The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  “No. I can only gate to and from places I have previously stored the location of, or places close enough so that the device’s scanner can set a dynamic access point. We will need to use the street network.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “She’ll use a twistkey to give her a direct route,” he said. “Even so, it’s a long distance, but I’d say less than an hour.”

  I looked around at the mess, and wiped my face. The water that had steeped into my clothes smelled like sweat.

  “Come on, then,” I said. “That’s not much time.”

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Fourteen

  08:10:51 BC

  The sun had just started to blaze by the time we reached Render’s Strip, and already the crowded streets were beginning to brew in the heat and humidity. A nearby sign flashed a temperature of 104 as scaleflies bounced off the marquee.

  I’d put the festival mask back on but pulled it to the top of my head so I could breathe. With the festival that night, the restaurant district was filling up fast with people looking to load up on chems and other illicit buys in spite of the added security. The underground food market especially thrived around festival time, and behind the backs of uniformed guards paper money changed hands all around us. I noticed splotches of red festival dye on the pavement, and on people’s clothes. By tonight, the place would be covered.

  “Sam, come on,” Vamp urged. People streamed around us, some of their eyes lingering on Nix as they passed. I held up one hand, pressing my phone to one ear with the other, as someone finally picked up.

  “Fang’s Café, what do you want?”

  “Mr. Fang?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you about Dragan Shao—”

  The line cut. I looked back at Vamp and held up the phone. “He hung up.”

  “Never mind, it’s in here somewhere.”

  Down the main drag of the strip, a cordon was still in place around the shattered remains of the government ration reclamation center. The one solid, shiny structure that used to stand tall among the hundreds of bookend storefronts surrounding it had been reduced to blackened rubble. The half-burned remains that littered the site, toppled counters, and twisted electronics and safety glass melted to slag were the only indications of what used to go on inside. The bodies had all been removed, but the pavement under the boots of the guards who stood at the perimeter was still stained with dried trickles and spatters of rust brown.

  I turned away from the guards and wiped sweat from my forehead as I scanned the crowded rows of little signs. Each one hung over a narrow door that led into a sliver of restaurant space, flashing bright, happy neon over old buildings covered with a lifetime of sweat, smoke, and grime.

  Ninety percent of the restaurants there were basically holes in the wall where you could redeem ration punches, and tiny tables to sit and eat them at if that was your bag. The only thing that made one different from the other was what was on the TV, whether or not they had AC, and what kind of little side rackets they had going on. Signs with white tags meant they sold booze. Red tags meant they sold pills. Blue tags meant clean water, orange tags meant smokes, and pink tags meant “live entertainment.” Two pink tags meant they had girls to get you off in the back. A yellow smiley face on a black background meant street meat. A black smiley face on yellow meant scrapcake.

  It was a complete mess, but I’d grown up sneaking through those streets looking for marks, and I knew where all the side streets and alleys were. The GPS marker put Fang’s Café two blocks up on the right, underneath rippling plastic tarps that had been stretched across the street from building to building two stories up.

  “This way.”

  There were more haan wandering Render’s Strip than I expected to see, standing a head or so above most people as they moved carefully through the flow of pedestrians, motor scooters, and bicycles. I saw a woman bump into one, and watched her apologize up and down as the haan assured her he was okay. He was fine, I realized now. There was no chance at all he’d been hurt, but his reaction seemed so genuine he still could almost convince me. The surrogate cluster even picked up a slight internal wince, a small pain he felt but kept from the woman so as not to worry her. If it was an act, it went layers deep. I watched him make an elegant bow, and the woman smiled as she watched him walk away.

  Fang’s Café was tucked in a dense row of shops, each front about two doors wide. His sat between one that traded ration tickets for booze, and one with a double pink tag. Through the tall front window of the double pink, a woman stood naked, leaning against a pole and smoking a cigar butt. Her body was bonier than mine even, with all of her ribs sticking out and a little patch of bush at the base of her jutting pubic bone. She was completely covered in sweat from being in the glass case, and looked bored, stoned, or about to keel over. Maybe all three. She just stood there while a small group watched from a few feet away. I wondered how much she got paid to stand there naked.

  I hopped the single step and pushed open the narrow door under Fang’s sign. It had a white and an orange tab. According to the scrawl underneath, he sat fifteen at five-minute intervals and took all ration sheet colors except gold. I could see he was over capacity when I went in, with each of five tiny round tables surrounded and more standing. Smoke had collected up under the high ceiling where a three-bladed fan pushed hot air around. A short length of counter stood nestled in one corner, and behind it sat a scrawny older guy with a big gap between his front teeth who stared at something on the screen of his phone. There was a glass jar packed tightly with thin brown cigarettes next to him, and a shelf with empty bottles behind him showing the five different kinds of booze he carried. As I made my way over, a red light flashed from under the counter and he raised his eyebrows a little but didn’t look over.

  “No weapons in here,” he said.

  “Mr. Fang?” I asked.

  “I said no weapons in here. You deaf?”

  “Are you Mr. Fang?”

  He looked up from his phone then and squinted at me through the smoke.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m at capacity,” he said. “Beat it. Take your friends with you.”

  I took three of the cigarettes out of the jar and put them down on the counter along with my cash card. Fang hesitated, then grabbed a paper fan off the counter next to him. He fanned himself with it a little as he picked up the card.

  “Now I’m a customer,” I said. “The three cigs, plus five minutes.”

  He ran my card through a plastic scanner that was plugged into his phone. He tapped at the screen for a minute and then pushed the card and the smokes back toward me.

  “You a cop?” he asked.

  “Do I look like a cop?”

  “You look like shit.”

  I felt my face flush.

  “Watch it,” Vamp warned, but Fang just smiled.

  “What happened? His wife come home early?”

  “Ha, ha. I need to ask you about a man named Dragan Shao.”

  As soon as he heard the name, his expression changed. At first I thought he was going to clam up, or throw me out, but he didn’t do either.

  “Oh,” he said, relieved. “That was you on the phone. I thought it was security or something.”

  “Why would security be calling you about Dragan?”

  “You know why.” He held up a hand to cut off my response. “We go way back. I know it’s bullshit, but when they get that scent they stick their noses in deep. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “No trouble,” I told him. “I just want to know where he is, that’s all.”

  “Why? What’s it to ...” He trailed off, then smiled and pointed his finger at me. “Wait a minute. You’re Sam.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s me. How do you know me?”

  “Like I said, Dragan’s an old friend. I’ve seen your picture.”

  “Dragan s
howed you my picture?”

  “He showed everybody your picture. The day he adopted you he bought smokes from that jar and handed them out,” he laughed. “Bōlí.”

  “He never told me.”

  “War’s ugly. Makes people do ugly things. He likes to keep the bad old days from you, I think.”

  “He thinks I can’t take it?”

  He laughed. “You ask me, the lady boy’s worried what you might think. He likes being a father.”

  In the back of my mind I’d wondered why he never took me along to Fang’s. In my worst moments I thought he was embarrassed about me. I hadn’t expected this. I had plenty of things I didn’t want to admit to anyone, not to Dragan, or even Vamp. It never occurred to me Dragan might carry around the same stuff.

  “Was he in here the other day?”

  Fang’s smile faded, and he nodded. He looked down at the counter. “Yeah. He was here.”

  “With two kids?”

  “Yeah. One girl, one boy. He needed to cash out a full ration sheet, and he wanted it kept quiet. He also needed someone to deliver them. Someone he could trust.”

  “Where? Where did he take them?”

  “He said he was going back for you next.”

  “Fang, where did he take the two kids?”

  “The Pot,” he said. “I dropped the rations off there for him.”

  “The old Zun-zhe Housing Project? You have an address?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Another old war hound. Name’s Chen.”

  He took a business card out from somewhere behind the counter and wrote it down in small, neat handwriting before sliding it over.

  “The Pot’s close,” Vamp said.

  It was. The project was at the far end of Render’s Strip, a low-income dumping ground for about a quarter million old people. It was only a few blocks from the end of the district. Things were looking up.

  “When did you make the delivery?” I asked Fang.

  “First drop was the morning after he got back,” he said. “Next is in two days.”

  “I need to find them, Fang.”

  “Why?”

  “The boy has something I need.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Look, you don’t want any trouble, right? It’s better if you don’t know. Just give me the rations, I’ll drop them, and you won’t have to worry about it again. Okay?”

  He paused for a second and then waved for me to come closer, back behind the counter. I did, but he stopped Nix and Vamp when they tried to follow.

  “Not you two,” he said. “You wait here. Better yet, wait outside.”

  He grabbed a rope knot from the floor and pulled, lifting up a trapdoor next to his chair that revealed a narrow set of concrete stairs leading down into the dark. He reached under the counter and pushed a button that activated a force field to keep customers away from the inventory and till.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Just wait here, guys,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  Vamp didn’t look too sure, but he nodded. I climbed down as Fang turned on a light at the bottom of the stairs, closing the trapdoor above me. I followed him into a small basement that had been painted in warm pastel orange and yellows, and fitted with overhead lights. A TV was mounted in one corner, and a desk with a pretty impressive computer rig was set up against one wall. In the far corner was a futon that had a little nightstand next to it. An open doorway with a bead curtain led into a closet with a sit-down toilet. Another doorway on the other side of the room led to another closet stacked with trunks that I guessed contained his inventory.

  On the walls, he’d taped up neat arrangements of news printouts and photos. The closest one was a picture of a monorail platform, with a sign reading Shiliuyuán Station in the foreground.

  “Shiliuyuán,” I said to myself.

  Fang looked over. “Before your time.”

  I followed the line of them, and saw that in each picture there were more and more security walking the platform, all decked out in black uniforms and helmets. A makeshift construction wall became a boxed-in structure, which grew until in the last picture the place was barely recognizable.

  “Isn’t this stuff classified?”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  “Do you know what went on inside?”

  He moved to stand next to me, looking at the pictures over my shoulder.

  “No,” he said. “My mother took these, over fifty years ago. She didn’t even know.”

  “Who does?”

  “The place was locked down. Whatever they were doing in there got wiped out along with them. Maybe no one knows.”

  He left me to go get the rations.

  “Did Dragan say what was going on? Why he needed your help so late at night?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask.”

  “When we came in, you said no weapons ... you have a scanner, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did the boy have anything on him?”

  “The boy? No, he was just a little kid.”

  “Do you have the footage?”

  “Sure, hang on.”

  He parted a bead curtain to expose a small cubby where he had two big glass terrariums stacked. The one on bottom had five big rats in it, sectioned off into separate compartments. The one on top had a grow light shining down onto a little bed of green sprouts.

  “Holy shit,” I said, approaching them. One of the rats sat up, putting its feet on the glass while its pink nose sniffed curiously. “Where did you get these?”

  “Trade secret.”

  The others inside squirmed around while the first tried to sniff my fingertip through the glass. Its feet looked like tiny human hands with a knobby thumb and claws. I’d never seen a rodent up close like that. They were cute.

  “Can I hold one?”

  “No,” he said, waving his hand. “They’re sneaky little fuckers.” He came over and pointed to one of the partitions inside the cage where paper scraps had been piled over a little clutch of tiny pink bodies.

  “Street meat?” I asked.

  He nodded. “People pay real money for real meat. Especially around festival time.”

  “How do you feed them?”

  He grinned, holding his index finger and thumb very close together and squinting a little.

  “I scrape a tiny bit off the sides of every ration. Then I rewrap them,” he said. “It adds up.”

  “What are the plants?”

  “Soybean hybrid. They don’t need much water and fruit in the small space and shitty soil.”

  “Still illegal, though.”

  “Everything’s illegal.”

  Rats were disease carriers and even after processing could, in theory, still pass prion sickness on. He’d get jail time for raising and selling unscreened meat. The water the plants needed would put him over his allotment easy, so he had to be siphoning it from somewhere in order to grow them. He’d lose his business if anyone ever got a look down there.

  “Here you go,” he said, lifting a box out from behind them. It was a quarter sheet’s worth of government-issue rations, a krill and scalefly mix. He handed it to me, and I took it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Over here.”

  He gestured for me to come over to his desk, where he tapped the keyboard and brought the system out of sleep mode. I stood next to him while he accessed something on the screen.

  “Dragan’s not coming back, is he?” he said.

  “He’s alive. I’m going to find him.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “I am. I’m going to get him back.”

  “They got to him,” Fang said. “He’s not coming back for those kids.”

  “He would if he could,” I snapped, “and when I find him and get this straightened out, he will. You don’t know shit about Dragan.”

  “I know Dragan better than you do.”

  “He risked his ass for me. He—”

  “He went into a scrapcake pr
ocessing plant, inside the rim,” he said. “When he realized there were still some survivors, he went in even though the order hadn’t been given yet. I know all about it. He was doing his job. He didn’t even know who you were yet.”

  “He didn’t have to do what he did,” I shot back, “and he didn’t have to take me in after. That wasn’t part of his job. If he said he’s coming back for them, then he is, one way or the other.”