by David Wong
She heard someone shouting commands from the street behind her. A lone VOP security guard, jogging her way. Not because she was an organized crime queen with a bounty on her head, but because she was a presumably drunk idiot in a monkey costume climbing on a giant, rolling inferno. She heard a few hip people in the crowd yelling, “Bonnie! Where’s Raja?”
The guard reached out for Zoey’s leg and she pulled herself into the fire.
The air was instantly sucked from her lungs. Heat squeezed around her like a fist. What was she doing? She tried to shield her face with her arm. She ran forward, between the cubicles. The crowd was going insane, cheering like they were watching a daredevil jump a ravine in a motorcycle. Zoey tried to get a good look at each burning figure as she passed but the flames lashed out at her, flashing into her eyes, cooking her skin, whooshing and roaring around her like snarling demons. This was stupid, so stupid.
She rushed past the cubicles, sure these were just mannequins. This was all a stupid trap and she’d fallen for it. She reached the rear end of the float and jumped off, quickly trying to look around at herself to see if the costume was on fire.
It was. She felt it.
Zoey had to pull the zipper down the back. There were flames back there and she badly scorched her hand, even through the furry gloves. She was only able to yank the zipper down about halfway, but it was enough to get her shoulders out and shove the smoking suit of fur down to her feet.
She still had the mask on, so she was now just a woman in jeans, a sweat-matted HOW ABOUT I SLAP YOUR SHIT T-shirt, and a smoldering monkey head. Would the cameras detect her identity judging from the neck down? They probably could map out her arm cellulite or something. Who cares, at this point?
The fiery float had pulled away from her and Zoey turned to see the back of it, to take one last look. There was a sign on the rear positioned so it would flash to the crowd as a punchline, and in burning text it said, PROUDLY MAINTAINED BY ASHE CONSTRUCTION!
Zoey froze.
That … wasn’t right, was it?
It’s not like parade floats are held to some kind of journalistic standards. Someone would have told her if that building had been her father’s, that he was possibly to blame for its failing fire protection system and that, by extension, she was to blame for not fixing it.
While she stared, Zoey was swallowed up by a flock of dancers and a rapper who was freestyling insults to random people he found in the crowd. Zoey tried to step out of their way, then pulled out her phone and looked at the tracking info for her mother again …
It no longer showed she was in the fire float. She—or the phone—was ahead of Zoey now, moving down the parade. They were toying with her, she knew. She considered going back, finding the Suits, calling it all off. Then the VOP guy came around the fire float, yelling commands at her.
Zoey ran through the dancers, vaguely aware that the rapper was now also berating her. (“Get out the parade, Bonnie, you gonna get run over for real / these floats don’t float, bitch, that shit’s on wheels. Also can we get a round of applause for Bonnie’s titties?”)
Zoey looked back at her pursuer in time to see the yellow jacket get “accidentally” tripped by one of the dancers, who did an impressive job of managing to make it look like part of the choreography. Zoey ran, making her way back down the parade, having seen no sign whatsoever of her mother or her mother’s phone or anything else. She ran around the next float. A quick glance to the side revealed it to be several actors in yellow VOP jackets comically brutalizing a young man who had stolen a loaf of bread, the victim on the ground yelling, “I told y’all, I paid for it! I got the receipt right here! Ow! Ow!”
Then she was moving through a group of marchers in Rasta costumes, or actual Rastas, one or the other. There were several huge Jamaican flags and they were towing the cables of a balloon shaped like an enormous joint, a mechanism spraying smoke down at the crowd from the lit end. If it wasn’t weed smoke, it sure as hell smelled like it.
Her phone showed her target was still up ahead, somewhere.
Zoey passed some clowns who were tossing out little bags of pills like they were candy, then a group of strippers wearing little-girl dresses and holding oversized lollipops. Zoey tried not to think about that and jumped onto the front of the next float, her phone insisting her target was right there with her. Zoey saw the scene they had staged and sucked in a breath.
On one hand, this float seemed like it had been hastily put together, lacking the production value of the others. Many of the floats were the result of professional teams working sometimes years in advance, but this one featured only a clean white “room” (a floor and few pieces of furniture) and in the middle was a banquet table. Lying on it was a man who was vaguely intended to look like Dexter Tilley. Same buzz cut, some crudely applied acne, drawn-on stitches in the appropriate spots. On his abdomen was piled loops of sausage and other meat parts they’d thrown on to suggest he’d been gutted, fake blood splattered over everything, running off the sides of the table and onto the floor. The man playing Tilley screamed for help, improvising lines about how he was being eaten, begging for death.
At the head of the table, sitting in front of a plate full of bloody guts, shirt and face smeared with red, was a person in a costume who was clearly supposed to be … Titus Chobb.
It wasn’t like it was hard to get the costume together, all the guy had to do was shave the sides of his head, add some gray hair coloring, and put on a wrinkled work shirt and khakis. The fake Chobb stood up from his seat and turned to show the crowd a comically exaggerated erection in his pants. He shouted, “Look, I’m getting my youth back already!”
That’s how quickly Budd’s rumor had spread. This float would have already been in the staging area when the talk began to radiate outward from Budd’s contacts. The ambitious designers of this one apparently tore down the original idea they’d worked on for who knows how long and threw together this scene with what they could get their hands on at the last minute, figuring that being on the cutting edge of a scandal would trump production value. From the reaction of the crowd—stunned into silence, with only the drunkest of them daring to laugh—they’d done it. They’d managed to actually cross a boundary.
The only other player on the set was a muscular guy they’d found to play Dirk Vikerness, who stood humorlessly behind “Chobb,” staring Zoey down. They hadn’t been able to find the armor, he was just in a tank top and black leather pants with a ridiculous glowing yellow codpiece. But they at least did get the stupid snake beard right. They’d even added an eye patch, as apparently word of him having died via scissors to the skull had hit the streets.
Zoey glanced down at her phone and saw her mother’s signal crawl her way at the same moment the eye-patched muscle man was walking toward her, reaching out, grabbing her.
The guy on the table lifted his head and said, “Hey, that’s Dirk Vikerness!”
By the time Zoey realized the same, she was flying through the air.
38
Zoey blinked. She had lost consciousness. She found herself lying in a pile of something somewhat soft but scratchy and for the moment, couldn’t remember how she got there. She was staring up at the stars, the sounds of a parade all around her. She was in unbelievable pain.
Ah, now she remembered.
Dirk Vikerness, who it turned out was absolutely alive, had grabbed her by the neck, picked her up, and thrown her like it was an Olympic event. Zoey sat up on her elbows and found she was sitting in a huge pile of fake money. She had landed on the next float down from the Chobb cannibalism scene—if she’d missed and landed on the pavement, she’d likely have split her head open (she didn’t know if this meant Vikerness had failed or succeeded with his throw). She sat up fully and realized that, in fact, she had landed just seconds ago—everyone nearby was staring, trying to comprehend what in the hell had just happened.
She made eye contact with a mostly naked Asian woman and said, “Hi.”
&
nbsp; Zoey tried to get to her feet in the waist-deep cash pool and immediately stumbled. She didn’t seem to have use of her left arm or right leg and the back of her neck was wet with what she was pretty sure was blood. She’d banged it off of the edge, or something, when she landed. The Bonobo mask had fallen off at some point.
She heard a commotion from street level and knew that Vikerness was coming, would hop up here with her within seconds. She trudged through the drifts of fake money and looked back, for the first time registering the float she was on.
It was decorated to be an amazingly lavish bathroom, more ostentatious than anything in her estate, or anything she’d ever install there. Zoey had landed in a giant golden hot tub that could probably accommodate twenty people, full of bundled cash instead of water. Across from Zoey was a naked animatronic sex doll with a Zoey Ashe black-and-blue wig. It was mechanically grabbing handfuls of the cash and “washing” with it, rubbing it around its chest and neck. Standing around the tub were four female slaves, all in filthy rags that barely covered their privates, in ankle and neck shackles. They were actual women and had been fanning “Zoey” and acting like they were feeding her grapes.
She didn’t need the backstory explained for this one. She suspected the parade spectators didn’t, either.
Arthur Livingston, Zoey’s father, had for years trafficked women from all over the world. He gave them safe passage to the USA in exchange for their services, sex work jobs they agreed to only in the sense that the alternative was starving in a refugee camp back home. Many of those women were still in Zoey’s employ, because when Zoey had demanded they be freed, Will carefully explained that these women were not prisoners, that they had no other skills and would simply be snapped up by one of the city’s other brothels or, worse, street pimps. Their new bosses would likely be men, likely be less generous with the pay, likely make less effort to keep them safe. They had nowhere else to go.
Zoey had told Will that she’d only agree on the condition that they were given time and money to get trained in something else, to do sales or coding or … something. He’d explained that they already had those programs, that Arthur had said the same toward the end of his life, but few took advantage due to language barriers, or the burden of childcare, or just not seeing the point in training for something that ultimately would pay less money. Words on top of words, the mortar keeping the bricks of the status quo locked into place. And, eventually, Zoey just dropped the issue. The same as her father had.
She yelled to the four slave girls, who were presumably just local actresses or models, “RUN! Get off the float!”
Zoey tried to do this herself, but there was Dirk Vikerness now, climbing onto the float with them. The girls just stared.
Zoey saw his bare shoulders … and there were the surgery scars. When he was rushed away to get help for his stabbed eyeball, he’d apparently decided to get an upgrade while he was in the shop.
Zoey grabbed her necklace and said, “Stop!”
He did not stop. Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t. Still, she tried a string of similar words. No effect.
The giant man stepped forward and then, projecting his voice for the crowd, said to Zoey, “When you die, this city will throw a party. And I think you know it.”
“Is my mother safe?”
He ignored this question, as Zoey had suspected he would. She was still standing in the tub of money, and actually wasn’t totally sure she could lift her dead leg up over the lip. She was trying to stand in a way that would not reveal to him that at least two of her limbs now didn’t work.
“As you can see,” he said, in a tone that suggested a rehearsed line, “I have come back from the grave, stronger than before. When you see your father, thank him for bringing his invention into the world.”
Dirk Vikerness lifted up his eye patch, and Zoey was sure that what she would find there was some kind of laser or plasma pulse thing embedded in the eye socket, something that would fire a beam and incinerate her.
“GO! GET OFF HERE!” she yelled to the four servant girls.
This time they listened, though they still didn’t seem to grasp the severity of the situation. Everyone seemed to suspect this might still be part of the performance. They pulled free of their prop manacles and jumped ship.
Zoey tried to climb over the lip of the tub, struggling to lift her uncooperative leg. She found herself staring at the rows of spectators as they passed. To the tourists, this all must have looked like some kind of highly experimental theater.
Dirk Vikerness put his hands on his hips and Zoey tried to prepare herself to dive away from whatever flashed out of the man’s replacement eye. Instead, his yellow codpiece opened. Out from it flew a length of thin chain, which ended in a wicked bloom of sharp spikes. The chain curled up into the air like a whip and then whooshed down in a blur, making impact right in the center of the tub.
There was a crash of blue energy and a shockwave that split the float in half, spraying a cloud of fake money and animatronic Zoey limbs in every direction. Zoey tumbled over the lip of the tub, then fell off of the float entirely. The float itself skidded to a stop, the axels shattered from the impact of Dirk Vikerness’s electrified crotch whip. The crowd went wild, now certain this was part of the act. This kind of thing didn’t actually happen to people, right?
Zoey landed hard on the pavement and struggled to suck in air. The wind had been knocked out of her. She tried to get up, and found she could not. Her limbs physically wouldn’t respond to her commands, but also … she just couldn’t. There was no energy inside her. Battery Discharge Error.
She lay there, looking up at the sky.
Someone in the crowd said, “Hey, I think that’s her!”
Oh, well, it wasn’t really a stealth mission anymore. Or any kind of mission.
“Yep, it’s me,” she muttered to herself. “Are you enjoying the parade?”
She knew Vikerness was coming. She knew he could splatter her like a beetle. And still she lay there, listening to the rumbling crowd, staring up at the stars, funny money wafting down like a ticker-tape parade.
And in that moment, she gave up.
39
The giant man with his absurd snake-beard came into view. Apparently the codpiece was not made to actually retract the crotch whip after use, as the chain was now dragging uselessly behind him, scraping along the pavement as he walked.
He loomed over Zoey and said, “They’re not coming, by the way. Your people. If you were expecting them to show up at the last minute, you should know they’re being pursued in the other direction.”
“Sure. Hey, uh, I’m not gonna lie, I can’t stand up.”
He kneeled down over her. “Like a statue that has been toppled.”
“Dude, I just want to know if my mother is okay.”
He drew a knife.
“The challenge of our age,” he said, “is pulling this lost generation of men out of the fake wars you’ve given them to fight and convincing them to fight the real ones. You know they’re still celebrating killing your avatar? We will wake them up, one at a time. We are the children you sacrificed to your god, come back to have our vengeance.”
“I want you to know that while you’re making this speech, all I’m hearing is a series of fart noises coming out of your mouth.”
He smirked and wrapped a rough hand around Zoey’s chin. Holding her head still.
He brought the knife down and said, “First, an eye for an eye.”
When Zoey realized what he meant to do, the fight-or-flight mechanism in her brain finally kicked in and she found enough strength to get her hands up, to try to push him away, to grab at his face. Even without implants, he could have overpowered her without straining himself. Her thrashing around only added to his amusement.
A blade was moving steadily toward her right eye.
Then there was a sickening thud, and Dirk Vikerness’s head bounced forward.
He just stared for a brief moment. Then blood drippe
d down onto Zoey’s face. He reached back and felt his head, pulled away red fingers—
Another thud, then he slumped over on top of her. His body was twitching.
Someone was rolling the huge man off of her now. It was a very large, very drunk-looking woman probably in her fifties. Zoey didn’t recognize her costume—she was dressed in a tank top and suspenders with filthy jeans, a bandanna around her neck. She had a sledgehammer in each hand. They were apparently not plastic props, as one was now matted with blood and hair.
She nudged Dirk Vikerness with her foot and said, “Did I kill ’im?” She then looked at Zoey. “What’s goin’ on here?”
Other people were crowding around now. They didn’t seem to know what was happening, either. She heard one of them mutter her name.
Zoey said, “Get away from him!”
She scooted away from Vikerness, pushing backward on the pavement with her one working leg. He groaned and got up on hands and knees, blood streaking down his face. Grunting, growling. He raised a hand toward her. Zoey thought he was going to get up and grab a utility pole and smash her like he was swatting a fly, or unleash a bolt of lightning from his fist.
Instead, he hissed to the crowd around him, “You idiots, that is Zoey Ashe!”
He climbed to his feet and snatched his knife off the pavement, the blood running crimson zebra stripes across his face. He took a step toward Zoey—
He was tackled from behind. The woman with the hammers. He dropped the blade and another woman ran in and grabbed it.
“I’ve got his knife!”
Vikerness stood upright, the huge woman now clinging to him, the bloody man wearing her like a backpack.
“GET OFF ME!”
Someone from the crowd flew in and dove at his knees. Dirk went down. Someone else tried to get him in a headlock. People swarming in, strangers in costumes trying to gang-tackle the huge man like a fullback.