The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out, one hand still on his chest. He paused for a second, and then put his arm around me. I felt the warmth of his palm on my back as he pulled me in a little closer.

  “I’ll always be here, Sam. You know that, right?”

  I moved my hand up his chest and over his collarbone. He tensed as I ran my fingers along his neck, then nestled them into his hair.

  “I know.”

  The air under the sheet had turned to soup and I was going to kick the blanket off when Vamp moved his hand from my back and over my ribs to my chest. He ran one thumb over my left nipple deliberately and lingered on the point of it.

  Blood rushed to my face as I put my hand on his and held it. He squeezed back and laced our sweaty fingers together as I felt a faint pulse down between my legs.

  I don’t know if it was the moment, or my excitement over the lead I’d just gotten, but I pulled him closer until I felt his breath on my face. In the neon light that flashed through the window, I could make out the tattoo on his banded shoulder, and the glint on his sweat-slick skin. The air that huffed up between us from under the sheet was so thick and hot it was hard to breathe as his stubble brushed my forehead. His lips pressed there.

  The heat had me dizzy, and I reached down to push the sheet away. I felt my fingertips run over the buckle of his belt, and then brush the significant bulge that pressed against the seam beneath it. When I did, I felt him tense and the pulse below my waist turned more insistent.

  Don’t, a voice in my head said. Don’t do this.

  No, no, another voice said. Definitely do this.

  He kissed my forehead again, then my cheek. His nose brushed mine, and then our lips were almost touching. Thoughts zipped through my brain so fast I couldn’t focus on any one. The world could end tomorrow, but all I could think about was that if I kissed him again I’d cross a line I couldn’t step back over. He was waiting, wanting me to cross it, but he didn’t know everything.

  “Vamp,” I whispered.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ve done things.”

  He touched his forehead to mine. “I don’t care.”

  I struggled to say more, but nothing would come out. He said he didn’t care, but that’s because he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he would be getting, not really, and if he found out after it was too late, and he hated me, I’d never be able to undo it.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “I don’t care.”

  Vamp held me gently, but he was coiled like a spring ready to snap, and I could feel the want coming off him like a flood of radiation. One kiss, one touch was all it would take to break the dam, I could tell. He’d take me, never mind Nix. He’d take me, and I’d let him expend all that pent-up energy, and all that love he thought he’d kept such a careful secret, until—

  “... but first, you have to help me.”

  The voice nagged in the back of my brain, pricking through even as I tried to push it out. My heart, which beat under Vamp’s hand so hard I thought I’d lose control any second, stuttered as I remembered the old man’s whiskey breath in my ear.

  “Touch me....”

  I remembered the sound of my hard-soled shoes, heels scraping as I tried to pull away, but—

  “I have to pee,” I blurted. I could barely think. I was afraid Vamp might get mad, but instead he laughed once through his nose into my hair. He ran his thumb across my nipple one last time, then relaxed his embrace to let me pull away. I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, but then thought I’d better just leave it alone. I had to get out of there before I did anything even stupider than I already had done.

  Instead I touched the side of his face, letting the five o’clock shadow scratch my palm as I stroked it once, and then got out of the bed with the soft squeak of springs. Vamp sighed, but he was drunk. We both were. With me gone, the combination of chems and booze won out. When I draped the damp sheet back down over him, he bunched the pillow against his face and began to drift off again.

  I snuck between the two sleeping figures and slipped through the bathroom curtain, pulling it closed again before I switched on the light. When the overhead clinked on, I squinted in the sudden brightness and found a stray coin in one pocket to feed to the sink. Once it had clattered down into the slot, a green LED circle around the faucet flickered on and began to quickly disappear, like a fuse burning out. I turned it all the way to cold and held my hands under the weak, warm stream.

  Cupping as much as I could, I drank it, and as I swallowed, it soothed my dry, sore throat somewhat. I cupped another double handful and dumped it down over my head, letting it trickle through my hair and down the back of my neck. I managed one more before the last of the green circle petered out and the valve thumped shut again.

  I pulled down my pants and sat down on the toilet with my elbows on my knees and my chin resting in my hands as the stream began to dribble.

  He wants me, I thought. Shit, he wants me bad.

  I picked my phone back up off the sink and turned it over in my hands. A new message had come through while I was asleep, and it was marked urgent. I brought it up and saw it was from Kang.

  Sam, we need to talk.

  I looked up his status and saw he was online. I brought up the keypad and replied.

  About what?

  He didn’t answer for almost a full minute, and I was wondering if he was really around or not when his answer came back.

  Can we meet?

  I checked the time. It was after three in the morning. I was beat, but meeting him felt like doing something. I needed to feel like I was doing something.

  Where?

  Where are you now?

  I’ll come to you.

  He paused again. The Rukou. I’m sending the address.

  I checked the map. It was across town. I’d need to use the gates if I was going to get there and back in time to hit Render’s Strip early. I was hesitant to give him any kind of a lead, anything that might give him or anyone else who might be listening a search radius, but I was pretty much broke.

  I’ll need some credit.

  No problem.

  I fished out my card and slipped it into the reader. The transfer application popped up and Kang dumped some cash in. It was more than enough to get me where I needed to go.

  Thanks, I said. On my way.

  He signed off.

  I snuck back out into the room and stood there for a minute watching the two guys sleep. I thought about waking them up and letting them know where I was going, but Vamp would insist on going for sure and I didn’t want him getting involved with Kang. Kang might cut me some slack, but he wouldn’t cut Vamp any.

  Neither of them stirred as I slipped out into the hall and heard the door latch behind me. Down the hall, Wei’s cubby behind the glass was empty. No one else was around.

  I padded down to the front door and headed back out into the night.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twelve

  10:36:44 BC

  My gas tank was getting close to empty, but the dream and the incident with Vamp had left me wired. My legs were restless and the walk felt good as the post-chem surge carried me deep back into the heart of Tùzi-wō. It felt good to get out in the open too, away from the sweat-heavy air of the hotel room. It had been getting hard to breathe in there, and getting back in that bed might have stirred things up again with Vamp.

  Gonzo, I almost jumped him. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Kang’s credit had bought me two jumps there and two back, but I decided to take one there and hoof it the rest of the way just in case he tried to do the math and track my distance from him. When I stepped through to the other side across town, the light flashed green with no yellow warning shade.

  The main drag was hopping, and through the gaps in the crowd I saw floodlights shining up ahead. A crew was doing nigh
t work, and the shop fronts across the street from them danced with the shadows of men moving along scaffolding. When I got closer, past the end of the block, I saw a crowd of people clustered at a chain-link fence that had been set up around an empty lot where a giant festival air float was being put together.

  The float’s base was a platform about the size of two tractor trailers side by side, and the metal framework mounted on it was a story tall. Wire mesh had been wrapped around the frame in the shape of a giant face, and shirtless workers moved along the scaffolding applying the plastic skin around two giant, googly eyes that stared down over a grinning, toothy mouth. Huge plastic streamers along the edge of the face were tied down, but a few had come loose to wave lazily over the street in the hot summer breeze. I watched them for a moment and sighed.

  I just want to go to the festival with Dragan, I thought. That’s all I want.

  I didn’t want to care about secret haan gates, pre-Impact conspiracy theories, or bomb-toting nut jobs. I didn’t want to care about refugees or gonzos or SIPS. I just wanted to live with Dragan, earn enough to pay my way, get enough to eat, and have enough left over to stay in smokes, shine, and double cross. Was that too much to ask?

  The streamers waved, like long ghostly tentacles that reached out over the crowd. Apparently, this year anyway, it was.

  “Jiangshi,” a voice said. I turned and saw kid with a wooden pole slung over one bony shoulder. Festival masks hung from the pole by their string ties.

  “No, thanks,” I said, but before he even got his mouth open to haggle me down, I changed my mind. “Actually you know what, that’s perfect.”

  He beamed as I picked the closest one, and then he held out the credit reader. I wiped my card over it, letting Kang pick up the tab.

  “Thanks,” I said. He made a cute little bow and scampered off into the crowd until all I could see was the pole, jutting up over their heads and tracing his path like a wobbly paper periscope.

  I slipped the mask on, hiding my face, and tied it snugly in place. The GPS pointed left, down a narrow side street, and I squeezed through the flow of foot traffic to pass in front of a set of headlights. The guy in the two-seater honked its anemic horn and muttered something at me through the glass as I made my way down the uneven sidewalk where grit and flakes of scrap plastic from the float construction had accumulated. Up ahead was the sign for the Rukou Bar, blazing red neon against the drab concrete.

  Something crept along a power line overhead as I wove through a crowd that lingered outside along the street, drinking and smoking. No one was manning the door, so I pushed it open and went inside.

  The bar was packed way over capacity, four to each table along the wall to my right and a row of sweaty backs all the way down the bar to my left. I made my way between them, squinting through the thin haze of smoke. Over the drunken babble around me, I heard someone call out from the direction of the bar and saw a tall man back there with a do-rag plastered over his brown, bald head. He pointed at me, scowling, but stopped when someone whistled. Kang was sitting a few tables down, the only one by himself. He signaled to the bartender, who nodded and went back to what he was doing.

  Kang had a fogged glass in front of him where whiskey formed a moat around a big ball of nitrogen-chilled crystal, and the ashtray was filled with ash. In front of the empty chair across from him was a shot of something clear sitting on a wrinkled cocktail napkin. I hopped up on the empty stool and he gave me a faint smile.

  “Nice mask.”

  “It’s my cover,” I said, pulling it back so that it sat on top of my head. The hanging streamers still covered most of my face like thick white hair. Kang nodded at the shot.

  “Take it,” he said. “You’ll need it.”

  I drank it. Whatever it was, it went down like drain cleaner. “Gonzo, Kang. You trying to kill me?”

  “Quit kidding around,” he said. “This is serious.”

  “Yeah, I got thrown out a window, Kang. Believe me, I get it,” I said. Kang sighed and shook a black cigarette out of a squashed pack. He offered me one, and I took it. “So, what do you need to talk to me about?”

  “Dragan’s not in any of the detention centers,” he said, lighting his smoke, then holding out the lighter to me. He watched my face as I puffed mine alight. “You don’t look surprised.”

  “I thought you might lie,” I said, sucking in smoke.

  “I wish I was lying.”

  “So where is he?” I asked, watching his face.

  He looked nervous. “Not anywhere easy to get to.”

  “Shiliuyuán Station?” I asked, and I saw his eyes widen, just for a second.

  “There is no more Shiliuyuán Station.”

  “The haan have him, don’t they?” I asked.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead and drained his glass. His hand shook a little as he put it back down and took another drag off his cigarette. “All I know is after she took him at the apartment, she—”

  “How did you know it was a she?” I asked, but even before the look in his eye changed, I’d already put it together.

  “I’m sorry,” his wife had told me when I called. “Jake is out on assignment.”

  “Is he on the security sweep?”

  “No, I don’t think he is....”

  “You were there,” I said.

  He looked down into his empty glass for a minute, and I noticed then how tired and red his eyes were. He watched fog drift around the stone, and nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was there.”

  “You were the third soldier.”

  He nodded again, and I slapped him across the face so hard it knocked the cigarette out of his mouth in a cloud of embers. The people around us turned to look. Some of them laughed.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” he said evenly.

  “How was it supposed to happen, Kang? Huh? How was it supposed to happen?”

  “It was just supposed to be an arrest,” he said, and his eyes looked haunted right then. He ran one hand over the stubble on his face. “He wasn’t supposed to get hurt, and I never thought she’d ...”

  He trailed off.

  “When I saw you go through the window ...,” he said, and shook his head. “I knew you only had a few seconds. She provided us with free-floating gate tech for the duration of the mission ... so while she was busy with Dragan I went to the balcony and managed to catch you with the graviton field, then drop you through to our exit point. It was the best I could do.”

  “That was the best you could do?”

  “Hey, I saved your life.”

  “You fucking sold us out, Kang!”

  “I know that,” he hissed. “Do you think I don’t know that? I had to!”

  “You had to?”

  “Yes.” He waved his hand, and I could see he was pretty drunk. “There’s ... too much at stake.”

  “Your wife drafted the adoption papers...How could you do it?”

  He didn’t have a good answer for that, and there was only so much satisfaction I could take from watching him squirm.

  “Does she know?” I asked him.

  “Look,” he said. “You might think you have some idea of what’s going on, but you don’t.”

  “He’s not a goddamned—”

  “I know.”

  “It’s the kid, isn’t it? He’s got the weapon.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s the Drugov kid.”

  “Why?”

  He raised his eyebrows raised a little, surprised, even while the crazy fear still brewed in his drunken eyes.

  “Why? Why would she—”

  “I don’t know what she’s getting out of it, and I don’t want to,” Kang said. “All I know is there are people who want the Pan-Slavs out of the picture for good and she delivered. After she rigged him and let him go home, he was supposed to stay there and burn the PSE, eighty-seven percent of the landmass pushing east from an ignition point inside Kostroma.”

  “Eighty-seven percen
t?”

  He stared, gritting his teeth and not speaking for a moment.

  “A pandemic,” he said finally. He looked scared now. “An accident. Nobody’s fault. The haan would step in and fix things, like they always said they would.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, if I was to be honest, I’d thought it before, especially lately, but thinking about it was one thing. Doing it was something totally different.