Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (7 page)

Zoey decided to keep moving, putting more crowd between her and the street. She passed a group of drunk guys circled around a roped-off area where a chubby frat boy was menacing a confused, heavily sedated bear. She eventually found an empty park bench that was displaying a video ad along the back featuring a man in a skull mask holding a huge knife, advertising his services as a vigilante for hire, hostage negotiator, and bail bondsman. She plopped down on the bench and sat Stench Machine's crate at her feet. She tried to think.

She had no ability to leave the city, short of just walking—obviously she wasn't getting back on a train (ever, again, for the rest of her life) and she had no means to rent a car, not with her credit. She also had no place to stay—she literally didn't have enough limit left on her credit cards to pay for a room, even with the cash advance Will Blackwater had used to lure her out here (and they were probably having a good laugh about that, too—for a measly five hundred dollars they had gotten their hostage to come right to them). She could try hitchhiking along the highway out of town, hoping some stranger would get her out of the city without also murdering her or demanding sexual favors as payment, but the odds of that were even worse than usual—her face was all over the news, and she had some kind of a bounty on her head. She had an urge to call her mom, but what would
she
do? Drive the ten or twelve hours from Colorado, on a suspended license, in a beat-up Toyota that, oh wait, was now a fish habitat under a frozen pond?

Zoey let Stench Machine out of his crate. He prowled the area around her bench, hoping to find a bird to eat. He wasn't much of a hunter, so when he saw that no birds had died of natural causes within five feet of the bench, he just gave up and lay down in the dirt. Zoey picked up the cat, hugged him, and tried to think of what to do. She glanced around. The Bank of America building that loomed over the park was wrapped in a thirty-story-tall animated weather forecast, showing cartoon rain drifting down over the next week. The Hilton next to it was one big promotional video boasting about their heated rooftop pool. The office building next to it carried a feed of the local news, which first covered the aftermath of some kind of small explosion (shots of shattered glass and debris surrounded by startled onlookers) but then cut to video of Zoey's big, dumb face. Zoey groaned and stupidly tried to pull the knit cap down further, as if obscuring her eyebrows would make her anonymous. She glanced at the people around her, seeing if anyone was paying attention.

The building was showing a clip of her walking off the train, just minutes ago. Then it cut to her doing the trick with the whiskey, then to video from
inside
the train car, the news grabbing the Blink feed from one of the people who had walked past her and Jacob on the way to the restroom. There were some cheers nearby in the park, and Zoey thought for a moment they were cheering her up on the screen, but she turned and saw the frat boy had the bear in a headlock. The bear seemed mildly annoyed—

Zoey froze. The feed up on the screen was now showing her, sitting on the park bench. Then it cut to another view, from behind. Then another, closer. It suddenly dawned on her that she had just tried to disappear into a crowd in a world where half of the crowd was wearing live cameras.

Every stranger was staring at her now. Clutching her cat and leaving its crate behind, she ran.

Through the crowd, across the street, and into an alley full of pantsless women in heels, wigs, and imitation fur coats. She rounded a corner pawn shop with a sign boasting that they would pay $75,000 for a human kidney, and headed toward the only spot on the landscape that wasn't bathed in light: a roped-off construction zone around a low, oddly shaped building. She climbed over orange barriers and ducked behind a huge metal roll-off bin full of construction debris. She peered back the way she came …

Lights, hovering about ten feet in the air, creeping toward her. It was a whizzing device the size and shape of a flying barbecue grill, with twin blue beams piercing the darkness, sweeping the ground for its target.

The lights hit Zoey's hiding spot and she ran, the drone tailing her, probably already reporting back to her father's mob, or the vigilantes, or the hobo wizards, or some other faction of thugs who also wanted to capture her and do unspeakable things. She plunged into the darkened construction site, tearing through yellow caution tape, shoes alternately sinking into sucking mud, then crunching through shards of broken glass that coated the ground. Looming ahead of her was a brick structure that looked like an apartment building that had been tipped onto its side. Exactly that, in fact, right down to useless sideways balconies and an ornate main entrance mounted fifty feet off the ground, its shredded awning flapping in the breeze.

Zoey saw faint light coming from an unglassed window low enough for her to climb into. She clambered her way through, entering what she thought was destined to be the most inconvenient building in the history of architecture. Stench Machine had finally had enough and thrashed out of her hands, darting toward the light at the end of the hallway that Zoey had climbed into. A sideways hallway—Zoey was standing on a painted wall, to her left was a tiled floor, to her right, light fixtures and acoustic tiles. She moved gingerly down the hall, stepping around open doorways at her feet. Above her was an identical row of numbered doors that only a gymnast could enter.

From behind her came the glare of lights and the angry bee hum of four rotors—the drone was following her in. Zoey jogged deeper into the absurd sideways building, kicking debris that had landed on the floor/wall—chunks of furniture, broken table lamps, a shattered toilet. She tripped over a fire extinguisher box and nearly plummeted into one of the floor doors. The drone was right on her now, and Zoey scrambled back to the emergency box, yanking the fire extinguisher free. She advanced on the whirring drone and, letting out a karate yell, swung the fire extinguisher. She knocked the little bastard right out of the air in a shower of sparks and chunks of shattered plastic.

Something burst out from the guts of the machine as it crashed to the floor, bundles wrapped in foil. Curious, she picked up one of the bundles. It was warm, the size of a burrito.

She unwrapped it.

It was a burrito.

She kicked over the broken drone, one rotor still whirring uselessly in its plastic housing. In bright yellow letters on the side it said:

HELITACO
!

FINE MEXICAN FOOD

DELIVERED TO WHEREVER YOU'RE STANDING

Below that was a phone number and a Web address to place orders. The drone itself was painted the red, green, and white of the Mexican flag. It had a festive sombrero glued to the top of it.

She heard voices from down the hall.

Zoey turned, seeing no one. The faint words were echoing from the direction of the lights at the end of the hall. Zoey moved cautiously along the wall, which sloped increasingly to her left as she went, as if the whole structure had a slight twist to it. She whispered a call for Stench Machine, which she knew was useless even while she was doing it. She found the source of the light, pouring up from an open doorway in the floor below her. The top of a ladder was visible, obviously having been propped up there for someone to go down into the sideways apartment without falling in and breaking their neck. Stench Machine was perched at the edge of the doorframe, peering down inside.

Something grabbed the cat. In a blur, he disappeared into the opening below.

Zoey ran to him, glancing back one more time to see if anything or anyone else had followed her into the building. She reached the open door, crouched, and peered into a lit chamber full of harsh shadows and debris. She yelled for the cat again, which again was stupid, because even if he responded he wasn't going to climb a ladder (even if cats in general could climb ladders, she was pretty confident that
hers
couldn't). So, she climbed down and found herself in a broken, sideways dining room. There were shattered windows on the floor, showing off a view that consisted of nothing but impacted mud and dead weeds. Furniture was tossed around the wall. Above her, to the right of the door she had just dropped through, was a sideways kitchenette with a bar. Two large, filthy Latino men used the bar as a bench, their muddy work boots dangling over the black marble countertop. Zoey turned and saw four more men standing behind her. One was holding a sledgehammer, another a pickaxe, another a regular axe. The fourth, a stocky man with Spanish words tattooed on his forearms, cradled Stench Machine in one hand and held an unlit blowtorch in the other. They all stood in silence for a moment, under the dim glare of a work lamp that lit the room like a medieval torture dungeon.

The man who was holding her cat said, “You lost, Chica?”

She was just so, so tired. She gave the ladder a look but she wouldn't make it up two steps before they grabbed her. As if she could leave without Stench Machine anyway.

Zoey sighed exhaustedly and said, “People are after me. I just need a place to hide. You guys got this … area here and that's fine. It's a big building, I'll find another room. But that's my cat. I'd like him back, please.”

The stocky man said, “We can't let you do that.”

One of the other men said something to him in Spanish, and he answered in kind.

Zoey said, “Just let me have the cat. Please.”

“And then where you gonna go?”

“Somewhere else.
Please
—”

Her phone rang. Thinking that somehow this could be a rescue, she pulled it out. The hologram of Will Blackwater blinked to life once more, floating above the phone in the dim light of the room. Everyone around her reacted, and started bantering with each other in Spanish. The stocky man with Zoey's cat let out a harsh laugh.

Zoey hung up on the call.

The stocky man looked her up and down.

“You're not from around here, am I right?”

“No.”

“And you got no place to stay? No friends, no family? That why you're tryin' to squat in a horizontal building?” Zoey didn't answer. Instead she wiped tears from her face and thought about how much she just wanted to go lay down somewhere.
So tired
.

He said, “Make you a deal. I'll give you a ride wherever you want to go. Maybe even give you something to eat. But you got to do something for us, first.”

Two of the men started talking to him in Spanish, talking over one another, insistent. The stocky man gestured with the blowtorch and said, “
Callate.
”

He turned back to Zoey and said, “And you got to do it for
all
of us.”

 

SEVEN

Behind the sideways building was a row of mobile homes parked haphazardly in the shadow cast by the dancing lights of downtown Tabula Ra$a. Inside one of the trailers, five of the men were standing around the cramped living room. Zoey and the stocky one with the tattoos, named Rico, were in the bedroom.

Rico sat upright on the bed and Zoey said, “Now the head. Hold still.”

She set the phone to scan and held it next to the man's right ear. She slowly moved it in an arc around his face. She checked the scan, and tapped the screen and told it to save.

“Okay.”

Rico said, “So that's it? It's got me in there? So I call somebody, it'll look like I'm standing there in front of them, right?”

“Well, you'll look like you're a foot tall and standing on their phone. It's not like
Star Wars,
it can't project you into the middle of the room. You'd need a projector on the floor for that. Or the glasses, the glasses will make it look like the person is right in front of you. But they'll make
you
look like a dork.”

They'd been at this for half an hour. It had turned out, after a lengthy and embarrassing discussion, that Rico and his crew were not, as Zoey had thought, a roving gang of rape bandits. They were the first wave of a demolition crew hired to recover anything and everything of value from the sideways building—copper wire, plumbing, undamaged fixtures—before the structure that had once been the Parkview Luxury Apartments would be demolished without having ever seen a single tenant.

“A-Ron! Get in here. We'll do A-Ron next, then we'll be done. Thanks for doing this. Bought these for the crew a month ago but the hologram thing never worked. Made everyone look deformed, like funhouse mirrors.”

Rico dialed from his phone, and A-Ron answered as he was walking through the doorway. A hologram of Rico's squat frame popped out of A-Ron's phone and A-Ron said, “Yay. It works. See, now you just got to hire Zoey to hang around you twenty-four hours a day for when you inevitably break it again a week from now.” To Zoey he said, “Yo, why does your cat smell so bad?”

Before she could answer, Rico asked, “If I'm sitting down then why am I standing up in the hologram thing?”

“It plays your face in real time but your body is just a standard animation. When you call somebody, your mouth and face will move while you talk but you'll always be wearing what you're wearing now.”

“Oh. Why?”

Zoey started to answer but A-Ron cut in. “So if I call you while you're takin' a dump, I don't got to watch you.”

Zoey made A-Ron stand in the center of the room just as she had done with Rico. She stood back a few feet and started scanning A-Ron's body.

Rico said, “Suck in your gut,
ese
. You see how fat I looked in mine? This thing adds twenty pounds.”

“It ain't the phone,
ese
.”

Zoey said, “So, I don't understand. That building just fell over? Perfectly intact?”

“Could have been way worse. If it'd fallen the other way, it'd have taken out the Rand Hotel, like dominoes.”

A-Ron said, “Inspectors in this city are a joke. Everybody's dirty, nobody's taking time to do it right.”