State of Decay (40 page)

The floor shook underneath me again, making my teeth rattle. Whatever was happening, it was getting worse.

I went to trigger the Leichenesser capsule—even if it meant losing what was left of Faye—but before I could, the connection dropped. The blue sky went dark. Somehow he’d managed to isolate the virus and get control back.

His command functions all dropped off and my JZI reset, then began to reinitialize. As soon as the system came back online, I fired a stim into my bloodstream.

My eyes snapped open. The big revivor was kneeling over me, its shirt sticky with black blood. For the first time, I noticed the explosives strapped underneath its coat, the blue light of the timer counting down slowly. Its right forearm was splayed apart down the middle and the tip of the blade inside was inches from my neck. It was waiting on the order from Fawkes, but the command spoke was still cut.

Faye was next to it. She was looking down at me with what I wanted to believe was concern or compassion, but the truth was I couldn’t be sure.

“Nico—”

My gun was gone. I swatted the revivor’s arm away, and the point of the blade slammed into the floor next to my ear. I grabbed its coat and reached behind my back for the field knife tucked in my belt. Pain bored into my chest as I pulled myself up and planted my shoulder in its gut, pushing it back. When it braced one foot, I dug the knife in behind its Achilles’ tendon and sliced through it.

Off balance, the revivor began to fall. I followed it down, then straddled it as it hit the floor. It bucked underneath me as I put one knee on the side of its face and jammed the knife in the back of its neck. With a violent jerk, I severed the spine.

“Nico!”

According to the counter, Faye had only minutes left before the Leichenesser capsule triggered. The Special Forces team was close. It was only a matter of time before they found the clean room. I opened the revivor’s coat and saw the LCD ticking down in the mass of wires. There was no way I could defuse it, but it had a reset mechanism . . . a dead- man’s switch in case the revivor was taken down. The revivor watched, unable to move as I pushed the button and the timer reset.

“Faye, come here,” I said, pushing a chair toward her. “Sit there. Hurry.”

She did as I said, then turned suddenly as something crashed behind us. I saw her hands go up as the door flew open and Calliope stormed in with a gun in her hand.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled, holding out one hand. Zoe was with her, blood smeared under her nose as she lingered by the doorway.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Cal barked, and there was fear in her voice but not panic.

“Hold on,” I said.

“Now!”

I spun the chair around and used my knife to cut through the skin at the base of Faye’s skull. As I scanned through the muscle and bone, I could see the revivor components clustered there. I had to go deep, but not too deep. The tip of the blade shook and I grabbed my wrist with my free hand to try to stop the tremors caused by the stim.

“What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!” Cal snapped behind me.

I dug the tip of the knife through to the casing where the Leichenesser capsule was housed. The black fluid was greasy under my fingertips as I coaxed it back.

Using the edge of the blade, I pried the casing free and pulled, breaking the connections. It slid out of its chamber and I pulled it away. The unit popped in my hand and white smoke began to pour off my fingers as it consumed the revivor’s blood.

“Faye?”

Black fluid leaked from the hole, branching down the back of her neck, but the Leichenesser hadn’t touched her. She turned back and looked at me from the corner of one eye. Cal was still sticking the gun out, not sure what to do. I waved the remaining smoke from my hand.

“Faye, you’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay; I’m going to take you out of here.”

“What happened to Fawkes?”

“He’s shut off from the rest of the revivors, but it won’t last. We have to get out of here.”

Footsteps were clambering up the steps toward the clean room. Two figures barreled through, and I caught the glow from their eyes before one turned to shut the door behind them. They were both armed with automatic rifles.

“This way,” Faye said, pushing a narrow panel open. Her voice was swallowed by a high-pitched shriek from the stairs. Flames poured through the space in the doorway, crawling across the ceiling, before one of the two new revivors managed to push it shut and cut off the flow in a puff of blue. Its palm sizzled as it held the door shut and then locked it.

“Cal, Zoe, this way!” I shouted. Cal was one step ahead of me, and Zoe followed her. I pushed them through the narrow opening.

“Where does it lead?” I asked Faye.

“I don’t know. He said away from here.”

Something hit the door to the clean room hard, and charred paint chips scattered to the floor. The two revivors ignored us and took up positions at the corners of the room. Each took aim at the entrance, waiting for the Special Forces team to come.

I took Faye by the wrist.

“Faye, come with me,” I said. She didn’t move. Cal grabbed my arm and pushed a gun into my hand.

“Faye, come on,” I said. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”

She just put her hand on mine, though, and pushed it away. She gave it a gentle squeeze, her palm and fingers cool and dry.

“Faye—”

She put one hand in the middle of my wounded chest and shoved me back.

That was the last time I saw her.

Cal pulled me the rest of the way as the panel slammed shut.

Go
, Faye said; then the link cut out.

When I looked back at them, Calliope was shouting something and Zoe was just staring up at me like she was seeing me for the first time. Even for her, there was something strange about her expression. It was like she had forgotten who I was.

On the other side of the panel, I heard gunfire and the shriek of a flamethrower. I felt the heat on my face as it radiated from the panel in front of me.

I checked the magazine of the gun Cal had handed me. Half the rounds were left.

“Stick close,” I told them. The heat was starting to get intense, and at this depth, between the fire and the smoke, the air would get used up fast.

We didn’t encounter any soldiers on the way back. We ran through the passageway until we came out near the elevator, which was shut down, so I followed the route Cal had taken us when we came in. We headed back up the stairs, back out through the bombed factory entrance and into the underground parking garage, where the shells of the cars were still burning.

As we moved up the ramp, the hot air below became a warm breeze, rushing over us from behind and smelling like smoke. We stepped out into the night and the crisp, cold air. Snow began to fall on my face. It felt good.

The helicopters had been joined by three more, sitting there quietly in the dark. There were no soldiers around, so they had to still be down there. Did they follow the revivors as they tried to get out, or did the whole lot of them burn?

I tried to open a connection to Faye. She didn’t respond.

“What do we do now?” Cal asked.

I knelt down in the snow next to them, the last reserves of my energy trickling away. Zoe stood near me, shivering in the snow as the wind whipped through her thin white linens. I took my coat off and pulled her down to me, placing it around her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Come here.”

I guided her into my lap to keep her bare feet out of the snow, and held her as she shook.

Fawkes believed it. He’d provoked the deployment of the National Guard so he could take control of its revivor ranks, then used them to kill the people on his list. He thought he was bringing down a massive conspiracy. He’d been torturing those people in that underground facility to try to learn how they did what they did and how to stop them.

Zoe shivered in my arms. Was Fawkes insane? Or could there be some truth to what he said?

Nico, what happened down there?
Sean asked.

If my memories had been altered, I wouldn’t know it. Zoe proved that the day I first met her.

The kind of destruction going on below us wasn’t sanctioned by the FBI. Whoever was behind the operation, it wasn’t us. They were destroying everything. Faye was gone, this time for good.

I don’t know
, I said, and cut the connection.

Cal scowled as a gust of wind blew. She looked down at me.

“Hey, what do we do now?” she asked again.

“We wait.”

“Wait,” she snorted.

“Quietly,” I said, and that’s how it ended.

Well, more or less.

“Hey, you okay?”

I caught myself staring into space again. I’d been doing that a lot. After everything was over and I finally got back, nothing felt the same. I guess I hadn’t really been gone very long, but it felt like forever.

I tipped my glass back, smelling the licorice and letting the fire fill my mouth, then my throat and belly. Karen watched me do it, but even though I don’t think she approved, she still smiled. I think she didn’t expect to ever see me again. I know I didn’t expect to see her again.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me stay with you. My place is kind of a crime scene.”

They had held me for a while and asked a lot of questions. I wanted to see Nico, but they wouldn’t let me. I was brought to another room where they tried to stick me with a needle, but I made them let me go. When the cab dropped me off, there were some cops still in my apartment and yellow police tape was all across the front door. The place was totally trashed, and no one would tell me anything. There were markers on the floor around a giant bloodstain, and kind of in the middle of it was the outline of a body in white tape. I found out later that it was my next-door neighbor. The revivor that took me killed him right there in my living room.

They asked me if I had anywhere else to stay while they finished their investigation, and when I said I didn’t, they said I should get a hotel for a few days. I was too afraid to ask what happened to Karen. I was looking around, afraid to find another outline, when she showed up in the hallway. She got me something to eat, and better still, something to drink. It was like she was waiting for me.

“Did they tell you anything?” she asked. I shook my head.

“Me neither,” she said. “Did they find out who it was?”

“No.”

“Well, you can stay here as long as you need.”

“What about what’s- his-face?” I asked. I didn’t see the oaf in the tank top anywhere around.

“He doesn’t live here; he just stays here,” she said. “He’s going to stay at his place for a while.”

Her eyes got kind of teary, and she wiped at the big, nasty double shiner she got when she ran in and tried to rescue me.

“Sorry you got hurt,” I said. She smiled, but she didn’t even remember how it happened. She never mentioned the revivor that broke in and attacked me, because she didn’t remember it. When I wiped her memory, it was like for her that part never happened. She knew only what she’d been told afterward. “What about your friend, the agent?” she asked.

“Nico’s going to check in later.”

“You’ll get to see him again, then.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t know how I felt about that. He didn’t just say he’d check in; he wanted to use me as a consultant, on the department payroll. He wanted to keep it very quiet, though. I thought that would make me happy, but it didn’t.

Mostly that was because he changed. At some point between the time I left him in the storage unit and the time he held me in his lap outside the factory, he’d changed. Not his personality, even though his face had changed a little and his left eyelid had gotten a little droopy. He still acted the same, and he still talked the same, but he was different.

“I can’t change him anymore,” I said into my glass.

“What?”

“Nico,” I said. “I can’t change him anymore. I can’t—”

I almost said “control him,” but I stopped myself. When I looked, I could see the colors around him. I could see the pain and the confusion and all the rest of it, but when I pushed, the colors didn’t change.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. She didn’t get it. She couldn’t.

“How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking?”

“You’re not supposed to know,” she said, smiling a little.

“Then what do I do?”

“Get to know him.”

Get to know him.
That was easy for her to say.

My drink was gone, and without asking she poured me another one, but a small one.

“Oh, by the way, I found this slipped under the front door,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a blank business card with some writing on it. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Is it for you? From your friend Nico, maybe?”

I took the card and turned it over. There was handwriting in small print on the back of it.