State of Decay (41 page)

You did it. Your place is with us.
My stomach dropped a little.

“It’s not from Nico,” I said.

“Do you know what it means?”

I crumpled up the card in my hand, then dropped it in the trash.

“No,” I said. “If it’s okay, I think my place is with you.”

A couple days after the whole thing went down, I stood out in the cold to wait for the bus, and it was goddamn gray out. The sky, what you could see, was gray; the buildings looked gray; everything was gray. The wind howled down the street, kicking up the dusting we got. It was cold. I heard that where I was going they had the opposite problem, but it couldn’t be much worse.

When the bus finally showed, it looked like it was going to blow by, but he saw me there and pumped the brakes. It rolled to a stop, front tire half in a puddle of slush when the door squealed open.

I hoisted my bag up on one shoulder and got on. It was warm in there and all the glass was fogged except the front. The driver looked like he came with the bus, and he’d get buried with it too.

“Pass,” he said.

I took out the little yellow chit they gave me when I signed up to serve. The driver gave it a look and I dropped it in the slot. It landed in the box with a few others.

“Just you?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Have a seat,” he said. “It’s a long trip.”

There were three other guys in the back. Two looked like they were passed out, and the last one looked like he wished he was. I sat down as far from them as I could and put my bag in the seat next to me. I wiped the fog off the window and watched with my head against the cold glass as we pulled out of Bullrich Heights.

I’m not sure what made me do it. Part of it was the G-man and something he said. He said he thought I was worth more than the arena. He said I impressed him down in that hellhole. He didn’t say “Go sign up”—that part was my idea—but I think I believed him.

That was part of it. The big thing, though, was that once it was all over, nothing felt right anymore. When I got back to my place, it was like it didn’t even look the same. As soon as I was through the door, I knew I’d leave. Anyplace had to be better than there, even the grinder.

The guys made some noise and we all went out for a big bash my last night, and I drank until I puked. I passed out facedown and said good-bye to my life, for what it was worth.

As the bus took me out of there, I thought about the G-Man, Nico. The training and the skills were just the start. The implant, the wiring, the strength, and the power . . . it could all be mine. I held his card in my hand as the bus took me where I was going, reading his message and his number.

For better or worse, things were going to change.

The first thing I saw when I finally woke up was the last of the diagnostic messages scrolling past the darkness behind my eyelids. The second thing I saw was the communication-pending message from Noakes marked URGENT.

Opening my eyes, I saw Sean sitting at the monitor on the bench in front of me as I lay in the maintenance chair. The rice paper underneath me crinkled as I cracked my back, and he glanced over, thin lips grinning. The dark shadow still floated in front of my eyes.

“Welcome back,” he said.

“How long was I down?”

“A long time.”

He got up, and I saw he hadn’t shaved. He looked tired as he stepped over to the chair and looked down at me, holding the scanner up to my right eye.

“How am I doing?”

“All things considered, pretty well,” he said. “I had to call in some help on this one. Your sternum was split, so it had to be replaced with an artificial one, and that plate you had behind it got dimpled, so it had to come out.”

“What about the rest of me?”

“You suffered a severe myocardial infarction and a lot of blood loss,” he said. “The chemicals released by the JZI kept you alive, but they take their own toll. It took almost a total transfusion to get you right, but you’ll be back on your feet.”

“I’ve got a blind spot in front of my right eye.”

“You had some oxygen starvation even despite the implant; you were down for a long time. I won’t lie; you had some pinprick necrosis in a section of your brain, but you got lucky.”

“Hang on,” I told Sean.

The last time I saw Faye, she was with one of the black-market revivors Fawkes had brought in. While I waited with Zoe and Calliope outside for the EMT to arrive, I’d searched for her signature, but I never picked it up again.

My memory of what happened down in the factory was a little fuzzy, but that didn’t sit with what I had seen. Still, I knew when something was a done deal. If I was going to pursue this further, it wasn’t going to be in front of Noakes.

The communication broke; then the array went off-line, thanks to some internal tweak from Sean.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“What happened to Zoe and Calliope?”

“They interviewed them, of course. Ott insisted she was unconscious the whole time and didn’t remember anything about her capture or her abductor.”

“They believed that?”

“I can’t explain it, but they just let her go.”

Maybe he couldn’t explain it, but I could.

“What about the other one?”

“Flax backed up the story you gave when you were brought in. They held her for a couple days, then cut her loose.”

“So that’s that?”

“Yeah.”

“No one cares about Cross, or the breach at Heinlein, or what was really going on down in that factory?”

Sean smiled faintly, then sat down next to the maintenance chair. He leaned in a little closer, putting his face near mine, like he was going to whisper something to me.

Instead, his stare became fixed, and a second later I watched as his pupils dilated almost all the way open. I felt a little wave of dizziness, but then it passed.

“Mark one three one,” he said. I was about to ask him what he was talking about when he spoke again, this time in a different tone of voice.

“Stop pursing the specifics of what was going on down in the factory,” he said, his voice authoritative and calm. “Any and all links to Heinlein Industries were opportunistic, to make use of their resources in order to maintain their smuggled revivor soldiers. There was no link between the murders investigated by Detective Dasalia and the events leading up to the strike on the factory. You never found the prisoners being kept in the underground facility, and as far as you know, they were burned along with everything else. Do you understand?”

His stare and his statements took me by such surprise that I thought I almost said something before I realized what was happening. As I watched him from the other side of that dark spot swimming in front of my eyes, I realized he was staring at me the same way Zoe had that time, the way I’d seen her stare at others when she was controlling them.

Sean was looking at me, pupils still wide, waiting for an answer. Except for some reason his little trick wasn’t working, and he hadn’t realized that. Not yet. His eyes narrowed.

I’d had pinprick necrosis in a section of my brain.
Whatever had happened to me, it seemed to have left me immune to their influence.

I let my mind go blank. I stopped thinking about anything else except what he’d said.

“I understand,” I said. His face relaxed.

“This was a win across the board,” he continued. “Whatever you saw or heard down there, forget it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Sean’s eyes stayed the same, but his face relaxed a little and his tone of voice changed when he spoke again.

“This is for your own good, Nico. Stay out of this.”

I had known Sean for years. Our relationship had always been the same, and I trusted him with my life. Seeing him then, it was like he had pulled off a mask.

“Just tell me one thing,” he said, leaning closer, “then forget everything to my statement ‘mark one three one.’ I need to know one thing.”

“Okay.”

“Where is Samuel Fawkes? Did he get out of the facility?”

I knew there was a lot riding on my answer. This was important to him, very important. I had never seen him so serious about anything before in my life. Fawkes had been telling the truth. The group he described, they did exist. They had infiltrated even the FBI, and they knew about him.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

I could have told him I didn’t know or I could have told him the truth, but something told me to play that information close to the vest.

“Samuel Fawkes is dead.”

“You’re sure?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

What the hell. It wasn’t a lie.

James Knapp
grew up in New England and currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Kim.