James Knapp - State of Decay

Got it , the security agent said. Rebecca Valle is the second wife of Luis Valle’s father, Miguel, and get this—Rebecca, the husband, and their daughter were all found dead in their home earlier today.

The medics hoisted the body onto a gurney, leaving behind nothing but a mess on the tiled floor. Whatever else he was, Cross wasn’t the kind of man who dealt with men like Tai. It sounded as though he found something at Heinlein, something that made him enlist the help of his computer-savvy nephew. Rebecca Valle’s name on that list of targets tied them together, though, somehow. Did she prompt Cross to get involved in whatever he had gotten involved in?

“Hold on,” I said, stopping the medics before they wheeled the body away. I found a cell phone in his pocket. Sure enough, Luis Valle was on his list of contacts. I punched the number in and the phone started to ring.

Someone was looking for that boy. By now, he most likely knew he was in trouble and was on the run.

He’s not answering his phone , I said, snapping it shut. Coordinate with local police and find that kid. Offer a reward—whatever it takes. I think we don’t have much time.

I’m on it.

Dig up some information on a Samuel Fawkes, too. According to Heinlein, he’s deceased, but find out if he was candidate for reanimation, and if so, where he ended up.

Will do. Can I ask why?

The coroner zipped Cross into a bag. I wasn’t sure why, but he took a bullet in the back because he wanted me to know that Samuel never left, whatever that meant.

Because something is going on at Heinlein that someone is trying to hide.

The kid, Luis Valle, might be the only one left who knew what.

When Wachalowski first left the envelope full of evidence with me, I was so excited that I didn’t think that much about what exactly he expected me to do with it, or how I was going to be able to give him any information he didn’t already know. It had been a while since he left, and although I had been looking at some of the stuff he gave me, I was mostly just a lot drunker.

Gray light peeked in from behind the shade, but the bedroom was lit by a couple of the scented candles Karen had left behind. Usually I didn’t use them, because candles and me didn’t mix, but the overhead was out. The light flickered over the walls where I had tacked up about half the stuff from the envelope so far.

Mostly it was a bunch of documents, but I wasn’t about to read through all that. Mixed in were copies of ID cards, what looked like schematics of some kind, and some other things I didn’t recognize. There were also ten printouts of waveforms like the kind I doodled on the card I’d left for him that night. They were all labeled RHS, along with a number code in the lower right-hand corner. Those squiggles meant a lot to him, but I didn’t even remember drawing the one on the card and I had no idea what I was supposed to be able to tell from them.

I’d been staring at them tacked up on the wall and letting my mind drift, but like I said, I was pretty much only getting drunker. I held the empty shot glass against my lower lip, smelling the fumes and waiting for inspiration to come.

Someone knocked on the front door, snapping me out of it. I sighed into the glass, fogging it up. Considering that up until a few days ago I hadn’t had any visitors for years, now it seemed like I never stopped getting them.

Putting down the glass and the bottle, I crawled off the bed and made my way to the door, thinking it was probably Karen and that maybe she wanted her clothes back. Nico had said he had someplace he had to go, so it probably wasn’t him. At least I hoped not, because I didn’t have anything to tell him.

Usually I used the peephole, but this time I didn’t. I should have, because it wasn’t Karen and it wasn’t Nico; it was my asshole next-door neighbor.

“God, what do you want?” I asked. He stood there watching me in that weird way he had.

“You get a lot of visitors lately,” he said.

He was too much. I’d had it with him. How did I end up with this spaz living next to me? The old woman had never done anything but smile at me in the hall every once in a while, which was almost never, because she came out of her apartment even less than I did. What was wrong with this guy? Was this just his weird way of trying to make conversation, or was he some kind of nut job?

Either way, I didn’t care anymore. Without bothering to answer, I focused on him until the color drained away from everything and the lights swelled.

The colors that drifted above him came into view, and so did that strange, thin white halo I noticed before. In fact, since I was concentrating harder this time, it was much brighter. It was brighter than anything else, and got even more intense until it threatened to wash out everything.

Right then, I started to feel funny, and instead of his curiosity or whatever it was disappearing, it was my anger and frustration that just melted away. This total relaxation kind of came over me that was even better than drinking.

The lights dimmed back to normal around me and his colors faded until they were gone, along with the odd halo. He was looking directly into my eyes and smiling faintly.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Your new friend is a federal investigator,” he said, still smiling.

“Yeah.”

“What did he want?”

“I’m helping him on a case he’s working on.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little proud of that fact. “He left me some stuff, some evidence to look at.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I would like very much to see that.”

“You want to see?”

“If it’s appropriate,” he said, still staring into my eyes.

“Well, he said none of it was classified….”

I opened the door wide enough for him to enter, pushing over a stack of notebooks as I did. His face changed for a second, showing what might have been disgust or contempt, but it was gone as fast as it came. Stepping back to let him through, I gestured to my bedroom door.

“Through here,” I said. “Follow me.”

He came inside, one of his shoes knocking into something that skittered across the floor before he closed the door behind him. His footsteps sounded behind me as I headed back into my room, where the contents of the envelope were tacked up.

As I looked over the array of things hanging on the walls, I felt him also looking behind me.

“Your friend works with revivors,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s something about the case he’s working on.”

He moved closer to the printouts with the heart squiggles on them and studied them. His eyes moved across the walls, looking at the other documents, IDs, and whatnot before they landed on the evidence envelope sitting open on my bed.

“May I?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He picked up the envelope and looked inside before shaking out what was left out onto my bed. Among the other papers were a stack of photographs that he spread out over the mattress.

One was a dark-skinned Asian man with a long face and long black hair. He was creepy- looking, and I knew right away I’d never seen him before. Another one looked like a video still of a girl revivor. She was standing completely naked in what looked like a public bathroom, with those electric eyes staring out from behind strands of straight black hair. I recognized that one; I’d seen her on the news in one of the clips the data miner had picked out when I was filtering on Wachalowski’s name.

He pushed the photographs around for a moment so that he could see them all. He didn’t show any particular interest in the naked ones, but he did linger on one in particular.