The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  The buildings beneath the aircar began to thin as we approached the dome, and the radio crackled up front as the wall surrounding the skirts appeared up ahead. I watched out the window as the shadow of our car passed over the spherical outer hull of one of the giant lenses, arcing down toward its jutting array of emitters. Turrets sat hunkered along the rim like huge mechanical gargoyles, aimed inward toward the ship and any criminals lurking in the wasteland between who might try and run the gantlet.

  “Approaching vehicle,” a voice crackled, “transmit your transponder code.”

  “Stand by,” the driver said, reaching forward to fiddle with something on the dash controls. A moment later the voice came back.

  “Thank you. You are cleared.”

  “We’re coming in,” the driver said over his shoulder.

  Nix stirred next to me as the wall passed beneath us and we began to descend down over the skirts. As bad as they looked from a distance, they looked a million times worse up close. Between the wall and the translucent electric blue of the dome force field was a fifty-year-old graveyard, a ring of toxic, unusable trash neither we nor the haan wanted. Stumps of buildings were still recognizable, sections of wall and steel framework poking up out of several stories of dust and ash that covered everything, but any trace of life was long gone. There were no lights, no fires, nothing.

  In the rearview mirror I could see the dust cloud billowing behind us and blotting out the city skyline. When I looked down at the blanket of soot and sludge that streaked past below the aircar’s belly, it made me uneasy. If for any reason we crashed down there, we’d be buried with no way to get out.

  A jagged section of wall huffed past on our right, fog streaming through the rows of empty window holes. The skewed slope of one of the floors sheared down from one side and into the soot below. People had lived there. They’d been sitting at tables eating, or lying in their beds sleeping, when it happened. Everyone knew the story, but it was spooky to see it up close like this. Black bits of ash streaked through the aircar’s headlamps as they blinked on, and off in the distance I spotted a faint electric red light that would be invisible from the outer rim through all the debris and dust.

  “What is that?”

  The driver throttled the emitters back and we dropped lower. Hard charred bits peppered the windshield as we passed through a cloud, then down a powdery slope to where a deep, dark pocket had been dug out up ahead.

  The red light flashed three times, went out, and then flashed three times again before coming back on. The driver closed in on the spot and hovered, making a lazy circle around the pit below. They’d blown out the dust and ash, then dug out the underlying layers of packed dirt, concrete powder, and soot to expose a big section of tiled floor about twenty feet down that they were using as a landing platform. An old twisted section of fire escape was half embedded in the wall of debris on one side to form a makeshift signal tower, the red electric lamp trailing cables down to a generator below.

  There were four other airbikes lined up down there, and we landed in an open space near one wall that still had an exposed doorway on it, though the other side was packed solid with dirt and debris. Across the old tiled floor on the other side was another piece of wall that had buckled a little under pressure from above. A metal doorframe in the middle had held its ground, and the chipped blue door had a red LED shining over a magnetic lock. Through the car’s sunroof I saw smoke and dust moaning over the pit’s mouth in billowy gray streams, the bright point of Fangwenzhe bleeding through like a tiny second sun. The car settled down, and floating grit suddenly dropped back down to the ground as the emitters deactivated.

  “Now what?” Vamp asked from up front. Fear flashed in his eyes as he looked out the window.

  “Let’s go,” Ligong said.

  The doors opened and we piled out, Vamp with his hands still pinned behind his back and Nix a little unsteady on his feet as we were escorted across the buckled floor. It was at least twenty degrees cooler there, and the air had a bittersweet chemical smell. When we reached the door at the far end, the LED turned from red to green, and I heard the bolt pop over the rush of wind. The door opened, and a man stepped out. He was tall and sinewy, with waxy skin and an ugly pockmarked face. He was dressed in uniform, but had a black rubber butcher’s apron on over it, and a cigar butt glowed in the corner of his wide, thick lips.

  “You,” Hwong said to Vamp, “go with him.”

  Vamp bristled, glancing back over his shoulder toward the car.

  “There’s nothing back there,” Hwong said. “Go with him.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Just hold on.”

  “Alive or dead,” Hwong said, his voice hardening. “Your choice.”

  Vamp took an unsteady step toward the man in the apron, who just watched, not smiling. Ligong shoved him then, causing him to stumble forward.

  “You too,” Hwong said to Nix. “Go with them.”

  Nix didn’t argue. He approached the uniformed man in the apron, and waited with Vamp as the man took a scanner from his belt and aimed it at him. When he switched it on, a holoscreen appeared in the air above it, displaying a vague outline of interference where Nix would be.

  “He’s got an Escher Field,” the man said. “The destination’s scrambled and it won’t respond with an inventory.”

  “Let’s have it,” Ligong said, holding out one hand.

  I watched as Nix gave up the tablet and she held it up to the light. She angled it back and forth, but the screen appeared as nothing more than a seamless silver plate. She handed it to Hwong.

  “Take them in,” Hwong said to the man. The guy nodded, then put the scanner away and gestured for Nix and Vamp to follow. Vamp looked back over his shoulder as he went, making eye contact with me.

  “Where are you taking them?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “Lieutenant, go with them.” She nodded, following along behind. They disappeared down the corridor branch ahead, and Hwong took us down the broken hallway in the other direction, to a heavy metal door. He held it open and signaled for me to go inside.

  The hallway of whatever building had been buried all those years ago had a floor and walls that had shifted and cracked, but it was still mostly intact. They’d strung up a tangled length of holiday lights all the way down on both sides, held in place with carpenter staples. There were other doors on the walls along the way, but they looked like they were jammed shut and I saw rubble poking out of a gap in one of them. Up ahead the corridor opened into what might once have been an old office.

  When I stepped through the doorway, my foot splashed into a black puddle of water and creosote, but beyond that it was dry. A desk had been set up in one corner, and there was computer equipment set up there, shielded wires trailing off through another open doorway on the far side of the room where a cracked glass window looked out into what might have been an auditorium at some point.

  “What is this place?” I asked him.

  “The important thing for you to know,” he said, “is that with all the interference it’s impossible for even our scanners to effectively sweep here. Anything that goes on here is invisible to the outside world. I am authority out there, but I am God in here. Do you understand?”

  I stepped closer to the cracked glass window, and through it I could make out rows of shipping containers that had been fashioned into makeshift holding cells. There were people inside them, men and women in dirty prison grays who looked like they’d been there for a long time. Some were young men, tough-looking types, but most were older... balding men with glasses, and women who could be mothers or office workers. They didn’t look like criminals.

  “This place is illegal,” I said.

  “This place doesn’t exist.”

  He leaned back against the desk, and it creaked a little under his weight. He held up Nix’s tablet in one hand.

  “Since this is haan tech,” he said, “I have no hope of getting it open without the pass code. Do you kn
ow how to open it?”

  “No.”

  “Does the haan?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re telling me he is in possession of a device that neither he nor anyone with him is able to access?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re lying,” Hwong said. “I know he knows how to access it, but I don’t think he’ll tell me.”

  “I don’t know how to get into it. I—”

  “Back in the Pot, the soldier’s scanner recorded you manipulating the device and then handing it back to the haan shortly before they entered,” he said. “I think you do know how to access it.”

  “Why do you care? What does it matter to you what he keeps in there anyway?”

  “Because I suspect the twistkey I’m looking for is inside it,” he said.

  I’d grown up watching Governor Hwong on the news. He wasn’t a guy you messed with. He was going to kill all three of us. The only thing stopping him was that he knew he’d never get the tablet open on his own. He had to satisfy himself that what he wanted wasn’t stuck in there where he couldn’t get to it.

  “Once you have it, you’ll just kill us,” I said.

  Hwong grinned, slowly. He was still smiling when he pulled a gun out of his jacket and pointed the barrel directly between my eyes. My next words fizzled in my mouth and I took a step back, bumping into the table behind me and knocking over a phone headset that clattered to the floor.

  “I could kill you right now,” he said calmly.

  “You’re afraid it’s still inside,” I said, keeping still, not looking at the gun.

  “The haan will open it, eventually.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “He’ll die first. You know he will.”

  The huge black eye of the gun barrel was staring down at me, and when he cocked the hammer back deliberately with his thumb, my legs went watery.

  “Then you open it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I can’t because I need it,” I said. He narrowed his eyes. “I need the twistkey.”

  “Why?”

  “My father’s down there. She’s got him.”

  Hwong hesitated. After a few more seconds he released the hammer slowly and moved the gun away from my face.

  “If Sillith has Specialist Shao,” he said, “then he’s gone. You can’t bargain with her.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean it. I hold a gun at her race’s head and she still plans to betray me. She’ll eat you alive.” He half smiled, with no real humor. “Maybe literally.”

  “Why make a deal with her, then?” I asked.

  “Because she’s about to become obsolete, and she knows it.”

  “Her fertility cycle is ending,” I said. He seemed surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “She understands that right now she holds great power, and that she’s about to lose it all. If she wants to effect any change, this will be her last opportunity to do it.”

  “So?”

  “So we both want something. She wants the haan to have their own state after she’s gone, and I want that rogue country burned off the map.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “It takes people with real will to effect real change,” he said. “In that respect she and I are alike. This will change the world, as we know it, for the better. We need the haan, but we can’t keep accommodating them. They need more room, more resources ... more food than we can give them. Thirteen settlements will turn into thirteen hundred, eventually. Right now they consume over eighty percent of our food just to stay alive. Projections put it at over three hundred percent over the next twenty years.”

  “But the haan have a plan to fix all that.”

  “In the long term,” Hwong said. “So they say. In the short term, things are going to get worse than you could imagine.”

  “But... killing all of them?”

  “The world is buckling,” he said. “We pretend we are isolated from that, but everyone knows it. The truth is that not even everyone in this country is going to survive the years to come, even with the haan’s help. Others will fare far worse and there will be only us to feed on. They’re going to keep attacking us, keep gathering their forces until one day—”

  “The haan defense shield will stop them,” I said. “Once it’s up they’ll—”

  “And when will that be?” he asked. “The PSE, the Americans, the EU ... they all have arsenals that would make your blood run cold. You think a few bombings are bad? There are nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons spread all over that fractured state of theirs, and they’re building those forces, getting ready to come in—”

  “But to just wipe all of them out like that... please, think about it. Just have the haan undo whatever they did to him, or keep him behind the force field so he doesn’t—”

  “It will appear to be a natural pandemic. Once they fall, we can go in and secure their weapons, including their WMDs. The world will be a safer place, believe me.”

  He was serious. He was completely serious. It didn’t matter that the Americans and the EU would never just stand by and let that happen. He had to know that. If I thought of it, he had to know it, but when I looked in his eyes I saw he had every intention of going ahead regardless.

  He stepped closer, and leaned in close. His voice was calm and reasonable.

  “In the end, when it’s all over and the dust has settled, the entire world will benefit. Everyone will see. The Americans, the EU, even our own leaders. I may not survive what follows, but my legacy will.”

  I could see by the look in his eyes that he’d come to terms with what he’d decided he had to do. There was even doubt there, just a little, a small glint in his eyes as he spoke that worried at the cost of the path he’d chosen, but he was going ahead anyway. He wasn’t going to be talked out of it, not now. Not by me.

  “If you have Alexei, and you’ve seen the recording,” I said, “then why do you need the twistkey?”

  “Because once this is over,” he said, “I’m taking a team in there to kill her, and to burn any evidence that Shiliuyuán Station was still intact off the map.”

  “You’re going to double-cross her?”

  “They’ll have their state,” he said, “but I happen to know something few others do. The haan share memories. They are stored and disseminated after death as some kind of virtual construct any of them can access. She has to go before that can happen.”

  “But there’s people down there,” I said.

  “What happened there can’t ever come to light, I’m sorry.”

  “But my father is down there!”

  “I’ll do what I can about Specialist Shao.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying. Hand over the key and I’ll do what I can.”

  “No.”

  “No?” He stepped closer, until he loomed over me.

  “It’s in the tablet,” I said quickly. “If you kill me you’ll never get it.”

  “The haan—”

  “Won’t tell you. You know he won’t. Everyone knows the story about the school in Shangzho. You can beat a haan to death and he won’t retaliate.”

  My heart pounded. I was losing control of the situation, and I could see in this man’s eyes that violence would come next. Some men could do things like that and some couldn’t. This man could, and he would. He closed in and grabbed my wrist with his big hand, pulling me toward him. I struggled to break free, but his grip was too strong. He headed back toward the desk, dragging me along behind him.

  “Be still,” he snapped. I stopped struggling, breath coming fast through my nose, and I held the tablet in a death grip against my chest.

  Dragan needs me. He needs me. This is my one chance to get him back. If I lose it, I’ll never see him again. No matter what this man does, I can’t—

  He stabbed at the console, and a holographic screen appeared on the far wall, six feet on
a side. An image appeared there, a live feed from a small room with a concrete floor and cinder block walls. The soldier who’d met us at the door was there along with two others, all in uniform, and all wearing black rubber aprons. The man who’d first met us held a big electric concrete saw in his hands. In the room with them were Vamp and Nix, both zip-tied to a chair with a big, heavy chopping block set between them. Each chair rested against a metal support pole, and their arms were bound behind them. They were both awake, and I could see Vamp’s chest rising and falling rapid-fire as he kept his eyes fixed on the saw.

  Hwong leaned in toward the microphone. “Are you ready?” The man with the saw nodded.