Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (39 page)

It didn't matter. At some point, some out-of-control chemical reaction had converted all of her pain and fear into mindless, all-consuming white-hot rage.

She swept wet hair out of her eyes and yelled to the other two men, “This is your
one chance
to be alphas! Every guy thinks he's an alpha male until he actually meets one. Well,
here's your chance
.”

The man looming over her said, “We're
all
alphas in Molech's crew, porkcushion.”

“
No!
You take orders from Molech. He doesn't take orders from you. That means he's the alpha, and
you're his bitch
.”

The guy ripped off his helmet, leaned over Zoey, and spat in her face. He then grabbed her by the jacket and dragged her toward the window. He threw her to the floor, then reared back and punched the glass wall, shattering it. A frozen wind howled into the room, the faint noises of the city wafting up from seven hundred feet below. A curious pigeon came and landed on the jagged glass.

The henchman grabbed Zoey by the hair and dragged her toward the opening—clearly intending to just chuck her out of the window. She frantically tried to claw away from him, to drop to the floor, to do anything to halt his progress. She punched and kicked and scratched, as the wind and noise of the city drew closer. He barely seemed to notice. She desperately looked around for a weapon—anything. She found nothing within grabbing distance but a toppled chair, and three little midget sharks slapping the floor with their tails, their rows of razor-sharp teeth biting helplessly at the air.

With no plan in mind whatsoever beyond “I'll shark him,” Zoey reached down, feeling her hair come out by the roots in the guy's fist. She was able to barely grab one of the baby sharks by the tail. It thrashed around in her hands as she twisted and stabbed at her captor with it, hoping to scare or distract him even if for just a fraction of a second.

The man let out a howl. Zoey was suddenly free, and dove to the floor. The henchman, now with a shark ferociously biting his crotch, flailed and stumbled and crashed through the shattered window.

There was a brief moment of peace, with only the sound of the wind and muffled traffic below. Then behind her one of the remaining henchman said, “Did …
did that just happen
?”

Both of the men started advancing on her, one on each side of the long conference table.

Zoey threw up her hands, as if to ward them off. “WAIT! Listen! I can pay—”

WHUMPP!

There was a deep, booming concussion from below. And then, the floor shook. Both of the approaching henchmen had to steady themselves on the conference table.

Molech popped up on their facemasks. He looked pale and sickly but also happier than Zoey had ever seen another human. He was outdoors now—in fact, he was right outside the main entrance of Livingston Tower, standing there with his gleaming chrome arms, near where his goons had parked their ludicrous tigercycles. Molech was tinkering with his new right hand, as if making an adjustment. He then held it up and the chrome hand transformed—two fingers rotated and merged and lengthened, the hand and forearm transforming itself into some kind of weapon.

Molech aimed his gun-hand at the building, and fired.

There was no crack of gunpowder, just a teeth-grating shriek like a fork dragged across a china plate
.
A projectile streaked forth, leaving a bright yellow trail behind it, as if it was igniting the air itself as it went. The projectile hit the building and the floor shook once again—an impact so impossibly powerful that they were feeling it reverberate through the structure, seventy stories up.

On the screen, Molech laughed, said, “Much better, Doc,” then aimed and fired once more.

Again came that
SSHHHEEK
followed by a
WHUMPP
of impact. He took several steps along the foundation, aimed, fired again. This time there happened to be a car in the way, parked along the street. The projectile sliced through the metal as if the car was an inflatable decoy, smashed through a concrete column behind it, and impacted the building somewhere inside. It seemed like random, petty vandalism, but Zoey soon realized Molech wasn't just breaking glass to hear the sound it made. He was targeting specific points along the foundation.

The whole building swayed and one of the henchmen said, “That crazy son of a bitch! He's just railgunning the support beams one by one! He's going to chop the tower down like a tree! Ha!”

SSHHHEEK!

WHUMP
!

Zoey screamed, “WE ARE CURRENTLY IN THAT BUILDING, MEATHEAD! We have to get out of here!”

“
You
don't, jerksock. Molech's orders.”

WHUMP!

“
You need me!
I know how to get us out! There's an emergency escape!” This was a lie, but one Zoey thought would be just fantastic if it turned out to be true. “Either we all die or we all live, those are
the only two choices
!”

“Then we all die,” said the henchman on the left, with no inflection. “It's kind of weird that you're just now understanding how this works.”

“
What is wrong with you people?
”

Both men edged toward her once more.

Zoey watched the facemask videos, timing it carefully. She watched Molech march to the next spot, finding the next support column.

He raised his arm to take aim—

She jumped up on the conference table and started running toward the door. Both men reached for her, and—

SSHHHEEK!

WHUMP
!

The building jolted so hard now that all three of them fell. Zoey scrambled to her feet and ran along the table, then jumped off and flew toward the door. One of the men threw a chair at her and it exploded against the doorframe a split second after she passed through it.

She skidded to a stop, pulled the big doors shut and said, “LOCK!”

She ran down the hall, toward the elevator.

From behind her, a woman's voice said, “HEY! ZOEY!”

She spun and found Echo Ling stumbling out of the stairwell, still in her red dress but having ditched the stupid wig.

“THIS WAY!”

Zoey ran toward her and said, “We're seventy flights up! I can't go down stairs that fast!”

“We're going up!”

Echo plunged back into the stairwell and started stomping up the stairs. The building shook and creaked and this time there was the sound of several hundred windows exploding, shattered as their frames twisted and buckled. The lights went out.

The two of them emerged onto a rooftop and Zoey had the crazy thought that they would either jump off the side of the building or ride the collapse down from the top. Instead, she found the windy roof was made windier by the rotors of a black helicopter, bearing that stupid Livingston Enterprises mustache logo.

The building now had a noticeable lean. They ran toward the helicopter. When they reached it, Will Blackwater opened the cockpit door and screamed over the engines, “DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW HOW TO FLY A HELICOPTER?”

She did not.

He motioned for them to get in anyway—Echo in the passenger seat, Zoey in back. Will poked ineffectually at buttons, and Echo leaned over and yelled suggestions as to which lever on the dash would actually cause the machine to fly.

The building shook and this time it didn't stop.

There was a cacophonous noise, like the end of the world.

They were going down.

 

FORTY-THREE

Zoey was thrown forward, clutching the back of Echo's seat as the helicopter lurched forward. She got a nice view out of the front window of the tower collapsing straight down, as if the whole building had fallen into a trapdoor. All else was obscured under a billowing cloud of dust and flying glass.

Will was yanking back on the stick and screaming commands at the machine, neither of which seemed to have any effect on its trajectory. The helicopter kept tilting forward at an alarming angle and Zoey was sure they were just going to somersault down into the falling avalanche of rubble below. Instead, the helicopter hovered, then kind of wobbled forward, nose still pointed down. Instead of plummeting into the maelstrom, they were now lurching horizontally—directly toward an office building across the street.

Will pulled up on the stick and stomped at some pedals, and Zoey could only sense that they were gaining altitude because the windows of the building they were about to collide with were whipping downward through the windshield. And then all at once they were looking at a rooftop—asphalt and duct work looking close enough to touch, the shadow of the rotor blades flitting along the surface. A flock of birds took off from the roof, and immediately one of them got hit by the rotors and exploded in a cloud of blood and feathers. Zoey heard someone in the helicopter screaming, and then realized it was all of them.

And then they were past the building and were looking down at the streets again, still leaning forward, still out of control. Pedestrians were pointing and running, for them the sound of the tower collapsing a block away now joined by the thunderous noise of the helicopter rotors chopping the air into submission overhead. Finally the helicopter's front end rose and the horizon fell into view. It was too late—the next building filled the windshield and they weren't going to avoid this one. Zoey barely had time to note that they were going to die colliding with a gigantic Santa Claus.

He was standing inside the hole of a thirty-story-tall donut, or rather, a thirty-story-tall glass building shaped like a donut standing on edge. It was a shopping mall, judging by how many of the terrified, fleeing people behind the windows were carrying shopping bags. Will yanked on the stick, presumably trying to avoid smashing into the building and sending the rotor blades flying murderously through a Lane Bryant store, but this meant he was aiming for the hole of the donut, and that meant he was aiming right for the ten-story-tall Santa Claus statue that was standing there. It was a festive thing, animated to rotate slowly, waving and jiggling its belly with laughter to the streets below. It was no hologram.

Zoey would never forget the noise the helicopter's blades made when they started sawing into Santa's neck. The statue was a hollow structure made of something like fiberglass over a thin metal frame, and the sound of the blades ripping through it was a series of thumps and screams, like a family of elves getting run over by a lawnmower. One of the rotor blades snapped and went flying, leaving a massive scar in the glass wall of the shopping mall.

They were crashing now, tumbling through the air. Zoey was thrown sideways, dangling from her seat belt. She had a fleeting thought that she wished she'd stolen one of the henchman's helmets. The helicopter got clear of the wrecked Santa statue and now the skyline was whipping around outside the windshield. Will no longer had his hands on the stick. He, like everyone else, was grabbing whatever was nearby, resigned to the crash and trying to brace for impact.

Then there was a
POP
and a
FWUMPH
and suddenly everything outside the windows was yellow.

There was a massive jolt, Zoey bashing her head on the window next to her. There was a horrific noise like rapid cannon fire, the remaining rotors tearing themselves to pieces as they battered the ground. Then Zoey was upside down and then right side up again, thrown around under the seat belt, the remains of the helicopter slowly rolling to a stop.

An engine whined and sputtered to a halt.

And then, finally, silence.

They were sideways, Zoey and Echo on the bottom. There was muffled screaming from outside. Will breathed, ran his hand through his hair, and then nodded to himself as if to confirm the job had been done to his satisfaction.

He asked, “Everyone all right?” and, without looking to see if anyone was in fact all right, started yanking off his seat belt. He climbed out of the pilot's-side door, which was pointing straight up at the sky.

He extended a hand down for Echo and said, “We have to move. He'll be coming.”

Zoey checked her limbs to make sure they were there and not jutting out at weird angles, then climbed up and out. She heard air escaping, as the whole battered aircraft was being slowly lowered to the ground, thanks to four yellow plastic airbags that had inflated around the hull just prior to impact. Zoey climbed atop the hull of the helicopter—or what was left of it, the tail had snapped off and the rotor was now just four short ragged stubs—and found they had landed on the roof of a parking garage in the shadow of the donut mall.

They had left a trail of wrecked cars in their wake, and one of the loose rotor blades had impaled an empty school bus nearby. Zoey didn't know which would be more traumatizing to the returning children: the skewered bus or the twenty-foot-tall severed head of Santa Claus next to it. It was lying on its side, one eye gouged out and its nose bashed in from having landed and rolled after being lopped off its body by the helicopter blades. The rest of the Santa was still standing next door, its headless body still slowly rotating and waving inside the giant crystal donut.

Beyond it, a cloud of dust filled the gap in the skyline where Livingston Tower once stood.

 

FORTY-FOUR

Zoey tried to jump down, and instead awkwardly rolled down the bulge of deflating rubber, tumbling onto the pavement. She was immediately surrounded by several dozen people frantically photographing her with their phones and blink cameras, leaning their own faces into the shots. Zoey tried to shake out the cobwebs.

Echo approached, looking oddly giddy. “Whew! We did it.”

Echo held her palm toward Zoey, who looked back quizzically. Echo grabbed Zoey's right wrist, brought her hand up, and slapped her own palm with Zoey's and said, “High five.”