Free State of Decay by James Knapp

into the smoke. I picked out faces in the crowd as they watched from every side, shouting all around me.
    I ran to the truck, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. I grabbed the handle to the back door, turned it, and pulled. The doors immediately swung open and a wave of heat blew out over me, stinking of soot and cooking meat. The smoke stung my eyes, and I covered my face as I scrambled back. I fell facing the crowd and caught a brief look at that ring of cell phones, watching with their tiny cameras, and their owners, who had now looked up from the little screens and were staring behind me in horror. A woman covered her mouth, and someone screamed.
    I turned back, following their eyes, and saw there were a bunch of bodies in the back of the truck. They were seated across from each other, facing in. Their heads were bowed and none of them were moving except one. One of them had somehow survived and was bent over in the doorway, struggling forward.
    It was a young woman. She was completely nude and was burned all over her body. Her hair had been singed away, and her eyes looked haunted as they stared out of her blackened face.
    She stepped forward and slipped, falling face-first onto the pavement. She managed to get back up, hands shaking, and took two more steps before falling down again.
    I grabbed her wrists and dragged her back, away from the fire. The crowd parted around me as I pulled her until she slipped out of my grasp and I fell backward.
    “Call an ambulance!” someone screamed. Everyone was screaming. I turned the woman over onto her back, cradling her head in my lap.
    She looked up at me, and I saw her eyes were the strangest color. They were kind of a pale, silvery yellow, and the irises actually seemed to glow very softly. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing.
    “You’re a revivor. . . .”
    I had never actually seen one before, not in person. It smelled terrible, like burnt hair, meat, and tar.
    “Hide . . . behind . . . whatever you . . . can . . .” she whispered.
    “Hold still. Help is coming.”
    “Keep . . . your . . . head . . . down . . .”
    People had stopped watching the truck and stopped yelling, for the most part. They were gathering to try to get a glimpse of the revivor. The cameras had turned from the fire to the spot where I knelt. Some part of the body still sizzled quietly as I held it. Finally, a siren began to swell in the distance, getting closer.
    A man moved next to me, trying to get a better view of the fire. I recognized him from the train; a middle-aged businessman with gray hair and a pink face. He had a smug sort of satisfied expression on his face. His eyes looked like they were seeing the rapture, and he was nodding very slightly to himself, arms crossed in front of him. He noticed me looking at him and looked down at me with contempt. When he saw my badge, some of the challenge went out of his expression, but not all of it. He sneered at me cradling the revivor like I was everything that was wrong with the world, then looked back to the burning bodies until his annoyance melted away, leaving only a sense of righteousness.
    The revivor was trying to say something, forming words with its cracked lips. Its eyelids had drooped almost closed and the light behind them was flickering. I leaned forward, moving my face closer and turning my ear to its mouth.
    “Zhang knew the truth,” it gasped softly. “You have to wake up. . . .”
    I shook my head, not knowing what it meant.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Zhang knew the truth. . . .”
    The revivor mouthed the words again, and not long after, its lips stopped moving. Its mechanical breathing hitched and stopped, then it sagged in my arms, this time gone from this world for good.
    Back at the truck, nothing else was moving. The people around me got their fill and moved closer to the truck, trying to see inside and get shots of the bodies. The lettering on the side of the truck read FBI.
    It’s hard to say