James Knapp - State of Decay

I rubbed my eyes and checked the video, backing it up. When I replayed it, I got the same thing: the revivor turned, started to get up; then the area around it flickered and faded away until it was gone. It was as if it had turned invisible. For just a second, there was a distortion in the shape of a man in the air, then nothing.

Sometimes a single detail caused a series of others to suddenly fall into place, and what I saw on the footage was like that. The killer was wearing some kind of suit that cloaked him or camouflaged him. At the truck fire, I wasn’t seeing things. The human outline in the smoke that I thought was my imagination was real. The revivor that killed the Valles had been there; it stood right there in front of me. What was it doing there? Was it following me?

Standing up quickly, I felt the blood rush from my head and I stumbled back into the chair. Shanks started to catch me, but I had righted myself. What had he been talking about?

“Doyle, what did you mean, ‘we suspected’?”

The killer couldn’t have followed me to the truck; even if it was unable to be seen, it was far too big and the train was too crowded for it to go unnoticed. There was no way it could have been waiting there for me, because I didn’t know I’d be there myself.

The only explanation was that it was already there for reasons that had nothing to do with me. It was responsible for the attack on the truck. It was up to something bigger than a string of simple murders.

Shanks held out his hand like he was going to touch my arm, and when I pulled away, he looked hurt. The way he was looking at me made me very uneasy, like he had dropped some kind of facade. The things he was saying and the way he was acting seemed out of character. Had he been working for some other department this whole time? Had they had him watching me for some reason?

I thought of what the revivor had said on the phone. The man sitting next to you is not your friend….

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced at the display. It was Nico.

“Faye, please,” Shanks said.

“Shut up.”

“I—”

“Doyle, shut up.”

I flipped open my phone and started talking.

“Nico, I know who the killer is. These murders and what happened that morning are related, I—”

My voice trailed off as I noticed the spots on the floor, like blood but darker. As I watched, several more appeared, dripping down from out of nowhere. I followed the drops upward, and the source should have been right in front of me.

“Faye, you’re in danger,” I heard him say. “Where are you?”

The air rippled, and all at once the revivor appeared. It was standing right there in front of me. It must have already been in the apartment when we came in. It had been watching us the whole time.

I was still staring when it lashed out and I caught a metallic flash under the light. Something warm spattered the side of my face and neck. Shanks collapsed onto his knees, then forward onto the floor, his gun falling free from his hand.

“Faye!” Nico’s voice barked from the phone.

It turned to me. The moonlit eyes glared down at me, orange light flickering behind the pupils.

“It’s here—” I said into the phone, as the revivor reached forward and took it, snapping it closed before placing it on the end table.

There was no way it was going to leave me alive. I went for my gun, but before it was fully clear of the holster, the revivor’s right hand and forearm split apart to reveal a dark gap inside where something metallic caught the light.

It struck me in the chest with its palm, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and at that same instant, I heard what sounded like a burst of air followed by an awful crunch.

“What a waste,” the revivor said.

All the strength went out of me, and my fingers slipped off its wrist. Looking down, I saw that some kind of blade had actually thrust out of a chamber inside its forearm, impaling me through the middle of the chest. With a loud snap, the blade pulled free and disappeared back into its arm, which closed over the seam, and the gun slipped from my fingers and onto the floor as I began to fall.

Don’t leave me like this , I wanted to say, but my lips wouldn’t move. Don’t let them bring me back….

At the last second, terror welled up inside me. It came on like a light from inside, and everything seemed crystal clear. There were no flashes or memories from my life, just that terror, pure and solitary, for just an instant.

The fear subsided, and I was floating weightless, drifting backward into the darkness and a long, long overdue sleep.

The city was crawling with police and soldiers. After the second bomb went off, Ohtomo had begun deploying the revivor soldiers. They’d all be animate and on the ground by nightfall. Checkpoints were being set up at the bridges. Overhead, a military helicopter passed between two buildings as I turned, numb, onto Faye’s street.

At the end, where her apartment sat, trash bags and snow bordered the road. There was no place to pull over, so I nosed into the no-parking zone in front of her building and cut the engine. Sitting there, feeling the heat leech out of the cab, I tried to take some solace from the fact that the girl, Flax, would most likely be dead if I hadn’t been there, but it didn’t provide much.

She’s in trouble. She’s going to die.

Zoe’s warning had come too late. I called Faye immediately, but the call was cut off. Before I’d gotten to the main drag, I got word from the local police. I was too late. Noakes had ordered me back to the arena, where I dealt with the fallout for half the night. Part of me was glad.

Wind blew over the car as a jeep slowed down at the intersection ahead and the soldier riding shotgun peered in at me from behind his visor. I held up my badge and pressed it against the inside of the windshield. After a few seconds, the jeep continued on.

When I shouldered open the car door, it crunched into a bank of snow, and a blast of cold, damp air blew into the car. The sky was overcast, a sliver of gray trailing through the building tops. Even though it was barely afternoon, it looked almost dark. Somehow it seemed fitting.

I pulled myself out of the car and pushed the salt-covered door closed with my foot. Looking around, I saw dirty slush and snow that had refrozen so many times it formed a slick, gray-black trench that bordered the narrow street. Cars were jammed in tight, some covered up to their windshields. Garbage bags stood in piles, waiting to be picked up, stinking faintly even in the cold.

This was where she lived? Sometimes I forgot what a difference full citizenship could mean, even for a public servant. I remembered how tired she’d looked at the restaurant, and how the stress had worked its way into her eyes. She was jacked up on stims and strung out. I’d known something was wrong, but when she smiled I looked past it. When she smiled, it took me back those ten years to before we’d made our choices, back to when she looked happy, and when, if the right song came on, she would dance.

It’s here—

It wasn’t like I never expected to see her again. On some level, I think I hoped our paths might cross someday, but when I extended my tour, the months turned into years, and before I knew it a decade had passed. When I heard her voice out of the blue, I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. But when I saw her in the restaurant, I knew I’d made a mistake back then. Things should have been different.

How could you come back and not even call me?