State of Decay

through the seam. I lifted the top away and put it on the floor. A thin sheet of black plastic was stretched across the inside, and sitting on that was a small index card. I picked it up and flipped it over to find a handwritten note.

Deanimation in twenty-four hours. Leichenesser will take care of the rest. Get what you need before then. Good luck.

Twenty-four hours. I hadn’t even thought about what would happen after the fact.

There was nothing I could do about it now. Maybe it was better that way. She hadn’t wanted this; I knew that.

I took a deep breath and pulled the black plastic apart to reveal what lay underneath. The inside of the locker was filled with a transparent rubber blister, filled with clear fluid so that its skin was taut. Through the plastic I could see the shape of a bare human figure cocooned inside. It was her.

Her eyes were closed and her hair had been completely removed, but the face was hers. A thick tube extended down her throat, her lips forming a seal around it. Dozens of small electrodes covered her body, trailing threads that hung suspended in the liquid surrounding her. Her skin was ashen, and the veins underneath had turned black from the synthetic blood they contained.

There was a drain fixed to the middle of the storage-unit floor where I could send the stasis fluid. Gritting my teeth, I nestled my hand between the skin of the blister and the inside of the storage container. I felt beneath it; it didn’t seem to be attached anywhere, so I lifted the sac and it came free with a sticky peeling sound.

The whole thing was hard to get a grip on, and it was heavy. I managed to pull it up over the edge of the container, when the whole thing oozed over the side of the crate before I could stop it. The rubber skin got snagged on one of the latches as it went, tearing it open top to bottom and spilling its contents out onto the floor.

I swore as cold liquid poured over my lap and gushed down into my shoes. I stumbled back and fell as her body slipped out and slid across the floor, bumping to a stop against me.

I pulled myself up, trailing strings of sticky fluid as I scrambled back. Her body lay on its back on the wet floor. As I watched, her nipples hardened in the cold, pointing straight up at the ceiling from either side of a wrinkled, oval skin graft.

Faye is dead. This thing is not her. Wake it up and do what you need to do.

I grabbed her wrists and dragged her off the plastic. The electrode filaments stretched and snapped as I pulled her over to the drain and let the fluid ooze through the grate. I grabbed the plastic tube that snaked down her throat and dragged it up out of her stomach until the end popped out of her mouth.

I grabbed one of the plastic water jugs and peeled the top off, then dumped it over her body. Once the stasis fluid was rinsed away, an internal electric jolt would trigger reanimation.

I looked down at the body. The vitals monitor was still showing a flatline. I knelt down next to her and peeled one of the electrodes free from her shoulder. Her face was slack and lifeless. My throat began to burn.

“I’m sorry, Faye.”

I heard a dull thud from inside her chest, and her whole body went rigid. Her eyes snapped wide open and she convulsed, leaning forward. The cords in her neck stood out and her face contorted; then her head fell back onto the concrete as she pulled in a long breath.

I stared as the monitor picked up signs of life; to all appearances, she seemed alive. Her eyes turned to me, bugging out of her head and reflecting the light from the lamp. She began hitching in breaths, forcing out words one at a time as ropes of fluid sprayed from her blue-black lips.

“What …happened …?”

Faye was staring up at me. For just that second, I swore I saw recognition.

“What …happened …to …me?”

I saw it at the last minute. I was looking right in her eyes, and I saw fear. Her stare looked through me into something else, something I couldn’t see. She saw something that terrified her.

“Don’t …” she whispered.

The muscles in her face relaxed. The terror went out of her, and a soft glow flickered on behind her eyes. The monitor wavered, then snapped into the waveform of the revivor heart signature.

I had no conscious memory of moving, but suddenly I was kneeling over her in the muck, one hand held out in front of me and the other raised near my head. An old dresser had crashed over, and a can rolled across the concrete and rattled to a stop among pieces of broken glass. Blood trickled out of a cut on my forearm.

I realized I was holding a pair of rusted scissors in my hand, grabbed from the dresser. The tips were pointed down at that oval-shaped scar.

Glass crunched under my heel as I started to stand and half fell, half sat on the wet floor. I threw the scissors away and heard them clatter across the concrete. After the initial jolt, a revivor might not move for as long as an hour.

Before I could change my mind, I gathered the chain and the lock.

9 Wake

Faye Dasalia—Guardian Metro Storage Facility

There was no sound, no sensation, and no light. I did not know what I was or where I was, only that I existed. Enough of me survived to at least know that.

When the darkness came, it had been absolute. There were no dreams, and I sensed no passing time; only a black, empty void. There was nothing and no one, not even me. I was lost in darkness until the warmth came.

Primary systems initializing.

The words hung there in the dark and then faded. Warmth gathered in my chest, then bled down my spine and trickled through my body. It wormed through each limb to find fingers and toes. It found the nape of my neck and gathered there.

Secondary systems initializing.

Cold pinprick light flickered to become a strobe. A connection inside my head seemed to spark and sent a pulse through my brain. I began to sense different parts of myself, like lights turned on through rooms of an empty home. My mind willed it, and my fingers and toes flexed.

I opened my eyes, and light poured through each lens. Images began to form.

I was lying on my back, staring upward. Above me were pipes and water-stained concrete, lit by flat electric light. I did not recognize the things around me.

I breathed in and sensed particles in the air. They were smells: decay and mildew. Beneath them were sweat and men’s deodorant. The smells opened up pathways inside my mind. Connections opened to dark and disused cells. My memories began to reawaken. I sensed them, endless points of light in a void. The sum of them, taken as a whole, was me.

Tertiary systems initializing.

A drop of liquid splashed in a shallow pool. The air was cold, and goose bumps rose on my skin. Somehow, somewhere, I was alive.

I sat up, naked in the cold, damp shadows. I sat on a bedroll on a concrete floor, surrounded by old boxes. I saw furniture, some covered and some not.

“Hello?” I called out, but no one answered me. I stretched, and tiny jolts twitched through my muscles. Vibrations hummed inside my chest. Energy flowed through me and urged me to move. Behind me, a drip of water splashed again.

I stood up and wobbled there in the dim light. Tiny jolts sparked through the muscles of my legs, making minute corrections.