by David Wong
Molech nodded. “Yeah. Screw it. Bring her with us.”
Zoey sat up and said, “But how do you know that isn’t what we wanted you to do?”
Molech leaned over and punched her in the jaw. Blood exploded into her mouth. She crashed to the floor, feeling sharp chunks like broken porcelain on her tongue. She spat three teeth and a gob of dark blood onto the oily concrete, then rolled over just in time to catch a boot to the face. Zoey’s nose collapsed with a gut-turning crunch and she had just enough time to feel a boot smash into her rib cage, bones cracking like eggshells, before she blacked out from the pain.
FIFTY-SIX
There had been a four-year window in Zoey’s life in which she didn’t believe in monsters. It lasted from age six, when her mother told her that the scary aliens she saw in a movie weren’t real, until age ten, when she ran into a big, fat, mean girl named Bella.
Bella was the class bully and one time she cornered Zoey behind a bowling alley, apparently having picked her completely at random. She wound up sitting on Zoey’s chest, her knees pinning her arms down, her bulk making it hard to breathe. And as it got harder to breathe, Zoey started to panic, and as she panicked, Bella started to smile.
It had been Zoey’s first glimpse of that dark thing that lurks in people, the writhing worm in the soul that feeds on other people’s pain and fear. Zoey’s terror and helplessness were making this person happy to the point of euphoria (in later years, Zoey would say it was getting Bella high). That such a look could appear on a human face in that situation was an earth-shattering revelation to little Zoey, a lesson more profound than anything she would learn in school that year. It was then that fourth-grader Zoey Ashe realized that, yup, monsters exist, all right. Not Bella, but the thing inside Bella.
Call it what you want, dismiss it as an old evolutionary defect in the brain that gets a charge out of cruelty, whatever. But don’t say that the monster isn’t real—what Zoey saw behind Bella’s eyes was very real, and terrifying, and utterly inhuman. It was a dark, mindless hunger to hurt that was only being kept in check by fear of some greater power—parents, teachers, cops, a bigger bully. Over time, Zoey Ashe would see how this ugly, parasitic thing lurked behind everything and everyone, like the roaches in that greasy old public housing complex that came oozing out of the walls the moment the lights were off. The history books were, in fact, nothing more than a log of mankind’s largely futile attempts to keep the monster in check. Zoey knew, even then, that if a person like Bella was ever to get so big and strong that nothing could touch them, so that they could just feed that monster, unchecked … then that would be the end.
Zoey would, of course, encounter the monster again and again over the years. She saw it in the eyes of Jezza, as he leaned her over the oven. She saw it in the face of the Soul Collector on the train, even with his eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. She saw it in the Hyena, when he had come after her in her bedroom that first night.
But what she saw on Molech’s face was different.
Over time, Zoey had found that most people know they have the monster inside them, and decent people get scared when they feel it lurching to the surface. When they feel that quick rush of guilty pleasure after hitting a child or delivering a cruel insult to a spouse, they immediately drown it in shame, spending weeks doing good deeds to push that dark, writhing thing back down into the shadows. Others will invent some fiction, to pretend they have the monster under control. Corrupt cops torturing suspects in back alleys and telling themselves they’re doing it for justice, or guys getting drunk and breaking their girlfriend’s jaw, then blaming the booze (desperately trying to ignore the fact that the pleasure of unleashing the monster is the main reason they drink in the first place). Medieval priests ripping the guts out of screaming teenage girls, and pretending the burst of pleasure they felt in their loins was the spiritual reward for doing God’s will. Everyone dressing up their cruelty as something else, rather than admit they are the monster’s slave.
But not Molech.
Molech understood the monster, and embraced it—saw the world through its eyes. Five days ago Zoey had thought that only a ridiculous man would adopt a comic book supervillain name like “Molech” for himself. But now it made perfect sense. There was no “Chet Campbell” left inside that well-muscled body. There was only the monster.
There was only Molech.
Molech didn’t waste energy lying to itself about what it was. Molech knew what it wanted and knew it could get it. And it would never, ever stop.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Zoey pried open her eyes and saw her wrists were now bound in front of her with barbed wire that was encrusted with dried blood, from where it had bitten into the skin. She took a breath and felt a knife-twist of pain, a splintered rib jabbing into her right lung. Her whole face was swollen, her head feeling like it was the size of a basketball. She couldn’t breathe out of her nose. She was freezing, a cold wind on her cheeks and ears.
She looked beyond her bound hands and saw she was moving, heading down a busy street with people on the sidewalks stopping and staring as she passed. She tried to sit up, and winced as barbed wire bit into her neck. She craned her head around as far as she could and figured out that she had been tied to the hood of one of Molech’s monster trucks, like an animal being hauled back from the hunt. Her shirt was wet, a crimson bib of blood that reached down to her belly.
The truck was rolling downtown, and Zoey’s head was too muddled to think about where they were going or what it might mean. Then she saw that several blocks down the street was an imposing alabaster art deco building whose design Zoey thought had borrowed heavily from the headquarters in the old Justice League comics. Parked in front were at least twenty menacing armored vehicles brandishing clusters of gun barrels. Black-clad armed guards crowded the spaces in between them, the men and women of the Co-Op in the best paramilitary gear money could buy, brandishing armor and guns designed for the battlefield. From the hood of the truck, Zoey imagined herself getting helplessly shredded in the crossfire that was about to occur. But if it meant that somehow, some way, they took out Molech in the process, then so be it.
The truck she was bound to rolled to a stop right in the middle of an intersection, a few blocks away from the Co-Op building and its black perimeter of bristling weapons. A second and third truck rolled to a stop on either side, the one to the right with a covered object in its bed about the size and shape of a snowman. Two muscular, shirtless men emerged from the cab of that one—neither of them Molech, as far as Zoey could tell—and whipped back the tarp. In the bed was a scaled-up version of the little fire hydrant gadget Molech had pulled out at the park—the one that had disabled every firearm within a few hundred yards.
The doors on Zoey’s truck clicked and creaked behind her and Molech strode into view along with Scott, who was now holding a professional-looking camera. That seemed redundant considering there were dozens of bystanders shooting from the sidewalks (each willing to risk getting torn to pieces in a crossfire if it meant drawing huge Blink numbers in the process), not to mention the swarm of drones buzzing overhead like gnats on a summer day. But, Zoey figured, Molech was like any showman and wanted as much control of the production as possible.
Molech looked euphoric, like a man released from a long, unjust prison sentence. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, and licking his lips. He scanned the crowds gathered along the sidewalk and soaked in their awe.
He muttered to himself, “Poor bastards don’t even know what they came to watch.”
He looked at Zoey and said, “You get a shovel and dig straight down, you know what you find?”
She tried to say something, but just wound up triggering a gurgling coughing fit that sent bolts of pain flashing through her entire body.
Molech said, “You find the end of the world. My daddy and I, we used to go digging for arrowheads in the field behind our house. And we’d find one and he’d say, you know what this is? This is the re
mnants of an apocalypse. For the Indians, the white man was their Judgment Day. Scorched all this clean and built somethin’ better. Same as the Black Death before that, over in Europe. Plague wiped out two hundred million people, killed all them peasants, livin’ among the rats and filth. And you know what happened right after that? Little thing they call the Renaissance. That’s how this always works—like a brushfire, cleaning out all that dead underbrush, so new growth can come in.”
Zoey swallowed blood and said, “Chet, listen to me. This is your last chance to turn back. What you think is going to happen today … won’t.”
Molech smiled. “I know you’re plannin’ somethin’, you and your entourage. I don’t know what, exactly, but I know you’ve been running around like worker ants these last couple days. My personal hope is that you’ve built yourself a superhero, to take me on. Maybe we’ll fight it out on top of a speeding train. I mean, what could make for a more awesome Raiden demo than two augmented dudes battling it out on camera?”
Molech turned to Scott and said, “Let’s do this, bitch!”
Molech positioned himself in front of the truck, Scott framing him up with the camera so the shot would have the bloodied Zoey in the background. Molech glanced up at the nearest building, where the skyline feed countdown was ticking off the final seconds.
5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …
The countdown vanished and it was replaced by the feed from Scott’s camera, stretching across every structure in downtown Tabula Ra$a. Looming over everyone was the image of Molech standing in front of the grill of his monster truck, with Zoey in the background trying to breathe through the bloody foam bubbling out of her nostrils.
Wow, I look like hell.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I, as all of you know by now, am Molech. And let me just kick off the festivities by bringing an end to the thousand-year reign of the gun.”
Molech signaled to the men in the bed of the monster truck to his right. They punched some controls on the fire hydrant gadget. The machine hummed, whined, and spun up to power. Then there was a thrum and a pulse that Zoey swore sent a visible ripple through the air. Scott turned to point his camera at the Co-Op headquarters, and the small army parked out front.
Zoey couldn’t see around Molech’s shoulders and bulging lats, but she heard explosions, and screams, and the sound of bystanders running. She peered up at the skyline feed. The armored vehicles in front of Co-Op HQ were now belching fire and plumes of black smoke, their stored ammunition erupting inside. Confused gunmen ducked away, clutching maimed hands.
Molech and his men casually climbed into the monster trucks and soon Zoey found herself rolling into Hell—roaring flames, men moaning in agony, acrid black smoke searing her eyes. She coughed and pain exploded across her chest with each spasm. The truck skidded to a stop, the momentum throwing Zoey painfully forward against her barbed restraints. Molech jumped out and strode up among what was left of the Co-Op guards, Scott filming him from behind. One of the guards drew a wicked-looking knife and threw himself at Molech. The guy was quick and skilled and showed no fear. Molech made a series of moves that were too fast to see, and tore the man in half.
He then strode up to the nearest armored vehicle, a plume of black smoke pouring from its rear. Molech made a fist, and even from Zoey’s vantage point she could see the bright ripple of electricity arc across his stainless-steel knuckles. He reared back and punched the tank. There was a massive crunch of rending metal and a thunderclap of energy—a blue flash bright enough to leave an afterimage in Zoey’s eyes. The tank was instantly broken in two, the ragged halves spinning away as if the vehicle had been kicked by an invisible giant. Four crewmembers were spilled across the pavement.
Molech screamed and hooted and felt the rush of a man becoming a god. Then he put his wrists together, and there was a flash of lightning so bright that this time Zoey had to close her eyes completely. Then she heard screams and decided to just keep them closed.
The terrible sounds continued for several minutes, but eventually a calm settled over the scene, leaving only the gasps and cries of bystanders. Zoey dared to look and there was now just smoke and debris and black smears of ash scattered across the marble stairs leading up to the Co-Op’s stately headquarters. At Molech’s feet, she saw the top half of a skeleton.
Molech kicked through the bones and found what appeared to be the lone survivor of the assault, struggling to get to his feet among the blackened limbs of his peers. An older guy, with a crew cut. It was Blake, the CEO they’d met with in the strip club basement. In full combat gear, just like the rest. He’d gone out there himself, side by side with his men.
Molech stood over him and said, “I got to tell you, man, that was disappointing. I heard you had more than a hundred guys working for you, I figured you’d circle everybody around your HQ, and I’d get to shred ’em all at once.”
Blake spat blood on the steps. “My only regret is I won’t get to see how you go down. But as dumb as you are, I’d say you’ve got about a day.”
Molech smiled, then pulled out a little device that looked like a metal starfish, the little pointed arms flexing on their own. He rolled Blake over, stuck the device on his back, and the older man let out a piercing scream as it dug into him.
Molech left him there, then strode over to the third monster truck and from the bed pulled an oversized device that looked to Zoey like a cartoon bazooka. He aimed it at the arched front entrance of the building, and once again waited for Scott to frame him up with the camera. Molech squeezed the trigger, firing a projectile that burst in midair a few feet short of the structure, ejecting a massive net of thin black lines that encircled the building.
The net pulled itself tight over the walls and columns, and then tighter, until puffs of dust were spurting from hundreds of cracks. The net kept squeezing and squeezing, pillars and corners buckling under the strain. Then, all at once the building imploded, sucking in on itself like a popped balloon, the netting pulling tighter and tighter until jagged hunks of stone, concrete, and glass were being crushed together into a solid mass. Soon all that remained was a massive sculpture of compacted rubble, bound together by the bundle of thin cables. It stood in the center of a now-empty foundation, a few broken water lines spurting into the air. When the dust cleared, Zoe could see the wire had squeezed the hunks of concrete, marble, and steel into the shape of a thirty-foot-tall hand, with the middle finger extended.
Molech then threw a cable around the finger, and dragged Blake up the steps. He tied the cable around the writhing and screaming man and hoisted him up, so that he was dangling from the rubble that minutes earlier had been his headquarters. Molech then climbed the hand, past the dangling man, until he was standing atop the extended finger. Scott moved to the base of the hand with the camera, getting a low-angle shot that would silhouette Molech against the gray sky, to really capture the majesty of the scene. Molech glanced up at the nearest building, taking a moment to soak in his own magnificence as it was being broadcast across the Tabula Ra$a skyline, and all around the world via Blink.
“I respect those who fight with honor, like my friend Blake here. The rest of you Co-Op foot soldiers around the city, you’ve got about five minutes until the device I attached to your boss slowly fries his internal organs. Come cut him down, I’m advancing to the next level. I’m about to do a little urban renewal, I think you’re gonna like it.”
They piled into the trucks and soon Zoey was moving again. Behind them, black trucks soon swarmed the middle finger monument that had been the Co-Op HQ, men spilling out to come to the aid of their boss.
She faintly heard Molech say, “All right, let’s go to Squatterville.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
As a target, Zoey thought, Squatterville made no sense. It was a crumbling tower full of shivering poor people—leveling it would prove nothing, considering the place looked like two guys with sledgehammers could do it over a weekend. But then again, the monster didn’t think that way, did
it? The bullies she had known didn’t take on other bullies, they got high off easy wins. Zoey tried not to think about what an “easy win” would look like when the target was a rickety concrete box full of two thousand men, women, and children.
She heard the crackling of the tires rolling over broken glass, and tried to look around. They were passing through the shadow of the mountain of debris that had been Livingston Tower just a few days earlier. All of the buildings across the street had plywood and tarps where the lower windows used to be, each having taken a cannonade of debris from the collapsing skyscraper. Zoey had to admit it: her visit had been hard on Tabula Ra$a.
And then there was Squatterville, looming over them with its tendrils of smoke drifting into the cloudy December sky. In the wake of any slow-developing disaster that hits the news—a hurricane, or a flood, or a war—there’s this infuriating thing that Zoey always heard people say about the victims: “Why didn’t those people just get out of there when they knew what was coming? Why are they so stubborn?” Infuriating, of course, because of the blithe presumption that everyone actually has somewhere to go. If you’re someone to whom even a cheap hotel is an unthinkable extravagance, and all of your friends already have extended family sleeping on their living room floor, all you can do is hunker down and hope the storm takes a last-second turn. You don’t have a choice. That’s what it’s like being poor—choices are something you sit around and dream about having, some day after you strike it rich. So Zoey was not surprised to see Squatterville still fully occupied, despite the fact that word of Molech’s approach must have traveled across Blink in a microsecond. If they fled the building in a panic and somehow managed to avoid being cut down in the streets by whatever exotic weapon Molech pulled out next, where would they go? They were at the mercy of whoever happened to care enough to protect them. As always.