by David Wong
“I … don’t think I can breathe in this.”
“Yeah that’s normal, that’s only because it’s squishing all of your organs together. I got tights in here for the bottom half but we’re not worried about that right now. See that? You just lost like twelve pounds. See, this is why us humans invented clothes, hides all the workouts we skipped. Put the jacket on. Nice—here, put your arms down so I can mark the sleeves. Perfect. Take a look in the mirror. We’ll bring that in at the waist, like this. So it’s got that slimming effect, right?”
“Oh, wow. That’s not bad.”
“Got a little bit of collar gap back here, we’ll take care of that. Like Will’s suit, see how everything fits smooth and flat against his neck, no wrinkles or anything around the shoulders or buttons? Here, put the skirt on.”
“You’re not watching this part, you’ve lost that privilege. Turn around.”
Tre made a show of turning around and covering his eyes with both hands. She changed, gave the all-clear, and Tre said, “Yeah … hold still. See, we’ll bring it right above the knee, like this. Probably don’t want it any tighter than that or—”
“Or I start to look like a sausage.”
She looked herself over in the mirror.
Tre said, “Admit I know what I’m doin’.”
“It looks good.”
“See? Look like a dignified businesswoman and yet still gonna have you showin’ up in a hundred dudes’ wank fantasies tonight.”
“Tre, please. Armando? What do you think?”
He turned away from the wall and came up behind her.
“It looks very nice.”
Tre said, “He means it, too. Don’t know if you noticed, but his eyes made two stops, he looked at the mirror second but he looked at your butt first. See, that’s what we’re going for.”
“My god, I’m going to have to go take a long shower after this.”
Will approached, studied the mirror like a doctor diagnosing a patient, and said, “And you’ll have her in heels, correct? I want the subconscious impression that she can’t run away.”
“And that would also mean I can’t actually run away, correct?”
“I think any plan that relies on your foot speed is probably not a sound one.”
She nodded toward his drink glass and said, “Right, just like any plan that relies on your sobriety.”
To Tre she said, “Do you have a different top? Aside from the fact that this one is probably squeezing my liver to death, it seems like this is showing a lot of boob for a funeral.”
“One, it’s not really a funeral, it’s a memorial service in the park. And two, girl, this is Arthur Livingston’s memorial service. You’ll be showing the least amount of boob there. We’ll get you a necklace—maybe pearls or a nice gold cross to come down right here. It’ll be classy, trust me. Even your momma would like it.”
“She would not. She’s a hippie, says we’re ruining the world because we throw out perfectly good clothes and cars just because we want to keep up appearances. She used to say that mankind would rather look good and die than look bad and live.”
Tre shook his head. “Girl, style is the only thing that separates us from the animals. A bird or a bear, all its got is the feathers and fur it’s born with, but a human, we can take our crazy imaginations and wear ’em on our sleeve. The only tragedy is not everybody can afford to bring out that natural expression of beauty.”
“So now I’m not trailer trash anymore, because I can afford a guy to dress me?”
“Girl, you were never trailer trash. Your circumstances just forced you to dress like it. Now take that off and let me make the alterations. Chantrell will be here in a minute to do hair and makeup.”
“Wait, what?”
“Bye-bye. I’d wish you luck, but in that outfit, you ain’t gonna need it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Zoey had literally once quit a job because it required her to wear a skirt and pantyhose every day. She always felt like her whole lower body was being slowly strangled, and the boobs-to-toe body-shaping garments Tre had her squeeze into were much, much worse. She shuffled toward the grand staircase and saw that below her, the mansion had become a raucous gun party full of burly men chatting in circles and guzzling hopefully nonalcoholic drinks, comparing gear, and sharing anecdotes that were punctuated with hand gestures demonstrating acts of violence. She headed down the stairs, thinking it would be hilarious if the heels caused her to tumble down and break her neck in front of fifty men who’d been hired to protect her.
Andre and Armando intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs. Andre was in a black suit that gave little whispers of purple, the colors hidden in the pinstripes and in subtle shades that revealed themselves when the light hit his tie and pocket square. Little splashes of flamboyance in his somber mourning clothes.
“Damn, Tre did right by you. You don’t even got to say anything, I can tell by the look on your face, you’re like, ‘I know I look good, we all know it, end of discussion.’”
“You can tell him he did a good job, I’m sure he really needs the self-esteem boost. But frankly I think it’s kind of weird how much you guys care how I look.”
Andre held out his hands in a look around you gesture. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but presentation is kind of our thing. Now admit it, that’s the best you’ve looked since your prom night.”
“I wore pajamas on prom night. Nobody asked me to the dance.”
Andre looked her up and down and said, “Well, I just now found out that you went to an all-white high school.”
“What does that mean?”
Armando pushed past him and said, “Follow me. We’re going over the plan.”
They shouldered past the armed men in the foyer, then had to wait for a stream of guys filing out of the dining hall, each with long guns strapped to their backs.
Zoey said, “Actually, I wonder if my ex-boyfriend Caleb has heard about all this.”
Armando said, “There are people living in mud huts who have heard about this.”
Andre said, “You think he’ll come callin’?”
“It was an ugly breakup. He cheated on me and I stabbed him in the crotch with a pair of scissors.”
That got Armando’s attention. Zoey laughed and said, “No, not really. He just upgraded.”
Andre said, “What do you mean?”
They shuffled into the crowded dining room, where the sprawling table was now covered in weapons—men tinkering with rifles and loading them with gleaming bullets that were as long as her hand. Did they think they were going to be attacked by bears?
She said, “He was in college when we met, in business school. I was waiting tables at Cracker Barrel. We moved in together after a year but then all of his future MBA buddies start picking out the sorority girls they were going to marry and it became obvious that a future businessman destined to make six figures needed something way thinner and blonder than me. He was actually really nice about it: he got me a gym membership for Christmas, kept buying salad ingredients to keep around the house. He really did want it to work. Offered to pay to get my teeth fixed.”
Andre said, “You can’t take it personal, sometimes the fire just goes out. I should know, it’s happened to me with four wives so far.”
They had to pause at the doorway to the hall, where a parade of four men walked in hauling boxes that were, alarmingly, full of medical supplies—wound-dressing kits, emergency burn care, disinfectant.
As they headed toward the Mold Room door, Zoey said, “But that’s the thing. When the lights were out, everything was the way it was before. I don’t want to get gross or anything, but there’s no way the new girl does, you know, the things I did. My mom taught tantric sex classes, out of our trailer. Always creepy naked people with tattoos in the living room. I know my way around a dude. I learned this massage technique, I swear Caleb actually blacked out one time, I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance, his balls were—”
Zoey realized they had timed their conversation just so that everyone in the conference room could hear that last part.
She said, “Nevermind.”
Andre raised an eyebrow. “So … what are you doin’ after the service?”
She sighed and said, “Decomposing.”
Armando went to the back of the room to grab some equipment. Will and Echo were seated at the table in their assigned chairs, examining a tiny object and muttering an argument about it. Will was in a dark gray suit jacket the color of a charcoal drawing, with a white shirt and a dark tie with the slightest silver shimmer to it, looking as always like he would clink if you tapped him with a fork. Echo had been poured into a dress that was made of exactly one piece of black stretchy fabric sewn into a tube, and looked like she could stop traffic three cities away. Zoey thought that the least Echo could have done was dress down so as not to upstage her boss, then sadly realized that she had tried to do just that.
Andre said to Zoey, “I’m just playin’. But seriously, listen up because this is important and this is where we’ll leave it. Your boy, my guess is he never stopped thinkin’ you were beautiful. The only thing that changed was he started worrying that other people didn’t think you were. So now he’s gonna spend his life with a gorgeous, boring woman who’ll make him miserable, all so that he can wear her on his arm to parties, thinkin’ that’ll show other people how great he is. He’ll pick the career and car and mansion that he thinks other people expect him to have, put all his energy into building up that front. Then one day he’ll find out his life is all wrapping paper and no gift.”
“Though that would be a perfect gift for a cat,” noted Zoey. “So you’re saying what he really wants is a skinny fashion model he can tote around at parties, then swap her out for one of me when the doors are closed and the lights are out?”
“I know half a dozen dudes got that very arrangement going.”
Armando was back. He picked the tiny object off the table and said, “Ideally we would have had thirty days to work out the logistics of this operation, but … here, hold still.”
He leaned close to Zoey, pushed her hair aside and placed a tiny, clear piece of tubing along the back of her ear. He ran his finger along her earlobe to press the adhesive backing into place.
“What’s that?”
Echo said, “This will let us hear each other, and we’ll be able to track you. We have equipment to detect if there is a firearm within five hundred yards of your location, but of course, we don’t know that they’re going to have guns. If you do get taken, just cooperate—we will be able to track you the entire time.”
Armando said, “Our problem is that none of what we are doing here will be a surprise to Molech or his people—he has told us ahead of time to expect him and he knows we are going to prepare accordingly. And, unless he is a fool, he can figure out ninety percent of what we’re doing. These are all standard procedures.”
Zoey nodded. “Right, unless we, like, got a bunch of big catapults and tossed clowns at him or something.”
Ignoring this, Armando continued, “The one thing we cannot stop is the one thing we are also assuming he won’t do—come in with some kind of undetectable exotic weapon or bomb, and just take us all out. Our one advantage is that he needs something from you, and we are assuming that is not just a ploy.”
“Well, that’s only twice you used the word ‘assuming’ in that spiel, so it sounds like we’re on solid ground. So, let’s say he flies down into the middle of the park in a big hot-air balloon in the shape of his head, and demands this ‘gold’ from me. Then what? You shoot him?”
Will piped up. “That would actually be our second best option. The best would be to turn this into a negotiation. I’ll be the negotiator.”
“Why is that better than just shooting him?”
“Zoey. This is taking place in a crowded public park. There may be children there. In the real world, bullets that miss their targets keep traveling until they hit something. They fly through windows, and into the bodies of bystanders. And even successfully killing a bad guy creates blowback, sets off a whole chain of consequences that are impossible to predict. Guns always represent a failure of negotiation.”
“So what do I do?”
“You’re going to play dumb—”
“I won’t be playing.”
“And I’ll make it clear that any conversation or confrontation between you and he is a dead end. You don’t know what he wants, or how to get it. You’ll hand it off to me. Armando will get you to safety. The rest is my problem. If it goes wrong from there, well, then we do it the ugly way.”
“And if he doesn’t go for any of this, and just tries to stab me to death?”
Armando said, “If he makes a move, hit the deck. Go flat on the ground, don’t get between Molech and the many bullets that are going to be flying in his direction.”
Zoey took a breath and said, “All right. And we don’t know when he’s going to show up?”
Will said, “Or if he’s even going to show at all.”
“Well … how long does the memorial last?”
“All night.”
“Okay. So what do I do the rest of the time?”
From behind her, Andre said, “It’s a party. You’re rich and famous. You mingle and have fun.”
Zoey felt a sinking in her gut. “Well, let’s just hope he shows up and tries to kill me near the start.”
Armando put a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye. “Hey. You will be fine. Let’s go do it.”
Zoey sighed and said, “All right. I have to go say good-bye to my cat.”
TWENTY-SIX
The traffic was the kind you’d expect to see five minutes before the utter breakdown of civilization. As they inched nearer to the park, they saw more and more work crews in reflective vests, sometimes dragging huge black canvas sheets across the street, or trying to direct traffic around delivery trucks disgorging kegs of beer and cases of liquor.
Zoey said, “This was Arthur’s dying wish. To make everyone else’s life miserable for an entire night.”
Andre raised an eyebrow and said, “Not everyone. Only the few million people who aren’t going to be at the party. And that’s their own fault, isn’t it?”
Zoey said, “Is it snowing? I mean is it only snowing around the park and nowhere else?”
“There are snow machines on top of all the buildings downtown. They run every night for the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas. Made possible by a generous donation from, uh, you.”
They arrived at a roped-off staging area packed with freezer trucks and stacks of supplies. Zoey had a good view of the park for the first time and even though the celebration hadn’t technically started yet, the park was already more crowded than Zoey was comfortable with. She felt social-anxiety alarms buzzing deep in her gut. She wondered if she could just hide back here the whole time, maybe make herself a fort out of beer kegs.
The most prominent feature in the park itself was an inexplicable thirty-foot-tall mountain of white near the center. Some college-age kids were digging into the side.
“Beer Mountain,” said Andre. “Twenty tons of chipped ice, ten thousand bottles of beer embedded throughout. Partiers just dig ’em out as the night goes on. Can’t tell from here, but it’s in the shape of Mt. Rushmore, only all four heads are Arthur.”
“Thank god, for a second I thought it was cocaine.”
Near Beer Mountain was a pink and yellow inflatable castle, with a few kids bouncing around inside it. Nearby was the bandstand, now lined with amplifiers and roadies doing a sound check.
A flash of firelight caught Zoey’s eye, flaring up from a nearby stand that was about ten feet tall, with a stone firepot at the top. A staff member was up on a ladder, he punched a button and with a whoosh, a dozen jets of blue/orange flame roared to life. They flashed and pulsed and danced, creating patterns and designs sculpted out of fire. The pot burped a flaming letter “A” th
at vanished into the sky a moment later, then the jets re-aimed themselves and a fiery angel appeared, wings outstretched. Satisfied, the man climbed down and moved his ladder to another, identical stand nearby—dozens of these firepots encircled the park.
And then, the smell of food hit her. The entire park was ringed in tents with black awnings trying and failing to signify the somber, dignified tone of the event (it didn’t help that they bore the yellow Livingston Enterprises logo, which was a letter “L” superimposed over a cartoon handlebar mustache). One massive tent housed a row of barbecue smokers, a guy flipping racks of ribs covered in a glistening bark of caramelized sugar and sauce. The tent next to it had a flashy sign promising Danish hot dogs and deep-fried lasagna balls. Under the next was a guy sweating over a giant cast-iron caldron bubbling over an open fire, the man standing on a stepladder and using a boat paddle to stir seventy-five gallons of chili (Zoey figured by the end of the night, at least a gallon of that would be that man’s sweat). Next to him was a stand with a series of festively colored vats, manned by a huge guy with a waxed mustache who was dipping flavored popcorn in liquid nitrogen, cold steam rising as he poured it into red-and-white-striped boxes.
“Good, you’re here.” Zoey was jolted out of her junk-food trance by Echo. She and the rest of the Suits were suddenly standing in a circle around her. “Welcome to the Arthur Livingston Street Obstruction Festival.”
Armando said, “Security is in plainclothes, mingling through the crowd. You won’t know who they are, but you don’t need to. Everyone will be listening in and monitoring your vital signs. If you panic, four dozen men with guns will come running. There are spotters on the rooftops there”—he started pointing to buildings surrounding the park—“there, there, and there.”
Echo said, “You see those firepots around the perimeter? Those are actually hiding backscatter scanners—unfortunately we can’t pat down everyone who comes to the party since it’s open to the public and crowds will be drifting in and out, but these will scan in real time for anything, uh, mechanical. We should know within seconds if something tries to slip in.”