State of Decay

This was a mistake, I said.

No, it wasn’t.

It was.

His eyes narrowed, and he leaned in very close. The warm brown of both his eyes was blotted out as his pupils dilated.

No, it wasn’t, he growled.

The anxiety left me, bleeding away. In its place, I felt relaxed. Happy, even.

This never happened, he said, no longer looking at me. I left you at the door and I never came inside. I have never been inside your apartment.

He got up and left me lying there in bed. He never looked back at me.

“I remembered it wrong,” I said to Nico. His heart went even faster.

“Zhang’s Syndrome,” he said to himself.

Through the memory’s portal, I studied the gap. What I saw there wasn’t real. It was a dream I’d had a long time ago. My brain’s decay had overlapped the memories. I couldn’t tell a dream from reality.

The portal closed and shrank to a point of light. I noticed then that it stood out from the rest. It appeared different somehow. It was dimmer than the rest. When it rejoined the rest in the field of lights, I saw more that were like it.

I drew one closer and peered inside of it. The memory itself was inconsequential, but the same strange glitch was there.

They’ve all been corrupted…. None of them are real….

I gazed down on the sea of information. When I did, I picked out more tainted memories, more than I could imagine. They were spread through the others like a cancer.

How many of them weren’t real? I saw ten, then twenty, then one hundred…. There were more than I could count.

“I remembered it wrong,” I whispered again, while the man named Nico just stood there and stared.

The life that I’d known was gone.

Zoe Ott—Unknown

“Zoe, wake up,” a woman’s voice said.

I opened my eyes and found myself slouched in a folding chair behind a metal table. The walls were concrete, painted green, and at the far end, the overhead light was on but there was no one there. Before I could stop myself, I began to cry. I didn’t want to be there anymore.

“He needs you. Wake up,” the voice said. It was the dead woman, the one who got stabbed. She moved into the light where I could see her.

“Go away.”

“He called you, remember? You need to go to him.”

Tears were blurring my vision, but I could see something shifting at the far end of the room, under the overhead light. It was like a heat ripple or something, a distortion.

“You need to wake up right now!”

When I squinted, the ripples in the air took the shape of a person, like the outline of a big man. Before I could get a better look, they disappeared again.

“Zoe!”

The images faded as I snapped out of it, gasping in air. Over the years, I had gotten used to waking up and not knowing exactly where I was, but this time something was wrong.

When I gasped, something that was touching me pulled away all of a sudden. Someone had a hand on one of my legs and was dragging me. I was lying on what might have been a chair or a sofa, but it wasn’t mine. A breeze cut through the stuffy, warm air and blew over my face; it was outside air.

I opened my eyes and saw it was dark, but I could see the city lights through a window above me and I heard one of the monorails clacking by over the howl of the wind.

Startled, I tried to sit up, and my arms and legs hit something as I flailed. I was in an enclosed space, and there was someone leaning over me. Someone big, with sour, smelly breath.

Kicking with one leg, I scooted up until my back was to the window behind me, and I realized I was in the backseat of a car. I was bundled up for going outside, but my parka was unzipped and my purse was lying open on the seat beside me.

When I jumped, the man in the backseat with me recoiled but he didn’t leave. He was holding my ID card in one hand and looking down at me uncertainly. He was bundled up in dirty clothes and a thick, dirty jacket. He had a thick black beard, and a cap pulled down over his hair.

“What are you doing?” I slurred.

With my ID still in his hand, he hooked my purse on his thumb and used his other hand to grab my ankle. He gripped it hard, and I felt myself being pulled from the car.

There wasn’t any time to think about it; I stared at him, and the city lights all bled together as the backseat got as bright as daylight. As the colors leeched out of everything, the lights above the man’s head became visible, prickling oranges and greens and reds. Anger, fear, guilt, and greed all mixed together.

Reaching out, I changed them, and the grip on my ankle relaxed.

“Stop,” I told him, and he did.

Still sitting half in and half out of the backseat of the car, I looked around for the first time and saw the car was parked under one of the monorail junctions where several tracks merged and then branched back out, forming a concrete canopy above. Everything was covered in graffiti, and the ground was littered with trash and pieces of brown ice that formed on the rails, then crumbled off whenever one of the trains passed. There was traffic in the distance, but we were parked away from the well-used streets and sidewalks.

“Let go of me,” I said, pulling my leg until he dropped it. I zipped up my coat and scooted across the seat, out the door so that I was standing in front of him.

“Put my ID and anything else you took back in my purse.”

He did as he was told.

“Now give it back.”

He held it out and I snatched it out of his hand. Once I was outside, I could see the car was actually a taxicab. I got a better look at the guy and saw that he also had a laminated badge clipped to his jacket, displaying his license information. He must have been the driver.

“How did I get here?” I asked him.

“You hailed my cab,” he said. “You told me to bring you here.”

“I told you to bring me out here?”

“Well, not here exactly. You had the directions on a phone message. You played it for me and told me to bring you there.”

“So, what were you doing?”

“You stopped moving. I thought you passed out.”

“And you decided to rob me?”

“You wouldn’t move. I thought maybe you were dead.”

He was going to dump me. He was going to take my things and dump me under a monorail platform.

“Stand there,” I said, “and don’t move.”

My phone wasn’t in my purse or in my pocket, but I saw its green signal light glowing softly from the floor of the cab’s backseat. I leaned in and picked it up.

Pulling one glove off with my teeth, I managed to get it open and punch in the voice- mail code, despite the fact that my finger was shaking like crazy. Putting it to my ear, I clamped my other hand down over the one holding the phone to keep it still.

“Zoe, this is Agent Wachalowski …”