by David Wong
Stench Machine meowed and stuck a paw through a slot in the crate, getting restless. He had never been put in an enclosed space for this long and he was probably wondering where the stink was coming from. The train finally bumped to a stop and Zoey heard the passengers up by the door stand and start wrestling carry-on bags out of the overhead bins …
And easily half a dozen of the passengers glanced back at her as they did it.
And yes, they were looking at her, not Jacob. She had an urge to stand up and ask them what they were staring at, but decided she was being silly. She needed to find her hotel, and was about to ask Jacob for a ride. But right as she opened her mouth, a new voice said, “You know what’s the difference between you and me?”
It was Doll Head Man, shouldering his way through the departing passengers. Looking right at her.
“You,” he said, to Zoey. “With the blue streaks in your hair. Do you know what’s the difference between you and me?”
He edged up until he was looming over them in the aisle. The rest of the passengers were shuffling away behind him, grateful to be on the other side of the crazy man’s attention.
Jacob said, “Come on.”
He made as if to stand and bring Zoey along with him, but Doll Head put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder and pushed him firmly back into his seat. The man was not huge, but had a body like leather stretched over bundles of steel cable.
Jacob said, “Buddy, we don’t want any trouble, just move along or we’re gonna have to call the—”
“Shut up. I’m talking to her.” He rested his hands on a pair of seat backs, arms and torso forming a bridge across the aisle. He squeezed the seat cushions and veins throbbed under his biceps. Zoey saw her own pale face reflected in the man’s pitch-black goggles. “And I asked her a question. Do you know what’s the difference between you and me?”
Exasperated, Zoey said, “I don’t know. What?”
Doll Head Man smiled. “The difference,” he whispered, “is that I would never have let a stranger intimidate me into answering such a question.”
Jacob said, “Now you listen here—”
Doll Head Man, without looking at him, raised his right hand to Jacob’s face. He snapped his fingers and there was a crackle and a piercing flash of bluish white light, like the man had just spawned a tiny lightning bolt from his fingertips. Stench Machine hissed and thrashed inside the crate.
Jacob recoiled and said, “What the—”
The man shushed him. “I am talking to her. There is a long, long line waiting to feed off this chubby little piglet. Please wait your turn.”
Yep, her first instinct had been right. This psychopath was here to finish the job that had been left undone by the last psychopath, both presumably sent by someone who had an endless ready supply of them. And here she thought she was being open-minded by not judging him. It hit Zoey all at once that she had just traded a gruesome death for fifty thousand dollars—not even enough for her mom to buy a nice car later, even if Livingston’s people followed through with payment, which they almost certainly wouldn’t.
Zoey peered around the man to see if there was a guard, or conductor, or burly passenger, or anyone paying any attention to what was happening in the back of the train. But no one in uniform appeared, and none of the shuffling passengers wanted any part of whatever was going on with the crazy naked hobo and the young couple he was tormenting. This man, Zoey realized, now had absolute power in this tiny corner of the world.
She was going to die on this train.
“Do you know what these are?” He gestured toward the doll heads. Zoey didn’t answer.
He said, “It is rude not to answer direct questions.”
“They look like doll heads that you’ve melted with a lighter or a blowtorch. Because you thought they would make you look scary.”
The man grinned. “They are souls. Each represents a soul I have taken. I am the Soul Collector. They will serve me in eternity.”
Before Zoey could even begin to formulate a reply, a bored but authoritative voice said, “You need to clear out the car, pal…”
Finally. All three of them looked up to where a balding man in a gray uniform was leaning in the sliding door. His eyes met Doll Head’s inhuman black goggles and all the color drained from his face.
“N-now we don’t want any trouble here. Whatever business you got with those folks, just clear out and take care of it elsewhere, all right? No need to hold up the train.”
Zoey glared at him. “Are you kidding me? Call the cops!”
Doll Head Man turned away from the uniform to face his hostages again.
He smiled and said, “I agree with the blue-haired piglet completely. Call the police. Call Co-Op. Call the black vests. Call the LoB. Tell them all that the Soul Collector has Arthur Livingston’s daughter. If anyone tries to enter this train, or if she does not give me what I want, I will add her to my collection.”
FIVE
The platform was now crowded with onlookers recording the scene from dozens of tiny cameras, people probably watching their viewer counts skyrocket as word spread across Blink that someone was about to be lightninged to death by an escaped mental patient. No one made to intervene, they just watched in detached curiosity as if Zoey, Jacob, and Homeless Zeus were behind the glass at a zoo enclosure. Doll Head stalked up and down the aisle of the train car, glaring out of the windows at the crowd. Zoey realized he wasn’t trying to scare the onlookers away, but was instead making sure all their cameras had a chance to get a clear shot of him in all of his menacing glory. At one point he stood in the open doorway, raised his hand, and with a crackle that made the whole crowd flinch, did that lightning trick with his fingers. The audience was impressed. Zoey wondered if she had lost her freaking mind.
Something else that was weird, which had almost gone unnoticed by Zoey due to the other, weirder things happening in her life at the moment, was that there were a lot of armed people in that crowd. Scattered among the gray-jumpsuited rail staff, white-shirted security guards, and hundreds of gawkers, Zoey could see half a dozen of the Co-Op guys in their black coats and ties, looking like Secret Service agents with their little machine guns pointed at the air. Then she counted at least five more men and women in black vests full of pockets, wearing amber wraparound shades and black backward baseball caps, clutching assault rifles with fingerless gloves. And then there were the armed loners—the odd man or woman who didn’t seem to be part of any team. There was one guy in a tank top with two pistols in shoulder holsters, beside him was a bald Japanese guy in a leather jacket with a katana on his back, then a woman with pink hair and a short double-barreled shotgun strapped to each thigh. They hadn’t shown up in response to the developing hostage situation—they hadn’t had time. They must have been waiting there, but why?
“I have to say,” thundered Doll Head, striding up the aisle, “they were wise to hide you on the train. But I found you, as was my destiny. Now you have seen the power inside me. You know what I can do to you.”
Zoey replied, “Okay, don’t, uh, go into a psychotic rage here or anything, because I’m more than happy to cooperate. But right now I have no idea what you’re talking about. Okay? I know there’s some kind of contract. But here’s the thing: I don’t know who wants me, or what they want me for, or anything else. And I don’t want to know.”
Doll Head grinned. “You are truly Arthur Livingston’s daughter. I should have expected nothing less.”
“Did he owe you guys money? Is that what this is about? Did he screw you on a drug deal or something? Whatever it is, I don’t care—if you want me to call the guy I talked to earlier and tell him to pay, I’ll do it. But I didn’t know Arthur Livingston. He tried to give me a car for my sixteenth birthday, I gave it back. His money was dirty, I wanted no part of it.”
“Good. So you will open his vault for me.”
“I would absolutely do that, if I knew where it was, or what it was, or how to get into it. But I swear, this is
the first I’m hearing of it.”
“I want you to know that I am not surprised, nor disappointed. In fact, I would have been disappointed in anything less. After all, you have no reason to respect me. Like all who have power, you only respect others who have it. You need me to demonstrate my power to you. So that you can respect me, and deal with me as an equal.”
“No, no, you really don’t—”
Doll Head reached out with his left hand and grabbed Jacob by the throat.
Jacob thrashed and tried to twist out of the man’s grip. His perfect hair tumbled down into his eyes as he choked out the words “Hey! No! What are you—Let go!” Doll Head was not choking him. Just keeping him in place. “Zoey!” hissed Jacob, tendons straining in his neck, face turning red with panic and exertion. “Just do … what he says…”
Doll Head said, “Shhhhhhhh,” and, continuing to pin Jacob to the seat with his left hand, reached out and laid the other hand gently on Jacob’s forehead. He held his palm against Jacob’s brow, pressing his thumb against one temple and his middle finger against the other, gripping his skull like a bowling ball.
“Zoey … tell him … how to…”
“Shhhhhhhhh.”
“Please.”
“Shhhhhhhhh. The only human destiny is to succumb to one stronger.”
There was a pop, and a sizzle, and smoke. Jacob’s body went rigid, his hands clenched and flew to his chest, his feet kicked the seat in front of him. One shoe flew off. There was a stink like steamed broccoli. Zoey’s cat howled and hissed and tried to claw his way out of the crate. Doll Head withdrew his hand and Jacob slumped back, his eyes open but blank, his mouth hanging slack. A low gurgle escaped from deep in his throat, a line of drool ran from his mouth, a pool of urine spread across his lap. In Jacob’s temple was a smoking hole left by the electrical current that had fried his brain.
Zoey screamed. “WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!”
In a theatrical voice, Doll Head Man said, “I have freed him from that weak husk. He has joined me, become part of something far more powerful. Only the limp vessel remains. I have added him to my collection.”
It was chaos out on the platform. A TV camera crew was now covering the situation live, and Zoey heard the soft drumming of helicopters outside the station. A huge screen that ran along the rear wall had flipped away from the local weather report and switched to live coverage of the scene. The headline that crawled along the bottom was not, as Zoey expected, “Crazy man holds up train” or “Hobo harnesses the power of lightning.” No, what it said was:”LIVINGSTON DAUGHTER HELD HOSTAGE”
Zoey clinched her teeth and wondered how many times she was going to have to pay for her mom having chosen a scumbag for a sperm donor. Jacob, his half-closed eyes twitching aimlessly around the cabin but seeing nothing, slumped over against her. Zoey pushed him off and screamed through her window at the people on the platform.
“HELP ME! HE’S GOING TO KILL ME!”
Once more, they just stared. Up until that point in her life, Zoey had lived every moment with the unspoken assumption there was always somebody she could call if things went to hell. Her mom, a teacher, the police, God. But now she was trapped in this giant steel tube—just her, and this man, and death. Maybe everyone feels like this at the end. The ice breaks under your feet and you realize that there had never been anything below you but cold and darkness. It was the point at which things could not get worse.
There was a stir in the crowd. People started to turn, to look back at the main entrance of the station. Then the crowd parted, slowly, as if a wild animal had wandered in and no one wanted to startle it with sudden movements. From the split in the crowd emerged first a huge black man, with a perfectly bald, polished head Zoey thought looked like a Whopper, the chocolate candy. She didn’t know if that was racist or not, but all of the progressive attitudes in the world wouldn’t change the fact that his head looked exactly like a Whopper. Behind him was a stunning but stern-looking Chinese woman, walking with the gait of someone whose skirt is too tight to be practical, but who is quite used to it. Behind her was a man in a cowboy hat with bushy eyebrows and a red nose who looked like he had popped out of a cartoon. Looming behind them was one more man she couldn’t see clearly. But the crowd knew who he was, who they all were, and wanted no part of them. No one in the group was visibly armed, but not even the men with machine guns would make eye contact with them. Everyone just stood down.
Doll Head Man, aka The Soul Collector, reached out a hand and pressed it against Zoey’s brow, digging finger and thumb into her temples.
He whispered, “I can take your treasure, or I can take your soul. I desire no outcome over the other. You choose. You have three seconds. One.”
“No! Listen!”
“Two.”
“PLEASE! I’LL TAKE YOU TO THE SAFE OR WHATEVER IT IS WE’LL FIGURE IT OUT I’LL DO WHATEVER YOU—”
“Stop. I’m here.”
At the door stood a striking, pale man in an overcoat and fedora. He had cold blue eyes and sharp cheekbones. His suit jacket, vest, shirt, and tie were all shades of gray and silver—Zoey thought it made him look like a robot. There were no wrinkles, it was as if the suit was part of the skin he was born with. Zoey immediately thought that she could not imagine this man wearing anything else.
She had seen him once before, projected through her phone.
The Soul Collector turned to face the man, arms loose at his sides, blocking the aisle with his body, putting himself between the silver suit and his prey.
Will Blackwater glanced around the train car as if assessing the situation, then calmly said, “First thing’s first—are you all right?”
Zoey was about to answer, when she realized Will was asking that of the Soul Collector, not her.
He smiled and said, “I wondered when you would arrive, Will.”
Will stopped where he was and removed his hat. His hair was a black helmet that looked ready to withstand a hurricane.
“How are you doing, Brandon? Are you still taking your medication? You’re not, are you?”
“I’m free of all that now. Thanks to Molech, I have become my destiny. I am the Soul Collector.”
“Yes, I can see that. The boy in the back there, is he dead?”
“His soul is with me now.”
Will nodded thoughtfully, as if doing some minor math in his head. “All right. That complicates things. I can get you out of here. But we have to go now. The girl looks unharmed. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“All right. That’s good. I’m sure you’ve noticed we’ve drawn quite a crowd here.”
The Soul Collector cast a scornful glanced toward the platform. “I possess a power that can reduce all of them to ashes.”
“Well, I don’t want to get ashes all over my suit, so let’s go ahead and do this as cleanly as possible. We have a car outside and we can get you through this crowd without incident if we move soon.”
He looked past the Soul Collector and said to Zoey, “You’re coming with us. We’re taking you to your father’s estate. That’s where his vault is. Do I need to tell you that your best—and only—course of action is to comply?”
Zoey glanced at the brain-dead man slumped next to her, thin tendrils of smoke still drifting out of the burn holes in his temples, stinking like piss.
She said, “Please. Just … let me go. Whatever shady business Arthur Livingston was into, whatever money he had, the vault, I don’t care about any of that.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re involved because your father involved you, and now you’re a hunk of meat in a kennel. If you don’t do what I say, things will get bad in ways you cannot comprehend.”
Will stood straight, placed his hat back on his black helmet of hair, straightened his sleeves, and addressed them both.
“Now, the situation is this. You see what’s happening out on the platform. In the absence of an actual organized police department in this city, what we have i
nstead is a gaggle of grossly unqualified and often mentally unstable hired guns. Every single one of them knows Livingston’s daughter is here, each of them thinks they can get a payday out of this. It’s a lot of very stupid people, pumped up on adrenaline, who know their every move is being broadcast to a live audience. We have to make it clear to them, and to everyone who may be lying in wait between here and our destination, that we are now in charge of this situation. Now, I’m going to walk out that door first. Zoey, you’ll be next. The Soul Collector will be right behind you. The moment we step out, we will be swarmed. Zoey is going to address the nearest camera and say the following. Listen carefully. Are you listening?”
Zoey nodded. Beside her, Jacob let out a guttural sound while his cloudy, unblinking eyes shifted lazily around the car. In a flash, a whole alternate future played in her head, one in which Zoey and Jacob arrive at the station without incident, the two of them shuffling off the train together …
He carries her bag for her. On the platform, she gives him her number. They agree to meet on Saturday night. The day comes and Jacob picks her up at her hotel. Her handsome stranger has a convertible and even though it’s December they put the top down and cruise through the chill air, the fifty-story video screens flashing ads and brand logos overhead. They go to a fancy restaurant, maybe one at the top of a tall hotel that looks out over the new city, and there’s a long line but of course Jacob can get right in because he knows people. They eat and drink and laugh. She sees the way he looks at her, Jacob knowing he can get someone thinner, and prettier, but he sees who she really is. He sees what’s inside, and wants it. And afterward, they’re waiting for the valet to bring the car around and the night air is cold and she’s a little bit drunk and Jacob drapes his coat over her shoulders …