James Knapp: State of Decay

Faye was dead. I walked away from her a long time ago, and by the time I regretted it, she was gone for good. She was dead; I had seen it with my own eyes, but the figure sitting in that chair and that face looking up at me were hers. That voice and the memories in that cold brain were hers. It was close enough.

Wasn’t it?

I fired, the muzzle flash lighting up the right side of her face for an instant before the figure behind her jerked and began to fall.

Her face was specked with black, and an oily drop began to roll down her cheek like a tear.

Stop, Agent Wachalowski.

The warning messages filled my entire line of sight, scrolling by until everything else was blocked out and I felt myself falling. The warnings flickered and snapped off just before everything in front of me went white except that one black blind spot. After a moment, that dissolved too, and I felt my head hit the floor.

Who is this?

Faintly, I heard what sounded like my gun landing nearby.

This is Samuel, Agent.

Nothing hurt anymore. I was disoriented, but I thought that I had finally pushed it too far. I had finally gone as far as I could go, and my body failed me.

His words floated in front of me: This is where it ends.

I followed a bunch of wires away from the strapped-down bodies and through a metal door that led into another big room, and that’s when I stopped. I was where I needed to be.

Across the room, the back wall was stacked top to bottom with big, clear plastic boxes, all with a door on the front. There were people in the cages, some up against the glass and some on their sides. Wires were spread out over the floor and up the sides of the plastic boxes, where they dropped through to connect to the heads of the people inside.

A loud screech came from behind the door in back of me, then another. I heard flames pop and burn. The goons were right behind me.

The room spun, like I got a head rush, and I heard screaming. It hit like a wave. It felt like the noise came from the people in the cages, but they weren’t moving. Their mouths were shut. There were no screams, not really, but the one who called me was there.

Eyes watched through the plastic as I went to the cage on the far bottom left and looked in. There was a girl in it, some scrawny little bitch I’d never seen before. She looked like she weighed ninety pounds, if that, with long, greasy red hair and a big beak nose. She sat on the floor and looked out at me.

“Who are you?” I asked. She just stared over that beak. Her hands were shaking in her lap, and she was sweating like a pig. Blood had come out of her right nostril in a big fat drop on her sweaty top lip.

Somewhere nearby a gun went off, and snapped me out of it.

“Hey!” I said thumping the glass with the gun I forgot I had. “Who are you?”

She put her face to the glass, and all of a sudden her eyes went freaky. The black part twitched, getting bigger and smaller. The blood drop got fatter and ran down her chin. With one bony finger she tapped the glass next to the lock, and I knew what to do. I pointed the gun at the bolt housing and pulled the trigger.

The plastic was tougher than it looked; I had to shoot it three times. I pulled open the door and went to grab her when she flinched, and all of a sudden I felt like a hand pushed me back. I stood there with my hand out.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“Zoe,” she said, and right then the goons came piling in. Our own guys …they just came in, guns out, and started shooting.

Bullets punched through the cages in front of me and I saw blood spatter inside. A woman’s head blew apart as specks of shattered plastic came falling down over us.

I grabbed the redhead’s wrist and dragged her out of the cage. Her knees hit the floor; then she got her legs back and hid behind me with two fistfuls of my jacket.

“Get off!”

Something hit the glass nearby and I saw some kind of brick with a flashing light on it stuck to the middle cage. I shoved her back, and the bitch pulled me down on top of her behind a rack of equipment. When I looked up, it was just in time to see the thing go off. The floor shook as the boom pounded my ears and a blast of heat hit me full-on. The glass blew into dust in a circle around it, until the whole thing was gone.

Through the ringing in my ears, I could hear her screaming behind me. I turned around to shut her up and saw two of the soldiers standing over us just a few feet away.

The girl was standing between us, hands clamped on her ears, toe-to-toe with the goons. She stood there staring at them, and they had us in their sights, but they stopped.

Then, just like that, one of the soldiers pointed his gun at the one next to him and put a slug right in his ear. No reason; he just blew his fucking head right off. His buddies got splattered, and turned on him like he’d gone nuts. The one that got shot was still falling when the guy that did it dropped his rifle and turned the flamethrower on the rest.

“Come on!” she yelled, pointing at the door that led back out the way I came. She didn’t have to say it twice.

We barreled through the door, gunshots booming over the shriek of the flamethrower.

I opened my eyes and saw a blue sky above me. It was a cool blue, with just a few white clouds, and even though I was shivering a little, it made me think of summer. The sound of wind and surf filled my ears, and just under that, faintly, were the sounds of others nearby as they talked and laughed and played.

Was I dreaming? Had I lost consciousness at the last moment in the factory, and was I imagining this place? Maybe I blacked out and the revivor finally killed me. Maybe it was all some kind of euphoria caused when my brain sensed the shock to my body was too much and released a flood of dopamine to ease my slipping away. Maybe I was finally going to die.

Agent Wachalowski.

That was no dream. The words hung there against the blue sky, then faded. I recognized the communications signature from when Fawkes broke in and hijacked Faye back in the storage unit. For better or worse, he was keeping me alive. I accessed my JZI and found a security lockdown had been initiated. He’d hacked into it, then, and been detected.

Where am I? I asked.

You haven’t moved. Your friend Ms. Dasalia is still near you. She is kneeling directly next to you. I know that matters to you. I found the way you looked at her when you stormed in a little touching.

What did you do to me?

Your cerebral implant was also developed at Heinlein Industries, Agent. You might be surprised how similar some of the technology is to the implants used in revivors.

No, I wouldn’t. What did you do?

I used a back door to communicate with your implant, briefly. I convinced it that fatal toxin levels were detected in your bloodstream. It put you in deep sedation to stop the spread until it could neutralize them.

I tried to move, but my body wouldn’t respond. Even when I rolled my eyes to look around, my view didn’t change, which meant the images were being fed to my brain directly and that my eyes, in reality, were still closed.

Warning messages began to flash over the image of the blue sky. He was hacking through the security locks to get access to the JZI’s main command functions. The only way to stop him would be to shut down the implant, but the emergency protocol was still in effect. It wouldn’t accept the shutdown code until it determined it was safe to do so.

Why not just kill me?