State of Decay r-1

by James Knapp

  I grabbed the redhead’s wrist and dragged her out of the cage. Her knees hit the floor; then she got her legs back and hid behind me with two fistfuls of my jacket.

  “Get off!”

  Something hit the glass nearby and I saw some kind of brick with a flashing light on it stuck to the middle cage. I shoved her back, and the bitch pulled me down on top of her behind a rack of equipment. When I looked up, it was just in time to see the thing go off. The floor shook as the boom pounded my ears and a blast of heat hit me full-on. The glass blew into dust in a circle around it, until the whole thing was gone.

  Through the ringing in my ears, I could hear her screaming behind me. I turned around to shut her up and saw two of the soldiers standing over us just a few feet away.

  The girl was standing between us, hands clamped on her ears, toe-to-toe with the goons. She stood there staring at them, and they had us in their sights, but they stopped.

  Then, just like that, one of the soldiers pointed his gun at the one next to him and put a slug right in his ear. No reason; he just blew his fucking head right off. His buddies got splattered, and turned on him like he’d gone nuts. The one that got shot was still falling when the guy that did it dropped his rifle and turned the flamethrower on the rest.

  “Come on!” she yelled, pointing at the door that led back out the way I came. She didn’t have to say it twice.

  We barreled through the door, gunshots booming over the shriek of the flamethrower.

  Nico Wachalowski—Factory Clean Room

  I opened my eyes and saw a blue sky above me. It was a cool blue, with just a few white clouds, and even though I was shivering a little, it made me think of summer. The sound of wind and surf filled my ears, and just under that, faintly, were the sounds of others nearby as they talked and laughed and played.

  Was I dreaming? Had I lost consciousness at the last moment in the factory, and was I imagining this place? Maybe I blacked out and the revivor finally killed me. Maybe it was all some kind of euphoria caused when my brain sensed the shock to my body was too much and released a flood of dopamine to ease my slipping away. Maybe I was finally going to die.

  Agent Wachalowski.

  That was no dream. The words hung there against the blue sky, then faded. I recognized the communications signature from when Fawkes broke in and hijacked Faye back in the storage unit. For better or worse, he was keeping me alive. I accessed my JZI and found a security lockdown had been initiated. He’d hacked into it, then, and been detected.

  Where am I? I asked.

  You haven’t moved. Your friend Ms. Dasalia is still near you. She is kneeling directly next to you. I know that matters to you. I found the way you looked at her when you stormed in a little touching.

  What did you do to me?

  Your cerebral implant was also developed at Heinlein Industries, Agent. You might be surprised how similar some of the technology is to the implants used in revivors.

  No, I wouldn’t. What did you do?

  I used a back door to communicate with your implant, briefly. I convinced it that fatal toxin levels were detected in your bloodstream. It put you in deep sedation to stop the spread until it could neutralize them.

  I tried to move, but my body wouldn’t respond. Even when I rolled my eyes to look around, my view didn’t change, which meant the images were being fed to my brain directly and that my eyes, in reality, were still closed.

  Warning messages began to flash over the image of the blue sky. He was hacking through the security locks to get access to the JZI’s main command functions. The only way to stop him would be to shut down the implant, but the emergency protocol was still in effect. It wouldn’t accept the shutdown code until it determined it was safe to do so.

  Why not just kill me?

  The systems you’re outfitted with are impressive. I could use a revivor like you in my ranks.

  I’m not wired for reanimation.

  Not yet.

  I’d faced revivors in the field back in the service and again at home. In all that time, I’d never had one try to hack into my systems before; I didn’t think they were capable of it. I’d broken into the control center of many revivors before, though. I understood them. I knew how they functioned.

  Before Fawkes could break through, I shunted a virus over the connection back toward the source. There was a noticeable lag before it dropped into his memory and executed.

  I realized he wasn’t in the factory. Wherever he was, he was far away. Really far.

  His next communication was garbled. The virus mapped his systems, then took control of them. When it was finished, it sent a full report, which included access codes to all of his systems.

  His assault stopped. Before he could give the command to the revivor in the room with me, I severed his command spokes. Every revivor in the facility was cut off from him.

  Agent, wait.

  I sifted through the access codes and found the trigger to the small capsule of Leichenesser that Heinlein implanted in the skull of every revivor.

  Agent, I have placed a lock on the necrotizing capsule contained inside Faye Dasalia. If you kill me and that connection times out, she’ll die too.

  You’re already dead, Fawkes, and so is she.

  You understand what I mean. Destroying me will be a mistake, Agent. There’s more going on here than you realize.

  I connected to his system and tried to trace his location. Wherever he was, it was outside the country. He’d set up some elaborate chain of reroutes on the circuit.

  Where the hell are you? I asked.

  I’m right where I’m supposed to be, suspended in stasis fluid, in a plastic blister, in a metal box buried under a warehouse of other identical metal boxes. The only difference between me and the rest of the PH soldiers awaiting deployment is that I arranged to be outfitted with capabilities they don’t have. They keep me conscious and allow me to still act, even though I can’t move.

  I wondered if that could be true, or if it was meant to keep me off his trail. If he had developed some means to do what he said, it was possible he was on a base somewhere in the world, still awaiting deployment. A PH soldier might sit in a storage depot for years before it was needed. If he had contact with the outside world and enough resources, he might have been able to orchestrate everything remotely.

  This was planned a long time ago, he said. If you’re going to destroy me, at least take the information I have. If you don’t, it was all for nothing.

  What information? What are you talking about?

  It all goes back to Ning Zhang.

  What does that mean? I asked. What does Zhang have to do with this?

  What Olav Sodder first discovered wasn’t what he thought it was. I realized after studying the revivor Zhang that his memories weren’t corrupted at all, as everyone had believed. When I studied him long enough, I found that it was actually just the opposite; as a revivor, he had an almost total command over his memories, so much so that he could pick them out and access them almost like pages of computer memory. I can definitively say now that this analogy is not far from the truth.

  You said yourself in one of the interviews with Zhang that events happen one way, not two, I said.

  Yes, but the assumption was always that the revivor’s memory was corrupted somehow during reanimation and that one memory was the original true one, and the other was the corrupted false one. I compared the brains and the components of many different subjects, and there was no physical or chemical difference between those that were affected and those that weren’t. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a corruption that happened during death or during reanimation. There could only be one other explanation: the corruption occurred before death. Zhang’s reanimation didn’t cause the memory corruption, Agent, it removed it. The original memory, the living memory, was the false one. Not the other way around.

  At that moment, I finally understood him. He was talking about Zoe. Not her specifically, but the phenomena she could crea
te.

  Are you saying someone altered Zhang’s memory when he was alive?

  Yes.

  And he remembered the truth, the way things really happened, after he was dead?

  Zhang never committed the crime he was accused of; someone convinced him that he did.

  Who? Why?

  The ones who actually did it, I imagine. As for why, who knows? It served someone’s purpose.

  Eyewitnesses came forward in the Zhang trial.

  I was able to interview one such witness after reanimation. The memory of witnessing that event was a lie as well.

  The memory was implanted? Is that what you’re saying?

  I know you have some idea of what I’m talking about, Agent. Memory is a tricky thing. It plays tricks on us all the time. In the hands of a master, it can be manipulated, I promise you. You yourself were a victim before I had Zoe Ott removed.

  She’s just one—

  She’s just one of many, Agent. Your friend isn’t unique; she’s one of thousands, and they have been using you to get to me. When I started analyzing the new revivors we brought online, I began uncovering more and more instances of what we called Zhang’s Syndrome. As reanimation technology got more sophisticated, the memories became more specific. I catalogued them, trying to create a bigger picture, and eventually one formed. I began to see an order to the thousands of alterations, and an organization took shape. As I studied the recovered memories, I began to see themes, policies, agendas, and, eventually, names.

  The list. A fragment of that list had been pulled from one of Samuel’s illegal imports; the rest later from Faye.

  If these people really exist and they’re so powerful, then how did you manage to kill them so easily?

  Because they have an Achilles’ heel. One that your friend may have noticed. They can’t read revivors.

  I remembered Zoe’s reaction when I put her in front of Faye back in the storage unit, the surprise on her face and the fear in her eyes when she backed away. It sobered her, as much as anything could have. At the time, I thought it was a reaction to seeing the body walking and talking again. Some people could handle it and some couldn’t. Now I thought I understood.

  They can’t read them, they can’t control them, and now they understand; we know too much.

  My mind struggled with what he was saying. I couldn’t deny the reality of Zoe’s power. If she had it, others like her could too. Could there be any truth to what he was saying?

  It doesn’t matter, Fawkes.

  You don’t believe that.

  You can’t justify those bombs going off downtown.

  I knew how to take control of as many revivors as I needed; the only trick was getting them out of storage so I could do it. I used the ones I smuggled to strike the key players who might get in the way, then caused enough chaos to threaten the security of the city. When the troops were finally deployed, I used them to eliminate the rest.

  All of them?

  Enough to hurt them. Enough to set them back decades.

  The blue sky warped, then flickered in front of me for a second. The sound of the voices and the surf skipped, and there was a pop of static.

  Have you seen the prisoners they keep down here and the experiments they’re conducting on them?

  To defeat an enemy, you have to understand them, Agent. I designed those experiments. It’s one thing to know people can influence the minds of others; it’s another thing to understand how it’s done and if anything can be done to stop it. Those experiments are the result of years of brain-pathway data amassed at Heinlein Industries. If the experiments hadn’t been necessary, I wouldn’t have to take the risk of breaching Heinlein’s system.

  Or killing Cross.

  These people knew someone was on to them and they were starting to figure it out, with the help of the likes of you and your friend Dasalia. They traced it to Heinlein, and one of them, Rebecca Valle, decided to influence Cross and her own son. They dragged them into this, not me.

  But you had them killed.

  We have to win at any cost. I know you understand that.

  The floor shook underneath me again, making my teeth rattle. Whatever was happening, it was getting worse.

  It’s time for you to wake up, Agent.

  I went to trigger the Leichenesser capsule—even if it meant losing what was left of Faye—but before I could, the connection dropped. The blue sky went dark. Somehow he’d managed to isolate the virus and get control back.

  His command functions all dropped off and my JZI reset, then began to reinitialize. As soon as the system came back online, I fired a stim into my bloodstream.

  My eyes snapped open. The big revivor was kneeling over me, its shirt sticky with black blood. For the first time, I noticed the explosives strapped underneath its coat, the blue light of the timer counting down slowly. Its right forearm was splayed apart down the middle and the tip of the blade inside was inches from my neck. It was waiting on the order from Fawkes, but the command spoke was still cut.

  Faye was next to it. She was looking down at me with what I wanted to believe was concern or compassion, but the truth was I couldn’t be sure.

  “Nico—”

  My gun was gone. I swatted the revivor’s arm away, and the point of the blade slammed into the floor next to my ear. I grabbed its coat and reached behind my back for the field knife tucked in my belt. Pain bored into my chest as I pulled myself up and planted my shoulder in its gut, pushing it back. When it braced one foot, I dug the knife in behind its Achilles’ tendon and sliced through it.

  Off balance, the revivor began to fall. I followed it down, then straddled it as it hit the floor. It bucked underneath me as I put one knee on the side of its face and jammed the knife in the back of its neck. With a violent jerk, I severed the spine.

  “Nico!”

  According to the counter, Faye had only minutes left before the Leichenesser capsule triggered. The Special Forces team was close. It was only a matter of time before they found the clean room. I opened the revivor’s coat and saw the LCD ticking down in the mass of wires. There was no way I could defuse it, but it had a reset mechanism …a dead- man’s switch in case the revivor was taken down. The revivor watched, unable to move as I pushed the button and the timer reset.

  “Faye, come here,” I said, pushing a chair toward her. “Sit there. Hurry.”

  She did as I said, then turned suddenly as something crashed behind us. I saw her hands go up as the door flew open and Calliope stormed in with a gun in her hand.

  “Don’t shoot!” I yelled, holding out one hand. Zoe was with her, blood smeared under her nose as she lingered by the doorway.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Cal barked, and there was fear in her voice but not panic.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  “Now!”

  I spun the chair around and used my knife to cut through the skin at the base of Faye’s skull. As I scanned through the muscle and bone, I could see the revivor components clustered there. I had to go deep, but not too deep. The tip of the blade shook and I grabbed my wrist with my free hand to try to stop the tremors caused by the stim.

  “What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!” Cal snapped behind me.

  Faye, hold still. This won’t take long.

  Okay.

  If it doesn’t work, I’m sorry.

  I dug the tip of the knife through to the casing where the Leichenesser capsule was housed. The black fluid was greasy under my fingertips as I coaxed it back.

  Using the edge of the blade, I pried the casing free and pulled, breaking the connections. It slid out of its chamber and I pulled it away. The unit popped in my hand and white smoke began to pour off my fingers as it consumed the revivor’s blood.

  “Faye?”

  Black fluid leaked from the hole, branching down the back of her neck, but the Leichenesser hadn’t touched her. She turned back and looked at me from the corner of one eye. Cal was still sticking the gun out, not sure wh
at to do. I waved the remaining smoke from my hand.

  “Faye, you’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay; I’m going to take you out of here.”

  “What happened to Fawkes?”

  “He’s shut off from the rest of the revivors, but it won’t last. We have to get out of here.”

  Footsteps were clambering up the steps toward the clean room. Two figures barreled through, and I caught the glow from their eyes before one turned to shut the door behind them. They were both armed with automatic rifles.

  “This way,” Faye said, pushing a narrow panel open. Her voice was swallowed by a high-pitched shriek from the stairs. Flames poured through the space in the doorway, crawling across the ceiling, before one of the two new revivors managed to push it shut and cut off the flow in a puff of blue. Its palm sizzled as it held the door shut and then locked it.

  “Cal, Zoe, this way!” I shouted. Cal was one step ahead of me, and Zoe followed her. I pushed them through the narrow opening.

  “Where does it lead?” I asked Faye.

  “I don’t know. He said away from here.”

  Something hit the door to the clean room hard, and charred paint chips scattered to the floor. The two revivors ignored us and took up positions at the corners of the room. Each took aim at the entrance, waiting for the Special Forces team to come.

  I took Faye by the wrist.

  “Faye, come with me,” I said. She didn’t move. Cal grabbed my arm and pushed a gun into my hand.

  “Faye, come on,” I said. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”

  She just put her hand on mine, though, and pushed it away. She gave it a gentle squeeze, her palm and fingers cool and dry.

  “Faye—”

  She put one hand in the middle of my wounded chest and shoved me back.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  Cal pulled me the rest of the way as the panel slammed shut.

  Go, Faye said; then the link cut out.

  When I looked back at them, Calliope was shouting something and Zoe was just staring up at me like she was seeing me for the first time. Even for her, there was something strange about her expression. It was like she had forgotten who I was.