by James Knapp
“I must be losing it,” I said, skipping to the end.
SUBSTANCE: UNKNOWN.
“The report says it’s not organic, that it’s some kind of silicate or something.”
“It’s an error at the lab,” Shanks said. “Let it go for now, and forensics will find something.”
I put the wineglass down and crossed over to the computer terminal. Originally, I had planned to wait until I was alone to look at the contents of the data card that I copied from the Craig house, but suddenly I didn’t want to wait anymore. I wanted to see who I was dealing with; I wanted to see his face.
“Faye—”
“This will only take a minute.”
The footage came up and I saw Rebecca Valle, still alive and sitting facing the camera as, presumably, she typed on the keyboard, which was out of frame.
“What’s that?” Shanks asked, leaning forward.
“I grabbed it from the computer at Craig’s place.”
On the screen, Rebecca’s face looked pale in the glow of the monitor. She glanced at the camera every so often, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning. There was no sound to go along with it.
“Score one for me,” I said, “and zero for the voice in my head.”
“Huh?”
“You say I’m not losing it, Shanks, but I don’t know. I think I am.”
“You’re not, Faye. It’s not your fault.”
There was something strange about the way he said that, but I didn’t pick up on it right away. I was too busy watching the woman on the video screen as she wiled away the last moments of her life. It was so mundane, almost like watching someone watch television, that it was eerie in a way. She had no idea that her life was about to end. She had no idea that this was how she would live the last sane moments of her life, sitting in front of a computer screen.
“I got a pass on my last psych evaluation,” I said, “but I’m coming apart, Doyle. You see it. You pretend you don’t, but I know you do. I’m on too many chemicals and my body is getting too old for this. My mind is getting too old for it. I want to slow down just a little bit, but I can’t.”
The footage continued to stream by as I watched, and Shanks had gotten quiet. I wasn’t looking at him, but I guessed he was probably trying to figure out the shortest path to the front door. When I agreed to have him come up, I was pretty sure I had no intention of dumping all this on him, and I wanted to stop—I knew I should stop—but the relaxant I had taken along with the wine had loosened my tongue.
“There really is a voice in my head. I’m not even kidding about that, and the worst thing about it is that this voice, this inner me or intuition or whatever it is, makes half of my decisions for me, it feels like.”
Shanks sighed, and I thought he might leave. Instead he spoke again in that odd tone of voice.
“It’s not your fault, Faye,” he said. “This hasn’t been fair to you. I haven’t been fair to you.”
“What?”
He was quiet for a minute, and I could see he was struggling with something.
“You don’t know how important you are,” he said finally. “What you do, I could never do. I realized that after I got assigned to you and I’d worked with you for a while.”
“Shanks, that’s not—”
“Sometimes I think we forget that. Sometimes I think we forget that people like us will always need people like you.”
Slowly, my mind was refocusing. I realized that Shanks was behaving more strangely than I had ever seen him before. Something about his tone of voice had become very disconcerting.
“What do you mean, ‘people like you’?” I asked.
He looked me in the eye then, and for a minute I thought there might be tears forming in them.
“I’m really sorry, Faye.”
“Shanks, what—”
“You deserve to know.”
“Know what?”
“The truth.”
On the screen, Rebecca Valle turned as she heard the sound that lured her to her death. She got up and left the room.
“Wait,” I said, watching. The image stayed static for several seconds.
Shanks stood up and moved next to me, but I couldn’t look away from the screen. As I watched, the killer walked into the computer room. There was a little blood on his right hand, but he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He sat down in front of the camera, not realizing it was there, and I looked right in his face.
“Oh,” I whispered.
His skin was pale and waxy. He had a heavy brow and a wide face, with some kind of scar in the middle of his throat. He was wearing a dark coat with the hood up over his head, which appeared to be bald. At the bottom of the frame, around chest level, I could see what appeared to be explosives strapped around his torso, but that wasn’t even the strangest thing.
His eyes, looking down at the screen as he typed, had irises that were pale and silver, like moonlight. In the darkness of the room, they emanated a soft glow. I realized then that the scar on his neck came from the entry wound of a bullet. It was a revivor.
“We suspected,” Shanks said.
The blood that showed up under the ALS but wasn’t human blood, the complete absence of trace hair, skin, sweat, or saliva at the crime scenes, the lack of any detectable breath or heartbeat on the phone recordings; it all made sense. The killer wasn’t human at all. These people had been killed by a revivor.
“Doyle, no offense, but what are you talking about? Who the hell is—”
On the screen, the revivor turned and looked over its shoulder, as if something startled it. It started to get up, and disappeared.
I rubbed my eyes and checked the video, backing it up. When I replayed it, I got the same thing: the revivor turned, started to get up; then the area around it flickered and faded away until it was gone. It was as if it had turned invisible. For just a second, there was a distortion in the shape of a man in the air, then nothing.
Sometimes a single detail caused a series of others to suddenly fall into place, and what I saw on the footage was like that. The killer was wearing some kind of suit that cloaked him or camouflaged him. At the truck fire, I wasn’t seeing things. The human outline in the smoke that I thought was my imagination was real. The revivor that killed the Valles had been there; it stood right there in front of me. What was it doing there? Was it following me?
Standing up quickly, I felt the blood rush from my head and I stumbled back into the chair. Shanks started to catch me, but I had righted myself. What had he been talking about?
“Doyle, what did you mean, ‘we suspected’?”
The killer couldn’t have followed me to the truck; even if it was unable to be seen, it was far too big and the train was too crowded for it to go unnoticed. There was no way it could have been waiting there for me, because I didn’t know I’d be there myself.
The only explanation was that it was already there for reasons that had nothing to do with me. It was responsible for the attack on the truck. It was up to something bigger than a string of simple murders.
Shanks held out his hand like he was going to touch my arm, and when I pulled away, he looked hurt. The way he was looking at me made me very uneasy, like he had dropped some kind of facade. The things he was saying and the way he was acting seemed out of character. Had he been working for some other department this whole time? Had they had him watching me for some reason?
I thought of what the revivor had said on the phone. The man sitting next to you is not your friend….
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced at the display. It was Nico.
“Faye, please,” Shanks said.
“Shut up.”
“I—”
“Doyle, shut up.”
I flipped open my phone and started talking.
“Nico, I know who the killer is. These murders and what happened that morning are related, I—”
My voice trailed off as I noticed the spots on the floor, like blood but darker. As I watched, several
more appeared, dripping down from out of nowhere. I followed the drops upward, and the source should have been right in front of me.
“Faye, you’re in danger,” I heard him say. “Where are you?”
The air rippled, and all at once the revivor appeared. It was standing right there in front of me. It must have already been in the apartment when we came in. It had been watching us the whole time.
I was still staring when it lashed out and I caught a metallic flash under the light. Something warm spattered the side of my face and neck. Shanks collapsed onto his knees, then forward onto the floor, his gun falling free from his hand.
“Faye!” Nico’s voice barked from the phone.
It turned to me. The moonlit eyes glared down at me, orange light flickering behind the pupils.
“It’s here—” I said into the phone, as the revivor reached forward and took it, snapping it closed before placing it on the end table.
There was no way it was going to leave me alive. I went for my gun, but before it was fully clear of the holster, the revivor’s right hand and forearm split apart to reveal a dark gap inside where something metallic caught the light.
It struck me in the chest with its palm, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and at that same instant, I heard what sounded like a burst of air followed by an awful crunch.
“What a waste,” the revivor said.
All the strength went out of me, and my fingers slipped off its wrist. Looking down, I saw that some kind of blade had actually thrust out of a chamber inside its forearm, impaling me through the middle of the chest. With a loud snap, the blade pulled free and disappeared back into its arm, which closed over the seam, and the gun slipped from my fingers and onto the floor as I began to fall.
Don’t leave me like this, I wanted to say, but my lips wouldn’t move. Don’t let them bring me back….
At the last second, terror welled up inside me. It came on like a light from inside, and everything seemed crystal clear. There were no flashes or memories from my life, just that terror, pure and solitary, for just an instant.
The fear subsided, and I was floating weightless, drifting backward into the darkness and a long, long overdue sleep.
8
Coil
Nico Wachalowski—Shine Tower Apartments, Unit 901
The city was crawling with police and soldiers. After the second bomb went off, Ohtomo had begun deploying the revivor soldiers. They’d all be animate and on the ground by nightfall. Checkpoints were being set up at the bridges. Overhead, a military helicopter passed between two buildings as I turned, numb, onto Faye’s street.
At the end, where her apartment sat, trash bags and snow bordered the road. There was no place to pull over, so I nosed into the no-parking zone in front of her building and cut the engine. Sitting there, feeling the heat leech out of the cab, I tried to take some solace from the fact that the girl, Flax, would most likely be dead if I hadn’t been there, but it didn’t provide much.
She’s in trouble. She’s going to die.
Zoe’s warning had come too late. I called Faye immediately, but the call was cut off. Before I’d gotten to the main drag, I got word from the local police. I was too late. Noakes had ordered me back to the arena, where I dealt with the fallout for half the night. Part of me was glad.
Wind blew over the car as a jeep slowed down at the intersection ahead and the soldier riding shotgun peered in at me from behind his visor. I held up my badge and pressed it against the inside of the windshield. After a few seconds, the jeep continued on.
When I shouldered open the car door, it crunched into a bank of snow, and a blast of cold, damp air blew into the car. The sky was overcast, a sliver of gray trailing through the building tops. Even though it was barely afternoon, it looked almost dark. Somehow it seemed fitting.
I pulled myself out of the car and pushed the salt-covered door closed with my foot. Looking around, I saw dirty slush and snow that had refrozen so many times it formed a slick, gray-black trench that bordered the narrow street. Cars were jammed in tight, some covered up to their windshields. Garbage bags stood in piles, waiting to be picked up, stinking faintly even in the cold.
This was where she lived? Sometimes I forgot what a difference full citizenship could mean, even for a public servant. I remembered how tired she’d looked at the restaurant, and how the stress had worked its way into her eyes. She was jacked up on stims and strung out. I’d known something was wrong, but when she smiled I looked past it. When she smiled, it took me back those ten years to before we’d made our choices, back to when she looked happy, and when, if the right song came on, she would dance.
It’s here—
It wasn’t like I never expected to see her again. On some level, I think I hoped our paths might cross someday, but when I extended my tour, the months turned into years, and before I knew it a decade had passed. When I heard her voice out of the blue, I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. But when I saw her in the restaurant, I knew I’d made a mistake back then. Things should have been different.
How could you come back and not even call me?
I didn’t have a good answer for that. Something stopped me. It had been a mistake. Now, after all those years, we reconnected just long enough for me to listen to her last words over a cell phone, unable to lift a finger to help her.
The face of the apartment building looked old and weathered. The front doors were double locked with bulletproof glass. I held my badge up to the scanner, which made a ticking sound.
“Unauthorized for access,” a voice said. “If you are visiting a tenant, you may—”
“I’m a federal agent,” I said, still holding up the badge. The scanner ticked again, reading the badge number then running it.
“Go right in, Agent.”
The doors snapped and I pushed them open. A bank of mail slots were arranged on the wall to my right in ten-by-ten grids. Scanning them, I found hers was empty. At the end of the empty entryway was a single elevator door. I took it up to the ninth floor.
The hallway was quiet as I made my way down toward the yellow tape that had been crossed over the door at the far end. Most of the commotion seemed to be over.
“Hello?” I called. Someone stirred inside, and a moment later a man with graying hair approached the door. His eyes narrowed when he saw me.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked me from the other side of the tape.
I showed him my badge. “Sorry to barge in.”
His expression stayed fixed for a few more seconds; then he sighed and took a step back.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had to chase camera eyes off all day. Name’s Bill Turner.”
“I understand. I’m Nico Wachalowski.”
I ducked under the tape and moved inside. It looked like everyone else had gone, leaving the place eerily quiet.
Her apartment was small but clean, and had a warm, cozy kind of look, in contrast to the exterior of the place. She had a decorator’s sense I didn’t have. The furniture looked secondhand but mostly real wood, and the prints hanging on the walls were picked carefully. It had warmth to it, a haven from the outside world.
“You were her partner?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That was Doyle Shanks.”
As soon as he said it, the name began to eat at me. I knew that name.
“Was?”
“He got it too,” he said, pointing down at the floor in front of the sofa. The outline of a human body had been drawn there, arms and legs sprawled. A large bloodstain had formed there, trickling across the slightly uneven surface. Traced over the sofa around a swath of blood was a second outline: all that remained of Faye Dasalia.
“What did you say her partner’s name was?” I asked.
“Shanks,” he said. “Doyle Shanks.”
Doyle Shanks.
The dock revivor; it was carrying a partial list of names in its memory. I brought up the list.
5. Mae Zhu
6. Re
becca Valle
7. Harold Craig
8. Doyle Shanks
“Who was the last victim before him?” I asked.
“Guy named Harold Craig,” he said. “He was killed shortly after victim number six, Rebecca Valle. Before that was—”
“Mae Zhu.”
He looked at me, his eyes sharp.
“That’s right.”
My gut felt hollow. I never even asked her partner’s name. We were sitting face-to-face; all it would have taken was one question. All it would have taken was just one piece of small talk, as I struggled to think of what I was going to say to her next. I would have known her partner was a marked man, and the danger that put her in.
“I’d like a full list of the victims’ names.”
“You got it.”
“He was here, then?” I asked. “Her partner?”
“Probably dropping her off,” he said.
Zoe knew. She tried to warn me. She knew this was going to happen.
“What is your interest in this case?” Turner asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Detective Dasalia was a witness in an ongoing investigation,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you any more than that right now.”
Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Her coat still hung on a coat rack near the wall, and a remote rested on the sofa next to the dark stain that had seeped into the cushion. The white outline in the shape of her body was seated upright. Based on the position, it looked like she had fallen there from a standing position. I’d seen tracings like that plenty of times before, but this one hit home. It was like she was suddenly erased from existence, leaving behind only an outline to indicate the space she had once occupied.
“Forensics been through already?”
“Yes.”
“So they’ve been taken to the morgue, then?”
“Shanks was.”
When I looked back at him, he was frowning.
“Heinlein’s got Dasalia. She signed up for it,” he said.
