Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (14 page)

 

THIRTEEN

At two in the morning, Zoey sat on the bottom steps of the grand staircase in the foyer, petting Stench Machine as he ate cat food off of a piece of china that, for all she knew, was an antique worth more than everything she owned. Zoey was starving, and the house was presumably full of all kinds of rich-people food—caviar or whatever—but she was too exhausted to go looking for it or to figure out how to cook it. Instead, she got out her phone and found a pizza place that delivered late at night. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of them in Tabula Ra$a (there were zero such establishments back home in Fort Drayton) so Zoey did what she always did when shopping, which was to sort them by customer ratings. She called the top place and ordered their special: “The Meatocalypse.” She got the large.

And so she sat there, waiting for the delivery guy, not even sure how to let him through that front gate when he arrived. She stroked her cat, her skinned finger throbbing, trying to come up with a plan. This was what she had so far:

Step One: Eat a giant pizza.

Step Two: Go to bed.

Step Three: Get up in the morning, call home and ask Mom what to do.

Zoey's mother had a lawyer who had done all of her divorces, maybe they could get him on the phone and figure out exactly what Zoey needed to do to extricate herself from the vast crime empire she now apparently ran. Didn't the government just seize everything in cases like this? For unpaid taxes and such? If so, she wondered if she could get a car out of the deal, something to drive herself back to Fort Drayton if nothing else. She'd also like to keep the shoes …

Candi, the house security A.I. stripper hologram, blinked to life by the door.

Stench Machine skittered up the stairs in terror as Candi said, “There is someone at the front gate, and my sensors show they are
incredibly aroused.
”

The hologram seemed to be waiting for some kind of instructions but Zoey wasn't sure what she was supposed to do. Could she talk to it?

“Uh, can you tell me who it is?”

There was a pause and then a male voice said, “Boselli's Pizza, delivery for Zoey Ashe.”

Candi said, “Scans indicate the vehicle contains one pizza and no weapons. Shall I open the gate?”

“Sure.”

A minute later there was a knock on the door. A monitor blinked on next to the doorframe, showing that it was in fact the pizza man. He was bald but with a thick, jet-black beard, wearing an old-fashioned navy pea coat with, of all things, a red boutonniere on his lapel. Even the late-night pizza delivery guys in this neighborhood were pure class.

Zoey opened and the man said, “Good evening, ma'am. That'll be thirty-eight fifty. You have a beautiful home, by the way.”

“Oh, thank you. I just got it. Let me run up and get my purse.”

“No problem, sweetie.”

She climbed the stairs and headed for her bedroom. The feed was still playing on the wall, the “Hunt for Livingston's Key” event still hopping from one view to the next, continuing to follow the exciting race to see who could destroy Zoey's life first.

She dug through her purse for her wallet and mumbled to the TV, “You guys do what you want, I'm eating a giant pizza made entirely of meat.”

She gave the feed a glance and saw a grainy nighttime shot of a camera bouncing down an alley. Two guys in black vests and guns were running toward something on the ground. It was a person, lying there, thrashing and squirming.

Zoey stopped what she was doing to watch.

One of them reached the writhing man and said, “Buddy, are you okay? Can you hear me?”

The man on the ground only grunted. One of the guys pulled out a flashlight and illuminated a bleeding man who was bound hand and foot, his mouth duct taped shut. Two things registered with Zoey immediately:

1. He was wearing a red T-shirt that was playing a looping animation of a “Boselli's Pizza” logo;

2. Several of his fingers had been bitten off.

Before Zoey could work out what this meant, the feed blinked away—one of the abrupt jump cuts that Zoey still wasn't used to—and what appeared next was a very clear shot of the stairwell she had just climbed, the view bouncing gently up toward the second floor.

Zoey stopped, and stared.

Text scrolled down a sidebar on the screen—video comments, posted by viewers, almost moving too fast to see. She caught one that said, “Hyena show us her tits before you eat her, bro,” and then that one was quickly driven off the screen by dozens more that simply said “Team Molech.”

Zoey dropped her purse and said, “Oh,
come on.
”

She turned and was not surprised to find the psychopath known as the Hyena standing in the doorway of her bedroom, blocking her way out. She had never gotten a clear look at the guy before, when it was dark and he was busy getting driven into a frozen pond by her Toyota. But there was no doubt it was him—he had ditched his “beard,” revealing an ugly surgical scar that looped around his jaw, looking like work that had been done in some back alley. He was no longer holding the pizza, and Zoey now noted that the little red flower pinned to his chest had a blue pinprick light in the center—that was his Blink camera. He was broadcasting live to the massive “Hunt for Livingston's Key” audience, along with a dedicated base of Hyena fans who simply got off on watching women get tortured in real time. She again wondered how big that audience was, and again decided she didn't want to know. Out the corner of her eye, she saw herself appear on the monitor, from the POV of her assailant. The room was a little too dark for the camera, so the Hyena found the light control on the wall and dialed it up to his satisfaction.

Zoey looked at herself on the monitor and actually had the crazy impulse to fix her hair, but then saw on the screen that the golf club was still on the bed behind her. She quickly snatched it, holding it out toward the Hyena like a sword. A fraction of a second later, the video version of herself up on the wall feed did the same.

He smiled and said, “Bet you never thought you'd see me again. I've had a whole train ride to think about this moment. To get it just right. First, let's get this out of the way.”

He yanked the club from her hands, like he was taking it from a baby. He held it out in front of him, letting his camera get a good view of it.

“Now watch.”

In a series of smooth, casual motions, the Hyena bent the golf club into the shape of a pretzel. He didn't strain, or grit his teeth, or even appear to be flexing with the effort. He just pulled the metal rod into loops, like it was a silver licorice whip.

He held it up and said, “Eh?”

Zoey's mouth went dry. She muttered, “What
are
you people?”

“Wait! I'm not finished!” He held the steel pretzel up to his mouth, and took a bite out of it. Again, with only a trivial amount of effort, like chewing some mildly tough beef jerky. He spat out a twisted hunk of metal and grinned. Then he tossed the golf-club pretzel aside.

The Hyena spat blood, then said, “That fear, that paralysis, that you're feeling right now? That's a primal memory, bubbling back to the surface. It's the realization that first and foremost, you were born to be food for something stronger. That as an organism, you were destined to end your existence with the sensation of teeth tearing flesh and crunching bone. So, here is how this is going to go. I'm going to bite you eight times. Those bites will sever eight tendons, and they will render your legs and arms both inoperable. Then, over the course of days and weeks, I will slowly, and completely at random—”

“No.”

Zoey crossed her arms.

“What?”

“No. I'm not doing this. I'm not running and screaming, I'm not letting you put on a slasher-movie chase for your creeper fans on Blink, I'm not giving you a show. I'm sick of it. I don't know what you are, or how you people can do the things you do. But I've been doing nothing but run for the last eight hours. I'm done with that. I don't run anymore. Anybody out there watching this hoping that's going to happen, go ahead and zip up your pants.”

“You've got quite a mouth on you. And I'm going to cut out that tongue and eat it in front of you. But first I'm going to—”

“
No
. You don't get to monologue for your audience. You're not cool, you're not menacing.”

“I don't think you're in any position to tell me what—”

“LA LA LA LA LA NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU! LA LA LA!”

“Shut up!”

“DOO DOO DOO DOO NOBODY CAN HEAR YOUR EVIL MONOLOGUE AND CREATIVE RAPE THREATS! BUTT SHOW, BUTT SHOW BABY—”

The Hyena lunged at her. Zoey tumbled back, hitting the floor while her on-screen doppelgänger was still singing “Butt Show.” They landed with the Hyena straddling her, trying to pin down her arms. She quickly reached up and snatched the boutonniere camera off his jacket. Before he could put together what she was doing, Zoey worked her right arm free and chucked the camera toward the bedroom door. The view on the wall monitor blurred into a boring shot of the hallway ceiling.

The Hyena screamed, “
BITCH!
” but he was now at an impasse—he had lost his audience, and therefore had lost not only his entire reason for being there, but also his ability to prove he had fulfilled the contract. He climbed off Zoey and ran into the hall to get his camera and—

BANG

—took a single bullet to the head.

A red mist of blood hung in the air. The Hyena flopped to the floor like a sack of dog food. Zoey yelped and crawled backward on her hands.

Into view stepped a Latino man in his thirties, in a black suit with a bright red shirt underneath, open at the collar. He had contrived beard stubble, and was keeping a smoking pistol trained on the dead man on the floor. He crushed the boutonniere camera under his shoe, then checked for a pulse on the Hyena.

Satisfied the man was dead, he stashed the pistol inside his jacket and in a deadpan tone muttered, “Stop, or I'll shoot.” He turned to Zoey and said, “Are you injured?”

“No. I don't think so. Who are you?”

“I apologize for entering your home without permission, and I will leave immediately if that is your wish. My name is Armando Ruiz, and if you will pardon my lack of modesty, I am the finest bodyguard in Tabula Rasa. If you look up my credentials, you can easily confirm this to be true and, in fact, I insist that you do so at your earliest convenience. I came to ask for a job but decided to intervene when I saw what was about to occur. So with your permission, I want to secure the front entrance and main gate, so that I am not forced to deal with additional intruders. This is actually not my preferred method for neutralizing threats, if for no other reason than the cleanup is very unpleasant for everyone involved.”

“Uh … sure. How did … how did that guy do that? He bent metal with his bare hands. Then he ate it.”

Armando shrugged. “I am going to guess that it is due to some combination of being very strong, insane, and high on hallucinogens. As of now, that is only a concern to whoever is saddled with the unenviable task of writing his obituary. Wait here, and lock the door to your room. I will be back within twenty minutes.”

He whipped out the gun and a moment later could be heard stomping down the stairs. Zoey sat on the bed, staring at the bleeding corpse on the hallway floor, then decided she preferred this new stranger's company to that of the dead man. She followed Armando down to the foyer and watched as he worked out the gate controls on the front-door monitor. He tapped through menus and the system assured him that no other threats were on the property at the moment, though Zoey thought it was strange the system didn't at least mention the presence of two tigers.

When Armando noticed her behind him, she said, “Sorry, I didn't like being that close to the dead guy. He came back to life once already.”

“He did?”

“Well. Sort of.”

“All right. Well, Ms. Ashe, I can tell you that the security on the grounds is top of the line, but it will do you no good if you allow strangers through the front door. And my services will do you no good if you do not listen to my instructions. Did you look me up?”

“Oh. No. Hold on.”

Armando headed back upstairs, maybe to make sure the Hyena was still dead. Zoey looked him up on her phone using the exact same method she'd used to find a pizza joint an hour earlier, and found he was lying about one thing—when she ranked bodyguards in the city by review score, Armando actually wasn't number one. He was number four. But to be fair, two of the guys above him were dead, and the other one had a really weird goatee. Armando charged—wait, really?—$300 an hour, but his highlight reel showed him escorting politicians and pop stars, tackling crazed fans and disarming gunmen. In the videos, he always wore some variation of that black suit and red shirt, like it was a uniform he had created for himself. If the clips were in date order, he had also gone through a phase where he wore a bright red fedora pulled down over his eyes, but apparently he had outgrown that. On the whole, he appeared to very much be on the level, and somewhat famous among people in his field.

When he returned, Armando said, “If you do not wish to hire me, I will give you some recommendations for other options. But I assume you know now that you cannot leave the grounds unguarded, correct?”

Zoey said, “Sure. You're hired, or whatever.” She looked around and said, “Did you see a pizza down here somewhere?”

“As your bodyguard, my first instruction will be for you to not eat any food delivered to you by a serial killer.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. I've kind of lost my appetite anyway.”

“I'm going to contact the police to come get the body. It's a nonemergency, so it will take them four to six hours to arrive, if they arrive at all. In the interim I will be appraising the security situation and we will have a serious discussion about it in the morning. There's nothing for you to do, other than get some sleep.”