State of Decay

by James Knapp

  “I know what Heinlein does, asshole.”

  “Well, he works for them,” he said. “Totally brilliant. He worked right under Samuel Fawkes, the top guy in the field until he died. Anyway, not long ago, he got it into his head that someone was spying on them over there.”

  “Why’d he think that?”

  “He wouldn’t say, but I think someone put the idea in his head. He got obsessive about it.”

  “So call the fucking cops or something.”

  “He wouldn’t; he was so nuts about it he wouldn’t even talk to anyone else there about it. It’s like it was some kind of conspiracy or something, like he didn’t think he could trust anyone.”

  “What does this have to do with you?”

  “He asked me to break in and snoop around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knew I could do it, and he trusts me. He got me some security codes, and I snuck in and set up a bunch of ’bots that watched everything, then reported back to a remote server. When I had enough data to go on, I downloaded it all and put it on a data spike so I could hand it off to him.”

  “Wait, that’s why you’re in trouble?”

  “I think they realized I was in there while I was in jail—”

  “This is all because you think you got pinched screwing around on someone’s network?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he said, pissed.

  “What do you get for that, a fine? Have your top-tier mom and dad bail you out.”

  His face changed when I said that. It got all dark.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “I know how things are.”

  “Money doesn’t fix everything.”

  “It fixes most things.”

  “It wouldn’t fix you.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck them and fuck you too.”

  “Even I had to take a PH tour,” he said. “Drop the third-tier hero bullsh—”

  “Don’t compare us, asshole. People like you end up officers; people like me end up on the front lines. When they put me in a box, you’ll still be drinking champagne in your high-rise, and we both know it. You live long enough, they won’t even use you.”

  He didn’t say anything. His face just got darker.

  “You and your happy little fam—”

  “Go to hell,” he said, his voice low. “I’m leaving.”

  I don’t know why, but I kind of felt bad right then. Something about his face, the way he looked. When I got pissed, I shot my mouth off. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought I might have crossed a line, there.

  “Hey, don’t cry or any—”

  “I’m not crying, bitch, and I don’t need you,” he said. “Take your bullshit and shove it back up your ass. It’s not my fault your life is shit.”

  “My life ain’t shit.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  His face was different. It was like he’d dropped an act, and I could see he wasn’t as soft as I had thought he was. I don’t know what it was, but I could tell he was on the edge. Whatever he was in, he was in deep, and there was fight in his eyes.

  “Hey, look,” I said. “I take it back, okay? Just forget it.”

  He just stood there and stared me down.

  “If you won’t take me, I’ll get a cab.”

  “Cabs don’t come out here, bro.”

  “Then I’ll—”

  “How’s this?” I said. “Eddie wants me in the ring tonight, so unless the cops shut him down, I’m on. You hitch a ride with me there and get a cab at the arena. How’s that?”

  He still looked pissed, but I could see him take the bait.

  “Fine. Can I use your shower?” he asked.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  He got up and just walked into the bathroom and shut the door. A while after, the water came on and then I heard it splash off him, making him, I think, the only guy to ever take a shower just to hit Arena Porco Rojo. When he was good and wet, I grabbed his phone and ID.

  On the card, his name said Luis Valle, and clipped to his keys was enough credit to buy the whole goddamn world. His phone showed a bunch of calls logged, but nothing that meant shit to me. He said something about putting the stuff he took from that company on a data-storage spike, but I didn’t see one on his clip.

  I put an ear to the door, and the water was still going strong. While he was tied up, I turned on the TV.

  “. . . where the bombing took place,” a reporter was saying. “So far authorities have no leads on who perpetrated the bombing, and no one has taken responsibility. National Guard forces are moving into place in key areas of the city, while others will be patrolled by a backup revivor contingency.”

  “Key areas” meant “rich areas.” Those would get guarded, and we’d get the backup, if that. That dick Ohtomo would send the zombies down to the slums to keep an eye on us and make sure we didn’t start shit with the rest of his precious city while the real soldiers were tied up.

  They cut to the mayor, a shitload of mikes jammed in his craw as he went to his car.

  “Mayor Ohtomo, is it true a curfew will be imposed?” one asked.

  “I will make an official statement on air in an hour,” he said.

  “Mayor what about the reports that this may be the first planned bombing of many?”

  “I have not heard any report to that effect.”

  “What about the witnesses who survived the blast, and their statements that the suicide bomber was actually a revivor?”

  “No comment.”

  The mayor could screw himself—what I really wanted was the miner. I had Luis’s full name now. That was enough to find out if the cops were on him.

  I fed in his name and the miner chewed on it for a second. Links started to pop up. The one with the most hits was on top.

  Local Family Tortured, Killed.

  It had a graphic-footage warning. I clicked on that one.

  Sure as shit, the cameras were pointed inside his place. From the angle, they must have been right inside the front door. I had stood in that same spot.

  “. . . an anonymous tip alerted authorities to the murders,” a voice said. “A search of the apartment revealed a grim discovery.”

  The camera moved past the bathroom I took my piss in and down the hall Luis came from when I walked back out. They turned the corner and went down a hall, where something was pooled on the floor. They moved through a door and focused on what was inside.

  There were three bodies in the middle of the room, all lying on the white carpet with their hands bound by plastic ties behind their backs, facedown on the floor. The carpet around them was covered with blood.

  One of the cops or someone else must have taken the video and sold it. It was bad, even for underground news. There was blood fucking everywhere.

  They killed his family. While I was on the can, he went to look for them and found them back there. I was in that place with three dead bodies and I didn’t even know it.

  He knew. That’s why he was so hot to get out of there. That’s why he said what he did. He had no way to help me like he said he would; he just needed out of there and way the hell away.

  “. . . last remaining family member Luis Valle, whose whereabouts are currently unknown. Investigators are not commenting yet on whether or not he is a suspect in these murders, or another victim. If you have any information concerning Luis Valle, please . . .”

  They flashed his mug shot and showed a number. I wrote it down and shoved it in my pocket.

  The water stopped, and I shut off the TV.

  He was trouble. He was big trouble. He was who the guys that murdered his family were looking for. They tossed his place looking for that storage-spike thing he talked about. Whoever he pissed off, they were hardcore, and they were still out there.

  They were looking for him, and I let him right in my front door.

  F
aye Dasalia—Concrete Falls

  “Any word?” Shanks asked. I snapped my phone shut.

  “He’s still not answering.” No one had been able to reach Harold Craig. The local police had checked out his place, but at my request they kept it low- key; no one approached on foot. If the killer was going to make his move, I didn’t want to spook him. His place was being watched while they waited for us, but so far no one had shown up.

  “Body heat came up negative in his home. He’s not there.” Shanks said.

  It had taken too long to get to the neighborhood where Harold Craig lived, and the sky was starting to get dark.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The city had slowly begun to trade its superstructures for tight blocks of duplexes in what looked like a well-to-do area. Crowded brick houses stood tall and slim at the heads of short but individual driveways with individual mailboxes. A woman bundled up in a coat and walking a medium-sized black dog watched as we drove by. The dog strained against its leash and barked.

  “This is Detective Shanks with Detective Dasalia,” Shanks said into his radio. “Be advised we are approaching the residence.”

  “We see you,” a voice crackled.

  “Turn left up here; it should be down this street,” Shanks said.

  I turned onto the narrow street and followed the numbers down until I found it. A silhouette watched through a window from across the street as I pulled up to the house. There was a car in the driveway, so I parked on the street and cut the engine.

  “Any movement?” Shanks asked into the radio.

  “Negative. Nothing on infrared or thermal.”

  He looked over at me.

  “Tell them we’re going in,” I said.

  “Have your men stand by. We’re going inside.”

  “Roger that.”

  We got out, and when I looked over, the figure watching from the window retreated.

  “Maybe he’s walking his dog.”

  “Maybe.”

  He followed me to the front door and I rang the bell, but no one answered. I tried the door; it was unlocked. I pushed it open and looked inside. The lights were off, but there was a soft glow coming from somewhere inside.

  “Mr. Craig?” I called. No one answered.

  “Mr. Craig, this is the police,” I called. “We’re coming in.”

  I glanced at Shanks, and he shrugged. I drew my gun and he followed suit as I pushed the door open the rest of the way and we crossed through.

  The unit was quiet, although I could hear a television through the wall from the connected duplex. The front door opened into a good-sized living area and a pair of French doors leading into a study where the glow was coming from. Another doorway opened into a short hallway that looked like it led to a kitchen.

  “Mr. Craig?”

  Moving closer, I could see the glow from the study was coming from a computer monitor.

  The study was small, crowded with expensive- looking wooden furniture and a single leather chair that was pushed away from the desk. This was where he had sat, conversing with Rebecca Valle over the message client. He had been talking to her when the intruder broke in at Alto Do Mundo and the Valles were killed.

  The client was still on the screen, displaying the same snippet of conversation I had seen at the Valle place. In addition, Mr. Craig seemed to have a video display sitting above it that looked out from somewhere above Valle’s monitor.

  Don’t touch it; leave it for the experts, my intuition warned.

  “Valle had a cam set up,” I said. “That would explain how he knew the person who responded on the chat wasn’t Rebecca.”

  Leave it for the experts.

  On the camera display I could see one of the investigators cross by in the hallway on the other side of the room. They were still there, looking for clues.

  “He probably looked right at the killer,” I said, watching. “That camera probably recorded him.”

  “I’ll have a look,” Shanks said. He started to move toward the computer station when something inside the house made a thump and he froze. The sound came from the direction of the kitchen.

  He looked back at me, and I nodded toward the doorway. He readied his gun and crept back out into the living area. I got ready to follow him, but first, there was one thing I wanted to do.

  My intuition had told me not to mess with the information on the computer, but my intuition didn’t seem to be as sharp as maybe it once was. There was a chance I might blow it, that I might be responsible for triggering something that would erase the data, like what had happened at the previous victim’s place, but this one time I was going to go against what my intuition was telling me.

  There was no time to look at it now, but I fished a data card out of my jacket pocket and slipped it into the first available bay. Working quickly, I dumped the entire contents of the client’s buffers onto the card.

  “Dasalia,” Shanks hissed. I pulled the card and slipped it back into my pocket.

  Following Shanks’s flashlight beam, I looked into the kitchen and saw papers and envelopes scattered across the floor. A wicker basket lay overturned off to one side, and two kitchen knives lay on the floor beneath a butcher’s block on the counter above. As we got closer, the air smelled like bleach.

  The noise didn’t recur, and it looked like it might have been the remainder of the stack of envelopes that had fallen from the counter. Listening carefully, there were no signs that we weren’t alone; the house was completely silent.

  The kitchen opened up into another short hallway where a door led into a half bath, and across from that was another door, which was closed. The bathroom was empty, but there were beads of water still in the sink.

  The door across from it opened into a stairwell leading down to what looked like a small cellar or storage area. The smell of bleach was coming from somewhere down below.

  I flipped the light switch and a light flickered on at the base of the stairs. The stairs creaked as we headed down and looked around. It was a small area, but it had been converted into some kind of hobbyist’s machine shop. There was a workbench covered in tools and a bunch of small mechanical parts I couldn’t identify. The walls were lined with shelves, which were stacked with uniform containers of screws, washers, nuts, and wire. The bleach fumes were strong enough to make me breathe through the fabric of my sleeve.

  “Dasalia,” Shanks said, nudging me. A foot wearing a slipper was sticking out from behind the bench. I holstered my gun and moved around to the other side of the work area, where a man’s body lay sprawled on its back. He was an older man, dressed in casual clothes. It looked like there had been a struggle—the floor around him was scattered with tools, and a cardboard box had fallen down, partially covering his head.

  The end result was the same, though; the killer had overpowered him and landed his signature blow. A deep puncture wound gaped from the middle of his chest. Clear liquid had been splashed across the floor a few feet away over by the workbench, where a plastic jug of bleach lay open on its side.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. Shanks spoke into the radio.

  “We’re too late,” he said. “Craig’s here. He’s already dead. Get CSI down here.”

  “On their way.”

  “How the hell did he beat them here?” I asked. It was impossible. We’d called the locals from the road. If he’d flown, he couldn’t have beaten them.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t surprise this one,” I said. I moved the cardboard box aside and saw his eyes were wide open. The man’s right forearm was bruised in a pattern that looked like it had been gripped tightly, and there was a gash on the wrist above it, in the center of a swollen knot. Shanks knelt down and fished out his ID.

  “Harold Craig,” he said. “It’s our guy.”

  Looking around the room, I could see there was no other way out except the way we had come down.

  “He had some idea about what was happening,” I said. “On the mes
senger he asked, ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ Who’s ‘us’?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “He seemed to think the killer knew something about him. He knew the killer knew that he’d seen him. Why didn’t he call the police? If not for his friend, then why not for himself?”

  “Maybe he figured he was safe way the hell out here.”

  “The chair upstairs was pushed away from the computer like he moved in a hurry, like he was surprised. The study door is between the front door and the kitchen, where the struggle took place. So the killer came in through the front and startled him, then chased him into the kitchen. After what he must have seen, he just sat there at the computer and waited?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Shanks said. “Maybe it happened sooner.”

  “It would take forty minutes to get here.”

  You’re assuming the killer worked alone, the voice said. You’re assuming there is only one killer. Maybe he made the same assumption.

  Could that be? Could the reason Harold Craig hadn’t called the police after witnessing the crime at Valle’s apartment be because he didn’t have time? Because he was attacked shortly afterward himself?

  The time of death will tell us that, I said to myself.

  I’m just saying. With what we have so far, we can’t definitively say others aren’t involved. Right?

  The fumes were making me light- headed. For all I knew, the bleach had combined with some other chemical down there and had created some kind of toxic gas. Why did he come down into the one place he had to have known there was no way out of?

  They struggled in the kitchen, and he came down into the basement. The killer overtook him again at the workbench and they struggled. There was a wound on the side of Craig’s wrist that looked like it was from an impact, like it had been smashed against something. . . .

  “A gun,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He kept a gun down here; that’s why he came down here.”

  He managed to get it too. The killer closed the distance and grabbed him. He smashed his wrist against the workbench, forcing him to drop it. Had he gotten a shot off?

  Yes. That’s what the bleach was for. It hadn’t just fallen over; the killer dumped it out. He did that to compromise any sample of his blood that might be collected.