James Knapp - State of Decay

“Nice place,” he said.

Dropping my satchel next to the door, I made my way into the living room and hung my coat on the rack. Scanning the room quickly, I saw it was reasonably clean, which wasn’t surprising, since it seemed like I barely set foot inside my apartment myself these days.

“Take off your coat. Make yourself at home,” I said, gesturing at the sofa.

He hung his coat next to mine and sat back on the couch, looking around.

“Looks like you’ve got a message,” he said, pointing at the computer terminal set up at the edge of the living area. A green light flashed on the printer, where a couple of pages were sitting in the bay. I grabbed them on my way to the kitchen.

“You want coffee or a drink?” I asked. “I’m having a drink.”

“Make it two, then.”

“Wine okay?”

“Sure.”

I probably didn’t need the alcohol, but I definitely didn’t need any more stimulants, and there wasn’t much time available to wind down. Uncorking a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter, I poured out two glasses before shaking out a blue capsule and dropping it in mine. I drank the first sip, making sure to get the floating pill, and swallowed it as I looked at the papers from the printer. It was a copy of the lab report.

“That was fast,” I said, bringing the other glass to Shanks.

“What?”

“It’s the results of the blood sample we just dropped off. How can they be done already?”

The header on the top sheet read ERRSAMP. That was the code for “Erroneous Sample,” which was shorthand for a field slipup. They had decided it was an innocuous substance. No wonder it came back so fast.

“Son of a bitch. They’re saying the sample was a mistake.”

Double-checking the sample code and identification number, it looked like they had processed the right sample. I read farther down to see what the determination was.

SAMPLE TYPE: BLOOD.

DETERMINED: INORGANIC OR INERT.

That couldn’t be right. The sample was organic; it had showed up as organic under the ALS light; that’s why I had taken it. The pattern was consistent with the spatter from a gunshot wound. It had to be blood.

“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.