The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  I looked over and followed his light to a series of jagged, broken tiles along the edge of a giant sinkhole. Beyond the edge a great, yawning pit in the floor dropped down out of sight, but from where we stood I could make out what looked like spines, or huge, thick bristles ringing the interior. The ceiling had a similar hole directly above it.

  “She has them in stasis,” Nix said. “Storing them for later use.”

  Through the crumbled wall next to it, electric lights flashed from an array of equipment and live monitors that displayed crowded columns of haan text. The room had been some kind of laboratory, with a big metal work surface surrounded by broken-down equipment. A light shone down onto the metal tray that trailed clusters of disconnected tubes and wires.

  Mounted on the wall behind the equipment were Haan holoscreens that displayed a dizzying amount of information. The rows of alien characters overlapped one another several layers deep, in varying brightness and color, including blank areas that I suspected I just couldn’t see. I couldn’t read any of it, but popping from the clouds of haan text were images of human body parts ... arms, legs, heads, various organs, then tissue, cells, all the way down to the DNA. They formed the jigsaw pieces of a broken-out human figure.

  The worktables and trays were filled with equipment that included scalpels, bone saws, and hacksaws...Some were shiny and new, but some were old, like the rest of this place.

  “There’s something behind them,” Vamp said, pointing at the haan displays.

  I looked, and saw that there was an image behind them. A large diagram had been on the wall, now covered by the haan monitors. I stared at the fractured image, but there wasn’t enough showing to get a full picture, just disconnected glimpses of what appeared to be thick black strands, and what looked like bundles of worms. I couldn’t piece them together to form any kind of whole that made sense. Every edge I followed showed something unfamiliar, something that had no human correlation. Panic scratched at the back of my mind as I tried to connect the dots and couldn’t.

  “Nix...”

  He’d crept up behind me.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said in my ear. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “What is that?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

  I looked back to the surgical equipment, the blades caked with black tarry blood and spotted now with fuzzy blossoms of mold. A row of metal coolers ran along the far wall in the gloom behind them, marked 1 through 13-A, and 1 through 13-B. Spots of mildew had grown across the walls, finding purchase on the microscopic remains of something that had once been spattered there, and then later scrubbed away.

  “This is from before the Impact,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You were here before the Impact.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how? You crashed...”

  I looked down at the muck-stained metal tray. There were metal bands still rusting in there, restraint straps that were twisted and bent, but not broken. There were dozens of them.

  “What did they do?” I asked.

  “They didn’t know what he was,” Nix said. “They couldn’t have.”

  “So, what did they—”

  “The same thing Sillith is now doing here with your people,” he said. “They studied him.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to believe it in spite of what I saw in front of me. No human could see something as sophisticated as a haan and then just strap it down and dissect it. Men like Hwong maybe, but even then for a reason, however twisted. Not just out of curiosity.

  “Our young don’t recognize you as thinking creatures,” Nix said quietly. “Not at first. It’s why the surrogate program is so important. This was the same. You cannot form empathy for something you can’t recognize or understand. When our envoy stepped through the gate—”

  “But you look so much like us.”

  Something banged from back down the corridor behind us, and I jumped, knocking into one of the trays and sending surgical tools clattering down onto the floor.

  “They’re in,” Vamp said. Something clanged farther in the facility, echoing through the empty hallways. “We’ve got to go now.”

  “There!” I heard Ligong bark, her voice echoing through the halls. “It came from there! Move!”

  “Sam, snap out of it!”

  I was still staring at the crisscrossing streaks of black blood when Vamp grabbed my wrist and pulled, dragging me along through the doorway.

  The haan couldn’t have been here before the Impact, I thought as I followed him. They didn’t come here on purpose. Everyone says so. All the official records, everything on TV, and in school, and on the feed says so. They didn’t come here on purpose.

  Did they?

  How could they not have? a tiny voice whispered, struggling to be heard from some deep place in the back of my mind. What would the chances be that they would accidentally come across us in a universe so vast?

  Vamp tugged my arm again, and I looked back at the row of metal coolers one last time as I stumbled away after him with no good answer.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  03:19:22 BC

  I slid down the slick, soot-covered slope with Vamp and Nix close behind me. Vamp looked unsure about heading down into that hole, but he looked even less sure about the sounds coming from back down the corridor. There was no way they could have cut through the hatch so quickly, but they must have found another way around because the sounds were getting close. When I glanced back through the gap in the broken floor above, I saw a flashlight beam sweep past.

  The tiles ended abruptly in front of me, splintered support struts jutting from underneath along with the broken ends of rusted pipe-work. There was a drop of maybe five feet down to the corridor below where hot, wet air billowed up like the breath of some giant creature. Vamp joined me at the edge, peering down.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “I’m taller. I’ll help you down.”

  Back behind us, a burst of radio chatter echoed through the hallways, rising over the constant low rumble of machinery. Heavy footsteps, the unmistakable tramping of many boots, grew louder as they approached.

  “This is crazy,” I muttered, looking back down into the darkness.

  “I know,” Vamp said.

  I glanced back at Nix. “Is she down there?”

  Nix drew in a long, deep breath, then slowly released it. I felt it vent against the side of my neck, until it petered out into that soft bone rattle.

  “Yes.”

  “How close?”

  “Close.”

  He dropped from the edge, down into the shadows, and I watched him touch down on the floor below, where his eyes cast a mellow glow in the darkness.

  “You ready?” I asked Vamp. He nodded, and I put one hand on his chest. “I’m sorry I dragged you into th—”

  He touched my cheek, then leaned forward suddenly and kissed me on the mouth. His lips were full, and soft, and I felt his fingers move through my hair, cradling the back of my head. Before I knew it I felt the rough stubble of his face under my palms, and I was kissing him back. He let it linger just long enough, and then broke.

  “Just in case,” he said, and jumped down to join Nix. I hesitated on the edge, my cheeks hot. Vamp was a good kisser.

  I dropped down after him as a flashlight beam floated past the hole above. Two more joined it, casting through the room.

  “Here,” a woman’s voice said. One of the beams stopped at the top of the slope, shining on the tracks we’d left behind.

  “This way,” Nix whispered.

  We followed him down a corridor that was nearly pitch-black until the dim light in the distance took on the shape of a doorway. Something slammed back behind us, and I heard the sound of voices accompanied by the jingle and clatter of equipment. I picked up the pace as we approached the light, and I was able to make out a white cinder block wall somewhere on the other side of the doorway there.

  “Jesus,” Vamp mu
ttered.

  In the glow cast through the doorway ahead, I saw an empty set of clothing that was plastered to the floor. A pair of shoes lay empty in front of a pair of blood-drenched pants and shirt. A few scaleflies scurried over the sticky pile, and had formed a crawling mass above the empty neckline. Where the head would have been, the floor was painted with a slick of red-black, littered with bits of white and gray.

  “It’s her,” I whispered, putting my arm in front of my nose and mouth to try and block out the stench. “Innuya, the woman from the recording. We’re getting close.”

  In the face of it, the jealousy I’d felt when I’d first learned about her seemed stupid. Dragan had cared for her. He cared for her son, who had to watch her die in such a horrible way. He’d tried to save them, the way he’d saved me.

  I stepped over the remains and through the doorway, squinting through salty sweat as we entered a large, open space where hanging lamps glowed from the bowed ductwork exposed high above. It looked like it might have been a storage warehouse at one point, broken boxes piled between rows of metal shelving and a grimy forklift lying on its side. Ahead, a space had been cleared and I could make out flashing lights and their reflections that shimmered on the ceiling above.

  As we crept down the row, toward the source of the light, I saw the movement of little haan constructs, hundreds of them skittering along the shelves and the cracked concrete floor.

  “Look,” Vamp breathed.

  Rows of shelving had been cleared and in their place six large, circular vats formed from thick plastic sat arranged in a hexagon. Each vat contained a single haan female, steeping in some kind of chemical stew while tubes dangled down around them from a cluster of electronics above. Their faces were all identical, saucer eyes glowing coal red and ringed with blue coronas. They floated there, just beneath the liquid whose surface rippled with the underground vibrations. They looked dead at first, but as I pointed the flashlight beam and moved closer, I could see their hearts pulsing slowly and a nervous jittering inside each skull.

  “Nix, what is this?” I whispered. “Who are they?”

  “They are clones of Sillith.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “She is using them to develop and grow genetic samples.”

  Vamp stepped closer, shining his light into the face of one. The clone didn’t seem to notice him as he moved the beam down into the liquid where what looked like little worms were wriggling around.

  “This goes far beyond a simulated pandemic,” Nix said in my ear. “Whatever she is attempting to create, you carry a prototype inside you. This place has to be destroyed before—”

  He broke off, cocking his head, and a moment later I felt her. The mites jumped alive and sent a jolt of signal into my brain. The force of it made me stumble a little, and I grabbed on to Nix for support.

  “Sam, what’s wrong?” Vamp asked. He stepped in to get an arm around me, but I got my footing back and squirmed away. Sillith had tapped into the mites and I could feel her in there, worming into my mind. Her voice whispered from inside my head.

  You shouldn’t have come here.

  “She’s here,” I said.

  A lithe figure dropped into view from somewhere up above, seeming to pour down onto the floor, where she landed on the balls of her feet without a sound.

  The hatred she felt bored into my mind, and the sheer intensity of it made me feel physically sick. Acid crept up my throat as she stepped closer, her molten red eyes staring through coronas of blue flame. She’d dropped the masquerade of the combat armor, and appeared as a nude haan female, an exact duplicate of the six in the vats. Her face was severe but beautiful in its haan way, an oversized, flawless mask with a stiff expression, and the two coiled shapes beneath her translucent skull flexed, causing the network of tissue around it to ripple in response. She had a long, slender neck and strong square shoulders, her chest sloping down to a pair of breasts that hung above her rib cage. Inside each I could make out a network of squiggling veins branching from the nipple and ending in a series of shadowy nodes behind them. Something was moving inside her belly, and a smaller, more subtle movement slithered beneath the skin above her crotch.

  “You’re too late,” she said.

  “Sillith,” Nix said, stepping forward. “Reconsider this.”

  I felt another surge of anger and contempt as the smaller brain fluttered beneath the mass of the larger.

  “Reconsider?” she asked. She took a few slow steps toward him.

  “It’s their world,” he said.

  “They had their chance. This planet has already been pushed past the point of sustainability. That wasn’t my doing.”

  “It doesn’t have to—”

  “Here!” a voice barked from behind us, and I felt a vague skip through the mites, anticipation interrupted by annoyance and then anger as she looked over my shoulder. The pupils in each did a slow revolution, as anger grew into fury.

  I turned and saw soldiers streaming in through the doorway, armed with assault rifles. They immediately-dispersed, breaking into formations and taking aim at Sillith as Ligong moved in behind them, carrying a Gauss rifle in one hand. Translucent red beams flickered pencil-thin through the fog, their points clustering over the throbbing mass inside Sillith’s chest.

  “Clear!” Ligong snapped back through the doorway, and unhurried footsteps rapped sharply in the sudden silence as Governor Jianguo Hwong came through the doorway.

  A low, almost inaudible purr or growl began to emanate from deep in Sillith’s chest as she watched the soldiers part for him. He marched between them, and as he moved past the metal drums, he glanced back and forth at the clones there like he was performing a military inspection.

  “Go back with the others,” he said without looking at me. “All three of you. Now.”

  His neck was still bruised from where I’d choked him, and the tone of his voice didn’t do anything to suggest he was there to help us, but none of us were about to get between him and Sillith. I followed Vamp and Nix back, past Ligong, whose eyes promised death, until we reached the formation of soldiers and moved behind them.

  “Didn’t expect to see me here, did you?” Hwong taunted, facing Sillith. He stood tall, fearless, as he addressed her like one of his lowest grunts. Without the surrogate mites he couldn’t directly experience her intent, but I could, and I felt all of her anger and all of her hatred as it focused on him like a laser.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice low and smooth. “I did.”

  Hwong drew a heavy rail pistol from his holster and pointed it at the nearest clone’s head. I heard it charge, and then emit a flat boom. There was a brief flash of light as a sizzling hole appeared in the side of the clone’s skull. Fluid began to jet from holes in either side of the vat; then a shock wave thumped under the liquid’s surface as the skull shattered like an eggshell around a murky cloud of black blood and brains.

  “If you so much as twitch,” Hwong said, jabbing his index finger at her, “my men will open fire on you and we’ll just see what’s left when the dust settles.”

  That actually made her pause. Her eyes moved from Hwong to the soldiers, scanning slowly down the length of the formation. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It became more subservient, and softer. A husky, even sexy quality had crept in, but through our connection I could tell it was a lie. Ligong picked up on it too.

  “I have honored my part of the deal,” she said.

  “This wasn’t part of the deal,” Hwong countered. “I saw Specialist Shao’s wet drive footage. Whatever you were planning ends right now. Hand over the boy.”

  “And then what?”

  “My men will destroy him and bury him along with everything else down here under a ton of rubble.”

  She hesitated. “Your enemies will eventually—”

  “Maybe so, Sillith, but our deal is off. Hand him over.”

  A surge of hostility flooded from Sillith, and her posture changed subtly as she t
ook two steps toward him.

  “And if I don’t?” she asked. The voice that issued through her voice box had grown dangerous, rising in pitch and taking on a piercing, dissonant tone. Hwong almost took a step back but held his ground.

  “We are the only chance you have,” she said. “Your race is pathetic. You look down your nose at the rest of this world, ready to scrape them off rather than deal with them but this city, and this country you are so proud of is pathetic. Your whole race deserves the slow death it has fostered—”

  “Is that some kind of threat?” Hwong asked. “Because one word from me will trigger the failsafe and wipe what’s left of your race off the surface of our planet.”