by David Wong
Vikerness snarled and flung everyone aside. One went flying, slamming into a storefront wall and going limp. This only inflamed the crowd. They closed in again, screaming curses at the enraged, bloody man. The big woman found one of her costume hammers on the sidewalk and smacked Dirk Vikerness in the back, and he fell to his hands and knees once more.
Then the woman who’d picked up the knife came running up, shouting, “He’s got those implant things! I know how to disable it!”
She started wildly stabbing Dirk Vikerness in the ass.
This did not dislodge the Raiden capacitor, but it definitely got the man’s attention. He spun on the woman and snatched her throat. The big woman with the hammer stepped up, screamed, and swung.
The impact of the hammer on Dirk Vikerness’s skull was a sound Zoey was pretty sure she’d never forget. The huge man flopped to the ground like a sack of meat. Then the woman screamed and hit him again. And again. Finally she stood over him, huge chest heaving. The gang who’d felled the giant gathered around, stunned at the turn their night had taken.
The big woman said, “Now is he dead? If not I’ll hit ’im with somethin’ bigger.”
She turned to Zoey, who’d never gotten up off the sidewalk.
“You all right, dear?”
“Yeah.”
“You know this turd?”
“Sort of. This is Titus Chobb’s right-hand man.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Rich guy, employs a lot of people with guns. He was the guy in the float back there—it doesn’t matter.”
Others were tending to the person who’d gotten flung into the wall—a young guy, who was sitting up but with a blank expression. A girl yelled for an ambulance. Work crews were rapidly trying to figure out how to get the shattered float out of the way so that the parade could continue. Nothing stops the party in Tabula Ra$a.
The large woman, who Zoey decided was probably not a medical professional by day because she didn’t seem to know the rule for not moving injured people, yanked Zoey to her feet like she was righting a knocked-over garden gnome. Zoey held on for support for a moment but found she could stand, sort of. Her left arm still didn’t work. Several women, friends of the hammer lady, were trying to talk to her.
“Are you okay? Oh my god is that guy dead? Jenny, look at his scars. Are you okay? You’ve got blood on the back of your shirt, did you hit your head? I think there’s an ambulance coming. Are you o—”
“Yeah, I’m okay, I think. Who, uh, are you people?”
“I’m Dani,” said one of them, “that’s Jenny, that’s Shonda.” The last one was the hammer lady.
“Hi. I’m, uh—”
“You’re Zoey! Obviously.”
A bystander said, “Who?”
Shonda said, “Oh, she’s the one who got them to run the buses out to my trailer park. She’s the only reason I can work in the city. And if you’ve ever used one of them free clinics, thank this girl right here.”
“Oh. Thank you,” said Zoey. “All that was … the very least we could do.”
Zoey looked around, nervously. Her life had been saved because she had apparently gotten attacked in front of the only handful of people in this city who actually liked her.
“In fact,” Zoey said, “I, uh, need to get out of here before the less-friendly people in the crowd find me.”
On cue, Zoey heard someone pushing through the gathering behind her. She turned and braced herself, very aware that even a small child could knock her over in her current state.
Several teenage girls popped out. They were bouncing with excitement.
“Zoey! Zoey! Oh my god, we watched it all. Are you okay? Can we get a picture? Real quick?”
On one hand, this seemed like a less lethal threat than she was anticipating. On the other, she was having primal high school flashbacks. The girl who was asking was wearing tights with cat ears and a tail. Zoey got a homecoming queen vibe from her and wondered who exactly she wanted to show the picture to.
Zoey said, “Do what you want, but I’m not going to do anything to entertain you. The blood on my face isn’t mine, if that’s what you were hoping for.”
The girl’s face fell. “Oh. I’m … oh god, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to be rude. I’m a fan, if this is a bad time … I’m sorry. I just wanted to say thank you.”
“Oh. No, don’t be sorry. I was—I just got attacked by a guy who launched a thing from his crotch. I assumed you were being sarcastic, I don’t think I have fans.”
“Seriously? You went in and talked down that guy who was holding that girl hostage? I named my cat Zoey.”
Another of the teens, this one dressed as a nurse who’s about to get fired for violating the dress code, said, “You want a drink? There’s a vendor right over there.”
“No, I’ve got a thing, I have to, uh, meet my mother somewhere. Hopefully. Oh, you guys are already taking the picture—should I wipe off my face?”
“Nah, the blood is badass. Smile!”
The cat girl and the inappropriate nurse squeezed on either side of her and a pink buzzing gadfly dropped in and snapped the pic of all three.
A third woman dressed as a futuristic schoolgirl in a glowing pink wig, who Zoey eventually noticed was dressed as Naoko from My Hero Reo, said, “Can I have a hug, or is that weird?”
And so Zoey hugged her and then she was hugging everyone and the whole time she could hear people nearby talking about what to do with the apparently dead guy whose brains were splattered all over the pavement. The destroyed Zoey Bath float was now being dragged slowly down the street by a pair of trucks, someone having decided to just make the shattered wreckage part of the parade. The crowd gasped as a gigantic Cthulhu balloon passed overhead, the tentacles on its face rigged to reach down and snatch at the crowd as it passed. People shrieked and laughed.
Zoey tried to pry herself away from her fans and largely failed, then two serious-looking men in suits showed up. Large men, not brandishing weapons, because they didn’t have to. Behind them was a wall of yellow jackets, a whole swarm. Why hadn’t they intervened a moment ago? Maybe they were all hoping Dirk Vikerness’s demise would mean a spot had opened up for a promotion.
Shonda asked, “Who are these guys?”
“It’s fine, I was expecting them. Thank you. Really.”
One of the suited men said, “Ms. Ashe, we’d like to take you to your mother.”
“Where is she?”
The other man silently pointed up and behind Zoey, to the top of Freya’s Palace in the distance. Titus Chobb’s stupid black blimp was parked up there, visible only as an oval void in the stars.
“I’ll go, but you have to agree not to do anything to these people. They stopped that monster from killing me, that’s all. If you want to blame somebody for Dirk’s death, other than Dirk himself, then blame me.”
“Mr. Vikerness was not an employee at the time of his demise and his death is not our jurisdiction. This way.”
“You’ll have to help me walk.”
40
Zoey wound up in the back of an unmarked sedan. This made for an incredibly awkward silent car ride with her captors and, as she always did in such situations, she distracted herself with her phone.
She tuned in to Charlie Chopra, who was doing a broadcast from the scene of Dirk Vikerness’s crotch assault on the Black Parade and his subsequent death by hammer. He was interviewing Shonda while, in the background, Kowalski was processing Vikerness’s huge, muscular corpse, now covered with a sheet. Kowalski was carrying a tiny bloody object in a clear plastic evidence bag, presumably the capacitor someone had cut out of Vikerness’s body.
Still, Zoey stared hard at the corpse, expecting the man to spring to life and start smashing everything into oblivion. She watched intently as they loaded him into the back of an ambulance parked on the sidewalk, his face covered, a limp hand flopping sadly out from under the sheet. In he went, the doors closing behind him. He would soon be pu
t into the ground and the worms and bugs would not note that he tasted any better or worse than anyone else.
Zoey turned off the stream, then remembered the strange request Will had made earlier, that she go back and watch the video from the night of her hostage crisis. She’d had no clue at the time what exactly he’d wanted her to see, but now, she had a suspicion …
She browsed through archived feeds from the scene a month ago, looking for shots of the crowds that had gathered to watch the Night Inn fiasco unfold. She started playback around the moment her leopard-print convertible arrived. There was the building with the Godzilla bite taken out; there was the thin yellow line of VOP guards holding back the gawkers.
She zoomed in on the crowd. She spotted some of the individual ringleaders they’d called out in their analysis earlier in the day, and in fact found the scruffy kid who’d led her into the room at the Screw to patch into her meeting (she wondered if that kid had survived the fire). When her leopard-print car pulled up, he and the rest were the first to start mooing and hurling insults. They were right by the spot where she’d parked the car, where they knew she’d hear them. Zoey saw herself get out of the car, hear the taunts, and say something about them to Will. Zoey remembered that she’d wanted to push the crowd back, but on the feed Will was saying something that she’d since forgotten, how he’d wished he could get the hecklers closer to the building.
Zoey turned up the audio, scrolled the video along the crowd by hopping across various feeds, watching every face. She counted. There were no more than twenty people actually yelling horrible things at her in that moment. About that many more stood around them, kind of looking spiteful but not really participating in the rage. Outside of that group she only found people who weren’t necessarily cheering Zoey, but they were smiling, waving, trying to get her attention. A group five times the size of the trolls. Once she got to the periphery of the crowd, she saw faces that showed no sign of knowing who Zoey was, or why this girl in the table lamp skirt was even relevant to this situation. She accidentally hopped to a feed two blocks away and found only oblivious citizens strolling out of shops or ordering food from vending machines, only vaguely aware that there was a commotion over at the Night Inn and that they should probably steer clear.
In the end, it had just been that little group of yelling guys, so few that you could stuff them all into a single van. That’s all it had taken to generate enough noise and ugliness to create the illusion that the entire species was against her. Will had wanted them even closer to Dexter Tilley to reinforce that belief that his people were an overwhelming majority, feeding his illusion of power and Zoey’s illusion of powerlessness.
Out of curiosity, she switched the focal point of the feed, calling up all of the feeds that had been pointed at her.
Zoey’s lifelong relationship with cameras was tumultuous and toxic. She could, if she was being honest, take a pretty damned good photo under the right circumstances. Looking upward a little, pushing the chest out, making her eyes big, just enough of a smile so as not to show her jacked-up teeth. But seeing her in a candid photo someone else took was like looking in a funhouse mirror, the camera turning her into a cruel mockery of herself. There was the little double chin, the fat rolls, the corpse complexion, the eyeliner that was never, ever drawn exactly the same on both eyes. An unlovable troll that would make guys turn off the bedroom lights so they could pretend she was someone else.
There, on these feeds, was that woman, only also looking scared to the point that she seemed sickly, fragile. It was horrible to see this version of herself and her impulse was to shut it off, look away. But she was also beginning to understand.
There she was, now recoiling from the wreckage of the spider robot, then steadfastly deciding to head into the building to face the monster that had done that damage. Zoey tried to see herself as the crowd would see her, this lumpy, jiggly thing in a dumb outfit, clumsily clambering up the food truck, then slowly climbing the ladder, wind whipping around her lampshade skirt and showing her fat, polka-dotted butt to the crowd. Totally unequipped to face the threat that had smashed its way into the building but facing it all the same. There was a moment where her left foot slipped on a rung—Zoey didn’t even remember that happening—and an almost comical gasp went up from the crowd. Scared that she would fall.
In his careful staging of the scene, Will had turned Zoey into an underdog, someone to root for. An everyday woman just trying to do her best in absurdly awful circumstances.
Once Tilley took her out of the room and away from the view of the cameras, the feeds had shifted to Will. He had immediately gone back down that ladder, actually sliding the last few steps, like he’d had tons of ladder practice in his life. He hit the ground already pointing and barking orders, coordinating with Andre and Kowalski. A team of firefighters dragged the food truck away and, a few minutes later, staff and customers started streaming out of the front entrance to cheers from the crowd. Cameras swarmed in as Will huddled with an armored team of Kowalski’s men, chopping the air with one hand to emphasize commands as the men checked their elaborate guns.
Before they ran into the building, he swatted one guy on the shoulder pads and said, “Get her the hell out of there.”
It was a clear narrative, and not totally inaccurate. Zoey sacrificing her own safety to occupy the superpowered psychopath so that her people could rescue the innocents. All of the important, complicating context that might muddle the story—that Zoey’s side had inadvertently supplied that psychopath with his powers, that she profited from the plight of hostage and captor alike—was conveniently invisible to the cameras.
Before she could watch any more, the car rolled to a stop and her door was opened.
41
Freya’s Palace hadn’t really registered with Zoey the first time she’d passed through it; she’d had other things on her mind at the time. Now, in her state of shambling exhaustion, she decided the building was a modern wonder. The space was all creamy marble and gentle curves that had somehow been engineered to absorb all sound. Walking through the lobby was like stepping outside on a morning coated in fresh snow, a silence like a pair of soft hands over her ears. In the center of the cavernous lobby was the aquarium, a blue pillar that stretched up for five stories, the elevator running up through the center. As they approached it, Zoey could hear gentle trickling fountains. No signs flashed, no announcements played; the space was an oasis in the sensory assault that was downtown Tabula Ra$a. Zoey badly wanted to just lie flat on the floor and rest forever in Freya’s peaceful embrace. She was pretty sure she had a concussion.
As Zoey and the two suit-goons rode up past the schools of startled fish, signs for the various spa services gently faded in and out on the screen as they passed their floors. Massage, beauty treatments, that sort of thing. Woman stuff. Then, at some point she happened to notice one of the floors was devoted to Cupid’s Eros, the sex therapy company her mother worked for.
Wait.
Did she work out of this location? Why did Zoey not know that? Was that just a weird coincidence?
The elevator reached the glassed-in boarding area on the top floor where the looming black shape above them had swallowed the stars. Zoey stepped on board the Innerer Schweinehund to find Titus Chobb was sitting alone at a table, her mother nowhere to be found. Chobb, however, was hardly alone in the passenger hold—Zoey counted six VOP guards in full bumblebee armor. The two guys in suits were following her in, so that was eight men and those were just the ones she could see. All for little old Zoey.
All she had brought with her was a tiny object no bigger than a shirt button. It was in the front right pocket of her jeans and she actually had no idea if it had survived the altercation at the parade. But it was there, the lone object she’d been given before leaving the mobile vapor pod. She, in the end, had only one target. Nothing else really mattered.
“Please sit,” said Chobb, sounding casual. “You don’t want to be standing when we take off, th
e floor shifts rather abruptly. And you don’t look like you are very steady on your feet even now.”
“Where is my mother?”
“She’s here. But we need to have a conversation, just the two of us. No competing voices in our ears to cloud our thoughts. Please, sit.”
“What if I don’t want to sit? Does anyone ever tell you no?”
“You can stand if you prefer. Just grab onto something.”
Actually, she couldn’t stand. She shambled over and managed to land her butt in the chair before she collapsed onto the floor. She ran her fingers over her front pocket, felt the tiny lump there. Titus had been eating some kind of dainty little salad prior to her arrival, which annoyed Zoey for several reasons.
He put down his fork and said, “I assume you know my son went public with the story. The details of his transplant, the truth behind Dexter Tilley’s demise.”
“Good for him. That’s the story that could have been told all along. Then none of this would have happened.”
“The bounty for your confession was of course lifted as well, by whatever anonymous donor had placed it.”
Zoey tried to roll her eyes, but even those muscles were too sore to work properly.
“I want you to know,” said Chobb, “that whole campaign against you, the unfortunate use of Mr. Tilley’s corpse, that was all Mr. Vikerness, acting on his own. He was trying to solve a problem on the fly, in an extremely misguided way. Within hours of Tilley’s disappearance, ugly rumors started to spread. Dirk was tasked with quelling that controversy. Still, I do not defend my former employee’s methods, they were extreme and irresponsible.”
“Convenient that he took all of that responsibility with him to the grave, leaving none for you.”
“I do not absolve myself. However, I feel like you should in turn acknowledge that you took things too far by abducting Martius.”
“Well, that of course was all Will Blackwater, acting on his own. Grossly irresponsible. And all of those other words you just used.”