Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (49 page)

She flicked through the menu, hundreds of items, each representing a gadget. She swiped down and down through the list, until the screen stopped when it reached the bottom.

The very last schematic on the indecipherable list was simply called:
ZOEY
.

Her coffee cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

Was this new? It was literally the only English word on the whole list. Had Echo seen it? Or Will? Why hadn't they mentioned it?

From behind her, Wu said, “There you are. We need to go over the escape plan.”

“Escape plan?”

“If everything fails, the final branch of the plan—Plan Z, we will call it—is I get you in a vehicle and drive you as far away from here as possible.”

“How about we just make sure it doesn't come to that?”

“We are not gods. We do not control the universe. All we can do is be ready for what it brings us. Come with me.”

They descended into the garage, where they found the armored sedan pointed at the door. The blue BMW escape car Budd had bought was now parked off in a corner, forgotten. Probably a hundred-thousand-dollar car, but they'd decided they didn't need it, so it gets discarded like a cheap toy. Insane.

Wu said, “Get in.”

“I don't get what it is we need to practice here. If everything goes to hell, you'll grab me and we'll get in the car and go.”

“You cannot assume I will still be available, or alive, to facilitate your escape. You need to know how to initiate the vehicle's emergency protocols. And we cannot assume you'll figure it out on the fly, when for all we know at that moment the mansion will be in flames and collapsing around you.”

“Jesus, Wu.”

“Zoey, regardless of what happens, you cannot be surprised. Men like me and Will who have a war background know something about the world that you do not. In those moments of chaos, everything you thought you could depend on falls away. Everything turns upside down. Heroes turn out to be cowards, and vice versa. Your best-laid plan fails, your most haphazard improvisation saves your life. Friends turn out to be enemies. In the end, Zoey, you can trust nothing. You can only have another plan ready to go. One after another. Get in.”

Zoey slid into the driver's seat. The dash and windshield display lit up.

“All right. So is there a voice command, or—”

The door slammed closed on its own.

The garage door began rolling upward.

Zoey assumed she'd said something or hit a button. She took her hands off the wheel and glanced around the dash.

“Uh … cancel. Stop. Stop doing what you're doing, car.”

Instead, the car lurched forward, tires squealing, flying toward the still-opening door.

“Stop! Hey! STOP!”

The door hadn't cleared enough room for the car to pass, but the armored sedan wasn't going to wait—it ran through it, the rising door scraping the roof as it passed. The second door was completely closed. No matter—the armored sedan bashed through it, chunks of debris piled on the hood as it flew out and down the back drive.

“Hey! Stop! Car! Stop driving! Park! Brake! Engine off!
STOOOPPPP!!!
”

The car did not respond. Zoey grabbed the steering wheel, and hit the brake—doing either should have automatically returned control to her. It did not.

The car pulled itself into traffic, weaving in and out of morning commuters, professionals from Beaver Heights who were sipping tea and applying makeup on their way to the offices downtown for yet another Tuesday. And then they were into the suburbs, whipping past the churches and family restaurants and weed dispensaries. And Zoey suddenly knew where they were going.

And she began to panic.

She tried to scream for help, pleading for another commuter to block the sedan's path, or run it off the road. But cars were remarkably soundproof these days, each driver in a bubble that seals out the outside world, people playing music or listening to soft-spoken public radio shows, commuters worried about parking and office politics and trying to remember if they had wheeled the trash out to the curb. The comforting little concerns that let us blot out the big things. No idea that they were two feet away from a young woman slapping her window and mouthing wordless cries, trying to get their attention.

They were through the suburbs now, heading into the city. Zoey desperately reared back with both feet and kicked at the driver's-side window. The glass bounced and flexed but held. This was glass intended to withstand an antitank rocket, it would be an all-day task even if she had power tools. And yet she still tried, because this was her life. She kicked the passenger side; she kicked the windshield. Who knows, maybe one piece of glass had a minute manufacturing flaw, or an invisible crack. Maybe it would trip some alarm in the auto drive, and cause the car to stop, or deviate from the course.

It did not.

As the buildings of downtown rose into view, she saw the ominous black countdown on the skyline. She punched the dash, smashing the glass panel readouts and maps and rearview monitors, hoping to damage some crucial component that would make the car stop short of its destination, anywhere other than Molech's renovated hotel. The armored sedan smoothly hummed along despite its wounds, just as its designers had built it to do. They had done their job well—her little bubble of panic bobbed along in the sea of indifference that was Fairfax Avenue.

The twin black-clad pillars grew in the windshield. Zoey screamed, and cried, and ripped the plastic inner panel from the driver's-side door, finding only solid metal underneath. The car slowed and placidly reached the Fire Palace, turning down a ramp leading to a heavy steel door. It rolled open as she approached—they were, of course, expecting her. By the time the car rolled to a stop, the inside of the driver's-side window was a pink smear of blood from Zoey's fists. When the door was yanked open, Zoey was cradling her hands, having turned her knuckles into hamburger trying to punch her way out.

Leaning into the door was Molech, wearing the ridiculous supervillain costume he'd probably paid six figures to have designed (a black costume that had been cut to leave most of his torso exposed, featuring cobalt highlights and a huge, bright blue codpiece), and the sidekick he'd named Black Scott.

Molech looked skeptical. “I'll be damned. He wasn't lying. Get her out.”

Scott reached in, and Zoey pushed herself backward, kicking at the reaching hands, pressing herself up against the passenger-side door. Then that door was yanked open and she tumbled out onto the oil-stained concrete. Someone laughed.

A boot pushed her to the floor. Her arms were pulled behind her back and she felt something metal go around her wrists.

Molech circled the car, looked down at her, and said, “This here is what happens when you put blind trust in people. You Livingston crew, you let traitors continue in your midst. See, organizations, just like men, are subject to natural selection. If your organization is vulnerable to infections of disloyalty, it'll die.”

From the floor, Zoey choked out the word “Who?”

“Doesn't matter now, does it?” To someone standing nearby, Molech said, “She got implants? Anything inside her she's about to spring on us?”

The bearded man who had examined Armando's body the day he died—who Molech had called “Doc”—leaned over Zoey.

He studied a gadget in his hand and said, “No, she's clean. Or she's unmodified, anyway.”

Molech shook his head.

“I don't like it.”

Scott said, “Seem too easy?”

“Yeah. Our man sneaking around inside the estate, rerouting the car … they
had
to know.”

Scott said, “Damn, man, she's a hell of an actress if so.”

Zoey rolled over, and tried to sit up. Her hands were bound with some kind of wire, but it felt loose. If she could just get one hand free …

Molech said, “No, they wouldn't let her in on it.”

“Well … maybe she's got, like, a bug or tracking device on her that we can't detect? Somethin' new?”

Doc interjected, “It would still have to send a signal back. This building is a dead zone, we're jamming everything.”

Molech said, “And she don't have a tiny bomb up her butthole?”

Doc just shrugged, making it clear that if there had been, he would have mentioned it long before now.

Molech said, “Maybe just to be sure, we ought to reach in there with a fishhook. Pull her guts out her ass, turn her inside out.”

Scott said, “Man, it's past time to go, if we're gonna get set up to coordinate with the countdown. Just stomp her head in and get it over with.”

“She might know somethin', even if she don't know she knows it.”

“Then stick her in the cage and let Doc work on her while we're gone. Let him reconnect some nerves, turn her own body into a torture chamber.”

“Yeah, let's do that. Wait—no. No…” Molech squinted again, the expression he apparently made when the gears in his head were turning. “No, that's what they'd expect me to do. Whatever plan they got, it's based on getting her inside my HQ, then us leavin' her alone here. I bet that's the whole point.”

Scott was getting impatient. “Man, you can sit here and second guess yourself all day. Fact, I bet that's what they want most of all. You pacing around and worrying about her instead of keepin' your eyes on the prize.”

Molech nodded. “Yeah. Screw it. Bring her with us.”

Zoey sat up and said, “But how do you know
that
isn't what we wanted you to do?”

Molech leaned over and punched her in the jaw. Blood exploded into her mouth. She crashed to the floor, feeling sharp chunks like broken porcelain on her tongue. She spat three teeth and a gob of dark blood onto the oily concrete, then rolled over just in time to catch a boot to the face. Zoey's nose collapsed with a gut-turning
crunch
and she had just enough time to feel a boot smash into her rib cage, bones cracking like eggshells, before she blacked out from the pain.

 

FIFTY-SIX

There had been a four-year window in Zoey's life in which she didn't believe in monsters. It lasted from age six, when her mother told her that the scary aliens she saw in a movie weren't real, until age ten, when she ran into a big, fat, mean girl named Bella.

Bella was the class bully and one time she cornered Zoey behind a bowling alley, apparently having picked her completely at random. She wound up sitting on Zoey's chest, her knees pinning her arms down, her bulk making it hard to breathe. And as it got harder to breathe, Zoey started to panic, and as she panicked, Bella started to smile.

It had been Zoey's first glimpse of that dark thing that lurks in people, the writhing worm in the soul that feeds on other people's pain and fear. Zoey's terror and helplessness were making this person happy to the point of euphoria (in later years, Zoey would say it was getting Bella
high
). That such a look could appear on a human face in that situation was an earth-shattering revelation to little Zoey, a lesson more profound than anything she would learn in school that year. It was then that fourth-grader Zoey Ashe realized that, yup, monsters exist, all right. Not Bella, but
the thing inside Bella
.

Call it what you want, dismiss it as an old evolutionary defect in the brain that gets a charge out of cruelty, whatever. But
don't
say that the monster isn't real—what Zoey saw behind Bella's eyes was very real, and terrifying, and utterly inhuman. It was a dark, mindless hunger to hurt that was only being kept in check by fear of some greater power—parents, teachers, cops, a bigger bully. Over time, Zoey Ashe would see how this ugly, parasitic thing lurked behind everything and everyone, like the roaches in that greasy old public housing complex that came oozing out of the walls the moment the lights were off. The history books were, in fact, nothing more than a log of mankind's largely futile attempts to keep the monster in check. Zoey knew, even then, that if a person like Bella was ever to get so big and strong that nothing could touch them, so that they could just feed that monster, unchecked … then that would be the end.

Zoey would, of course, encounter the monster again and again over the years. She saw it in the eyes of Jezza, as he leaned her over the oven. She saw it in the face of the Soul Collector on the train, even with his eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. She saw it in the Hyena, when he had come after her in her bedroom that first night.

But what she saw on Molech's face was different.

Over time, Zoey had found that most people know they have the monster inside them, and decent people get scared when they feel it lurching to the surface. When they feel that quick rush of guilty pleasure after hitting a child or delivering a cruel insult to a spouse, they immediately drown it in shame, spending weeks doing good deeds to push that dark, writhing thing back down into the shadows. Others will invent some fiction, to pretend they have the monster under control. Corrupt cops torturing suspects in back alleys and telling themselves they're doing it for justice, or guys getting drunk and breaking their girlfriend's jaw, then blaming the booze (desperately trying to ignore the fact that the pleasure of unleashing the monster is the main reason they drink in the first place). Medieval priests ripping the guts out of screaming teenage girls, and pretending the burst of pleasure they felt in their loins was the spiritual reward for doing God's will. Everyone dressing up their cruelty as something else, rather than admit they are the monster's slave.

But not Molech.

Molech understood the monster, and embraced it—saw the world through its eyes. Five days ago Zoey had thought that only a ridiculous man would adopt a comic book supervillain name like “Molech” for himself. But now it made perfect sense. There was no “Chet Campbell” left inside that well-muscled body. There was only the monster.