State of Decay

running.

Try to get the cops to hang back. I’m almost there.

By the time I got to the arena, blue and red lights flickered over the faces of patrons who had streamed out to see what the commotion was about, and the cops had their hands full keeping them back. Inside the lobby, faces were pressed against the glass, looking out. I pulled over near the blockade and got out of the car, holding up my badge. A handful of the arena-goers hooted when they saw me, but the officers looked less impressed.

“Who’s in charge?” I asked.

One of the men held up his hand, looking at me under the brim of his cap.

“You,” he said. “I got the call to hang back until you got here.”

“I appreciate it. Can we get these lights off?”

He nodded to one of the officers, who ducked away, and a few seconds later the flashing lights went dark one set at a time. I switched to a thermal filter, but there was still too much interference; too many people had been through to pick out any one signature.

“There’s a woman down there somewhere,” I said. “Has anyone seen her?”

“Not since the attack. Word is she took off down toward the lower levels, and the guy went after her.”

“Who was the victim?”

“Name was Luis Valle.”

“Where’d it start?”

“Men’s room,” he said, pointing. “One of the fighters came out and heard something, then went to check it out and got into it with the shooter. There was an altercation that spilled out into the garage; then Sawed-off Sam over there comes out and starts shooting.”

He gestured to a stocky, balding man with a thick neck who was standing cuffed next to a pair of officers. Following the path he traced, I saw one of the cars nearby had sustained several shotgun blasts at medium range. Glass and spent shells littered the pavement.

Wachalowski, this is Noakes. Secure that body immediately.

If he had what they were after, he doesn’t have it now.

I’m not asking you.

“I need the crime scene locked down,” I told the officer. “No one in or out.”

“Already done,” he said evenly.

The attacker might still be here, and I’ve got a civilian in trouble. I’m going to try to bring him in.

Without the kid, the information he was holding is the first priority.

I get it.

“The fighter was female?”

“Yeah.”

On my map, I was still reading the signal from her phone. The blip was stationary, so the phone was still in one piece, even if she wasn’t.

“Start getting these people out of here,” I said.

He shook his head, but he got moving. I dropped the thermal filter to 20 percent transparency and bumped the light up a little as I headed down the ramp through the rows of cars. At the same time, I started scanning the JZI communications bands, pulling out the police chatter until it got quiet. If the attacker tried to communicate with anyone else, I wanted to pick it up.

Crouching next to one of the vehicles, I scanned the area, but again, there were too many signatures. I listened, but I didn’t hear anyone nearby. The blip was brighter, though. It was close.

Staying low, I adjusted my visual filters until I found recent thermal prints that probably belonged to Flax. With the concrete to my back, I scanned the area in front of me, but the garage was quiet.

“Calliope Flax,” I said, “this is Agent Wachalowski with the FBI. If you can hear me, don’t speak out. Stay where you are.”

Her signal was maybe five spaces away to my left, keeping perfectly still. I put one hand on the cold pavement and leaned down to look under the vehicle I was using as cover. Beneath the undercarriages of the other cars, I saw a tiny light move somewhere in the distance near the ground.

I zoomed in toward the movement. It was the LED on her phone. She had spotted me and was waving it to get my attention. Her chin rested on the pavement as she lay flat under the axle of a truck, her face flecked with blood and her eyes wide.

I wasn’t sure how well she could see me, but I held out one palm to indicate she should stay put. That was when my phone rang.

It was a rookie mistake, and it was almost a fatal one. The shooter had a pretty good bead on me already, and that cinched it; the garage erupted with gunfire, and bullets punched into the vehicle I was crouched behind. The windows sprayed out, and several shots sparked off the ground less than a foot away from me, one of them puncturing the rear tire.

Stupid …

I grabbed the phone as air hissed out of the hole, struts groaning as the vehicle leaned onto the rim. The display on the phone flashed the name ZOEOTTas I shut it off.

The shots stopped for a minute, and I could hear him reloading. Staying low, I changed positions, moving several cars down before scanning in the direction the shots had come from. No thermal signature that I could see was there, but when I flipped through the other filters, I finally got an outline. He was hiding under another LW suit about three cars away, but based on the body structure, it didn’t look like the same guy I’d shot at outside the FBI building.

I’ve got him.

I raised my weapon and turned up the intensity on the filter until his outline stood out sharply and I could target the shoulder joint of his gun arm.

A three-round burst caught him and he pitched back. His gun fell out from under the LW drape and clattered to the ground.

“Freeze!”

He moved like he was going to go for the gun, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate. He stood up.

“Kick it over!”

He did, and the weapon skittered to a stop in front of me. I picked it up and slipped it under my belt, keeping my gun trained on him. He kept the LW suit active, still appearing as nothing but a silhouette in front of me.

“Ma’am,” I said, “come on out. Stay on the other side of the car.”

I heard her come out from under the car, and moved to join her. She was kneeling on the ground, and I reached out to help her to her feet, but she batted my hand away. She stood up, glaring at me.

“Nice ringtone.”

“Go back to the barricade and stay with the cops,” I told her.

“Who the hell are you looking at? There’s no one over there.”

“Just do it.”

The shooter moved, his outline shimmering as he started closing the distance between us.

“Stop right there,” I yelled, even though I knew it wouldn’t work.

He kept coming and I fired three bursts, nine shots in all. On the third burst, the air in front of us rippled as the LW suit shorted out and the guy came into view.

“Holy shit!” Calliope yelled.

“Go back to the others!”

As the LW field flickered away, he opened the defunct suit to reveal a device strapped around his middle. He raised a detonator in his good hand.

I fired one last burst, tearing through his throat. I didn’t look to see what happened; I grabbed the girl and carried us both behind a concrete divider.

“What the he—”

The bomb went off, and for a second the inside of the garage lit up. I clamped my hands over her ears as the explosion pounded through the air. Everything went white as glass, metal and concrete sprayed across the divider, scattering tiles. It was over in a second, a cloud of flame huffing back up the ramp as the twisted remains of a