by David Wong
Zoey stuck out her hand to Mei and said, “Good to meet you!”
She shook Zoey’s hand with the same enthusiasm she’d use to pull a wad of hair out of a drain. Wu then forced a joke and pulled his flannel family away to browse the snack stands around the courtyard.
Zoey sighed. She had about ten more hours of this ahead of her. She dug her tube of hand cream from her pocket, only to find it was empty.
46
That evening, the team did their Halloween gift exchange in the courtyard gazebo, close enough to hear the last of the kids passing through the maze, the skeleton in that corner giving chase and wiping out for probably the fiftieth time that day (at some point, Zoey had started to root for the skeleton to catch them). They had previously agreed to do this Secret Santa–style, everyone drawing a name to buy a single gift. Will never showed up, which was not a surprise as he’d said not to expect him. He was nothing if not dependable: when Will said he wasn’t coming to your thing, you could bet he’d do whatever it took to not be there.
Echo had drawn Will’s name and said she’d gotten him a Hawaiian shirt covered in animated parrots that shrieked a song called “Pretty Paris Park Parrot Party” loud enough to be heard from several blocks away. Budd drew Echo and had gotten her a five-year subscription to a cigar-of-the-month club. Andre drew Budd and got him a unicycle. Zoey drew Andre and gave him a pink Cow Zoey T-shirt, size extra-small, signed by Zoey. There was no gift for Zoey, meaning Will had drawn her name and he had apparently boycotted the entire affair.
Zoey listened to the skeleton rise and fall for maybe the last time. “It’s annoying that Will didn’t show up for this.”
“Maybe that was his Halloween gift,” said Budd. “He knew how aggravatin’ you’d find it.”
“Come Monday,” said Zoey, “I want you guys to start assembling a list of everything. Everything we own, everything we do, out in the open and under the table. All of it. No more surprises. Then we’re going through it and I’m deciding what parts I still want a hand in. If you’ve got a problem with that, too bad.”
Budd said, “We’ll have it in your hand by eight A.M. tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to pull an all-nighter, just make it a priority—”
“What he means,” said Echo, “is that we already have that list. You asked for it a couple of months ago. After you got out of the hospital.”
“Oh. Right. Well, I’ll actually look at it this…”
Before Zoey could finish her sentence, she happened to glance over Echo’s shoulder. Behind her was the exterior of the ballroom and she just happened to catch someone slipping inside the small door there. That, Zoey knew well, should not have been possible.
“Uh, hold on. I have to go check something.”
Zoey limped over toward the door, mainly worried that some kid was going to activate Santa’s Workshop and accidentally build a doomsday weapon. Not only should that door have been locked, but it should have taken an extraordinary effort to unlock it if you weren’t a Suit.
Zoey reached the door, eventually, and poked her head inside the vast darkened room.
“Hello?”
Alonzo’s bodyguard, Deedee, did not act startled to have been discovered. She was standing in front of Santa’s Workshop, in the exact spot where Alonzo had stood a day earlier, which had been only hours before someone had gotten in and abducted Zoey’s cat. She glanced back at Zoey, then turned away again.
Zoey approached slowly. “Is … Alonzo here?”
“He went home.”
“Can I help you with something? You’re Deedee, right? I don’t think I ever got your last name.”
“My last name is Dunn.”
“Is Deedee like the letter D twice, like initials? Do they stand for something?”
“Dun-Dun.”
“Is there something I can … wait, your name is Dun-Dun Dunn?”
Deedee sighed. “My father,” she said, pausing to sneer at the word, “was a … whimsical man.”
“Well, I see why you learned how to fight. Is there something I can do for you? That door was supposed to be locked.”
“I’m sure it was.” Deedee glanced around the room. “What is it like? To be this wealthy?”
“Ah, well, I don’t think I know yet? If you’d asked me a year ago to guess what it’s like to be rich, I’d have talked about fancy cars and big houses and vacations. But now I’m realizing that’s like asking somebody in one of those Indian villages where they still don’t have clean water how they’d handle living in my old trailer. They’d be like, ‘I’d just sit around and enjoy my clean water all day.’ It’s kind of like that, you’re beyond these basic needs but then there’s this whole layer of new problems on top. Suddenly you’re in charge of helping shape the world. I guess I could ask you what’s it like to be strong, to know you can beat people up.”
“You think that’s what I do?”
“Aren’t you Alonzo’s bodyguard?”
“I protect my uncle from danger.” She shot a brief glance back at Zoey. “Of all kinds.”
“How did you get in here?”
“There are ways.”
“Have you done it before?”
Deedee didn’t answer.
Zoey asked, “You think I’m dangerous?”
“Yes. Because you don’t really know what it’s like to have a boot on your neck but you think you do. So you’re going to slip right into the status quo. Same as all the rest.”
“That thing with Alonzo going on camera and saying he was eating Tilley’s heart, the thing that got us to come visit. Your idea?”
Deedee shrugged, as if none of that mattered now.
Zoey said, “What is it you want?”
“For me and the people I love to be able to walk the streets without fear.”
“Isn’t that what Alonzo is doing? With his mayoral run?”
“The change I want doesn’t happen from the top down. It happens on the streets. If the people out there don’t change, nothing Alonzo does will matter.”
“Well, I don’t want to be part of the problem, Deedee. I really don’t.”
“You are passing a stabbed man in the street and promising not to stab him a second time. That’s not enough. The blade needs to be removed, the wound healed.”
“You came in here for a reason. You want a weapon? Or are you looking to go all the way with implants?”
“I want, for the first time in my life, to enter an elevator with a man and not stand there with the knowledge that he can overpower me anytime he feels like it. I want to be able to go jogging alone, at night. And when I enter a room, I want the people there to take me seriously, because they know they have to.”
“You think this machine can give you all that?”
“I’d like to at least find out. But where there’s power, there’s always somebody like you acting as the gatekeeper.”
“Deedee … if you want it, if you really want it, come back in a week. We’d need to set you up with the surgeon, there are pre-op appointments, medical history stuff, training so that you don’t accidentally rip your legs off. But I do want you to take some time to think about it. I’m telling you, getting a whole bunch of new power all at once, you can lose yourself. Forget why you even wanted it in the first place.”
“And yet, you’re keeping your money. And power.”
“Yes.”
“Then that, too, is my answer.”
“If that’s still your answer in a week, come back here.”
“See you then.” She turned to head for the door.
“Oh,” said Zoey, to her back. “I have an extra cat, do you need one?”
“No.”
47
Zoey had just eased herself into the tub when she got a call from Carlton saying Will was at the front door. Zoey grunted and decided she wasn’t going to move. Let him come back in the morning. Then Carlton called again and Zoey cursed and dragged herself out of the water, did a cursory job of drying herself
, and pulled on pajamas and a bathrobe.
Will wasn’t in the foyer. Instead, she found him standing out on the cobblestones outside the big doors. She went out and let the doors close behind her.
She threw out her hands and said, “What the hell?”
“Can you be more specific with your question?”
“What the hell, Will?”
“Are you asking why I’m here? Or are you asking why I didn’t share all of my information with you about the Tilley situation?”
Zoey answered with a silent glare. He knew damned well what she wanted.
“Look,” he said, “you asked me to find out how to get to Titus Chobb. His weakness was his dead wife and his sick son. If I’d told you the strategy, you’d have vetoed it. So the answer to the question ‘How do you get to Titus Chobb’ was ‘Find a way to exploit those weaknesses and don’t tell Zoey.’ The only way to carry out your order was to shield you from it.”
“No.” She stabbed a finger at him. “You’re the one who got my mom that job at that Freya building. That’s too much of a coincidence. You set that up and you did it months ago. You knew this was coming.”
“I knew that the guy who instigated Arthur’s death and was building a private army was going to eventually be a problem? You think that took some kind of next-level foresight?”
“And you got my mother involved, how?”
“She came to me and asked how she could help. I said she could keep an eye on this guy who was going to be a threat soon, talk to him, take his temperature. The rest, she did on her own.”
“This city is full of absurdly hot twenty-five-year-olds you could have thrown at Chobb. There is no reason you had to pick my mother for that task.”
“You think Titus Chobb wants a hot twenty-five-year-old? You don’t think he can get that whenever he wants? He didn’t need that; he needed what Freya had given him. He needed someone to give him permission to be the better version of himself. By making him feel like, deep down, he can still be a good man, that he could maybe even go off and have a whole new life with this woman, a fresh start. The same thing that captivated Arthur and probably several males your mother meets in the course of an average commute.”
“That shouldn’t be any woman’s job.”
“Fixing a clogged toilet shouldn’t be any man’s job but it’s either that or let the house fill with shit.”
“So you knew all the stuff with Dexter Tilley was going to happen, somehow?”
“What? No. That blew my plan apart. I wanted a rift between Chobb and Dirk Vikerness. The staff was loyal to Chobb, the people on the ground were loyal to Dirk. Nothing I’ve tried since Tilley has succeeded.”
“But it all worked out exactly how you wanted anyway.”
“Because you found a way. You convinced Marti to come clean. You and your mother somehow convinced Titus to abandon his life’s work altogether. I’ll never know how you sold him on that. I made a mess of the situation and you cleaned it up.”
“God, you’re so phony when you’re trying to play humble. I think you’re trying to butter me up to get me to ignore the obvious, which is that the Vanguard of Peace was your Halloween present, your prank gift to me. That this whole thing was orchestrated, by you, in some kind of misguided attempt to … what? Consolidate power?”
“It’s strange how you simultaneously have an impossibly high and impossibly low opinion of me.”
“You keep exceeding my expectations in both directions. You know I promised Titus that I’d keep you in line. Make sure you don’t wind up running the city according to your evil desires.”
“It seems like the first step in doing that would have been not telling me.”
“Which raises a question in my mind that I still can’t answer,” said Zoey. “What do you want?”
“Right now?”
“Just, in general.”
He shrugged. “I want what every man wants. I want to build something. Look around you. This house, all those buildings downtown, what do you think all of that is about? It’s about leaving a mark. Not just the stuff you can see, but the connections, the systems. This guy needs a thing and has money, this woman on the other side of town has the thing and needs money. Find a way to connect those two and you’ve made the world a happier place. That’s really all it is, all of civilization—just organizing those transactions. But the second you set yourself to building something great, a swarm of jackals wash in and start gnawing at it. Grifters, thieves, bureaucrats. Pretty soon, fighting them off is all you get done. What do you want?”
Zoey thought about it.
“I want to be comfortable in my skin. I want a little switch I can flip that decides whether or not people are paying attention to me. I want a daughter. A little nerdy daughter who wears dorky glasses and knows a million facts about dinosaurs. She has a little round face and hates dresses. Her name is Marcy.”
“You think any of that’s possible, in your situation?”
Zoey didn’t answer. They stood in silence for a bit. It was cold, and the remnants of Zoey’s bathwater had dampened her pajamas. She studied the cobblestones and tried to see if she could find dried bloodstains.
“How long ago,” asked Zoey, “did your wife pass away?”
“The accident was four years ago this February, on the tenth. I don’t know the exact time, she was gone before the ambulances even got to the scene. But would have been around three-fifteen in the afternoon.”
Zoey studied her fuzzy slippers and said, “This summer, when I had my breakdown and woke up in the hospital … my mom said the paramedics showed up and found me passed out in bed. Pills and alcohol nearby. Then you called nine-one-one, she said, because Carlton was asleep and I’d sent Wu home. But you were there, for some reason. That’s what she told me.”
Will didn’t answer, because she hadn’t asked a question.
“But that story has never added up. Not based on what I remember.”
Will just looked off into the distance, watching the giant jack-o’-lantern casting its orange glow around the front lawn, as if he was worried it would come to life and start rolling after them.
“My memory from that night isn’t great,” Zoey continued, “but it’s not a total blackout, either. I did send Wu home, against his wishes, then took off in the convertible and found a trashy bar. I’d saved some of the pain pills from my surgery last year and took four of them, then drank a whole lot, really fast. I found this guy, big biker guy with a tattoo on his neck—or maybe he just liked the biker leathers—and dragged him back to the bathroom. So I remember that, that whole … sequence, and then he left me there and I stayed behind. I took off my dress and threw it in the trash, because it had … stains, and I remember that and then I remember that I was then lying on the damp concrete in my bra and panties and in that moment that floor just felt like a big puffy cloud I just wanted to sleep on forever. Then I blinked and I was in the hospital.”
Will said, “If you say so. I wasn’t there for that part.”
“You weren’t? Because that means someone had come and gotten me out of that situation and did it in a way so that no one ever found out about it. No staff at the bar ever talked, no customers talked, neither did anyone passing by outside. Not a single glimpse from a running Blink camera, not a single anonymous rumor leaked to Chopra. Not even the biker talked. I can’t even fathom how that was accomplished. But it happened, and it happened because this mysterious, all-powerful person didn’t want strangers to see me like that. Then that person proceeded to tell absolutely no one the embarrassing truth in the months since, not even my own mother. Not even me.”
“If you say so.”
She sighed. It was like pulling teeth. “You should have been at the party today, Will.”
“Just not my thing.”
“Hey, I hate crowds, too. There’s too many—”
“Variables to control. Yeah.”
“Hating parties, that’s the only thing we have in common.”
“Anyway,” she said, turning to go back into the foyer, “for your performance this weekend, I’m giving you a six.”
“I guess I’m getting better.”
She went inside, closing the door behind her.
AFTERWORD
If you didn’t already know, this is the second novel in this series. The first is called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits and it’s not too late to go back and read it if you started with this one. It’ll be like a prequel! And when beloved characters show up there who are conspicuously absent from this one, well, this way you’ll know not to get too attached.
If you enjoyed this book and would like to see more adventures involving Zoey and the Suits, the best thing you can do is go out onto whatever social media thing you use and tell everyone you liked it. Now, the way social media works, these messages will travel further if there’s some kind of outrageous statement attached, so maybe try something like, “You’ll love this book if, like me, you agree that cannibalism should not only be legal, but required.” If it doesn’t get any traction, you can just keep adding stuff. (“Too bad we’ll never get those laws changed as long as women are allowed to vote. Also, I never, ever tip.”)
It also helps to leave an online review at whatever outlet is appropriate for your situation. If you’re the type of reader who still likes to go outside the house now and then, you can even spread the word in real life. Maybe go to a pharmacy during their busiest time of day, walk up to the counter and throw a bottle of erectile dysfunction pills at the cashier, and say, “We no longer need those. We have these.” Then hold up all of my books, kind of fanned out in your hands. There are a lot of ways to go about it, these are all just suggestions. The point is that whether or not there are future books will be determined by the invisible hand of the marketplace, and word-of-mouth is everything.
Speaking of which, I should also note that one danger of writing about a hypothetical future in which an Internet-of-Cameras has reshaped society is that it is almost impossible to keep up with the speed at which the actual technology appears. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits was conceived in 2012 and finished in 2014. That means, for example, that doorbell cameras didn’t exist when I first sat down to write it. Today, all of my neighbors have them and, sure enough, there’s a social network/app called Neighbors where you can join up and watch other people’s feeds. Did something terrible and/or hilarious happen in the neighborhood last night? Jump on and see it from every angle, follow the action down the street. So, yeah, it kind of looks like by the time I get around to writing a third book in this series, Blink will mostly exist in real life but will just be called something else. It’s like when you read a futuristic sci-fi novel from the sixties and a character says something like, “I need to access the mainframe with my portable computer! Find me a DATA-NET port!” and you’re like, “Man, this author was way off. What a dipshit.” It’s not my fault. I’m writing these as fast as I can.