State of Decay

near the exit. He wasn’t in uniform. I pinged the squad leader upstairs.

You guys have anyone in the lobby?

Negative. Two outside; the rest are up here.

The figure moved toward me, and when he stepped into the light I could see he was young, maybe college age. He had tangled brown hair and uneven stubble. He wore sneakers, running pants, and a gray hoodie. He wasn’t carrying a weapon.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked him.

“Agent Wachalowski?”

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

I scanned into the soft tissue of his face and saw some bioelectronics fitted behind the eyes. He was here gathering footage. I was being recorded.

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

“Be careful what you admit to,” I said, moving past him. “There’s only one way you could have heard that.”

As I pushed past, he followed, keeping pace with me.

“Come on, you can give me something, can’t you?”

“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “And listening in on even unsecured communications like that is a felony; you know that. The SWAT guys are on their way down, and if they find you here, you’re going to be arrested.”

There’s a reporter down here looking for footage. Clear him out before you bring the revivors down.

Roger that.

“It’s already out,” he said. “You can’t keep it a secret. Just give me fifteen seconds’ worth.”

“Technically, if you’re not outside, you’re supposed to inform anyone you talk to if you’re going to record them,” I said. “Like you’re doing right now. If you want, I can slap an injunction on you, and the techs can take a crawl through everything you’ve got sitting in your buffers. How does that sound?”

That seemed to hit home, and he stayed behind as I headed across the parking lot toward my car. When I got in, I could see him still standing there like he wasn’t sure whether or not he should chance going back. In the rearview mirror I saw him watching me, probably still recording as I pulled out and drove away.

With the scene behind me, I took a deep breath. I realized my heart was pounding and I tried to slow it down. I couldn’t get the image of that girl revivor’s face out of my head.

The first time I ever saw a revivor’s face, it was dark out and hotter than hell. The revivor was a male, and when it came staggering up out of the wet grass, I knew for a fact that the man was dead because I was the one who had killed him.

The last time I’d seen one out in the grinder, I was being airlifted away in a helicopter, with a tube down my throat. It came lurching out of the brush, wet eyes staring right at me as we began to rise. Its teeth, stained bright red, were showing, and there was a terrible want on that waxy face that remained even as the gunner turned on it and made it dance.

Faye Dasalia—Shine Tower Apartments, Unit 901

“Faye,” he’d whispered. I could almost still hear him as I roused from the dream, stirring in my cold bed.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Faye….” He’d breathed it into my ear, the stubble from his chin pricking the side of my neck. He had finally stopped, and was propped over me, smelling like sweat and that brand of deodorant he used. Even awake, I could almost still smell him. It was almost real.

“You deserve better than this,” he’d said, as he said every time. “The world should be yours.”

Stretching under the covers, I tried to shake it off. I didn’t want the world; all I wanted was to make it to first tier without getting shipped off to the grinder. I didn’t want the things I dreamed, no matter how many times I dreamed them. Sometimes I thought they happened because he was the only man I knew, but I knew him only because I worked next to him every day. We never had so much as a drink together, and he had never even been inside my apartment the entire time I’d known him.

Besides, I didn’t think of Doyle like that. It wasn’t even a departmental or career thing; I just didn’t think of him that way, and that made the whole thing all the more strange. Doyle Shanks was a friend and I liked him, but there was nothing else there. Not even the dreams could change that.

My phone was ringing. I cracked my eyes open and saw that neon was still seeping through the blinds, but otherwise the room was dark. It wasn’t morning yet, then. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep, but it hadn’t been nearly long enough.

The room seemed to spin slightly as I oriented myself, finding the dresser where the indicator light on my cell made a mellow green strobe as it rang again. Cold air rushed under the blankets as I groped for it and brought it close to my face to check the number; it wasn’t Shanks’s cell, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be calling me.

They found another body. That was the first thought that came into my head. That would make a fourth. Four murders, all the same. I knew somehow that the case was going to go from bad to worse. I retreated back under the covers and flipped open the phone.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Dasalia?” a man asked. It wasn’t Shanks; I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Who is this?”

“Is this Detective Dasalia?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Detective, someone is walking in your shadow.”

Terrific. A precious handful of hours of sleep, cut short for this.

“Look—”

“Stop following me, Detective.”

That got my attention. I sat up in bed, pulling the covers around me. Fumbling with the phone, I began recording the call and started a trace. Had he actually decided to make contact after being virtually invisible for so long? Could I be that lucky?

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Did you hear me? I said stop following me.”

“Am I following you?”

“Yes. You will find another one this morning. Your partner will find her first, but I want you to let it go.”

“You want me to let you continue killing these people and do nothing?”

“Yes.”

Glancing at the screen, I could see the trace was coming up empty. The ’bot was having trouble following the circuit connections back to the source, for some reason.

“Why should I do that?” I asked. “Why are you doing this? Help me understand it. Is it because they’re all first tier?”

So far, that was the only thing any of the victims had in common; they all managed to make it to first tier without getting shipped off to serve. It was a category I hoped to fall into myself one day, but none of the victims so far looked like they had to work very hard for it.

“Your only way out of this is to wake up,” he said, ignoring me.

The trace had failed. Whoever he was, he could be anywhere. He was quiet for a minute. I listened but I couldn’t hear anything on his end. There was nothing to indicate where he might be. The line was eerily quiet, almost like a digital recording.

“What do you mean—”

“Try to wake up,” he said, and the line cut out.