James Knapp - State of Decay

“Out,” he said. I went through the gate and he slammed it shut behind me. He didn’t look at me twice, and just walked down the hall with me in back of him.

“Nice shiner,” he said when we got out of holding.

“Thanks.”

“You get that in the ring, or at the bar after?”

“The second one.”

The night before was a blur, but it didn’t happen at the fight. I got the cut over my right eye there, but not the shiner on my left. Someone caught me good at the bar.

“Well, Ms. Flax, it’s your lucky day,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yup. The guy you jumped dropped the charges, and in all the resulting bullshit of the little war you started, even the cameras couldn’t pin anything too bad on you.”

I shrugged at his back. That was pretty lucky, actually.

“Here we are,” he said when we got to the main entryway.

“Huh?”

“You got posted,” he said. “What’d you think, I was giving you a tour? You’re free to go.”

He handed me my leather jacket and I put it on.

“I left what I found in the pocket. Consider that a gift.”

He held out a big yellow envelope like I should take it, so I did. I ripped it open and saw my cell phone and keys inside. When I looked back, he was pointing like I should get the hell out.

“A couple of your buddies dropped your bike off last night so it didn’t get towed; it’s in the lot out back.”

“Who bailed me out?” I asked. He jerked his thumb toward the wall.

“Nice fight, by the way,” he said. “The first one, not the second one.”

When I looked at where he pointed, I saw pretty boy from inside the cell standing there, arms crossed and back against the wall like some kind of pimp. When I turned back, the guard was gone.

I looked back and pretty boy was still smiling that smug smile I was going to learn to hate in about five minutes. If he’d really bailed me out, I’d almost rather have gone back in, but not enough to actually have done it. When people did things for you, they wanted something back.

“You do this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, still smiling. He tailed me out. The sun was almost up.

“Why?”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

Bail, even for a back-lot brawl, was a big deal, but maybe it wasn’t a big deal for him. Maybe he was a fan, or maybe he did it just to pat himself on the back. Maybe it was to show off.

“What do I owe you?” I asked.

“I just—”

“Don’t screw with me. What do I owe you?”

“How about a ride home?” he said.

I still didn’t know what his game was, but a ride I could do. If that was all it was going to take, I could do that. A ride on the back of my bike in the cold might wipe that look of his face, even.

“A ride? Sure. Okay. You got it.”

His shit was so slick, I even bought it a little. Just a fan , I said to myself, or some punk with an itch to walk on the wild side. If it got his rocks off to be nice to a three, why not take him up on it? It beat a week in jail, and he was nothing to be scared of. Tight, but slight, and never fought a day in his life. Harmless, right?

What a crock of shit.

Whenever I was put under for maintenance, my mind always went back to the same place.

I never found out what knocked me down back then. Later I was told it was probably a concussion grenade. The last thing I saw was Sean turning from the radio as if he’d heard something; then everything turned to white noise.

I could see before I could hear; when I opened my eyes I was on my back, being dragged by one foot through the brush. Wet grass and branches whipped across my face, and I could see the night sky above me. I lifted my head and saw a figure trudging forward, the hand that was gripping my boot trailing behind him. There were two others with him.

Screaming and the tearing of cloth cut through the ringing in my ears, then the crunching of metal and electronics. Someone was shouting into a radio, it sounded like, and gunfire was being exchanged.

I reached for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My knife was gone too. I struggled, and three sets of dead, yellow eyes stared back at me from above. I tried to kick free, but one of them grabbed my other leg. They dragged me out of the brush and into damp, soft soil as I felt myself being pulled downward.

Dirt was forced up the back of my shirt, and ants and termites scattered as I was dragged underneath something. I craned my neck back to see the mouth of a tunnel getting smaller behind me, the earth swallowing the sounds of the screams and gunfire….

“Nico?”

The memories scattered, and I opened my eyes. Sean’s gaunt face looked down on me, his narrow eyes serious. His once-black hair had begun to turn gray, and he looked tired. After a moment, he smiled faintly.

Sean Pu and I had served together. He was a tech man now, running the soft side of many operations in the field. He specialized in bioaugmentations, and kept a section of the Agency field ready. Unofficially, he was still more like my wingman; my pair of eyes on the inside when I was out there. Un-unofficially, he was more like my personal guru.

“You know those stims are for emergencies only,” he said.

“I know.”

Everything felt more or less back to normal. I took a deep breath and felt pretty good.

“You threw everything out of balance back there,” Sean said. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re like that.”

“Am I okay?”

“Your blood levels are back to normal,” he said. “I’m just finishing up replacing the stim packets.”

“Thanks.”

He continued working next to me. All I felt was a tugging at the back of my neck and an occasional tiny jolt down my spine.

“Why didn’t you put down the revivor?” he asked.

“I did.”

“The other one,” he said. “The one in the restroom.”

“Word travels fast.”

“It does.”

I sighed. The truth was, I’d had every intention of doing it; from the moment I walked into the building to the moment I walked into that bathroom, and even the moment I pulled the codes from it.

“Did they ask you about it?” I said.

“Yeah, they wanted to know if you’ve seemed unstable at all.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you’re fine, which was a lie. Of course, if they listened to me, they wouldn’t have sent you in the first place,” he added.

“You recommended they didn’t use me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason they wanted to send you,” he said. “Because you have experience with revivors. But unlike them, I know what some of those experiences were. I questioned how you might react, and I was right.”

A strange sensation crept up my back and neck as he withdrew the thin series of tubes, the ends popping softly as they came free. He smoothed down the little dermal strip.

“Good as new.”

I stretched, flexing my muscles and cracking my back. Everything felt like it was in order. When I ran the diagnostics on my heads-up display, everything came up green. I swiveled my legs around and hopped off the chair.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All the revivors are going down after they’re done with them anyway.”

“You did everything right. No one’s going to complain about the job you did, but why would you want to go back to that place? How often do that many revivors end up stateside?”

Sean had a way of echoing my own thoughts. The truth was, I could still feel that cold slab of meat crushing my neck, that saliva and breath that should have been warm but wasn’t. I could still see those eyes, just barely glowing in the dark like they used to at night, and that damn girl, that walking sex doll and the way it spoke.