James Knapp - State of Decay

“Sure.”

I looked through the glass at the strange amoeba, sitting at the bottom of the beaker surrounded by a little cloud of stringy goo.

“It hasn’t gone inert,” Sean said. “You might be able to scan it.”

I zoomed in and ran the scan; sure enough, the wriggling amber line coalesced, snapping into the familiar waveform.

“Nice.”

I was able to pull the lot number, serial number, model numbers, versions …everything. Unlike the one in the bathroom, this one was legit; it had a valid code, so it was wired as part of a national program, and it had a military assignment tag as well, meaning it had actually been deployed. Either it never got where it was going or it was AWOL.

Also, unlike the one in the bathroom, the revivor components weren’t manufactured overseas; they rolled off the line at Heinlein Industries.

“Sean, could these parts have been reused?”

“You mean harvested out of an existing unit and put into this one? No. I mean, some of the nuts and bolts, sure, but not the important stuff.”

“Then we may have another problem. Let me see if I can get into the memory buffer.”

I opened a connection to the revivor’s communication node, then sent a specialized virus over the channel. It chiseled through security, then implanted itself and began to map the revivor’s systems. A few seconds later, it sent a bundle of information back over the circuit.

“I’ve got something.”

I pulled the access codes out of the bundle and tapped into its memory core. From there I sifted through recent communication entries. Some of them were encrypted.

A series of text entries appeared before everything scrambled and feedback started coming across the connection. A second later, it dropped. Something made a popping sound from inside the body, followed by a high-pitched hissing.

“Step away from it!” I said. They didn’t ask why; they just did it. The hole Sean had made in the back of the revivor’s neck expanded as white smoke began to pour out.

All at once, the back of the head and neck collapsed, followed by the shoulders and back. A clear gelatin had formed inside.

“Jesus,” Judy snapped, watching the body melt in front of her eyes. She had seen many strange things on her table, but never that. I had seen it, though, and so had Sean.

“You can’t stop it,” I said. “Let it go. It isn’t toxic.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“ Leichenesser ,” Sean said.

The buttocks, the backs of the thighs, then the calves all melted down like wax within seconds. The gelatin dissolved everything, even the oily blood on the tray beneath it.

Leichenesser was another controlled technology used in combat. It could start as a small seed, but it fed on necrotized flesh. It was used by the field meds to clean out gangrene and other infections, but in combat, it was very useful against revivors. A lot of the newer ones were seeded with it, set to go off in case their memories were tampered with.

“It only consumes dead flesh,” I told her. “That fuels its growth. When there’s nothing left to eat, it dissipates.”

The gelatin continued to dissolve the body, and then it began to boil away into mist. In less than a minute, a single blob of it sizzled around a pool of blood in the middle of the tray like water on a hot pan. Then it was gone.

The tray was empty except for a few surgical instruments, some lightweight shield plating from inside the body, and the long blade that had been concealed up inside the forearm. Sean used his forceps to pick up a cluster of nodules webbed together that had been the revivor components fixed beneath the skull and along the spine, but they were ruined.

“What caused that?” Judy asked, leaning back in.

“I think I did,” I said. The text I’d managed to pull off before I’d triggered the gelatin’s release still sat in a window in the corner of my vision. I brought it to the forefront for a closer look. It was a portion of a list of names.

5. Mae Zhu

6. Rebecca Valle

7. Harold Craig

8. Doyle Shanks

I didn’t recognize any of them. There were four missing from the head of the list, and any number that might have followed.

“I’ll catalogue what’s left behind here and see what I can get off of it,” Sean said.

“You do that,” I said. “In the meantime, I think it’s time I poked my head in over at Heinlein Industries.”

“Yeah?”

“Their product is popping up where it doesn’t belong.”

I pushed through the doors to the lab, and Sean followed me out, glancing over his shoulder as Judy frowned at the cadaver tray.

“As a heads-up,” he said, keeping his voice low, “I sat on my findings regarding your suspect’s kill switch as long as I could, but Noakes knows. He’s going to want to know what you did to set a device like that off while you were alone with that guy in the interrogation room.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth.”

Even as I said it, though, I was replaying the recording in my mind.

…don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say …

He’d been coerced, but not by me. Before I talked to anyone else on our side, I needed to track down that woman again, and try to find out what the truth was.

“Green light,” Shanks said from the passenger’s seat. It was snowing again, but the streets were filled with people, and even this far from the restaurant district, the unease was palpable. News of the bombing had saturated every form of media before authorities could even lock down the site. Every time a new report came in, the death toll went up. The carnage had been horrible.

A horn honked behind us, snapping me out of it.

“Faye, it’s green.”

I gunned the engine and pulled out and veered down the next ramp on my right. At the bottom, I edged out onto the main street, nosing past the stream of foot traffic. When the GPS stopped blinking, I pulled off. Hitting the blues, I flashed them a few times and tapped the siren as I crunched over a snowdrift and partially up onto the sidewalk as pedestrians grudgingly moved out of the way to allow access to the parking ramp.

“Look, Faye—”

“I told you I’m fine.”

I left the blues on steady, then sat there for a minute, watching the light flicker off the snow and concrete while the garage cameras scanned the car and people trudged past, rubbernecking as they went. They all wanted to know what was going on. Who had set off the bomb and why? Were more attacks coming?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions.

“You don’t look fine.”

I felt Shanks move his hand over my own around the steering wheel. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. His hand was warm and dry.

“No one would think worse of you if you took five,” he said.

Shanks was a good guy. A good partner, and a good guy. He knew me as well as anyone did, I guessed, and he knew me just well enough to know I was fraying at the edges. He understood it. I felt like I knew where I stood with him, and it was tempting to give in to the stress and the fatigue and rest, but I couldn’t. If I did, I might never get back up.

He’s right. You’re not fine, but you can’t stop , the voice in my head whispered.

The mayor has placed the city on high alert. Every cop in the city has been deployed. We just had a terrorist attack in a major population center, and we don’t have any idea who was responsible. Shouldn’t we—

It doesn’t matter . The killer won’t stop.