State of Decay (14 page)

“I missed you,” she said in my ear, but she didn’t let the hug linger. I found myself a little disappointed when she pulled away. When she did, her eyes darted to the scar on the side of my neck. She didn’t ask about it; she just made a note of it.

“Come on,” she said. “I got us a table.”

We sat down, wedged between the window and two businessmen who were talking animatedly. She reached across and switched on the noise screen, tuning it until the chatter of the businessmen faded into the general din.

She ordered hot noodles that came with an egg sitting in another bowl next to it. I got some kind of spring ramen.

“Since when are you a vegetarian?” she asked, peering down at my bowl.

“I’m not.”

She picked up the egg and cracked it, dumping the contents raw onto the noodles. She stirred them with her chopsticks, letting the egg congeal as the steam rose in little clouds between us. When she looked back up at me, her eyes darted to the scar again.

“Ask,” I said.

“What happened?”

“I was injured,” I said. “It happened when I was in the service.”

“How far down does it go?”

“Pretty far.”

She looked back at my face.

“Were your eyes always that blue?”

“No. They’re replacements.”

“Oh.”

“It’s good to see you, Faye.”

She smiled, but her eyes were sad. She looked like she wanted to say something but was having trouble with it. I’m not sure if I did it to spare her or to spare myself, but I spoke first.

“You saw the fire from the train?” I asked.

She nodded. This was familiar ground. This was something we could talk about.

“Yes. The fire was fairly close to the train stop, so I got off at the next platform and followed the smoke.”

“It was hard to tell from the footage,” I said. “Did you approach the truck because you heard something inside?”

“Yes.”

“So the revivor was animate?”

“At first.”

“What made you help it?”

“I didn’t realize it was a revivor at first. I thought she was alive. Even so . . .”

She sighed, her eyes looking distant for a moment.

“I understand,” I said.

“I’ve seen plenty of bodies, but I can’t get her face out of my mind. She was burned so badly.”

“They don’t feel pain,” I told her, but she didn’t look so sure.

“They don’t,” I said.

“It just seemed like so many of those people there were glad to see her like that.”

“It wasn’t alive.”

“She was once.”

“Yes, but it was too late to do anything about that. What you saw in the truck, they weren’t hostages. I didn’t rescue them.”

“What were they, then?”

“Evidence,” I said, and I could see that it bothered her. This was one of the big reasons why the government didn’t want the general public exposed to revivors if they could help it. When they had to deploy them locally, they used them sparingly. They kept them in full uniform, with their faces mostly covered. People weren’t supposed to relate to them. They were supposed to fear them. It’s what they were for.

“I heard what you did,” she said. “You risked your life.”

“Not for them. Those women didn’t sign up or donate; they were kidnapped and murdered. All I could do with them was deactivate them, dissect them, and hope something in there would lead us to whoever did this to them. So we can stop them from doing it to anyone else.”

She smiled, but looked down.

“You’ve changed.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry; I’m running on fumes.”

“Stim wearing off?”

“Yes.”

“You want tea?”

“I want sleep.”

She stared into her noodles, stirring them.

“The girl, the revivor, it spoke to me,” she said.

“Before it died, or deactivated, it was trying to tell me something.”

“What did it say?”

“It said to hide behind whatever I could and keep my head down, but I think it was rambling at that point.”

I recognized the words as the last thing I’d said to the revivor, but didn’t point that out.

“Anything else?”

“Yes. It said, ‘Zhang knew the truth.’ ”

“Zhang?”

“Yes. It said I had to wake up, and then it said it again: ‘Zhang knew the truth.’ ”

Zhang. That name had not come up at any point in our investigation. Not on the client list or Tai’s contact list.

“Does that name mean anything to you?” I asked.

“No.”

I sent a message via my implant.

When I brought my attention back to her, Faye was looking into my eyes intently.

“You have a JZ implant,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did you get that in the service?”

“After the standard tour, I specialized.”

“I know.”

A pause developed and started to get uncomfortable. Neither of us felt like eating, and there wasn’t enough time to get into the things we needed to talk about. I felt like I should ask her if she had gotten wired up for PH service, but I knew she had, and she knew that I knew. I felt like I should tell her it wasn’t too late to serve now. They wouldn’t throw her on the front lines at her age; she wouldn’t be exposed to the things I was. Her reasons for not wanting to go were probably the same as they had been, though, and the truth was I didn’t know whether I could argue my original position with the same conviction I’d once had.

“You know, it was strange,” she said suddenly. “Afterward, when I was waiting there, I decided to call you. I was still on the ground with the revivor, and I’d just gotten through. I swore I saw the strangest thing.”

“What?”

“For just a second, I thought I saw someone standing next to me.”

“What did he look like?”

“That’s just it—I couldn’t see him. Just his outline, like he was invisible. Just a hole in the snow and the smoke.”

I remembered the footprints I had seen next to the spot where she’d knelt, and wondered. She laughed a little.

“Too many stims,” she said.

“Maybe not.”

She wouldn’t have seen anything like that before, but I had. I wondered if the person responsible for the fire hadn’t been still standing there when she arrived. Maybe he just couldn’t be seen.

She frowned suddenly, and looked me in the eye.

“How could you come back and not even call me?” she asked. She watched me as I didn’t answer.

Before either one of us could say anything else, her phone rang. She looked apologetic, but was still watching me when she answered.

“Shanks,” she said. “What’s up?”

Her face fell just a little as she listened, and I afforded her what privacy I could by turning my attention out the window. The stream of cars was inching forward on the other side of the snowbank, as somewhere down the street the signal changed. A white van in the midst of them began to slow down.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She listened again, then nodded.

The van slowed down some more, and the gap between it and the car in front of it got wider, prompting the traffic behind it to begin blaring their horns. People inside the restaurant and outside on the sidewalk began looking over to see what the problem was.

“I’m on my way,” she said. She snapped the phone shut and looked out the window.

“What’s the—” she began, but stopped in midsentence as the van skidded to a stop and a couple seconds later the back doors burst open. Immediately, we both knew something was wrong, but before anyone could do anything, another man jumped out of the back and into the middle of the street. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and from where I sat, I could see the explosives strapped around his torso.

The guy in the car directly in front of him saw them too; he slammed it into reverse and immediately crashed into the vehicle behind him. People on the street started to scatter, streaming by the window as they abandoned their cars and ran. A woman was slammed into the glass near where we sat and went down onto the sidewalk as Faye and I both stood up.

“It’s a bomb!” someone inside shouted. People began getting up uncertainly, some pushing their way out, while others clustered at the windows, holding out digital cameras.

The man outside turned toward the window and I got a good look at his face. The skin was ashen, and the lips and eyelids were grayish-black. The eyes looked bleached white in the daytime light.

“Nick!” Faye shouted.

I pushed my way through the crowd and out onto the street, displaying my badge to try to keep the worst of the foot traffic off me. A kid scooted by my legs, and another man clipped me as he ran past.

The revivor had a communications system, so I started flooding it with a connection request. The revivor began to look around, trying to find the source.

“Nicky!”

It looked in my direction and I met its eye, holding up my badge so it could see. It hadn’t picked up yet, but it stopped looking, keeping its dead eyes fixed on me.

Faye reached me through the crowd and grabbed me, physically pulling me back. She was stronger than she looked, one arm gripping me tightly around the waist as she began to force me away.

The revivor accepted the connection. As soon as it did, I tried a brute- force scan of its memory buffer, but never got the chance. Still watching me, it raised the detonator in one hand.

Time to wake up, Agent Wachalowski.
The words blinked in front of my eyes for a brief second.

I turned and grabbed Faye, throwing my coat over her as I pulled us down to the sidewalk behind a box truck. There was a bright flash of light, and a beat later a loud boom slammed through the air, shaking the pavement and rattling in my chest. A blast of air and dust rushed by, and something struck the side of the truck as the windows of storefronts buckled and exploded. Through the ringing in my ears I heard dull thumps as debris rained down over the clogged street, bouncing off hoods, windshields, and rooftops.

The explosion thundered down the streets as people ran screaming. I looked back to see the mangled remains of the vehicles that were closest to the blast. The van the revivor had driven was twisted into shrapnel, burning in the middle of the street. The revivor was gone.

When I looked back at Faye, she was staring at the spot where the revivor had been.

“Are you okay?” I said, my voice sounding muted in my own ears. She nodded.

Panic had erupted on the streets. All around, throngs of bodies were pushing and shoving at each other, trying to move through a mob that was quickly getting out of control. Sirens began swelling in the distance, coming closer. My head was spinning.

Trying to get through the crowd was pointless. I could barely keep my position, and Faye wouldn’t have a chance. Already people were shoving past with shoulders, hands, and elbows. Screams filled the air as I saw a woman slip and go down behind a parked car as people forced their way past. I couldn’t even get to her.

“Come on!” I shouted, grabbing Faye. She gripped my arm and held on while we pushed our way back to the closest storefront. When we pushed through to the door, I saw faces staring out at us from behind the safety glass. A newspaper dispenser crashed off one of the windows, bouncing back onto the sidewalk and knocking someone over. A man on the other side of the door looked at me and shook his head.

I held out my badge, and that got him to back up. The door opened enough to squeeze through, and I dragged Faye in along with me.

“Get back away from the door!” I shouted.

A man who looked like he was missing a chunk of his shoulder stumbled against the window and left a streak of blood as he scrambled away. The crowd had become one giant organism, ready to consume anything that got too close.

With no way to stop it, we stood there and watched it happen.

I found myself becoming giddy as I headed down the hallway to my apartment, and by the time I got to my front door, I was smiling uncontrollably but I didn’t feel happy. When I unzipped my purse, my hands were shaking and I had to fumble for my keys.

The door next to mine opened and the guy with the red hair stepped out, making me jump and drop my purse onto the floor.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Yeah, hi.”

I scooped up my purse and dug my keys out, trying to find the one to the door. The man stood there and watched me as I managed to find it, then tried to stab it into the lock, but I couldn’t keep it steady. The tip of the key quivered as I tried to home in on the keyhole.

“You look like you’ve had some excitement,” he said. “Where have you been?”