State of Decay (36 page)

Another update came over the connection I was monitoring.

The names continued to peel off. This was a much larger change than the ones I had witnessed before; at least fifteen names were removed.

Fawkes was behind this. He had to be. He knew revivor technology intimately; he would know how to infect the command matrix. Whatever he was up to, this was part of it.

The question remained, though: why? Samuel Fawkes might have the knowledge to take control of a large group of revivors—he’d already demonstrated he could take control of one—but he wouldn’t do it for nothing. If that was his intent all along and he just needed more revivors than he could bring in illegally, then the purpose of the attacks leading up to this point might have been to pressure the authorities into doing exactly what they did: deploy the National Guard with a compliment of PH soldiers. It would be one of the only set of circumstances under which anyone would ever see so many revivors out of stasis on American soil. Was this what he wanted all along?

There’s something else down there too
, Sean said.
Thermal signatures, a bunch of them.

I tapped Calliope’s helmet.

“What?” she yelled over the engine.

“Forget the apartment. Head toward the industrial sector!”

“What about your friend?”

“Change of plan!”

I remembered falling, and my head hurt like it had hit the floor, but when I opened my eyes I was sitting down in a folding chair. The white light was gone, and it had gotten very quiet.

Looking around, I saw I was back in the green concrete room, a single fluorescent light flickering above my head. The table was in front of me, and down at the far end were three figures, the first two kind of hanging limp in the dark and the last one standing with a light shining down on her from the ceiling.

The green room wasn’t real. Whatever happened back in the real world, it zapped me into a vision.

That’s what the guy said right before it happened. . . . Another consciousness rushed into my head all at once, filling my brain with her thoughts. She pounced like she’d been struggling to reach someone for a long time and finally got the chance.

Whoever she was, she was in pain and she was desperate. When her mind flooded mine, I had the feeling she couldn’t see me and didn’t know who or where I was. It didn’t matter that it was me; it didn’t matter who I was. I was someone—anyone—who might be able to help her.

She wasn’t just calling out for help; she was trying to dominate me. She was using the same abilities I used on others all the time. When she tried to take control, I reflexively threw a wall up between us. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the chair.

The chair legs scraped across the floor as I pushed it back and stood up. When I looked around, I saw the metal door that led out of the room was hanging open. A woman was standing in the doorway, but she was pushed up against the empty space like there was an invisible wall. She had really hollow cheekbones and sunken eyes. Her hair was ratty, and her forehead was pressed to the invisible wall like it was too heavy for her to hold up straight. I could see two big flaps of skin draping down over either side of her neck, and the whole back of her skull and top of her spine were exposed. A square hole had been sawed in the bone, and a bunch of long needles stuck up out of the hole like she was a human pincushion.

I made myself step closer. There were three star tattoos near one of her eyes.

I know that face.
She’d appeared to me before.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She was saying something, over and over. I couldn’t hear her, but I could make it out when I watched her lips.

When I looked close, I could see very faint, very thin threads of light trailing from my head and stretching out between us. I followed them to the ends of the needles.

“I know you,” I said.

She was the one that showed up in my bathroom, back before I met Nico. She told me that I’d end her pain. She was like me. The ones who took me, they did this. They connected us together. They wired us up so they could watch this happen.

“Why are they doing this?” I asked out loud, but she looked as though she couldn’t hear me.

“Your place is with us,” a voice said from behind me. I turned around and saw what I thought at first was a little boy, but it turned out to be a very small Asian woman with a short haircut. She was standing off to the side where the dead woman with the split heart usually stood, and was dressed in a smart little navy skirt and suit coat with a white blouse. Her shoes and clothes all looked very expensive, and if the diamonds in her jewelry were real, then they must have cost a fortune. Her tiny nails were manicured and painted, and her makeup was carefully applied so that she almost looked pretty, but her lips and eyes were a little fishlike and her head was too big for her body.

“You were in the picture,” I said. She was in one of the photos Nico had left with me, the one my neighbor was interested in. She looked around the room, her eyes settling on the figures against the far wall.

“I’m not really here,” she said. “Neither of us is; this is a construct of your mind. You are alone, and you are in great danger. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“The people who have taken you set up this facility in order to learn how our minds work. No one here will survive what is to come except for you, but only if you do what I say. Do you understand?”

There was something about her stare. I found myself nodding again.

“Yes.”

“Your life doesn’t have to be as pathetic as it is,” she said offhandedly. “People with less have achieved more.”

She gestured for me to follow as she moved toward the three figures. I moved around the other side of the table to join her.

The first two figures were Nico and the woman, the dead one with the broken heart that he had with him in the storage room. They both looked limp, like they were hanging from hooks. Her eyes were closed, but his were just a little bit open, orange light flickering behind them as they watched me.

“Why are they in the dark?” I asked.

“You failed them.”

“No—”

“You failed them.”

My face burned as I looked at Nico peering down at me. It wasn’t true. Maybe I failed the woman, but not him.

My eyes blurred and I felt tears run down my cheeks. The little woman didn’t seem to notice or care; she just turned to the last one, the one that was still lit. It was that ugly, muscular woman, the mean-looking one with the short hair. The light over her got a little brighter.

“I didn’t fail him,” I said, but the woman ignored me.

“It’s time to call her,” she said.

“Why her?”

“Some are more open than others, and like it or not, there is a connection between you. Reach out to her now.”

I was going to ask how I was supposed to do that when I didn’t know where she was and I didn’t even know where I was, but the woman just kept staring into my eyes, and after a couple seconds an image started to form in my head.

“Focus.”

The image took shape and I saw the mean- looking woman on a motorcycle, snow spitting past her as the collar of her leather coat ruffled in the wind. I thought I saw someone riding in back of her—a man—but it wasn’t clear.

“Focus.”

I tried to focus on her, but the woman with the needles kept pushing at the invisible barrier across the doorway. The thin threads of light that connected us pulsed, getting brighter and then fading as her thoughts washed over me.

A sound like electricity crackling came from her direction, and the lights flickered as her face clenched up. The thoughts got even more urgent, making the picture of the woman on the motorcycle fade in and out.

“Your life can be much more than it is,” I heard the Asian woman say, “but only if you succeed here.”

I tried to concentrate. If this woman knew where I was, then why didn’t she send someone to help me?

“I have sent someone,” she said, like I had spoken out loud, “but that facility must be destroyed. Nothing can survive. If you cannot do this, then I cannot use you, and you will not survive either.”

The electrical cracking filled the hallway beyond the door again, and the woman with the needles seized up like all of her muscles had contracted at once. Another wave from her hit me.

“Focus!” the woman snapped. “If you fail here, it’s over!”

I wasn’t going to be able to hold the image of the motorcycle if the signals from the other woman kept coming at me so strong. If I was going to do anything at all, I had to get her to stop.

Usually I would concentrate on a person and I’d see colors, but this time it was like I had a direct connection right into her head. I reached out and pushed through the current toward her.

When I found her, the colors finally appeared, only instead of being fuzzy patterns, they formed a crisp map where the different colors and shades were all distinct. I reached past the blues, the reds, the yellows, past the fear and the anger and the desperation and doubt. I reached past the thin halo, as deep as I could go until I saw a single hot, white band that was more concentrated than anything I’d ever seen in anyone before. It was as if all things were connected to it. This was the source of her energy, the source of her terror.

With less effort than I expected, I concentrated on it, and like a valve, I turned it off. The flow of light through the band stopped and it went dark. All the colors followed immediately afterward, blinking out until everything was dark. The flow of thoughts stopped, leaving complete silence.

“There,” I said. I looked over at the Asian woman and she was staring at me, this time with a different expression, her mouth parted a little bit like she was stunned. When I looked back to the doorway to see what the needlehead was doing, she had fallen to the floor and wasn’t moving. Any trace of light around her was gone.

There wasn’t any time to think about it. I got the image of the woman on the motorcycle back. Sweat beaded up on my forehead. I saw the colors begin to appear.

The colors formed patterns, and all at once I could read them. I reached out and with all the strength I could muster, I grabbed hold of her.

Calliope had been reckless on the bike all along, but all of a sudden I felt a lurch as she throttled the engine and picked up speed. The road cleared as we raced beneath a monorail platform, and while the back tire kicked sand off the pavement, the front wheel almost came up off the ground.

“Cal, take it easy!”

We’d left the residential and business districts behind us, along with most of the patrols, a while back. The road ahead merged into a clover, which led into a series of open industrial-park areas, none of which looked like they’d seen much recent activity. Through the snow I could make out warehouses and cargo lanes, but they were all covered over now. We lost traction for a second as she hit the clover way too fast and veered down one of the off-ramps.

“Cal!”

There was a chain- link fence up ahead with a gate that hung open partway. She sped toward it, banking at the last second, and the bike tilted wildly. I gripped her waist in a death lock as slush sprayed up over me, and I heard the heel of her boot doing a high- speed scrape across the pavement. Somehow she righted the bike, and I pulled my knees in tight as we flew through the narrow opening in the fence. The blacktop disappeared under the snow again as she took us onto one of the lots.

“Damn it, it’s too deep—stop the bike!”

What was the matter with her? She couldn’t have any idea where she was going, not when I hadn’t even zeroed in on the exact GPS location yet. Over her shoulder, I saw that other vehicles had been here before us, and that she was taking us down a narrow trench formed by their treads. Every few seconds the bike fishtailed and she managed to right it. My chest throbbed and my stomach began to knot.