State of Decay (32 page)

The doors opened and I stepped out. After they closed again, it got very quiet. I stood there and listened for a minute, but all I could hear was the occasional drip of water. The musty corridor met a junction about ten feet in front of me, lit by fluorescent bulbs behind corroding metal cages.

“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed once, but no one answered.

A sign at the junction said A-I with an arrow pointing right, and J-R with an arrow pointing left. I took the right, and found the door labeled C.

Looking back the way I came, I began to wonder what the hell I was doing there, and reached into my purse for the flask. It was still half full, so I finished it off and put it back. When it hit my stomach, my forehead beaded up with cold sweat and I felt as though I might have to sit down, but after a minute it passed. This had to be the place. Whatever he wanted, I was supposed to go to him. I was supposed to help him.

I put my hand on the door and leaned against the frozen metal as my mind opened and what little light there was brightened. After a few seconds, I saw it; somewhere behind the door was a presence, a single consciousness. He was there, after all, and he was alone.

Before I could knock on the door, it opened, and he was standing there in the doorway. He was wearing his suit pants and shoes, but he had taken off his shirt and was wearing just a sleeveless undershirt. He must have had some kind of heater working inside, because hot air was drifting out from behind him. He looked down at me with his eyelids drooping. He looked out of it.

“You came,” he said.

That outfit he had on, it was the one from the green concrete room when the dead woman first showed him to me. I could see the scar branching out over his right shoulder.

“Yeah.”

He stared at me a minute longer, then took a step back, giving me room to get by. He looked drunk or drugged.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked.

“Just the cab driver,” I said, slipping through the door. It was nothing but a big concrete box, filled with old junk. As I looked around, I saw furniture underneath plastic tarps, stacks of boxes, and other stuff filling up most of the available space.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

“I had to,” he said.

“Had to?”

As messed up as I was, I could see something was really weird about him. I hadn’t been around him that much, but he was acting totally different from before, like he was a totally different person. His eyes looked dull and his expression didn’t change when he talked.

“What happened?” I asked. When his aura phased into view, there was a thin membrane of light rippling under everything else, like a torn parachute falling from the sky. There was a bright cord tethering the membrane to someplace deep inside of him. I recognized that.

“Why are you so scared?”

He started to protest, but I soothed the membrane back, calming it.

“Don’t—”

I’m not sure what made me do it, but I put my hand on his.

“Shhh.”

The billowing light faded a little more but wouldn’t quite go away. Even as his expression and his breathing relaxed, the tension wouldn’t completely go away, and my heart kind of went out to him. Underneath his fear were other things: guilt, uncertainty, sadness, loneliness, and all the other things I knew so well. In him they were more structured than usual, but in some ways that seemed to make them all the more intense, like the colors were reined in but more concentrated and brighter.

“Stop doing that,” he said, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice.

“Why?”

There was no one there to see. I put my other hand on his stomach, right under where the gun was strapped. It felt flat and firm under his shirt. Right away, I could tell from the way his patterns shifted that he hadn’t been touched in a long time. I knew how that felt too.

Maybe it was the alcohol, or just the total weirdness of the whole thing, but all I could think about right then was the way he felt under my hand. Without thinking, I ran my palm up and down his belly, feeling the ridges of muscle underneath his cotton undershirt.

“I know you miss it,” I said. “I know you know how I feel.”

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t pull away either. He put a hand on my shoulder like he might push me away, but he just left it there as the colors shifted in front of my eyes. His eyes drooped further as I moved closer, my forehead almost touching his chest.

“I wanted to thank you,” I said into his shirt.

“For what?”

“For caring about me, even a little bit.”

Something flashed from the darkness behind him just then. When I looked over, I saw a pair of eyes glowing softly back in the corner.

There was no one else there; I had checked before I went inside, so I had to be seeing things again. But then the eyes moved. Something got knocked over, and the eyes began to move closer.

“You . . .”

Breaking out of the trance, Nico jumped, looking disoriented. I pulled my hands back in surprise as a figure stepped out of the shadows, moving toward me. It was her, the dead woman from my dreams, naked except for a button-up shirt that was open at the top. She stepped forward again, then stopped short with the jingle of metal as she reached the end of the chain that was pad-locked to her ankle.

“You can’t be here,” I said, as Nico turned to look and saw her too. She was really there. For some reason, her hair was gone, even her eyebrows, but there was no mistaking her. She even had a thick, puckered pink gash closed up in the middle of her chest.

She stood there, following my eyes down to the wound.

“It got split,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” I said, taking a step back. Nico looked from her to me.

“Zoe, calm down.”

“Why is she here?”

“I need to know what she knows,” he said, gripping me by the shoulders. He held me hard enough so that it hurt a little.

“What?”

“She might be the only one that can tell me,” he said. “I need you to help me.”

It was a trick. He didn’t call me to him because he needed me; it was because he needed her. All he wanted me for was to do something for him. He wanted me to make his woman friend talk.

“Help you do what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. His patterns were so chaotic right then that I doubt he even knew himself.

“Please,” he said.

“You want to know what’s in her head,” I said. “Fine.”

So I pushed, and I pushed hard. Maybe because I was drunk or maybe just because I was angry; it wasn’t fair that another woman was there, and it wasn’t fair that even though she was dead, he could only think about her and not me. It wasn’t fair that he only called me to do a trick for him. None of it was fair. Right at that moment I wanted to control her, to make her leave or back off, or maybe even hurt her if I could.

So, I was drunk, and I was mad, and I pushed hard. I pushed real hard.

The room got very bright, and everything went almost gray. I focused on the woman in front of me with more intensity than I think I’d ever turned on anyone. I reached out to the place where the light would bloom.

“Zoe?”

They didn’t appear. No lights, no colors . . . nothing. When I stared into her eyes, they didn’t change, they didn’t get dull and stupid. They just stared back.

My heart started beating faster. This had never happened before, not ever. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the patterns rippling around Nico’s head. It was working, just not on her.

I pushed harder, concentrating until the light got so bright she was all I could see; her face, her eyes, and the empty space where it should have been. Her thoughts, her consciousness, her self, her soul . . . whatever it was, it wasn’t there. The light blotted out everything else until the only thing that was dark was that empty spot, that empty hole where she should have been. It was like looking into an abyss or a black hole. When I pushed against it . . .

“Zoe!”

All at once, the lights dimmed back to normal. He was shaking my shoulder. The dead girl was still standing there, looking at me. I wiped my nose and there was blood.

“What happened? What did you see?”

She was just standing there, staring at me the way she did in my dreams. Those electric eyes watched me lifelessly as I backed away. I had to get out of there.

Nico reached out to me and I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. What was I doing there? What in the world ever compelled me to get involved in this whole thing? All I wanted was to get back to my apartment, lock the door, and forget about the whole thing—him, her . . . everything. It was a mistake. The whole thing was a mistake.

I stumbled to the door, and he followed me. I pushed on him again, making him stop before he could reach me.

“Your friend is gone,” I told him, and left. He didn’t come after me.

He didn’t even come after me.

After Zoe ran, I wasn’t sure what I should do. Faye had sat back down on the bedroll and hadn’t spoken in minutes.

“Who was that?” she asked finally.

“No one.”

I hadn’t wanted to risk poking around in her systems, because I knew she was seeded with Leichenesser, and the memory of the dock revivor melting away on that autopsy table was too fresh in my mind. That had been triggered when I started rifling through sections of memory I wasn’t supposed to be in.

“Where am I?” she asked.

As I looked down on her, she just stared up at me, her brown eyes replaced by moonlight silver. It was amazing how dehumanizing that one change alone was, but it was more than that. This was the first time I had ever seen a revivor that I had previously known so closely, and the change was subtle but startling at the same time. More than just the color of her eyes or her skin, it was her body language, her expression, the way she held herself; everything was different. It was as if her body had been inhabited by some completely different entity.

I sat down on the bedroll in front of her so that we were facing. Immediately, she reached out and took my hands in hers.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. Her palms and fingers were cold, with no pulse.

“I don’t know.”

“Hold still,” I said, “and stay quiet. I need to concentrate.”

Closing my eyes, I scanned the communications band until I found her signal. She was on an encrypted broadcast band.

“I can’t force my way in,” I told her. “I’m extending a connection; can you see it?”

She didn’t respond at first. I opened my eyes and saw her staring into space, slightly out of focus.

“Yes,” she said.

“Can you accept the con—”

In front of me, her lips curled very slightly, forming the ghost of a smile. Or was that wishful thinking?

“Yes,” she said.

Her hands were like ice, but my palms were sweating.

I moved more carefully this time around, sending a data miner across to feel out any security instead of brute-forcing it. Her systems were protected, but since she hadn’t been deployed, there were no modifications, and the miner managed to clear the way in.

Having only been reanimated for a short time, there wasn’t much in there. The bulk of it was a dynamic database. It looked like a full copy of the list I’d pulled off of the dock revivor.

I compared the list fragment I’d pulled from the dock revivor to the database of names I’d just recovered. There were no matches.

As I watched, it changed size in front of me. A couple seconds later, it did it again. It was getting smaller.

Do you know what this is?
I asked Faye.

A connection opens and they arrive
, Faye said.
First the list came; then, after that, the updates.

The list was keeping track of the names dynamically. That was it; the names were no longer on the list because the people they represented were dead. The database had been updated, and the names removed. If it was a synchronized database, then the updates were coming from somewhere. As the Heinlein rep had pointed out, revivors communicated in a hub-and-spoke fashion, not directly to one another but through a common point. That common point, that hub, must be where these people were based. If I could locate that . . .

The last change in the list size was already complete. I set up a monitor to watch all incoming ports to trace the next one when it came in, then went back to the list.

What do these names have in common?
I asked her.

There were backups going back several iterations in case of corruption. Fishing through them, I found the names from my list fragment. They had been removed eight iterations ago: