by David Wong
The noise of the collapsing tower filled the world, Zoey now watching a skyscraper tumble into its own footprint for the second time in three days. Then she saw it again when Molech strode over and did the same to the Ice Palace. The reaction from the bystanders was a bizarre stew of cheers and screams of terror. Plaster dust hung in the air like a thick fog.
Molech stomped back toward Scott and Zoey and said, “I hope that was worth it, bitch. Those buildings were junk and Andre Knox is a pancake now.” To Scott he said, “Give me some good news, partner.”
“How about this—approximately every remaining gun in Tabula Rasa is converging on this spot.” This was relayed as if it was, in fact, good news. Almost on cue, Zoey heard the faint sound of approaching helicopters.
Molech grinned, baring his teeth. “Ain’t no man felt juice like this, Black Scott. It’s God Mode, from here on out.”
The skyline feed switched away from the Fire and Ice aftermath to the collection of ragtag armies approaching from all four directions. And then, abruptly, the feed cut to black, and then to a laughing Andre.
Molech let out a long breath, and closed his eyes. “You freaking people.”
Andre bellowed, “Aha! I see that you have fallen for my trivial diversion! As you can see, I was not in the hollowed-out shell of a casino you thought was my headquarters, but am across town, in the toppled-over ruins of the once-great Parkview apartments. But you do not dare approach! For now, I unveil the true centerpiece of our master plan! Tabula Rasa, behold what is behind me, and tremble! We are in possession of a ten megaton plasma fusion warhead—a weapon powerful enough to turn all of this city into a vast wasteland of molten sand!”
Zoey heard screams and gasps from the bystanders gathered on the sidewalks, and from at least one of Molech’s henchmen. On the screen, Andre stepped aside to reveal the bomb—an olive green cone with a yellow tip, about three feet wide and ten feet long.
“We will detonate this device, vaporizing everything within a fifty-mile radius, unless our demands are met within the next sixty minutes. What demands? Stay tuned to this feed, and all will be revealed!”
The skyline feed switched to a still image, a doctored photo depicting a costumed Andre and Molech standing back to back, giving a thumbs-up to the camera. The words “FIRE AND ICE” were spelled out beneath their feet, in flashy animated text.
Molech rushed over and grabbed Zoey’s face.
“Hey. Wake up. Have you ever been on fire, piglet? Do you know what it feels like to have third-degree burns over your whole body? Do you know what it feels like to then lie on a dirty concrete floor in your own filth, for weeks and months after your skin has burned away? Do you have any idea how long my doctors can keep you alive in that condition? I’m going to ask you exactly one time. IS THE NUKE REAL?”
Zoey spat the blood out of her mouth so she could sputter the word “Yes.”
“YOU’RE A LYING GASH SCAB. Why would you have a real nuke?”
“Why would we have a fake one? We bought a machine to build Arthur’s designs. That’s what we made.”
“So what’s your plan, blow up the whole city? For what?”
“To stop you from getting it!”
Scott said, “All the hired guns are diverting toward the Parkview site. Looks like every Blink camera in the city is headed there, too. So, what? We goin’?”
The gears turned in Molech’s head. He tried to study Zoey’s face.
“Yes. No! Goddamn it, that’s what they want, isn’t it?”
He grabbed Zoey again, squeezing her throat this time with metal fingers. Instantly, her air was gone.
“Tell me what you’re planning. You think you know what I’m capable of. I promise, you do not.”
He took his hand away long enough for her to scream, “I DON’T KNOW!” This was the truth, she had pretty much lost track of the plan at this point. “You want to know, ask Will!”
“Hey, good idea. Where is he now?”
“Back at the house. He’s controlling everything from there!”
Molech studied Zoey’s bloody face once more.
Scott said what Molech was surely thinking. “This sure looks like an ambush, boss.”
“What could they possibly ambush me with, Scott? Whatever it is, I’m kind of eager to see it. Screw it. Let’s go.”
SIXTY-ONE
Zoey blacked out, she had no idea for how long.
When she felt the trucks slowing to a stop again, she pried her swollen eyes open and had the sense of having come full circle: she saw the wrought-iron front gates of Arthur Livingston’s estate—no, her estate—standing closed to all unwelcome visitors, the two stone dragon pillars standing vigilant on either side. She expected the Candi hologram to appear and tell them the gates were locked, or for a crazy array of security devices to spring into action and cut them all to pieces.
Instead, the gates simply slid open.
But of course they did. Molech, after all, had someone on the inside.
Instead of looping around the winding path through all of the statues, decorations, and the Siberian tiger enclosure, Molech just pointed his hood toward the front doors and gunned it. The truck smashed through a pair of knight statues, rumbled over bushes covered in Christmas lights, and ripped through the fence around the tiger enclosure, the sleepy beasts lazily watching them pass.
They arrived in front of the massive bronze front doors, and Molech came around and ripped away the wires holding Zoey to the hood of the truck. She tumbled off onto the cobblestones, smashing her knees and elbows when she landed. A rough hand—Scott’s—hooked under her armpit and yanked her up.
She instinctively started to pull away, and walk on her own—she didn’t want to be carried, or dragged, or yanked around by that freaking arm again. She was sick of being cargo. Instead, she fell limp in his strong hands. Making him practically drag her.
The front doors started slowly creaking open, on their own.
Molech said to her, “By the way, are you curious to know who sold you out? To know who it was that you trusted, and shared a roof with, while they were tipping me off? Are you curious to know who told me Armando would be mincing along my rooftop that day?” He turned toward the open doorway and said, “Come on out here and say hi.”
A figure emerged from the shadows of the foyer and strode confidently into view, standing defiantly in the afternoon sun.
The man said, “It’s always the last one you’d suspect, isn’t it, Zoey? Always the one you underestimate. I took abuse from your father for far too long. And now, today, I finally have my revenge.”
Zoey peered at her traitor through her swollen eyes. That dark complexion, the curly hair, the goatee. The toothpick, jutting from a corner of his mouth.
Zoey said, “Who the hell are you?”
“You know who I am.”
“I … I literally don’t. I have never seen you before in my life.”
“YOU SAW ME EVERY DAY!” The man spat the words, in a rage. “In the yard? Trimming the bushes? Fixing the decorations in the courtyard? I was fixing lights on that tree two days ago! You walked right past me!”
“You’re … what? One of the landscaping guys?”
“I’M GARY! Gary O’Brien! The gardener! I worked for your father for twenty-five years! We played golf together! I slept in one of the guest rooms! Oh, I knew what you were saying. ‘We don’t need to worry about Gary. Gary’s too dumb to think up schemes like us. Well, now you’re lookin’ at Gary in a whole new light, aren’t ya?”
“I’m … sorry. I just don’t remember you.”
“I want to hear you say it! I want to hear you say you underestimated me!”
Molech said, “Calm down, yard-master. So, she says Blackwater is inside, is that true?”
“Yeah. Go up the stairs, there’s a sitting room to the left. They’re just sittin’ in there. Waiting. No ambush, no nothin’. They didn’t even notice the grounds security was off. All because in their wildest dreams, t
hey never could have guessed that little ol’ Gary could—”
“And that’s all you know? You got no other information for me?”
“No, man, but they’re right up there. Go have at them.”
“Good. Looks like we’re done here.”
And with that, Molech stepped forward and punched the man.
There was a wet sound, like a bucket of paint splashed against a wall.
And in a blink, everything on Gary from the knees up had vaporized. Fragments of pink and white and yellow flew across the open bronze doors, spraying across the marble tile of the foyer inside. A red mist hung in the air, and then was gone. Zoey screamed, or tried to. It was just kind of a gurgle at this point. Molech hooted in celebration, a sound he’d make rooting for a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest.
He said, “God, I’ll never get bored with that.”
They stepped inside and Molech glanced around at the foyer.
“This is a nice place. I might set up shop here after this is all said and done. Let’s go.”
They stepped around the spray of gore that had been Gary the Gardener, went past the massive looming Christmas tree, and headed up the grand staircase—Molech in the lead, Scott having to drag Zoey up the stairs like a bag of trash. Doc and the other henchmen had stayed behind, maybe to make sure nobody stole their trucks—Molech clearly was not worried about being outnumbered. Below them, Zoey saw Carlton enter the foyer with a mop.
They reached the buffalo room, and Molech gestured to Zoey to open the door, presumably to take the brunt of any booby traps that lay in wait. Scott tossed her in that direction, and she tumbled to the floor. She reached up and opened the door from her knees.
There was a fire going. Soft classical music played. On the wall feed, an army could be seen swarming around the sideways Parkview building. In one of two large leather armchairs on the opposite side of the room sat Will Blackwater, looking calm to the point of boredom, swirling the scotch in his glass. As if he had been watching the whole event play out, and found it uninteresting.
Sitting in the chair next to him was Arthur Livingston.
SIXTY-TWO
Arthur smiled at Molech and said, “Dun-dun duuun!”
There was a long silence, then Molech said, “Bullshit.”
Arthur turned to Will and said, “He’s nine minutes later than you said he’d be. You owe me fifty bucks.”
Will shrugged. “Traffic was worse than I anticipated, lot of people trying to flee the city, due to our little bomb threat. Have to admit, I expected more from the populace. This is Tabula Rasa, since when do we run?”
Molech said, “I killed you. No, I not only killed you, but your body was vaporized…”
Arthur said, “You did massive damage to my rib cage, lungs, diaphragm, and various gut parts I’d never even heard of. Required fifteen hours of surgery and two thousand stitches to repair it all. So, no, I won’t be jumping up from this chair and doing a jig for you—my whole torso looks like Frankenstein. But I’m a tough old bastard and I was able to crawl to the subbasement before the warehouse blew. As was the plan.”
Molech paused, feeling the ground shifting beneath his feet. Zoey thought he was trying to work out the logistics of what Arthur was saying, and coming up blank.
When he finally got his mouth working again, all he could do was repeat, “Bullshit.”
Will said, “Do you want a drink? Why don’t you have a drink, and we’ll talk through this like adults. That’s all we wanted. I mean, look at us—we had to hold a whole city hostage just to get you back to the negotiating table.”
Molech turned to Black Scott, as if looking for someone to agree that none of this could possibly be real.
Scott said, “Man, don’t look at me. I’m totally lost here.”
Will said, “Before we begin, let’s establish some parameters, just so everyone is on the same page. This estate is well within the blast radius of the plasma nuke Andre is currently threatening the city with. If I die, it goes off. You won’t hear anything, you won’t see anything—you just … won’t be, anymore.”
Molech said, “No. You’re not that crazy.”
Arthur said, “You didn’t leave us a choice. This patch of land was dirt and scrub brush when I staked my claim and, quite frankly, I think of it as my city, still. You don’t get to have it, I’ll turn it all back into desert before I’ll allow that. The rest of the world, I don’t care. But Tabula Rasa is off the table. The negotiation begins there. Now, are you familiar with the Lord of the Rings?”
Molech hesitated again, realizing he was playing someone else’s game, but with no idea what else to do.
He said, “Yeah, old horror movie about a ghost girl who crawls out of a television?”
“No, this is the one with wizards and elves. Ends with the midgets fighting in a volcano? It’s not important. What matters is that the rings in the title are magic rings, that grant the owner total power. Kind of like Raiden, wouldn’t you say? Now in the story, the rings came from a wizard named Sauron. He makes these rings and hands them out to the rulers of the land, knowing that the greed of the people would overcome their common sense, which if they’d listened, would have told them this was clearly too good to be true. So I guess he would be like me, and Singh, perfecting Raiden to sell to the highest bidder. But see, here’s the twist—it turns out that Sauron was playing a trick. The rings were not all-powerful—there was one ring he kept for himself, unimaginatively called the One Ring, that ruled aaaaaall of the others. The rulers should have seen this coming, should have known a sly character like Sauron wouldn’t just give away such a prize. But in their lust for power, these rulers had made themselves slaves. Just like you did.”
Molech narrowed his eyes. This clearly sounded like a lie, but the events of the last two minutes had rendered anything possible.
Will said, “We have a device, a switch, that can remotely overload Raiden. You, Molech, are a walking bomb. And we hold the detonator.”
“Bullshit.”
“Think it through,” said Arthur. “Why would I have left this to chance? The moment we had a working device, I had the engineering team build in the Sauron safeguard in secret.”
Will set a simple black box on the coffee table in between the chairs. On it was a single, oversized red button.
Arthur said, “It was destroyed in the warehouse, so we needed a little time to build a new one—had to actually install a whole new factory just to build it, in fact. But it’s very simple in how it works—if I push this button, you die, along with every man in the vicinity with Raiden in his bones. But I don’t want that, and not just because I don’t want burning chunks of you two all over my salon. I have a daughter now, as it turns out, and my goal is for her to not have to inherit some mindless cycle of retaliation. No, I’d prefer to make you a deal. All I need you to do is leave town. Tabula Rasa is mine. It’s my baby. Take your whole Molech act and go do your demonstration in India, or China, or the Moon, I don’t care. You go make your billions and leave me and mine alone. But you don’t ever set foot in this city again, or else I punch the off button on your life, and that’s that. You’ve had your fun, you can tell the city whatever you like to save face. But then you leave us alone. That’s all you have to do. The rest of the world is yours.”
Molech said nothing. Zoey couldn’t tell if he was considering the offer or not. These next few moments were everything. Zoey studied his face from where she sat on the floor, trying to keep her mind off her battered body. That jab of the knife in her ribs, with every breath. Sick with the blood she had swallowed …
To Molech, Will said, “There’s nothing to consider. In this deal, all you leave here with … is everything.”
There was a meow and Zoey turned to see Stench Machine, trotting in to greet his owner and ask why she’d left the house without permission. She reached out to stroke him, and then he froze, staring down the men in the armchairs at the opposite side of the room. As if seeing his old nemesi
s.
Rage and terror filled Stench Machine’s eyes. The sight of an old foe who had tormented him time and time again, haunting his dreams. Then came the steely resolve of an animal who has decided that enough is enough, that he’s going to make a stand.
With a meow that Zoey had no doubt meant, “This ends now!,” Stench Machine darted across the floor.
Zoey screamed at the cat. He did not respond to her command, because he is a cat.
Stench Machine cleared the distance in two seconds. There was a moment when Will saw what was happening, and began to make a move to stop it, but was too late.
Stench Machine flung his body at Arthur Livingston, who did not react. The cat flew right through his torso, through the hologram. He bounced off the back of the empty leather chair and flopped haphazardly to the floor.
Molech’s eyes grew wide.
“Yes! I knew it!”
Will tried to recover. “Now … this changes nothing, Molech, the kill switch is—”
Molech flew across the room. He yanked Will up by his throat, kicked the chair out of the way, and slammed Will into the wall, the wood splintering with the impact.
Zoey looked at the kill switch. She wasn’t actually sure how much strength she had in her legs—she’d been dogging it with Scott, making him drag her, but she also hadn’t actually tested her limbs. And this, here, was a one-shot thing.
She coiled and sprung and threw herself across the room, toward the kill switch button. She could hear Scott lunging after her—she had a moment to imagine his look of surprise, at how spry his captive was. But then she fell well short of the button and banged her chin off the floor. She frantically reached up again and swatted at the button and this time, she got it.