State of Decay

by James Knapp

  “He shot him.”

  Using the ALS light, I adjusted the beam’s spectrum and scanned the area around the body, then over near the workbench. There was nothing on the walls or ceiling, and nothing on the surface of the bench. The bullet, if there was one, must have gotten lodged inside its target.

  “Come on,” Shanks said. “Let’s get forensics in here.”

  “Hold on.”

  Kneeling down and shining the light up under the bench, I could see a spatter there. He had been hit. I scraped off a small sample.

  “Come on, before we both pass out.”

  If he had any kind of record, it would identify him. Even if he didn’t, we’d have his entire genome. After six crime scenes and not one hair, not one speck of saliva or sweat, not one thing that could be used as a reliable identification, he left behind the most damning thing he possibly could have.

  The room spun for a second, and I grabbed the leg of the workbench until it passed.

  “Faye, CSI will take care of this. Come on.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not. Call it in.”

  You’ve done what you came to do. Do you still want to know why he’s different?

  Was my inner voice taunting me now?

  Yes, why is he different?

  The answer is in the sample you just took.

  I know.

  No, you don’t, but you will soon.

  How? I asked, but the voice wouldn’t say. It didn’t pipe up again.

  I called it in.

  6

  Syndrome

  Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office

  Wachalowski, this is Noakes. What have you got for me?

  Heinlein’s rep came through with the data they promised.

  Any lead on the parts we dug out of the dock revivor?

  It was all legit. The information on the Zhang lead will take a little longer to sort through.

  What about the other lead you were following?

  I still hadn’t told him specifically about Zoe, and he was getting impatient. It had been hours since I’d dropped the evidence off with her, and I hadn’t heard back yet.

  Nothing yet.

  Things were tense out there and getting worse. Rumors of more terrorist attacks were flooding the airwaves, and the FBI circuits were jammed with false tips, confessions, and more bomb threats. The police and the Guard had their hands full trying to keep order and enforce the curfew. The first revivor soldiers were due to hit the streets in the next few hours.

  It’s a mistake, deploying those revivors, I told Noakes.

  Find out who did this before they strike again and maybe it won’t be necessary. Let me know when you can pin that name on anyone.

  Understood.

  After sifting through Heinlein’s data on Zhang’s Syndrome, I was able to come to two conclusions. The first was that the condition was not as much of a footnote as MacReady indicated it was. The second was that although Olav Sodder may have been the one who first became aware of it with Samuel Fawkes as his protégé, it was Fawkes who had the obsession with it, far more so than his mentor ever had. Most of the data I’d received had been gathered by Fawkes.

  With pages of information scattered in the background, I watched one of hundreds of archived sessions Fawkes conducted with the revivor for whom the condition was named, Ning Zhang. Zhang, in life, had been a second-tier citizen who worked in sanitation, specializing in substructure plumbing. Zhang had also been a convicted criminal.

  He was a short male revivor, lean but stocky, with Asian features. His eyes were flat white and his skin, even after reanimation, leaned toward dark. In the footage he was seated at a table with a series of what looked like index cards in neat stacks in front of him. His face had no expression as Samuel Fawkes approached him.

  In contrast to Zhang, Fawkes was thin and very pale. There was dense stubble on his face, and he wore his thick black hair fairly long. He’d removed his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He looked tired, but his eyes were sharp as he regarded the revivor.

  “Stack zero,” he said. Zhang looked to the leftmost stack of cards. He reached over and slid them closer with one hand.

  “Event series N through R,” Fawkes continued. “Each card relates information regarding documented events. Some of the events are compiled from information on record, cited by you, prior to reanimation. Some of the events are compiled from information obtained from interviews after reanimation.”

  “Why?” Zhang asked, still looking down at the stack of cards.

  “Each event is reduced to the salient, documented facts. Review each event and—”

  “We did this.”

  Fawkes ran one hand over his face, then rubbed the bridge of his prominent nose.

  “Are you refusing to cooperate?”

  “No. I will do whatever I’m told.”

  “And if your first commander removes your ghrelin inhibitor and commands you to eat human flesh?”

  “Then I will.”

  “Would you have done so in life?”

  “No.”

  “Would you have found it repulsive?”

  “I believe so.”

  “The event on the card in your hand, is it accurate?”

  “No. Are you trying to trick me?”

  “We know the event is accurate. You were convicted of murdering that woman—this is a verifiable event. You’re claiming now that your confession was a lie?”

  “I was not lying.”

  “So you did, in fact, stab Noelle Hyde with a kitchen knife?”

  “I did not.”

  “You confessed. All the polygraph sensors and computer models validated your confession.”

  “I was not lying.”

  “Then you’re lying now.”

  “No.”

  “They can’t both be the truth. The event occurred once, in one way. Not two.”

  “In both cases, I was asked to tell the truth. In both cases, I related the information without alteration.”

  “So you feel now the information you believed in life was false?”

  “I don’t know. I gain nothing by denying it now.”

  “You either did or did not commit that crime. Events happen only in one way,” Fawkes insisted.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he snapped. “Reanimation doesn’t open the mind to parallel experiences and somehow replace perceptions of events with alternate possibilities.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You killed her. Something corrupted those memories.”

  “If it did,” Zhang said with the certainty of one who didn’t care one way or the other, “then I will never have any way of knowing which ones. By extension, neither will you.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  I paused the footage and dug up what information there was on the Zhang trial. It looked cut-and-dried. For whatever reasons, Ning Zhang had followed Noelle Hyde one night, pulled her into an alley, and stabbed her repeatedly. Her body was never found, but Zhang’s prints were on the knife, and traces of her blood were found on his clothes. Witnesses were produced who saw him approach her that night. Eventually he confessed. Less than a month later, he was killed in a prison altercation and picked up by Heinlein. Even as a revivor, though, he could not or would not say where the body ended up.

  I gain nothing by denying it now.

  That was true on one level, but people often had strange reasons for lying, especially to themselves. Had his mind somehow purged the information? Had he convinced himself, somehow, of his own innocence at the end, and carried it with him into death?

  The problem probably existed long before, but in the early days, revivor brains were so simplistic that no one had noticed. The problem surfaced more as time went by and the records contained the same kind of experiments for almost fifty other revivors, but his obsession had started with Zhang.

  It could have been a scientist’s curiosi
ty or even an obsession, but having sat through and conducted as many interrogations as I had, it looked to me like Fawkes was digging for something. The isolation, the repetition, and just the way he held himself, the way he kept at it—it was standard stuff whether Fawkes even knew it or not. He was trying to extract information. He was pretty good at it too.

  Regardless, he never figured it out. The experiment eventually ended. The revivor was shipped off across the ocean, where its ghrelin inhibitor was eventually removed, despite being in violation of international law. In the resulting state of perpetual hunger, Zhang most likely committed atrocities far worse than he ever had in life.

  A red warning light flashed at the apex of my line of sight. I snapped open my eyes.

  Wachalowski.

  I’m here. What is it?

  Security camera twenty-three. We have a vehicle approaching with a driver who says he’s looking for you. He looks like he’s being pursued.

  On my way.

  I sprinted to the stairwell and down to the ground floor, heading for the lobby. On the security feed, I could see the car as it tore around the corner, tires smoking. It fishtailed and then began picking up momentum, heading right for the front doors. Was he planning on ramming the place?

  We got a partial message from him before he cut out, the guard says. He says he’s got information, and he needs protection.

  Weaving through the suits in the main corridor, I picked up speed, moving toward the guard station.

  Who is he?

  Checking . . .

  “Out of the way!” I shouted, drawing my gun as I hurried toward the entryway. I was about a hundred yards down the hall when through the glass doors I saw people on the sidewalk scatter as the car screeched to a halt, bucking up over the curb.

  “Out of the way!”

  He identified himself as Edward Cross. We’re still referencing.

  Cross. MacReady had dropped that name back at Heinlein.

  Outside, the car door opened and a middle-aged man lurched out, his face red and his eyes wild. He tripped on the curb and went facedown on the sidewalk just as the rear window of the car exploded and a loud report boomed down the street.

  We have gunfire.

  People on the street outside began fleeing from the car as two more shots went off and one of the tires blew out. The man picked himself up off the ground and looked around.

  Stay down. . . .

  On the security feed, I looked but I couldn’t see which vehicle, if any, had been following him.

  “Stay down!” I shouted, waving the man down as I approached the doors, but he had already committed to making a run for it. He got as far as the steps when he was struck in the side and went down on the concrete.

  Two armored guards appeared and barreled through the door just ahead of me, each carrying an assault rifle. They immediately took aim down the street, but didn’t fire, as if they were trying to get a bead on the shooter.

  Another shot went off and struck the man in the shoulder blade as he lay on the steps. The two guards began firing controlled bursts.

  Suppressing fire. They still don’t see the shooter.

  I pushed through the doors and grabbed the wounded man, dragging him back by his suit jacket. Another bullet slammed off the bulletproof glass as I got him through the doors.

  We need a medic down here now.

  “Help him . . .” the man muttered. He was alive anyway.

  “Take it easy, sir,” I told him. “Help is coming, understand?”

  “Help him. . . .”

  The guards outside were scanning the street again, but the gunfire had stopped. I abandoned the man for a moment, pushing the glass door open and using it as a shield so I could see out onto the street with my own eyes.

  “You see anything?” one guard asked the other.

  “Negative.”

  The street was clogged with cars that had either been abandoned or had passengers cowering inside. Several windshields were pocked with gunshots, and the blacktop was littered with glass. Smoke drifted from beneath the hood of one of the vehicles.

  “Hold your fire,” I said, looking down the street.

  Where had the shooter come from? He might have been pursuing in any one of the abandoned cars, but those shots had come from street level.

  Several car doors still hung open. I could hear some people sobbing faintly, and far-off traffic, but that was all. Where had he . . . ?

  There. The smoke from one of the cars parted suddenly as it drifted across the street. It was subtle, but I saw it. For just a second, there was the outline of an arm and a leg in the smoke; then it flickered and moved away.

  He was there. He was right there. Whoever it was really did have an LW suit. I hadn’t seen one of those since my tour.

  “Is he out there?” one of the guards asked. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to spook the shooter.

  Switching filters, I managed to at least get a fix on him. It was definitely a male, carrying a rifle of some kind. I couldn’t make out any features, just an enhanced silhouette, but I could see him. He stood in the middle of the street, between two cars, looking toward the steps, which were still covered in the man’s blood. The shooter lingered, like he was debating whether or not to press the attack.

  He opted not to. He took two steps back, then turned.

  I moved out from behind the door, took aim, and fired three times. I hit him twice for sure, but it didn’t stop him. He crouched down and darted down a side street.

  “Sir?” one of the guards said.

  “Let him go.”

  We could get a team together with the right hardware to track him, but not before he was long gone. For now I had gotten at least a recording of him, proof that he existed. Faye wasn’t seeing things; someone or something had been under an LW field at the truck fire as well.

  Stepping over the slick of blood on the stairs, I followed the trail back inside. The medics had arrived and were treating the man, but he was hemorrhaging badly. I knelt over him, and his although he looked very weak, his eyes found mine immediately and fixed on me. He spoke, struggling to get the words out.

  “His name is Luis Valle. . . .”

  “Luis Valle.”

  “Luis . . . they’re looking for him. Help him . . .” he whispered, groping with one hand.

  “I will,” I said. “They told me you asked for me by name. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why me?”

  “You were there. . . .”

  His face tightened and his eyes went wide; then everything relaxed. His eyes began to swim out of focus.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Heinlein . . . Samuel never left. . . .”

  “You left that message for me?”

  He nodded.

  “Samuel Fawkes?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. He could barely speak. “He found me out. . . . I had to run. . . .”

  “Samuel Fawkes is dead. Isn’t he?”

  “I suspected . . . he was in the system. Luis found something . . . for me. He’s in danger. . . .”

  “What does that mean? What did he find?”

  His eyes met mine one last time, tears brimming.

  “Help Luis. . . .”

  He flatlined. The medic closest to me gave me a look.

  “That’s it.”

  I stood up. The knees of my pants were wet with blood. I called back to security.

  What did he say when he contacted you?

  Just that he was coming in fast, and he needed to see you. His records show he had a doctorate in applied cybernetics. Full citizen with a high security clearance.

  No doubt. Bob MacReady, the representative from Heinlein who met with me, had mentioned his name, in passing anyway. He had worked at one time for Samuel Fawkes, up until the time of Samuel’s death. The two had worked on Zhang’s Syndrome.

  He worked at Heinlein Industries, I said.

  He was a key player there. How did you know?
<
br />   MacReady dropped his name. What about the name Luis Valle? Any relation?

  Hang on.

  Heinlein Industries, and the name Zhang in particular, had a way of cropping up during the course of all this.

  I’ve got a Luis Valle, age twenty, son of Tara Valle, maiden name Tara Cross. It’s his nephew. Looks like he’s got a record; all computer crimes.

  One of the names on the list we recovered from the dock revivor was Rebecca Valle.

  Hang on.

  Rebecca Valle’s name was right after that of Mae Zhu, who had been murdered in her car the night before. None of the others on the list were reachable, and none had responded to repeated messages. That last name could not be a coincidence.

  Got it, the security agent said. Rebecca Valle is the second wife of Luis Valle’s father, Miguel, and get this—Rebecca, the husband, and their daughter were all found dead in their home earlier today.

  The medics hoisted the body onto a gurney, leaving behind nothing but a mess on the tiled floor. Whatever else he was, Cross wasn’t the kind of man who dealt with men like Tai. It sounded as though he found something at Heinlein, something that made him enlist the help of his computer-savvy nephew. Rebecca Valle’s name on that list of targets tied them together, though, somehow. Did she prompt Cross to get involved in whatever he had gotten involved in?

  “Hold on,” I said, stopping the medics before they wheeled the body away. I found a cell phone in his pocket. Sure enough, Luis Valle was on his list of contacts. I punched the number in and the phone started to ring.

  Someone was looking for that boy. By now, he most likely knew he was in trouble and was on the run.

  He’s not answering his phone, I said, snapping it shut. Coordinate with local police and find that kid. Offer a reward—whatever it takes. I think we don’t have much time.

  I’m on it.

  Dig up some information on a Samuel Fawkes, too. According to Heinlein, he’s deceased, but find out if he was candidate for reanimation, and if so, where he ended up.

  Will do. Can I ask why?

  The coroner zipped Cross into a bag. I wasn’t sure why, but he took a bullet in the back because he wanted me to know that Samuel never left, whatever that meant.

  Because something is going on at Heinlein that someone is trying to hide.