The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  Alexei struggled a minute more and then his body slumped. Sillith grabbed him by his neck and hurled him through the gate.

  I glanced back toward Vamp, who still lay sprawled on the tunnel floor next to Dragan’s bed, but there wasn’t time. I hobbled toward Sillith as back behind me—or above me, I suppose—something exploded with enough force to shake the bed frames mounted to the tunnel walls.

  She turned, the gate control in her hand, and I knew she was about to close it. If she did, Alexei would be stuck on the other side and that would be the end of it.

  I knelt, propping the butt of the rail gun against one hip and raising the barrel. The scope’s laser wandered as I tried to steady it, but there wasn’t any time left. As soon as I saw the red dot drift over her midsection, I pulled the trigger.

  Despite the weapon’s size and how heavy it was, it had almost zero kick. It just made a low chuff sound. For a second, I had thought it hadn’t gone off at all when a tunnel appeared through the haze of fog followed by a loud boom. At the same instant, Sillith looked down at a neat hole that had formed in her belly.

  The slug bored straight through, then punched into the tunnel wall next to the gate. When the shock wave erupted inside her, she jumped as if she’d been electrocuted. An explosion of blood blew out from in front and behind, some of the mess splashing down onto the graviton plates and the rest raining down the tunnel behind her. A wobbly ring of beaded blood formed in the air behind her as the drops circled the tunnel’s gravity field, then broke apart a moment later.

  She went down on one knee. One hand reached forward to stop her fall, coming down in the muck as an aftermath of bits splashed down around her. The pieces seemed to squiggle and morph as they hit, some forming half-glimpsed shapes of hands, limbs, or feet before one by one they warped away and disappeared in a series of firecracker bangs. The air around her distorted, and it looked for a second like she was going to go too, but she didn’t. Instead she raised her head, and her molten eyes glared down the tunnel at me.

  I adjusted my aim, the laser beam cutting through the mist as it homed in on her, but before I could fire again, something clamped down on the barrel. It was a hand, Sillith’s hand, somehow, flickering like a hologram or a ghost.

  I held on, trying to steer the laser against her grip, when another huge explosion went off, and with a shower of sparks from somewhere behind me, the power went out and engulfed the tunnel in darkness.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  03:03:03 BC

  Debris rained through the tunnel, peppering my back and shoulders as some went up and some went down. Then the last of the graviton plating’s charge left it, and I felt the tunnel swivel beneath my feet as my center of gravity changed. All at once the tunnel ahead became a straight drop and I pitched forward, legs pedaling in the air, while Sillith stared up from below. I flailed with my free arm and managed to grab on to one of the sheets of the bed mounted next to me, pulling it free and dragging it down to the next frame below me, where I managed to land just as Vamp flew past.

  “No!”

  I leaned over the side in time to see him jerk to a stop, as if he’d been impaled on an invisible spike. Something had him, and turned him over like a spider spinning a fly in its web.

  The soldiers shouted in the darkness, and I could make out the winding down of machines as I struggled to keep hold of the rifle. By the light of the gate’s outline, I could make out Sillith’s plated fist still curled around the rifle’s barrel, but as I was dragged toward the edge of the bed frame, the hand began to flicker. It warped, going out of focus, and then coming back, while in the darkness below Sillith’s smoldering eyes left trails of bloodred light.

  How is she doing it? How...

  Sillith’s hand turned from delicate smoked crystal to tar black. Her skin turned rubbery, pocked with huge open pores as the fingers merged together to form a coiled, wormlike tentacle. A scalefly crawled out of one of the pores and onto my hand as I followed the tentacle down the length of the tunnel where the rest of her body shuddered, uncoiling into a writhing mass. Her blazing red eyes dimmed, the light fading as they collapsed into a cluster of glossy black marbles.

  “Things aren’t always as they seem. ...” Nix’s words came back to me as I stared, unable to look away. I couldn’t see her clearly in the darkness, but I saw enough. It wasn’t a hallucination. As impossible as it seemed, part of me recognized that a veil had begun to break down, allowing me to see, for the first time, the truth.

  More wormlike cilia slithered from the mass and wrapped around the rifle, tearing it from my hands, and I saw a long, ropy arm whip away as she smashed the weapon to pieces against the tunnel wall.

  My hand shook as I groped for my flashlight, unclipping it from my belt and switching it on. I could hear her coming, a heavy, dragging sound, and I cast the jittering beam toward her as she rose a full head taller than she had been.

  The light passed over Vamp, who hung suspended by several more of the black ropes, then reached her, and the strength began to go out of me. I saw a shadowy mass, a squirming ball in a nest of tangled arms and legs. The delicate, almost beautiful latticework of bones had been replaced with some kind of wiry webbing that formed a flexible mesh surrounding the organs. I caught a glimpse of those two familiar brains lurking under a murky blister filled with cloudy, amber soup, and her heart, pulsing near the center where damaged tissue dangled around the gaping hole left behind by the rail gun’s slug.

  All of it was crawling with flies. So many flies scurried over, in, and out of the creeping silhouette that her skin looked alive. My mind struggled to find a familiar shape—any familiar shape—but between her movements and the shadows I couldn’t.

  I understood then how she could reach so far and to so many places. How Nix’s severed arm could become three. The thing below me wasn’t just Sillith, but all of them. Something, some haan technology, forced us to see what they wanted. We saw something harmless, something symmetrical and familiar. We saw something delicate, and even beautiful, but it was a lie. It was an illusion, and for whatever reason that illusion had just broken down, if only for a moment.

  Her body sprang apart, strands bursting free from the mound, forming groups, and then parting again as they carried her body with an ease and grace that reminded me of a machine. She lunged for me, and the flashlight fell, spinning end over end before plunging through the gate. I scrambled back to get away from her as the tunnel filled with a low, eerie rasp, overlapping whispers that hissed over a mechanical clicking sound. Light flickered from above then, and shadows moved across the bedding in front of me as electronics began to power back up. The graviton plating hummed back to life, and I rolled off the bed to land in a crouch as the tunnel wall became the floor again.

  “... I will eat him,” Sillith said, her voice burbling up out of the fading clicks and rasps, “and I will make you watch.”

  “Sam, move away from her,” a second voice called. It was Nix.

  A shadow moved across the tunnel wall as he came toward us, a creeping, undulating mass that was already beginning to change. In seconds, the wriggling mound condensed into a form that was recognizable, understandable, and comforting. By the time I turned, the drapes of Nix’s suit were flowing behind him like a cape, and his face looked the way it had always, handsome and familiar.

  I know what haan look like, I thought desperately. I know what they look like, and feel like. I know —

  “Sam, move away,” he called again.

  Something whipped around my ankle and jerked my leg out from under me so that I fell hard on my back. The grip around my ankle squeezed like a steel band, and I cried out as I was dragged down the tunnel toward Sillith. I skidded across the floor, groping for something to grab on to. My fingers closed around the edge of one of the bed frames, but were wrenched loose just as fast as Sillith hauled me down the tunnel, where I crashed onto my chest.

  I pushed myself up, standing, as Sillith limped
toward me, one arm hanging at her side like deadweight and the other dragging Vamp. The dead arm flickered and two were displayed there for a second, merging again as she closed the distance between us. Blood flowed freely from somewhere I couldn’t see, and left a wet crimson trail behind her as she came.

  She hurled Vamp aside, then lunged and I ducked as her fist struck the tunnel wall, sending shards of shattered plating over my head. I stumbled away, back toward Nix, and her hand clamped down on one of the bed frames as I ducked behind it. Metal groaned as she wrenched the frame free from the wall and hurled it away.

  My heel struck a ridge in the fractured plating and I fell back onto the floor. I looked up just in time to see Sillith’s balled fist bearing down on me like a piston, and I rolled. She struck the floor as I pushed myself up and stumbled away, out of her reach.

  “Sillith,” I said, backing away, “wait...”

  Nix removed his tablet from inside his jacket as he sped past me, but before he could reach her she grabbed him by the throat and bore down on him. The tablet fell from his hand, spinning across the floor, as she slammed him down in a spray of shattered tiles. Blood spattered from the spot where his head struck, and the wound cast a pattern of dots across the wall as she hurled him back the way he’d come. He rolled to a stop in a heap and didn’t move.

  “Nix!”

  The mites lit up and I staggered, as if she’d somehow found the strings that made me move and had taken control of them. She was dying, delirious. The room around me flickered as the incoming signals found their way into my visual cortex, and I fell back, the tunnel dissolving away under a flood of alien images.

  I saw cities, great cities, greater than anything we’d ever even dreamed of. They were so huge, so vast, and yet so perfect and clean that they made Hangfei look like nothing but campfires scattered in the dark, and above them, in a sea of scattered stars, hung the bright, shining ball of Fangwenzhe.

  I understood then. The star hadn’t always been there. It had never been there. The others might look the same, but no matter what we were told, Fangwenzhe hadn’t been a star in our sky. Not until the haan came.

  “Where are we?” I asked her. I sensed Sillith move closer, until she loomed over me.

  “You cry about the Impact,” she croaked, “but you don’t know what pain is. All of our history and all of our accomplishments were wiped away in an instant, and replaced with this.”

  She said it with disgust, but the signals she radiated were of despair. For a moment all I could feel was her fatigue, and suffering, and as strange as it was I found myself feeling sorry for her.

  “How?”

  “We never left our planet,” she said. “We were looking for another habitable world, a way to sustain multiple instances of our planet in dynamically created universes, unoccupied but habitable, when we found you.”

  “You didn’t crash....”

  “No,” she said. “The opportunity to meet another race was too tempting. We tried to travel to your world, but the gate imploded. Our dimensions overlapped, and then merged, collapsing your universe.”

  “Our universe ... ?”

  “Was destroyed.”

  I stared, struggling to grasp what she was saying.

  “After the collapse the field surrounding our world broke down, and in your universe’s last moments, your planet’s instance was pulled through to replace ours. It began at the opposite side of the planet and circled the globe in hours. In our last minutes we managed to establish a field around the facility, to stop the collapse there, but by then it was too late. All that was left is what you call Shiliuyuán, the facility where the experiment took place.”

  “Our universe ... ?”

  “Your universe is gone,” she said. “It died with my world.” Her voice was a little softer, and I could feel that she meant it, but then the moment passed, and the despair shifted back toward resolve. Anger. Violence.

  “Wait,” I said. She swung again and I just managed to launch off one leg to leap out of the way. My hip struck the floor as her heel came down on the spot where I’d been, fracturing the concrete there with a heavy thud.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter why. My species is perfected. It deserves to survive. There is a moral imperative to ensure that it survives, even at the expense of yours.”

  She went for me, and I ducked, but she got hold of my arm and when I tried to twist loose, her grip closed and pain shot up all the way to my shoulder. She forced me down and my back slammed onto the floor of the tunnel, knocking the wind out of me.

  I looked for something, anything to knock her off with, but it was no use. She was too big, too heavy, and too strong. Even after the hit she took from the rail gun, she could still squash me like a bug and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her. A few more gunshots went off as my reaching fingers found the edge of something hard.

  Looking over, I saw Nix’s tablet. Straining as hard as I could, I managed to hook my nails over the edge and pull it just close enough to grab. My other hand was still free. If I could just...

  I managed to get the tablet in front of me and place the finger of my other hand on the screen. Carefully, I traced the hanzi strokes. The screen dissolved, and the honeycomb storage cells appeared under the gate. There were items sitting in the different pockets that I didn’t recognize, but none of them were what I was looking for. I swiped the field, and the cells began to scroll past.

  When the shape jumped out at me, I plunged my hand through the field, feeling the icy air on the other side chill the sweat that covered it. I curled my fingers around the grip of the electronic wand with its coiled needles and pulled it out of the Escher Field just as Sillith swatted the tablet away.

  She reared back, but before she could strike again I jammed the needles into her side and squeezed the grip.

  I had no idea if I’d done it right, or if it would work. She slammed my wrist into the floor, and the wand fell free, clattering away. She squeezed, and I screamed.

  The bones were going to break. I could feel them start to go, but then suddenly the strength seemed to go out of her. Her fist went slack, and her whole body shuddered.

  I sensed confusion, then pain, and then finally fear as the reality of what had just happened sank in. She looked down at the site where I’d stuck her, clutching at it with one hand as she hauled herself back up onto her feet.

  With a loud snap, Sillith’s entire body erupted at once into a huge blob of water. Her skin snapped away like a wrinkled, broken water balloon as the payload of water flew apart and came crashing down in a huge splash.

  I closed my eyes, covering my face with one arm as the warm flood gushed over me, followed by a rain of cooler drops and mist.

  Wiping my face, I opened my eyes in time to see Sillith’s head go thumping down the tunnel. Swaths of her skin lay quivering on the graviton plates between me and the gate that was just starting to collapse. They had begun to flicker, the air around them rippling.

  I looked down at my chest and saw what looked like a giant black amoeba lying there, its network of slick tentacles plastered across the floor like veins on either side of me. I sat up and shoved it away, kicking it into a pile as it rolled down onto the wet floor.

  I hauled myself to my feet, facing the gate, where I could still see Alexei as he lay in a heap on the other side. It would be closed in a matter of seconds.

  Sam, forgive me. I couldn’t let them do it. I know how it looks, but I couldn’t let them all die, not even for you. I’m sorry to leave you. I know what that means to you, but I’m just one man and you’re strong enough to make it on your own now.

  The soldiers were going to destroy this place, and everything in it. I only had one shot. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was the only shot I had.

  One shot. Save my father, my friends, or save them.

  I couldn’t let them all die.

  Don’t worry, I sent. They won’t.

  I sprinted for th
e gate, grabbing one of the flickering sheets of skin as I passed. It peeled up off the floor, trailing sticky threads, a sickening, still-warm streamer that tickled against my palm like millions of tiny, squirming worms.

  The gate shrank, closing like an iris to choke off the alley on the other side as I ran. When I reached the edge, the world around me skipped, turning dark before flashing back again.

  It’s going to go, I thought, pulling the skin to my chest. It’s going to take me with it.

  I jumped through the gate, an electric jolt shooting down my back as my head brushed the glowing white edge. Everything slowed down for a beat, and then I came out the other side.

  Freezing cold braced my skin, chilling the sweat that covered my body as I fell and rolled to a stop on the gritty pavement. Alexei was there, stirring now.