State of Decay (5 page)

I brought up his listings and had a look; they were all news channels, all short segments. I cycled through the stills. Three of them were the same shot of him standing in what looked like a dark building lobby, facing the person taking the footage.

It was the man from the green room, the one with the scar. He was with the FBI, it looked like. The scar I’d seen in my dream was there, going from beneath his jaw to down under his shirt collar.

I clicked the remote to play the first segment. Agent Wachalowski took out his badge and showed it to the person filming.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Colin Patrick,” a young man’s voice, maybe dubbed in, said from offscreen, “freelance news. I received a tip that you uncovered a human-trafficking ring, right here in this office building. Can you tell me anything about what you found?”

“Sorry, I can’t,” Wachalowski said. The camera cut away to show the elevator door, where the numbers on the display indicated a car descending.

“I hear you’ve got some revivors upstairs,” Colin said.

“Be careful,” Wachalowski said, and the camera cut quickly a couple times as he pushed by, “the SWAT guys are on their way down.”

The camera cut back to the newsroom, where two anchors were sitting.

“While there were no witnesses to the actual removal of the revivors,” the woman anchor said, “a source at the FBI confirmed that a total of twenty-one revivors were recovered at the Goicoechea Building, which was, to all appearances, a hub for trafficking in bodies from outside the country, for distribution to the underground labor and sex trades.”

I shuddered.

“Sources also report that at least one of the smuggler’s clients was not apprehended,” the male anchor said, “and that, based on the records recovered, there may be twenty or more revivors still unaccounted for inside the city.”

The rest of the clip looked like the anchors going back and forth, so I flipped to the next one. Someone had managed to get some footage as the FBI came out of the building. One of them held a woman’s arm as she walked, naked except for a blanket, through the snow. Her skin was grayish, and her white eyes looked like they were staring right at the camera. It was a revivor.

Weird.
I took another shot, looking into those freaky eyes over the rim of the glass. You almost never saw video of them. It sent a shiver down my spine.

“This is just one more example of the sick, twisted, and ultimately debasing effect this whole endeavor is having on our people, our country, and our world,” a man was saying. “Offering second- tier citizenship benefits to anyone volunteering for Posthumous Service is this administration’s most appalling—”

“So serve,” the woman countered. “Serve your country, is that so much to ask? Serve the obligatory two years and get first-tier benefits. Is that such a crime? Serve your country, and it will serve you.”

“They don’t even want that. They’d rather have a never-ending stream of cannon fodder they can buy on the cheap for second-tier benefits. The whole thing is—”

“Then don’t serve,” the woman snapped. “If you can’t handle either form of service, then don’t serve. No one is forced into it.”

“No, they can settle for life below the poverty line. Less than one percent of third tiers ever make it to even lower-middle class. That’s the life you can expect for—”

I flipped through the rest of the clips and found they were all just variations on the first footage I saw. There weren’t any other revivor pictures, and there weren’t any good pictures of Wachalowski.

I did a freeze-frame on the shot of him from the hotel lobby, and zoomed in on his face. He looked kind of mad, but maybe something else too. I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, but there was something about the set of them that seemed . . . distressed? Disturbed? They almost looked a little sad. He had really blue eyes. Light blue. I wondered where the scar came from.

It didn’t sound as though they were going to offer any more information. I took another drink and yawned, when I heard a medium-loud thump from the apartment below me. Just like clockwork.

The ticker under Wachalowski’s picture said the office where the incident took place was right here in the city. He worked out of the local office. He was somewhere right in the city. Whatever was going on, it was happening out there, right now.

There was a loud crash from below. I heard glass break, and a man’s angry voice. Couldn’t they give it a rest for one night?

I stood up too quickly and stumbled into the couch a little before making my way to the front door. I shoved it open and knocked an old pizza box across the floor, then hurried down the hall, past the peeling wallpaper and the hole in the drywall to the stairwell. I pushed the heavy door open, then started down the stairs, holding on to the metal railing for support. The walls were covered in graffiti, and at the next landing something brown stained the grout between the grimy tiles. I pushed open the door and staggered out into the hallway.

The shouting was coming from down there, and I did a fast walk down that familiar path. I stopped at the door marked 613 and started knocking on it. I was still knocking on it when it opened suddenly.

My fist pounded the air and I stumbled forward before catching myself. He was standing there, holding it open, looking like he had opened the door and found dog crap. He was wearing a tank top and jeans, as usual. His hair was greasy, and he always looked kind of sweaty.

“What the hell do you want?”

I focused, staring at him until the room seemed to get brighter and the color kind of washed out of everything except the light that came into focus around his head. It glowed, like soft electric light . . . red, kind of like fire, and flaring up in little points and spikes. He was angry, as usual.

“What the fu—” he said, then fizzled in midsentence as I focused on that light.

“Calm down,” I said, and the spikes began to settle. The red shifted to violet, then blue. His stupid eyes changed, some of the meanness going out of them. He stood there like an ape until the light settled into a cool blue, like the sky on a sunny day.

His girlfriend or whoever she was peeked out from behind him, watching me from a few feet inside. She’d been crying, her shirt torn and her hair messed up.

“You should get some sleep,” I told him.

He nodded, his eyes dull. I pulled my attention away from him. The light shifted back to normal, and the sharpness surged back into my surroundings. He rubbed at his face, then turned and waddled back inside. The woman met my eye for a second and gave me that look she sometimes did. That relieved, embarrassed, guilty look that was the closest she ever came to thanking me.

A chill ran up my legs and I realized for the first time that I was standing there in nothing but a nightshirt and underpants. I turned without saying anything, and went back upstairs.

When I got back inside, I closed the door behind me and locked it. I stood there for a second, leaning my back against it, and hoped she wouldn’t follow me. She wouldn’t, though; she never did. I hated going down there. Why did she stay with him?

The image of the FBI agent Wachalowski was still on the TV screen, like he was staring me down from across the room. There was something about his eyes, like he could see right through the screen and into my apartment and was wondering what he had just watched.

He wouldn’t believe it if he knew. The woman downstairs had watched it enough times with her own two eyes and she didn’t even believe it.

Sitting back down with the bottle, I tried to push the whole thing out of my head. I switched the channel before I had my next drink, because I didn’t want him to watch me do it. Later, when I got closer to the bottom, I wouldn’t care, but right then I didn’t want anyone to see. Tomorrow I’d stay sober. Maybe I’d take it easy for a few nights, to detox myself and kind of clear my head.

I was too far gone tonight, but tomorrow definitely.

Using the tuner, I strayed out of the news bands and into the movie area, where the search ’bot scanned hundreds of channels for things that interested me. It stayed quiet downstairs for a while; then they had sex for a few minutes; then it got quiet again. I wondered why the FBI agent Wachalowski ended up in the green room, but not for long before the booze started doing its job.

All I wanted was to be numb when the needle-head finally did show up again. The rest would work itself out.

As I cruised down the interstate, I could still feel the blood pulsing in my neck. Before I left, I’d signed out a weapon. Having a gun strapped next to my ribs made me breathe a little easier, but I could still feel the cold meat of that dead arm around my neck.

Where had someone like Tai gotten a piece of meat like that? Revivors like the females he kept were the only kind most people outside of the military wanted to deal in. They were weak and docile. They were predictable. The one that attacked me in the hallway was old-school, third-world military. I didn’t think anyone made them like that anymore. It drooled, so it was hungry. Revivors couldn’t process food; the newer ones had a shunt in the brain that told them they were full. The old ones were always hungry, with no way to make it stop. Back in the grinder, sometimes they wired their jaws shut. Sometimes they just let them eat. No one stateside wanted units like that.

The kinds of people who might be interested in a revivor like that would also be interested in Tai’s little arsenal. Someone on this side of the border wanted both those things and was willing to pay for them. Tai had at least one customer I hadn’t known anything about. Whoever that was, he was into something worse than body-bag sex and slavery.

A horn blared, snapping my attention back to the road. A semi with a freezer car sporting a biohazard warning, probably filled with bodies and headed for the Heinlein labs, drifted into my lane.

A message came in from the Federal Building. I picked up.

Streetlights streaked by as I veered off the express lane and down toward the shipyard. A tight loop took me under a rusted bridge that was covered in graffiti and sent me toward a series of shadowed behemoths moored along the docks.

As I got closer, my long- range scanner picked up a revivor heart signature, although it was too far away to read. I brought up a map of the dock and laid the location of the signature over it, a soft orange flickering behind my eyes in the rearview mirror.

I homed in on the dock where the signature was emanating from and pulled over, stepping out of the car. It was windy, and the cold, damp breeze coming in off the water smelled like ocean and garbage. The dock planks and chain posts were covered in a thick layer of frost, jagged little icicles leaning into the wind. Beyond that, through fog and snow, the skyline rose up in a sea of neon and electric light.

I switched off the GPS and focused on the signal. It was coming from a stack of huge metal shipping containers that had been offloaded and were sitting in the fog. Were we going to get that lucky?

The containers were stacked two stories high; mass vehicle transports, each capable of holding maybe twenty-four cars. I moved into the shadows between two rows of them, toward the signal.

I found the container the signature was coming from and approached it. The front end of it had a huge set of doors to allow vehicles in and out, and it was barred and locked. To the side of the large doors was a small one to allow inspectors in and out. I scanned the scene and packaged the footage along with the rest of the case information, then sent out a warrant request.

I approached the small door and put my thumb to the lock, issuing an override code. A few seconds later, the bolt opened with a loud snap. I pushed it open with a crunch that brought flakes of ice down over my head, and went inside.

Adjusting the night vision filter, I looked around. The crate was filled with tightly packed rows of electric cars sitting on metal skids, parked bumper to bumper and three rows high.

I scanned the inside of the container; the signal was coming from above me. After climbing up the scaffolding, I managed to follow it to a single car in the middle row. I peered in through the side window, trying not to fog it up.

There was a female revivor inside, lying on the backseat and wrapped in plastic. I opened the back door and leaned in for a closer look. The wrap was sealed, and the body wasn’t moving.

Using my field knife, I slit the plastic down the middle and pulled it apart. I could tell right away it was a combat model; plain-looking with short hair, a scar on the forehead, and little in the way of curves. No fancy skin work or cosmetic augmentation had been done.

Leaning in close, I used the backscatter to get a look under the skin and saw some muscle work and joint augmentation. Resting in a chamber between the bones of the right forearm was what they called a revivor bayonet. For sure, it was a combat model, and not a hack job either. This one had rolled off some country’s assembly line.

There was a low creak from below me as the door to the crate opened partway, and I froze. I backed slowly out of the car and drew my gun, peeking through the metal lattice where I saw a figure down below, moving through the doorway. I zoomed in on it.