by David Wong
Wu reared back with his explode-knife again and tried to stab the ghoul in the lower back, as if hoping to sever its spine and paralyze it. Instead, the one-armed corpse spun on him, reaching out with its remaining arm and snatching his knife hand by the wrist. Wu tried to pull himself away, causing the pair of them to crash into a glass case, sending shards and cigars flying. They then toppled to the floor, the corpse on top.
The corpse’s hand was still around Wu’s wrist.
It squeezed.
There was a sound like a bag of peanuts getting crushed under a boot. Wu tried to suppress his scream, then failed. The noise he made terrified Zoey. The knife fell to the floor and his hand flopped over, now barely connected to his arm.
Zoey had to get that necklace.
She yelled, “I’ll be back!”
Over Wu’s protests, she ran and leaped over the two of them, stumbling into the hall and sprinting toward the stairs. She went up, nearly bowling over Carlton on the way. She made it to her bedroom, then pushed through into the bathroom. She always left the necklace next to the sink …
It wasn’t there.
She looked around, knocking aside face creams and toothpaste. She faintly heard another howl from Wu, the noise rolling through the halls below her. The Tilley zombie could crush his skull any time it chose to.
She looked around the tub. Nothing. She stumbled back out into the bedroom. No necklace on the nightstand. Not on her dresser. Not on top of her mini-fridge, or Stench Machine’s mini-fridge. Had it fallen under the bed? She dropped to the floor, looked.
There was a crash and tinkle of glass breaking from downstairs. But no more screams …
She went back into the bathroom. Had she checked by the sink? She checked again. Had she really checked the lip of the tub carefully? Maybe it fell onto the floor and got kicked under the bath mat. She looked. She was covered in sweat.
It wasn’t here.
Okay. Okay. Plan B.
She needed a weapon. There was a cheese knife on the tray … no, it was flimsy.
She paused to listen.
From below, only silence.
Damn it. So stupid. Wasting time.
She grabbed one of the empty beer bottles from the floor. Through the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs. Her heart drumming. She braced herself for what she would see when she arrived back in the moose humidor. For what she would do after she saw it.
She slowed as she got closer to the doorway. Creeping down the hall, she stopped about ten feet away and slammed the beer bottle against the wall, to turn it into a jagged weapon.
It didn’t break.
She tried it again. It just bounced.
What the—?
She smacked the bottle against the wall again, and again. It just kind of made a hollow bonking sound. What the hell do they make these bottles out of?
“What are you doing?”
A confused Wu was standing outside the door to the humidor, clutching his left arm, the hand dangling at a gut-churning angle. Carlton stepped out of the room behind him, holding Zoey’s necklace. She stopped bonking the beer bottle.
“I was looking for that!”
Wu silenced her with a head shake, then nodded toward the room behind him. She moved to where she could see inside, noting on the way that Wu now had a reddish-brown stain of corpse ooze on his shirt and neck, and a few wriggling maggots strewn across his chest. The corpse was flat on its back, the holographic face showing some confusion as it found the mechanism suddenly unresponsive. Stench Machine was sniffing the corpse and Zoey leaned in and picked him up before he could start eating it.
Zoey knew why Wu had silenced her. Whoever was operating Tilley was about to figure out that the implants had been remotely disabled—the big tactical secret Will had continually lectured them about keeping.
Zoey looked around and quickly said, “He, uh, stopped moving. I think it’s … cats. The technology doesn’t work near cats.”
Wu said, “I managed to dislodge the Raiden capacitor with my blade, before we went down. We were fortunate.”
“Right, right,” she murmured, going along with this much better lie. “The power source is usually located in the, uh … butt … area.”
The holographic face said, “There you are, cow.”
“I have to admit,” replied Zoey, “if this was all a prank, you absolutely win Halloween.”
Will Blackwater walked up behind them, looking extremely confused. Zoey watched him scan the room and it was kind of alarming how quickly the confusion dissipated.
“Someone operated the corpse remotely,” he said. He looked the holographic face in the eye. “Who are you?”
“I am The Blowback.”
Zoey said, “Great, do you have a name?”
“First name ‘The,’ last name ‘Blowback.’”
“Oh. Of course. And your gimmick is you murder people and turn them into puppets? Is that just for your own amusement or do you have some other goal in mind?”
“Your feigned ignorance does not impress me.”
“We know this is that Tilley kid. Did you kill him?”
“Dexter Tilley’s murdered corpse was found Tuesday morning missing its eyes, stomach, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and testicles. Among other parts. He was found in the parking garage of Fort Fortuna.”
That was a hotel and casino Zoey owned. The largest one, in fact. It was shaped like a sprawling medieval castle and its dining area featured entire animals being roasted over open flame, served by scantily clad wenches. Otherwise the only way it was period-accurate was that a lot of men probably contracted flesh-rotting diseases there.
Zoey said, “So you killed him to, what, send a message to me?”
The holographic face said, “Spare me. We know who you are. All of you.”
“Wait, are you saying we killed him? Did you not watch us go out of our way to not do that like a month ago? Even though he totally deserved it? You, meanwhile, have just shown yourself to at the very least be capable of nonconsensual corpse puppetry.”
“The very next night after Dexter Tilley was found missing his organs, your estate hosted a dinner party.”
“Uh … probably? My life is a never-ending stream of banquets and functions with people I’m told are important. It’s the main reason I secretly suspect that I died a year ago and am actually in Hell.”
“I am sure you ate well that night.”
“Is that a fat joke? You’re losing me.”
“It is very interesting,” said the holographic face, “how every time you and your people plan a feast, another corpse is discovered missing key pieces. Which of you ate his liver? Or do you share it? I hear it’s the best part.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re crazy.”
Will said, “Just turn it off.”
To the corpse, Zoey said, “Not that you’re going to listen to anything I say, but while my deceased father was undoubtedly a pile of hot garbage shaped like a person, he wasn’t that kind of garbage, and neither are we. Nobody is eating people over here. Especially not this kid. You think we gave him a good construction job just to make him taste better? The added muscle would just make him stringy.”
“Like the rest of your team, you are a skilled liar.”
“I’m really not.”
“Tilley was one of us.”
Will said, “One of what?”
“The Blowback. We know you killed this man and partook of his flesh in order to send a message, to try to quell the uprising. It has only birthed in us a new resolve.”
Zoey said, “Wait, is your ‘uprising’ just all of those twenty-year-old dudes who keep mooing at me at public appearances? You think we cannibalized somebody in response to that? To the mooing?”
“You deny now, because you are afraid. You will soon have greater reason to be. The bounty went up on the Skin Wall one minute ago. One million dollars for evidence of your complicity in Tilley’s murder. Sleep well.”
The hologram disappe
ared, leaving only the slack, gray face behind. Even now, Zoey barely recognized the man.
Wu went to Zoey. “Are you all right?”
“Your hand is barely attached. Go tell the sedan to drive you to the hospital.” To Will, she said, “We need to do something with that body. Does the city still do that?”
The machinery of justice existed in Tabula Ra$a, but was about 10 percent of what was needed. There was a coroner’s office that tried to process the obvious murders but it usually took a bribe to get your case to the front of the line.
Wu, who had made no move to leave for the hospital, said, “They claimed he was their friend, but were willing to defile his body like this? I don’t understand these people.”
Zoey said, “Actually, if I get taken out one of these days, I want you to do exactly this with my body. Rig me up and unleash me on my enemies. Stick a flamethrower inside so I breathe fire. We need to notify his family, so they can arrange a funeral. And to let them know that we’re going to find who killed him.”
Will said, “We are?”
Zoey said, “It’s the right thing to do. Also, it kind of sounds like we have to. Wu, if you don’t go to the hospital right now, I’m breaking your other arm.”
Wu reluctantly left and Carlton went to go get a mop. Will made like he was going to call someone about the body, but Zoey put her hand over his phone.
He met her eyes. “What?”
“Did you do this?”
“Did I do what?”
“Did you decide to finish the job on Tilley? Like you said you wanted?”
“And steal his organs? No.”
She studied his face. “If you did it, because you thought it was safer, or whatever, just tell me. I won’t be happy, but it’s better than us running around in circles trying to answer a question you already know the answer to.”
“You told me not to do it, so I didn’t. I shouldn’t have to keep saying it.”
“But you wish you had done it.”
“We wouldn’t be in this situation if I had.”
8
The next day was Saturday, October 29. Like most profitable holidays, over time Halloween had expanded to swallow up more and more of the calendar. The actual Halloween celebration had, as such, spread to two separate days and nights. October 30 the night before, was now Devil’s Night. It was the naughtier of the two, the night for wild parties, drugs if you were into that kind of thing, vandalism, pranks, and a costume that was either incredibly inappropriate, gross, slutty, or all three. At midnight in Tabula Ra$a was the annual Black Parade, which Zoey was told was legendary, though she was dubious because parades by their very nature were sad and stupid.
The next morning, October 31, marked the beginning of the family-friendly part of the holiday. That’s when the mischievous gifts from under the Halloween Tree were handed out by hungover adults. The rule was that if your gift was actually thoughtful or useful to the recipient, you had failed—these gifts were to be tasteless and worse than useless. They were also extremely difficult to shop for, you had to know a person pretty well to know exactly what they hated. For the kids, there were baskets of booby-trapped treats (say, a batch of six caramel apples, only one was secretly an onion). Everyone either had a separate costume for that day, or a tasteful modification to their Devil’s Night outfit for the traditional haunted houses and trick-or-treating. At Zoey’s estate, they were hosting a “haunted” maze in the courtyard for hundreds of mostly poor kids from the city. The point is, this had been cued up to be a hectic, stressful weekend even before somebody mailed Zoey a dead body.
She was still in her pajamas when she dragged herself toward the conference room at the obscene hour of seven forty-five A.M. These were different pajamas; she’d spent forty minutes in a hot shower scrubbing the corpse juice off herself before bed. She was carrying a mug of steaming Da Hong Pao tea.
She glanced back at Wu—his left arm now in a plastic cast that could also dose the area with pain medication—and said, “Can you smell me? I feel like I smell bad again. I think I was sweating all night.”
“I would say you are within range of how you normally smell.”
“That is an amazing answer.”
They headed down a hall to a sturdy door labeled STAFF FARTING ROOM—DO NOT TURN OFF VENTILATION FAN.
The door automatically unlocked itself for Zoey, revealing the Suits’ conference room. Echo was already inside, sitting at the long table, drinking some kind of morning post-workout shake probably made with oats and algae protein or something. There was an understanding that the estate was Zoey’s home but also the Suits’ workplace, so they had access but with a rule that she always be told whenever they were coming so she could put on some pants.
Zoey said, “You look awful. Do you have some sort of disease?”
She said some variation of this every time she saw Echo, who’d done something different with her hair, pulling the curls to one side so it formed a mop that cascaded down the right side of her face. It was adorable in a way that could almost be considered an act of violence.
“I actually am a mess this morning. Couldn’t sleep last night, for some reason. Put on my gym clothes at three and just went to work on the heavy bag, to burn off the energy.”
“Whose face do you imagine on there when you’re hitting it?”
“Yours, of course. I’ve stuck a little wig on top.”
When Zoey had first moved in, the conference room had been a dour space dominated by a beaten-up table and battered leather chairs, the room stinking of old tobacco and coffee, like they were all sitting inside a giant cop’s mouth. The table had since been replaced with a new one with a built-in display along with new chairs that had on-the-fly body temperature adjustment to keep your back from getting sweaty. Along the wall to the right, opposite the main monitor, was a row of plants under grow lights, to freshen up the air. It was a whole different vibe. Will hated it.
Zoey set the mug of tea in front of an empty seat, then went and sat in another spot. Will was next through the door, in a suit the color of a ripe cherry that had been spray-painted flat black. He was carrying a fedora and went to set it down at his customary spot, when he found a mug of tea in its way.
“Is someone sitting here?”
“That’s yours. It’s that tea you like.”
Will stood frozen for a moment. He did not like it when people gave things to him unexpectedly, because he hated being put in the position of having to choose between saying “thank you” for something he didn’t ask for, or refusing an act of kindness and looking like a jerk. Will knew that Zoey knew he hated this, because he had told her as much.
He muttered, “Thank you. Where’s Budd and Andre?”
It was still seven minutes until meeting time, so neither of them were late, but in Will’s mind the meeting started whenever he happened to get there. He’d ask after whoever wasn’t in the room when he arrived as if they were missing, no matter how much time was left until the actual appointment. Andre showed up a minute later, in a pinstripe suit with a tie woven with some kind of reflective red that appeared to undulate as he moved, subtle changes in light making it appear the colors were rippling across the fabric. He was carrying a huge pink donut box, bless him.
Andre glanced around the room, looked at his watch, and said, “Where in the hell is Budd? Must have overslept. Probably hungover.”
Budd appeared five seconds later, clearly having been right behind Andre in the hall. They’d probably ridden together.
After everyone was seated, Echo said, “First order of business, we should talk about the sale of the Moutainview lot, they finally got financing squared away. I’ve got documents. Just need signatures.”
Zoey said, “Wait, are you serious? I think me getting attacked by a mechanized corpse last night is probably the first order of business.”
Will said, “Actually, we’ve been going back and forth with AliCOM on this sale for months, we definitely don’t want to give the
m time to change their minds.”
Zoey said, “Sure, sure. Whatever it is, I’m confident you’re on top of it.”
“You have to give final approval and signature, Zoey. That’s your land. You said you wanted to be involved in the business, this is the business.”
“Then in my role of Queen of Business, I declare that we talk about the mechanized attack corpse and the organization who sent it to try to kill me because they think I ate the guts of their friend, who happened to be the very corpse they sent.”
“The corpse wasn’t trying to kill you,” said Will, in an infuriatingly dismissive tone. “I’m estimating that the implants were operating at about one percent power. They just wanted to make you run around in a panic and get it on camera. That was the whole point. They don’t want you dead, because then the show’s over. You don’t kill the cow as long as it’s giving milk.”
“Either way,” replied Zoey, “the murder of Dexter Tilley is officially our problem. Now, with the combined brains of everybody here, I think we should be able to knock this out over the weekend. If we’re lucky, maybe somebody caught his murder on cam—”
“They didn’t,” said Echo. “I checked. You had to know it wouldn’t be that easy.”
“He was found at a casino but nobody got it on camera? Aren’t there cameras all over, to keep people from cheating and all that?”
“Your casinos are proudly camera-free zones,” noted Budd, “and feature prominent signage guaranteeing it. No closed-circuit, no Blink, no nothin’. Your high-rollers who enjoy the company of mistresses and escorts appreciate the discretion, you understand. Cheating—casino cheating, not marital cheating—is monitored with sensors and algorithms that detect patterns they reckon are a bit too lucky.”
“So if people win, we kick them out. Remind me that we need to get rid of the casinos next.”
“In other words,” continued Budd, “we don’t even know that he actually passed at Fortuna, or that he was even found there. They could be makin’ that up, to put his death at your feet. Coroner had no record of him.”
Andre made himself a cup of coffee from the machine in the back of the room. He returned to his seat and opened the big pink donut box to reveal that it contained exactly one donut. He picked it up and took a bite.
