James Knapp - State of Decay

Something cold and hard pressed underneath my jaw. I heard a metallic click, and knew that sound; it was a pistol’s hammer. I raised my hands, my face still near his chest.

“Back away,” he told me. His eyes had opened. I hadn’t seen the gun or noticed him move. I moved back from him slowly. He forced my chin toward the ceiling with the gun. I sat back on my heels while he held me there and sat up on the sofa.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” I said.

“I’m not afraid,” he said, but the pulsing in his chest said otherwise.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know where I am.”

I looked at his face, and thought he would shoot me. His eyelids drooped, but there was fear in his eyes, like he had lost his senses.

A memory swam up from the sea of lights; it opened like a portal to show the inside, where this man knelt over me. Blood dripped from his hand as he held something sharp. A pair of scissors was pointed at my chest. The portal went dark, and shrank to a point of light that flew back to join the rest.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” I told him.

He stared at me until his eyes seemed to clear. He eased the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb and then moved the gun away.

“What are you going to do with me?” I asked. He didn’t respond to that.

“Do you remember me, Faye?”

Points of light sparkled through the memory field. I’d known him for a long time, and very well, though he seemed like a stranger. One light displayed our fingers, laced together. I remembered the warmth of his palm in mine.

“Yes, I know you. You’re Nico.”

His heart sped up and he said, “Do you remember what happened?”

I scanned the sea of lights, but I wasn’t sure. It was difficult to make sense of them all. He watched me, waiting.

“I don’t know how I got here.”

“It’s okay,” he told me after a while. “Someone is coming to help you retrieve them.”

“What do you mean? Retrieve what?”

“Your memories. You learned something …just before. You were in your apartment. You thought our cases were related …do you remember that?”

I did remember. Spots had formed on the floor, like blood but darker. They dripped down from the thin air. The air rippled, and a dark figure appeared. It had been right there, watching us the whole time. It raised the pistol it held in its right hand …

“It killed him first,” I whispered.

“You weren’t the target. It was your partner. You just got in the way.”

Doyle had been about to tell me something…. What was he going to say?

“How can you be sure that’s true?”

“We recovered a partial list of names from an illegally trafficked revivor. The list contained four names: the victims of the last three murders, and that of your partner, Doyle Shanks. I’m sorry, Faye. I didn’t know who he was.”

“But why was he on the list?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. What do you remember about him? Who was he?”

Again, light sparkled through the field of memories. I had known Doyle Shanks for a long, long time. I worked with him every day. We tracked the killer who finally killed us both. He was with me the night before Mae Zhu’s death, and dropped me off at my place. The next morning he’d called to—

The associated memory had come forth. It hung suspended over the rest of them, opened up like a portal. The images from that night were beyond it. He dropped me off; then I saw a distortion, like a glitch left by a splice. I slept, then was awakened by the strange call.

“What’s the matter?” Nico asked.

“The memory,” I said. “It’s wrong.”

“Wrong?”

I focused on the memory distortion. The glitch tied the two memories together, concealing a missing piece. I concentrated, peering through the strange gap. I saw Shanks drop me off at my place, and then …

Faye, I wish it didn’t have to be like this.

Shanks sat on the edge of my bed, getting dressed. I lay on my stomach, nude and still sweaty.

Me too.

When I said it, I was upset. I felt sick. He was rough and left me feeling sore and used. He smiled, though, like I had just agreed with him.

I do care for you , he said. He brushed my hair behind my ear with one hand. Why had I agreed to this?

This was a mistake , I said.

No, it wasn’t.

It was.

His eyes narrowed, and he leaned in very close. The warm brown of both his eyes was blotted out as his pupils dilated.

No, it wasn’t , he growled.

The anxiety left me, bleeding away. In its place, I felt relaxed. Happy, even.

This never happened , he said, no longer looking at me. I left you at the door and I never came inside. I have never been inside your apartment.

He got up and left me lying there in bed. He never looked back at me.

“I remembered it wrong,” I said to Nico. His heart went even faster.

“Zhang’s Syndrome,” he said to himself.

Through the memory’s portal, I studied the gap. What I saw there wasn’t real. It was a dream I’d had a long time ago. My brain’s decay had overlapped the memories. I couldn’t tell a dream from reality.

The portal closed and shrank to a point of light. I noticed then that it stood out from the rest. It appeared different somehow. It was dimmer than the rest. When it rejoined the rest in the field of lights, I saw more that were like it.

I drew one closer and peered inside of it. The memory itself was inconsequential, but the same strange glitch was there.

They’ve all been corrupted…. None of them are real….

I gazed down on the sea of information. When I did, I picked out more tainted memories, more than I could imagine. They were spread through the others like a cancer.

How many of them weren’t real? I saw ten, then twenty, then one hundred…. There were more than I could count.

“I remembered it wrong,” I whispered again, while the man named Nico just stood there and stared.

The life that I’d known was gone.

“Zoe, wake up,” a woman’s voice said.

I opened my eyes and found myself slouched in a folding chair behind a metal table. The walls were concrete, painted green, and at the far end, the overhead light was on but there was no one there. Before I could stop myself, I began to cry. I didn’t want to be there anymore.

“He needs you. Wake up,” the voice said. It was the dead woman, the one who got stabbed. She moved into the light where I could see her.

“Go away.”

“He called you, remember? You need to go to him.”

Tears were blurring my vision, but I could see something shifting at the far end of the room, under the overhead light. It was like a heat ripple or something, a distortion.

“You need to wake up right now!”

When I squinted, the ripples in the air took the shape of a person, like the outline of a big man. Before I could get a better look, they disappeared again.

“Zoe!”

The images faded as I snapped out of it, gasping in air. Over the years, I had gotten used to waking up and not knowing exactly where I was, but this time something was wrong.

When I gasped, something that was touching me pulled away all of a sudden. Someone had a hand on one of my legs and was dragging me. I was lying on what might have been a chair or a sofa, but it wasn’t mine. A breeze cut through the stuffy, warm air and blew over my face; it was outside air.

I opened my eyes and saw it was dark, but I could see the city lights through a window above me and I heard one of the monorails clacking by over the howl of the wind.

Startled, I tried to sit up, and my arms and legs hit something as I flailed. I was in an enclosed space, and there was someone leaning over me. Someone big, with sour, smelly breath.