Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (18 page)

Zoey said to Will, “I'm here, show me what you got to show me.”

Will just gestured toward the twisted truck.

Zoey shook her head. “What am I looking at? The truck? It looks like it made it out of the explosion better than the building did.”

Will shook his head. “This didn't happen in the blast. The truck belongs to the cleanup crew. They left it parked here last night, this is what it looked like this morning.”

“I don't understand.”

Echo said, “Look at the bumper.”

Zoey walked around to the front and Echo said, “You see those dents? Two of them, each about as wide as a hand, about four feet apart on the bumper? One on top, one on bottom.”

“All right.”

“Now imagine in your mind a person grabbing the bumper so that they could twist a truck in half with their bare hands. That's where the dents would be.”

“Oh.
Oh
.” A freaking
person
had done this. Zoey felt a sinking in her gut. Suddenly the five of them seemed very exposed, standing out here in the open. “Jesus.”

Will asked, “Now do you understand?”

“Not in the least.”

“It's a threat. Intended for us. Or rather, you, since now these are
your
trucks. It's from Molech.”

“There's that name again. What's this guy's deal?”

Will pulled out his phone and brought up a video feed. “This is from a drone, above us right now. Look.”

It was an overhead view of the dark circle of the blast crater, zooming in until Zoey could see the six of them standing around the twisted truck. The ruined vehicle was, she could now see, part of a message that could only be viewed from the sky—the truck they were examining formed the lower part of a capital “L.” Scattered around the crater were the remains of probably a dozen other vehicles that had been torn apart and rearranged to form four letters: G O L D.

Zoey said, “What, he wants Arthur's gold? He can have it. Tell this Molech he can pick it up, or we'll drive it to him, whatever is convenient. Throw it in the trunk, we'll take it right now. I totally don't care.”

Will shook his head. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“Are you saying we don't have any gold?”

Andre answered, “Oh, I'm sure Arthur had some, somewhere. Gold and platinum and several hundred other commodities that made up a portfolio that even he barely kept track of. If somebody stole all the gold Arthur owned, he probably wouldn't even have noticed. Probably kept it in a cigar box in his basement.”

Budd said, “It's like if somebody kidnapped your family and their only ransom demand was a jar of mayonnaise.”

Zoey said, “Okay, and why do these people seem to have superpowers, again? Are they magic?”

Will said, “No. But the reality isn't any less alarming.”

“Tell me.”

“Information like that, Ms. Ashe, is precisely the kind of helpful insight I bring to the table as one of the chairmen of Livingston Enterprises. Unfortunately, I am not currently employed in that capacity, as you know.”

“Ah. That's what this is about. You want a share of the money.”

“I want to not get torn in half by one of Molech's carnival freaks. Whatever our differences, I think you and I have that in common. And if you look at this twisted wreck behind me, you will understand why
I am growing alarmed.
I'm sorry if I haven't exactly had time to be polite about this.”

“Ah, and this is the point where you try to convince me you're really a nice guy after all.”

“I'm not a nice guy. But I am on your side. Don't confuse the two. You hate me because I'm blunt and have no patience for wasted time or wasted words. Because I'm not
nice
. Well, a lot of nice people are nice because they've figured out it's a great way to get things from other people. Some of the slimiest snakes I've run across have been nice. So let me tell you now, if you ever see me resort to being nice,
run.
”

“Forgive me if I'm not a genius negotiator like you, but my fragile little woman brain is telling me that just because the other guys are monsters
doesn't automatically mean you're not
.”

“You'll change your mind when you hear what I have to say.”

Armando was nervously scanning the lip of the crater, and then the sky, as if something was going to swoop down and spit fire at them at any moment. “Zoey, I no longer consider this a safe meeting location. I was thinking guns earlier, not … whatever did
that
.”

Will said, “I agree. There's a nice meeting room in Livingston Tower, it has walls, chairs, and alcohol. Hell, we'll take you up to the roof and you can go for a ride in your own helicopter.”

Zoey asked Armando. “You know where that is?”

Armando smirked. “People on airplanes flying thirty thousand feet over the city know where Livingston Tower is. It's pretty hard to miss.”

“Is it safe?”

“It's a crowded building full of armed security. So I guess the question is, safe from
what
?”

 

SEVENTEEN

Livingston Tower was the tallest and weirdest building Zoey had ever seen in person. The structure that loomed in the windshield of the sedan was banana-shaped, and flat black (at the moment—Armando noted that it could turn any color, the black was for mourning) and the banana curve caused it to lean over the street below, as if it was in the process of being blown over by a hard wind. There was something vaguely obscene about it. Actually, no. It wasn't vague at all.

As they approached, Zoey asked Armando, “So that's my building? I own that whole thing?”

“And it's full of your employees, too.”

“Weird.” So she could walk in there and just fire them all. Ruin their lives, just like that.

They arrived at the circular drive in front of a row of revolving doors.

Zoey said, “Don't stop. Pull back out to the street. Keep going.”

“To where?”

“Somewhere other than here. If this is where they want to meet, I want to go … whatever the opposite of this place is.”

They rounded a corner, and Zoey saw the two trailing vehicles—driven by Will and Andre—follow them. She looked around for a sleazy bar or maybe a Chuck E. Cheese they could meet in. They passed a high-end massage parlor, a three-story-tall shop advertising military-grade weapons for sale, and another fast-food franchise she had never heard of, a place called Korea Streets that boasted dishes called bindaeduk and mandu. Undulating across the windows above them all was a row of text that shouted, “
LIVINGSTON MEMORIAL AND DROP PARTY TOMORROW
!
5:00 PM UNTIL EVERYONE HAS PASSED OUT
.”

And then she saw it.

It was a ragged, half-finished building that looked like forty stories of stacked garbage—tarps, sheets, cardboard, plywood.

Zoey said, “Ew. What happened to that place?” Smoke poured from dozens of haphazard gaps where windows should have been. “Is it on fire?”

Armando said, “That's just people trying to keep warm. And I think you own ‘that place.' This whole plaza is yours, unless I'm mistaken.”

“What happened to it? It looks like the front was blown off by a bomb.”

“This is as far as construction got. It was supposed to be upscale condos. Broke ground five years ago, they got the frame up and the concrete down, then it got stalled over some legal thing. Over time, the homeless started squatting there until it just … filled up. Everybody calls it Squatterville.”

“Pull over. This is where we're meeting.”

Armando looked alarmed. “I'm going to advise against that, for reasons I should not have to state out loud.”

“We're driving a rocket-proof luxury tank, I think we can risk getting within fifty feet of poor people.”

Armando reluctantly did what he was told, and Zoey remembered that he didn't really have a choice. This whole employer/employee thing was intoxicating. The car pulled onto a patch of weed-riddled concrete in the shadow of the battered structure. Zoey gawked up at it. It looked postapocalyptic.

Andre's Bentley and Will's sports car pulled up behind them.

Armando nodded back toward Will's vehicle and said, “Aston Martin Vanquish. 2023, I think.”

Zoey and Armando got out of the car. Zoey looked up and was met with faces leaning down from every floor of the crumbling tower, rumor of the luxury sedans with the tinted windows having made it all the way to the roof. The place had a grapevine that could transmit information faster than wireless. The first floor was almost entirely open, even the framework of the unfinished walls having been torn away at some point, presumably for scrap.

A crowd of people were milling about in between exposed concrete pillars that Zoey thought looked ready to buckle at a moment's notice, everyone lining up in front of folding tables packed with food. If Zoey was famous in Tabula Ra$a, her fame hadn't reached this group—all she got were annoyed stares from people ready to fly into a rage if it looked like she was about to cut in front of them in line. She walked toward the crowd, then felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder before she could make it inside.

Armando said, “Let's keep our distance.”

Another, more deliberate set of footsteps approached. Zoey turned and saw that only Will had exited his vehicle, presumably to ask them what the hell they were doing. Before he could reach them, he was accosted by a huge guy who had tattoos instead of hair on his skull—bundles of snakes, like Medusa. The man seemed to be muttering a series of demands and threats at Will as he passed. Will, never even glancing at the man, reached into his inside pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed it to him without breaking stride.

When Will reached Zoey, she asked, “Did you just get mugged?”

“What are we doing here?”

“I changed my mind. This is where I want to meet.”

Will glanced up at the smoking tower and let out an annoyed sigh.

Zoey said, “Armando says I own it.”

“This,” said Will, “is one of ten thousand headaches you'll be taking on if you insist on staying in Tabula Rasa.”

Five floors above them, a filthy naked man was standing in front of an open section of wall, washing his crotch with a bottle of water. Will turned and motioned to Andre, Budd, and Echo to join them. All three faces looked terrified. Workers were hustling nearby, hauling containers out from the backs of a pair of box trucks in the parking lot, carrying them to the tables.

Zoey asked, “Who are those people?”

“You're paying them. This whole thing, it's a property line dispute with the people building the parking garage next door. The courts eventually ruled in their favor, which means this building has to come down and be moved thirty feet that way. But that will mean running out all your squatters up there and that didn't sit too well with your father. He had the Livingston Foundation set up a soup kitchen down here and contracted with a catering company to come in three times a day, every day, while he stalled with the court order.”

Zoey watched filthy people continue to pile up in front of the folding tables, lines becoming undefined clumps, stage two of a process that seemed destined to progress to “unruly crowd” and then “riot.” Half of the people in line were kids, most of the rest were women. A morbidly obese man in a beard was arguing with a wall. A toddler was picking off pieces of his sandwich and feeding them to a bony dog. There were a lot of smokers.

Will said, “See that lady over there, the one with dried diarrhea down the back of her pants? You could put her up in a mansion and hire servants to wait on her the rest of her life. Or, you could leave her here, to drink herself to death in her own filth. Same for every person in this building. Every person in the city. You have the power of life and death. How's it feel?”

Zoey was scanning the food table. From what she could see, the selection wasn't great. There was some kind of thick vegetable stew, and loaves of generic bread, lunch meat, and cheese they were making sandwiches from. Plastic tubs of apples that no one was taking, plastic tubs of bananas and oranges that were going faster. Bottles of water, bottles of imitation juice, generic soda.

Zoey said, “Maybe I'll just give away the whole estate. Sell all the land and give it to these people. What would you think about that?”

Will cocked an eyebrow and said, “Because you're a good person, right? Unlike me? But why do you consider yourself to be a good person? Back in the trailer park, how many times did you think, ‘I'd rescue all of these people, and feed all of the sick children,
if only I had the money
.' It's real easy to say, isn't it? But then you actually get the money, and you find out some things about yourself. You realize how much of what you used to consider morality was just powerlessness—you took for granted the enormous comfort that comes with knowing that none of your choices could hurt anyone outside of your own four walls. And that, Zoey, is when you find out the terrible truth of every downtrodden person who has climbed to the top—that if put in the same shoes as the bullies, we'd be just as bad, or worse.”

“God you must love listening to yourself talk.”

“Look around. Do you want to have to make the final call on this building? It'll have to happen soon, the structure will become unsafe if it sits much longer. So what happens to the families if you give the demolition order? What happens if you do nothing but gravity does the demolition for you?”

The other three had arrived, everyone standing in a tight group as if huddling together would create a bubble that would keep out the poverty. A drunken elderly man tried to join them, shouting something about their mothers. Armando simply opened his jacket to show the man the gun in its holster. The man shuffled away.