by David Wong
The feed cut to black, then a split second later, Zoey thought the glasses were just glasses again—the view was of the bedroom, as seen from right where she was sitting. But there was still a date stamp hovering in the corner, marked as having been recorded ten days ago, and the room was no longer in disarray. She was just watching a feed that had been recorded from the very spot where she was watching it.
Zoey flinched as a hand came up into view, as if she had a phantom limb. The hand was holding Arthur’s lucky coin. The other hand came into view and he tried to do Will’s magic trick. The coin tumbled into Arthur’s lap.
Arthur’s voice said, “I hope I’ve done this right. If I’m heading toward, well, what I think I’m heading to, then there’s a better than even chance this will be my last day. And that’s okay, because if I do this right, I’ll spend this last day saving the world. Granted, I’ll be saving it from something I myself unleashed, so you know, don’t build any monuments to me for it.” He let out a long breath and said, “All right, no speeches. Let’s just do it.”
The view jumped inside a cavernous building, which Zoey assumed was the warehouse she’d previously only seen from the outside. Arthur strolled between rows of tall metal shelves, three stories of bags and boxes and barrels looming overhead. He passed a row of dormant forklifts plugged into wall chargers, before finally arriving at a utility closet full of janitor supplies. He issued a voice command that caused the back wall of the closet to slide open, revealing an elevator. Arthur went down one floor, then down a hall and through a full body scan security airlock—the scanner between a series of steel doors thick enough to blunt a nuclear warhead. This, Zoey realized, was the real warehouse. Everything above it was camouflage.
When the final door rumbled open, Arthur was greeted by a massive bloodstain that covered the concrete floor.
Zoey heard a sigh from Arthur. Saddened by what he was about to see, but not surprised.
He stepped cautiously around the crimson stain and the view panned over to see a toppled wheelchair that was also soaked in blood, tossed against one wall. Arthur found Singh’s legs jutting out from behind a crate, then the view panned around again and found Singh’s torso sprawled behind a forklift across the room. Arthur moved slowly but deliberately into the room, entering a space full of workbenches and elaborate machines, some of which were the size of houses, one shaped like a big robotic caterpillar. He crossed the room and approached one more doorway, this one standing open. Behind it came the muffled sound of giggling and wet, ripping noises.
Arthur and his camera passed into a long open room that looked like a shooting range. At one end hung four pig carcasses, dangling from meat hooks. Standing among them was a young guy who had his back to them. He was shirtless, with long flowing blond hair, wearing a backward baseball cap and jeans. He bulged with tanned muscles—he looked like he’d borrowed the photoshopped body of a model on a billboard.
Zoey would forever have to live with the fact that this was her first impression of Molech: admiring his rippling back muscles, beach-tan biceps, and a perfect butt under worn jeans. And she was sure this was Molech, mainly because he had the letters M O L E C H tattooed across his back.
In Molech’s right hand was another hand. Most of an arm, actually—everything from the elbow up, as if he had severed it from someone’s body and carried it around as a keepsake. For a horrified moment Zoey thought he had hacked it off of Singh’s corpse, but as the view got closer it became clear that the severed limb was made of rubber, or plastic. A prosthetic. Molech was using it as a weapon—he reached back, shoved the hand through the rib cage of the nearest pig with a crunch of snapping bones. He twisted it around inside and with a series of wet, sucking squishes, pulled the hand out of the ragged wound, which was now clutching a pink and yellow mass of organs in its fist.
Molech laughed uproariously and said, “Dude, this is orgasmic!”
He couldn’t have been any older than Zoey. There was another man watching him, a bearded black guy who looked a bit older than Molech, but who probably still hadn’t seen thirty. Standing around the room were four other musclemen holding shotguns and watching Molech play—there didn’t seem to be an ounce of body fat in the room. Molech turned and looked toward Arthur and the camera. He smiled, and swung the prosthetic arm toward the floor, discarding the wad of guts with a wet slap. The fingers flexed on their own, with a mechanical whirr.
“Artie Livingston! As I live and breathe! Dude, I have to shake your hand!”
Molech extended the prosthetic limb toward Arthur, as if to shake with it. The mechanical fingers flexed. Molech giggled.
Arthur declined the shake and said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Nope, but I bet you’ve heard of me. They call me Molech.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
Molech gestured toward the black guy with the beard and said, “This is my right-hand man, Black Scott. And don’t call me racist, that’s the name he gave himself.”
In the background, Black Scott shook his head and silently mouthed, “Nope.”
“Oh, and sorry about your friend back there. It was self-defense, I swear! Dude kept tryin’ to run me over in his wheelchair. And by that point, the juice was flowin’ and, dude, you just got to ride it out, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Did Singh let you in here?”
Molech used the mechanical hand to scratch his chin and said, “He didn’t, the ingrate. And we go way back, too! See, a while back I put in a bid for all his awesome toys, but some rich bastard outbid me! You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Ha!”
Molech walked over to an empty oil drum, grabbed it with the disembodied hand, and watched as the fingers effortlessly tore a chunk out of the side, the metal squealing as it ripped like construction paper. Molech giggled until he couldn’t breathe.
“So, who did let you in?”
“Not everybody on your team is as loyal as you think, Artie. See, there’s two ways of keepin’ everybody in line, they can be scared of you, or they can be your buddy. Sounds to me like you do it the second way. The problem with that is, they turn on ya the moment you piss ’em off. Me, I run a tight ship. Everybody knows the score—stick with me, you live like a king, you cross me, I put your ass in Hell.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“You’ve already done it, my man. You just didn’t know it. Though I got to say, you got a way better setup in here than I got. Way more floor space.”
“So … you have your own workshop? Someone leaked the Raiden tech to you. Was it Singh?”
“Dude, I’m so juiced out I can barely think straight. You ever felt it, Artie? You ever felt the juice? Or has it been so long that you don’t remember?”
“I suspect you intend to kill me, Molech. But I can tell you now that I think there is more to be gained by keeping me alive. I am a man of means and even if Singh was leaking designs to you, you don’t have everything. I don’t think you really want to do what you came to do.”
“What I want don’t matter, don’t you see? I serve the juice. We all do, even if we try to deny it.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re high? Because that’s never stopped me from negotiating before.”
“Nah, juice is a natural high, man. First time I felt it, I was out huntin’ with my daddy. See, the way he hunted, you don’t pack no food for the trip. You stay gone for a month, and the hunting grounds are a two-day hike from the car. You only eat what you kill, see, that’s the idea. So my first time, we shot nothin’ for three days. And we was starvin’ at that point, I cried and begged, out there in the woods in Montana, just the two of us, beggin’ him to take me home, to take me to McDonald’s. I got so hungry I tried to catch and eat some crickets that had gotten into my tent. They got away and I just cried, like a little baby. Old man heard me and beat the piss outta me. Ha!
“And he sits me down and looks me in the eye and my old man told me how it was. Told me you got to let
the hunger drive you, to motivate you. Next morning, I’m layin’ in wait up in a tree and a big ol’ wild boar comes gruntin’ through the bush down below. The gun is shakin’ in my hand, I know if I miss, that may be it for me, I might get too weak to hunt, might die out there in the woods, in the wet and the cold. But I shoot and the shot goes true and when that thing fell over, I felt it, man. I felt the juice. The adrenaline, the dopamine, all that pumpin’ like fire through my veins and my brains and my balls. I had won. We built a fire and gutted and cooked that bastard and when my teeth sank into that tough, charred meat … mmmm. That was the first time I’d ever really eaten. The first time I was ever really alive. I was ten years old.”
Molech watched as the mechanical prosthetic flexed its fingers, mesmerized.
He continued, “My daddy told me what I was feelin’. He says, man evolved to have these juices that flow through your body to reward you for doin’ somethin’ good. All them hormones, the dopamine, the adrenaline—the true drugs. You get that high—the real high—when your body knows you did somethin’ to advance survival, not just yours but the species, man. When you won a fight, or killed some food, or banged a chick. And he tells me how now all my friends are livin’ off fake highs, smokin’ meth or playin’ video games or jerkin’ it to porn—all these little tricks to try to trigger the juice without earning it. Fake sex, fake danger, fake victories. But if we’re gonna survive, he says, we got to get back to the true juice. Get rid of all that other nonsense and live the way we was intended. Muscle. Blood. Sweat.”
There was a silence in the room that was broken by Molech snorting a sudden, crazy burst of laugher.
Arthur said calmly, “We’re both businessmen, Molech.”
“You’re a businessman. I’m just a man.”
“All right, how about I put it like this—I’m a realist. I know what you’re capable of and I know I don’t have any choice but to cooperate. A man like me doesn’t survive this long without knowing which way the wind is blowing.”
Molech tossed the mechanical arm from one hand to the other, grinning that stupid grin.
“Yeah, like one of them fat fish that sits on the bottom of the river and just waits for worms to float by, right? Just sittin’ there and eatin’ up everything that comes your way, gettin’ fatter. But you know what I am? I’m a shark.”
Molech swung with his real hand, and connected with a blow that landed with a sickening crack of bone. Zoey jumped.
The camera’s view spun and whirled, showing floor, and then ceiling.
Molech loomed over Arthur. “Nah. You know what, I thought of a better animal for you. You’re a panda. You hear about that? The way they had ’em in zoos, tryin’ to force ’em to hump because they wouldn’t do it themselves. See, a long time ago, the pandas forgot they were bears. Stopped huntin’, stopped fightin’, started eatin’ leaves instead of meat. They let the juice dry up and pretty soon, the pandas were all gone, too. If it was up to people like you, we humans would go the same way. Well, I’ve decided I’m gonna go ahead and save the world.”
Arthur gasped and tried to say, “Listen! Listen to me! It’s not too late—”
Molech said, “Let’s hope not.”
And then Molech struck again, and again, and again, each time with that horrible crunch of impact.
Then he grabbed the mechanical arm and reached down. There were wet, ripping noises.
Zoey yanked off the glasses. She stood up, tried to catch her breath, then ran into the bathroom and threw up.
TWENTY-TWO
Armando appeared in the door of the bathroom with his gun drawn, because in his world even a vomiting woman was apparently a problem that could be cured with a well-placed bullet. Zoey told him she was fine and he kind of awkwardly put his hand on her shoulder, as if he had seen somebody do it on TV once. Zoey shrugged him off, flushed, gathered herself and was about to speak when Carlton appeared in the doorway and asked if all was well.
Zoey hesitated. Molech flat out told Arthur he had a traitor on his team, and he apparently wasn’t referring to Singh because Singh was already in multiple pieces when he said it. If he wasn’t just playing mind games, then the traitor was someone close enough to know the secret codes or keys that would get him into a structure built like a nuclear bunker. Aside from the Suits, who else would have that kind of access? Could it be Carlton?
Zoey said, “I’m fine, can you give us a minute?”
Carlton left and Zoey told Armando, “I just watched a Blink of Arthur Livingston getting murdered by Molech with a disembodied mechanical arm after the latter stole a bunch of magic weapons from the former.”
Armando furrowed his brow as he tried to untangle this sentence.
“Oh. I’m … sorry…”
“No, it’s fine. I mean, it was awful, but I saw Molech’s face clearly.”
“Everybody has left, but we can call—”
“Wait, there’s more. Before he killed him, Molech said there was a traitor on Arthur’s team.”
“You think he was telling the truth, or just making a play?”
“I don’t know. What do I do?”
“Call Will.”
“How do we know he’s not the traitor?”
“We can’t ever know anything for sure, but I’d say he’s by far the least likely to betray Arthur and he definitely wouldn’t do it on Molech’s behalf. I don’t know Will but I know enough about him to say that with some confidence.”
“Maybe Molech forced him. Threatened him into doing it.”
“Ha. You don’t know Will.”
Zoey thought back to the beginning of the second video, Will escorting Arthur, seemingly in the dark. If he had known at the time what was about to happen, the man hid it well.
“What about the rest of them?”
Armando ran his hand through his hair, thinking. “All I know is what I pick up from the grapevine, you understand. So … Echo hasn’t been here as long as the rest, so there is that to consider. But the thing with the Suits—you’re better off assuming that everything they present to you is a mirror image of the truth. That’s their game. If you want to know who to be afraid of, start with who seems to have worked hardest to earn your trust.”
“Well, that’s definitely not Echo.” Zoey considered. “That first night, it was Andre who came and found me, to talk me down.”
“Knowing what little I know, Zoey, I would not … well, I was about to say I would not turn my back on him. But this is Tabula Rasa. You do not turn your back on anyone here.”
Zoey made a decision. Will arrived at the Casa ten minutes later.
They watched the glasses video together on the Mold Room’s wall display. Zoey warned Will about the graphic nature of the ending, and offered to simply describe it to him, so he wouldn’t have to watch his friend get gutted by a backward cap-wearing frat boy. But Will insisted on watching it, which didn’t surprise her. Will showed no emotion, right up to and including the moment when Arthur met his gruesome end. He let the video play out, then replayed it, stopping it at various points as if to notice minute details he’d missed the last time around. After he watched the video six times, he paused it on a clear view of Molech’s face, then got up to pour himself a drink.
Will muttered, “Just a kid. Looked like he had to skip a frat party to be there. After all that. All these years. Just some goddamned kid.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No, but either Budd will know who he is, or we can run him through facial recognition. Either way we’ll have his real name by morning.”
“The first time I watched it, I thought Molech kept saying he served ‘the Jews.’”
“So did I.”
“I bet his real name is Chad, he looks like one. Did you hear the part where Arthur asked him how he got into the building and he said—”
“That somebody on the team had betrayed him. Yes, I picked up on that, Zoey.”
“So who is it?”
Will thought for a
moment and said, “Why were you so sure it wasn’t me?”
“Armando. He said you had too much history with Arthur.”
“Did he tell you the story? Of how we met?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“So who is it?”
“Nobody in the inner circle. Not Carlton, either.”
“Are you sure? Maybe somebody else who worked for—”
“No. I will stake my life on it. I’m not using that as a figure of speech. I’m telling you I am literally going to stake my life on it tomorrow. If anyone was going behind our back, I’d know. End of discussion.”
“So these gadgets, this stuff that gives you murderous superpowers, Arthur is the one who unleashed it on the world.”
“It would appear so.”
“And you actually knew that this whole time, didn’t you?”
Will set his glass on the conference table, then made like he was packing up to leave.
“Not the exact details, no. But enough to know whatever he was working on was dangerous in the wrong hands. Bodies started turning up, and it was clear Arthur was involved from the way he acted. Wouldn’t talk to us about it, though, because at some point he decided he didn’t know who he could trust. Including me. After everything, he still wasn’t sure I wasn’t going behind his back.”
Will worked his jaw. Grinding his molars, trying to push down rage and sadness before they bubbled up to where the world could see them. He almost got his face back to that of a chiseled, impassive robot. Almost.
Zoey said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For your loss. I should have said that. You said it to me the first time you called me but that was stupid, it was your loss, not mine. I should have realized that.”
Will waved her off. “No, it’s … fine. Anyway, that’s why there was such a mad scramble for his vault key, we were trying to piece together what exactly he had been up to, because it seemed so … apocalyptic. What we were hoping to find in there were the schematics, or some prototypes, anything. Backups. Hoping it hadn’t all gone up with the warehouse. Then we finally get it open and, you know the rest.”