State of Decay (16 page)

“Quiet!”

He unzipped the front of my coat and stuck his hand in, right to the lined pocket. He fished in there and pulled out my ID and both sets of knuckles. He checked the ID and scanned it, then looked back at his partner and shook his head.

“Negative,” the other guy said in the radio. “Both passengers were processed earlier today, and were stopped again across town less than an hour ago. . . .”

The goon held out my ID and both pairs of brass knuckles as the black car slammed into reverse and rolled back out of the way. It took a second for me to get that he was giving me my shit back, even the brass. I took it and stuck the lot back in my coat.

“Move along,” he said. Just like that; no fine, no ticket, no speech, just beat it. He stepped back and I went through.

“What was that all about?” Luis asked when they were out of earshot.

“No idea.”

“Something must have happened. They’re looking for someone.”

“Not us.”

He shut up and didn’t talk again until we got to my street. The buildings were mostly dark there, the concrete black from smog and the windows broken or boarded. Rusted chain link leaned around empty lots where new graffiti covered old graffiti. One titty bar-slashwhorehouse had some of the last lit neon, along with some shit-hole martial arts dojo to the left and up. I took us through the concrete pylons holding up the maglev rails that crossed between the housing units, then down between the huge piles of brown ice and snow, mixed with piles of trash bags and dead cars.

“This is where you live?”

“Down here.”

I pulled into my unit and down the ramp to the underground parking area that held two cars that ran, one that didn’t, and my bike. I cut the engine, kicked it, locked it, and armed it.

“Come on,” I said, climbing off and heading up.

The kid looked like he changed his mind, but it was too late for that now. He held up okay in jail, but now he looked twitchy.

“Take it easy,” I told him. “You’re okay.”

He didn’t look sure, but he tagged along after me when I buzzed in the back door and turned the bolt. Another badge at my unit, two more bolts, then the security bar slammed down in its track behind the door and I shoved it open.

“Come on in.”

He made a face when he went in, like he just saw a rat or worse. He stood right inside in front of the couch and stared.

“This is where you live?” he asked again.

“Yeah. Fuck you.”

“No, I know. It’s just—”

“Whatever,” I said. “You want the tour? That’s the kitchen, this is the TV room, the can is through there, and through there is where I sleep.”

“It’s so small,” he said.

I thought of his bathroom and how huge it was. You could see my whole place from the front door. The kitchen had a half fridge, two burners, a sink, and that was it. The TV area had the couch, the TV, a weight bench, and a heavy bag in the corner. The can had a shitter, a shower with industrial plastic sheeting, and a sink with all plain metal and no colored soap.

“Can I use your TV?” he asked.

“Knock yourself out.”

He turned it on and flipped. Not long after, he found what he was looking for.

“. . . the site of what witnesses describe as a suicide bombing, in broad daylight, right in the center of one of the city’s restaurant districts.”

It was total mayhem. The camera looked over the crowd, where cops were pushing people back. People all up and down the street had blood on their heads and faces, and there was glass everywhere.

“That’s why the patrols are out,” he said. “Shit . . .”

“If a bomb went off there, why look here?”

“They must be following some kind of lead. Holy shit, look at that,” he said, sitting down on the couch.

It was bad; I had to say that. The place got blown to shit. There were dead bodies all over.

“. . . took authorities several hours to completely quell the ensuing riot, which resulted in many more injuries, deaths, and damage to local property and businesses. Initial estimates place the damage in the millions. Mayor Ohtomo and his administration have been quick to respond, with plans to deploy the National Guard to prevent looting and other crimes of opportunity until the area can be completely secured. Given the range and impact of this attack, that will be no easy task. . . .”

Luis turned down the sound and got on his phone. He tapped his foot like a junkie.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m trying to reach Dr. Edward Cross, please.”

Someone babbled on the other end, but I couldn’t make it out.

“I know,” he said, “but it’s important. Would it be possible to have someone get him, or patch me through to the lab? I understand. You’re sure he’s there, though? He signed in? You’re sure he’s there? Okay, thanks.”

He hung up.

“Trying to reach your doctor?”

“He’s not that kind of doctor,” he said, eyes on the TV. “Anyway, he’s my uncle. Hey, you mind if I use the data miner?”

“The TV miner? Knock yourself out.” He typed away with his thumbs on the remote.

“You said you’d buy dinner,” I said.

“Sure, whatever you want.”

I watched him work the TV for a minute, until hits and lists popped up on the screen and he started typing in weird shit I’d never seen before and using stuff I didn’t know was in there.

“Don’t get me in trouble,” I said.

“I won’t.”

Promises.

People edged quickly past my desk as I checked for messages, and the normally quiet halls were filled with rapid-fire chatter. There was no word from Faye, Zoe, or any contacts that might provide a lead, just a battery of alerts and notifications marked high priority. A sweep was being set up that covered voice, text, and anything else they could think of. Any circuit that could have a tap shunted in was being monitored as computers sifted through the data, looking for leads. The scope of the effort was huge. So huge that just to get enough bodies on the street, an unprecedented number of revivors had been deployed to supplement foot soldiers at key points through the city. Whoever initiated the attack, they’d stirred up a hornet’s nest.

My ears were still ringing, and I could still smell the burned biochemical stink left behind by the revivor that had detonated the bomb. Nothing useful had survived, but pieces of it had been thrown as far as two blocks away. Fused components were being dug out of vehicles, concrete, and even victims caught in the blast. Initial reports indicated military-grade explosives in a configuration that maximized the blast radius, so whoever wired the revivor knew what he was doing. Despite the relatively small amount of charge, the force was devastating.

Getting out of the restaurant strip had been dicey. We were pinned down until riot control got there, and by then it was a war zone. The explosion had killed at least fifty-three people and wounded almost two hundred others; then another nine died in the riot that followed—five crushed or trampled, three from clashing with other citizens, and one choked with a police baton in the heat of the struggle. Even with escorts, getting Faye to the perimeter was a struggle.

The inventory had come in for the arsenal recovered from Tai’s base of operations. It included explosives that easily could have caused the kind of damage that occurred downtown. The bomb that killed all those people had come through Tai; I was sure of it. Whoever killed him was behind it.

I sat at my desk and watched the footage I had recorded from the interrogation earlier, the window floating behind my closed eyelids. Off to one side I kept a smaller window tapped into a camera that watched from the wall behind me, in case anyone came by.

“
Answer her questions
,” I heard myself say. Zoe was staring at the suspect, which I had pretty much expected. What color she had drained out of her face. If she was any paler, she could have been mistaken for a revivor.

Given the circumstances, I had switched off the camera in the interrogation room, and I didn’t disclose the POV recording I’d made myself either, but I wanted a record of the interview for my own use. When I first found out why she had really left the note, I had almost turned it off and sent her home. I was glad I hadn’t.

“
Are you okay?
” she asked in a small voice.

I remember taking a small amount of satisfaction in that. Honestly, I figured once she got a look at the guy, she’d turn around and that would be that. She did better than I expected, though.

“
Who are you?
” the guy asked.

I scanned forward, looking for the moment when she did whatever it was she did. When I saw her arms go down by her sides and her head start to drift forward, I stopped.

He spit and a glob of red squirted out at caught her right in the face. The camera rose as I knocked the chair back and moved toward him.

I wasn’t looking at her when it happened; I was looking at him. He was glaring at me with a defiant smirk, when all of a sudden his face changed. The smirk disappeared and his eyelids drooped.

“
Sleep
,” I heard her say, and his eyelids fluttered. They stayed open, but his eyes went out of focus. It was as if he suddenly had gone blind or something. I had scanned him, getting a bead on his vitals; his heartbeat had slowed, and he was totally relaxed. He seemed, in fact, to be very close to sleep.

The camera moved back to Zoe, my hand moving into frame with a paper towel. I froze the image.

She was staring at the guy, her pupils almost completely dilated, like she was loaded on amphetamines. Her face had changed dramatically. I remember thinking that at the time, too. When she first came in, she was nervous, shy almost to the point of paralysis, despite the fact that she had clearly been drinking. Her eyes were always cast downward at the floor, at her shoes, or at her hands. Now she was staring right at someone she knew to be a killer, looking him right in the eyes. It was like a pair of invisible beams connected her eyes to his and neither one could look away, but looking at her face again now, I could see who was in control. She could have looked away at any time, but he couldn’t have. Not until she let him. It was like a completely different personality had emerged from inside her, and the expression in her eyes as she stared at him from over that beaky nose was something that didn’t seem to belong there.

Was it real?

Having done some research on the type of device used to kill him, I found out that it typically monitored for two things: a loosening of the inhibitions caused by prolonged, extreme pain, and a brain- wave state indicative of drug-induced mind control or hypnosis.

He wasn’t in any pain. After the beating he took and the surgery that followed, he was on enough painkillers that he wasn’t feeling much of anything. He wasn’t coerced with drugs at any point.

“
Can you hear me?
” she asked, as I resumed the recording.

I wondered whether she had known him previously, if somehow this whole meeting was a setup of some kind. The image of the revivor heart signature she had scrawled on the card she left wasn’t just an uncanny representation; when I compared it to the one I had recorded from the female I encountered in the bathroom at Tai’s place, it was an exact match. Every revivor’s signature was unique. She had to have seen it somewhere.

“
What’s your name?
” she asked.

I’d seen hypnosis before, but never anything like that. I knew his type, and he was ex-military. He was trained on how to behave if he was ever captured, and he could endure a lot of pain and interrogation. It didn’t make sense that a ninety-pound woman could walk in and make him give everything up in less than a minute, but that’s what it looked like he was about to do.

The kill switch implanted in his head seemed to believe so too.

The more I watched her, the more interesting the strange woman became. I needed to get her back, but I didn’t know if after what happened, I wanted to risk bringing her back in. Maybe I could set something up off the premises. . . .

Backing up the recording, I watched as the man reversed out of his stupefied state and the smirk returned. The spit jumped in reverse through the space between his teeth and Zoe backed away; then the camera did as well as we both moved back down the hallway.

If I had known what was going to happen, I’d have watched her more closely, but as it was, I was focused initially on the suspect and, I had to admit, the message from Faye I had gotten earlier. The only other time we were alone was when Zoe first came in and I met her in the conference room. That had been a short introduction, but it was better than nothing. I kept backing up, looking for the moment when I first walked in and saw her.

The camera turned as we backed into the conference room and then sat at the table. For a while I focused on her face as she spoke, glancing down self-consciously; then I saw her pupils dilate. They dilated completely, just as they had in the interrogation room.

I stopped rewinding and let the footage play.

“
. . . and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you
,” she said.

My eyes had been fixed on hers, just staring, with her staring up at me.

“
Do you understand?
” she asked.

“
Yes,
” I heard myself say, and I froze the image.

As sure as I was of anything, that had not happened. I would have remembered it. Frantically, I searched my memory for any trace of that conversation, but it wasn’t there.

Stunned, I scanned back until her pupils returned to normal a few seconds prior.

“
. . . can help you
,” she said.

That I remembered. I watched as she pushed the paper, her skill list, across to me. I remembered the exasperation and annoyance I had felt when I first realized what I was looking at.