State of Decay r-1

by James Knapp

A message came in, flagged urgent. Someone was on the line, waiting. Moving the footage off to one side, I brought up the image a second before I decided I should screen it. In a window I could see Serena’s face, lips pressed together as she waited. A receipt had already been sent, so it was too late to try to duck her. The expression on her face said I’d already been doing that too long.

  I opened the connection and typed.

  Hello, Dr. Pyznar. I’m on the train. Nonverbal only, please.

  She looked at me from the screen and frowned, but not in an angry way.

  These psych exams are mandatory, Faye. For everyone in the department.

  I know.

  The results of your blood chemistry have come back.

  And?

  The bottom line is, it’s obvious to anyone who looks that you take too many stims and too many tranquilizers. Knocking yourself out and then shocking yourself awake isn’t the same as sleeping.

  She didn’t have to tell me that, but unfortunately, at the moment it was all I had. I was a second-tier citizen. I never served in the military, but I was wired for Posthumous Service. Making detective was the first step toward at least a first-tier retirement. My caseload would dictate the rest.

  Are the levels within tolerance?

  You mean, are they within the department’s acceptable range? Yes, but—

  So I’m okay?

  She pursed her thin lips, fixing me with a frustrated look. My recommendations hold some weight.

  My eyes drifted to the window containing the security footage. Scanning through, I watched the snow pile up in fast motion until it covered the windshield of the car. People continued to cross in front of it until a small figure broke off and approached the driver’s-side door and got in. I stopped the image, backed it up, and let it play.

  The figure was female: the victim. She approached the car, unlocked it using the remote, then opened the door. She didn’t seem as though she heard or saw anything strange. She got in and shut the door behind her.

  This shouldn’t even count as the evaluation. Doing something else at the same time isn’t helping.

  Doctor, I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.

  She sighed.

  I know. Tell me, at least: Are you still having the dreams?

  Yes. I had one last night.

  How are they affecting you these days? How do they make you feel?

  Sore.

  If you’re tense enough in sleep to wake up with muscle aches, that’s not good.

  Tell me about it.

  What about the voice?

  It’s not a voice, it’s my voice…. Talking to myself helps me think. That doesn’t make me crazy, does it?

  Not yet.

  Can we call this done?

  On the screen she frowned again, but again, not in an angry way. She wasn’t mad; she was concerned, and I knew that, but there was just too much going on.

  The next exam is in three months. You have to come in for that one. Physically come in.

  I will. Thank you, Doctor.

  There’s no point in making first tier if you work yourself into an early grave. Slow down.

  I will. Thank you.

  Closing the window, I smiled, thinking that it had gone better than I expected. She was going to give me a pass for now; one more thing off the list. I turned my attention fully back to the security footage.

  It had gotten dark out by that point in the feed, and the car was in shadow. Even after enhancing the image, all I could get from the driver’s-side window was a reflection. The people on the sidewalk were passing right by the grille of the car, completely unaware that behind the blanket of snow on the windshield, Mae Zhu was being quietly murdered.

  I watched closely, but there wasn’t any observable movement to tell what was happening inside, and no one gave the car even a passing glance that might indicate they had heard anything strange. I followed the passersby while keeping track on the camera’s timer; it took only fifteen seconds before anyone who had been close enough to see what happened had moved on, outside the line of sight. In that amount of time, not one of the hundreds of people on the street was even aware of the fact that anyone was inside the car. It would have been the same when he got in.

  I started scanning through again and saw the back door open and a man get out. He shut the door behind him casually, and walked out of frame as if nothing was wrong.

  I backed it up to try to get a better look at him, but he knew about the camera; he was wearing a long, dark coat that covered his body, with a hood that concealed his face, given the camera angle. More than that, though, when I tried to enhance the image, there was some kind of distortion, like something corrupted the signal. He must have been carrying a baffle screen in his pocket or on his belt. He obviously didn’t mind being seen, but he didn’t want to be recorded.

  I scanned back, looking for the time when he actually entered the car, but he had been in there for a while; the security cameras began overwriting every twelve hours, and he had gotten in at some point before the beginning of the current buffer.

  All those people around. That was bold.

  I rubbed my eyes. He’d been sitting in that car as I was home in bed, finally managing to drift off to sleep.

  “Holy shit,” a young man said from toward the front of the car, his voice piercing the quiet. I looked up and saw the passengers in the seats ahead were focusing outside the window. I saw something flickering up ahead.

  “Is that for real?” someone asked.

  It took a few seconds to register—something up ahead was on fire. The train approached the source of the flames, and people began moving to my side of the car to get a better look.

  When we got closer I saw what looked like an armored car was sitting in the middle of an empty parking lot where disused buildings towered on three sides. Fire poured out of the cab, and sent blue-black smoke upward in a thick column that rose high into the air. I could see a crowd of people had started to approach the vehicle before the train whipped by and passed out of sight. I called in to the station.

  “Dasalia, what’s up?”

  “I’m on the L,” I said, “just coming up on One Hundred Thirteenth at East Concord Yard, and I’ve got a burning vehicle here. Has anyone called it in?”

  “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “Get someone down here,” I said, “and coordinate with the fire department. I’m going to check it out.”

  The train slowed down as it approached the next stop. While the other people on the train were clustering around the windows I pushed my way into the aisle and headed for the nearest exit. As soon as the doors opened, I got off and started sprinting down the platform in the direction of the truck.

  People were packing in tighter, looking over each other’s shoulders as I forced my way through them toward the column of smoke. As I broke into the parking lot, I could already feel the heat from the fire. Bodies were crowded around the truck, phones and cameras thrust out, recording as the event unfolded on the tiny LCD screens.

  I held up my badge, shoving my way closer. The truck was dark blue with some kind of emblem on the side. The paint was scorched, but I could make out part of it clearly. It wasn’t an armored car; it was a police vehicle, used to transport prisoners. I could make out a charred figure still behind the wheel of the cab.

  “Get a fire extinguisher!” someone screamed, and just then the doors to the back of the truck moved with a thud as something collided with them from inside. A set of keys that still dangled from the lock there jingled as it happened again.

  The door was struck again from the inside, and everything kind of slowed down. The back doors were straining against the latch, being pushed from inside as the fire raged. The air rippled with heat, ashes fluttering upward into the smoke. I picked out faces in the crowd as they watched from every side, shouting all around me.

  I ran to the truck, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. I grabbed the handle to the back door, turned i
t, and pulled. The doors immediately swung open and a wave of heat blew out over me, stinking of soot and cooking meat. The smoke stung my eyes, and I covered my face as I scrambled back. I fell facing the crowd and caught a brief look at that ring of cell phones, watching with their tiny cameras, and their owners, who had now looked up from the little screens and were staring behind me in horror. A woman covered her mouth, and someone screamed.

  I turned back, following their eyes, and saw there were a bunch of bodies in the back of the truck. They were seated across from each other, facing in. Their heads were bowed and none of them were moving except one. One of them had somehow survived and was bent over in the doorway, struggling forward.

  It was a young woman. She was completely nude and was burned all over her body. Her hair had been singed away, and her eyes looked haunted as they stared out of her blackened face.

  She stepped forward and slipped, falling face-first onto the pavement. She managed to get back up, hands shaking, and took two more steps before falling down again.

  I grabbed her wrists and dragged her back, away from the fire. The crowd parted around me as I pulled her until she slipped out of my grasp and I fell backward.

  “Call an ambulance!” someone screamed. Everyone was screaming. I turned the woman over onto her back, cradling her head in my lap.

  She looked up at me, and I saw her eyes were the strangest color. They were kind of a pale, silvery yellow, and the irises actually seemed to glow very softly. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing.

  “You’re a revivor….”

  I had never actually seen one before, not in person. It smelled terrible, like burnt hair, meat, and tar.

  “Hide …behind …whatever you …can …” she whispered.

  “Hold still. Help is coming.”

  “Keep …your …head …down …”

  People had stopped watching the truck and stopped yelling, for the most part. They were gathering to try to get a glimpse of the revivor. The cameras had turned from the fire to the spot where I knelt. Some part of the body still sizzled quietly as I held it. Finally, a siren began to swell in the distance, getting closer.

  A man moved next to me, trying to get a better view of the fire. I recognized him from the train; a middle-aged businessman with gray hair and a pink face. He had a smug sort of satisfied expression on his face. His eyes looked like they were seeing the rapture, and he was nodding very slightly to himself, arms crossed in front of him. He noticed me looking at him and looked down at me with contempt. When he saw my badge, some of the challenge went out of his expression, but not all of it. He sneered at me cradling the revivor like I was everything that was wrong with the world, then looked back to the burning bodies until his annoyance melted away, leaving only a sense of righteousness.

  The revivor was trying to say something, forming words with its cracked lips. Its eyelids had drooped almost closed and the light behind them was flickering. I leaned forward, moving my face closer and turning my ear to its mouth.

  “Zhang knew the truth,” it gasped softly. “You have to wake up….”

  I shook my head, not knowing what it meant.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Zhang knew the truth….”

  The revivor mouthed the words again, and not long after, its lips stopped moving. Its mechanical breathing hitched and stopped, then it sagged in my arms, this time gone from this world for good.

  Back at the truck, nothing else was moving. The people around me got their fill and moved closer to the truck, trying to see inside and get shots of the bodies. The lettering on the side of the truck read FBI.

  It’s hard to say exactly what motivated me to make the call. Later I thought maybe it was something I could ask Dr. Pyznar about, if I actually made it over there for the next exam. On the surface of it, I was a law enforcement officer, calling a sister bureau with information. It was their truck; these were their prisoners. The trafficking of revivors fell into their jurisdiction; they would have to be called and told what had happened, if they didn’t already know.

  That call didn’t need to be made by me, though, and the fact that the person I called was the one who wanted to know was just a coincidence. I called because he was the only person I knew who worked at the FBI, even though I hadn’t spoken to him for years. Maybe that was why. Maybe I’d been waiting for a reason to break that silence.

  My vision blurred as cold wind blasted me in the face, followed by a burst of hot, smoky air. I had to disengage myself from the defunct revivor and get moving. This wasn’t my case. My case was still waiting for me….

  Blinking, I stared as, for just a second, it looked like someone was standing next to me. Not like a person; more like an outline. It was as if the smoke from the fire blew by, and for just a brief moment it revealed an invisible man standing there. He was looking down at me.

  “Ma’am?” a voice in the phone said. Someone had picked up and was trying to get my name. The outline I had seen faded as soon as I saw it. I waved my hand across the spot, but there was nothing there.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Sorry,” I said, still staring at the empty spot. “My name is Detective Faye Dasalia. I need to speak to Agent Wachalowski.”

  Zoe Ott—Pleasantview Apartments, Apartment 713

  Someone was knocking. It must have been going on for a while if it brought me out of it. I opened my eyes partway and saw light around the edges of the shade, making my head hurt and my stomach turn over. Stretching out on the bed, I craned my neck back until it popped.

  “What?” I mumbled, but whoever it was wouldn’t be able to hear me.

  My first thought, which was my first thought most every day, was that this better be real. It was kind of a hit-or-miss thing, that. One time I woke up because my phone was ringing, and talked for fifteen minutes before I realized there was no one on the other end. Another time I woke up and found a man standing in my bedroom, and was so convinced he was a dream that I just went back to sleep, only to find out later he was the landlord’s brother checking to make sure I wasn’t dead.

  The knock came again and I decided one thing my dreams never did was knock. If someone was knocking at the door, they were probably real.

  “Go away,” I said.

  My head was pounding now, and it looked like I wasn’t going to get any peace until I took care of whatever it was. I crawled out of bed and looked in the mirror; my nightshirt was long enough to cover up everything that needed covering, which, admittedly, wasn’t much. I plodded out into the living room and opened the front door a little bit.

  “What?” I asked.

  I guess I was expecting either one of the take-out guys or some kid selling something, because no one from the apartment complex ever knocked on my door. Once in a while I forgot that I ordered food and got surprised by the delivery guy, but even they knew to just leave it if I didn’t answer.

  It wasn’t a delivery guy, though, and it wasn’t a kid peddling something. It was the woman who lived in the apartment below me, standing there with a black eye and a cardboard box in her hands.

  “Uh, hi,” she said. “I’m—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “from downstairs. What do you want?”

  “I’m Karen,” she said. She was looking at me expectantly. My head really hurt, and I was dying of thirst. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted.

  “And you are?” she asked finally, extending her hand a little.

  “Right,” I said, “Zoe. I’m Zoe.”

  Her hand hovered between us uncertainly. I gave it a little shake.

  “Look, no offense, but what do you want?”

  “I just …wanted to …”

  “Wanted to what?”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you. I’ve never thanked you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Here,” she said, holding out the box, “I hope sugar cookies are okay. I would have made something better, but I didn’t know if you had any alle
rgies or anything.”

  I took the box.

  “You made cookies for me?”

  “Well, I bought them.”

  “Why?”

  She gave me a frustrated look, and I could tell she was starting to get upset.

  “I mean, thanks,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t know what to do in these situations.”

  “Usually you invite the other person in,” she said.

  “My place is kind of a mess. Like, really.”

  She smiled and nodded, but the smile didn’t stay. She looked upset, and I felt bad. I actually thought about letting her in, but I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t let anyone see my place the way it looked.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “No, really, maybe some other—”

  “How do you do it?” she asked suddenly.

  “Do what?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Ted, when he gets like he does sometimes …like he was last night. You just tell him to calm down and he does. You just …switch him off. How do you—”

  “Don’t read too much into it.”

  One thing I learned a long time ago was not to talk about that. Bringing it up was a mistake.

  “You shouldn’t hide it,” she said.

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “You do something to him,” she insisted. “I’ve watched it; it’s like your face changes. Your eyes change. Something happens. It’s like something passes between you, and he just stops being angry.”

  “Maybe it’s my personality.”

  I had meant it as a joke, but she made this kind of “as if” expression when I said it. My face started getting hot.

  “No offense, but it’s not that,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, no offense, but go away.”

  “I don’t know how you do it, but he’s actually gotten better since you started coming down.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “If I could influence people, would I be living here, like this? Even if I could influence people, it doesn’t mean I can change anything that’s going to happen. I can’t change anything that’s going to happen; you should think about that.”