Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

  “I want to not get torn in half by one of Molech’s carnival freaks. Whatever our differences, I think you and I have that in common. And if you look at this twisted wreck behind me, you will understand why I am growing alarmed. I’m sorry if I haven’t exactly had time to be polite about this.”

  “Ah, and this is the point where you try to convince me you’re really a nice guy after all.”

  “I’m not a nice guy. But I am on your side. Don’t confuse the two. You hate me because I’m blunt and have no patience for wasted time or wasted words. Because I’m not nice. Well, a lot of nice people are nice because they’ve figured out it’s a great way to get things from other people. Some of the slimiest snakes I’ve run across have been nice. So let me tell you now, if you ever see me resort to being nice, run.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not a genius negotiator like you, but my fragile little woman brain is telling me that just because the other guys are monsters doesn’t automatically mean you’re not.”

  “You’ll change your mind when you hear what I have to say.”

  Armando was nervously scanning the lip of the crater, and then the sky, as if something was going to swoop down and spit fire at them at any moment. “Zoey, I no longer consider this a safe meeting location. I was thinking guns earlier, not … whatever did that.”

  Will said, “I agree. There’s a nice meeting room in Livingston Tower, it has walls, chairs, and alcohol. Hell, we’ll take you up to the roof and you can go for a ride in your own helicopter.”

  Zoey asked Armando. “You know where that is?”

  Armando smirked. “People on airplanes flying thirty thousand feet over the city know where Livingston Tower is. It’s pretty hard to miss.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “It’s a crowded building full of armed security. So I guess the question is, safe from what?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Livingston Tower was the tallest and weirdest building Zoey had ever seen in person. The structure that loomed in the windshield of the sedan was banana-shaped, and flat black (at the moment—Armando noted that it could turn any color, the black was for mourning) and the banana curve caused it to lean over the street below, as if it was in the process of being blown over by a hard wind. There was something vaguely obscene about it. Actually, no. It wasn’t vague at all.

  As they approached, Zoey asked Armando, “So that’s my building? I own that whole thing?”

  “And it’s full of your employees, too.”

  “Weird.” So she could walk in there and just fire them all. Ruin their lives, just like that.

  They arrived at the circular drive in front of a row of revolving doors.

  Zoey said, “Don’t stop. Pull back out to the street. Keep going.”

  “To where?”

  “Somewhere other than here. If this is where they want to meet, I want to go … whatever the opposite of this place is.”

  They rounded a corner, and Zoey saw the two trailing vehicles—driven by Will and Andre—follow them. She looked around for a sleazy bar or maybe a Chuck E. Cheese they could meet in. They passed a high-end massage parlor, a three-story-tall shop advertising military-grade weapons for sale, and another fast-food franchise she had never heard of, a place called Korea Streets that boasted dishes called bindaeduk and mandu. Undulating across the windows above them all was a row of text that shouted, “LIVINGSTON MEMORIAL AND DROP PARTY TOMORROW! 5:00 PM UNTIL EVERYONE HAS PASSED OUT.”

  And then she saw it.

  It was a ragged, half-finished building that looked like forty stories of stacked garbage—tarps, sheets, cardboard, plywood.

  Zoey said, “Ew. What happened to that place?” Smoke poured from dozens of haphazard gaps where windows should have been. “Is it on fire?”

  Armando said, “That’s just people trying to keep warm. And I think you own ‘that place.’ This whole plaza is yours, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “What happened to it? It looks like the front was blown off by a bomb.”

  “This is as far as construction got. It was supposed to be upscale condos. Broke ground five years ago, they got the frame up and the concrete down, then it got stalled over some legal thing. Over time, the homeless started squatting there until it just … filled up. Everybody calls it Squatterville.”

  “Pull over. This is where we’re meeting.”

  Armando looked alarmed. “I’m going to advise against that, for reasons I should not have to state out loud.”

  “We’re driving a rocket-proof luxury tank, I think we can risk getting within fifty feet of poor people.”

  Armando reluctantly did what he was told, and Zoey remembered that he didn’t really have a choice. This whole employer/employee thing was intoxicating. The car pulled onto a patch of weed-riddled concrete in the shadow of the battered structure. Zoey gawked up at it. It looked postapocalyptic.

  Andre’s Bentley and Will’s sports car pulled up behind them.

  Armando nodded back toward Will’s vehicle and said, “Aston Martin Vanquish. 2023, I think.”

  Zoey and Armando got out of the car. Zoey looked up and was met with faces leaning down from every floor of the crumbling tower, rumor of the luxury sedans with the tinted windows having made it all the way to the roof. The place had a grapevine that could transmit information faster than wireless. The first floor was almost entirely open, even the framework of the unfinished walls having been torn away at some point, presumably for scrap.

  A crowd of people were milling about in between exposed concrete pillars that Zoey thought looked ready to buckle at a moment’s notice, everyone lining up in front of folding tables packed with food. If Zoey was famous in Tabula Ra$a, her fame hadn’t reached this group—all she got were annoyed stares from people ready to fly into a rage if it looked like she was about to cut in front of them in line. She walked toward the crowd, then felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder before she could make it inside.

  Armando said, “Let’s keep our distance.”

  Another, more deliberate set of footsteps approached. Zoey turned and saw that only Will had exited his vehicle, presumably to ask them what the hell they were doing. Before he could reach them, he was accosted by a huge guy who had tattoos instead of hair on his skull—bundles of snakes, like Medusa. The man seemed to be muttering a series of demands and threats at Will as he passed. Will, never even glancing at the man, reached into his inside pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed it to him without breaking stride.

  When Will reached Zoey, she asked, “Did you just get mugged?”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “I changed my mind. This is where I want to meet.”

  Will glanced up at the smoking tower and let out an annoyed sigh.

  Zoey said, “Armando says I own it.”

  “This,” said Will, “is one of ten thousand headaches you’ll be taking on if you insist on staying in Tabula Rasa.”

  Five floors above them, a filthy naked man was standing in front of an open section of wall, washing his crotch with a bottle of water. Will turned and motioned to Andre, Budd, and Echo to join them. All three faces looked terrified. Workers were hustling nearby, hauling containers out from the backs of a pair of box trucks in the parking lot, carrying them to the tables.

  Zoey asked, “Who are those people?”

  “You’re paying them. This whole thing, it’s a property line dispute with the people building the parking garage next door. The courts eventually ruled in their favor, which means this building has to come down and be moved thirty feet that way. But that will mean running out all your squatters up there and that didn’t sit too well with your father. He had the Livingston Foundation set up a soup kitchen down here and contracted with a catering company to come in three times a day, every day, while he stalled with the court order.”

  Zoey watched filthy people continue to pile up in front of the folding tables, lines becoming undefined clumps, stage two of a process that seemed destined to progress to “u
nruly crowd” and then “riot.” Half of the people in line were kids, most of the rest were women. A morbidly obese man in a beard was arguing with a wall. A toddler was picking off pieces of his sandwich and feeding them to a bony dog. There were a lot of smokers.

  Will said, “See that lady over there, the one with dried diarrhea down the back of her pants? You could put her up in a mansion and hire servants to wait on her the rest of her life. Or, you could leave her here, to drink herself to death in her own filth. Same for every person in this building. Every person in the city. You have the power of life and death. How’s it feel?”

  Zoey was scanning the food table. From what she could see, the selection wasn’t great. There was some kind of thick vegetable stew, and loaves of generic bread, lunch meat, and cheese they were making sandwiches from. Plastic tubs of apples that no one was taking, plastic tubs of bananas and oranges that were going faster. Bottles of water, bottles of imitation juice, generic soda.

  Zoey said, “Maybe I’ll just give away the whole estate. Sell all the land and give it to these people. What would you think about that?”

  Will cocked an eyebrow and said, “Because you’re a good person, right? Unlike me? But why do you consider yourself to be a good person? Back in the trailer park, how many times did you think, ‘I’d rescue all of these people, and feed all of the sick children, if only I had the money.’ It’s real easy to say, isn’t it? But then you actually get the money, and you find out some things about yourself. You realize how much of what you used to consider morality was just powerlessness—you took for granted the enormous comfort that comes with knowing that none of your choices could hurt anyone outside of your own four walls. And that, Zoey, is when you find out the terrible truth of every downtrodden person who has climbed to the top—that if put in the same shoes as the bullies, we’d be just as bad, or worse.”

  “God you must love listening to yourself talk.”

  “Look around. Do you want to have to make the final call on this building? It’ll have to happen soon, the structure will become unsafe if it sits much longer. So what happens to the families if you give the demolition order? What happens if you do nothing but gravity does the demolition for you?”

  The other three had arrived, everyone standing in a tight group as if huddling together would create a bubble that would keep out the poverty. A drunken elderly man tried to join them, shouting something about their mothers. Armando simply opened his jacket to show the man the gun in its holster. The man shuffled away.

  Zoey said, “First item on the agenda, Will Blackwater has thirty seconds to somehow make me feel better about the severed hand in my house.”

  Budd said, “Oh, was that Sanzenbacher’s hand?”

  Will nodded and said, “Kowalski was able to get it from the coroner’s office after the autopsy. Not like they were going to convict anyway.”

  Zoey said, “Who?”

  Budd answered, “Brandon Sanzenbacher. The crazy fella with the doll heads who you dong-roasted to death. The Soul Collector.”

  “Who cut his hand off?”

  Andre said, “No one. It happened on its own. Did you not watch the news coverage of your own hostage situation?”

  “Why would I? I was there.”

  Budd said, “He exploded, into little pieces, just as you were leaving the train station. Like he had a stick of dynamite up his ass. I wasn’t playing dumb back at the house, I honestly didn’t know they were gonna bring chunks of the guy in for examination.” He shot an admonishing glance at Echo. “I eat on that table.”

  Andre said, “To me, looked like a transformer blew. You ever seen that happen? I mean a transformer like you have on utility poles, not them robots that turn into cars. Looks just like that, a flash of white and blue, bright enough to leave spots in your eyes.”

  Zoey said, “And … why would he spontaneously explode?”

  Will answered, “The device he had inside him—the thing that was generating the electricity—it failed. Overloaded, shorted out, whatever. I’m going to speculate that if it had discharged properly, that you, Zoey, and everything within ten feet of you would have been charred to a crisp. I don’t know how much juice this guy had inside him, but…”

  “Inside him?”

  “Do you really want to know this?”

  Zoey threw up her hands. “I apparently have to!”

  Echo said, “Here. This is what we were looking at when your cat tried to eat the hand.”

  She laid her phone on the hood of the armored sedan and tapped through menus until a holographic projection of a hand floated above it, rotating slowly. Echo tapped the phone again and the flesh vanished from the hand, revealing the bones underneath.

  Andre grimaced at the ghostly skeleton hand hovering menacingly over the car, then glanced up at the vagrants in the building above him and said, “Man, these people are gonna think we’re doin’ some kind of voodoo ritual down here.”

  Echo said, “See these white lines running down his fingers? Along the bone here? Those are wires, conductive graphene braids, to be exact. This is how he did the lightning—they all run back to a device in his palm, that’s this square here, which was wired up to … we’re not sure what.”

  Zoey said, “So he had something implanted in his body.”

  Will said, “Something incredible. There’s a device the military uses, called a laser-induced plasma channel. It fires a beam through the air, a pulse so strong that it creates plasma by separating electrons from air molecules, basically unleashing a bolt of lightning. To me, this looks like a micro version of one of those. But here’s the thing—the military version has to be able to generate a pulse of around fifty billion watts. That’s why their version is so big it has to be carried on the back of a tank.”

  “But this guy,” said Echo, “seemed to have the equivalent stashed in the palm of his hand.”

  Zoey said, “How does a crazy guy on a train get something like that installed?”

  Echo said, “Presumably the same way an even crazier guy would get strength implants added to his limbs, or jaws that can bite through steel. That’s not even the question we’re asking right now. The issue at the moment is that the device shouldn’t even be possible.”

  Andre said, “There were weird rumors, over the last couple of months. Dead bodies with freaky injuries, or their brains fried. Couple guys spontaneously combusted. One guy managed to get himself lodged into the engine of an airliner at thirty thousand feet, somehow. At first it came off like a viral Blink hoax, but … yeah. It turns out some of the shady characters in this city now have … powers.”

  Zoey grabbed her hair and growled in frustration. “Okay, just how much more information are you people withholding from me? Because every new layer of this thing is more terrifying than the last.”

  Will said, “So now you understand the state of mind we were in when you arrived.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’ve convinced me. I want no part of this nonsense. This whole city is a butt that farts horror.”

  Another of the vagrants had wondered over, this one also shouting about someone’s mother. Either he was copycatting the first guy, or else the mother thing was some kind of popular insult in Squatterville.

  Zoey looked to Armando, who was standing between them and the unruly masses, looking ready to draw several guns.

  She said, “I’ve got a bodyguard question. There’s this huge bounty on my head, is there a way to buy myself out of it? If I just pay off this Molech and leave town, will his henchmen follow me?”

  Will interjected, “Zoey, that’s not the question. The issue is if you stay—”

  “Hush. I asked Armando.”

  Armando gave careful thought to it and, without taking his eyes off the crowd, said, “Remember what I said, about how if a threat gets close enough to you that I have to physically deal with it, that I have already failed at my job? That’s because my job is to deter adversaries long before conflict even begins—to make it clear that any att
empt to harm you is so futile that it doesn’t warrant leaving the house. In a city where there’s no authority, that fear, that reputation, is all you have to keep the wolves at bay. A name that follows you like a black cloud. Do you understand?”

  “It’s the same reason the crazy guy on the train glued doll heads to his crotch.”

  “Exactly. A while back, a snitch started working with the prosecutors, back when this city still had them. Said he was going to give up Molech’s identity, and tie him to this mass shooting at a nightclub. That snitch was dragged out of his home by Molech’s men. They strung him up in the park by the fountain, upside down, hanging by his ankles, and poured molten glass into his nostrils. It burned through his sinuses, and ran out his eye sockets, before it finally burned through his brain. See, they do it upside down, so the man can continue screaming the whole time, right up until it finally cooks the part of his brain that controls that particular function. And of course, there were cameras there for the whole thing. If you wish to see the video, go to Blink and search for the name Marvin Hammett.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That is the reaction they seek. One you feel in your gut more than your brain. So now we apply that to your situation. There was a highly publicized chase to find Arthur Livingston’s daughter. Molech’s man won. All of the cameras were there to see it. Then, with everyone watching, well…”

  Budd said, “You couldn’t have known this, but in this part of the world it’s considered a grave insult to set a man’s pecker on fire.”

  Armando said, “You made him look weak, in front of the whole world. So. You tell me, Zoey. Do you think Molech can let that slide, even if you gave him everything?”

  “Even though it wasn’t my fault? Even though he caused the whole thing?”

  “It is not about fairness. It is about building a brand.” Armando looked back at the group and asked, “Do any of you disagree with anything I said?”

  Will said, “If she stays here and keeps the inheritance, then she’ll be a high-profile target with ten figures in assets for an aspiring kidnapper to ransom. If she goes on the run and leaves everything behind, makes it clear there is no financial gain to be had from going after her, then maybe she has a fighting chance.”