State of Decay (15 page)

“What?”

He was watching me, his expression not changing. It was weird enough that I was about to focus on him and make him go back inside, when my key found the lock and I pushed it in and turned it.

“I don’t see you out much,” the man said. He was still talking, I think, when I pushed the door open, then slammed it behind me and turned the bolt. Shrugging out of my coat, I dropped it on the floor and sat down on the sofa, crossing my arms over my stomach and leaning forward.

My visit didn’t go anything like I thought it might. The place was uninviting and everyone looked at me funny, if they looked at me at all. I didn’t think I’d talk face-to-face with a suspect, and I never expected to see anyone look like that. He was so beaten up, it made me feel sick.

The image of his face clenching up and the blood spraying out of his ear kept playing in my mind over and over again. The popping sound that came from inside his head was horrible. All I could think of was him lying there in that wheelchair with blood draining out of his ear, splattering all over the floor.

Why did I go there? What made me think I could go there and deal with something like that? Nico didn’t even flinch when he examined the body. How could that not bother him?

Yes, it had worked. For whatever it was worth, it had worked, and Nico Wachalowski was now very interested in me, I could tell.

I remembered his hand on my shoulder, and the electricity I felt when he touched me. I hadn’t been touched in so long it made me ache a little, just in those seconds before he moved it away. I shook my head. There were tears in my eyes.

The room was dark, and behind the shade across the room the sky was gray. I needed a drink. I felt sick, but I needed a drink more.

Someone knocked on the door, breaking me out of my thoughts. I should have ignored it, but instead I opened it like a zombie. It was the woman from downstairs. She was standing there with her hands behind her back and smiling, but her face fell when she saw me.

“Hi,” she said kind of uncertainly. I didn’t say anything.

“Karen,” she prompted.

“Hi, Karen. What do you want?”

“I was thinking about it,” she said. “I think cookies were the wrong way to go.”

“Cookies?”

“Yeah. I brought you something better.”

“Better?”

She brought her hands out from behind her back and held out a bottle. It was clear, filled with amber liquid. I looked at the label; it was top-shelf stuff.

“Wow,” I said. She pulled it back just a little as I reached for it.

“The only catch is, you have to share it,” she said, “with me.”

“Gifts aren’t supposed to have catches.”

“I know, but this one does.”

I felt kind of embarrassed that she thought she could ply me with booze, and even more so that it was working.

“When?”

“Now?”

Maybe I was still just delirious from everything that had happened, but my mouth opened and the word came out.

“Okay,” I said, and she smiled a great, big smile.

“My place is a dump,” I told her.

“That’s fine,” she said.

“Seriously, it’s bad. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“My life is a complete mess,” I warned her.

“Birds of a feather.”

She stood there smiling, and I wondered what it was that some people had inside of them that made them enjoy meeting strangers and interacting with them. I wondered how the prospect of coming up here and getting me to just let her in the front door could put a smile like that on her face.

Stepping back, I let the door swing open so she could come inside. She made a face when she first walked in, but true to her word, she didn’t say anything.

“Still want to stay?”

“It could use a little light,” she said.

“I had a lamp, but it broke,” I said. “You can sit wherever. I’ll get some glasses.”

“What about the overhead lights?”

“They burned out.”

There were no clean glasses, so I rinsed two of them out and dried them off with a paper towel.

“What’s all this stuff?” she called. “The notebooks?”

“My notes,” I said. “Don’t read those.”

“Can I move them?”

“Yeah, just put them anywhere.”

“Notes for what?” she asked as I came in with the glasses.

My face got hot. I couldn’t tell her they were full of dreams and visions and other stuff she wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t tell her they were pages and pages, books and books full of a crazy person’s rants. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just stood there not saying anything until her face started to fall again.

“This is going well, huh?” I said.

She shrugged, trying to keep her smile going, but she was getting uncomfortable too. She looked like she was starting to think this was a bigger mistake than I did.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know what to say.”

I thought she might leave, but instead she got a determined look on her face and the smile came back, at least a little. She patted the cushion of the chair across from her gently, inviting me to sit down, and when I did, she filled my glass about an inch’s worth.

“Tell me about your day,” she said.

I drained the glass, and it felt good. Whatever it was, it was sweet and fiery, and burned going down. Not too much and not too little, and as I felt that heat trickle down my throat and into my stomach, it filled my nose with the smell of spice.

“You’d never believe me.”

She poured me another one, and one for herself. After that, it started flowing pretty freely.

“You don’t want to tell me,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Has it to do with your gift?” she asked.

“My gift?”

“That thing you do,” she said. “The way you calm Ted down. How does it work?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and swallowed another glassful. With my nose in the glass, I breathed in, drawing in the fumes.

“Oh, come on.”

“Really, I wish I did.”

“Are you psychic?”

“I don’t know what I am,” I said, shaking my head.

“For all I know, we’re not even really having this conversation.”

I didn’t notice right away because I was starting to get drunk, but she was looking at me all seriously, and the smile was gone.

“You really see things?”

Instead of answering, I held out my glass again, and she poured some more in.

“Like ghosts?” she asked.

“No.”

“Visions?”

“They’re not hallucinations.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“They’re not. I wish they were.”

“Why?”

“Because it all burns,” I said, looking into the glass. What little light there was looked red through the liquor, shimmering like little hot embers. When I looked back at her, her eyes had gotten wider.

“What does—”

“I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”

Karen nodded.

“Why wouldn’t you let me thank you before?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“You know he used to hit me all the time,” she said, looking down into her glass.

“I know.”

“But not anymore,” she said, “and that’s because of you. I know this is a touchy subject for you, but just let me say it, okay? I don’t know what it is you do or how you do it, but you’ve been a big help. Whether you meant to or not, you made a difference to me. I’ve always wanted to stop you, to talk to you. I’ve always wanted to thank you, but I was afraid.”

As she spoke, I felt this sort of heaviness coming over me, like a fog or water. The light in the room seemed to dim.

“I need to be clear about something,” I said, and I was suddenly very conscious that my words were slurring. “I can’t change anyone or anything. Calming down a violent person doesn’t make him not violent—you get it? If I know something that’s going to happen, I can’t make it not happen. I can’t change anything.”

“You might think that,” she said, “but you’re wrong. People change things all the time. Maybe they don’t do it by reaching into people’s heads, but they don’t have to. They do it by reaching out to them, even if it’s just something little. That’s how you change things, and anyone can do it. Even you.”

She looked up from her glass, and her eyes were a ghostly color. Like moonlight. They glowed softly, and in that instant before she looked down again, they watched me with a cold, dead indifference.

I felt like the floor dropped out from under me, and my face started to feel cold. From outside the window I heard what sounded like a transformer blowing or a loud firework going off from blocks away. I thought I was hearing things, but she heard it too. When she looked back from the window, her eyes were normal.

“What was that?” she asked.

“You need to leave,” I said. Another sound, one she didn’t hear, was getting louder. It was a sound like voices all talking at once.

“I’m sorry—”

“You need to leave,” I said again, getting up. I felt light-headed and stumbled, almost falling back onto the couch. “I didn’t go down there to help you. I went down there because you were being too loud.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The voices were getting louder, and I could hear they were panicked and screaming. The room was getting darker, and the floor felt like it was moving underneath me.

“Something happened,” I said. “Something terrible happened.”

“What—”

“Get out!” I shouted, and she jumped, almost dropping her glass. The heavy feeling was getting worse. Everything was slowing down. I heard a smash as the glass slipped out of my hands and hit the floor. I was hyper-ventilating and I couldn’t stop.

“Hey, are you okay?” Karen asked, getting up and reaching toward me. I slapped her hands aside and she backed away. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I didn’t want what I was seeing to be true.

“It’s not fair!” I screamed. She was looking at me like I’d gone nuts, but by then it was too late for me to even try to stop it.

I stepped back over a body lying on its back on the floor. Three other men with strange silvery eyes hunched over around him. One turned and raised his head, red, gristly meat clenched in his teeth as he tore away a long strip of rubbery skin.

The room disappeared. The voices became a roar as a stampede of men, women, and children charged around me and drowned out everything else. Their faces were burned, their clothing charred off their bodies. Some were bleeding; some were missing arms or legs, stumps flailing as they clawed their way past; some were impaled with pieces of metal, with their skin, bones, and guts torn away. They were screaming as they ran, screaming with eyes wide and blind with fear.

Pieces of glass and metal began raining down from the sky as they fought, pushing tighter and tighter against each other until they could no longer even punch or kick their way forward. They piled around me until there was nothing left but the stinking, shoving, and screaming, and I squeezed my eyes shut, clamping my hands over my ears.

“This isn’t real!” I shrieked, but it was and I knew it. It was real, and everyone was going to die, and everything was going to burn. Karen and me and Wachalowski and the dead woman . . . none of it mattered because it was all going to burn.

By the time we got close to my place, I was so goddamn cold, Luis must have been freezing his second-tier nuts off. The buildings were jammed close together down my way, and no one ever came to plow any road except the main one, so snow was piled up in the places where people bothered to dig out. Down most side streets, the cars were buried ass to nose on both sides, stuck in ice until spring.

I took a left down Iranistan and steered the bike down the narrow path between the stuck cars. The building fronts were covered in graffiti, and half the windows were boarded up.

“How do they get to work?” Luis asked. I didn’t answer.

Up ahead was the old gun shop, or what was left of it, and for the first time in months, there were some guys in front of it. The Turkish guy who ran the market next to it was there in his wool hat, talking to two patrol cops with rifles. A third cop shoved the gun shop’s bent gate open and went in, while a black patrol car with tinted windows idled nearby. The shop used to deal stolen guns under the table and other shit too, but that was a long time ago. Since then it had been torched.

“Are there always so many patrols down here?” Luis asked.

“No.”

The black car gunned its engine when we got closer, and moved into the road to block our path.

We were stuck, so I hit the brakes and we slid to a stop a foot away from the armored front door. One of the two guys with the Turk came up to us with his hand out.

“Hands up,” he said as he came around the side of the car.

“What the hell?” I said. “What now? We’re just—”

“Hands over your heads! Do it!”

Luis’s went up the first time, I think, and I put mine up there too. This guy was tense, one hand on his gun when he came up. The other one was calling in.

“One vehicle, two passengers. Vehicle ID . . .”

The first one looked Luis over, then me.

“Where’s your ID?”

“In my jacket—”

I went to reach for it, and as soon as I moved my hand the gun went right in my face.

“Hands over your head!”

“Alright! Jesus—”