James Knapp - State of Decay

There’s a reporter down here looking for footage. Clear him out before you bring the revivors down.

Roger that.

“It’s already out,” he said. “You can’t keep it a secret. Just give me fifteen seconds’ worth.”

“Technically, if you’re not outside, you’re supposed to inform anyone you talk to if you’re going to record them,” I said. “Like you’re doing right now. If you want, I can slap an injunction on you, and the techs can take a crawl through everything you’ve got sitting in your buffers. How does that sound?”

That seemed to hit home, and he stayed behind as I headed across the parking lot toward my car. When I got in, I could see him still standing there like he wasn’t sure whether or not he should chance going back. In the rearview mirror I saw him watching me, probably still recording as I pulled out and drove away.

With the scene behind me, I took a deep breath. I realized my heart was pounding and I tried to slow it down. I couldn’t get the image of that girl revivor’s face out of my head.

The first time I ever saw a revivor’s face, it was dark out and hotter than hell. The revivor was a male, and when it came staggering up out of the wet grass, I knew for a fact that the man was dead because I was the one who had killed him.

The last time I’d seen one out in the grinder, I was being airlifted away in a helicopter, with a tube down my throat. It came lurching out of the brush, wet eyes staring right at me as we began to rise. Its teeth, stained bright red, were showing, and there was a terrible want on that waxy face that remained even as the gunner turned on it and made it dance.

“ Faye ,” he’d whispered. I could almost still hear him as I roused from the dream, stirring in my cold bed.

“ You’re a beautiful woman, Faye ….” He’d breathed it into my ear, the stubble from his chin pricking the side of my neck. He had finally stopped, and was propped over me, smelling like sweat and that brand of deodorant he used. Even awake, I could almost still smell him. It was almost real.

“ You deserve better than this ,” he’d said, as he said every time. “ The world should be yours .”

Stretching under the covers, I tried to shake it off. I didn’t want the world; all I wanted was to make it to first tier without getting shipped off to the grinder. I didn’t want the things I dreamed, no matter how many times I dreamed them. Sometimes I thought they happened because he was the only man I knew, but I knew him only because I worked next to him every day. We never had so much as a drink together, and he had never even been inside my apartment the entire time I’d known him.

Besides, I didn’t think of Doyle like that. It wasn’t even a departmental or career thing; I just didn’t think of him that way, and that made the whole thing all the more strange. Doyle Shanks was a friend and I liked him, but there was nothing else there. Not even the dreams could change that.

My phone was ringing. I cracked my eyes open and saw that neon was still seeping through the blinds, but otherwise the room was dark. It wasn’t morning yet, then. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep, but it hadn’t been nearly long enough.

The room seemed to spin slightly as I oriented myself, finding the dresser where the indicator light on my cell made a mellow green strobe as it rang again. Cold air rushed under the blankets as I groped for it and brought it close to my face to check the number; it wasn’t Shanks’s cell, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be calling me.

They found another body. That was the first thought that came into my head. That would make a fourth. Four murders, all the same. I knew somehow that the case was going to go from bad to worse. I retreated back under the covers and flipped open the phone.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Dasalia?” a man asked. It wasn’t Shanks; I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Who is this?”

“Is this Detective Dasalia?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Detective, someone is walking in your shadow.”

Terrific. A precious handful of hours of sleep, cut short for this.

“Look—”

“Stop following me, Detective.”

That got my attention. I sat up in bed, pulling the covers around me. Fumbling with the phone, I began recording the call and started a trace. Had he actually decided to make contact after being virtually invisible for so long? Could I be that lucky?

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Did you hear me? I said stop following me.”

“Am I following you?”

“Yes. You will find another one this morning. Your partner will find her first, but I want you to let it go.”

“You want me to let you continue killing these people and do nothing?”

“Yes.”

Glancing at the screen, I could see the trace was coming up empty. The ’bot was having trouble following the circuit connections back to the source, for some reason.

“Why should I do that?” I asked. “Why are you doing this? Help me understand it. Is it because they’re all first tier?”

So far, that was the only thing any of the victims had in common; they all managed to make it to first tier without getting shipped off to serve. It was a category I hoped to fall into myself one day, but none of the victims so far looked like they had to work very hard for it.

“Your only way out of this is to wake up,” he said, ignoring me.

The trace had failed. Whoever he was, he could be anywhere. He was quiet for a minute. I listened but I couldn’t hear anything on his end. There was nothing to indicate where he might be. The line was eerily quiet, almost like a digital recording.

“What do you mean—”

“Try to wake up,” he said, and the line cut out.

I stared at the LCD for a minute, trying to make sense of it as the screen flashed and the connection dropped.

The time said 3:13 a.m. I’d been in bed for a little more than four hours, and I had one more hour of sleep coming that I wasn’t going to get. The cold was already invading my bed. It was time to get moving.

Stretching again, I felt aches in my lower back and other places that were harder to explain. One night I had watched people on TV debate the possibility that a dream could be so vivid, it could affect a person’s physical body. At least one of them believed it was possible that dying in a dream that was vivid enough could result in a person’s death. It made me wonder whether the same premise held true for an erotic dream, and if one were vivid enough, would it be the same as actually committing the acts? If it was, it was grossly unfair.

I got up, hating the way my joints cracked as I stood and stretched. Since the tenant below had moved out, the floor was always freezing and I had gooseflesh head to toe in seconds. I snapped on the carnival glass lamp next to the bed, found my slippers, and shrugged on my robe, pulling it tightly around me. The floor squeaked under my feet as I made my way in a haze into the kitchen.

I’d spent the previous night comparing everything I knew about the victims, trying to find some kind of thread that tied them together, but so far I had come up pretty much empty. The murders had a ritualistic quality that made me think the selection of the victims should be significant, but none of them appeared to have anything in common at all, except their first- tier status, which wasn’t much to go on.

I poured a small glass of water from the filter and set it in the microwave, then took a single sugar cube from the little jar on the table. Using a dropper from the bottle next to it, I squeezed two amber drops onto the cube and watched the liquid bleed through the white granules. I was still staring at it when my phone rang again.