The Burn Zone (22 page)

He appeared on my list and I sent a quick reply.

Thank you, Nix.
Very, very much.

We need to meet
—

No time to chat, though.

I signed off as the doors slid shut, and the intercom chimed followed by an unintelligible stream of babble. Sucking the last of the pill grit from my teeth, I swallowed, watching out the train window as the buildings peeled away to reveal the expanse of tidal flats and blue-green ocean beyond. Off in the distance I could see waves crash against the platform housing the
desalination derricks, steel-frame pyramids around pumps that sucked up seawater twenty-four-seven.

Six hexagonal shadows appeared in the sky in a tight
formation, and a low sonic boom sounded as the ships rocketed past the shoreline toward the foreign fleets in the distance. Foreign jets scrambled in response, rising off the carrier like little scaleflies, but our guys wouldn
’
t start anything. It was just a message, a reminder that with the haan tech on our side their ships were powerless against ours.

The opiate synth kicked in for real, slowing my heart as it eased me toward a mellow pharmaceutical calm. The adrenaline throttled back, and the alarm bells in my head grew muted as I watched the world pass through the window.

My phone buzzed again, three quick pulses that said I had a message. I reached into my pocket and felt a wad of toilet tissue with my fingertips as I grabbed the phone and checked the screen. It was a text message, from Kang.

Don
’
t call this number. I
’
ll try you again in ten.

“
Damn it,
”
I muttered.

I slipped the phone back into my pocket and grabbed the wad of toilet tissue, then coaxed it apart to reveal the wet drive nestled inside.

“
Gonzo, Dragan.
What did you do?
”
I whispered.

I pinched the lanyard that dangled from behind my ear, and a little notification popped up on the 3i
’
s display as I pulled my drive out. I un
cl
ipped it from the lanyard and swapped in Dragan
’
s, then reached back and nestled it into the port.

Initializing...

Some music files got pulled into my library, and two new contacts were read and added to my 3i list as the drive was scanned.

Alexei Drugov.

Innuya Drugov.

I knew those names. Innuya was the Pan-Slav woman he
’
d been e-mailing right before he went AWOL, and
Alexei was her son, the one the soldiers were looking for. The status icon for each of them was gray.

“
He wanted fake passports and passage to Duongroi for four... himself, two women, and a kid.
”

Himself, Innuya, Alexei... and me.
According to Eng, Dragan was alone when he stopped at the hotel, so he had to have dropped them off somewhere beforehand. If it was true and one of them really did smuggle something back with them, they might still have it.

I checked the drive
’
s contents. Other than the stray cached stuff, Dragan had wiped it except for one file, some kind of video file. I dragged it down to the tray
’
s media player and dropped it in.

When the player window first popped up, it was mostly dark. Shadows shifted at the edges, like the frame was moving.

“
This is Specialist Dragan Shao.
”
His voice was tinny in my ear through the 3i
’
s audio
tap
.
“
I am making this recording in the event I am captured or killed. If anyone finds this message, it is critical that you deliver it to Military Governor Jianguo Hwong immediately. Do not hand it over to security, only to him.
”

A flashlight snapped on, lighting the way ahead of him. He was in a dimly lit corridor, water-stained cinder block scrolling past at the right edge of the screen as the view jostled a little in spite of the image stabilizers. He stopped, and turned to look down at a woman in tattered clothes. She was obviously Pan-Slav, with round eyes and thick eyebrows.

Scaleflies buzzed back and forth through the flashlight beam as he turned back and moved quickly toward a dim light at the far end of the hall. They weren
’
t in the PSE; the graffiti was a mishmash of hanzi, so they had to be back in-country, but wherever they were, it looked like no one had been there in years.

“
I
have evidence that a major attack is under way,
”
he
said quietly as he hurried on.
“
The attack involves an engineered bioweapon that violates international law, designed to wipe out human life on a massive scale.
”

“
Dragan,
”
a woman
’
s voice whispered on the audio
tap
.
“
Gde
zhe
my?
Chto
takoe
jeto
mesto
?
”

The screen flickered as he looked back at the Pan-Slav again. Her eyes were wide, and terrified.

“
Dvigat
’
sja
,
dvigat
’
sja
...,
”
he hissed. His hand moved into frame, gesturing for her to follow, and then the scene reeled as he turned and began to move again. As he did, I saw a sign on the wall, just for a moment, before he
passed it. An arrow pointed in the direction he was moving, next to the words
Shiliuyuán
Station— Platform N.

“
Shiliuyuán
,
”
I said under my breath. That was the old metro station where the haan ship was now. It was destroyed in the Impact.

“
The delivery system for this weapon is the haan scale-fly,
”
Dragan said.
“
The specifics are encoded in this file along with the names I
’
ve been able to dig up, but just know that carrier flies have been engineered with a genetic fuse that shortens the life span of each generation until they die out. Given their very predictable reproductive cycles and migration patterns, it
’
s possible to chart the zone where they will be active within fairly rigid boundaries. During that time, they and their offspring will spread the bioweapon to every human living inside what has been termed the Burn Zone.
”

The scene moved through an underground metro station, the concrete platform cracked to expose jutting re-bar. Off to his left a train was visible, crushed in a collapsed tunnel.

“
If these projections are true,
”
he said,
“
the Burn Zone will cover over ten million square kilometers... big enough to wipe out an entire continent.
”

A
window blinked on in his field of view, showing a
map in glowing white vectors. Their location was marked, and a little ways away to the north another marker pulsed. He was tracking something.

The scene moved faster as Dragan ducked through a doorway at the opposite end of the platform and followed a string of battery-powered emergency lights to the end of a hallway where an exposed stairwell was half-covered in rubble.

Dragan followed the flashlight beam down into darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, Dragan pushed open another door and I caught a glimpse of hanzi, stenciled onto the rusted metal:

DEEPWELL BIOT
—
The
woman behind him gasped as the flashlight beam settled on a young boy, maybe ten years old, with the same Pan-Slav features as the woman. He was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the cinder block wall behind him while some kind of black membrane held him stuck in place. His eyes were closed.

Dragan moved toward him and immediately used a knife to cut through the sticky stuff, which peeled and shrank away. The boy twitched, and his eyes opened.

“
Shh
,
”
Dragan warned. The boy
’
s eyes widened, but he nodded.

Dragan took his hand and guided him to the woman before moving through another doorway off to their left and then quickly through a large, dark room on the other side where beds were lined up in rows. I caught glimpses of people lying on some of them as he sprinted toward a dimly lit doorway on the far side of the room. On the other side, I could see shadows moving.

“
Kto
tarn?
”
the woman whispered. Dragan shushed her,
then
responded, whispering even lower,
“
Ja ne
znaju
.
”

I dug up the Web translator and kicked it off, causing pinyin to pop up onto the feed.

The view stopped at the edge of the rusted doorframe
and he peeked carefully around the corner. As it panned, it showed the tiles cracked and broken around the edge of a black hole that had consumed almost the entire floor.

Across the chasm, the camera caught movement through an open double doorway on the opposite side of the room as a metal cart of equipment moved into view there. Just before Dragan moved to duck behind something, I saw the figure pushing the cart, blazing red eyes leaving trails of light in the shadows.

It
’
s a haan.

Once the way was clear, he moved farther into the room, tilting to look down over the edge of the huge hole.

Starting about six feet down, a ring of beds were fixed by their steel-frame headboards around the interior, pointing in like a ring of teeth in the mouth of a giant fluke. My lips parted as I stared.

I
’
ve seen this....

Lying in each bed was a single person, men and women of all different ages. All of them had a black rubber mask pulled tight over their eyes, with clusters of white wires trailing from electrodes stuck to their sun-bronzed foreheads. The only thing that was different was that where Red-stamp had seen those strange constructs sitting on each of them, they weren
’
t there in the video. The people all looked asleep, or comatose.

Beneath the ring of beds was another, and another, and another, going down deeper and deeper into the hole until they were lost in blackness.

What in the world
... ?

Dragan moved farther and farther into the room, leaning forward and looking down to better see into the pit of beds. A swatch of red jumped out from the edge of the frame as the frame moved, and another bed moved into view.

My stomach sank, and I swallowed around a dry
throat. The bed had a body covered with a sheet like the others, but the sheet had been pulled away and was drenched in blood. The body underneath was that of a young man with his mouth unhinged to reveal bloodstained teeth while he stared, blind, into his rubber mask. There was a ragged hole bored into his gut, big enough to reach into. Instinctively I turned my face away, but the 3i window followed as the pan continued.

The next four rows of beds were all the same. Men, women, girls, and boys all lay dead with their bellies bored out, ribs jutting up over huge black pores torn in the sunken, stretched skin. Some had more than one hole. One had a third, gaping over a collapsed pit in his right thigh.

The camera moved, focusing on the lit face of a console that fanned out at the edge of the pit. An image of the fluke mouth, each ring of beds called out, traveled down the left side of the main screen. It focused on the information displayed next to each bed, printed out in varying shades of faint, deep purple, rows and rows of haan symbols that I couldn
’
t decipher.