by David Wong
Zoey was completely lost, but said, “Yes?”
“What neither Zoey nor the rest of us knew was that Arthur was performing a neural etch. He was imprinting the schematics and software drivers for the Raiden exoquantum hypercapacitor right into her brain tissue. The gold code is right there inside her cranium—Arthur turned her into a living hard drive.”
Zoey was pretty sure this was a lie, unless she had zoned out during an important conversation at some point, but couldn’t for the life of her figure out where Will was going with it.
Molech said, “You just made that up, didn’t you?”
“Think it through. Arthur did not want Zoey’s life endangered—and the only way to extract the information from her neural tissue is via her willing cooperation. Kill her, and those signals go dark and the data vanishes from the universe forever. Distress her, and the emotional activity will cloud the signal and make it impossible to retrieve. This is all by design, in case of a situation just like this. The girl must be placed into a perfectly relaxed state, while conscious, while the data is retrieved. It can be done instantly with any quantum data scanner capable of reading 3-D neural etching.”
Molech said, “And you brought one of these gadgets with you? Zoey’s momma certainly hopes so.”
“Unfortunately the only one Arthur owned was destroyed in the warehouse blast.”
“How convenient for you. But inconvenient for Zoey and the owner of the baby hatch she crawled out of.”
“But there is another way to extract the data, it just takes a bit longer. Zoey, lie on the table.”
Whatever Will was going for here had in no way been shared with Zoey beforehand, which alarmed her more than anything. Still, she had to assume the man had a plan, since his brain did nothing but generate plans twenty-four hours a day. She climbed onto the conference table, then lay awkwardly on her back.
Will said, “Make sure your henchmen are close enough to record clear audio, and make no sound to interfere. I’m going to remotely activate the neural upload, and Zoey will begin to broadcast the data in the form of an audio waveform from her vocal cords. Record the sound, and decode it to binary. You’ll have your data. Now, the waveform will to your ears just sound like Zoey is making a series of high-pitched screeching noises. The process will take about sixty minutes. I’m activating the audio waveform now.”
Zoey stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what Will wanted her to do next.
He said, “All right, I’ve initiated the process. You should hear the sound of the transmission from Zoey momentarily.”
Zoey waited, in silence.
“Any moment now.”
Zoey finally realized what Will wanted from her and, taking the cue, said, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!”
From the masks of his three henchmen, Molech watched this happen in dull silence.
After a moment he said, “All right, while we’re waiting for that, I’m going to check in with what’s going on up on my roof.”
The henchman on the far left’s mask cut away from the feed of Molech’s face, and brought up a view of a group of shirtless men loading machine guns. They were on a roof, one very similar to the one Zoey had just watched Armando cross a few minutes earlier.
Zoey stopped screeching and sat up on the table, suddenly unable to breathe. She was also unable to stop herself from muttering, “No…”
Responding to a command Zoey couldn’t hear, the gunmen crouched and jogged across the Fire Palace roof, dodging between a pair of black and yellow cranes Zoey thought looked like a couple of robotic giraffes. Zoey counted six—no, eight—men, buckles and straps jingling and clacking as they hustled toward the glass bridge that connected their rooftop to the Ice Palace. They threw their bodies up against the curved wall of the empty pool, peering across the dry swim bridge where a single speck in a black suit and red shirt was striding toward them.
Armando, walking right into their ambush.
Molech said, “Kools, can you hear me, bro?”
The facemask of the henchman on the far right blinked away from Molech and brought up the feed from Colorado, where Zoey’s mother was in mid-laugh at something her captor had said.
Kools said, “Loud and clear, boss.”
“Bury that bitch.”
Without a word, the man reached out and roughly yanked Zoey’s mother by the wrist, pulling her toward a clearing in the woods. She laughed again, still sure her new friend was just fooling around, so very familiar with men grabbing and pulling as a form of flirtation. Then she saw the clearing, and the grave-sized hole in the ground, and the open pine box lying nearby. In mid-laugh, she started shrieking.
Zoey jumped down off the table and screamed incoherently into the henchman’s facemask, as if her mother could hear her. On the screen, Zoey’s mother tried to rip her arm free, but the captor’s hands were well-practiced at this, effortlessly anticipating and countering all of the jerking moves of the frantic woman. With his free hand, he pulled out a little gadget shaped like a curling iron. He pressed it to his hostage’s spine and it made a pop and a whine, like an old-timey camera, and Zoey’s mother collapsed into the frozen mud and dead leaves of the forest floor. She fell onto her back, her eyes wide open and twitching in terror, her body a useless rag doll.
Zoey screamed again.
“Don’t worry,” said Molech from the faceplate of the middle henchman. “That’ll just stop her from thrashing around. She’ll be awake, and aware, the whole time.”
Zoey said, “We’ll give it to you! We’ll give you the gold! It’s in a coin! A silver coin! There’s a chip in the coin! Will, tell him!”
Will’s hologram, perfectly calm, said, “Now, let’s all take a step back and make sure we understand each other’s positions…”
“WE ARE NOT STILL DOING THE SCAM! Give him the coin!”
Zoey heard the muffled rattle of gunfire. The sound was coming from the facemask on the far left, carrying the rooftop feed. On the screen, four machine guns were spitting fire. The four gunmen had advanced out onto the curved glass half-pipe of the swim bridge, crunching through ankle-deep slush, brass shells bouncing and clinking off the glass walls.
Armando was halfway across, still walking toward them, apparently unarmed, strolling right into the lethal teeth of the guns. He closed the distance, never slowing down as the four men fired right into his body, through his body, bullets chipping the clear walls and floor of the bridge. Then Armando was right in front of them and only then did they realize he wasn’t perfectly solid, and that his feet weren’t exactly touching the ground with each step.
The hologram of Armando Ruiz slowly stopped a few feet in front of the gunmen, his legs still going, walking in place, a looping animation emitting from one of the little toy projection cars that had created Arthur Livingston “ghosts” in the park the night before. One of the gunmen ran up and kicked the toy like a football, sending the Armando projection flying through the sky, walking in place all the way down to the street below.
As the four men watched it go, a hand reached up over the rail of the swim bridge, holding a curved yellow gadget that for one crazy moment Zoey thought was a banana. But then the gadget popped. There was a flash of blue light, and a crack and a sizzle. The gunman in front arched his back. He spun around, his limbs tensing and clenching as if in the throes of a seizure. His machine gun roared, firing out of control, ripping off an arc of bullets that tore through one of his comrades.
Armando tossed his briefcase over the rail, then effortlessly pulled himself up and over, landing in a crouch. Suddenly Wu’s katana was in his hand. He ran toward the two remaining gunmen and went to work. A flash of blade, a whistle of sliced air, a sickening sound like a crab shell being smashed with a hammer. An arm tumbled to the ground. Another flash of sun glinting off steel, another high note of gashed air, a man screaming and clutching a stump. Blood sprayed across the glass walls.
The remaining four gunmen were watching from afar. They had stayed behind
on the Fire Palace rooftop and were presumably trying to figure out if this was the real Armando or another strangely convincing and lethal hologram. Armando turned his back to them and stepped toward where he had tossed the briefcase. He tapped the latch with his toe and the lid flew open. Just as the gunmen behind him opened fire, two pistols jumped out of the briefcase, as if flung out by some spring-loaded mechanism. Armando caught them in midair, turned, and without taking a moment to aim, fired four shots that landed in four skulls. On the rooftop in the distance, four men slumped over.
And then there was silence. The entire confrontation had taken just over fifteen seconds.
When the last henchman’s feed went dark, the camera angle switched to an overhead view from what Zoey assumed was a passing aerial drone. Armando marched off the swim bridge, onto the roof of the Fire Palace casino. Molech’s HQ.
Zoey turned back to the middle henchman and said to Molech’s video face, “He’s going to kill you! I can stop him! Let my mom go, I’ll call off Armando, and we’ll all talk about this!”
Molech seemed unconcerned. “Those men died doing what they loved—screwing up my most simplest goddamned instructions. But why do I get the feeling that your boyfriend is using a little bit of performance enhancement there? Very interesting. But that’s all right, those boys were just there to soften things up for Rodzilla.”
Armando was moving stealthily between the construction giraffes, scanning for more guards. He slowly made his way toward the stairwell door, which stood atop an elevated island in the dry pool.
Armando took a few cautious steps toward the door, then it exploded into a cloud of whirling chunks of debris.
A monster stood in the ragged remains of the doorframe.
Not a monster—a man, made into a monster.
He was about eight feet tall, thanks to thick leg extensions that ended in clawed metal feet, and a helmet that gave him another artificial metal head atop his actual head, so that his real face was looking out from between the robotic monster’s teeth, like a sports mascot. Across an emerald green chest plate was painted the word “RODZILLA,” the last two letters smaller than the rest, as if they’d gotten most of the way through and realized they didn’t have room. One of the legs was still the color of bare metal from the knee down, as if they’d run out of green paint.
Molech said, “Rod decided to trick out his enhancements a bit—it’s all about presentation, you know. But he didn’t get started until yesterday afternoon, so…”
Rodzilla stomped forward, stopping at a forklift carrying a stack of plate glass. He grabbed the forklift in his metal claws, and tossed it at Armando. He had apparently underestimated his own strength, however. Instead of squishing Armando like a bug, the forklift sailed twenty feet over his head and disappeared off the edge of the building, squares of glass spinning through the air in its wake. Armando and Rodzilla both watched it go, waiting in silence for a few seconds until it and the glass could be faintly heard crashing into the street below.
Rodzilla said, “Huh. I just barely threw it, too.”
Armando looked him over and said, “Nice paint job.”
“How about I repaint it … with your blood!”
Rodzilla jumped ten feet into the air, and landed punch-first into the spot where Armando had been standing, his fist actually smashing through the floor of the pool.
Armando had rolled away, then whipped out the katana and charged at Rodzilla. He jumped and swung the blade and Rodzilla blocked it with a metal forearm, the blade creating a trail of sparks and a scar in the paint.
Armando landed and somersaulted and swung back at the metal monster, swiping at a spot behind the knees. A bundle of cables were severed and there was an eruption of blue sparks. Rodzilla stumbled backward, going down to one knee.
Armando stood and said, “Man, you have exposed cables all over the back of this thing.”
Rodzilla growled, “We have shielding for that! The leg wouldn’t bend right with it on there. We were supposed to have like two more days!”
Armando said, “What happens in two days?”
Rodzilla stumbled to his feet, a knowing smile on his lips.
“This.”
The jaws of the helmet closed, obscuring his face. The eyes of the metallic monster head glowed blue. There was a deep rumble. An electric sound, the thrum of gathering power.
Armando ran away from whatever laser or lightning bolts or other lethal magic was going to come pouring forth from those eyes.
There was a flash, and thunder.
Rodzilla exploded into a ball of blue light brighter than the sun.
Armando was thrown flat, tossed across the filthy pool. Burning debris and construction equipment flew. When the smoke cleared, Rodzilla was gone, along with the raised island where the stairwell access door had been. All that remained was a crater into which several tons’ worth of beams, fiberglass, and two massive cranes had tumbled.
Armando climbed to his feet, brushed himself off, and realized he was now stuck on the roof.
From the screen of the middle henchman, Molech whooped and said, “All right, Rod lasted three minutes, seventeen seconds! Looks like Bill wins the office pool on that, as he’s the only one who put money on Rod making it up the stairs before overloading. And now our hero must find a way off the roof, to fight his way down floor by floor, like the opposite of the original plot of Game of Death! Somebody microwave some popcorn!”
Armando looked around the scattering of debris and equipment on the roof, then grabbed a spool of electrical extension cord he found among the smoldering junk. He dragged it toward the ledge and peered down the side of the building. From that height the wide street below looked like a thin line drawn with a Magic Marker. Zoey felt her guts tighten up at the view, just watching it secondhand.
Armando tied one end of the cord to the railing along the ledge, measured off about fifteen feet, then looped the rest around his waist, cinching it tight. He swiped down with the katana and sliced away a section of the black tarp, exposing a darkened window, smoked to black by the fire that had ruined the building two years ago. He climbed up onto the ledge, his shoes balancing precariously on the rail, his back to the open air and the steep drop below.
Armando crouched, took a breath and muttered, “I hope to god we’re getting all this on cam—”
He was interrupted by the plinking of bullets, raking the rail next to him.
The Ice Palace contingent of Molech’s guards had apparently figured out they’d let their boss’s assassin walk right past them, and were now charging across the bullet-riddled half pipe of the swim bridge. Armando reached inside his jacket and pushed a button.
His briefcase, still sitting open on the bridge, detonated.
A spherical shockwave rippled out in every direction, shattering the bridge as it went.
Amid the cacophony, Armando pushed off the ledge. He flew back, suspended for a moment in the air above the sheer drop to the street below, then the cord went taut and he swung toward the window as the shattered glass bridge cascaded down behind him in a crystal rain, a half dozen Molech henchmen tumbling down with it.
Armando flew toward the window, bullets pelting the wall around it. One crazy gunman was shooting as he fell, as if he would still have to answer to Molech in the afterlife. Armando crashed through the window and disappeared from view.
The feed on the mask of the far left henchman went black, then switched back to Molech’s bemused face.
Molech nodded slowly and said, “Yes, I knew every single one of these things was going to happen.”
Somewhere in the background Zoey heard Black Scott say, “Uh huh.”
From her phone, Will said, “It’s not too late. We can still call off Armando, you can still call off your man in Colorado. We can still negotiate this like human beings. My counteroffer is this. We give you the gold. You leave Zoey alone for the rest of her life. She leaves town, you don’t follow. You get your crazy arsenal and sell it to th
e world for billions. Everyone is happy.”
Molech’s video face said, “Counter-counteroffer. You give me the gold. Zoey’s mother goes in the ground. I get Zoey. I sever Zoey’s spine, paralyzing her, then bury her in a different coffin with only … five thousand cockroaches. I broadcast the results on the Tabula Rasa skyline for the next month, yadda yadda yadda.”
“We don’t feel like that’s a good faith offer, because it seems more like you’re just trying to save money on cockroaches. Let’s put all that aside for now and agree to call off the dogs, so that we can at least have time to talk. Tell your man to let Zoey’s mother go, she’s not a party to this either way.”
“Rather than counter that, I’m just going to sit back and watch Kools bury that jizz-Dumpster.”
The henchman on the far right—the one showing the Colorado feed—displayed Kools placing the lid on the pine box, giving Zoey just a brief glimpse inside—a split second to see her mother’s face, eyes wide, realizing what was happening, mouth working as she tried to form a scream with a tongue and vocal cords that wouldn’t cooperate. The man pulled out a little gun gadget and fired it into the edge of the lid. A nail gun.
Zoey screamed. Again. She couldn’t help it.
Will Blackwater’s hologram was still completely unperturbed, however, and Zoey hated him for it, wishing that could be him in that box, about to hear dirt landing on the lid one shovelful at a time. But men in suits don’t wind up in shallow graves in the woods, do they? No, they ride behind tinted windows and make conference calls and negotiate away the lives of little people like Zoey and Melinda Ashe. How had she let herself get taken by these people?
Will said, “Molech, Zoey will not negotiate with you if you kill her mother. This is actually true of most people you’ll encounter in a business setting.”
“Blackwater, if you say the word ‘negotiate’ one more time I’m going to find you, tie you down, and inject bot fly maggots into your eyeballs. This is not a negotiation. This is strength taking from weakness. I assume it’s true what she said, that you got the gold on a little drive somewhere?”