by David Wong
Zoey grabbed a cube of cheese off the tray mounted to the edge of the tub. She accidentally knocked a couple of olives into the water, where they vanished under the suds.
The phone chimed again. Another text message from Wu, about the box. Asking if she’d gotten the first message, then asking if she was still in the tub. Zoey lifted her feet out of the water and studied the black polish on her toes.
“So we’ve made it almost all the way through the list,” said Chopra, “and no mention of the Suits. Will that end our streak? Have things honestly gone quiet on that front for a whole entire week? Not at all, my beautiful, yet hopelessly impatient disciples.”
Ah, there it was, Zoey thought. All of the streamers were obsessed with Zoey’s people, who everyone just called the “Suits,” always sniffing around for any hint of palace intrigue. When she’d been hospitalized due to her breakdown a few months ago, guys like Chopra went wild with the idea that it was some sort of coup, a Will Blackwater PSYOPS operation that would let him seize power once Zoey was found mentally incompetent. Word had leaked somehow that he was the one who’d discovered her unconscious in her bedroom, Zoey having mixed the wrong alcohol with the wrong pills. The rumor mill immediately mutated this into Will having drugged her. Crazy, the things people make up.
Chopra stopped walking in front of a glowing construction site. His gadfly got a low angle, showing off the looming skeleton of a seventy-story skyscraper enshrouded by an enormous hologram. This would eventually be the new headquarters for Zoey’s company. She was supposed to come up with a name for the tower, but she’d been stalling, since sticking her own dumb name on there just seemed weird (the whole idea of having her own building seemed weird, if she was being honest). They had decided it would be cool that if during the months-long construction process, they installed a bunch of hologram projectors that would show off the building as it would look once finished. As for the design, they had held a contest for people to submit their own and Zoey had ignored the professional renderings in favor of one sent in by a six-year-old girl. She demanded the finished building be built exactly like the winner’s wobbly crayon scribble, complete with colors spilling outside the lines and giant squiggly windows seemingly placed at random. The press seemed to think the cartoonish hologram was just a joke and that the final building would be something more professional. Boy, would they be surprised.
Chopra said, “Get a look up behind me, Cammy.”
His camera drone tilted its view upward to reveal that some clever jerk had gotten in and reprogrammed a few of the projectors so that what scrawled across the middle of the building in glowing red was a fairly sloppy Cow Zoey drawing. Under it were the words,
WAIT, THAT’S NOT MILK!
… which Zoey assumed was a reference so many memes deep that it’d take a half hour for someone to explain it to her.
“You talk to any old-timer in this city,” said Chopra, “they’ll tell you, if you opposed Arthur Livingston, if you had an expression on your face that implied you were even idly musing about it, bystanders would get quiet and slowly back away, as if waiting for a giant fist to crash down from the heavens and smite you. And you know what? The streets were peaceful back then. That first decade, the blank slate years, you didn’t dare rob a Livingston business, you didn’t dare intimidate his potential customers. You didn’t hurt his escorts, you didn’t tag his walls. And he owned everything. That, my children, is what kept the peace. Now, with all of the advisors in charge and his daughter, who I’m going to be frank, when they were handing out brains in Heaven she accidentally got back into the tit line, the inmates are running the asylum. It’s the scariest thing in nature, my friends—a power vacuum. What do you get then? Anarchy. Or worse, government.”
Chopra gestured to the glowing graffiti. “That’s why this simple act of holographic vandalism takes the number one spot this month. It’s an act that would have been totally unthinkable a year ago. Those of you who’ve been in town from the start, who saw this place grow up around a single casino in the middle of nowhere, could you imagine somebody striding onto a Livingston property and doing this, ever, in your wildest dreams? No, you could not. Or maybe you could. Okay, I admit I only had nine good ones this month.”
Zoey turned it off.
Here’s what really drove her crazy: if her on-site security had shot that vandal, it would have gotten ten thousand times more coverage than, say, the sliding scale housing project she’d spent months getting built outside the city. Nobody cared about that, or the endless meetings spent fighting with the bus companies to get them to set up routes out there, finally paying through the nose for additional security to calm drivers who were nervous about doing stops in the projects. That housing meant thousands of homeless and semi-homeless people were saved from the incredibly dangerous structures they had been squatting in. It meant heat in the winter, locks on their doors, and working plumbing. But it wasn’t exciting, so nobody cared. People don’t want solutions. They want novelty.
Her phone rang, from where it was perched on the lip of the tub. Wu’s translucent head hovered over the phone and this time, she answered.
She said, “I’m here.”
“Did you get my messages? I completed the scan of the package. It took forever, it was specifically shielded to block scans. Someone paid a fortune for that box. I actually had to drill a hole in it so I could run a probe through. I think you need to come see it.”
“Is it a bomb?”
“No. It’s a corpse.”
7
Zoey stood in her pajamas and huge furry slippers, waiting in the foyer just inside the giant doors that probably both cost and weighed more than her old trailer in Colorado. The haunted Halloween tree moaned behind her, the little robotic plastic skeletons clicking around the branches. Zoey’s eyes wandered toward a bowl of candy near those enormous doors and she had to force herself to look away. It was full of these golf ball–sized brownie things with an ice cream core. They sat at room temperature but opening the wrapper triggered some chemical magic that froze the ice cream inside in about ten seconds, while somehow warming the brownie exterior, creating a light crust. She’d had four of them today.
Wu pushed his way through one of the giant doors and she said, “Hey, I need you to protect me from those ice cream brownie balls. If I start to take one, chop my hand off.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to just throw them out?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Carlton is bringing up the box from the gate.”
The two of them stepped out into the chilly night to see Carlton rolling up the winding driveway in one of the electric carts the grounds crew used. He rounded an enormous jack-o’-lantern the size of a small house, the fiery interior casting an orange glow around the landscaping. Zoey hadn’t bought that one, it was already in the storage building with the other seasonal decorations, including the dozens of bat-shaped drones with glowing red eyes that were currently flapping around overhead. She unwrapped a brownie ball and waited for it to cook/freeze in her hand. She had no memory of picking it up.
Carlton’s cart skidded to a stop in front of them and from behind the wheel he asked, “Did you have a specific location in mind for the corpse?”
“I guess just plop it down right here. I definitely don’t want it in the house. Should we wait for Will to get here?”
She’d texted him, knowing he’d be annoyed if they waited until morning to tell him that they’d been mailed a dead body.
“That is up to your judgment,” said Wu. “The box contains no explosives, poisons, biotoxins, or booby traps that I can detect. Just the body. But those are all of the details I have, the best scan I could get just looks like a very blurry X-ray. It is clearly a person, though, and they are very clearly deceased.”
“So no idea who sent it?”
“The return address is fake, it’s the address of the construction site of your new office tower—a lot of the hate mail uses it. But right now,
I am less concerned about the box’s sender than I am its inhabitant.”
“Well they’re dead, so I think they’re beyond earthly concerns.”
“So … everyone is accounted for, then?”
Zoey didn’t quite understand the question, then she went cold.
Somehow, the novelty of receiving a corpse delivery had completely obscured the possibility that this box may contain someone she actually knew, or loved. Zoey reached for her phone, found she didn’t have it, then sprinted back inside the foyer.
Carlton had said the box arrived in the afternoon.
She hadn’t seen her mother since yesterday.
Zoey found her purse where she’d left it at the bottom of the stairs, dug out her phone, then almost dropped it with shaking fingers.
She couldn’t breathe.
She dialed her mother.
There was no answer.
That, again, was not strange. Friday night, her mother was certainly at some party, or at a bar, or passed out in some gross guy’s bed. She tried again, no answer. Of course, she could just go out there, see who was in the box, see who her enemies had managed to snatch up and mutilate to death. But in that moment Zoey was seized by a superstition that what was in the box didn’t become real until she set eyes on it, that if she could reach her mother, it would somehow make it so that it wasn’t her in the box, that there was still a chance because the death wouldn’t become final until it was observed. It was stupid, she knew. She wasn’t thinking. Zoey put her hand on her forehead and tried to force herself to think, to be rational, to be like Will. She failed.
She didn’t have any of her mother’s friends’ contacts in her phone, and in fact didn’t know their names. She could try to find her on Blink, if she was in range of a live camera …
Zoey sensed Wu standing behind her.
He said, “Do you want me to open it for you? If it is your—if it is someone you know…”
“Yes. Please.”
He went outside and, after several seconds, Zoey followed. She found Wu already at the box, working a latch. He glanced back at her.
“I changed my mind. I want to see. I want to see what they did to her. If it is her…”
Zoey hadn’t had time to take inventory of who all it couldn’t be. Will had been at the meetings with her all day, but not the rest of the crew. It could also be Echo in there. Or Budd. The box looked too small for Andre.
“Are you certain?”
She wasn’t, but for some reason she felt like it was something she needed to do. If they’d rigged a camera in the box hoping to catch the moment of despair, she’d use it to talk to them, to tell them that she’d find them all and pound them into marmalade.
Wu opened one of the two overly complicated latches, then the other. Zoey’s cat had wandered up from the lawn. They tried to keep him restricted to the enclosed courtyard out back but he always found a way out when he felt like it.
Wu lifted the lid. Zoey steeled herself.
The stench hit her first, a hot wave of it. She tried not to gag and made herself step forward, to examine the contents. It was a man, naked, compressed into the box in the fetal position. White guy, looked fairly young. Definitely dead and not recently, either. Maggots pooled in the bottom of the box. The last thing Zoey noticed before she turned her back to it was that his eyelids had been sewn shut.
Zoey put her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath. It wasn’t any of her people. Good. Then she felt a pang of guilt because of course this was still someone else’s father, son, brother, friend, whatever. Had they killed a guy just for a dumb prank? Or maybe stolen a body from a morgue, or funeral home? Maybe that was it.
Wu was still standing over the open box, leaning into it, scrutinizing the contents for clues with a small flashlight and taking photos with his phone. Which, of course, is what she should have been doing, trying to gather information. Zoey had nothing to fear from what was in the box other than a very bad smell. And, if her enemies had killed this man in her name, this was now her responsibility, like it or not.
Zoey covered her mouth and nose with her shirt and joined Wu.
“Do you see anyth—”
The corpse reached up and punched her in the face.
Zoey tumbled back onto the cobblestones. Her eyes watered. She tasted blood.
Wu stood there stunned for the moment, unsure of what had just happened, looking back and forth from her to the fist that was still standing erect from the box. The naked corpse then raised itself up slowly from the steamer trunk. It moved unnaturally, not using its hands at all to climb to its feet. It just unfolded itself, like a machine. Dark fluids oozed from various holes, maggots dripped off of it in squirming clumps.
The corpse took a step out of the box. Wu sprang into action.
He pointed his closed fist at the figure and with a sharp mechanical snap, an unseen object launched from his wrist and whizzed through the night, punching the corpse in the chest. Blue arcs of electricity flickered and popped off the embedded projectile, the smell of cooked flesh filled the air.
The corpse was not bothered. It stepped out of the box and lumbered toward Zoey. Its face was slack, the head lolling around without purpose, the mouth drooping open stupidly. The sewn-shut eyelids were sunken, as if there were no eyeballs behind them. A viscous stream of dumpster water ran freely from its lips.
Wu ran in Zoey’s direction, pulled her to her feet, and urged her through the doors, back into the foyer. She and Wu tumbled through and spun to close the door on the approaching corpse—
Zoey said, “Wait!”
Stench Machine the Cat was still out there, heading toward the door but not really showing the urgency Zoey would have preferred.
“GET IN HERE!”
Stench Machine, still traveling according to his own itinerary and no one else’s, trotted through the doorway. The corpse stepped purposefully toward the door, just two strides behind him. Zoey and Wu shoved at the door—
Too late. The corpse effortlessly flung the doors open. Zoey and Wu staggered backward. The corpse stepped forward, then its left hand pistoned out and slammed Wu in the chest so hard that he fell and then slid backward on the marble tiles for several feet.
The corpse, Zoey saw, was wearing a glowing apparatus around its neck. It blinked and got brighter, then a hologram flashed to life, an image projected over the corpse’s dead, slack face. It was another face, a translucent mask of light. It had chiseled features and a pompadour of sculpted, unmoving black hair. A cartoon face, not a real one.
The face smiled and in a modulated voice said, “Didn’t think you’d see him again, did you? Everything comes back around, my dear. WE are RISING.”
Zoey tried to process what it had just said. Then she noticed the sloppy surgery scars on the corpse’s shoulders. It appeared that sparing Dexter Tilley had only bought another four weeks or so of life and Zoey was going to go out on a limb and say that he had not made the most of it.
Then Zoey realized that someone was remotely driving the dead body’s implants and that, oh yeah, it meant this corpse was strong enough to tear her in half.
Wu jumped to his feet, making the simple movement look acrobatic. He waved at her and said, “GO!”
The problem was that the place Zoey needed to go—her bedroom, where she had both a panic room and a necklace that could shut down the corpse’s mechanism—was upstairs. Tilley’s resurrected robot corpse stood right between the two staircases, meaning he’d be able to easily snatch her before she hit the first step on either.
Wu knew her dilemma and urged her to just go, in any direction, to just get distance.
Zoey snatched up her cat and ran out of the foyer, toward the nearest hallway, which led to the west wing of the mansion. Behind her came rapid footsteps, each one beginning with a faint electrical whine and ending with a slap of rotten meat, the machinery inside doing its work. Wu was shouting instructions that she could not hear over the sound of her own frantic breat
hs and hammering heart. She put a hand on her neck, hoping her override necklace would have magically appeared there despite the fact that she’d taken it off an hour ago, before her bath. No such luck.
Zoey ducked into the first room she came to, a space walled with glass cases that had been Arthur Livingston’s cigar humidor. The floor was now mostly occupied by a life-sized animatronic moose Zoey had accidentally won in an online auction while drunk and then quickly broken while attempting to ride it. Before she could turn and force the door closed, a hand grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her backward.
Stench Machine thrashed free, as usual deciding that he’d have a better shot on his own. Zoey tried to remember Wu’s self-defense training. Don’t pull away, turn and face the attacker, get your balance, strike back, go for the eyes. She twisted herself around, feeling hair getting ripped from her scalp, in time to see that the holographic face was grinning at her, the slack visage of the corpse lolling behind it. Well, clearly clawing at its sewn-up eyes wasn’t going to accomplish a lot.
Wu burst into the room and pulled out a jagged, black knife. He plunged it into the corpse’s shoulder and punched a button with his thumb. There was a flash from the blade and a meaty ripping noise. The corpse’s shoulder exploded, sending bits of putrid meat flying. The arm went limp and Zoey twisted out of its grip, then stumbled and fell to the floor.