by David Wong
Zoey stopped, and stared.
Text scrolled down a sidebar on the screen—video comments, posted by viewers, almost moving too fast to see. She caught one that said, “Hyena show us her tits before you eat her, bro,” and then that one was quickly driven off the screen by dozens more that simply said “Team Molech.”
Zoey dropped her purse and said, “Oh, come on.”
She turned and was not surprised to find the psychopath known as the Hyena standing in the doorway of her bedroom, blocking her way out. She had never gotten a clear look at the guy before, when it was dark and he was busy getting driven into a frozen pond by her Toyota. But there was no doubt it was him—he had ditched his “beard,” revealing an ugly surgical scar that looped around his jaw, looking like work that had been done in some back alley. He was no longer holding the pizza, and Zoey now noted that the little red flower pinned to his chest had a blue pinprick light in the center—that was his Blink camera. He was broadcasting live to the massive “Hunt for Livingston’s Key” audience, along with a dedicated base of Hyena fans who simply got off on watching women get tortured in real time. She again wondered how big that audience was, and again decided she didn’t want to know. Out the corner of her eye, she saw herself appear on the monitor, from the POV of her assailant. The room was a little too dark for the camera, so the Hyena found the light control on the wall and dialed it up to his satisfaction.
Zoey looked at herself on the monitor and actually had the crazy impulse to fix her hair, but then saw on the screen that the golf club was still on the bed behind her. She quickly snatched it, holding it out toward the Hyena like a sword. A fraction of a second later, the video version of herself up on the wall feed did the same.
He smiled and said, “Bet you never thought you’d see me again. I’ve had a whole train ride to think about this moment. To get it just right. First, let’s get this out of the way.”
He yanked the club from her hands, like he was taking it from a baby. He held it out in front of him, letting his camera get a good view of it.
“Now watch.”
In a series of smooth, casual motions, the Hyena bent the golf club into the shape of a pretzel. He didn’t strain, or grit his teeth, or even appear to be flexing with the effort. He just pulled the metal rod into loops, like it was a silver licorice whip.
He held it up and said, “Eh?”
Zoey’s mouth went dry. She muttered, “What are you people?”
“Wait! I’m not finished!” He held the steel pretzel up to his mouth, and took a bite out of it. Again, with only a trivial amount of effort, like chewing some mildly tough beef jerky. He spat out a twisted hunk of metal and grinned. Then he tossed the golf-club pretzel aside.
The Hyena spat blood, then said, “That fear, that paralysis, that you’re feeling right now? That’s a primal memory, bubbling back to the surface. It’s the realization that first and foremost, you were born to be food for something stronger. That as an organism, you were destined to end your existence with the sensation of teeth tearing flesh and crunching bone. So, here is how this is going to go. I’m going to bite you eight times. Those bites will sever eight tendons, and they will render your legs and arms both inoperable. Then, over the course of days and weeks, I will slowly, and completely at random—”
“No.”
Zoey crossed her arms.
“What?”
“No. I’m not doing this. I’m not running and screaming, I’m not letting you put on a slasher-movie chase for your creeper fans on Blink, I’m not giving you a show. I’m sick of it. I don’t know what you are, or how you people can do the things you do. But I’ve been doing nothing but run for the last eight hours. I’m done with that. I don’t run anymore. Anybody out there watching this hoping that’s going to happen, go ahead and zip up your pants.”
“You’ve got quite a mouth on you. And I’m going to cut out that tongue and eat it in front of you. But first I’m going to—”
“No. You don’t get to monologue for your audience. You’re not cool, you’re not menacing.”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me what—”
“LA LA LA LA LA NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU! LA LA LA!”
“Shut up!”
“DOO DOO DOO DOO NOBODY CAN HEAR YOUR EVIL MONOLOGUE AND CREATIVE RAPE THREATS! BUTT SHOW, BUTT SHOW BABY—”
The Hyena lunged at her. Zoey tumbled back, hitting the floor while her on-screen doppelgänger was still singing “Butt Show.” They landed with the Hyena straddling her, trying to pin down her arms. She quickly reached up and snatched the boutonniere camera off his jacket. Before he could put together what she was doing, Zoey worked her right arm free and chucked the camera toward the bedroom door. The view on the wall monitor blurred into a boring shot of the hallway ceiling.
The Hyena screamed, “BITCH!” but he was now at an impasse—he had lost his audience, and therefore had lost not only his entire reason for being there, but also his ability to prove he had fulfilled the contract. He climbed off Zoey and ran into the hall to get his camera and—
BANG
—took a single bullet to the head.
A red mist of blood hung in the air. The Hyena flopped to the floor like a sack of dog food. Zoey yelped and crawled backward on her hands.
Into view stepped a Latino man in his thirties, in a black suit with a bright red shirt underneath, open at the collar. He had contrived beard stubble, and was keeping a smoking pistol trained on the dead man on the floor. He crushed the boutonniere camera under his shoe, then checked for a pulse on the Hyena.
Satisfied the man was dead, he stashed the pistol inside his jacket and in a deadpan tone muttered, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.” He turned to Zoey and said, “Are you injured?”
“No. I don’t think so. Who are you?”
“I apologize for entering your home without permission, and I will leave immediately if that is your wish. My name is Armando Ruiz, and if you will pardon my lack of modesty, I am the finest bodyguard in Tabula Rasa. If you look up my credentials, you can easily confirm this to be true and, in fact, I insist that you do so at your earliest convenience. I came to ask for a job but decided to intervene when I saw what was about to occur. So with your permission, I want to secure the front entrance and main gate, so that I am not forced to deal with additional intruders. This is actually not my preferred method for neutralizing threats, if for no other reason than the cleanup is very unpleasant for everyone involved.”
“Uh … sure. How did … how did that guy do that? He bent metal with his bare hands. Then he ate it.”
Armando shrugged. “I am going to guess that it is due to some combination of being very strong, insane, and high on hallucinogens. As of now, that is only a concern to whoever is saddled with the unenviable task of writing his obituary. Wait here, and lock the door to your room. I will be back within twenty minutes.”
He whipped out the gun and a moment later could be heard stomping down the stairs. Zoey sat on the bed, staring at the bleeding corpse on the hallway floor, then decided she preferred this new stranger’s company to that of the dead man. She followed Armando down to the foyer and watched as he worked out the gate controls on the front-door monitor. He tapped through menus and the system assured him that no other threats were on the property at the moment, though Zoey thought it was strange the system didn’t at least mention the presence of two tigers.
When Armando noticed her behind him, she said, “Sorry, I didn’t like being that close to the dead guy. He came back to life once already.”
“He did?”
“Well. Sort of.”
“All right. Well, Ms. Ashe, I can tell you that the security on the grounds is top of the line, but it will do you no good if you allow strangers through the front door. And my services will do you no good if you do not listen to my instructions. Did you look me up?”
“Oh. No. Hold on.”
Armando headed back upstairs, maybe to make sure the Hyena was still
dead. Zoey looked him up on her phone using the exact same method she’d used to find a pizza joint an hour earlier, and found he was lying about one thing—when she ranked bodyguards in the city by review score, Armando actually wasn’t number one. He was number four. But to be fair, two of the guys above him were dead, and the other one had a really weird goatee. Armando charged—wait, really?—$300 an hour, but his highlight reel showed him escorting politicians and pop stars, tackling crazed fans and disarming gunmen. In the videos, he always wore some variation of that black suit and red shirt, like it was a uniform he had created for himself. If the clips were in date order, he had also gone through a phase where he wore a bright red fedora pulled down over his eyes, but apparently he had outgrown that. On the whole, he appeared to very much be on the level, and somewhat famous among people in his field.
When he returned, Armando said, “If you do not wish to hire me, I will give you some recommendations for other options. But I assume you know now that you cannot leave the grounds unguarded, correct?”
Zoey said, “Sure. You’re hired, or whatever.” She looked around and said, “Did you see a pizza down here somewhere?”
“As your bodyguard, my first instruction will be for you to not eat any food delivered to you by a serial killer.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve kind of lost my appetite anyway.”
“I’m going to contact the police to come get the body. It’s a nonemergency, so it will take them four to six hours to arrive, if they arrive at all. In the interim I will be appraising the security situation and we will have a serious discussion about it in the morning. There’s nothing for you to do, other than get some sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping with that body right in front of the door.”
“I’ll drag him away, if that will ease your mind. But he took a bullet to the brain, which even by zombie rules should eliminate him as a future threat.”
“Move him anyway. Oh, and I haven’t figured out how to access Arthur’s money yet but if I can’t get into the accounts then you can just take a bunch of furniture or something as payment. It all looks pretty expensive.”
He smiled. “I’m confident we can work it out. Do you have any problems or questions?”
“Yeah. I mean no, that sounds fine. I’m too tired to think.”
“This is what you are paying me for. In the morning, you will have some big decisions to make.”
“And then you’ll tell me just how screwed I am?”
“Most people in your situation would be pondering just how screwed their enemies are. You’re safe now, Ms. Ashe.”
“Zoey.”
“Armando.” They shook hands. “Good night, Zoey.”
When he let go of her hand, she lunged in and hugged him. He reciprocated the hug about as much as a tree trunk would, and clearly wasn’t a fan of the way she spent the next ten minutes crying into his lapel. But he waited it out in silence, which Zoey thought was polite of him.
Finally she pried herself away and apologized, and by the time Zoey was closing the door to the bedroom Armando was already dragging the dead psychopath down the hall, leaving a red smear on the hardwood floor in his wake. Zoey locked the door and shut off the wall feed. She kicked off her shoes for the first time and crawled into bed. Stench Machine jumped up and pressed his back against her face, as he usually did. She had time to think that after this nightmare of a day, she’d never get to sleep again. But halfway through the thought, she was out like a light.
FOURTEEN
The first two things Zoey discovered after she woke up sore and stiff Friday morning was that she was apparently now a huge celebrity in Tabula Ra$a, and that the toilet in the guest room talked.
It was, on the whole, an extremely impressive toilet. It had a self-warming seat (which apparently automatically lowered itself when it detected a female approaching), played gentle music the entire time she sat on it, and had two nozzles inside the bowl to wash and then dry her private parts when she was done. That list was presented in ascending order of how alarming Zoey found each of them.
Topping them all, however, was the fact that in the middle of this process a male voice with a British accent asked her if she wanted to watch the morning news update while she peed. Zoey’s answer, a sleepy yelp of terror, apparently was interpreted as “Sure, toilet, show me the news to drown out the sound of my farts.” A screen blinked to life and automatically hopped around from coverage of Zoey’s hostage situation on the train, to the intruder getting shot in her house, to rumors of her inheritance, to a recap of the chase for the “key” that had led up to it. Zoey thought for a moment that the whole world had ground to a halt to cover her situation, then figured out that the feed was set to deliver a custom feed of just the news that pertained to her. It was the kind of thing that could mess with a person’s head.
The British toilet-bot interrupted to give a startlingly detailed report of her health, informing her that she was not pregnant, currently did not have any drugs in her system, was not diabetic or suffering from kidney disease, but was at risk for a urinary tract infection due to slightly elevated levels of leukocyte esterase in her urine. She thanked the toilet, but it did not respond. That was good—if she started to think of it as a sentient being, it would probably be much harder to poop in its mouth.
Zoey knew she should go out and get a status report from Armando, or at the very least find out if Armando had been killed by a second wave of psychopaths who were now waiting to ambush her outside the bedroom door, but she kept finding reasons to not leave the guest room or even get off the toilet. She decided she liked it in there, a little room with a big, heavy door and soundproofed walls. Outside was the big, crazy house and outside that, the bigger, crazier city. For all she knew, the corpse of the Hyena was still slumped out there somewhere, drawing a cloud of flies.
The toilet voice came back to ask if she was okay, apparently if you sat on it too long it started to assume you had died. She told it she was fine, but a few minutes later it asked again. She needed to figure out how to turn off that feature if she intended to sit there the rest of the day, which at some point had apparently become her plan. The part of Zoey’s brain that thought up ways to procrastinate from unpleasant tasks—honed to perfection through years of exercise—reminded her that she should call her mother, who was probably worried sick about her. Especially if she had watched the news, though she normally wasn’t in the habit of doing that (“Honey, don’t you know they’re just giving you all of the stories of people being ugly to each other and ignoring all of the good?”). The call went to her voice mail, because Zoey’s mother also wasn’t in the habit of answering her phone.
“Hi Mom. I just wanted to let you know I’m okay. I don’t know if you watch the news but it looks like I inherited like a billion dollars in drug money or something. Can you find a lawyer? Just tell him I’m in danger of getting murdered or going to jail for having a bunch of heroin warehouses and mafia money that I didn’t even ask for, so whatever he can do to fix that would be great—SHUT UP! Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you, Arthur’s robot toilet is hassling me. Oh also my bodyguard shot a guy last night, hope that’s okay. He had super powers, they all do. I don’t know what’s up with that. Anyway, call me.”
Well, that should set her mind at ease. Zoey hung up and summoned the tremendous force of will it took to stand. She glanced at the shower and tried to decide if she felt safe enough to get naked in this house, then decided she smelled so bad that she just had to risk it. Also, it would be another good excuse to not leave the guest suite. She went out into the bedroom and scooted the table and lamp in front of the door, just in case.
The shower, she discovered, had fifty nozzles and a touchscreen with dozens of settings bearing unhelpful descriptions like “Jungle Massage.” After trying a few it became clear that each was set to fire the water from various patterns and temperatures in order to create some kind of transcendental showering experience, while some unseen aromatherap
y module pumped the room full of scents ranging from “Fresh-Cut Grass” to “Baking Cinnamon Buns.” Zoey could not find a setting for just “regular shower” so she picked one at random and set about trying to decipher which of the dispensers on the wall oozed shampoo (at least one of them seemed to have been filled with scotch). Then, a few seconds in, the walls of the shower stall vanished and were replaced by a crystal-clear view of an emerald rainforest, the four screens simulating the experience of being outdoors bathing under a tropical waterfall. This freaked her out, because even though she knew it was just a video feed, she still couldn’t shake the fear that a group of savages would come along and find her inexplicably standing naked in a stream. She hurried up and finished bathing, then spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to turn the shower off.
By nine, Zoey found herself sitting on her bed, staring at the big door, and steeling herself to go outside. At nine-thirty she was still sitting there, Stench Machine getting hungry and impatient. Time and time again she mentally resolved to go out, and time and time again, her butt would not leave the bed. Finally there was a knock at the door, and Armando was asking if she was okay. That broke the spell and, bracing herself to see the pale corpse of a serial killer, she yanked open the door and found that not even a bloodstain remained from last night’s horror.
She said, “So what did you do with the dead guy, just toss him out to the tigers?”
“No, ma’am, everything was done through official channels. Though the TRPD and the coroner required two separate bribes, for some reason. I’ll put it in my expense report.”
“They didn’t need to talk to me?”
“Welcome to the world of Tabula Rasa. Or rather, welcome to the world of being wealthy in Tabula Rasa. Now, the first decision I have to burden you with this morning involves access to the grounds. You’ve had a number of house staff try to report to work this morning. I’ve been turning them away—”