by David Wong
“Then we make sure he doesn’t get me. You wouldn’t be saying this if it was my father sitting here instead of me.”
“If I agree with that statement then you’ll say I’m holding you to a different standard. If I disagree, you’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not my father.’ So what’s the point of responding at all? You’ve already made up your mind.”
Zoey studied the monitor, the one with the map showing the six angry red dots. “If we run into one of the bad guys’ helicopters, can we shoot it down?”
Echo said, “You want to shoot down a helicopter over a populated city? You’ve seen what one of those looks like when it crashes, right?”
“You know I have. So we’re going?”
“Turning around now. You’ll feel us banking.”
They tilted, heading toward the industrial park and a situation that had apparently gone badly awry. Zoey figured that, in retrospect, they probably should have predicted that.
“Hey, Marti,” said Zoey, “whose cat is that?”
He shrugged. “Just a stray I guess. It hangs around my dad’s ranch.”
“We need to get him water. When we get somewhere safe, I mean.”
“Okay.”
They flew for a moment. He wouldn’t even look down at the cat. Just a costume prop to him.
She said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“Why? Why all of this, why come after me?”
“I wasn’t really a part of that. I—”
“Yes you were. Come on.”
“I don’t know. It just got out of hand, like I said.”
“‘Got out of hand.’”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“People say that to me ten times a day. Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“Because you’re not a guy.”
“Explain it to me, then. Tell me what it’s like.”
Marti looked hard at her, searching for a way to phrase it. “It’s like everyone is laughing at you all the time and all you want to do is shut them up.”
“I absolutely feel like that.”
He scoffed. “Everyone thinks girls are God’s perfect little angels. You’re never in the wrong, always the innocent victims, always calm and wise and perfect. And nothing is ever your fault. If a boy cheats on a girl it’s because he’s scum, if a girl cheats on a boy it’s because he didn’t treat her right.”
“Get this cat water when we get somewhere safe.”
He didn’t reply.
They flew in tense silence, Zoey watching out a window as the glimmering city oozed under them, white strands of streetlights and headlights crisscrossing and pulsing. A spider’s web, Zoey thought, waiting for her to descend, get entangled, and be bled dry.
She jumped when the monitor suddenly blinked back on. Andre’s face appeared on the screen. He was covered in sweat and appeared to be running. An ominous red glow washed over the landscape behind him.
“Can you hear me?” he grunted. “There’s been a complication!”
Will rushed over. “We’re just a few minutes out.”
Andre stopped to swat away something that was jumping at his face, it looked like a large insect. They were swirling all around him, black specks backlit by the hellish light in the sky. It looked like a Biblical apocalypse.
“No! Abort. There’s no place to land. We’re gonna get snatched up, no matter what.”
“That’s not an option,” barked Will. “Can you get on top of a—”
“No. Will, tell Zoey the cat isn’t here.”
“Andre, listen. Go to the—”
“They’re here! Gotta go!”
There was more shouting from off-screen, and the feed went dark.
Echo said, “We’re four minutes out.”
Will looked toward the cockpit. “Have we been detected?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“Turn around.”
Zoey was about to override him, tell him to go in anyway, then she heard Echo gasp at what she saw on the horizon. Zoey moved to the cockpit. They were coming up on the sprawl of low buildings that was the industrial park, from their height looking like an array of miniature models on a table. Perched in the middle of them was what looked to Zoey like a glowing Japanese lantern someone had set down among the models, casting a gently pulsing light on everything around it. The stars directly above it were shrouded behind a pillar of smoke.
It was the Screw, and it was on fire.
31
The lower half of the building was fully engulfed, the flames steadily clawing their way up through spirals of tiny boxes. It was lighting them up like pixels, the blaze sweeping up into one container apartment after another.
Echo punched the controls and the helicopter banked, hard this time.
Zoey said, “Will, we can’t.”
“Zoey, you have to start thinking more than one move ahead. You want to help Andre and Budd, this is the direction to fly to help them. Either we’ll get a call from Chobb’s people wanting to do an exchange, or we’ll get a call from Andre saying they got away. In either case, we can only come to their aid if we keep ourselves free.”
Zoey hated the fact that she had no rebuttal for that. She grabbed her phone and started searching for Blink coverage of the fire. The camera view hopped across members of a crowd standing in a ring around the building, the heat keeping them some distance away. Those little specks were flying and buzzing and jumping around. The view panned down to see dozens of grasshoppers bouncing through the grass around everyone’s shoes. Then the crowd started whooping and gasping and pointing until the view swung upward, to see what the fuss was about. Halfway up, one of the storage containers was tumbling out of its socket and rolling down to earth, trailing fire behind it like a meteor, crashing to the pavement below and scattering meager furnishings on impact. The brackets holding the living spaces in place were melting loose, the building was falling apart.
Nearby, a teenage boy yelled, “We found Foles! We found Foles! He got out!” A celebratory cheer went up.
Blink was great for showing you an event, searching “fire at the Screw” got Zoey this feed immediately, but that required the algorithm to actually know about the event or person you were looking for. What she wanted, to see if Andre and Budd were being arrested/abducted by yellow-jacketed goons, wouldn’t come up for her under any combination of terms.
Echo said, “The VOP would block any feed of their arrest or transport; they wouldn’t want us knowing where they were taken.”
“Then what the hell do we do, keep flying stupid circles around the city?” Without waiting for an answer, Zoey walked back to their hostage. “I’ve already forgotten your name.”
“Marti.”
“Marti, I’m tired, and sore, our friends may be dead or worse, and all of this is because your people took my goddamned cat. So I am asking you, as a human being. You say you don’t have him, so who does? And where are they?”
“I swear to god I don’t know anything about your cat, I don’t even know why you’re asking. Is the cat a code word for something else?”
Will, it turned out, had been listening. “Marti, this whole city is about to combust over this. Do you understand? People will die. Bystanders. The people you’re talking to right now might not survive this. Your father might not survive this. You might not survive this. If we find out what’s going on, maybe we can defuse it.”
“If you find out what’s going on with … the cat?”
“If we find out what’s going on with your father trying to whip the city into a frenzy over Dexter Tilley’s murder.”
Zoey said, “That was your dad’s bodyguard who killed him, right? Dirk Vikerness? Are you acting like you don’t know that?”
“DV didn’t kill Dexter Tilley. Neither did my dad, or any of us.”
“But you know who did. And you know why.” The look on his face made that more than clear.
“Yes.”
“We’re wa
iting.”
“I’ll show you. But I won’t tell you.”
Zoey threw up her hands. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll tell you where to go, who to talk to. But I want that person to tell you what happened, because you won’t believe me if I just say it. I know you won’t. I’ll take you there, on the condition that you let me go once you have your answers.”
“Is this mysterious person your father?”
“No.”
“Oh, but let me guess. This person you need us to go talk to is in some fortified location with one entrance and exit that happens to be perfect for launching ambushes.”
“No. They’re not. I swear.”
Zoey looked at Will, who seemed to be thinking it over. But where else did they have to go?
“So this place you want us to go,” asked Zoey, “will I find my cat there, too?”
“No. Not as far as I know.”
Zoey looked pleadingly to Echo. “Then what are we supposed to … I mean … how much time is left?”
There was a clock in the corner of the main monitor. It was already almost eleven P.M. The “feast” of Zoey’s cat was supposed to happen at midnight.
An hour. And they had absolutely nothing. No leads, no plan. Strangely enough, the possibility that they would simply fail to rescue Stench Machine hadn’t ever actually entered Zoey’s mind. She hadn’t allowed it to. She had imagined things turning ugly in all sorts of ways, but had never thought that her trolls would just outsmart her. That midnight would come and they would … do what they’re going to do. The realization was hitting her in waves, like nausea.
Will said, “All right. Where is this place?”
“West Hills. The little shops there? It’s in one of them.”
Echo said, “That’s that little area where the Ballistic Couture shop used to be. East of South Hills.”
Will asked Marti, “Which shop, specifically?”
“I’ll tell you when we land.”
Everyone looked skeptical. An anxious warning buzzer sounded from the cockpit.
Echo leaned over it and said, “Two of the VOP aircraft are now tracking and tailing us. We flew too close to the fire.”
“If we go back to the estate,” Will said to Zoey, “no pursuit can get to us. We can land right on the roof and they would have to peel back at the property line. You could go inside, sleep in your own bed. Regroup.”
“But then what? Nothing’s been solved.”
And she would be utterly alone in that bedroom.
Will nodded. Zoey wondered how often he had made these fake offers to her father, giving him the chance to verbalize making a choice that was, in reality, no choice at all. Echo went up front and punched in commands.
Zoey asked, “Wait, won’t the bad guys just follow us to where we’re going now?”
“It has a protocol for that situation,” said Echo. “It just means it will take longer to get there.”
The helicopter’s “lose pursuit” system involved flying at top speed toward a tiny private airfield in the desert, but with no intention of landing there. Instead it swooped low and, from the rear, ejected a box the size of a refrigerator. The box hit the ground, bounced a few times, then expanded into a flimsy wire-frame object roughly the shape of the helicopter itself. Then, from a small compartment at the top of the frame erupted a camouflage tarp that floofed into the air and draped itself over it, creating the very convincing impression that the helicopter had been landed in the field and hastily covered.
As they watched all of this unfold on the monitor, Echo said, “The decoy actually has a pair of heat generators to attract the attention of anyone scanning for infrared, it should perfectly mimic the cooling engines of this aircraft. Meanwhile, all of our own countermeasures kick in, including an exhaust capture system that eliminates our heat signature entirely. It should appear to any pursuing aircraft that we’ve landed in that field.”
Zoey said, “It won’t take them long to figure out it’s not real.”
“It actually will. They know this model of helicopter and they know the antipersonnel measures it comes with. No one will approach it who isn’t suicidal, they’ll have a whole siege strategy they’ll have to put into place. Remember, they can’t just blow it up, they think Titus’s kid is in there.”
The pursuit-losing gambit also lost them an obscene amount of time—it was now thirty minutes to midnight. No one in the vehicle said what everyone knew, which is that if the trolls’ intention was to eat cooked cat, then Zoey’s friend, the one who’d gotten her through her breakup, the one who depended entirely on Zoey for his safety and who she’d promised she’d never allow to be harmed, could already be in the oven.
Zoey looked down at Marti, at his slack-jawed, stupid face, and thought carefully about exactly what would make him feel what she was feeling right now. What would make all of them feel it.
32
In Tabula Ra$a, only a handful of buildings were more than twenty years old and the vast majority had been built within the last decade. In a city in which everything is shiny and new, the hot fad was to build old.
The estate Zoey lived in, for instance, was reconstructed out of components recovered from a mansion built in 1935, transported across the country and reassembled brick by brick. Likewise, the trendy boutiques and bars selling everything from vintage clothes to hallucinogenic muffins in West Hills were often designed to look like old structures that had been renovated and gentrified. There was a candied gnocchi shop run out of a building that appeared to have once been an old-time service station that had in fact been built from scratch to look like that, complete with a new sign mounted on top of an artificially old and weathered one. Next door was a bar designed to look like it had once been a bank, including an antique vault door leading to the kitchen. The most prominent building was a decrepit granary whose roof had been partially collapsed when the neighboring silo had fallen on top of it—both structures having been in exactly that position from the design stage. It was a dance club.
None of these buildings, however, offered a strong, flat surface for the helicopter to land upon. The thing weighed eight tons, Echo noted, and would collapse most rooftops. More importantly, there was also no way for their stealth aircraft to remain stealthy as it landed. West Hills was bustling with activity (it was, in fact, along the parade route) and even the drunkest of shoppers would notice a giant semi-invisible machine chopping up the night air above them.
But, where their pursuers would be alerted by trending Blink streams about a black stealth helicopter skulking through the night, they would presumably have no reason to note the appearance of something that was, say, the opposite of that. Thus, as part of the preparations before they’d left, Andre had downloaded an alternate “disguise” for the aircraft that would let them blend rather than disappear. Echo scrolled through menus and punched it in. Instantly, the helicopter’s programmable skin transformed from a night sky transparency into a bright pink wash of bouncy letters and animated women’s breasts. Flashing and scrolling all around the aircraft were the words:
TITTYCOPTER
AERIAL NUDE PARTY BUS
NIGHTLY LAS VEGAS TO TABULA RA$A TOURS
BOOK NOW!!!
Dance music blasted from speakers and swirling spotlights flashed across the streets and structures below.
In the rear storage area, where in the stock version of this aircraft a Special Forces unit would have stowed their various soldiering supplies, was a second set of costumes (the original plan had required them to change at least once in the process of getting away). Andre had been tasked with finding the backup outfits and it was clear they were last-minute rentals, a bundle of seven themed costumes from the popular children’s franchise Raja’s Entourage. The five of them quickly distributed and pulled on the costumes, Zoey and Echo changing in the little storage closet.
Zoey would be dressed as Bonnie the Bonobo, Echo would be Lumpy Ninja, Wu was ShitShark, and Will was Professor C
heeselog. The hostage, Marti, was forced to take the costume of Bald Sasquatch. Andre and Budd, had they been there, would have gone as Pizzabot and his imaginary friend, Fudgefiddle. Even though the show was called Raja’s Entourage, there was no Raja costume, as the character had never actually appeared in the show. Every episode was about the entourage trying to frantically cover for Raja’s absence from that week’s adventure, a running joke being the increasingly absurd ways in which they described the absent character and his actions once they were inevitably asked, “Where’s Raja?”
They each grabbed a bottle from the wet bar, to play the role of drunks in search of a Devil’s Night party. It turned out one of the clubs at the periphery of West Hills had a rooftop bar (the entire structure built to look like a huge cosmopolitan glass), so the gaudy party copter hovered overhead and they all climbed down the ladder into the mass of shocked revelers below, the winds from the rotors blowing off wigs and spilling drinks. It was exactly the kind of obnoxious stunt that drunk tourists would pull on a night like this, so it was perfect for what they were trying to accomplish: none of their enemies would see that incident scroll across Blink and say, “That sounds exactly like the kind of thing Will Blackwater would do.”
They headed downstairs, then out through the club. Once on the sidewalk, Zoey watched the helicopter take off on autopilot, leaving her feeling stranded. She adjusted her mask. It was kind of hard to see out of it, which she thought could be a problem in an emergency. She was carrying the crate with the knockoff Stench Machine inside, she hadn’t wanted to leave him alone on the helicopter—she imagined him jumping up on the control console and crashing it into a skyscraper.
“So it’s just going to wander around the sky until we need it?” asked Zoey. “How long until it runs out of gas?”
Echo checked something on her phone. “Uh … it’s not gas that’s the issue, it’s that it’s saying it has to be back to its owner by midnight? It says another customer needs it.”
That got Will’s attention. “Are you serious?”
“Well, it is a rental…”