Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (3 page)

“Oh, well, at least there's that.”

“But the contract specifies that after you've served your purpose, they can have their way with you. It's difficult to explain and also moot, as long as we're both in agreement we don't want you falling into their hands. Zoey, we you need to come to the city. Have you ever been to Tabula Rasa?”

The actual spelling of the city's name was Tabula Ra$a, with a dollar sign instead of an “S,” because that's what happens when a bunch of rich douche bags build a brand-new city in the desert and reserve the right to name it themselves.

“I've never been, and I'm not going now. I'm going to the police. And then I'm going to bed.”

“That would be a mistake. We've already made plans for accommodations here, we already have a car on the way. It will be there in a few hours. We'll give you a location and a limousine will—”

“Wait, a limo? How many drugs did Arthur Livingston have to sell to afford one of those?” She was never going to refer to the man as her “dad,” since the connection was genetic only and she would disavow even that if she could.

“Listen, Zoey, this must be done quickly, for everyone's sake. There could be other bad guys en route right now.”

“I … I'll think about it. I have to talk to my mom.”

“It's dangerous to involve her. You shouldn't even go back home.”

“I'd need to pack a bag. And I have to tell her
something.
”

“Tell her that your father unexpectedly passed and his estate has requested that you make an emergency trip to meet with his associates. Tell her you were so stunned by this news that you drove your car into a pond. Tell her that to compensate you for the inconvenience, the estate is prepared to pay you fifty thousand dollars. That last part is true, by the way.” He paused, to let that sink in, then added, “That should cover the damage to your car plus pay you the equivalent of a year's salary in addition.”

Zoey had a solid line of reasoning in her brain that demonstrated with perfect clarity why she should refuse, but it was quickly obscured behind a chorus line of dancing dollar signs. Fifty thousand was actually way more than one year's salary—she worked at a coffee bar, after all. It was the kind of money that could get her and her mom both out of the trailer park, or to a nicer trailer park, anyway. It could get her back into school. She could get a degree in some lucrative field, like nanotechnology. Then she could open a quaint little nanotechnology boutique in Fort Drayton, next to the bait shop. Still, Arthur Livingston was a criminal, which meant this man who “worked” for him was also a criminal, regardless of what kind of fancy little suit he wore in his holograms. That meant the chase that had just occurred was really between two factions of bad guys—he had, after all, just told her not to go to the police.

She asked, “If I leave, how do I know more bad guys won't come after my mom while I'm gone?”

“If you leave, they'll have no reason to. The contract is on you, not her. But if you stay, then
I guarantee you that more of them will come,
which means that just by delaying, you're putting both you and your mother in danger. Making this trip is literally the only safe option.”

Zoey remembered the psycho's soft call—
come back off the ice, sweetie
—and shuddered.

She said, “All right, how do I know you're not just more bad guys trying to collect on this ‘contract' yourselves?”

“Honestly? We don't need the money. And if we meant you harm, couldn't we have just driven your car into an abutment earlier?”

That made sense, she supposed. Still, she wasn't getting into a car with any of these people. Even if she decided to make the trip to Tabula Ra$a—which on some level she knew would be incredibly stupid and reckless—she'd find her own way there.

Will said, “Are you still there?”

“Prove the money offer is real.”

“Hold on. All right, check your account. I just sent you five hundred dollars.”

Zoey logged into her bank account and found he wasn't lying—she now had a total of five hundred and seventeen dollars in her savings. Zoey sucked in a breath and thought,
We can get the refrigerator fixed
.

Will said, “The rest I can put into an escrow account, give me twenty minutes and I'll set it up … if you agree to make the trip.”

“I'll think about it. But don't bother with the car, if I go, I'll take the train.”

“Ms. Ashe, I would strongly, strongly advise you
not
to—”

She hung up.

It was seven
PM
; if she took the train out of Denver, she could be in Tabula Ra$a by midnight. She pulled into traffic, not realizing that a tiny camera The Hyena kept on his dash had recorded her entire conversation, or that more than 1.5 million people were watching.

 

FOUR

Zoey didn't want to be paranoid, but there was something about the man in the loincloth made of charred doll heads that made her nervous.

He was at the opposite end of the train car, standing in the aisle muttering to himself, his only other item of clothing a pair of blacked-out welder's goggles that made him look like he had bug eyes. When he had boarded at Salt Lake City—the last stop before Tabula Ra$a—Zoey had immediately assumed he was another crazy who had come for her, but then he had just silently taken a standing spot at the other end of the car and she felt bad for prejudging him. Still, Zoey studiously avoided looking in his direction; as any mass transit commuter can tell you, the only way to counter the dark powers of the mentally ill is to avoid eye contact. She gazed out of the window at the scrub brush blurring past at 250 miles an hour. She wondered if her head would go flying off if she stuck it out the window. Her cat meowed a complaint from inside the plastic carrier on her lap.

Zoey's nerves were eating her alive. For the tenth time she pulled out her phone and logged into the escrow account, mostly just because she liked seeing the $49,500.00 displayed on the screen. She dropped her phone back into her purse and nervously started scraping black polish off her thumbnail with her bottom teeth. It was her first time on the high-speed rail and for about five minutes she had been awed by the speed, and then she had quickly gotten bored and started to notice how much this particular car smelled like pee. She had bought her ticket at the gate and the only open seat was this one at the very rear of the car, next to the restroom. Whoever designed the train had put the seat about three inches too close to the restroom door, so it bumped her seat every time somebody went in or out. It had happened exactly nineteen times so far, and what was worse was that each person who did it would stop and look down at her like,
Whose idea was it to put this weird
girl
in the way?

Someone said, “What's your cat's name?”

Zoey gave a start, because for a moment she thought the male voice was the crazy homeless guy with the doll heads on his crotch. But it wasn't; it was the stranger in the seat next to her, a fancy young man in an old-fashioned suit who had spent the entire ride constantly checking his e-mail via a pair of wired-up eyeglasses. She looked him over and got the sense that this kid had taken vacations that cost more than she made in a year.

Zoey forced what she hoped was a friendly smile and said, “Excuse me?”

“Your cat. What's his name?”

“Stench Machine.”

“Really? That's mean.” He grinned, flashing perfect teeth.

“Have you smelled him?”

“No, but still.”

Zoey finger-petted Stench Machine through a slot in the crate. He was a Persian, white except for his face and chest, which were black fading to brown. He looked like somebody had thrown a cup of coffee in his face and the fur around his mouth gave it a downturned expression that made it look like he wasn't at all happy about it. He wore a black leather collar encircled with silver spikes. It made him look like a punk rock cat, Zoey thought.

Jacob asked, “Does he answer to that name?”

“Cats don't answer to anything.”

“My name is Jacob, by the way.”

“Good to meet you.” Zoey realized she was supposed to give him her name at that point, but even when she wasn't a target for abduction, she didn't go trusting train strangers that easily.

Jacob asked, “Is this your first trip to Tabula Rasa?”

“Yes, and I'm already a little freaked out. I grew up in Colorado, a tiny place called Fort Drayton. It's way out in the boonies. Just to give you an idea, at the entrance of the—” She almost said “trailer park” but caught herself in time. “—uh, subdivision where we live, there's this big statue of an elk, made of concrete. And the whole thing is chipped with bullet holes where over the years drunken hunters have shot it by mistake.”

Jacob laughed, showing those perfect teeth. Zoey squashed the jealousy she always felt toward people whose parents had actually taken them to the dentist as a kid. She was missing a lower canine due to a skateboarding accident when she was eleven, and had a chipped incisor due to an encounter with a drunken stepdad. She suddenly wished she had more than just the one amusing anecdote about Fort Drayton to share with Jacob. She could tell him about that time the high school basketball team made it to the state finals and one of the players got diarrhea during the game …

Another person shuffled down the aisle toward the restroom, and they
also
glanced down at her, an act that was starting to seem intentional—Zoey swore everyone who passed was doing it. Did she still have chili stuck to her face? This time it was a black teenage girl with wired-up glasses like the ones Jacob was wearing, which meant for all Zoey knew the girl had the built-in camera on and was broadcasting a feed, maybe one called
The Worst Hair Dye Jobs on Mass Transit Daily
(today's episode: “The Cat Girl in the Back Row with Cyan Bangs”).

Jacob said, “Well, you're about to enter a whole new world out here. How much do you know about it?”

“I know it didn't exist twenty years ago, that it was just an empty patch of desert in Utah. Then a bunch of rich people started putting up skyscrapers and suddenly there's a city there. There's no government, right? That's all I know. Oh, and every picture I see of Tabula Rasa looks like the Blade Runner universe is holding a Mardi Gras parade.”

Jacob laughed again. “Yeah I'd say you're in for a bit of culture shock. There is no place like it on earth. Your phone will never die, though, there's wireless power coils under everything. Charges the cars as they drive.”

“Great, maybe I'll get cancer while I'm there.”

Zoey glanced at Doll Head Man again, and thought she had caught him staring at her—it was hard to tell behind his bug-eye goggles. She watched as the man stuck a filterless cigarette between cracked lips. He then casually lifted his hand, touched the end of the cigarette with his finger, and lit it.
With his finger.

Jacob said, “There's construction everywhere. After dark, it looks like the half-finished buildings are full of fireflies, all the crews in there working through the night, welding the metalwork—”

“Did you see that? What that man just did?”

Jacob glanced toward Doll Head Man. “Yeah, there's no smoking on these trains. You want to tell him or should I?”

“No, he … nevermind.” Zoey decided the guy must have had a match hidden in his palm or something.

Jacob stared at the guy in amusement and asked, “Are those tiny heads glued to his crotch?”

“You know what the scariest part is about people like him? Everything he's doing makes perfect sense in his own mind.”

“Ha! Though I guess that's true of all of us.”

No one else had noticed the Doll Head guy doing his cigarette trick. Yet just in the time Zoey was looking in that direction, two other passengers had craned their heads around to look at
her.
She knew she wasn't just being paranoid now—one at a time they would glance around their seat or raise up a bit to see over, peer back, then quickly turn around again when they saw she was meeting their gaze. The bathroom door bumped Zoey's seat. The black girl shuffled past and she made a point to look down at Zoey
again.
She felt to see if there was something in her hair, but then remembered she was still wearing the knit cap she had pulled down over her ears during the bus ride to Denver. Were they making fun of the hat? Or maybe they were looking at Jacob? Was he a celebrity?

“Anyway,” Jacob said, “it's amazing how fast they can build them now. You leave for vacation, and when you come back a week later there's one less gap in the skyline, you have to stare at it for a minute to figure out what they added. They're amazing to watch, the way they work. They never stop.”

“‘They'? What, like robots?”

“No, Mexicans. All of the crews are immigrants on work visas. Great workers, though.”

“Oh … that's kind of racist, isn't it?”

“Is it? I mean, I guess some of them are probably bad workers. Anyway, it's kind of mesmerizing to watch them go, they have these huge fabricators right there on the job site, like big 3D printers that just ride up the side of the building and stamp out whole sections of wall, ready to assemble.”

Zoey tried to figure out if Jacob was hitting on her or if he was just bored from the train ride. She imagined the scary doll guy coming back and pulling a weapon or something, and Jacob punching him out like one of those old-timey boxers.

Jacob continued, “One Friday on the way home from work, I made an offhand comment to my friend about how I wished we had a Falafel Fusion joint in our neighborhood. Then, when I was on my way home from work Monday evening, there it was! They had built it over the weekend, almost like they had heard me say that. It went from vacant lot to open business in less than seventy-two hours. That's Tabula Rasa in a nutshell—you blink and the landscape changes around you. It's like an American Dubai, back when Dubai was Dubai.”