Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

by David Wong

  From where she was, Zoey could see that parked in the weedy lot in front of the decomposing building was the black League of Badass van. They had taken her up on her offer, or had come to dig up the imaginary pirate gold under the floor. Either way, this was not going to end well.

  Molech’s convoy rolled to a stop, almost exactly in the spot where Zoey had held her open-air meeting with Will Blackwater and the rest five days earlier. The first person Zoey saw standing in the open first floor was Lee, red Mohawk and all. The other five members were fanned out on either side of him. Behind them was a crowd—residents of Squatterville having come downstairs to see what was happening. Or, rather, to find out what was going to happen to them. Some of them had brought weapons—knives, lengths of pipe—but neither they nor their ragtag band of vigilante protectors held guns. What guns they had owned now presumably lay in pieces, thanks to Molech’s gadget—Zoey assumed there wasn’t an intact firearm for several miles around. There were so many drones overhead that there was now a pervasive beehive buzz under everything. Occasionally a couple of the tiny aircraft would collide and tumble out of the sky, in pieces.

  Molech jumped out of the truck to go meet with Doc, intently watching something on a feed Doc was showing him. Black Scott stepped into view in front of Zoey, glancing at her briefly as if to absently make sure she was still attached to the hood. He messed with his camera.

  Zoey tried to clear her throat, swallowing blood in the process. She croaked, “This is stupid.”

  “Shut up. Ain’t nobody likes a noisy hood ornament.”

  “You’re trying to prove these gadgets can take on armies, what does it prove if you murder two thousand unarmed women and children?”

  “Actually, the customers we got lined up for this gear, they need to know it can do that very thing. They just got to be sold on the efficiency of the process. Now quiet down or I’m gonna wire your whole face shut.”

  “Have you seen who lives in there? These are your people.”

  “‘My people’? Yeah, talk to me about racism, millionaire white girl. Your daddy buyin’ and sellin’ bitches like livestock. Well, instead of makin’ money off the filth of this city, we gonna clean it all out. Fumigate all the insects. Here, and all over the world. Scrape off the barnacles and get this ship sailin’ right.”

  “I’m pretty sure in Molech’s eyes, we’re all insects. Including you. What has he told you, that he’s going to sell to the highest bidder and split the cash with you? Open your eyes.”

  “Oh, my eyes are wide open. And it ain’t about sellin’ Raiden to the ‘highest bidder,’ hood ornament. That’s trailer-park thinking right there. No, it’s about deciding who gets Raiden and who doesn’t. That’s how we’re gonna shape the world.”

  Molech approached, looking giddy.

  Scott said, “Help, your hostage is playin’ mind games on me.”

  “Ha! She probably just wants to play a solo on your pork horn.” To Zoey he said, “He’s magnificent, isn’t he? Look at him. You know, you people almost blew it. But while the whites were breeding masculinity out, you were also raising slaves and breeding masculinity into them, growing the best workers and warriors and point guards. So be thankful for slavery, it wound up preserving masculinity in the species. Isn’t that right?”

  Scott said, “Uh, I just want to make it clear that the views expressed by Molech are not necessarily those of the rest of his organization.”

  Molech told Scott he wanted a shot where he was standing in front of the crumbling building and its rows of frightened faces. Scott framed up the shot, and once more the feed spread itself across the skyline.

  Molech said, “To the hundred and twenty million of you who have tuned in to watch the beginning of the end of your world, welcome. Before this next part happens, I want to warn you that if you have children in the room, well, keep ’em in the room, because they’re about to learn somethin’ important about the world. Behind me is a building full of termites. Oh, they look like people, but don’t be fooled—everywhere they go, the structures start fallin’ down around ’em. This here, this was supposed to be luxury condominiums. Look at it now. Our whole civilization, it’s just like this, it’s like a microcosm of a world with too many damned termites in the walls. Well, I got somethin’ for that. Here, let me do a demonstration. Let’s switch over to our friends back at the Co-Op.”

  The skyline feed switched to the finger-shaped rubble of the former Co-Op HQ, now swarming with black-clad guards who probably wished they had working guns in their hands, surrounding their boss. Someone had gotten him down from the rubble and they were huddling over the star-shaped device stuck to his back, trying to figure out how to remove it.

  Molech said, “Three, two, one…”

  A flash, and a crackle, and a spray of meat.

  When it was over, a crowd of skeletons cumbled to the steps of the Co-Op headquarters.

  Zoey squeezed her eyes shut. From all around her, screams. Except for Molech. Molech was laughing. Not an evil laugh—she didn’t actually think people did that in real life. It was an honest, involuntary belly laugh. The way a toddler laughs when he sees a fat person fall down.

  Molech said, “Fries the meat right off the bone, like ribs in a slow cooker. Radius up to fifty yards.” He held up his left hand and once more, his mechanical fingers transformed and changed shape, clicking and whirring into something shaped vaguely like an eggbeater. “This has a range of a hundred.”

  The crumbling building in front of them was slowly draining its tenants onto the surrounding streets, some of them finally making a run for it. The rest just … waited. Knowing they had no hope of outrunning what Molech was about to do.

  Zoey spat blood and rasped, “Don’t. This won’t prove anything. Don’t do it.”

  Molech smiled. He pointed his hand-gun at her. Scott came around with the camera, to get them both in the shot.

  Molech said, “Make you a deal. You can sacrifice yourself, and I’ll let these people live. You willing to do that? You have my word, we’re sayin’ this in front of the whole world here. Here’s your chance to be a hero. One life for two thousand.”

  Zoey said, “You’ll kill all of us either way.”

  “So I take that as a no. How about this: I’ll save all of these people, in exchange for your cat. Will you do that? Will you sacrifice a single cat to save these two thousand lives? Half of them kids?”

  “I’m not playing your game.”

  “You know damned well what your choice would be. People like you make that choice every day. You don’t care about these people any more than I do. The rest of these buildings downtown, they got armies standing guard. Them churches we’re going to next? They got a thousand volunteers, locking arms around them, turning themselves into human shields. Who did these people have? Nobody. But you know who owns this building? You. And the only protection you sent were half a dozen slapdicks in a van.”

  Molech turned away from her and strode toward the League of Badass squad, the six of them now huddled with their backs together, weapons at the ready—crossbows and swords that Zoey doubted they even knew how to use.

  Molech waited for Scott to get all of them on camera, then said, “So here’s what’s going to happen. I am going to air-broil the flesh off everyone in front of me. So you guys standing there in your little costumes and toys, you can either die heroically yet pointlessly in the wake of the blast, or you can walk away, and admit that you actually don’t give a runny shit about these people, which is perfectly reasonable considering any of them would slit your throat for meth money if given half a chance. I’ll give you five seconds to decide. Five…”

  The LoB didn’t need five seconds.

  Lee screamed, “This isn’t over, Molech!,” then grabbed a canister off his belt and threw it to the ground. It exploded into a cloud of red smoke, which actually didn’t do much to obscure the sight of the six of them running frantically toward their van. By the time Molech reached the end of his coun
tdown, the black van with the League of Badass logo airbrushed on the side was squealing out of the parking lot.

  And then it was just Molech, and the tower, and the masses trying to find cover in a building that barely even had walls.

  Zoey said, “Please. It’s women and kids. Look at them! Please. Scott, tell him! This won’t prove anything!”

  Molech put his back to the building. Scott framed up the shot so that the panic inside would be visible behind him.

  Molech addressed Zoey, and the world.

  “‘Women and children.’ That’s what they say when the boat is sinkin’, right? ‘Women and children first’? I thought you people wanted equality. Well, if the men don’t count, then nobody does. And don’t give me that crap about saving the little children. Maggots turn into flies. And that’s all I see here—you got people who can’t feed themselves, can’t clothe themselves, can’t shelter themselves without squatting like rats in a barn. In what sane species can this trash behind me be allowed to stink up the gene pool? So spare me, please. I’m looking at addicts and whores raising future addicts and whores. Enough. All you watching this, open your eyes and remember what you see here. This is what’s coming. Everything you think you know about power is about to be—OW! WHAT THE F—”

  A drone shaped like a three-foot-long taco crashed into Molech’s face.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Molech grabbed the drone and smashed it on the pavement, sending a half dozen hard-shell tacos scattering around his feet.

  He flung the wreckage aside, in time to be met by another taco drone, this one white and decorated with a logo bearing a cartoon chipotle pepper. Behind it were three drones bearing the logo of a purple and yellow bell. Molech swung and kicked and slaughtered Mexican food with every mighty blow, while a quarter billion extremely confused Blink users watched.

  And still they came, every Mexican food delivery drone that happened to be in the air at that moment, their navigation systems hacked and commanded to fly as fast as possible to the exact location where Molech was standing. This part had been Zoey’s idea, and if it caused Molech to run over and crush her skull in a fit of rage, she wouldn’t mind this being the last thing she saw.

  Molech took the drones out one by one, screaming incoherent commands to his utterly baffled henchmen, until he stood victorious over the shattered carcasses of three dozen Mexican food-themed quadrocopters, breathing heavily and trying to suppress his rage. His clenching mechanical fists were covered in brown and white streaks of refried beans and sour cream.

  He surveyed the wreckage and said, “What the hell was that?”

  Scott squinted at the smears of food on the pavement. “Did somebody order a bunch of Mexican?”

  “Get the camera back on me.” Scott did, and Molech said, “All right, I don’t know who pulled that little stunt, but I’m about to—”

  Molech’s face abruptly vanished from the skyline feed.

  The video on the walls of the buildings downtown scrambled and pixelated and finally resolved into a new image. What appeared there was the face of a masked Andre Knox. Andre bellowed a comic book villain’s evil laugh.

  “Fools! You have fallen for my diversion! I want to thank my junior partner, Molech, for setting the stage. That boy sure does love his tacos.”

  The shot zoomed out to reveal Andre in full supervillain gear—the exact costume Molech was wearing, only with the blue highlights and codpiece done in red. In addition, Andre had added a rather flamboyant red domino mask, and a large-brimmed black hat with a red feather stuck into the band. He was stroking a black cat.

  Molech gaped at the figure that towered over him from the skin of the nearest building.

  “Who the … what the hell is happening?”

  Andre’s booming voice continued. “As my assistant-slash-underling Molech indicated, we are a terrorist organization. We call ourselves Fire and Ice, and Tabula Rasa, and then the world, will feel the steam of our combined passion, and fury.”

  Molech looked at Scott, then at Zoey, then back up at the building.

  Scott was messing with the camera. “They’re blocking our feed. Got to have a drone up there jamming the signal or somethin’.”

  “As you now know,” continued Andre, “over the last few months, we have built in secret a lair right in the heart of this city. The place from which I am broadcasting is invulnerable to assault from the ground and the air—as you have seen, armies will bounce off our walls like mere gerbils off a bulldozer. And now, behold!”

  The view switched to an exterior aerial shot of the former Fire and Ice Palaces, captured from a drone hovering over a street choked with traffic from fleeing citizens and transfixed rubberneckers. Simultaneously the black tarps fell off each of the two towers like a pair of dresses on prom night, settling silently on the streets below.

  On the each building, Molech had gotten his volcanic glass etchings, the images vividly outlined in glowing orange, as if cut from still-hot magma. A. J. Skelnik’s facade crews had done a fine job, it really did look like obsidian. The etchings, however, were not what Molech had described in the work order. That’s because twelve hours earlier, a brand-new rendering had been uploaded to the grinders that had been set to carve the relief into each tower’s veneer. It was the one thing they were able to get Skelnick to agree to before Budd’s network got him and his crew out of the state.

  On the tower that used to be the Ice Palace, there was now a detailed rendering of Andre, wearing his hat and mask. And only his hat and mask. Zoey had never seen the real Andre naked, and doubted she ever would, but the rendering of Andre on the building had been very, very generous when it came to how well endowed he was.

  On the Fire Palace across the street, instead of the huge rendering of his scowling face that Molech had ordered and paid for, there was another full-body nude. This one depicting Molech, wearing only his robot hands. Zoey had never seen Molech naked, and prayed she never would, but the rendering on the building had been very, very stingy when depicting Molech’s genitalia. The Blink algorithm, tracking the camera movements and zooms of thousands of onlookers, instantly decided this specific part of the facade was most worthy of notice.

  The expression on the real Molech’s face would have been hilarious, Zoey thought, if she hadn’t been seeing it on someone capable of effortlessly vaporizing everyone in the vicinity. He had the look of a chess player who at the same moment realized his king had been checkmated and that the beer he’d been drinking was actually piss. This had been Phase One of the plan—a stage they had simply referred to as “Confusion.” And if nothing else, Molech certainly did look confused. Zoey coughed and a spray of blood splattered across the metallic blue paint of the monster truck hood. She decided that she still didn’t feel like her side was winning.

  Scott said, “Is that … is that the design you wanted, man?” Molech didn’t answer. He looked like he was going to have a rage-stroke. Scott said, “I like it. Kind of got a Greek statue vibe goin’.”

  Molech made a sort of hissing growl, then stormed toward where Zoey was tied to the truck and grabbed her by the neck.

  “IS THAT YOU? Is this your people doing this? How did he get inside the tower? TELL ME.”

  Zoey actually came up with something really clever to say, but her whole jaw was now swollen shut from her busted teeth, and everything was all sticky with coagulated blood in there. Her retort just came out as a series of wet moans and grunts.

  He turned toward Scott and screamed, “GET IN THE TRUCK! We’re goin’ to the Fire Palace.”

  Scott said, “Man, think! Don’t you get this is what they want you to do? I say we move on to the next target, stick with the plan. Whatever little prank they’re pullin’ back at the palace, that don’t matter now. Think it through—what’s more important, takin’ over the whole world, or having a few hundred million people think you got a baby dick?”

  Molech stopped, and thought it over.

  SIXTY

  They rolled t
o a stop a block away from the Fire and Ice buildings. Zoey had slipped out of consciousness again at some point, but was awaken when the truck lurched to a stop and she felt the cold bite of the barbed wire digging into her wrists. Molech stepped out, and the crowd roared at the sight of him. He sneered up at the grossly unflattering depiction of his anatomy etched into the facade. After Zoey had floated the general idea of changing the renderings, Echo had spent four hours drawing up the designs. She wouldn’t show them to anyone, and had never cracked a smile the whole time she was working.

  Molech stomped toward a random car—an occupied one—grabbed it by the front end and started swinging it around like a discus. He let it fly and it crashed into the faux obsidian, leaving a massive scar where his own sculpted face had been.

  Scott stood by the truck, and sighed.

  Zoey got her swollen jaw loose enough to ask, “Is the anatomy right? We had to guess.”

  Without looking at her, Scott said, “You know why he’s keepin’ you alive, right? It’s so he can take his time with you later. You know what Molech does in his spare time? He studies torture techniques. Goin’ back thousands of years. He’s a walking encyclopedia on the subject. If you knew what was coming, you’d already be screamin’.”

  Andre appeared on the skyline feed, bellowing a cartoon villain laugh. “As you can see, my humble servant Molech has come to join me in our lavish headquarters! He appears to be throwing something of a tantrum, probably due to having had too much Mexican.”

  Molech walked up to the foundation and punched it, unleashing the full force of the plasma from his fist. The wall exploded, leaving a hole like a dump truck had crashed through it. A swarm of shirtless men were scrambling out of the building, Molech’s own crew trying to get clear of it before their boss’s tantrum brought it down on their heads.

  The skyline feed blinked away to a reporter who was standing a block from the scene. Shouting over the chaos, she said, “As you can see behind me, a lone figure believed to be Molech himself has appeared, and is destroying the tower. That’s right, he is tearing away at his own headquarters, as if he has had a change of heart, a crisis of conscience if you will. We’re going to try to get an interview with him, this powerful story of redemption playing out before our very—”