James Knapp - State of Decay

“Yeah.”

He stared at me a minute longer, then took a step back, giving me room to get by. He looked drunk or drugged.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked.

“Just the cab driver,” I said, slipping through the door. It was nothing but a big concrete box, filled with old junk. As I looked around, I saw furniture underneath plastic tarps, stacks of boxes, and other stuff filling up most of the available space.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

“I had to,” he said.

“Had to?”

As messed up as I was, I could see something was really weird about him. I hadn’t been around him that much, but he was acting totally different from before, like he was a totally different person. His eyes looked dull and his expression didn’t change when he talked.

“What happened?” I asked. When his aura phased into view, there was a thin membrane of light rippling under everything else, like a torn parachute falling from the sky. There was a bright cord tethering the membrane to someplace deep inside of him. I recognized that.

“Why are you so scared?”

He started to protest, but I soothed the membrane back, calming it.

“Don’t—”

I’m not sure what made me do it, but I put my hand on his.

“Shhh.”

The billowing light faded a little more but wouldn’t quite go away. Even as his expression and his breathing relaxed, the tension wouldn’t completely go away, and my heart kind of went out to him. Underneath his fear were other things: guilt, uncertainty, sadness, loneliness, and all the other things I knew so well. In him they were more structured than usual, but in some ways that seemed to make them all the more intense, like the colors were reined in but more concentrated and brighter.

“Stop doing that,” he said, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice.

“Why?”

There was no one there to see. I put my other hand on his stomach, right under where the gun was strapped. It felt flat and firm under his shirt. Right away, I could tell from the way his patterns shifted that he hadn’t been touched in a long time. I knew how that felt too.

Maybe it was the alcohol, or just the total weirdness of the whole thing, but all I could think about right then was the way he felt under my hand. Without thinking, I ran my palm up and down his belly, feeling the ridges of muscle underneath his cotton undershirt.

“I know you miss it,” I said. “I know you know how I feel.”

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t pull away either. He put a hand on my shoulder like he might push me away, but he just left it there as the colors shifted in front of my eyes. His eyes drooped further as I moved closer, my forehead almost touching his chest.

“I wanted to thank you,” I said into his shirt.

“For what?”

“For caring about me, even a little bit.”

Something flashed from the darkness behind him just then. When I looked over, I saw a pair of eyes glowing softly back in the corner.

Not now …

There was no one else there; I had checked before I went inside, so I had to be seeing things again. But then the eyes moved. Something got knocked over, and the eyes began to move closer.

“You …”

Breaking out of the trance, Nico jumped, looking disoriented. I pulled my hands back in surprise as a figure stepped out of the shadows, moving toward me. It was her, the dead woman from my dreams, naked except for a button-up shirt that was open at the top. She stepped forward again, then stopped short with the jingle of metal as she reached the end of the chain that was pad-locked to her ankle.

“You can’t be here,” I said, as Nico turned to look and saw her too. She was really there. For some reason, her hair was gone, even her eyebrows, but there was no mistaking her. She even had a thick, puckered pink gash closed up in the middle of her chest.

She stood there, following my eyes down to the wound.

“It got split,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” I said, taking a step back. Nico looked from her to me.

“Zoe, calm down.”

“Why is she here?”

“I need to know what she knows,” he said, gripping me by the shoulders. He held me hard enough so that it hurt a little.

“What?”

“She might be the only one that can tell me,” he said. “I need you to help me.”

It was a trick. He didn’t call me to him because he needed me; it was because he needed her. All he wanted me for was to do something for him. He wanted me to make his woman friend talk.

“Help you do what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. His patterns were so chaotic right then that I doubt he even knew himself.

“Please,” he said.

“You want to know what’s in her head,” I said. “Fine.”

So I pushed, and I pushed hard. Maybe because I was drunk or maybe just because I was angry; it wasn’t fair that another woman was there, and it wasn’t fair that even though she was dead, he could only think about her and not me. It wasn’t fair that he only called me to do a trick for him. None of it was fair. Right at that moment I wanted to control her, to make her leave or back off, or maybe even hurt her if I could.

So, I was drunk, and I was mad, and I pushed hard. I pushed real hard.

The room got very bright, and everything went almost gray. I focused on the woman in front of me with more intensity than I think I’d ever turned on anyone. I reached out to the place where the light would bloom.

“Zoe?”

They didn’t appear. No lights, no colors …nothing. When I stared into her eyes, they didn’t change, they didn’t get dull and stupid. They just stared back.

My heart started beating faster. This had never happened before, not ever. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the patterns rippling around Nico’s head. It was working, just not on her.

I pushed harder, concentrating until the light got so bright she was all I could see; her face, her eyes, and the empty space where it should have been. Her thoughts, her consciousness, her self, her soul …whatever it was, it wasn’t there. The light blotted out everything else until the only thing that was dark was that empty spot, that empty hole where she should have been. It was like looking into an abyss or a black hole. When I pushed against it …

“Zoe!”

All at once, the lights dimmed back to normal. He was shaking my shoulder. The dead girl was still standing there, looking at me. I wiped my nose and there was blood.

“What happened? What did you see?”

She was just standing there, staring at me the way she did in my dreams. Those electric eyes watched me lifelessly as I backed away. I had to get out of there.

Nico reached out to me and I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. What was I doing there? What in the world ever compelled me to get involved in this whole thing? All I wanted was to get back to my apartment, lock the door, and forget about the whole thing—him, her …everything. It was a mistake. The whole thing was a mistake.

I stumbled to the door, and he followed me. I pushed on him again, making him stop before he could reach me.

“Your friend is gone,” I told him, and left. He didn’t come after me.

He didn’t even come after me.

After Zoe ran, I wasn’t sure what I should do. Faye had sat back down on the bedroll and hadn’t spoken in minutes.

“Who was that?” she asked finally.

“No one.”

I hadn’t wanted to risk poking around in her systems, because I knew she was seeded with Leichenesser, and the memory of the dock revivor melting away on that autopsy table was too fresh in my mind. That had been triggered when I started rifling through sections of memory I wasn’t supposed to be in.