The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  He didn’t answer.

  “I guess you probably think we’re pretty sick sometimes, huh?” I asked him.

  “Sick? No.”

  “Yeah, well... I do.”

  “Actually, I find you quite beautiful at times.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s true. Not all haan would agree, especially those not born here, but your world is impressive in its own right, and as a people you have a resilience that can be very moving. We were like you, once. One day, you will be like us.”

  “Everyone wants what you got, I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s more than that. We are better for having met you, even if not everyone sees it.”

  We walked in silence for another few moments.

  “So ... is your planet anything like this?” I asked him. One eye rolled toward me.

  “No.” He paused, and then corrected himself. “It was quite similar in makeup. Our societies were very different.”

  “What is it like? Where you come from? You guys never talk about that. Are you not allowed?”

  He was quiet for a minute, and from the vibe I picked up from him I thought that he wasn’t supposed to say anything. I sensed loss, and a need to communicate it mingled with frustration.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forget you were born here.”

  “Through genetic memory I’ve experienced it,” he said finally.

  “Genetic memory?”

  “None of us is ever lost. When one of us is returned to the vats, his memories are added to our genetic sequence. All subsequent haan gain access to the memories as their brains develop.”

  “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the haan who are already born?”

  “The genetic sequence is distributed and written into active memory.”

  “Distributed? How?”

  “Genetic information is disseminated through scaleflies.”

  I grabbed his sleeve, stopping him for a minute. “Wait, what?”

  “Scaleflies are more than a stowaway pest as is generally implied. They have been engineered over the centuries to pass complex genetic information and material between haan, mainly retroviruses capable of writing memories or other information into the brain.”

  “That’s why they’re always hanging around you?” I asked. “I just figured it was the smell or something.”

  “Smell?”

  “After feeding, your breath can be a little stinky.” I thought about what he’d said for a minute. “So, wait, how often do they do that?”

  “They constantly ferry new information. If redundant information is received, it is ignored. Otherwise it is stored.”

  “And other genetic material, stuff besides memories? Something dangerous?”

  He hesitated, but didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he’d seen the wet drive recording yet.

  “It’s how I know my world,” he said instead, “even though I’ve never been there, and will never see it.”

  “And what’s it like?”

  “It was perfect.”

  “Perfect, huh?”

  “We had mastered the physical world,” he said, and the tide of emotion intensified over the brain band. I felt his painful longing, a deep ache, and also his pride. “We were the architects of our environment, and our physical selves. We had transcended evolution, and achieved the pinnacle of conscious development. We were perfect creatures, who created a perfect world.”

  “Why do you keep talking about it in the past tense?”

  That snapped him out of it a little. The flow of signal ebbed, then stopped altogether as he retreated. He didn’t answer the question.

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here,” I told him. “It’s the same with us. Not everyone thinks so, but I do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You know,” I said, “after Dragan found me, after he got me away from the meat farm, but before he took me in, I got tied up in the system for a few weeks. Since I didn’t have a home or a job or legal guardians, I got spayed.”

  “You can’t have children.”

  “Yeah, it’s why I wanted to stay out of the system as a kid, why I ran from Baishan Park. I knew it was the first thing they’d do.” I threw up one hand. “Then they just did it anyway.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So, when I thought I’d lose the surrogate program too, I—”

  “You have been reinstated.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m glad.”

  “Thanks.”

  I picked up a faint pulse, as a decision he’d been weighing back and forth tipped in one direction. He reached into his jacket, then handed me Dragan’s wet drive back.

  “The facility is of haan design,” he said.

  “Yeah, I recognized the characters.” I took the drive back and stuck it in my pocket. “This isn’t good, is it?”

  “No.”

  “What are they doing down there? Could you tell?”

  “They are experimenting on humans,” he said.

  “To create the bioweapon.”

  “The evidence suggests the weapon, in its current form, is complete and has been deployed. It also suggests that this experimentation is ongoing in spite of that fact.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but the information on this drive is very dangerous.”

  “Dragan says I should get it to Governor Hwong.”

  “Do you plan to?”

  “Aren’t you afraid of what he’ll do to you if he sees it? I mean, do you think he could trigger the failsafe over it?”

  “Do you?”

  I wasn’t sure. It had been nagging at me. We were in bed pretty deep with the haan by now, but if the evidence encoded on the drive really backed up what Dragan said, that a haan engineered something that horrible for whatever reason... all haan might pay for that, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

  “I saw her down there ...,” I said to myself.

  “You were there?”

  “No, it was like a dream or something. She was knocked out and it started bleeding over the surrogate cluster. She was there. I just don’t understand why. I mean, the Pan-Slavs are our problem. Why would she do something like this and risk so much?”

  “Her fertility cycle is ending. She will be replaced soon, but until then she is very influential... she may be hoping to effect some kind of change before she is sent back to the vats.”

  “Hey,” a voice called from behind. Nix started to look back, but I stopped him.

  “Don’t. Just keep walking. What kind of change?”

  “I don’t know,” Nix said, his voice uncertain. “She’s been responsible for, among other things, routing offspring through the surrogate program for imprinting. Since all surrogate activities go through military channels, this might explain where she forged her contacts.”

  A bottle whipped past between us and bounced off the sidewalk before spinning away.

  “Hey!”

  Nix leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Sam ...”

  “Just take it easy,” I told him, but I eased one hand down into my pocket and curled my fingers around the stun gun’s grip. Still walking, I turned back to look over my shoulder.

  “What’s your prob—”

  He was right behind us, a scrawny, shirtless old tattooed man with a scraggly, graying beard and bad teeth. Before I could do anything he reached out and grabbed my arm, spinning me around. I kept my hand on the stun gun as I jerked my elbow free from his grip.

  “Let go!”

  The man slipped a knife out of his back pocket and flicked out the blade. “Humans only, sister.”

  “What?”

  “Take the maggot and go back the way you came.”

  Anger surged, but even with the shocker I didn’t like the look of the knife. I glanced back behind the guy and saw a couple of his buddies hanging back, watching us.

  “It’s a free country,�
�� I said.

  “Take the maggot,” he said again, “and go back the way you came.”

  “Sam, it’s okay,” Nix said. “Don’t—”

  “Look, we’re just passing through,” I said to the guy. “What are you going to do? Knife us for walking down the sidewalk?”

  He swung his fist, lightning fast. I cringed in surprise, but before I could react Nix had moved one arm out between us. The man’s forearm clashed with his, causing a faint flash of blue and a bony thud. The inertial dampening field, or whatever Nix had called it, lit up in a hexagon grid pattern before fading.

  “Nix, don’t!”

  The guy recoiled, pain twisting his face, but it didn’t slow him down long. Even as the others started to head toward us from behind him, he reached out and grabbed Nix’s wrist. His fingers eased through the field, and I felt a stab of pain through the mites as he pulled Nix off balance.

  “Piece of shit....”

  I pulled the stun gun out of my pocket, but I was too late. The guy jerked Nix forward and he fell onto his knees. Once he was down, the man grabbed Nix’s elbow with his other hand and put his forearm down across his knee.

  “Don’t!” I yelled.

  I heard the break, and received a bolt of pain over the surrogate link that made me stagger for a second. It intensified, until my eyes teared up.

  “Let go of him!” I squeezed the shocker’s trigger, and electricity arced across the prongs.

  The man stood and hauled Nix back up onto his feet. He still had Nix’s wrist and had started to twist it back when another guy came from out of nowhere behind us. He swung and caught the man in the jaw with his fist.

  The man let go, blood filling the space between his lips as he staggered back. The other guy kept on him, and I saw it was Vamp. We must have been close enough to the hotel that he’d spotted us.

  The man raised his knife, but he was still off balance. Vamp hit him again, right in the face, and blood began to run from both nostrils into his beard. Vamp shoved him down onto the sidewalk and then stomped on his wrist. The knife slipped out of his fingers, and Vamp snatched it up.

  He held it, glaring down the street at the other men, who hung back, not quite as confident as they’d been a minute ago. They glared back, but then seemed to decide that even though there were two of them they weren’t in a hurry to tangle with the much younger and stronger Vamp.

  “Take your friend and beat it,” Vamp said. “Unless you want jail time for assault on a haan.”

  They didn’t. One of them helped his injured friend up, who then shoved him away. There was death in the bloodied man’s eyes, but the three stalked off.

  Vamp stepped back toward us, where I still held out the stun gun and Nix was holding his injured arm to his chest. “You guys okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Shit, Vamp, you’re like a badass.”

  “What about him?” He gestured at Nix.

  “I will be fine,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Vamp.”

  “Thank you, Vamp.”

  “No problem.” He looked back at me. “Come on, we’d better get him off the street.”

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  He pointed back down the street. “Right down there.”

  The place had really gone south. It took me a minute to find the entrance to the old building. The pool hall was gone, but the sign for Wei’s was still there, hanging above a set of worn concrete steps that led down from the sidewalk to a heavily spray-painted metal door. A four-pack of whiskey soda sat on one step where Vamp had abandoned it to help us.

  “Okay,” I said. “Nix, are you okay? For real?”

  “Yes. Vamp is right. We should get inside.”

  Through the mites I could sense his concern, and his fear stirred in with a good dose of haan shame and guilt. He stood up straight, and we crossed the street. Vamp’s muscles were tense and his expression was set, warning away anyone else who might get the idea to mess with us as he picked the four-pack back up. Another breeze made the puppets sway on their lines, and sent paper trash skittering across the blacktop.

  I pulled the door open and wiped my hand on my shirt as I stepped through into the cramped hallway on the other side. It seemed a little smaller, these days. The walls were plastered with copied advertisements for bars, nudie shows, and illegal rations.

  Two stringy men in white tank tops came around the corner. They stared openly at us as they passed, and then I heard them snicker behind us.

  “What is a three-way?” Nix asked.

  “I’ll explain it later.”

  Around the corner was what Wei called the Foyer, a closet with a chair, a computer, and a piece particleboard adorned with hanging key cards. The bulletproof glass with the honeycomb wire sandwiched between that covered the front of it had been reinforced by a haan force shield that shimmered faint blue in the dim light. Behind the shield sat Wei, looking much older and bonier than I remembered. The monitor was streaming footage of the bombing and he watched, a fat cigar smoldering idly in one stained corner of his lips. His cheeks were hollow, and the skin stretched over them looked thin as paper.

  He glanced up when he heard us approach, his watery brown eyes watching us from over the top of the screen. I was ready to explain to him who I was, but as it turned out I didn’t have to.

  “Niu-niu,” he rasped. He broke into a smile that showed his yellowed teeth.

  “Hey, Wei.”

  “I never thought I’d see you here again.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You guys know each other?” Vamp asked, sounding a little skeptical.

  “Know her?” Wei said. “Little shit used to work for me in exchange for a room. Good times.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Yeah, cleaning up puke and plunging condoms out of toilets. Good times.”

  “Hey, that was a good deal,” he said. The corners of his lips furrowed deeper into the wrinkles of his face as he peered closer. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  I saw my own reflection in the glass between us. and the scratches that crisscrossed my cheeks and forehead. “It got introduced to a window.”

  “Looks like they didn’t get along.” He chuckled, and pointed at the TV screen. “Hwong’s men already caught the fuckers set that bomb off.”

  “Really?” That was pretty fast, even for Hwong.

  “The execution’s tonight.”

  I shrugged. “Great.”

  “Hey, you used to like executions.” He chuckled again, but then slowly his smile began to fade. “You know, Dragan told me if he ever saw me around you again, I was a dead man.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  His smile faded completely. I thought I actually saw a little shimmer in the old man’s eyes. “He blamed me for what happened. He thought those meat farmers were getting their marks from the hotel... that I sold you to them.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “I—“

  “I knew better than to go there at night, alone,” I said. “It was my own fault.” He nodded, but not like he agreed.

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  His eyes finally moved to Vamp, and then Nix. “It can’t stay here, though.”

  “We just need a place to lie low for tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Then we disappear.”

  Wei sighed, adjusting the cigar in his mouth.

  “You and your boyfriend can stay,” he said. “Not the zhameng.”

  “All three,” I insisted, ignoring the insult. He shook his head. “Please. For old times’ sake.”

  “Why here?” he asked.

  “Because he’s injured,” I said. “And because I’m in trouble.”

  He frowned, but I felt him relent, just a little.

  “You know,” he said, turning to the others, “when I found her digging in my trash way back then, I took her for a boy. I almost used the stunner on her.”

&nb
sp; “You did use the stunner on me.”

  His eyes twinkled a little, and his lips formed a faint smile. “I was going to turn her over to security, but she was so pathetic I couldn’t do it.”