was clear, he moved farther into the room, tilting to look down over the edge of the huge hole.

  Starting about six feet down, a ring of beds were fixed by their steel-frame headboards around the interior, pointing in like a ring of teeth in the mouth of a giant fluke. My lips parted as I stared.

  I’ve seen this....

  Lying in each bed was a single person, men and women of all different ages. All of them had a black rubber mask pulled tight over their eyes, with clusters of white wires trailing from electrodes stuck to their sun-bronzed foreheads. The only thing that was different was that where Red-stamp had seen those strange constructs sitting on each of them, they weren’t there in the video. The people all looked asleep, or comatose.

  Beneath the ring of beds was another, and another, and another, going down deeper and deeper into the hole until they were lost in blackness.

  What in the world... ?

  Dragan moved farther and farther into the room, leaning forward a
nd looking down to better see into the pit of beds. A swatch of red jumped out from the edge of the frame as the frame moved, and another bed moved into view.

  My stomach sank, and I swallowed around a dry throat. The bed had a body covered with a sheet like the others, but the sheet had been pulled away and was drenched in blood. The body underneath was that of a young man with his mouth unhinged to reveal bloodstained teeth while he stared, blind, into his rubber mask. There was a ragged hole bored into his gut, big enough to reach into. Instinctively I turned my face away, but the 3i window followed as the pan continued.

  The next four rows of beds were all the same. Men, women, girls, and boys all lay dead with their bellies bored out, ribs jutting up over huge black pores torn in the sunken, stretched skin. Some had more than one hole. One had a third, gaping over a collapsed pit in his right thigh.