James Decker - Fallout

Eat.

The haan didn’t know the name of the area it had wandered to, only that it had arrived in a place where humans didn’t matter, not even to other humans. No authority watched here. Reports of crimes went unheeded, and cries for help went unanswered. A human could disappear here, and no one of importance would ever know.

I flowed into an alleyway, and then settled down low to the ground to face a basement window. Through the plywood that had been set there I could see down into the dark room, where the fading heat signatures of human footprints led away.

I felt the rough edges of the plywood on what felt like hundreds of tiny fingertips, and then it came free, moving away to be placed against the brickface. My body changed, oozing through the tiny window. Parts of me felt the rough floor beneath it even as other parts still rested on the damp sidewalk. Then the rest made its way inside, and my body resumed its original shape.

I followed the ghost footprints deeper into the basement, until a wall with a door in the center appeared in front of me. As I moved closer, my gaze moved through it all to see three men on the other side.

They appeared as skeletons, surrounded by soft tissue and giving off billows of heat and particles. I sensed that none of them was alarmed. None had so much as heard me enter. They lay on bedrolls, their hearts and breathing slowed as they slept.

With the door in front of me, I reached out with an appendage, black and covered in deep pores, and knocked three times on the door.

I sensed the haan’s amusement at the concept of knocking, something all humans did. Haan saw, knew, and shared everything, but not humans. They could not know if anyone was inside, and those inside could not know who was out. A knock became a moment of possibility, something that could evoke apprehension, excitement, or even secrecy if the human inside chose to ignore the knock and pretend to be elsewhere. The haan found all of it endearing.

It knew, though, that this knock would evoke fear, and I sensed regret at that fact. All three men jolted awake at the sound of it, and all at once, their cottony hearts began to beat faster as they stirred. One reached to an electronic device in the middle of their arranged bedrolls and switched it on to fill their cubby with light.

I knocked again, and after some hushed discussion, one of the men stepped forward and opened the door a crack to look out.

All he would see would be another, unfamiliar human and I sensed him relax a little as he encountered not a dangerous human, or a security officer, but an unassuming old man.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, his tongue working inside his skull and pinpricks of electricity zipping through the mass of his brain.

I hesitated, wishing the whole thing weren’t necessary. I wanted to apologize, somehow, but knew that prolonging this in any way would only make things worse for these humans who felt fear so keenly in the face of death. I didn’t want to be the cause of that fear, but the hole inside of me had grown so big and so empty.

“I asked who the hell are you?”

When I didn’t answer he moved to close the door but found he could not. He shoved at it again but couldn’t budge it.

I pushed it open fully, forcing him back inside with the others who all stood as, once inside, I closed the door behind me. Their hearts began to beat faster then, brains buzzing with activity, adrenaline entering their bloodstreams.

I grabbed all three at once, feeling the heat in the skin of their necks, feeling the flexing of the cords that worked there, feeling the pulsing of blood within. The patterns of activity inside each brain changed abruptly as the oxygen flow stopped and their bodies went limp. I held them that way, dangling, until the impulses in each brain fluttered away to nothing.

Should I take them to the safe place? I thought. We should take them to the safe place… but to move them… in this case it would mean even more risk, and the hole inside me. The hole…

I dragged the closest man closer still and then felt hundreds of tiny fingertips arrange themselves on either side of his skull.

Their kind will not survive on this world, I told myself. Mine will. This is necessary. This is justified….

The guilt persisted, though, even as the fingertips poked through the scalp, and then the skull itself to perforate it from the forehead to the back of the neck. Then, like cracking a melon in two, they pulled the man’s head apart to expose the brain inside.

I pushed my face into the warm mass and felt the feeding tube slither out. In seconds the calorie-rich brains, blood, and fat were coursing into me, filling the pit inside of me, and the pleasure—the pure, greedy pleasure—of that made everything else fade away. The rib cage sprang apart in front of me, bones popping free to reveal the treasures inside, and I became lost in the gorging—the sheer ecstasy of it—as…

The images snapped away. I found myself back in Ping Xi, sitting on the sidewalk with one arm looped around a streetlamp. People streamed past me on either side as both Vamp and Alexei stood in front of me, looking worried.

“Sam?” Vamp asked.

“Yeah.”

“What the hell just happened? Are you okay?”

I looked around. Everything had returned to normal.

“Yeah,” I said. I managed to get back up onto my feet, still a little disoriented. “Yeah, sorry. I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

That wasn’t a dream, I told myself. That was real. That was a haan memory. It had already happened.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just got light-headed there.”

U sure? Alexei sent on the 3i. I tousled his hair and managed a smile. I didn’t want to tell them what I’d seen. I didn’t want to scare Alexei and Vamp… I wasn’t sure he’d believe me. I wasn’t completely sure what I even believed myself.

Sure, I sent back.

“Come on,” Vamp said, handing me back the video flash. “We’ve got trouble to make.”

I took the flash, turning it over in my hand. If everything went according to plan, we’d broadcast the truth about the haan to the whole country. Everything we knew, so far.

But as I remembered the sensation of eating from the haan memory, remembered how even while it turned my stomach I’d liked it, telling the truth no longer seemed like enough.

I lay facedown on frozen blacktop, shivering in the bitter cold while the wind ruffled my clothes and hair. I didn’t know where I’d awoken, but somewhere a long way from Hangfei’s steamy summer heat. The city sounds had gone leaving only the whisper of wind, and I smelled wood smoke as flurries of snow drifted down to melt on the back of my neck and shoulders.

“Sam?”

Gray light stabbed into my eyes as I cracked them open and saw a fog of big white flakes drifting down around me. A thin blanket of snow had formed on the pavement of the alley I found myself in, and dusted the edges of a rusted metal trash bin stenciled with Pan-Slav lettering. On the brick wall, a paper notice fluttered in the breeze. It had a picture of a boy on it, framed by words I couldn’t understand but felt sure said the boy had gone missing. Farther down the street, more posters had been pasted on a brick wall. Hundreds maybe, overlapping one another all down the length of it. “Sam?”

I recognized the voice, and knew I had to be dreaming. I wasn’t in the Pan-Slav border territories. I couldn’t be, and Nix couldn’t be there with me. Not anymore.

I lifted my head and turned toward the source of the voice. A haan stood there in the alleyway, his wide head turned down toward me while the cold wind ruffled his draping suit jacket. I recognized his face, handsome, and familiar. I knew his figure, too, even at a distance, the lithe but powerful body of a dancer or martial artist. The bond we’d shared since he’d been an infant began to tickle at the edges of my consciousness, making me happy and sad all at once.