by David Wong
Zoey’s mother said “Yay!” and hugged him.
“Don’t celebrate too hard,” said Zoey, studying the events outside the window. “There’s a good chance we’re still all about to die in a stupid blimp shootout.”
Chobb said, “I still don’t see how I won’t wind up living the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for retribution from Blackwater.”
Zoey watched the oncoming lights outside her window and shook her head.
“You won’t have to look over your shoulder. I said before that what you’re banking on is my ability to get between you and Will. Well, Titus, we’re going to test that ability right … now.”
It turned out those moving lights outside belonged to a drone. It whizzed past the windows and then there was a crash and a noise like a robot getting his hand caught in his food processor. The drone had destroyed one of the engines. A moment later, an identical sound from the other side, a second drone hitting its mark.
The blimp stopped struggling against the cable. They were listing again; some silverware slid off the table and clinked onto the floor.
“They’ll swing that paw back up,” said Chobb, “with the cable attached. It will draw the passenger hold even with the top of the cat’s head up there. At which point we will be boarded, presumably.”
Zoey raised her voice to the nine guards, plus any others who may have remained hidden.
“Everyone stay calm! Will’s plan is not to simply kill all of us, as far as I know.”
Titus said, “Yes, stand down unless I give the order. Everyone got me? If I become incapacitated, well, you know what to do.”
Soon, another cable was fired from the rooftop, from a flat spot in between the cat’s enormous ears. It impacted the paw and a moment later, the cable was being pulled tight by some kind of apparatus up there, drawing the paw up vertically and dragging the blimp along with it, just as Chobb had said. As they drew even with the rooftop, there were the Suits, Zoey’s people looking like fleas as they scurried around the Lucky Cat’s rooftop cafe, frantically messing with their blimp-boarding equipment.
Wu was there with his rifle and he fired another cable. The hook on this one smashed through the side window and everyone jumped. The cable was then pulled tight and the hook grabbed the window frame, pulling them toward the rooftop, yanking them free of the paw, metal squealing and complaining every step of the way. They inched their way over, drawing close enough that Zoey could see everyone’s nervous faces out there, her people jacked up on adrenaline and ready for action.
Zoey said, “If you don’t want them to destroy your door, maybe go over there and open it?”
“I would not do that to a man,” Chobb said. “To get all pumped up to breach a door, only to have someone just pull it open instead? I am not capable of such cruelty.”
The blimp jolted as it forcefully contacted the rooftop. There was shouting from outside, commands for everyone to clear the door.
Chobb said, “Cover your ears.”
An explosion blew the lock and the door was ripped open. A figure clad in sparkly red dove into the room and rolled.
It was Echo. She tossed a weapon to Zoey, who wasn’t ready. It bounced off her right boob.
Zoey yelled, “Wait! I’m okay! I’m okay!”
Wu charged into the room next. He tossed a black sphere toward Zoey, like he was aiming for her face but missed high. When it reached her, it burst into a wadded-up cloth, which then spread and lowered over her, like an invisible hunter had thrown a sack over Zoey with the intention of hauling her away. It was actually a bulletproof fabric, intended to shield her from crossfire. She’d been briefed on it at some point.
Zoey frantically clawed the sack off of her, only to find that in the two seconds it’d taken her to do that, Wu was now behind Chobb, using him as a human shield, a katana at his neck. Chobb, Zoey thought, was doing an admirable job of staying calm. His guards were pointing their weapons, yelling commands. Wu was yelling back.
Zoey ran—well, limped quickly—around to get between the guards and Wu/Chobb.
“Stop! It’s okay! Everybody!”
Andre entered immediately after, wearing a flashy red tuxedo, brandishing a gun with a barrel big enough that Zoey could have put her fist in it. He fired a projectile that bounced off the opposite wall and rolled onto the floor.
Zoey yelled “No!” just as the canister sparked and began spraying white smoke into the room. “Stop! Here…”
Zoey ran over to the smoking canister and kind of nudged it out the door with her shoe. She put her shirt over her mouth and nose, but the smoke just seemed to be for concealment, it wasn’t tear gas or anything.
Through her shirt she said, “I’m fine! I’m fine! Everybody stop the rescue! Somebody kick that gas thing away from the door, some if it’s still blowing in.”
Everyone stopped yelling, at least for the moment.
Will was outside the door, it turned out, and he calmly kicked the gas grenade aside on his way in. He’d somehow had time to change suits and the bastard had a drink in his hand.
To Echo, he said, “I told you she was fine.”
Wu slowly removed his blade from Chobb’s throat and sheathed it.
Echo came over to Zoey. For the first time, it registered with Zoey that Echo was dressed as a magician’s assistant, in tights and red sequins, apparently to coordinate with Andre as the magician. Unless this was some kind of progressive act where the roles were reversed.
Echo got a view of the blood on the back of Zoey’s shirt. “Are you okay?”
“How do I look?”
“Like you died and were resurrected by someone who got distracted halfway through.”
Zoey said, “Hey, when did you guys replace Echo with this talking trash bag full of fish heads?”
They were interrupted by a noisy wind outside. A helicopter was approaching. It didn’t sound like Zoey’s rental.
“Whose helicopter is that? Are a dozen more VOP dudes going to zipline down?”
“We reached out to Megaboss Alonzo for help,” said Will, “but he flatly refused. We then sent Budd after him to try to change his mind, about thirty minutes ago. So without turning my head to look, I’m very confident in saying that is Alonzo’s helicopter and that Alonzo did not send his men, but in fact came himself.”
Will sipped his drink and the helicopter descended behind him. Its programmable skin was made to look like the scales on a snake and across the length of its undulating body were the words MEGA and BOSS alternately flashing in red.
Zoey, having to shout over the sound of the helicopter now, said, “So you launched this venture with no actual ability to get me off this rooftop? Just hoping that Budd and Alonzo would come through at this exact moment?”
“You hire the right people and trust them to get it done.”
Andre ran out of the room and waved his arms at the helicopter. A moment later, the engine went silent, the helicopter having landed atop several pieces of cafe furniture in between the cat’s giant ears. Out from the aircraft came Budd, Alonzo, and Alonzo’s bodyguard, Deedee. Soon everyone was crowded inside the beached blimp.
“All right, everybody,” began Zoey, “I’m not saying this under duress. We’ve come to a resolution. It will take a long time to explain and there are thousands of lawyer hours remaining to work out the details but…” She paused to take in and let out an exhausted breath. “I think we have it worked out.”
Zoey’s mother stood and said, “Everybody sit down! There are plenty of chairs. Titus’s chef has enough back there for all of you.”
Nobody sat. The blimp was tethered to an enormous cat’s head with two destroyed engines and its door had been blown aside. The passenger hold now contained at least twenty people carrying a total of probably fifty weapons.
Zoey’s mother said, “SIT!”
People started finding chairs. Andre propped the door closed as best he could to keep the cold out. Echo came and sat next to Zoey, acr
oss from Titus and Zoey’s mother. Echo looked at them, then shot a curious glance at Zoey who waved her off with an “I’ll explain later” gesture.
Zoey said, “Titus’s chef has made a really good dish here, it’s some kind of pork I think. And the side is…”
Chobb said, “Those are honey-roasted Sekai Ichi apples. As for the meat, as I said, I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. Based on what I’ve heard, secondhand.”
Zoey took a bite. “What is it?”
“It’s wild game I caught myself. In fact, some would call it … the most dangerous game.”
“Dude, just tell me what it is.”
“Wild boar.”
Zoey was too tired to get whatever reference was being made there.
“Yeah, it’s good.”
44
The boots of the armies never touched the soil, battling atop compacted layers of the dead. The broken corpses lay in heaps from horizon to horizon, discarded weapons jutting up like sprigs of a drought-stricken crop. And still, the battle raged.
“Your ex used to play this, right?” asked Echo, never taking her eyes off the monitor on the bedroom wall. “You think he’s out there somewhere?”
“Oh, no,” said Zoey, “he’d be hundreds of miles away from the battle, farming digital food and selling it to both sides at inflated prices. He’d have seen all of this as a big investment opportunity.”
“That sounds hot.”
“It was! Growing up where I did, having a guy who seemed to have it all figured out? Mmm. Yeah. And he’d spent his teenage years as a nerd, so he thought I was the hottest thing in the world. I thought he was going to have a heart attack the first time I took off my top. I should have known I was in trouble once he learned how to dress himself.”
They were in Zoey’s room. Echo was curled up in the chair with a glass of wine, Zoey was on her bed under the influence of the pain meds her nurse had left behind earlier (yeah, it turns out if you’re rich enough, you can get somebody to come stitch you up right in your own bedroom in the middle of the night). Stench Machine would normally have been up there with her, but he was currently under the bed in a silent fit of rage over Zoey having brought another cat home. It was almost five in the morning and they’d been watching the battle since they’d gotten back to the estate an hour ago. The most recent development in the virtual war was that another army had swarmed in to support the remnants of Dirk Vikerness’s garrison at the ruins of their citadel, nearly encircling Martius Chobb’s invading force and cutting them off from their supply lines. Now a rear guard of Marti’s was trying to hold them off so that the rest of his soldiers could retreat back to friendly territory, the withdrawing forces trickling across a single narrow bridge that was the only passage over a glowing river of lava.
Echo said, “This is the most stressful thing I’ve watched all month.”
“Ooh, we should go find my castle on here.”
“I, uh, think they razed it.”
“So who built it? And the army, all of that? That wasn’t you, was it? Something you were tinkering with behind the scenes?”
“I think your avatar was being run by an AI,” said Echo, “mimicking your voice. Your army was made up of some real people and some bots.”
“But who set it all up? Someone was organizing all of this with a fake me.”
“My guess? Someone from The Blowback. As far as I can tell, ‘you’ showed up in the Hub right after the real you came home from the, uh, hospital last summer. They had failed to get you in real life, so they needed to pull you into their world. They got a whole bunch of followers to mine Spoils and built an army that would appear imposing, but that could be beaten. All so they could have a fight they could actually win.”
“This is getting depressing. Will these guys spend the rest of their lives in here doing this?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Hopefully just their angriest years. A lot of them will probably wake up one day and see that thirty is around the corner and think, ‘What the hell am I doing? I need to get a wife and a real place to live.’ But in terms of giving them something to do in the meantime, it beats prison.”
“It is a kind of prison, if you think about it.”
Echo shrugged. “If you think about it, everything is.”
“That chair isn’t very comfortable. Do want to come over here on the bed with me?”
“No, I have to get going. The, uh, dogs need me.”
45
Andre had retrieved the battered carcass of the Stench Reo robot from the park, which was now riddled with about ten thousand bullet holes. It no longer functioned aside from its ability to spout its catchphrases, but they propped it up in the courtyard and the kids were absolutely amazed by it. Zoey had put on most of her Naoko costume and since her own body was also beaten to hell, it looked like they’d added the damage on purpose. A girl and her mecha-cat, post-battle.
The Halloween party was an all-day affair, the first visitors showing up at about ten in the morning. They would come in scheduled waves, the first from a special-needs school Zoey had donated to, then after lunch would be the children of any employees from Ashe Enterprises who wanted to bring them. This included the sex workers, which had caused a huge controversy when announced (the lawyers, secretaries, and other white-collar types didn’t want their kids around prostitutes and strippers, or to be seen with them in general—Zoey had told them they could stay home if they didn’t like it). After that, the maze would be open to the public, though with several layers of security screenings that would be mostly invisible to those who passed through them. They were an hour into it, which meant it was the special-needs kids going through a low-key version of the maze with their parents, gently chased by a gang of Halloween staples like the whimsical, bumbling animatronic skeletons that at a designated point would trip and fall, bursting into a pile of disconnected bones.
Meanwhile, various junk-food vendors were doling out treats. From where Zoey was standing, she could smell the intoxicating scent of molten sugar from a booth where a Japanese guy was making teppanyaki popcorn on a flat iron griddle. He’d pile the kernels and oil inside a ring of sugar, then allow it to pop under a steel bowl. Kids were walking away with the warm, sticky clumps of popcorn in paper bags.
Zoey’s arm was in a sling as she had in fact dislocated her shoulder, and she had stitches in the back of her head that were covered by her glowing pink wig. She’d gone light on the painkillers, though (they just made her sleepy), and as a result was standing there in a throbbing little pool of pain.
Megaboss Alonzo was talking at her and had been for some time, though little of what he said was registering. He was dressed as Batman, complete with the enormous white mustache that had been a staple of the character for a decade. She had been surprised when he had showed up at the opening of the maze with 2-Bladez in tow. The latter had apparently demanded to come, worried that the wiring in that skeleton was going to short out again. The man, now dressed as a pirate, had spent the morning hovering around that corner of the maze, making sure that the damned skeleton activated properly every time a group of kids passed.
Zoey sensed Alonzo was talking politics and said, “All that mayor stuff, that was Will’s deal. I’m not into all that.”
Alonzo groaned. “But by not taking a position, you’re taking a position! That’s the hell of politics.”
“I just don’t see how it will matter. You collect taxes and fund the cops, then eventually the voters and donors will say, ‘Hey, I don’t like these people over here, pass a law they can’t help but break and then act like it’s their own fault.’ We’ll be right back in the same boat.”
“That’s why you need a strong figure in that office! Somebody to stand against those tides! Did you know that in Japan, they’ve got this thing, it kind of just looks like a futon they’ve stood up on end, just a big cushion in a frame. When they’ve got someone who’s drunk or crazy, they launch this thing at them and it just wraps them up like a burrit
o. Then they just tip it over and throw them in the back of a paddy wagon, take them somewhere to calm down. Next day, they’re good to go. See? It’ll be like that, give people room to make mistakes.”
“For someone who is an actual professional criminal, you have a strangely utopian view of humanity.”
“I can tell you from years of long experience that for every one truly evil man, there’s a hundred wayward souls who just need to be put right. There are ways to set those people on the righteous path without handing them over to sadists to be treated like dogs.”
“Okay, well, if you win and turn the city into a nightmarish dystopia, I’m going to show up at your office and say I told you so.”
“So,” he said, subtly shifting his posture, “what are you doing tonight, after the kids go home?”
“Nothing.”
“Great, come to the club with me.”
“No, I mean I’m planning to do nothing. An evening of doing nothing is incredibly important to me right now. I need it.”
Wu appeared then, in a flannel shirt and jeans, an appearance so startling to Zoey that it might as well have been a Halloween costume even if she was sure it wasn’t. Behind him was a boy and a girl, both in their late teens, who seemed very nervous to meet Zoey. Behind them was an annoyed-looking woman Zoey took to be Wu’s wife, who seemed to silently disapprove of Zoey’s very existence.
“Zoey,” said Wu, smiling, “this is my son, Dennis, and my daughter, Rizza. Gary is away at Stanford. This is my wife, Mei.”
“Hi!” said Zoey. They were all in matching flannel and jeans—wait, was it a costume? She was afraid to ask.
“Hello,” said Mei, through pursed lips.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Oh, I can’t escape hearing about you.”
To Wu, Zoey said, “See you at work tomorrow?”
Zoey vaguely remembered that she had maybe fired him the night before.
“If that is your wish, I will be here.”
