by David Wong
There was a deep, booming concussion from below. And then, the floor shook. Both of the approaching henchmen had to steady themselves on the conference table.
Molech popped up on their facemasks. He looked pale and sickly but also happier than Zoey had ever seen another human. He was outdoors now—in fact, he was right outside the main entrance of Livingston Tower, standing there with his gleaming chrome arms, near where his goons had parked their ludicrous tigercycles. Molech was tinkering with his new right hand, as if making an adjustment. He then held it up and the chrome hand transformed—two fingers rotated and merged and lengthened, the hand and forearm transforming itself into some kind of weapon.
Molech aimed his gun-hand at the building, and fired.
There was no crack of gunpowder, just a teeth-grating shriek like a fork dragged across a china plate. A projectile streaked forth, leaving a bright yellow trail behind it, as if it was igniting the air itself as it went. The projectile hit the building and the floor shook once again—an impact so impossibly powerful that they were feeling it reverberate through the structure, seventy stories up.
On the screen, Molech laughed, said, “Much better, Doc,” then aimed and fired once more.
Again came that SSHHHEEK followed by a WHUMPP of impact. He took several steps along the foundation, aimed, fired again. This time there happened to be a car in the way, parked along the street. The projectile sliced through the metal as if the car was an inflatable decoy, smashed through a concrete column behind it, and impacted the building somewhere inside. It seemed like random, petty vandalism, but Zoey soon realized Molech wasn’t just breaking glass to hear the sound it made. He was targeting specific points along the foundation.
The whole building swayed and one of the henchmen said, “That crazy son of a bitch! He’s just railgunning the support beams one by one! He’s going to chop the tower down like a tree! Ha!”
SSHHHEEK!
WHUMP!
Zoey screamed, “WE ARE CURRENTLY IN THAT BUILDING, MEATHEAD! We have to get out of here!”
“You don’t, jerksock. Molech’s orders.”
WHUMP!
“You need me! I know how to get us out! There’s an emergency escape!” This was a lie, but one Zoey thought would be just fantastic if it turned out to be true. “Either we all die or we all live, those are the only two choices!”
“Then we all die,” said the henchman on the left, with no inflection. “It’s kind of weird that you’re just now understanding how this works.”
“What is wrong with you people?”
Both men edged toward her once more.
Zoey watched the facemask videos, timing it carefully. She watched Molech march to the next spot, finding the next support column.
He raised his arm to take aim—
She jumped up on the conference table and started running toward the door. Both men reached for her, and—
SSHHHEEK!
WHUMP!
The building jolted so hard now that all three of them fell. Zoey scrambled to her feet and ran along the table, then jumped off and flew toward the door. One of the men threw a chair at her and it exploded against the doorframe a split second after she passed through it.
She skidded to a stop, pulled the big doors shut and said, “LOCK!”
She ran down the hall, toward the elevator.
From behind her, a woman’s voice said, “HEY! ZOEY!”
She spun and found Echo Ling stumbling out of the stairwell, still in her red dress but having ditched the stupid wig.
“THIS WAY!”
Zoey ran toward her and said, “We’re seventy flights up! I can’t go down stairs that fast!”
“We’re going up!”
Echo plunged back into the stairwell and started stomping up the stairs. The building shook and creaked and this time there was the sound of several hundred windows exploding, shattered as their frames twisted and buckled. The lights went out.
The two of them emerged onto a rooftop and Zoey had the crazy thought that they would either jump off the side of the building or ride the collapse down from the top. Instead, she found the windy roof was made windier by the rotors of a black helicopter, bearing that stupid Livingston Enterprises mustache logo.
The building now had a noticeable lean. They ran toward the helicopter. When they reached it, Will Blackwater opened the cockpit door and screamed over the engines, “DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW HOW TO FLY A HELICOPTER?”
She did not.
He motioned for them to get in anyway—Echo in the passenger seat, Zoey in back. Will poked ineffectually at buttons, and Echo leaned over and yelled suggestions as to which lever on the dash would actually cause the machine to fly.
The building shook and this time it didn’t stop.
There was a cacophonous noise, like the end of the world.
They were going down.
FORTY-THREE
Zoey was thrown forward, clutching the back of Echo’s seat as the helicopter lurched forward. She got a nice view out of the front window of the tower collapsing straight down, as if the whole building had fallen into a trapdoor. All else was obscured under a billowing cloud of dust and flying glass.
Will was yanking back on the stick and screaming commands at the machine, neither of which seemed to have any effect on its trajectory. The helicopter kept tilting forward at an alarming angle and Zoey was sure they were just going to somersault down into the falling avalanche of rubble below. Instead, the helicopter hovered, then kind of wobbled forward, nose still pointed down. Instead of plummeting into the maelstrom, they were now lurching horizontally—directly toward an office building across the street.
Will pulled up on the stick and stomped at some pedals, and Zoey could only sense that they were gaining altitude because the windows of the building they were about to collide with were whipping downward through the windshield. And then all at once they were looking at a rooftop—asphalt and duct work looking close enough to touch, the shadow of the rotor blades flitting along the surface. A flock of birds took off from the roof, and immediately one of them got hit by the rotors and exploded in a cloud of blood and feathers. Zoey heard someone in the helicopter screaming, and then realized it was all of them.
And then they were past the building and were looking down at the streets again, still leaning forward, still out of control. Pedestrians were pointing and running, for them the sound of the tower collapsing a block away now joined by the thunderous noise of the helicopter rotors chopping the air into submission overhead. Finally the helicopter’s front end rose and the horizon fell into view. It was too late—the next building filled the windshield and they weren’t going to avoid this one. Zoey barely had time to note that they were going to die colliding with a gigantic Santa Claus.
He was standing inside the hole of a thirty-story-tall donut, or rather, a thirty-story-tall glass building shaped like a donut standing on edge. It was a shopping mall, judging by how many of the terrified, fleeing people behind the windows were carrying shopping bags. Will yanked on the stick, presumably trying to avoid smashing into the building and sending the rotor blades flying murderously through a Lane Bryant store, but this meant he was aiming for the hole of the donut, and that meant he was aiming right for the ten-story-tall Santa Claus statue that was standing there. It was a festive thing, animated to rotate slowly, waving and jiggling its belly with laughter to the streets below. It was no hologram.
Zoey would never forget the noise the helicopter’s blades made when they started sawing into Santa’s neck. The statue was a hollow structure made of something like fiberglass over a thin metal frame, and the sound of the blades ripping through it was a series of thumps and screams, like a family of elves getting run over by a lawnmower. One of the rotor blades snapped and went flying, leaving a massive scar in the glass wall of the shopping mall.
They were crashing now, tumbling through the air. Zoey was thrown sideways, dangling from her seat belt. She had a fleeting thought that she wished she’
d stolen one of the henchman’s helmets. The helicopter got clear of the wrecked Santa statue and now the skyline was whipping around outside the windshield. Will no longer had his hands on the stick. He, like everyone else, was grabbing whatever was nearby, resigned to the crash and trying to brace for impact.
Then there was a POP and a FWUMPH and suddenly everything outside the windows was yellow.
There was a massive jolt, Zoey bashing her head on the window next to her. There was a horrific noise like rapid cannon fire, the remaining rotors tearing themselves to pieces as they battered the ground. Then Zoey was upside down and then right side up again, thrown around under the seat belt, the remains of the helicopter slowly rolling to a stop.
An engine whined and sputtered to a halt.
And then, finally, silence.
They were sideways, Zoey and Echo on the bottom. There was muffled screaming from outside. Will breathed, ran his hand through his hair, and then nodded to himself as if to confirm the job had been done to his satisfaction.
He asked, “Everyone all right?” and, without looking to see if anyone was in fact all right, started yanking off his seat belt. He climbed out of the pilot’s-side door, which was pointing straight up at the sky.
He extended a hand down for Echo and said, “We have to move. He’ll be coming.”
Zoey checked her limbs to make sure they were there and not jutting out at weird angles, then climbed up and out. She heard air escaping, as the whole battered aircraft was being slowly lowered to the ground, thanks to four yellow plastic airbags that had inflated around the hull just prior to impact. Zoey climbed atop the hull of the helicopter—or what was left of it, the tail had snapped off and the rotor was now just four short ragged stubs—and found they had landed on the roof of a parking garage in the shadow of the donut mall.
They had left a trail of wrecked cars in their wake, and one of the loose rotor blades had impaled an empty school bus nearby. Zoey didn’t know which would be more traumatizing to the returning children: the skewered bus or the twenty-foot-tall severed head of Santa Claus next to it. It was lying on its side, one eye gouged out and its nose bashed in from having landed and rolled after being lopped off its body by the helicopter blades. The rest of the Santa was still standing next door, its headless body still slowly rotating and waving inside the giant crystal donut.
Beyond it, a cloud of dust filled the gap in the skyline where Livingston Tower once stood.
FORTY-FOUR
Zoey tried to jump down, and instead awkwardly rolled down the bulge of deflating rubber, tumbling onto the pavement. She was immediately surrounded by several dozen people frantically photographing her with their phones and blink cameras, leaning their own faces into the shots. Zoey tried to shake out the cobwebs.
Echo approached, looking oddly giddy. “Whew! We did it.”
Echo held her palm toward Zoey, who looked back quizzically. Echo grabbed Zoey’s right wrist, brought her hand up, and slapped her own palm with Zoey’s and said, “High five.”
“Oh. Right.” Zoey looked around, “Can we … call a cab or something?”
Will said, “Hold on, I’ll grab a car.” Will pulled out his phone, glanced around, and tapped some controls.
A random hatchback that happened to be driving up the parking garage ramp at that moment swerved off its path, heading directly toward Zoey while the wide-eyed woman behind the wheel wondered what in the hell was going on. The driver’s-side door flipped open all on its own, then the car power slid toward Zoey, flinging the driver out of the door and sending her tumbling onto the pavement.
Will said, “Get in.”
Zoey stared at the car, then down at the middle-aged woman lying stunned on the ground.
Zoey ran for the car, looking back and saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m going to buy this car for five million dollars, I’ll send the money tonight. I’m so sorry—”
All three of them piled in and the car spun out and flew down the ramp with abandon. They emerged into traffic to find the streets were bedlam—sirens and screams and people standing stupidly in the streets to record the collapse aftermath. The hijacked car weaved around rubberneckers and even bumped up onto the sidewalk, carrying them away from the scene of the disaster, emergency vehicles whooshing past in the other direction. Soon they were out in the suburbs and into Beaver Heights. And there, all was placid calm—this was where city problems simply … stopped. And then there was the gate of the Casa and the grounds with its stupid tiger enclosure.
Carlton opened the giant front doors and Zoey stumbled through, unable to feel her legs. Wu rushed to meet her, said some things that she didn’t really hear, then started hurrying around talking about security, and locking down the grounds. Then Echo and Will were there and they sounded very frantic and very busy and soon they went off to presumably ready the Casa de Zoey to fend off an invasion of Molech’s enhanced monsters. Zoey just shuffled past them, in a daze.
Will was talking to her now, he told her that her mother was fine, that she was at the police station in Fort Drayton but that they needed to get her away, to some place safe. He was talking about options and professionals Budd worked with who could make people disappear, and how they needed to act soon before Molech sent someone else after her. But Zoey just kept walking past him, across the foyer, past the gigantic Christmas tree where some member of the house staff was now up on a ladder fixing a string of dead lights, the poor bastard lucky enough to think he still lived in a world in which such things mattered. Zoey sat on the bottom stair of the grand staircase, put her head between her legs, and tried not to pass out.
Will stopped talking. Carlton was there now, and was asking if she needed water, or a doctor, or if he should draw her a bath. All these people, buzzing around her like bees the moment she walked in through the door. She just wanted them to go away. She couldn’t hear them behind the pulsing roar of her own blood pumping through her ears. She was sweating, her heart was racing, her whole body trembling.
She saw Armando, face like a wax dummy, sprawled on the floor.
She saw the look of terrible realization in her mother’s face when she became sure she was about to be buried alive, for the first time realizing that death was a real thing that could happen to her. She saw the cruel, dumb joy on Molech’s face when he realized he had the power of a god. Because Zoey had given it to him.
Zoey looked and saw a pair of yellow eyes were now staring back at her. There was a meow, and Stench Machine sat down between her knees and Zoey pressed her face into his. There was silence and she didn’t know if everyone had left, or if Will and Wu and Echo and Carlton were all just standing there, waiting for her to come around. She didn’t care.
After a calculated few minutes, shoes clicked toward her and somehow she knew from the robot pace that it was Will. He stood over her like a statue, in silence, for an excruciating period of time before he surprised her by sitting on the step next to her.
Finally he said, “This, all of this, is what I was trying to avoid.”
She screamed at him. “DID YOU KNOW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN? Did you know, and let it happen anyway, you dead-eyed fucking robot?”
“Did I know that Armando would get shot while swinging into a top-floor window and that Molech would emerge from amputation surgery with the ability to knock the building to the ground with me inside of it? No, Zoey, I did not. Did I know that this plan had a really good chance of going wrong? Yes, and I said as much.”
Zoey let her head sink back between her knees, deflated.
She muttered, “I’m just going to go. I should have done that the first night. I’ll take some money and my cat and I’ll just disappear, I’ll change my name and go to some foreign country. Me and my mom, we’ll take enough money to start over.”
“That’s your choice.”
“Shut up. Don’t talk to me anymore. I don’t have to listen to you, so I’m not going to. There’s nothing inside you but gears and numbers. I’ll spend the rest
of my life trying to forget I ever met you.”
Will let out a breath and that was as much as she got from him as a response. They sat there for a while on the steps, Zoey with her eyes closed, stroking her cat.
Softly, Will said, “Arthur Livingston … was family to me. He was your father by biology, but he was like a father to me in life. We had been through more together than you can imagine. What happened to Armando … I know what it’s like because I’ve watched people die in front of me, over and over. But you knew him for three days. I spent fifteen years side by side with your father. Only now, do you understand the state of mind the rest of us were in when you arrived on the scene.”
She didn’t answer.
Will continued, “When I kept telling you that you didn’t understand the situation, I was never insulting you. I was giving you information.”
“No, I get it now. I do. I’m not … I’m not up to this, I never was. I’m just trailer trash, just like you thought when you saw me. I’m not one of your Suits, or whatever. I’m not a hero.”
Wu passed and said he had dispatched drones to watch the surrounding ten blocks for approaching monstrosities, and that he was prepping the armored sedan for an emergency getaway, should they come. He hurried off.
Will said to Zoey, “You are what you were raised to be. If you’d been raised in an exclusive prep school with private tutors and high-achiever friends, you’d be something different. Arthur could have given you all of that, but instead he spent the money on collectible cars and high-roller suites and very expensive, disposable women.”
“Yep, if I’d had all that training I could have grown up to be just like you. Sad.”
“I’m saying, Zoey, that Arthur failed you. And you’re a walking reminder of what kind of man he could be at times. And you showed up right when he passed and that wasn’t the reminder I needed just then. But none of this is your fault.”
Zoey looked over at the security monitor by the door and said, “Is Molech coming? Will he come here and tear this place apart?”