by David Wong
The impact of what they were saying finally hit Zoey, all at once. She bent over, and tried to breathe.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
She was, quite simply, going to die. She would probably not see Christmas. She would likely never see her mother again. Stench Machine would get stuck with some owner who probably didn’t understand him. Or he’d wind up getting euthanized in a shelter.
Armando put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
She shook off his hand.
“Just … let me summarize. One of you says I’m dead if I stay and the other says I’m dead if I go, but reading between the lines, it’s pretty obvious that I’m dead no matter what I do. You people—you’ve given me a terminal diagnosis with like two days to live, and you’re all just so casual about it. Because apparently in this awful town, this sort of thing just happens all the time? Is that how it is? Girls come here and just get chewed up and spat out as part of this dick-swinging game you rich gangsters play with each other?”
She was drawing attention now. People from the crowd were actually giving up their place in line to come see the drama with the rich folks in the parking lot. A teenage girl with a shaved head shouted something about her mother.
Zoey met Will’s eyes and said, “You just look annoyed by this, you know that? Like I’ve messed up your weekend plans. I’m imagining you in that room, with the stupid buffalo head on the wall, with all of your other suit buddies, saying ‘Sorry we had to reschedule the golf game, this thing happened last week, my boss died and his daughter came into town and inconvenienced everybody, but that’s okay because yesterday she was dragged screaming from her bed and gutted like fish while millions of people cheered on the Blink feed. So it’s all better now, guys, that little glitch, that little bump in the road is gone forever, and now the men can get back to work.’”
Zoey found a wadded-up tissue in the pocket of her cardigan and tried to dry her eyes and wipe the running mascara.
From behind her, Armando said, “Zoey, whatever decision you make, stay or go, you must factor in one thing. You are not going to be hurt as long as I am on the payroll. Period.”
Armando glanced back at the crowd. Many of them were recording the scene with their phones—if they hadn’t known who Zoey was when they pulled up, they certainly knew now.
He said, “Come on. We should go.”
Zoey stared at the crowd. A little girl was sitting cross-legged at the base of one of the concrete columns, trying to pick through the vegetable stew for the parts she liked. Her older brother was standing over her, he had discarded the bread from his sandwich and rolled the cheese and meat into a tube he was trying to play like a horn.
Zoey turned and found Echo, who was already heading back to Will’s fancy sports car, eager to get away from a situation that was about to turn ugly.
“Hey, Echo. How many pizzas would it take to feed the building?”
She stopped. “How many what?”
“Pizzas. It’s Pizza Day in Squatterville. You want to come back to work for me? Well, this is your first job. Call Boselli’s, and order enough pizzas to feed everybody here. And get me a Meatocalypse.”
Echo scrunched her brow. “I’m not totally clear as to whether that second part is a separate request or if it’s elaborating on the first. And there are over two thousand people in that building, you’d need seven hundred pizzas. That restaurant would need a week to—”
“Then you’ll need to call multiple places, won’t you? Figure it out.”
Will said, “That’s a nice gesture, but what those people need isn’t pizza. They need real housing, and heat, and running water. And diapers, and doctors, and daycare. And job training. And those kids need to be in school.”
Zoey nodded. “Right, right. Echo, are you writing all that down?”
Echo asked, “Are you serious or are you being sarcastic? I honestly can’t tell.”
“Dead serious.”
“And do you have any concept of what that will cost?”
“Will it cost less than a billion dollars? Just do what you can and let me know if we run out of money.”
Andre said, “Zoey, I think what those people need most of all is some condoms and a time machine.”
Zoey said, “Congratulations, you’re now partnering with Echo on the Squatterville charity.”
Zoey rounded the sedan and opened the passenger door. A huge man approached from the crowd—the tattoo-headed guy, the one who had taken Will’s wallet. The man had an expression of one headed for the guillotine. He held out the wallet to Will.
“Mr. Blackwater, I am—If I’d had any idea it was you, I’d have never have—”
“I know.”
“You should have said somethin’. I thought you were one of them lawyers that are always comin’ by. I would’ve never—”
“I know. Forget about it.”
“Mr. Blackwater … I got a wife and two kids up there. And I don’t know what they’d do if—”
“You’re fine. Walk away.”
Will headed back to his car, the man stood frozen, watching him go.
Zoey closed her door but by the time Armando started the sedan, the dam had broken on the crowd, as if seeing the bald guy approach one of the Suits had breached some invisible barrier that gave permission to the rest. They spilled out around the cars, led by a few instigators who were shouting and laughing, too drunk for a Friday afternoon. Armando rolled the sedan forward, then stopped, finding his path blocked.
Zoey asked, “What are they saying?”
“I’m going to take a wild guess and say they’re asking for money.”
“No. Listen.”
They were chanting something. Zoey cracked a window, and heard dozens of people in the crowd shouting the same phrase, over and over:
“Say hi to your mom.”
They were intentionally blocking the car now, hands on the hood, chanting at the windshield. Chanting at Zoey.
Armando said, “Roll up your window. We’re going to do some crowd control.”
“Don’t run them over!”
He tapped some controls and an electronic voice boomed from the car, telling the crowd to disperse, and that countermeasures would be used if they refused. The crowd didn’t react, everyone having fallen under that riot spell that convinces normal people to turn cars over and set them ablaze, invincible as long as they do it en masse. Armando punched another button and there was a hum, winding up in pitch. And then, the crowd was running. They slapped at their limbs as they fled, as if on fire.
“What did you do? What did you do to them?”
Armando hit the accelerator and the sedan charged through the now wide-open gap in the crowd.
“They’re fine, it’s a nonlethal microwave blast. Heats up the water in your skin, makes you feel like you’re getting cooked from the inside. Just a little nudge, that’s all.”
“What was happening back there? Why were they chanting about my—”
And then the nearest hotel came into view, and Zoey was looking at her mother’s boobs.
The building—and the one next to it, and the next one down—was carrying a Blink feed from someone sitting in the Zombie Quarantine bar in Fort Drayton. They were at a table, peering over a pair of empty beer mugs, chatting up Melinda Ashe, in her waitress uniform that consisted of a pair of camouflage hotpants, gray zombie makeup, and nothing else. She was holding a tray and it was clear she was doing the fake laugh she did with customers to drive up tips (there was no audio on the feed, but Zoey could tell she was doing her giggle from the way she … bounced).
There was a scroll of text at the bottom that said, “ZOEY, SAY HI TO YOUR MOM.”
Armando squinted at it. “Who’s that?”
“That, Armando, is my mother. She’s at work.”
“Wait? Are you joking?”
“No.”
“They must have hacked the skyline feed.”
; “Molech?”
“Or his fans.”
Zoey tasted blood, and had to make herself stop biting her lip.
“Take me home. With a route that avoids the buildings. And tell Will and the rest I want to meet them there.”
EIGHTEEN
Both of the other vehicles had beaten Zoey back to the Casa, since they weren’t taking a circuitous route that avoided any tower carrying the skyline feed. Zoey stormed off the elevator in the library and Carlton told her he had seated everyone in the salon, which made Zoey think she would find Will and the rest sitting like old ladies under a row of hair dryers, but apparently that was the name for the fancy room with the fireplace and mounted buffalo head where she’d met everyone the night before. Armando trailed behind her as she flew through the door in a rage, meeting the gaze of Will, Andre, Budd, and Echo. A nearly identical scene to her arrival just twelve hours earlier, with the circumstances having changed radically.
“Is it still up? The feed?”
Echo said, “We got it down from the skyline, but the Blink is still live, and is very … popular. It’s coming from one of Molech’s men, in Fort Drayton. We think he got there a couple of hours ago.”
“Stalking my mom. Where is he now? Is he still at the bar?”
“No. He’s inside a house, it looks like.”
Echo brought up the feed to play on the wall across from the buffalo head. The wearer of the camera was moving slowly and casually through a dirty living room, past a sofa that had been tortured with cat claws. Down a short hallway …
Zoey tried to breathe.
“That’s my trailer.”
Zoey tried to ignore the column of comment text streaming down the bar to the right of the screen, but she couldn’t miss that same phrase repeated over and over: “SAY HI TO YOUR MOM.” It was a Team Molech meme.
Will said, “We have to stay calm, here. This isn’t about your mother, this is about you, and getting your attention.”
The person wearing the camera was lazily browsing around the trailer, picking up framed photos, making a point of touching everything. Acting like he owned the place. He stopped by the kitchen and started eating from a package of Oreos. He continued down a hall and arrived at a room at the end—Zoey’s bedroom.
Zoey bit her lip again.
“And we can’t … block this somehow? Cut off his feed from the rest of the world?”
“No. You can jam a device if it’s close to the source, but you can’t just pick a feed and cut it off.”
The man with the camera knew he had found her bedroom, and was freely poking around her meager possessions. He went to the chest of drawers, opened each one, and then found the underwear drawer on the bottom. Over the next five excruciating minutes, Zoey and her new employees watched a stranger slowly pick through her bras and panties, then arrange them on the floor to spell the word “GOLD.”
Then he added an exclamation point to the end, in the form of Zoey’s pink vibrator.
The fans in the comment stream were going wild.
Zoey closed her eyes and was pretty sure she was going to be sick this time.
Will said, “I know it’s difficult to see the, uh, positive in this, but whatever the ‘gold’ is, it’s something Molech wants, and something he thinks we can give him. That’s actually a good thing: it means we have a bargaining chip. Now what should happen next is—”
Zoey’s phone rang. It was her mother.
“Mom! Are you okay?”
“Hi, baby! Can you hear me, it’s noisy in here. We’re getting six inches of snow today, are you guys getting anything out there?”
“Mom, do you have any idea—”
“I can’t hear you, babe, they got the music way up. Hey I got a message from a guy who came in, he said he couldn’t get through to you so asked if I’d pass it along.”
Zoey’s mouth went dry.
“What was it?”
“Hold on I wrote it down. Can you hear me? He says he’s going to be at Arthur’s memorial service tomorrow, and for you to meet him there. He says to bring the gold.”
Zoey closed her eyes.
“You there, Z?”
“Got it. It’s … it’s just more stuff about the arrangements. It’s no big deal.”
“I can’t hear you, Z. I’m gonna go, have fun at your thing tomorrow.”
The line was dead before Zoey could even say good-bye.
Zoey started dialing again.
Will asked, “Who are you calling?”
“The cops. Our cops. We still have those where I’m from.”
“Zoey. Think it through. You call Fort Drayton and tell them your mother is being stalked, and they’ll send out one of their patrol cars to drive past your trailer once every couple of hours. That’s it. And even if they dedicated every single officer they had on the payroll, would they be sufficient to protect your mother, knowing what we know about Molech’s henchmen, and what their capabilities are?”
“So what the hell do we do?”
“We calm down and figure it out. Together. Assuming we have our jobs back.”
“Consider this your tryout period. Your interview involves finding Molech and crushing him like a grape.”
“Then I suggest we adjourn to the conference room.”
Candi blinked into the room and everyone jumped. In her bubbly voice she said, “We have a visitor at the front gate and, ooh, it looks like he’s been doing squats!”
A voice said it was the delivery from Boselli’s, and Armando volunteered to just go accept it at the gate this time.
Andre said, “Bet you feel silly for almost buying pizza for those people back there.”
“What do you mean, ‘almost’?” Zoey spun on Echo. “Have you not ordered the Squatterville pizzas yet?”
“For … the people who swarmed your car and screamed veiled threats about your mother?”
“Yes,” she said, as they filed out of the room. “What is it with rich people thinking they can starve the poor into good behavior?”
They headed down to the Mold door and this time it opened at Zoey’s touch—the mansion’s security system had apparently been set to answer entirely to Zoey, the whole thing having switched over automatically as part of the terms of Arthur’s will. Not much had registered about the conference room when Zoey had been there the night before, other than the strange schematics on the wall monitors to her left and the severed hand that had been sitting on the table. Some thoughtful person had put the hand away since then, and she wondered where it had gone, but then saw a red cooler marked “BIOHAZARD” on the floor and figured it was in there. That would be a helpful detail to remember for when she had nightmares about it later.
The center of the room was dominated by a long wooden table, its varnish ruined by cigarette burns and coffee cup stains. Surrounding the table were five well-worn leather rolling chairs. The wall to her right held a corkboard with dozens of photos pinned to it—mostly dead bodies, most having suffered gruesome injuries. At the opposite end of the room was a refrigerator and a counter with a coffee machine nestled behind a mountain range of piled junk food. Next to it was an open door that led to a bathroom. The toilet seat was up. The whole room smelled of ancient coffee and the ghosts of cigars.
Music filled the room—it faded the moment Will walked through the door, his personalized theme, apparently. It was a man singing about how he’d like to hear some funky Dixieland. The Suits fanned into the room and guided themselves to their designated chairs, all landing simultaneously, like four billiard balls rolling into their holes after a trick shot. The Suits, back to work, doing what they did. Well, not quite—the chair at the end of the table remained empty. Zoey decided she would just stand.
She nodded toward the bathroom and said to Echo, “You ever fall in that toilet?”
“I would never use that bathroom, it’s disgusting.”
Will waited for the music to fade, then surveyed the room, seeming to … come alive, somehow. His people, pi
cking up where they’d left off.
“All right, let’s tally up the score so far. Zoey, you didn’t warn your mother she was being stalked. I take it to mean you don’t think she’s resourceful enough to slip away on her own?”
Zoey shook her head. “I wouldn’t have put it exactly like that, but … she’d go and try to reason with the guy or something. Or just call a boyfriend to come protect her. Whatever she did, it would make things worse. Can we send somebody?”
“That’s an option, but you wouldn’t want to send one guy, you’d want to send a team. And they don’t know who the stalker is or what he looks like. Or even if it’s a he.”
Budd said, “It is. Had man-hands, saw them when he was rooting through Zoey’s unmentionables. Had a wedding ring, but no wristwatch. White guy, not much body hair, probably not Italian or Greek…”
Zoey said, “So what, we’re just helpless? Molech can just say the word at any moment and his guy kills my mother five seconds later?”
Will said, “Yes, but you should be asking yourself why he hasn’t done that yet. It’s not conscience—it’s because there’s something he wants from you, apparently very badly, and the mother killing thing is a card he can only play once. So that means we now have two cards in our hand—the fact that we have something Molech wants, and that we know exactly where Molech is going to be tomorrow night.”
Armando appeared at the door with a pizza box. Andre sprang to his feet and said, “It could be poison!” He took a piece and started eating it as he headed calmly back toward his chair. He chewed and said, “Nah, it’s fine.”
Zoey leaned against the wall with an eighth of a Meatocalypse in her hand and said, “So just to be clear—we don’t even know who Molech is, right?”
Echo pointed to the corkboard behind Zoey. “That pretty much sums it up.”
A series of photos were pinned together in a pattern, like the Suits had been trying to trace the members of a criminal organization the way detectives did on old cop shows. Only here there was no pyramid-shaped structure to mark levels of lieutenants and made men, just a row of crazy-looking people—many of them dead or dismembered—with one single picture above them. It was a black photo with a white question mark, with “Molech” scrawled below it.