James Knapp: State of Decay

As we moved up the ramp, the hot air below became a warm breeze, rushing over us from behind and smelling like smoke. We stepped out into the night and the crisp, cold air. Snow began to fall on my face. It felt good.

The helicopters had been joined by three more, sitting there quietly in the dark. There were no soldiers around, so they had to still be down there. Did they follow the revivors as they tried to get out, or did the whole lot of them burn?

I tried to open a connection to Faye. She didn’t respond.

“What do we do now?” Cal asked.

Sean.

Yeah?

I need an EMT at my location.

You got it. Good to hear from you, Nico.

You too.

I knelt down in the snow next to them, the last reserves of my energy trickling away. Zoe stood near me, shivering in the snow as the wind whipped through her thin white linens. I took my coat off and pulled her down to me, placing it around her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Come here.”

I guided her into my lap to keep her bare feet out of the snow, and held her as she shook.

She’s just one of many, Agent. Your friend isn’t unique; she’s one of thousands….

Fawkes believed it. He’d provoked the deployment of the National Guard so he could take control of its revivor ranks, then used them to kill the people on his list. He thought he was bringing down a massive conspiracy. He’d been torturing those people in that underground facility to try to learn how they did what they did and how to stop them.

Zoe shivered in my arms. Was Fawkes insane? Or could there be some truth to what he said?

Nico, what happened down there? Sean asked.

If my memories had been altered, I wouldn’t know it. Zoe proved that the day I first met her.

…she’s one of thousands, and they have been using you to get to me….

The kind of destruction going on below us wasn’t sanctioned by the FBI. Whoever was behind the operation, it wasn’t us. They were destroying everything. Faye was gone, this time for good.

Nico, respond. What happened down there?

I don’t know , I said, and cut the connection.

Cal scowled as a gust of wind blew. She looked down at me.

“Hey, what do we do now?” she asked again.

“We wait.”

“Wait,” she snorted.

“Quietly,” I said, and that’s how it ended.

Well, more or less.

“Hey, you okay?”

I caught myself staring into space again. I’d been doing that a lot. After everything was over and I finally got back, nothing felt the same. I guess I hadn’t really been gone very long, but it felt like forever.

I tipped my glass back, smelling the licorice and letting the fire fill my mouth, then my throat and belly. Karen watched me do it, but even though I don’t think she approved, she still smiled. I think she didn’t expect to ever see me again. I know I didn’t expect to see her again.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me stay with you. My place is kind of a crime scene.”

They had held me for a while and asked a lot of questions. I wanted to see Nico, but they wouldn’t let me. I was brought to another room where they tried to stick me with a needle, but I made them let me go. When the cab dropped me off, there were some cops still in my apartment and yellow police tape was all across the front door. The place was totally trashed, and no one would tell me anything. There were markers on the floor around a giant bloodstain, and kind of in the middle of it was the outline of a body in white tape. I found out later that it was my next-door neighbor. The revivor that took me killed him right there in my living room.

They asked me if I had anywhere else to stay while they finished their investigation, and when I said I didn’t, they said I should get a hotel for a few days. I was too afraid to ask what happened to Karen. I was looking around, afraid to find another outline, when she showed up in the hallway. She got me something to eat, and better still, something to drink. It was like she was waiting for me.

“Did they tell you anything?” she asked. I shook my head.

“Me neither,” she said. “Did they find out who it was?”

“No.”

“Well, you can stay here as long as you need.”

“What about what’s- his-face?” I asked. I didn’t see the oaf in the tank top anywhere around.

“He doesn’t live here; he just stays here,” she said. “He’s going to stay at his place for a while.”

Her eyes got kind of teary, and she wiped at the big, nasty double shiner she got when she ran in and tried to rescue me.

“Sorry you got hurt,” I said. She smiled, but she didn’t even remember how it happened. She never mentioned the revivor that broke in and attacked me, because she didn’t remember it. When I wiped her memory, it was like for her that part never happened. She knew only what she’d been told afterward. “What about your friend, the agent?” she asked.

“Nico’s going to check in later.”

“You’ll get to see him again, then.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t know how I felt about that. He didn’t just say he’d check in; he wanted to use me as a consultant, on the department payroll. He wanted to keep it very quiet, though. I thought that would make me happy, but it didn’t.

Mostly that was because he changed. At some point between the time I left him in the storage unit and the time he held me in his lap outside the factory, he’d changed. Not his personality, even though his face had changed a little and his left eyelid had gotten a little droopy. He still acted the same, and he still talked the same, but he was different.

“I can’t change him anymore,” I said into my glass.

“What?”

“Nico,” I said. “I can’t change him anymore. I can’t—”

I almost said “control him,” but I stopped myself. When I looked, I could see the colors around him. I could see the pain and the confusion and all the rest of it, but when I pushed, the colors didn’t change.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. She didn’t get it. She couldn’t.

“How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking?”

“You’re not supposed to know,” she said, smiling a little.

“Then what do I do?”

“Get to know him.”

Get to know him. That was easy for her to say.

My drink was gone, and without asking she poured me another one, but a small one.

“Oh, by the way, I found this slipped under the front door,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a blank business card with some writing on it. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Is it for you? From your friend Nico, maybe?”

I took the card and turned it over. There was handwriting in small print on the back of it.

You did it. Your place is with us. My stomach dropped a little.

“It’s not from Nico,” I said.

“Do you know what it means?”

I crumpled up the card in my hand, then dropped it in the trash.

“No,” I said. “If it’s okay, I think my place is with you.”

A couple days after the whole thing went down, I stood out in the cold to wait for the bus, and it was goddamn gray out. The sky, what you could see, was gray; the buildings looked gray; everything was gray. The wind howled down the street, kicking up the dusting we got. It was cold. I heard that where I was going they had the opposite problem, but it couldn’t be much worse.