“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 metaclass="underline"
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.
Suddenly something moved in front of the camera, blotting out the scene, and I jumped in the train seat. The frame reeled and I saw Dragan lift a pistol into frame as he backed away, signaling for the woman to run. The door to the room with the bodies in it opened the rest of the way.
“Go!” he shouted.
The frame turned and became chaotic. I saw Dragan grab someone from the closest bed on the top ring of the fluke mouth, a little girl with scrawny arms and legs. Tubes and electrode wires stretched taut, then broke free as he dragged her from the sweaty sheets and hauled her up into his arms.
“Run!” he yelled. The woman ran, hauling the boy along after her. She pushed open a door and went through, tracing her route back the way she’d come when at the junction she stopped, unsure. She started to go one way, and then Dragan grabbed her wrist and pulled her in the opposite direction. As the camera swept by the hallway they’d come from, I saw the door at the opposite end bang open, where saucer-shaped eyes glowed in the dark like embers.
The image began moving so wildly I couldn’t make anything out. At some point the flashlight came back on, the beam flashing in and out of frame. He was running, looking back over his shoulder down the abandoned corridor as he went.
He turned back just in time to see the woman stop short in front of him, like she’d snagged at the end of an invisible leash. The boy stumbled forward, falling onto the floor as his hand slipped from hers. She screamed as something I couldn’t see yanked her off her feet and she soared through the air back past Dragan.