State of Decay

list.

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

“No.”

I sent a message via my implant.

Sean.

Yeah?

I’m interviewing the detective that responded to the truck fire—

You mean Faye.

She was with the only revivor that made it before it deanimated. It looks like it dropped a name: Zhang.

Is that a last name?

I think so. Sorry, but that’s all we’ve got.

I’ll see what I can find.

Thanks.

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.

This is Wachalowski.

Go ahead.

We’ve got a suicide bomber at my location.

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.

It’s a revivor. There’s a revivor armed with explosives at my location.

Roger that. Is it threatening to blow?

Someone sent it here. It will detonate.

“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.

Call connected.

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