Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (37 page)

Armando was halfway across, still walking toward them, apparently unarmed, strolling right into the lethal teeth of the guns. He closed the distance, never slowing down as the four men fired right into his body,
through
his body, bullets chipping the clear walls and floor of the bridge. Then Armando was right in front of them and only then did they realize he wasn't perfectly solid, and that his feet weren't exactly touching the ground with each step.

The hologram of Armando Ruiz slowly stopped a few feet in front of the gunmen, his legs still going, walking in place, a looping animation emitting from one of the little toy projection cars that had created Arthur Livingston “ghosts” in the park the night before. One of the gunmen ran up and kicked the toy like a football, sending the Armando projection flying through the sky, walking in place all the way down to the street below.

As the four men watched it go, a hand reached up over the rail of the swim bridge, holding a curved yellow gadget that for one crazy moment Zoey thought was a banana. But then the gadget popped. There was a flash of blue light, and a crack and a sizzle. The gunman in front arched his back. He spun around, his limbs tensing and clenching as if in the throes of a seizure. His machine gun roared, firing out of control, ripping off an arc of bullets that tore through one of his comrades.

Armando tossed his briefcase over the rail, then effortlessly pulled himself up and over, landing in a crouch. Suddenly Wu's katana was in his hand. He ran toward the two remaining gunmen and went to work. A flash of blade, a whistle of sliced air, a sickening sound like a crab shell being smashed with a hammer. An arm tumbled to the ground. Another flash of sun glinting off steel, another high note of gashed air, a man screaming and clutching a stump. Blood sprayed across the glass walls.

The remaining four gunmen were watching from afar. They had stayed behind on the Fire Palace rooftop and were presumably trying to figure out if this was the real Armando or another strangely convincing and lethal hologram. Armando turned his back to them and stepped toward where he had tossed the briefcase. He tapped the latch with his toe and the lid flew open. Just as the gunmen behind him opened fire, two pistols jumped out of the briefcase, as if flung out by some spring-loaded mechanism. Armando caught them in midair, turned, and without taking a moment to aim, fired four shots that landed in four skulls. On the rooftop in the distance, four men slumped over.

And then there was silence. The entire confrontation had taken just over fifteen seconds.

When the last henchman's feed went dark, the camera angle switched to an overhead view from what Zoey assumed was a passing aerial drone. Armando marched off the swim bridge, onto the roof of the Fire Palace casino. Molech's HQ.

Zoey turned back to the middle henchman and said to Molech's video face, “He's going to kill you! I can stop him! Let my mom go, I'll call off Armando, and we'll all talk about this!”

Molech seemed unconcerned. “Those men died doing what they loved—screwing up my most simplest goddamned instructions. But why do I get the feeling that your boyfriend is using a little bit of performance enhancement there? Very interesting. But that's all right, those boys were just there to soften things up for Rodzilla.”

Armando was moving stealthily between the construction giraffes, scanning for more guards. He slowly made his way toward the stairwell door, which stood atop an elevated island in the dry pool.

Armando took a few cautious steps toward the door, then it exploded into a cloud of whirling chunks of debris.

A monster stood in the ragged remains of the doorframe.

Not a monster—a man, made into a monster.

He was about eight feet tall, thanks to thick leg extensions that ended in clawed metal feet, and a helmet that gave him another artificial metal head atop his actual head, so that his real face was looking out from between the robotic monster's teeth, like a sports mascot. Across an emerald green chest plate was painted the word “RODZIL
LA
,” the last two letters smaller than the rest, as if they'd gotten most of the way through and realized they didn't have room. One of the legs was still the color of bare metal from the knee down, as if they'd run out of green paint.

Molech said, “Rod decided to trick out his enhancements a bit—it's all about presentation, you know. But he didn't get started until yesterday afternoon, so…”

Rodzilla stomped forward, stopping at a forklift carrying a stack of plate glass. He grabbed the forklift in his metal claws, and tossed it at Armando. He had apparently underestimated his own strength, however. Instead of squishing Armando like a bug, the forklift sailed twenty feet over his head and disappeared off the edge of the building, squares of glass spinning through the air in its wake. Armando and Rodzilla both watched it go, waiting in silence for a few seconds until it and the glass could be faintly heard crashing into the street below.

Rodzilla said, “Huh. I just barely threw it, too.”

Armando looked him over and said, “Nice paint job.”

“How about I repaint it …
with your blood
!”

Rodzilla jumped ten feet into the air, and landed punch-first into the spot where Armando had been standing, his fist actually smashing through the floor of the pool.

Armando had rolled away, then whipped out the katana and charged at Rodzilla. He jumped and swung the blade and Rodzilla blocked it with a metal forearm, the blade creating a trail of sparks and a scar in the paint.

Armando landed and somersaulted and swung back at the metal monster, swiping at a spot behind the knees. A bundle of cables were severed and there was an eruption of blue sparks. Rodzilla stumbled backward, going down to one knee.

Armando stood and said, “Man, you have exposed cables all over the back of this thing.”

Rodzilla growled, “We have shielding for that! The leg wouldn't bend right with it on there. We were supposed to have like two more days!”

Armando said, “What happens in two days?”

Rodzilla stumbled to his feet, a knowing smile on his lips.

“This.”

The jaws of the helmet closed, obscuring his face. The eyes of the metallic monster head glowed blue. There was a deep rumble. An electric sound, the thrum of gathering power.

Armando ran away from whatever laser or lightning bolts or other lethal magic was going to come pouring forth from those eyes.

There was a flash, and thunder.

Rodzilla exploded into a ball of blue light brighter than the sun.

Armando was thrown flat, tossed across the filthy pool. Burning debris and construction equipment flew. When the smoke cleared, Rodzilla was gone, along with the raised island where the stairwell access door had been. All that remained was a crater into which several tons' worth of beams, fiberglass, and two massive cranes had tumbled.

Armando climbed to his feet, brushed himself off, and realized he was now stuck on the roof.

From the screen of the middle henchman, Molech whooped and said, “All right, Rod lasted three minutes, seventeen seconds! Looks like Bill wins the office pool on that, as he's the only one who put money on Rod making it up the stairs before overloading. And now our hero must find a way off the roof, to fight his way down floor by floor, like the opposite of the original plot of Game of Death! Somebody microwave some popcorn!”

Armando looked around the scattering of debris and equipment on the roof, then grabbed a spool of electrical extension cord he found among the smoldering junk. He dragged it toward the ledge and peered down the side of the building. From that height the wide street below looked like a thin line drawn with a Magic Marker. Zoey felt her guts tighten up at the view, just watching it secondhand.

Armando tied one end of the cord to the railing along the ledge, measured off about fifteen feet, then looped the rest around his waist, cinching it tight. He swiped down with the katana and sliced away a section of the black tarp, exposing a darkened window, smoked to black by the fire that had ruined the building two years ago. He climbed up onto the ledge, his shoes balancing precariously on the rail, his back to the open air and the steep drop below.

Armando crouched, took a breath and muttered, “I hope to god we're getting all this on cam—”

He was interrupted by the plinking of bullets, raking the rail next to him.

The Ice Palace contingent of Molech's guards had apparently figured out they'd let their boss's assassin walk right past them, and were now charging across the bullet-riddled half pipe of the swim bridge. Armando reached inside his jacket and pushed a button.

His briefcase, still sitting open on the bridge, detonated.

A spherical shockwave rippled out in every direction, shattering the bridge as it went.

Amid the cacophony, Armando pushed off the ledge. He flew back, suspended for a moment in the air above the sheer drop to the street below, then the cord went taut and he swung toward the window as the shattered glass bridge cascaded down behind him in a crystal rain, a half dozen Molech henchmen tumbling down with it.

Armando flew toward the window, bullets pelting the wall around it. One crazy gunman was shooting as he fell, as if he would still have to answer to Molech in the afterlife. Armando crashed through the window and disappeared from view.

The feed on the mask of the far left henchman went black, then switched back to Molech's bemused face.

Molech nodded slowly and said, “Yes, I knew every single one of these things was going to happen.”

Somewhere in the background Zoey heard Black Scott say, “Uh huh.”

From her phone, Will said, “It's not too late. We can still call off Armando, you can still call off your man in Colorado. We can still negotiate this like human beings. My counteroffer is this. We give you the gold. You leave Zoey alone for the rest of her life. She leaves town, you don't follow. You get your crazy arsenal and sell it to the world for billions. Everyone is happy.”

Molech's video face said, “Counter-counteroffer. You give me the gold. Zoey's mother goes in the ground. I get Zoey. I sever Zoey's spine, paralyzing her, then bury her in a different coffin with only …
five
thousand cockroaches. I broadcast the results on the Tabula Rasa skyline for the next month, yadda yadda yadda.”

“We don't feel like that's a good faith offer, because it seems more like you're just trying to save money on cockroaches. Let's put all that aside for now and agree to call off the dogs, so that we can at least have time to talk. Tell your man to let Zoey's mother go, she's not a party to this either way.”

“Rather than counter that, I'm just going to sit back and watch Kools bury that jizz-Dumpster.”

The henchman on the far right—the one showing the Colorado feed—displayed Kools placing the lid on the pine box, giving Zoey just a brief glimpse inside—a split second to see her mother's face, eyes wide, realizing what was happening, mouth working as she tried to form a scream with a tongue and vocal cords that wouldn't cooperate. The man pulled out a little gun gadget and fired it into the edge of the lid. A nail gun.

Zoey screamed. Again. She couldn't help it.

Will Blackwater's hologram was still completely unperturbed, however, and Zoey hated him for it, wishing that could be him in that box, about to hear dirt landing on the lid one shovelful at a time. But men in suits don't wind up in shallow graves in the woods, do they? No, they ride behind tinted windows and make conference calls and negotiate away the lives of little people like Zoey and Melinda Ashe. How had she let herself get taken by these people?

Will said, “Molech, Zoey will not negotiate with you if you kill her mother. This is actually true of most people you'll encounter in a business setting.”

“Blackwater, if you say the word ‘negotiate' one more time I'm going to find you, tie you down, and inject bot fly maggots into your eyeballs. This is not a negotiation. This is strength taking from weakness. I assume it's true what she said, that you got the gold on a little drive somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“And I don't suppose Zoey here has it on her?”

“No, she does not.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yes, I do.”

On the screen, Kools fired nails around the edge of the coffin lid, finishing the task in seconds. Zoey screamed for him to stop, then she faced Will Blackwater's holographic ghost and screamed for him to give Molech the coin. No one acknowledged her. One of the henchmen chuckled.

Will's hologram sighed, glanced at his watch and said, “I can see you're not willing to discuss this in good faith, Molech. Get back to me when you come to your senses.”

The hologram blinked away as Will disconnected the call, and Zoey was now alone in the room with Molech's three henchmen. She screamed Will's name. She was losing her voice. The phone's voice command actually responded to this and attempted to dial, but announced that Will Blackwater was not answering.

He had abandoned her.

On the Colorado feed, Kools pushed the coffin into the grave, where it landed with a thud.

From the other two facemasks, Molech said, “Well, looks like it's just you and me, piglet. Did you pick up the subtext of what just happened there? Will Blackwater just cut you out of the equation. I do believe that not only does he not care if I take you back to my place and grate you like a block of cheese, but that he would regard that as a favor.”

“You're a dead man!” Zoey screeched, through tears that probably rendered the threat unconvincing. “Armando is going to chop your head off!”

“Did you even think to keep the gold on you? Or did you just trust Blackwater with it? When the two of you were planning this little powwow, did he even make the effort to convince you to trust him with your one bargaining chip? Or did he just take it and assume you'd be too distraught to notice? You don't have to answer, I'm just curious to hear how he works, that's all. I mean, did he put
any
effort into convincing you he was your friend? Or did he just sit back and wait for your fat fatherless ass to blindly trust him?”