James Decker - Fallout

“No…”

Alexei still stood next to him, frozen in shock as he stared up at the creature that had suddenly appeared. My eyes moved to the tattered shirt still draped over the thing. It belonged to a security uniform, the crisp white stained black, and tears began to stream down my cheeks as I stared at the name patch still visible there.

SHAO

“No…”

Sam, wait.

The words appeared on the 3i chat. The message had come from Dragan.

He reached out to touch me and I recoiled, backing into Vamp who crossed one arm over my chest. He held out the other to stop the haanyo ng from coming any closer and right at that moment I felt a signal stream in through the surrogate cluster. I felt confusion, but also pain. The hurt, wounded feeling I picked up felt so honest and so real that my throat closed up, and fresh tears welled up in my eyes.

I’d lost him. At some point I’d lost him, and never known. The thing in front of me didn’t even know.

How long? It was all I could think. How long had he been this way? Since the beginning? Since we rescued him from Shiliuyuán Station, or shortly after? Or had it happened more recently? How many afternoons had I spent with the haanyo ng? How many stories had we shared? Could Dragan truly have helped plan for this night, and never known what he’d become?

Sam, what’s wrong?

The words appeared on the holodisplay between us, as the thing tried to approach again. Again I backed into Vamp, who took a step back himself. Again, I felt the hurt and the confusion.

Sam, it’s me.

The missiles fell, while around us the city screamed as if it had just awoken into a collective nightmare. The truth of it threatened to send them over the edge, and me along with them. It wasn’t just Dragan, they were everywhere. Some were being attacked by the crowd, and some were fleeing along with everyone else, but easily one in twenty of the people I saw weren’t human… on the sidewalks, under awnings, in vehicles. They were everywhere.

Everywhere.

The thing that had been Dragan took another step toward us and when I raised my own right hand out to stop it, I froze.

Everything… the screaming, the sirens, the gunshots, the shrieks of the jets and missiles… all of it faded as I stared down what seemed to be a long tunnel. My tears stopped as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown, and my legs turned weak. My mouth went dry, and I felt my lips part as my brain struggled, without success, to process what I saw. My left hand looked the same as it ever did, the same pale skin, the same tattoos, the same scars, but my right hand…

My right hand had turned completely black, all the way to my elbow. The skin had turned rubbery, glistening as if wet. The nails had come off and the hand formed a gnarled claw, the tips vaguely pointed, with deep pores at irregular intervals over its surface. I stared in shock as a scalefly crawled out from a pore near the base of my palm, and flitted off above the panicked crowd.

I looked back at Vamp but he just stared at what used to be Dragan. I moved the hand down to my side so he wouldn’t see, but I couldn’t take my eyes from it.

In that instant, memories came rushing back, clicking into place as they came. Gohan had seen… it’s why he took my hand, and kissed it in the aircar, then again, on the train. Qian had taken my hand as well, in the Gong district, and I’d seen a scalefly crawl from my hand to hers. At that moment, she’d become aware of my plan. The scalefly had shared my thoughts when it left my body, and entered hers. It’s how they’d stayed one step ahead of me the whole time… I’d been telling them my secrets, broadcasting them, without even knowing.

I remembered the A.I. advertisers, pitching things like hand lotion, and scalefly repellent… they’d seen, matching on some pattern that told them the hand needed to be fixed.

“Tell me how the haan changed you… tell me how you convinced them to bestow their blessing on you….”

My dreams of Nix, they weren’t dreams. They were messages, information carried by scaleflies that I’d picked up through receptors I hadn’t known I had. The dreams were my brain’s attempt to interpret the packaged memories.

Fire bloomed in the air high above us as the defense shield sent out arcs of energy that licked across the falling missiles and caused them to explode. Most of them went up in flames but some continued to fall through the boiling smoke. Jets broke formation, some getting caught in the haan beams while others managed to escape.

All of it seemed to be happening far away. All I could see was my black right hand. Behind that stood the creature that had once been the only father I’d ever known. Behind that, far in the distance, loomed the mighty haan ship as thin white contrails crept ever closer.

Then, the angry orange light of the defense shield faded. Within seconds, the entire structure went dark, while at the same time the faint blue dome of light reappeared over the ship.

They’re diverting the shield’s power, I realized. They know it can’t stop all the missiles and they’re using it as a power source to get the force field back up.

The field that masked their real appearance stayed down, and the ship itself remained dark, but the glow of the force field grew brighter until the first missile struck. It exploded without penetrating, creating a cloud of black smoke and flame. Others fell into the expanding explosion and joined with it until a huge black spot bloomed across the shell of electric blue. Debris rained down the curvature of it, sending sparks spitting off into the night as the pieces struck and then bounced off.

In the time it took me to blink, my hand returned to normal. I still had it held down by my side like I wanted to hide it away somewhere, but once again it looked familiar, right down to the calluses and scars.

Dragan stood in front of me, his face a mask of concern… worry for me. Around us, the city streets had returned to normal and people were beginning to stop running, to slow down and look around, confused as the world they’d always known returned just as suddenly as it had vanished.

“Sam,” Dragan said. “Talk to me… what happened? Are you okay?”

He reached for me, to hold me, or shake me… anything that might snap me out of my shock, which he still didn’t understand.

Before he could, I twisted out of Vamp’s arms. I grabbed Alexei’s hand and ran with him through the crowd into the darkness of Hangfei. I ran until I lost Dragan, until I lost Vamp, and until I lost even myself in the sea of confused and frightened masses, and a city gone mad.

I held the cigarillo in my right hand, between my index and middle finger, and closed my eyes.

“The universe you find your world in now is rejecting you. The decay will be slow, but certain. All life on this world that does not evolve will die. Stop fighting. Let us save you.”

In my mind, I willed myself to move it, to move it away from me.

“…security deployed to the docks at Ocean Heights, where crates of rations that were provided to us by the haan have been dumped into the harbor by a group calling themselves the Hangfei Truth Initiative.”

I opened my eyes and in the dim light I saw the smoldering ember of tobacco floating in the air between me and the TV. I could still feel it between my fingertips, but it hung there in the air in front of me. I pushed it out farther. I couldn’t see them, but I imagined the fingers of my right hand extending, becoming long, thin tentacles coiled gently around the cigarillo’s end.

I was getting pretty good at it.

I kept the volume low as I watched the news woman on the screen, not wanting to wake up Alexei. He’d been with me for the past two weeks. I wasn’t about to let him go back to live with Dragan, and he wouldn’t have gone even if I did no matter how much Dragan pushed for it. Since Dragan still didn’t seem to know what had happened to him, he pushed a lot, but I got Alexei to tell him he wanted time to get to know me better. It seemed to work.