Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

by David Wong

  “Trust me, I’m well aware of what the private security is doing to this city.”

  “Because of what Chobb’s people tried to do to you last night? Do you have any idea how many of my people the VOP have done that to? My niece, she was stopped by Van of Piss security leaving the Sibal-Biyong Mall, insisted they saw her steal jewelry. Held her down, did a search right there by the door. A deep search. People, cameras all over. Making sure it gets recorded, see. Making an example of her.”

  “Chobb’s people did that to send a message to you?”

  “Oh, no, they had no idea who she was. That’s my point. They did that because that’s what they do. Because they can. Or at least, they thought they could. The two guards who did that, they didn’t show up to work the next day.”

  “If my people ever did that, I’d have them fired and probably beaten.”

  “I think you mean what you’re saying. But that’s part of it, too. The rich owners of those businesses, they’ll condemn the abuses but profit from the end result just the same.”

  “Why in the hell would they be okay with their own customers getting assaulted? Even if they are racists, money is money, right?”

  Alonzo looked at her like she’d just asked why they can’t just find a kind wizard to magic their problems away.

  He seemed to be thinking about how to approach it, then said, “My mother and father moved me here from Chicago when I was sixteen. Rent was already sky-high but there were jobs and word was you could get a fresh start. No background checks in Tabula Rasa, they said. My father, he needed one of those fresh starts. See, because they’d set the rules so that if you commit a felony at nineteen, you’re locked out of the good jobs for the rest of your life. So, the plan was to move with friends, a white couple who had the same idea. We were all going to get a place together, in a safe neighborhood. Combined, the four of them could afford that, just barely. So my mother, she spends the whole day here, looking at places to rent. Goes to three different buildings, all three tell her they’re full up, got a waiting list a mile long. But then the very next day, one of the white friends goes to those very same buildings. All three had vacancies.”

  “That sucks.”

  “All three buildings were owned by your father.”

  This time it was Zoey who was genuinely confused. “You’re saying he was so racist he just preferred the units sit empty?”

  “It’s not about personal feelings, not from where the owners sit. That’s what you people always get wrong. It was a brand-new city, see. The landlords knew you could only have about twenty percent minority tenants before the upper-class renters decided it was destined to be ghetto and started steering clear. So, those landlords were telling the truth. There were, in fact, no more slots for non-white renters. And if you call them on it, they’ll insist they harbor no animosity, that they’re just doing what the customers want, same as the VOP, same as everyone else. And on and on it goes.”

  “I get it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I get that I don’t get it, how’s that? But either way, you’re here because we both agree that Titus Chobb is worse.”

  “That’s true, but also we shouldn’t let him set the bar. All right, I’m bored with the machine now. What time is lunch?”

  22

  Zoey’s secret plan to give herself and the team a menial task so that the anxiety wouldn’t tear her apart had kind of worked.

  Putting the haunted maze together turned out to be a nightmare. Entire sections were missing and they couldn’t get power to a whole corner of it. In one spot there was an animatronic skeleton that was supposed to pop out of the ground and chase the kids to the next area, but the thing just stayed dead no matter what. Zoey, Echo, and a huge muscular guy with tribal tattoos and a scimitar on his back had to trace hundreds of feet of wiring until 2-Bladez (that was the guy’s name, though he only seemed to have one blade today) found a single spot where a tiny speck of missing insulation was causing the whole thing to short out. Something so small, and the whole system fails …

  According to the chatter on Blink, the supposed attack on the estate was scheduled for sundown, which would be in the neighborhood of six P.M. At three, Zoey’s people and Alonzo met in the Buffalo Room, so-named because of the giant stuffed buffalo head over a fireplace that itself was large enough to roast the rest of a buffalo in, should someone ever feel the need.

  Alonzo was moving casually around the room, admiring details of its construction. Budd stood near the fireplace, Will paced around with a drink in his hand, and Andre and Echo sat in a pair of antique leather chairs. Zoey was buried in an enormous, eight-foot-wide leather beanbag she’d had added to the room over the summer. She sank so far down into it that she was actually invisible to anyone else; the crater in the bag was like her own private little office.

  Budd said, “I have the location of every single employee of the Vanguard of Peace, updating in real time. All of them are exactly where they’re supposed to be, corralling early parade crowds, watching doors and warehouses, escorting rich folk. The ones who are off duty are at home, or in bars, or running errands. Six of them exchanged a lot of chatter about throwing a ‘surprise party,’ which I thought might be code for an attack, but if so, they’re bringing a lot of beer and hamburger and are taking the time to decorate a local bar they’ve rented out for the evening. One of their coworkers is retiring, it appears.”

  From down in her beanbag well, Zoey said, “So The Blowback and/or Chobb has hired somebody else to attack the house?”

  With audible frustration, Budd said, “If they have, it has officially escaped my notice.”

  “What about the supplies we found out they bought? The truck? Big drone?”

  “Both sitting in a garage, unattended.”

  “And when one of you bought a headset and went into the Hub to infiltrate their group in there, what did you find out? And you know I’m going to throw a fit if you say you haven’t tried.”

  “I did,” said Andre, sounding proud. “Logged in, found myself in a big virtual lobby with a bunch of naked people. I asked around to try to get the lay of the land, was greeted with a torrent of racial slurs, even though my avatar was a flamboyant talking unicorn. I responded in a way that I believed was reasonable, only to find I’d been bounced from that lobby and put into a different one, full of people who were all speaking Chinese.”

  Echo said, “If you’re not acclimated to it, it’s pretty much like an American from Wisconsin trying to infiltrate a terror cell in Sudan—they see you coming a mile away. Meanwhile, out in the physical world, five different properties of ours were vandalized this morning, all with the same phrase, all done simultaneously by different vandals in skull masks.”

  “Do I want to know what the phrase is?”

  “‘Tonight We Feast.’”

  Zoey stared at the ceiling from within the beanbag crater. “Here’s what I think. I think their ‘invasion’ or ‘siege’ or whatever amounts to nothing more than a threat intended to keep me in the house, to ruin my Devil’s Night. Well, if nobody shows up, I’m going to that parade. If they do show up and try to kill me, I’m still going to that parade.”

  Echo said, “Wait, I thought you’d spent the last month saying you weren’t going? Because parades are stupid and you get nervous in crowds where there aren’t bathrooms nearby? You went on a twenty-minute rant about it two weeks ago. I think the phrase you used was ‘I’d rather poop a sun.’”

  “Well, I’ve changed my mind. I’m going. Will, did you find out who killed Dexter Tilley? Everybody remembers him, right?”

  “There is something,” said Echo, “but it’s nothing.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s … weird.”

  Zoey tried to sit up, but struggled as the bag shifted under her. Everyone seemed to wait patiently for the sounds of Zoey’s thrashing to stop.

  Finally she just gave up and said, “I’m listening.”

  �
�When a conspiracy theory becomes mainstream,” said Echo, “the early adopters have to latch onto a different, even more niche conspiracy, since their identity is tied to going against the grain. Since everyone has come around to the idea that Tilley died because you ate him during a ritualistic cannibal orgy, there’s now an alternate theory that he died while playing a game. A specific mission in a fantasy game called Crimson Day that they’ve decided has some kind of symbolic importance.”

  “Okay? Why would that even matter?”

  “Well,” Echo continued, “the thing is, we do have his account logs from the Hub, and his logout approximately matches our best estimate for time of death, based on when he was last seen alive and when he turned up at Fort Fortuna.”

  “And you’re one hundred percent sure that one of those VR headsets can’t malfunction in a way that makes all of your important organs dissolve?”

  “I think what you meant to ask is, can we pinpoint the login location and figure out where exactly he was when he died, thus narrowing down both the cause and suspects. The answer, so far, is no. He was using an incredibly encrypted VPN. Like he didn’t want anyone to know where he was logging in from.”

  “Right, that’s what I was really asking.”

  “And…” Echo paused, as if getting a “stop talking” signal from someone. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  Will said, “We don’t want to introduce a bad theory without information to back it up. It just clouds our thinking.”

  “You know I’m going to make you tell me.”

  Zoey heard only silence from within the indentation of the beanbag. She made the enormous effort to sit up and then crawl over to where she could see, her bruises aching all the way.

  “Well?”

  Echo finally said, “That chef that Chobb uses, Werner Wolff, his specialty is exotic meats, he boasts he can prepare anything as cuisine, even roadkill and all the parts of the animal not meant to be eaten. He has this whole thing about tasting nature, not factory-farmed animals that he says have had the flavor bred out of them. Says they’re no better than the vat-grown stuff—”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s famous for that.” Zoey could feel where this was going, and was mentally urging Echo to talk faster.

  “Well, there’s a fledgling theory that after Titus Chobb’s wife died of cancer a couple of years ago, that he came to believe that in order to stave off disease and achieve immortality himself, he needed to regularly eat the organs of a young male. And the rumor is that his chef saw this as the ultimate culinary challenge.”

  Zoey tried to jump down off the beanbag, but stumbled and kind of rolled off onto the floor. She scrambled to her feet, breathing heavily, pushing her hair back from her face.

  “Okay … but why pick Tilley for that?”

  Will said, “Zoey, there is no evidence for this whatsoever. The nonsense about thinking he can gain immortality, Chobb is not crazy or even superstitious, he doesn’t think that way.”

  “Grief does weird things to people.”

  Alonzo said, “Ooh, I got it! He chose Tilley because the ritual needed a virgin.”

  Echo said, “What ritual?”

  “Come on, you can’t eat a person without a ritual. You’re not just going to treat it like making a pot roast.”

  “Good,” said Zoey. “Let’s follow up on that. If nothing else, maybe it’s significant that there are rumors going around that point somewhere other than me.”

  Will said, “We will … follow up to the fullest degree that it deserves.”

  “Final point of order. I know where Stench Machine is, he’s currently in the courtyard stalking a discarded glove he apparently thinks is a bird. Where’s my mom?”

  “At work at the clinic,” said Budd, “being monitored. If someone comes after her, we will know long before they get there.”

  Andre said, “Hey, look at that! I got a message in my Hub inbox. One of the naked avatars I yelled questions at apparently decided to follow up after I got booted. It says…”

  Andre messed with his phone, apparently unclear on how to actually see the contents of the message.

  “Here. It says The Blowback has a thousand officers commanding a million foot soldiers. And they intend to raze the estate, seize the objective, and eat it—I assume they mean you—at a ceremonial feast at midnight.”

  Alonzo perked up. “You didn’t tell me a million nerds were coming. I’d have brought a fifteenth man.”

  Zoey scoffed. “Well that’s just—I mean, now we know it’s a bluff. Ha. A million soldiers? There’s no way. Right?”

  23

  The sun was setting and there was still no indication that, say, the entire North Korean military was amassing somewhere nearby—someone would have noticed. Still, Alonzo’s team had been dispersed to various points along the walls that Will had determined were tactically the most likely places to attempt a breach, with two shooters placed on the roof with a clear view of the gates. Guns were a no-go on Zoey’s side, as the grounds were dotted with the propellant cookers that had ignited Redd Gunn the day before. Anyone who showed up with firearms would have a very bad time and the bigger the guns, the worse time they’d have. As such, Alonzo’s men had been supplied with railguns from the Suits’ arsenal, rifles that could send a pulse of electricity down the length of the barrel, carrying with it a tiny object that flew so fast that the impact alone would splatter a human body like a ketchup packet under a car tire.

  Echo was inside in the conference room, monitoring all of the security camera feeds. Budd was working the phones, trying to get a line on anything that might be occurring, anywhere. Andre had been piloting a drone to monitor everything from the sky, until he crashed it into a tree and now he was wandering around the grounds with nothing to do.

  Will stood in the front yard in the orange glow of the huge house-sized jack-o’-lantern, drinking scotch next to Andre. Zoey and Wu approached and a moment later they were joined by Megaboss Alonzo and his bodyguard, Deedee.

  Zoey made eye contact with Deedee. “You don’t say much.”

  “People don’t ask me much.” She did not smile when she said it.

  “Are you missing big Devil’s Night plans for this? Were you supposed to be staking out a spot along the parade route?”

  “If I want to watch a string of noisy eyesores driving along at walking speed, I can just look out the window of my apartment any day of the week. I’m supposed to be getting the winter collections up on our racks. Some of us don’t just get to take off from work when something more fun comes along.”

  Alonzo, forcing a jocular tone, said, “Don’t let her fool you with that, she’s got girls to do that work. The store’s the job she puts on her taxes, this is her real job, being the eyes in the back of my head.”

  “I stand corrected,” said Deedee. “What I meant to say was I should be at the store explaining to those girls why they did the whole thing wrong and making sure they fix it the right way.” Alonzo started to reply, but Deedee cut him off. “And go right ahead and swallow your speech about how I need to learn to delegate. Not in the mood.”

  Zoey glanced around. “Well, I don’t see a million people. Unless they’re tiny. Wait, I’m freaking myself out with the thought of a million little elves pouring over the walls.”

  Andre gave her an ugly look. “Ew. Now I’m gonna have bad dreams. Why’d you have to say that?”

  Budd’s voice came through Zoey’s earpiece. “They just announced the battering ram was at the gates.”

  “I can see the gates from here,” said Will, “and there’s no battering ram there.”

  “Unless it’s tiny,” muttered Andre. “Got a little rat driving it or something.”

  Alonzo said, “Let’s get serious now. This is what we’ve been waiting all day for.”

  “A white moving truck just turned onto the inlet road,” said Echo’s voice in Zoey’s ear. “It’s the one Budd’s been tracking since they rented it. Will arrive at the property
in a few minutes.”

  Everyone exchanged serious looks. Here it comes, thought Zoey. The “million foot soldiers,” be they real or metaphorical.

  Will asked, “Can you get a scan of the truck’s interior?”

  “Just a moment,” replied Echo. “All right … there are people in the back with … something. Oh, it’s the drone. The one Budd said they’d bought, consumer model.”

  Will said, “How many people?”

  “Two.”

  “What if they’re going to use the drone to drop a bioweapon on us?” asked Zoey. “Like the million foot soldiers are viruses? Or bacteria?”

  Will said, “They don’t have a bioweapon. If there was a place making or selling such a thing we’d already know about it.”

  “Nanobots? Oh god, I didn’t think about nanobots.”

  “If they managed to build an army of microscopic attack robots without us hearing anything about it, then they deserve to win.”

  “The truck is stopping,” said Echo. “They got right up to the property line, parked.”

  Will nodded. “They knew exactly where the countermeasures kick in. Zoey, get inside.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m suggesting, as your employee, that you get inside. Wu?”

  Wu said, “There really is no reason to stay out here.”

  “There is a reason, which is that it’s my house and my yard and I can stand in it if I want to. They don’t get to decide that.”

  Alonzo said, “Damn right!”

  “They’re pulling out the drone,” said Echo, sounding a little excited.

  Will nodded, also relieved that something was actually happening. “Alonzo, make sure your people are watching all of their stations, this could be a distraction for whatever they’re actually about to do. I don’t want every pair of eyes on this thing, no matter what it is.”