State of Decay

by James Knapp

  The camera cut back to the newsroom, where two anchors were sitting.

  “While there were no witnesses to the actual removal of the revivors,” the woman anchor said, “a source at the FBI confirmed that a total of twenty-one revivors were recovered at the Goicoechea Building, which was, to all appearances, a hub for trafficking in bodies from outside the country, for distribution to the underground labor and sex trades.”

  I shuddered.

  “Sources also report that at least one of the smuggler’s clients was not apprehended,” the male anchor said, “and that, based on the records recovered, there may be twenty or more revivors still unaccounted for inside the city.”

  The rest of the clip looked like the anchors going back and forth, so I flipped to the next one. Someone had managed to get some footage as the FBI came out of the building. One of them held a woman’s arm as she walked, naked except for a blanket, through the snow. Her skin was grayish, and her white eyes looked like they were staring right at the camera. It was a revivor.

  Weird. I took another shot, looking into those freaky eyes over the rim of the glass. You almost never saw video of them. It sent a shiver down my spine.

  “This is just one more example of the sick, twisted, and ultimately debasing effect this whole endeavor is having on our people, our country, and our world,” a man was saying. “Offering second- tier citizenship benefits to anyone volunteering for Posthumous Service is this administration’s most appalling—”

  “So serve,” the woman countered. “Serve your country, is that so much to ask? Serve the obligatory two years and get first-tier benefits. Is that such a crime? Serve your country, and it will serve you.”

  “They don’t even want that. They’d rather have a never-ending stream of cannon fodder they can buy on the cheap for second-tier benefits. The whole thing is—”

  “Then don’t serve,” the woman snapped. “If you can’t handle either form of service, then don’t serve. No one is forced into it.”

  “No, they can settle for life below the poverty line. Less than one percent of third tiers ever make it to even lower-middle class. That’s the life you can expect for—”

  I flipped through the rest of the clips and found they were all just variations on the first footage I saw. There weren’t any other revivor pictures, and there weren’t any good pictures of Wachalowski.

  I did a freeze-frame on the shot of him from the hotel lobby, and zoomed in on his face. He looked kind of mad, but maybe something else too. I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, but there was something about the set of them that seemed . . . distressed? Disturbed? They almost looked a little sad. He had really blue eyes. Light blue. I wondered where the scar came from.

  What did you see in there? What did you see that made you look that way?

  It didn’t sound as though they were going to offer any more information. I took another drink and yawned, when I heard a medium-loud thump from the apartment below me. Just like clockwork.

  The ticker under Wachalowski’s picture said the office where the incident took place was right here in the city. He worked out of the local office. He was somewhere right in the city. Whatever was going on, it was happening out there, right now.

  There was a loud crash from below. I heard glass break, and a man’s angry voice. Couldn’t they give it a rest for one night?

  I stood up too quickly and stumbled into the couch a little before making my way to the front door. I shoved it open and knocked an old pizza box across the floor, then hurried down the hall, past the peeling wallpaper and the hole in the drywall to the stairwell. I pushed the heavy door open, then started down the stairs, holding on to the metal railing for support. The walls were covered in graffiti, and at the next landing something brown stained the grout between the grimy tiles. I pushed open the door and staggered out into the hallway.

  The shouting was coming from down there, and I did a fast walk down that familiar path. I stopped at the door marked 613 and started knocking on it. I was still knocking on it when it opened suddenly.

  My fist pounded the air and I stumbled forward before catching myself. He was standing there, holding it open, looking like he had opened the door and found dog crap. He was wearing a tank top and jeans, as usual. His hair was greasy, and he always looked kind of sweaty.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  I focused, staring at him until the room seemed to get brighter and the color kind of washed out of everything except the light that came into focus around his head. It glowed, like soft electric light . . . red, kind of like fire, and flaring up in little points and spikes. He was angry, as usual.

  “What the fu—” he said, then fizzled in midsentence as I focused on that light.

  “Calm down,” I said, and the spikes began to settle. The red shifted to violet, then blue. His stupid eyes changed, some of the meanness going out of them. He stood there like an ape until the light settled into a cool blue, like the sky on a sunny day.

  His girlfriend or whoever she was peeked out from behind him, watching me from a few feet inside. She’d been crying, her shirt torn and her hair messed up.

  “You should get some sleep,” I told him.

  He nodded, his eyes dull. I pulled my attention away from him. The light shifted back to normal, and the sharpness surged back into my surroundings. He rubbed at his face, then turned and waddled back inside. The woman met my eye for a second and gave me that look she sometimes did. That relieved, embarrassed, guilty look that was the closest she ever came to thanking me.

  A chill ran up my legs and I realized for the first time that I was standing there in nothing but a nightshirt and underpants. I turned without saying anything, and went back upstairs.

  When I got back inside, I closed the door behind me and locked it. I stood there for a second, leaning my back against it, and hoped she wouldn’t follow me. She wouldn’t, though; she never did. I hated going down there. Why did she stay with him?

  The image of the FBI agent Wachalowski was still on the TV screen, like he was staring me down from across the room. There was something about his eyes, like he could see right through the screen and into my apartment and was wondering what he had just watched.

  He wouldn’t believe it if he knew. The woman downstairs had watched it enough times with her own two eyes and she didn’t even believe it.

  Sitting back down with the bottle, I tried to push the whole thing out of my head. I switched the channel before I had my next drink, because I didn’t want him to watch me do it. Later, when I got closer to the bottom, I wouldn’t care, but right then I didn’t want anyone to see. Tomorrow I’d stay sober. Maybe I’d take it easy for a few nights, to detox myself and kind of clear my head.

  I was too far gone tonight, but tomorrow definitely.

  Using the tuner, I strayed out of the news bands and into the movie area, where the search ’bot scanned hundreds of channels for things that interested me. It stayed quiet downstairs for a while; then they had sex for a few minutes; then it got quiet again. I wondered why the FBI agent Wachalowski ended up in the green room, but not for long before the booze started doing its job.

  All I wanted was to be numb when the needle-head finally did show up again. The rest would work itself out.

  Nico Wachalowski—Palm Harbor Shipyard

  As I cruised down the interstate, I could still feel the blood pulsing in my neck. Before I left, I’d signed out a weapon. Having a gun strapped next to my ribs made me breathe a little easier, but I could still feel the cold meat of that dead arm around my neck.

  Where had someone like Tai gotten a piece of meat like that? Revivors like the females he kept were the only kind most people outside of the military wanted to deal in. They were weak and docile. They were predictable. The one that attacked me in the hallway was old-school, third-world military. I didn’t think anyone made them like that anymore. It drooled, so it was hungry. Revivors couldn’t process food; the newer ones had a shunt in th
e brain that told them they were full. The old ones were always hungry, with no way to make it stop. Back in the grinder, sometimes they wired their jaws shut. Sometimes they just let them eat. No one stateside wanted units like that.

  The kinds of people who might be interested in a revivor like that would also be interested in Tai’s little arsenal. Someone on this side of the border wanted both those things and was willing to pay for them. Tai had at least one customer I hadn’t known anything about. Whoever that was, he was into something worse than body-bag sex and slavery.

  A horn blared, snapping my attention back to the road. A semi with a freezer car sporting a biohazard warning, probably filled with bodies and headed for the Heinlein labs, drifted into my lane.

  A message came in from the Federal Building. I picked up.

  Go ahead, Sean.

  That kid from the lobby already has bites airing.

  Great. How’d he edit?

  Well. You two look like best friends. They want a statement tomorrow to defuse this.

  I’ll try to find something newsworthy.

  Streetlights streaked by as I veered off the express lane and down toward the shipyard. A tight loop took me under a rusted bridge that was covered in graffiti and sent me toward a series of shadowed behemoths moored along the docks.

  As I got closer, my long- range scanner picked up a revivor heart signature, although it was too far away to read. I brought up a map of the dock and laid the location of the signature over it, a soft orange flickering behind my eyes in the rearview mirror.

  It’s a revivor—I’ve got a signature. Where’s the backup team?

  On their way.

  I homed in on the dock where the signature was emanating from and pulled over, stepping out of the car. It was windy, and the cold, damp breeze coming in off the water smelled like ocean and garbage. The dock planks and chain posts were covered in a thick layer of frost, jagged little icicles leaning into the wind. Beyond that, through fog and snow, the skyline rose up in a sea of neon and electric light.

  I switched off the GPS and focused on the signal. It was coming from a stack of huge metal shipping containers that had been offloaded and were sitting in the fog. Were we going to get that lucky?

  It looks like it’s still with the offloaded cargo. I’m going to check it out.

  The containers were stacked two stories high; mass vehicle transports, each capable of holding maybe twenty-four cars. I moved into the shadows between two rows of them, toward the signal.

  How many?

  Just one.

  I found the container the signature was coming from and approached it. The front end of it had a huge set of doors to allow vehicles in and out, and it was barred and locked. To the side of the large doors was a small one to allow inspectors in and out. I scanned the scene and packaged the footage along with the rest of the case information, then sent out a warrant request.

  Granted.

  I approached the small door and put my thumb to the lock, issuing an override code. A few seconds later, the bolt opened with a loud snap. I pushed it open with a crunch that brought flakes of ice down over my head, and went inside.

  Adjusting the night vision filter, I looked around. The crate was filled with tightly packed rows of electric cars sitting on metal skids, parked bumper to bumper and three rows high.

  I scanned the inside of the container; the signal was coming from above me. After climbing up the scaffolding, I managed to follow it to a single car in the middle row. I peered in through the side window, trying not to fog it up.

  There was a female revivor inside, lying on the backseat and wrapped in plastic. I opened the back door and leaned in for a closer look. The wrap was sealed, and the body wasn’t moving.

  Using my field knife, I slit the plastic down the middle and pulled it apart. I could tell right away it was a combat model; plain-looking with short hair, a scar on the forehead, and little in the way of curves. No fancy skin work or cosmetic augmentation had been done.

  Leaning in close, I used the backscatter to get a look under the skin and saw some muscle work and joint augmentation. Resting in a chamber between the bones of the right forearm was what they called a revivor bayonet. For sure, it was a combat model, and not a hack job either. This one had rolled off some country’s assembly line.

  There was a low creak from below me as the door to the crate opened partway, and I froze. I backed slowly out of the car and drew my gun, peeking through the metal lattice where I saw a figure down below, moving through the doorway. I zoomed in on it.

  “What are you doing here, kid?” I said, just loud enough to be heard. At the sound, he jumped. It was the same one from the lobby; he must have tailed me.

  “Following the story.”

  “You pieced that footage together pretty quick,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Gotta move fast in this business,” he said. “Did you find it?”

  “Find what?”

  “Oh, come on,” he whispered. “What do you think? The reviv—”

  A shot rang out before I could answer him, and the kid’s head pitched to one side. His body bounced off the door and spilled out onto the dock.

  I stayed crouched as the container door slowly ground to a stop with a metallic groan. I zoomed in on the kid; most of what had been inside his head was scattered over the planks, steam rising off it. Footsteps were approaching; someone heavy was running very fast across the dock toward the container. Given the weight and speed of the footfalls, whoever it was had to be augmented. I aimed toward the doorway as the footsteps thumped to an abrupt stop just outside.

  I’ve got gunfire down here and one civilian dead. Where’s backup?

  A weapon was thrust through the doorway, and immediately automatic gunfire pounded through the inside of the container, sending sparks flying off the car I was crouched behind. One of the tires blew out and I was sprayed with bits of safety glass as bullets punched through the car. I fell back, slipped, and tumbled off the scaffolding down onto the floor. I pushed myself behind another car as the racket continued. A second later, the heart signature I was monitoring flatlined.

  Damn it.

  The backup team just entered the shipyard. Hang on.

  Another burst of gunfire sounded, and as I moved along the bottom row of cars, I caught sight of the shooter in the doorway. I fired at him three times, hitting him at least once before another volley ripped into the car in front of me.

  He ducked back out and it got quiet. He wasn’t visible through the exit where the kid’s body was now holding the door open, so I listened for him, but my ears were ringing and I couldn’t make anything out. He wasn’t showing up on the thermal filter, but the door or the walls of the container might have been shielding him.

  I moved to the far end of the container and followed the wall to the door. I still didn’t see him, so I moved to the doorway and crouched down near the body. No one was on the left side of the exit, but the door was still hanging open to the right. I moved outside and spun around the door, but before I could bring my gun around, he grabbed my wrist and held it like a vise.

  He was definitely augmented; he moved me easily, pulling me off balance and smashing my hand into the metal wall. My grip loosened, and he delivered a hard punch to my gut. The strength went out of my legs, and I felt the gun fall from my fingers.

  He let go of me and I slipped on a patch of ice, coming down on my knees onto the dock. It hurt when I forced in a breath, and spots were swimming in front of my eyes. I felt like I’d just been hit by a train.

  The guy was wearing a navy jumpsuit like one of the dockworkers might wear over a thermal body glove. He had dark skin and wavy black hair that stuck out from under a gray wool cap. He put the automatic weapon he’d been carrying down on the ground, the clip expended. He didn’t bother to go for my gun, so he knew the grip was keyed to me.

  “I’m a federal agent,” I said, but he didn’t show any sign that he cared or that he even understood me. I went
for my gun and he threw a kick, catching me in the chest and knocking me back.

  I was lifted up by the lapels and felt my heels brush the ground for a moment before the back of my head crashed into the metal wall. Everything went white for a second, and his hand began to squeeze around my neck, crushing it.

  I was going to black out. Warning lights were flashing red across my field of vision. I caught a brief glimpse of an override code flickering by as the world spun around me, and one of the internal stims popped and released into my bloodstream.

  My adrenaline shot through the roof. About half the warning indicators blinked out and half stayed on as my EKG spiked and every muscle in my body jumped like I’d grabbed a live wire. I shot out my palm and his nose crunched underneath it, spattering us both with blood. I grabbed his head and jabbed my knee up into his jaw. The grip on my neck released.

  I fell to the ground and tackled him, knocking us both onto the dock with me on top of him. I started hammering him in the face and neck with my fists, splitting his cheek open and shearing away his two front teeth before he could get his arms up between us.

  The stim wasn’t going to last forever; I put three right hooks into his ear as he got a hand on my chest and shoved me back. My last punch hit air as I floundered, and he kicked me square in the chest. I fell on my back and saw him getting up.

  Blood was running out of his nose, dripping off his chin. His lips were red and his right earlobe was smashed. He grimaced, flicking a tooth out onto the ground with his tongue. A crimson strand of saliva from his busted lower lip waved in the cold wind as his breath plumed out of his mouth.

  I tried to kick away and he grabbed me, pulling me up by my collar.

  We’ve got him.

  It took me a second to realize what the message meant; my backup was there, targeting him from somewhere nearby. The stim was wearing off, and I could feel the strength draining out of me.

  Don’t kill him.

  Roger that.

  He pitched back and dropped me just as I heard the shot ring out. I saw his leg collapse into a Z shape between the right knee and ankle as the flesh and bone were torn away and he fell to the ground. He rolled over on his side, staring bug-eyed at his leg.