“The Mouth was asking for you. Seemed angry. You need to go back, tell them I had to meet with my bosses,” she’d said. I’d watched them go, barely processing Lila’s face at the taxi window as they flew off.
Zunz’s face was plastered on every screen on every wall of the Sphinxes stadium. He wasn’t doing much. It was the top of the first, and the Mets were in the dugout. Zunz was sitting on the bench and smiling. He looked drugged, and he must have been. I suppose you don’t get your flesh reconfigured in a couple days without heavy anesthesia. Two assistant coaches in lab coats monitored him.
When I got back to the luxury box, the Mouth was furious. “Kobo, you loser. Where were you? I wanted to put you on-screen.”
“Bathroom,” I said.
The Mouth guffawed. Slapped his golden hand on the arm of his chair. “I bet you couldn’t believe it. I bet you shit your pants and had to run to the bathroom. Did you shit your pants? I bet you did. You weren’t expecting the Mets to save Zunz, were you? So little faith. Someone call a dry cleaner. Get this guy some new pants.”
I forced myself to laugh. “You got me.”
“You were supposed to be here for the announcement,” the Mouth said. His own mouth frowned. “That was the whole point. Zunz’s brother watching Zunz triumphantly return. I wanted that on camera! Why do you think we paid you?”
“We’ll get some footage,” Natasha said, waving over the reporter in the box.
The Mouth threw his arm around me, hugged me close while the camera snapped.
“See, Zunz’s brother here can confirm we fixed him,” the Mouth said.
I must have mumbled an agreement. Everything seemed to be happening at an impossible speed. Too fast and too slow simultaneously.
When the reporters had left, the Mouth turned away and began bragging to the other executives.
I sat down to watch the game, seeing Natasha’s grin from the side of my eye.
Zunz stood inscrutable at left field. The Sphinx batters seemed spooked by his presence, didn’t hit any balls in his direction in the first few innings.
I had a few messages from Dolores on my phone asking me if I was okay, and a dozen from Okafor. Did you know, you asshole? Did you know? they said. I should be asking you that, I wrote back. Then I turned off the screen and tuned my eyes to Zunz. Didn’t look away. I kept thinking if I went up to go to the bathroom or even blinked, Zunz would disappear again. Or worse. I’d close my eyes for a second and in that span his skin would ripple and his head would melt.
No runs were on the board when Zunz stepped to the plate at the top of the fourth. Lex Dash was on second with Sam Tzu on first. Two outs.
The crowd threw their arms up, the wave wrapping around the stadium and increasing in speed.
Zunz looked a little unsteady at the plate. When the first pitch came in, he swung low and late. He stepped back, kicked his feet in the dirt, then got back in his stance. The second pitch sailed high for a foul. The third he let go right through the floating green lights for a second strike. He connected on the next pitch, smacking the ball skyward, and giving the Sphinx catcher, Marius Lupu, an easy out.
The players jogged back to the dugouts, Zunz a little bit slower than the rest. A team of men in white coats attended to him, poking and prodding him with different instruments.
“How?” I asked Natasha.
Natasha looked at me, her large lips pulled back and her giant brow unmoving. “How what, Mr. Kobo?”
My brain was as alive and confused as a shaken beehive. Questions buzzed around the walls of my skull, then they escaped. “How did you regenerate him?” I said. “How long was he legally dead? Did he never truly die? Does he have brain damage? Nerve damage? Blood clots? When were you going to tell me?”
Natasha cut me off with one stumpy finger to my lips. “Now is not the time for questions. Now is the time to root for the team.”
“Can I talk to him after the game?” I asked.
She smiled, waved a hand idly.
“Please.”
“I imagine the doctors will want to be thorough in examining him. I’m sure you’ll want them to be. Plus, he’ll need his rest. Perhaps in a few days, or weeks.”
I watched the rest of the game in a daze. I was way up high, overlooking the field, and JJ Zunz was somehow down low in the thick of things. Far away from me, too far, but happy and alive with all his parts in their proper places.
And his face was everywhere. The screens in front of our seats, the display drones buzzing through the crowds, and the massive three-hundred-foot spherical scoreboard that spun from the ceiling. Everywhere I turned, Zunz was looking back.
Zunz’s presence powered the rest of the team. You could see them vibrate with the excitement. On the mound, T. L. Park took a no-hitter into the seventh. Ashburn made a spectacular diving catch in center field, sliding into the fence without dropping the ball. Van Young had his first home run of the postseason, clear into the fourth level. The Mets seemed to be a team on a mission.
Zunz’s performance was more solid than spectacular. He had no errors in the field but didn’t do much at the plate. He’d struck out in his first at bat and popped out his second. There was something not quite right with him, as if he was operating on a fraction-of-a-second delay. Understandable from someone who had been a bloody corpse only a week before.
And the crowd roared at every swing. Two hundred thousand people in a stadium willing his bat to smack the ball into orbit.
We got our wish in the seventh when Zunz hit a ground ball that popped over the shortstop’s glove. Zunz sprinted to first, driving Henry “Hologram” Graham home to put the Mets up 2–0.
I couldn’t help it. I jumped out of my seat, screaming.
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Kobo,” Natasha said. “Are you happy?”
“Yes. Of course,” I said. Although as soon as I said it, I wasn’t sure. I was glad my brother was alive. But I felt like something had been torn out of me. My purpose. I’d spent the last days with one goal animating my brain, heart, and lungs. I thought I was going to solve something. To deal out justice. To be a hero.
Now? I was back to being a broke, out-of-work oiler with no problems to solve but my own.
Still, my brother was alive.
The Mets kept the score two to zero until the top of the eighth, when Park’s arm gave out and they lost the no-hitter on back-to-back home runs. They were taken off the mound. The ninth was scoreless, and the game went to extra innings.
“Brilliant,” the Mouth said. “We couldn’t have scripted this better.”
At the top of the eleventh, the Sphinxes closer, Meredith Blackwood, spun a wild pitch past the catcher. Dash was on second and sprinted to third base. She took a hard turn and the crowd rose as if they were levitating. But she braked when the catcher held up the ball.
Tzu was up next and overeager. Swung at everything and struck out in three. Graham made the closer work for it, getting a full count, and then was walked to first.
JJ Zunz was up. One out, runners on third and first, and a tie game.
He didn’t wave this time or turn to the crowd at all. He was zoned in. The crowd didn’t mean anything to him. “When I’m in the zone, I can’t even hear them,” he liked to say. That didn’t stop them from chanting “Zunz! Zunz!” in the increasingly desperate volumes of a cult trying to summon a demonic force.
The noise got louder and louder.
The Sphinxes brought in a new pitcher, Boris Gorky. A knuckleballer with extra knuckles. It didn’t matter. Zunz let the first pitch curve past his knee for a ball. Didn’t move an inch when the low strike came in. Then another ball and another. Gorky was trying a different windup each time. Adjusting his hat, making signals to the catcher. The next pitch came in, so low and slow it might as well have been gift wrapped. Zunz stayed steady, sent it soaring into the air.
The Sphinxes center fielder ran back from the wall, dove, and caught it.
Dash sprinted home.
Zunz threw his hands in the air. Sacrifice fly.
I jumped up in my seat, shouting and pumping a fist, right as Zunz collapsed.
36
THE BRIEF TOUCH
I felt like a rat let out of the maze, only to find himself in a larger one. Zunz was alive, yet injured again. He hadn’t died this time. Hadn’t bled out. His body was still holding together. But he lay on his back and waved for medics to arrive. A half dozen of them carried him off on a levitating stretcher.
I needed to find him. Ran out of the Mouth’s box without even saying goodbye.
Halfway down the hall, someone grabbed my arm. Stopped me.
“Mr. Kobo,” Natasha said. “Don’t you want to see if our bullpen can close out the game?”
“I need to see him,” I said. My eyes must have looked wild.
“He’s with the team doctors. He’s been through a lot. Let him rest.” She took out her screen, pulled up a form. “Plus, I’m afraid I need your signature here.”
“What’s this?”
“Standard de-employment contract with a nondisclosure rider.”
“You’re taking me off the case?”
Natasha’s look wanted to pat me on the head. “What case, Mr. Kobo? Zunz’s murder? He’s not murdered. Case closed.”
She passed me the contract.
I could barely concentrate on the screen. The words became the scribbles of a toddler. “Don’t you still want to know who poisoned him?”
“We do, but not two million dollars’ worth still. We’ve got memory worms to work on him later.”
“Maybe no one poisoned him except his own doctors.”
Natasha pursed her lips. “That could be considered slander. Luckily, the Mouth has authorized me to give a one-time payment of two hundred thousand dollars in exchange for your silence. Call it a severance package.” She pulled out a bytewallet strapped to her thigh, handed it to me. “Everybody wins.”
I wanted to snap her screen in half and toss the bytewallet down the hall. But I needed the money. It was enough to pay off the Sassafras sisters for a couple months and maybe even get a new loan. I’d be able to patch up my hand, again. Start planning for the future. Turn my life around.
Natasha tapped the screen where she needed me to write, her finger obscuring the line.
I signed. Told myself it was the only play.
“Tell your boyfriend Coppelius he can stop following me.”
Her face was blank. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure.”
I stumbled around toward the exit. Made it look like I was too dazed to think. When I was out of sight, I sprinted. I took the stairs down, galloping down the spiraling case to the ground floor.
There was a crowd of Mets staffers and teammates outside the door of the visiting team lockers. Everyone was shouting. I tried to squeeze through them, but the wall of bodies didn’t budge. Camera drones shaped like giant eyeballs flew around, filling the room with flashing lights.
“Everyone out of the way!” someone yelled.
The crowd parted reluctantly. Two doctors in blue-and-orange lab coats guided out a hovering stretcher covered in a white sheet. I could see the form of my friend underneath.
Zunz’s head was exposed at the top, his blue batting helmet still on. He was alive. There was a little bit of blood on his lips, and his eyes looked yellow and bloodshot. But he was alive and solid. The sheet rose and fell with his breaths.
I pushed someone in an orange jacket out of the way. Got to Zunz’s side.
“JJ.”
It was the first time I’d seen Zunz in the flesh in months. I’d been so used to seeing him on various screens and devices, in different sizes and resolutions, that I forgot what he looked like in actual skin. Shiny, almost plastic. His head lolled back and forth and his arms trembled.
“Hey. Move away from the player.” A guard grabbed my shoulder. But I stayed by the stretcher, gripping the side.
I slid my hand under the sheet and took his.
“Are you okay? JJ, are you okay?”
He turned his head to me. His face was unsmiling, but kind. The old face. His hand was sticky with sweat.
“I know you,” he said. He coughed.
“No shit,” I said. I laughed, a little. “What did they do to you?”
Someone else grabbed my other shoulder. Both were tugging. The smell of beer and sweat swirled in the hallway. The crowd was screaming and cheering.
Zunz looked at me, confused. His eyebrows scrunched. “Kobo,” he said flatly.
“Yes. It’s me, Kobo. JJ. What happened? Why didn’t you call me?”
But he didn’t say anything. His face was a vacant lot.
He turned his head to a guard on the other side of the stretcher. “Tired.” Then it was as if his mind had clicked off. He lay there, eyes open, not moving.
“Wait, who did it to you?” I said, but the security guards were pulling me away. Almost instinctively, I detached the pinkie finger of my bionic hand. I slipped it into Zunz’s gurney as I was yanked back.
I was slammed into the wall. New bodies filled in the space in front of me. Zunz was only a dozen feet away, but there were walls of bodies between us.
“Everyone get out of the way. This player needs treatment.”
The crowd of Mets fans was swelling in the hallway. Shouting faces with blue-and-orange paint. Cheering for Zunz, even as he lay injured in the stretcher.
“You kicked mummy ass out there!” a woman yelled.
Three guards with shock batons got in front of the stretcher. They powered up their weapons, waved the crackling sticks to clear a path. The crowd pressed out of the way as well as they could.
I was still being held as he was pushed toward the exit. The crowd started to follow them, shouting slogans and well wishes.
I threw an elbow back into one guy, who responded with a pained grunt. “What the hell?”
Zunz and the guards had gone through the door, slammed it shut behind them. A row of Sphinxes security guards stepped in front of the door.
I wove through the crowd in the other direction, bouncing off people like a pinball. Took the stairwell to the balcony above the back exit. The finger that I’d detached had a tracker in it. My bionic eye sensed it moving outside the stadium. I got to the balcony as the stretcher was being loaded into a large white van. There was a group of doctors around him. I was practically falling over the railing trying to look at them. A half dozen, each holding different instruments. One of them had dark skin and a collar around her neck. Julia Arocha, I thought, although it was hard to tell.
Another one wasn’t hard to tell at all. He had a set of metallic spider legs clicking under him and an ugly poof of orange hair. Dr. Setek. He seemed to be shouting angrily, although the stadium speakers were so loud I couldn’t hear. Setek pulled out a large injector and screwed a vial of black serum into the slot. He shot the liquid into Zunz’s left thigh. Put in another vial, and injected it into his right side.
I thought about trying to scale the wall, hoping I didn’t injure my legs on the drop. It was two stories down. But too many people milled around. People with guns and serious-looking expressions.
The van started. Lifted off the ground. It flew my brother away into the night.
37
THE HARD TALK
What’s to discuss?”
“We don’t have a plan. We need a plan.”
“The plan is we go into the Monsanto compound, right now, and rescue him.”
“With what army, kiddo?”
Dolores reached out for Lila’s shoulder. Lila shrugged her off.
Lila moved to the corner of the balcony. Spat against the glass enclosure, watched the spit drip down the panorama. She looked small against the Manhattan skyline. An insect clinging to the edge of a windshield.
The city’s horizon slowly spun as the building twisted. Blimps and construction cranes moved around the sky. The long strands of Manhattan skystabbers stretched t
o the clouds. Closer to us were the jagged, squatter buildings of Brooklyn. In the dying light of the evening, the buildings around us sat like sets of broken teeth.
“Aren’t you both scouts? Isn’t this what you do for a living?”
“We know how to sneak prospects into compounds, not how to take them out,” Dolores said.
I didn’t say anything. It was Zunz who had been brought back from the dead, but I was the one who felt like a zombie. I was sitting in the corner, my mind swirling faster than the ice clinking in my glass.
The finger I’d detached had lost its signal a few hundred yards from the stadium next to a couple utility sheds. Dolores and I checked on the map and there was nothing around. Setek or someone else must have found it and disabled it before they took Zunz to wherever they’d taken him. I’d broken my hand yet again, for no purpose. But that wasn’t what was bothering me the most.
He’d barely recognized me. JJ Zunz. My best friend and brother. Yet he might as well have been staring at a stranger.
“Great, okay. So let’s sit around until they kill my father a second time.”
“We have to be careful. Your father would want us to be careful,” Dolores said without much conviction. She’d met Zunz a half dozen times and they’d exchanged maybe fifty words. She didn’t know him at all. After the way he’d looked at me, I wasn’t sure I did either.
“My father doesn’t give a crap what I do. Maybe he doesn’t even know I’m alive.” She spat again, a big white glob that didn’t make it to the glass. “You two obviously don’t care. But I care.”
I’d saved my eye’s recording of my encounter with Zunz in the hall and the van being loaded up and flying away. I’d replayed them in my eye, but they didn’t tell me anything. Just images to loop in my mind, over and over, to no purpose.
In the chair, those images were replaced with others, one after another. Dr. Setek laughing as he twisted on the gas. Natasha waving me away. The Mouth’s golden lips forming a smile. Coppelius waiting outside the Edenist compound. Zunz being trotted out on the field. Zunz’s body wrapped in a sheet. Zunz dead. Zunz murdered. Zunz on replay. Zunz at bat. Zunz sick. Zunz alive.
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