State of Decay (39 page)

Eyes watched through the plastic as I went to the cage on the far bottom left and looked in. There was a girl in it, some scrawny little bitch I’d never seen before. She looked like she weighed ninety pounds, if that, with long, greasy red hair and a big beak nose. She sat on the floor and looked out at me.

“Who are you?” I asked. She just stared over that beak. Her hands were shaking in her lap, and she was sweating like a pig. Blood had come out of her right nostril in a big fat drop on her sweaty top lip.

Somewhere nearby a gun went off, and snapped me out of it.

“Hey!” I said thumping the glass with the gun I forgot I had. “Who are you?”

She put her face to the glass, and all of a sudden her eyes went freaky. The black part twitched, getting bigger and smaller. The blood drop got fatter and ran down her chin. With one bony finger she tapped the glass next to the lock, and I knew what to do. I pointed the gun at the bolt housing and pulled the trigger.

The plastic was tougher than it looked; I had to shoot it three times. I pulled open the door and went to grab her when she flinched, and all of a sudden I felt like a hand pushed me back. I stood there with my hand out.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“Zoe,” she said, and right then the goons came piling in. Our own guys . . . they just came in, guns out, and started shooting.

Bullets punched through the cages in front of me and I saw blood spatter inside. A woman’s head blew apart as specks of shattered plastic came falling down over us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.