State of Decay

I think I need to be on this case.

It’s your call.

I approached the vehicle, but it didn’t look like there were any survivors. It was completely gutted, the back doors hanging open. I flashed my badge at the cops.

“Agent Wachalowski,” I said. “Who’s in charge?”

“Detective Hamilton,” a man in a suit said, stepping forward and shaking my hand.

“What about Dasalia?”

“She’s up to her neck in bullshit, chasing bodies,” he said. “She tip you?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know she had a contact at the bureau.”

“Where is she now?”

“She got a fresh one just this morning. If I had to guess, she’s at the scene.”

“I’d like to speak with her; can you let me know how she can be reached?”

“Sure.”

He peeled a card out of his wallet and jotted a number on the back.

“That’s her,” he said handing it to me.

“Thanks.”

I looked at the back doors of the truck and saw a set of keys still dangling from the lock.

“Were those keys like that when the truck was found?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The inside of the truck looked worse than the outside; blackened bodies sat opposite each other facing in, covered in soot. Their heads were bowed as if in prayer, and the parts of them that were exposed to the outside were burned down to the bone; skulls, arms, hands, rib cages, everything. I prodded one of the ones closest to the exit and its index finger crumbled and snapped away like charcoal.

The ones farther back fared a little better, but not much. They were all inanimate, there was no question. I did a head count, and including the one found outside the truck, they were all accounted for.

All the way in the back were the only fresh corpses in the bunch: Tai and his men. None of them looked like they struggled.

I ran the backscatter filter as I scanned the bodies, adjusting it until I could see behind the remaining flesh and bones. A handful of foreign objects stood out, but all I found were fillings and leftover surgical staples. The revivor components near the base of each skull were ruined; the heat had caused the fluid in them to expand and split them apart. Hopefully, the girl who made it out of the truck had fared better.

I crouched down, my knee grinding into the soot, and checked the floor. I didn’t see any shell casings anywhere, so none of them had been shot. They were burned alive. In a sense anyway.

The only casings I could find were two on the pavement outside the cab. I didn’t recognize the agents inside, but unlike the passengers, they’d been killed beforehand. Each had been shot in the head before the inside was burned out.

No one ever meant to spring Tai. They wanted him, his men, and his inventory destroyed. They wanted it badly enough to attack right in the open, and they managed it on short notice. Even the revivor from the dock had been targeted.

Noakes.

Go ahead, Agent.

This wasn’t an associate trying to spring him or a rival trying to steal his inventory. This is someone who wanted to destroy every trace of his business with Tai.

You’re sure?

Tai kept records of what was coming in where, and whom the product was lined up for. He did that for everything except for the weapons and the heavy revivors; there was no mention of any of that in the files we recovered.

He had a customer we didn’t know about. The one he brought in the weapons and the military- grade revivors for. We may have uncovered a real rat’s nest.

Any ideas as to who?

Not yet.

Keep me informed. By the way, you got a message last night.

A message?

An image file arrived, and I opened it. It showed what looked like a business card, with the front displayed on the left and the back on the right.

Someone left that for you last night. It was stuck to the front entrance this morning.

It was the size and shape of a business card, but the print wasn’t quite straight. On the front was just a name: ZOE OTT. On the back was a messy handwritten scrawl that said AGENT WACHALOWSKI, I CAN HELPYOU, along with a number. In the bottom right corner was a doodle of a little waveform that looked exactly like a revivor heart signature. It had been traced over several times.

When was it left?

Camera twenty-three picked it up around three a.m.

I tapped into the security feed and brought up the image, relegating it to a window in my lower peripheral. The camera was pointed at the front doorway of the building. Scanning forward until shortly after three in the morning, I saw a figure step into frame. It was a small person, a woman or maybe even a kid; it was hard to tell because it was wearing a large overstuffed parka and a thick wool cap. The figure stopped with its back to the camera, swaying a bit as it watched the door. After a moment, the person stumbled forward on a pair of skinny legs and wobbled up to the door, clearly drunk.

I watched as a pair of gloved hands stuck the card to the window of the door; then the figure turned to look around, and I could see it was a young woman. She looked back at the card to make sure it was still there, then climbed back down the stairs and moved out of frame.

She come back?

No. Friend of yours?

Never seen her before. Who is she?

Some third. Father died in an industrial accident. She’s living off the settlement, if you could call it that.

The smell near the truck was starting to get to me. I took a look at the revivor lying on the ground, now under a wool blanket. The components inside looked a little better than the others, but they didn’t survive either.

Bring her in, Noakes said.

Sean got tasked with the autopsy of the dock revivor, but it had been a long time since he worked on one. Revivors were kept on ice when they were in the country, in case of public emergency, to round out National Guard numbers. They were only shipped out of the country, never in, except by black marketers like Tai. Finding useful information about them was going to mean going to the source: Heinlein Industries, the company that developed and built them. Since they were the country’s largest government contractor and highly political, that was going to make a lot of people nervous, but it couldn’t be helped. Smuggling a revivor into the country was not an easy thing to do, and someone who was able to manage it needed a lot of underworld contacts that put him at huge personal risk. That kind of service was expensive; no one spent that kind of money for nothing. Revivors and guns equaled one thing.

Someone out there meant to stir up some trouble.

3 Sub Rosa