Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

by David Wong

  “Every time things get hard, you retreat right back to this place. Thinking of Arthur as this monster, ignoring all of the lessons you’ve learned. Everything you’ve learned about what power really means.”

  “And by lessons, you mean a pile of words to make victims sound like customers.”

  Wu said, “Perhaps you could have this argument at another time? We need to establish a decoy transport that will appear to have Zoey in it, then we can—”

  Will ignored him. “If you want to walk away, walk away. I’m done trying to talk you out of it.”

  “Oh, and if you think I’m putting you in charge, think again. I’m giving the money away.”

  “What does that even mean? You’re still picturing your wealth like it’s a pile of gold coins in your vault. It’s not. It’s a machine. You pay five thousand employees just to run your rental properties. Cleaners, maintenance, security. So you want to close it all down, fire all of them? Split up the cash and give it to the homeless in this big one-time payment that they’ll spend within a month on drugs and booze? And then what?”

  Budd, also trying to cut off the argument, said, “Kowalski’s trying to get ahold of the guy who was watching your mother. Things are chaotic at the moment, the parade has started.”

  Will remained focused on Zoey. “And what becomes of the properties? They get snapped up by one of the million developers in this country looking to swoop in here and get a piece of the pie. Landlords who won’t keep the tenants safe or the buildings warm. All of those people you fired, they’ll wind up with a boss who’ll treat them worse or they’ll wind up on the street, get deported. How many of your workers are Mexican, Haitian, Filipino? How many of your women are Korean, Chinese … you want to see them get sent back? Every part of your machine will wind up under the control of men who don’t know what a crisis of conscience even is. If you give up the money, you give up the power to make change.”

  “So you’re saying I keep my power, but try to use it for good, to shape the world the way I see fit. In other words, the exact thing Arthur believed.”

  Echo said, “There are two helicopters right above us—”

  Will cut her off. “Being against power is easy, Zoey, because you never, ever need to offer solutions or take risks. Exercising power in the right way is what’s hard. This system favors psychopaths in the same way that basketball favors the tall. But Arthur’s last act was to put his machine under the control of someone he thought could be better.”

  “Me.”

  “No. A fantasy version of you he’d created in his mind. He didn’t know you. And you want to be better than him but you refuse to take a hard look at what being better actually means. If it means sick people die on the transplant waiting list because the government says it’s illegal to let them buy organs, that’s not being better, that’s just not wanting to get your hands dirty.”

  “Meanwhile, I can’t leave my house without getting torn apart by a city that hates me and, as I just found out, has every reason to. That whole time we were looking for Stench Machine, I had this nagging voice in the back of my head saying ‘You deserve this.’ I’m a part of the problem. So I guess that’s two people who were right about this whole thing. My mom, and Titus Chobb.”

  Wu slapped the counter with his palm and said, “I will put an end to this argument with force, if I have to.”

  Echo said, “Our position is now being tracked from those helicopters. They know we’re in here.”

  “All I ask,” said Will, quietly, “is that before you run away, you watch the video from a month ago, from the night of the hostage standoff.”

  “None of that was on video.”

  “Not the stuff with you and Tilley, I’m talking about the videos from the scene outside the building.”

  “Why would I want to—”

  “I heard from Kowalski,” Budd interrupted, loudly. “And he, ah, says his people lost track of your mother. Hours ago. Blink search of her face turns up nothing, but of course it would if she’d put on a spontaneous costume at some point.”

  More to reassure herself than anything, Zoey said, “I’ve learned my lesson from the Stench Machine affair. We’re obviously not going to assume an abduction this time.”

  Echo said, “We can track your mother’s phone, if by some miracle she has it on.”

  Budd said, “Already doing that.” He stared at his screen for a moment, perplexed. “Huh.”

  “Oh god,” said Zoey. “What?”

  “She appears to be, uh, in the parade.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Her phone is located inside one of the floats.”

  36

  All told, about a hundred floats and balloons and several thousand performers would snake their way around the city over the course of the next three hours or so. More than a million people had crowded around the parade route the previous year, maybe twice that many had been expected this year. The city, and its reputation among tourists, was growing exponentially. If you took a trip to Tabula Ra$a, everyone knew, it was guaranteed you’d come back with a story to tell. There was no tourism board to advertise the fact. Blink did the advertising for them.

  Over the summer, Zoey had been crushed to find out that her company would not in fact have a float in the Black Parade. Attending the event sounded like hell, but designing a truly mischievous float sounded like a blast. It turned out the parade organizers had banned Arthur Livingston from the event three years ago, after he’d rigged his float with an enormous catapult to fling whimsical projectiles at, and in some cases destroy, other floats along the route. The best Zoey’s team had been able to do was convince the organizers to allow her back in next year, if all went well.

  It wouldn’t be a minor project. The average float in the Tabula Ra$a Devil’s Night Black Parade was wide enough to occupy the entire street and as tall as many of the buildings it would pass. There was bitter competition between float makers—creative teams sponsored by local businesses and plutocrats—and they kept trying to top each other. Zoey was told that last year, one float was around two hundred feet tall, a massive mechanical Grim Reaper that seemed to float along the route. In its bony fist was a headless corpse dressed as a police officer, referencing a real event that had happened months earlier when a policeman was beheaded and hung from an overpass. That incident and its aftermath (including the revelation that higher-ups had been bribed to destroy evidence) had caused hundreds of officers to walk off the job, their positions never to be filled. That was how the Black Parade worked: the floats depicted in graphic, often cartoonishly exaggerated detail some horror from the dark underbelly of the city. A chance, organizers had always said, for Tabula Ra$a to confront and exorcise its demons.

  And now, apparently, Zoey’s mother was a participant. Somehow.

  Echo was saying, “VOP ground units have now been dispersed along the parade route. Every outgoing surface street is being monitored.”

  Zoey only half-heard her. If she were still the type to become hysterical about her mother’s safety, which she of course wasn’t because she had resolved not to be, but if she was, she’d easily be able to put together a nightmare scenario in her mind. Chobb’s thugs would have known Zoey’s mother would be at the parade, would have been watching her, would be ready at a moment’s notice to snatch her if they decided they needed leverage. Once they had done that, one of the creative, sadistic minds in Chobb’s employ could have their way with her, and displayed her body in one of the horror-themed floats.

  Will, once again seemingly reading her thoughts, said, “By far the most likely scenario is that Chobb’s people picked up your mother and tossed her phone onto one of the passing floats, just so we’d have to chase it down while they moved her to another location.”

  Andre said, “Isn’t it just as likely that some dude up on one of the floats spotted her in the crowd and invited her up there? They do that all the time, she’s probably giggling and dancing with a guy in a Will costume.
”

  “We just need to find a feed with the float in view,” said Echo. “Here … oh. Uh … well…”

  Zoey leaned over. “What?”

  It was a drone’s view of the parade, tracking a particular float that it turned out was actually very easy to spot. The float in question was a huge ball of flame, fifteen stories at least. The flames didn’t look holographic—Zoey wasn’t sure how they’d achieved the effect without the thing actually being on fire.

  “It’s supposed to represent the Goldstone fire. The float is about four blocks that way,” she pointed. “Can already see the glow—look.”

  Zoey started to picture her mother tied to that float, burning to death. She squished the thought before it could fully form. No. She wasn’t doing this. Fear was interest paid on money you didn’t even owe. She tried to remember where she’d heard that. Oh, right. It was on a framed poster Arthur had kept in the conference room. She’d thrown it away when they redecorated.

  Zoey heard a text chime on her phone. She held her breath, and looked.

  Hovering above the screen was a message from her mother. Or rather, from her mother’s phone. Two words:

  COME ALONE

  Zoey held up the phone, but didn’t say a word.

  Will barely skipped a beat. “All right. We’ve always known this was a possibility. Here’s where we wish we had Marti to use as a trading chip, but—”

  “Shut up, Will.”

  “Zoey. We’ve been through this situation before. This is a move we knew was out there for Chobb to make. He’s made it. Now we make ours. This is exactly what you asked me to prepare for—”

  “You think you’re some kind of expert at reading people. But I’m telling you, buddy, you are not reading me right now.”

  Zoey looked out of the one-way glass bubble, at the crowd. All the giggling people, the dumb costumes. She tried to think of the last time she went somewhere and just enjoyed herself, drinking with real friends who made her laugh until she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even remember.

  She met Will’s impatient eyes and said, “I’ve got to say, it’s a miraculous system you’ve built here. At one end you have an unthinkable act of evil, then the guilt for it gets chopped up and dispersed so that it comes out the other end as a cool breeze.”

  It was only now that Zoey remembered she had been holding this entire heated discussion while wearing the stupid Bonnie the Bonobo monkey mask. She pulled it off and blew hair out of her face.

  She said, “Everyone, get yourselves to safety. Wu, you, too.”

  Zoey pulled up her phone and typed a response to the text:

  I’LL BE THERE

  Echo said, “You’re not going alone. I don’t care what you say. We stop, I’m getting off, too.”

  “Why? Because you care about me? If you do, then listen. You people remind me to listen to you ten times a day, are you capable of doing it? Any of you? I have to do this because this is what Arthur would never have done. I’m going down there alone and I’m ordering you to use that distraction to get yourselves to safety. Take this cat with you. Wu, you’re relieved of duty. If I survive, I’ll leave you a good review.”

  Zoey reached inside her costume, found a band in her pants pocket, and tied back her hair.

  “Now, does somebody have a weapon I can borrow?”

  Echo said, “I have something better.”

  37

  Zoey couldn’t help but notice that their operation was getting less sophisticated by the minute. A mission that began with an invisible helicopter, a giant robot, and Hollywood-quality wound makeup ended with Zoey alone, on foot, in a smelly rented costume of a bikini-wearing monkey. She was pushing through the crowd along the sidewalk heading back toward the oncoming parade, occasionally glancing up at the lights of at least two helicopters that were circling up there. She was using her phone to track the location of her mother’s and it was, in fact, still creeping toward her at parade-speed.

  Zoey reached the first float a few minutes later, out of breath and sweating in her stupid costume. She kept moving, largely ignoring the parade as it passed. She was vaguely aware of the crowd hooting and whistling when a particularly bawdy float or balloon went by, or groaning and jeering at one built around some intentionally terrible joke or bad pun. She heard everyone burst out laughing at one point and looked up to see a rolling fifty-foot-tall animatronic statue of the president sporting a grossly exaggerated stainless-steel penis. There’d been a rumor that he’d come to Tabula Ra$a to get an implant to combat erectile dysfunction. Behind and above him was one of the massive balloons, this one shaped like a crashing airliner, rigged to belch real black smoke behind it and to broadcast the screams of doomed passengers inside. The next float was a platform of actors on a set made up to look like a restaurant kitchen, one man in a bloody chef’s costume feeding a pile of stuffed dogs into a sausage grinder, each crank of the wheel spurting “blood” out onto the crowd as it passed. Zoey had no idea what scandal that was referencing, you couldn’t stay on top of them all.

  The pulses of firelight were now just a couple of blocks down and it absolutely appeared to be an office building fully engulfed in roiling flames, somehow crawling down the street with the rest of the parade. Already Zoey could hear faint roars from the crowd where it passed. It was a stunning sight, and gave the impression that a strong breeze would cause the whole rolling inferno to tip over onto the crowd. A really good parade, Zoey thought, is one that can accidentally kill you at any moment.

  She jogged a little faster. It was a cool night but the costume was stifling, her hot breath steaming her head inside the mask. No horror scenarios of what she would find ahead flashed through her mind. She was too exhausted for that. Plus, it would trigger all sorts of related thoughts she was not equipped to process right now, like the fact that she had spent hours tracking down a lost cat who wasn’t even missing, while her actual mother may have been the one who was—

  Nope. Enough of that. Until she knew what happened, nothing had happened. She had to be ready for whatever, or whoever, was waiting up there.

  She could hear guitar music overhead now; a live band was playing on a stage thirty feet above the street, the platform held aloft by cables and balloons overhead. People in the crowd were throwing bottles at them as they passed, trying to knock them off.

  And now, here was the burning float that contained her mother. Or her mother’s phone. Or something.

  The flames were definitely real, Zoey could feel the heat from where she was on the sidewalk. It was, as Echo had said, commemorating/mocking the infamous Goldstone building fire. That had been an office building in town holding several brokerage firms and other such businesses. When the blaze started, the alarm system and sprinklers both failed, or had never worked at all. Twenty-six people died, supposedly because the staff of one firm feared their boss so much that they stayed rooted at their desks even as smoke slowly filled the room. That boss had apparently told them they would all lose their jobs unless a certain report was finished by the end of the business day and without an alarm to give the order to evacuate, they just kept working. That was the story, anyway. The boss, who very much evacuated at the first sign of smoke, refused to speak of it in public.

  The rolling re-creation of the building had no exterior walls, so that the burning victims inside were in full view. On each floor of the float were two rows of cubicles, each cubicle featuring a life-sized figure in a suit and tie working away at a computer. Everything was in flames—the desks, the chairs, the workers themselves. Fire rippled over their bodies, licking across faces that remained obliviously locked in concentration over some spreadsheet or other. Zoey figured they had to be extremely detailed animatronic dummies, ones designed so that the flesh would still cook and peel in an incredibly realistic manner …

  Zoey studied the burning office inhabitants to see if there was anything that stood out. Not to see if any of them were her mother, of course, like if they had strapped her to a chai
r alongside the flammable dummies and set her on fire, her skin turning black while she screamed and the crowd cheered, because Zoey was past that, past imagining terrible things happening to her loved ones.

  The tracking implied the phone was close, somewhere around that first level of the float. For all she knew, the phone was just lying up there, slowly getting melted. She needed a closer look, somehow. Well, the costume covered every inch of her body. It’d protect her enough to get up close, right? For just a few seconds? Long enough to see if any of the roasting human figures were …

  Part of Zoey’s brain was still trying to run the numbers on that plan while another part was already making her feet go. That damned hand cream.

  She climbed over the barrier that had been set up along the sidewalk, then ran around to the front of the float and jumped onto its bumper. She’d had some idea that because these were decorative special-effects pyrotechnics that they somehow wouldn’t be quite as hot as the flames you’d get in, say, an actual office fire. She now wasn’t sure that was the case, absolutely feeling like she was being cooked alive in her ridiculous costume. She could faintly hear people yelling and gasping from the crowd. To them, this float had just gotten about 50 percent more entertaining. Look, everyone! A drunk person could die!

  In front of her, the two rows of flaming cubicles on the first floor were separated by a walkway, just as they would be in an actual office. There was a gap in the flames wide enough for a person to dash through if they were wearing good protective gear or were very stupid.

  She squinted against the flames and tried to study the burning figures, to see if any of them were … not animatronic. The ones nearest seemed to be performing the same looping mechanical movements, their flaming hands comically tapping keyboards and shuffling burning papers, everything made of some kind of material that was never fully consumed by the blaze. She couldn’t see much beyond those first couple.