by David Wong
“Yes.”
“And I don’t suppose Zoey here has it on her?”
“No, she does not.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yes, I do.”
On the screen, Kools fired nails around the edge of the coffin lid, finishing the task in seconds. Zoey screamed for him to stop, then she faced Will Blackwater’s holographic ghost and screamed for him to give Molech the coin. No one acknowledged her. One of the henchmen chuckled.
Will’s hologram sighed, glanced at his watch and said, “I can see you’re not willing to discuss this in good faith, Molech. Get back to me when you come to your senses.”
The hologram blinked away as Will disconnected the call, and Zoey was now alone in the room with Molech’s three henchmen. She screamed Will’s name. She was losing her voice. The phone’s voice command actually responded to this and attempted to dial, but announced that Will Blackwater was not answering.
He had abandoned her.
On the Colorado feed, Kools pushed the coffin into the grave, where it landed with a thud.
From the other two facemasks, Molech said, “Well, looks like it’s just you and me, piglet. Did you pick up the subtext of what just happened there? Will Blackwater just cut you out of the equation. I do believe that not only does he not care if I take you back to my place and grate you like a block of cheese, but that he would regard that as a favor.”
“You’re a dead man!” Zoey screeched, through tears that probably rendered the threat unconvincing. “Armando is going to chop your head off!”
“Did you even think to keep the gold on you? Or did you just trust Blackwater with it? When the two of you were planning this little powwow, did he even make the effort to convince you to trust him with your one bargaining chip? Or did he just take it and assume you’d be too distraught to notice? You don’t have to answer, I’m just curious to hear how he works, that’s all. I mean, did he put any effort into convincing you he was your friend? Or did he just sit back and wait for your fat fatherless ass to blindly trust him?”
Zoey didn’t let him finish before she turned and ran for the door. One of the henchmen wearing Molech’s video face clamped down on her arm with a gorilla-strong grip, yanking her back. Squeezing that same goddamned patch of bruises. He threw her up against the glass and three tiny sharks swam over to investigate the commotion.
Zoey tried to pull away and said, “I will give you ten million dollars to let me out of this room! Enough to start a new life, enough to—”
“Honey,” said Molech from the screen, “I’ve spent more than ten million dollars betting on sports I’m not even a fan of.”
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to you. The guy wearing the mask, the guy right here in the room with me. Same deal for all you. Ten million each. All you have to do is nothing. Just let me out that door.”
She looked around at the other two, one of whom was wearing the video of Kools, who was in the process of filling in the hole where Zoey’s mother was nailed into the box, burying her in a spot more than six hundred miles away from anyone who cared.
“Look!” Zoey screamed. “Look at what he’s doing. You have to know this is wrong. You have to. You don’t have to do anything but take my money and disappear. Live on a beach the rest of your life.”
The henchmen didn’t answer, but Molech did. “Piglet, did you not just watch one of my dudes continue shooting at your man even as he plummeted to his death? How can you still not get it? They don’t work for money. They don’t even work for me. They work for the juice. If these were the type of men who were willing to trade failure for a chance to get fat in the sun, they’d have never made it past orientation day. My men may not be geniuses—no offense, guys—but they’re all winners. They’d rather see everyone they love turned into hamburger than give one inch to your mushy trailer park ass. My men are men of iron, you chop off their arms and they’ll punch you with the stumps. And I got more than fifty of the hardest converging on your boyfriend’s location above us. Maybe he’ll get through five and maybe he’ll get through ten. But he only has to slip up once, and he’s done. I got boys up there who are ex-military. Hell, I got boys who were cops until last month. They know how to shoot just fine. And I’m going to bet that right about now, your boyfriend is already sprawled out dead somewh—”
Molech was interrupted by the sound of a door bursting open nearby.
FORTY
There was a commotion. The camera that had been pointed at Molech’s face suddenly swung away, creating a disorienting effect as the image on the henchman’s facemask blurred and shifted.
Standing at the door to Molech’s hospital room was his right-hand man, Black Scott. He was smiling. Relaxed.
Zoey did not like that look.
Scott said, “You got to see this. Patch in to T-Bone, up on the top floor. T-Bone, you hear me? Molech is on.”
The view on the faceplate switched again. It was now bouncing down the shadowy hallway of a burned building, past smoke-browned plaster on walls that were rotting to pieces from neglected water damage. The camera finally arrived at a shattered plate-glass window.
Lying in front of it was a body, sprawled in a pool of blood. It had an electrical extension cord cinched around its waist.
The man wearing the camera approached and Zoey held her breath once again—she knew what was surely coming next. She hadn’t understood Will’s play with the supposed “brain code” but it was clear what was happening here—this was how they would get them to let their guard down. When they turned the body over, it would surely turn out to be one of Molech’s henchmen. Then Armando would spring out with his ambush, or fly into Molech’s hospital room.
The view drew closer and the bad guys were still unaware of the ruse—the body was wearing a black suit and red shirt, just like Armando’s. Maybe he’d had time to switch clothes with a guard. And he’d chosen his double well—even facedown, she could see this man also had Armando’s trademark five o’clock shadow.
Molech’s men arrived at the body and a foot emerged from the bottom of the frame, rolling the corpse over. Zoey realized she had been mistaken about the nature of the ploy—this was in fact Armando, who was playing possum—the “blood” would turn out to be a can of paint left behind by one of the construction crews, or something. The moment the henchmen let their guard down, he’d spring up and slice them to pieces.
Molech’s men gathered around Armando, snickering. Armando continued not to move. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling. His chest was not moving. Finally the man wearing the camera knelt over him and turned Armando’s head, to bring the other side of his neck fully into view.
The henchman said, “Look, boss! He has gills!”
One bullet. That’s all it took. One of the desperate last shots of that falling madman from the collapsed bridge, who would never know that his last shot had landed true. The bullet left a deep gouge, slicing across Armando’s Adam’s apple and tearing through his jugular. He had swung through the window and was probably in the middle of untying the cord when he felt the wet, hot gush soaking his black suit, turning his shirt the wrong shade of red. He probably hadn’t even have time to register what exactly had gone wrong, before the blood drained away from his brain and caused the rest of his body to drop to the floor, like an action figure that some toddler had suddenly gotten bored with.
And then, Zoey heard laughter. Molech, laughing so hard it sounded like he was going to choke.
That was the last sound Zoey heard. She saw the ceiling, and then she saw nothing. She had fainted.
FORTY-ONE
A kick to her ribs woke her up, and unlike her first morning in Tabula Ra$a, this time Zoey had no moment to believe she was back home, in bed, or that her mother was in the next room cooking breakfast. No, the moment she opened her eyes she was looking at the transmitted face of Molech on the facemask of a goon looming over her, the toe of a combat boot roughly shaking her torso. The wall to her right
was full of Arthur’s stupid pet sharks, swimming back and forth and trying to figure out why an invisible barrier was preventing them from eating her.
Molech’s face was looking off to the side of the faceplate, talking to someone in the room with him. Zoey sat up and blinked and saw that the scene of Armando’s death was still playing on one of the other facemasks. Now there was a bearded man in glasses kneeling over Armando’s corpse, studying it with some kind of wand gadget, checking a readout. They were continuing a conversation they’d apparently been having for several minutes while Zoey was out.
The bearded man nodded and said, “They’re right. It’s a perfectly stable system, across the board. Molech, Armando had the gold.”
From another mask, Molech said, “Sweet. So we know it exists.”
“You don’t understand. I can copy the software right off of this mechanism’s drive. The idiots walked the gold right to us.”
“Don’t tease me here, Doc. You know I been hurt before.”
“I can have it uploaded to a test subject for additional trials within minutes.”
“Yeah, we could do that. Or, you could zap that code into my implants and turn me into a mythical god.”
The bearded man said, “If that’s what you’d prefer.”
Molech’s face turned its attention to Zoey once more.
“Well, all right! I like the way you negotiate, piglet!”
Zoey stumbled to her feet and said, “There! There, you’ve got it! You don’t need me, you don’t need Will, you don’t need my mom. You have everything you want, just let us go!”
Molech said, “Speaking of which! Kools, how you coming?”
The view screen flipped back to the gravesite, where the box was no longer visible under the dirt. Kools stopped working for a moment and said, “What’s that?”
“I need you to stop shoveling.”
“Okay.”
“Go down, dig up the coffin, piss in Zoey’s mother’s face, then resume burying her until the ground looks like she was never there.”
Kools, sounding somewhat doubtful, said, “Is that an actual order or are you just saying that?”
“Are you just meeting me for the first time, Kools?”
“Well, I don’t have to go right now, boss. Can I wait a—”
Before Kools could finish his question, a new voice from out of nowhere said, “Kools? You hearing this?”
A monitor in the conference room blinked to life, obscuring a five-foot-wide section of sharks on the opposite wall. The feed was displaying three people, sitting calmly for the camera. It was Budd, Andre, and an obese woman with a butch haircut and a pair of glasses that seemed designed to enhance her scowl. The woman was wearing an aqua nurse’s uniform, and the three of them were sitting in what looked like the break room of a hospital.
Andre repeated, “Kools, you can’t see us but we’re watching your feed.”
A confused Kools asked, “Who’s this?”
“My name is Andre Knox, I work for Zoey Ashe. But more important than who I am, is who I’m sitting here with.”
The large woman sitting with the pair said, “Charlie? What in the hell are you doing?”
Kools froze. He said, “Mom?”
“Where are you?”
Kools, growing alarmed, said, “If you so much as touch her you’ll—”
Budd interrupted, “We’re not going to touch anybody, and in fact we just paid off her student loans. No, I reckon all we’re gonna do is sit here—me, Andre, and your momma—and watch you bury this nice woman alive.”
Kools’s mother’s eyes went wide. “What did he just say? Charlie, what have you gotten yourself wrapped up in? Show me what’s in that hole, right now.”
“Mom, get off here. I’m at work. I’ll explain later.”
“You’re at work? What kind of ‘work’ are you doing, exactly? That don’t look like Nordstrom.”
Before Kools could answer, Andre said, “Miss, your son is in the process of burying a woman he abducted, by the name of Melinda Ashe. She is thirty-eight years old. She is from a small town called Fort Drayton, Colorado. She is the mother of one daughter and you can read her missing persons report in the news tomorrow. Unless, that is, Kools has a change of heart.”
“Charlie, tell me that isn’t true.”
“No, no. You gotta understand, I’m, uh, I’m a hostage here. There’s a man pointin’ a gun at me, forcin’ me to do this.”
“Charlie, if you don’t go dig that woman up right this minute, I’ll make you wish you were dead. Does Jacki know you’re into this nonsense? Or Justine? Does she know this is how you’re paying your child support? And god forbid little Lauren should find out—”
“Oh, just shut up, Mom. Jesus.” Kools stomped over to the hole and angrily started flinging dirt out with his hands, like a teenager making a show of cleaning up his room as if to say, See, now get off my back already.
Zoey watched all of this in dumbfounded silence. On the nearest henchman’s facemask, Molech was looking offscreen, shaking his head and muttering, “Okay, I admit there are still some flaws in our hiring process.”
Molech was sitting up now, two people helping him stand shakily next to the bed. He was flexing new mechanical prosthetics—gleaming chrome hands and forearms, making him look like he was wearing a medieval suit of armor from the elbows down. The fingers clicked and whirred as he flexed them. He made a fist, and a blue arc of electricity flashed from knuckle to knuckle.
“See that? That’s juice, Scott. Juice that can break the world in half. I don’t like the finish, though. That chrome is going to get all scuffed up the first time I punch anything solid. I wonder how they’d look all black and yellow, like those warning signs they had all over the construction stuff on the roof? Make it look all scratched up and industrial.”
Scott said, “Yellow and black, like a bumblebee? They gonna call you Bee Man. Bee Hands. Somethin’ like that.”
“Yeah. Maybe blue? I don’t know—what color are God’s hands?”
“Brown.”
“We’ll worry about it later. Bring me my pants.”
The absurdity of the situation was making Zoey dizzy.
Molech said, “You guys over in Livingston Tower, go ahead and do an orifice search of Zoey, to make sure she doesn’t have the coin inside her somewhere. I don’t need it anymore, I’m just curious. After that, you can do whatever you want with her. Other than let her go, obviously. From the look of this one, I would definitely wear protection, though. Them trailer park bugs eat dicks for breakfast and antibiotics for lunch.”
The feeds went dark—the visors of the three henchmen were suddenly blank, reflecting back Zoey’s own pale, tear-stained face. The three shirtless thugs closed in around her. One reached around and grabbed her by the hair.
FORTY-TWO
Zoey sucked in a breath and gritted her teeth. Those rough hands on her once more, a feeling that was too familiar.
Zoey twisted away from the henchman who had hold of her and said to the other two, “You broadcasting this on Blink? Then let what I’m about to say act as a binding verbal contract—fifty million dollars to whichever one of you kills this man behind me. If you cooperate, you split the money.”
There was just the briefest moment when the other two men glanced at each other, as if they were considering it. This set Zoey’s captor into a blind rage. He twisted his fist in her hair, then smashed her head into the shark aquarium. The glass shattered and she tumbled to the floor under a cascade of freezing water, little sharks flopping onto the black tile all around her, blood streaming into her eyes.
It didn’t matter. At some point, some out-of-control chemical reaction had converted all of her pain and fear into mindless, all-consuming white-hot rage.
She swept wet hair out of her eyes and yelled to the other two men, “This is your one chance to be alphas! Every guy thinks he’s an alpha male until he actually meets one. Well, here’s your chance.”
The man
looming over her said, “We’re all alphas in Molech’s crew, porkcushion.”
“No! You take orders from Molech. He doesn’t take orders from you. That means he’s the alpha, and you’re his bitch.”
The guy ripped off his helmet, leaned over Zoey, and spat in her face. He then grabbed her by the jacket and dragged her toward the window. He threw her to the floor, then reared back and punched the glass wall, shattering it. A frozen wind howled into the room, the faint noises of the city wafting up from seven hundred feet below. A curious pigeon came and landed on the jagged glass.
The henchman grabbed Zoey by the hair and dragged her toward the opening—clearly intending to just chuck her out of the window. She frantically tried to claw away from him, to drop to the floor, to do anything to halt his progress. She punched and kicked and scratched, as the wind and noise of the city drew closer. He barely seemed to notice. She desperately looked around for a weapon—anything. She found nothing within grabbing distance but a toppled chair, and three little midget sharks slapping the floor with their tails, their rows of razor-sharp teeth biting helplessly at the air.
With no plan in mind whatsoever beyond “I’ll shark him,” Zoey reached down, feeling her hair come out by the roots in the guy’s fist. She was able to barely grab one of the baby sharks by the tail. It thrashed around in her hands as she twisted and stabbed at her captor with it, hoping to scare or distract him even if for just a fraction of a second.
The man let out a howl. Zoey was suddenly free, and dove to the floor. The henchman, now with a shark ferociously biting his crotch, flailed and stumbled and crashed through the shattered window.
There was a brief moment of peace, with only the sound of the wind and muffled traffic below. Then behind her one of the remaining henchman said, “Did … did that just happen?”
Both of the men started advancing on her, one on each side of the long conference table.
Zoey threw up her hands, as if to ward them off. “WAIT! Listen! I can pay—”
WHUMPP!
