Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (53 page)

There was a fire going. Soft classical music played. On the wall feed, an army could be seen swarming around the sideways Parkview building. In one of two large leather armchairs on the opposite side of the room sat Will Blackwater, looking calm to the point of boredom, swirling the scotch in his glass. As if he had been watching the whole event play out, and found it uninteresting.

Sitting in the chair next to him was Arthur Livingston.

 

SIXTY-TWO

Arthur smiled at Molech and said, “Dun-dun
duuun!
”

There was a long silence, then Molech said, “Bullshit.”

Arthur turned to Will and said, “He's nine minutes later than you said he'd be. You owe me fifty bucks.”

Will shrugged. “Traffic was worse than I anticipated, lot of people trying to flee the city, due to our little bomb threat. Have to admit, I expected more from the populace. This is Tabula Rasa, since when do we
run
?”

Molech said, “I killed you. No, I not only killed you, but
your body was vaporized
…”

Arthur said, “You did massive damage to my rib cage, lungs, diaphragm, and various gut parts I'd never even heard of. Required fifteen hours of surgery and two thousand stitches to repair it all. So, no, I won't be jumping up from this chair and doing a jig for you—my whole torso looks like Frankenstein. But I'm a tough old bastard and I was able to crawl to the subbasement before the warehouse blew. As was the plan.”

Molech paused, feeling the ground shifting beneath his feet. Zoey thought he was trying to work out the logistics of what Arthur was saying, and coming up blank.

When he finally got his mouth working again, all he could do was repeat, “
Bullshit
.”

Will said, “Do you want a drink? Why don't you have a drink, and we'll talk through this like adults. That's all we wanted. I mean, look at us—we had to hold a whole city hostage just to get you back to the negotiating table.”

Molech turned to Black Scott, as if looking for someone to agree that none of this could possibly be real.

Scott said, “Man, don't look at me. I'm totally lost here.”

Will said, “Before we begin, let's establish some parameters, just so everyone is on the same page. This estate is well within the blast radius of the plasma nuke Andre is currently threatening the city with. If I die, it goes off. You won't hear anything, you won't see anything—you just … won't
be
, anymore.”

Molech said, “No. You're not that crazy.”

Arthur said, “You didn't leave us a choice. This patch of land was dirt and scrub brush when I staked my claim and, quite frankly, I think of it as my city, still. You don't get to have it, I'll turn it all back into desert before I'll allow that. The rest of the world, I don't care. But Tabula Rasa is off the table. The negotiation begins there. Now, are you familiar with the
Lord of the Rings
?”

Molech hesitated again, realizing he was playing someone else's game, but with no idea what else to do.

He said, “Yeah, old horror movie about a ghost girl who crawls out of a television?”

“No, this is the one with wizards and elves. Ends with the midgets fighting in a volcano? It's not important. What matters is that the rings in the title are magic rings, that grant the owner total power. Kind of like Raiden, wouldn't you say? Now in the story, the rings came from a wizard named Sauron. He makes these rings and hands them out to the rulers of the land, knowing that the greed of the people would overcome their common sense, which if they'd listened, would have told them this was clearly too good to be true. So I guess he would be like me, and Singh, perfecting Raiden to sell to the highest bidder. But see, here's the twist—it turns out that Sauron was playing a trick. The rings were not all-powerful—there was one ring he kept for himself, unimaginatively called the One Ring, that ruled aaaaaall of the others. The rulers should have seen this coming, should have known a sly character like Sauron wouldn't just give away such a prize. But in their lust for power, these rulers had made themselves slaves. Just like you did.”

Molech narrowed his eyes. This clearly sounded like a lie, but the events of the last two minutes had rendered anything possible.

Will said, “We have a device, a switch, that can remotely overload Raiden. You, Molech, are a walking bomb. And we hold the detonator.”

“
Bullshit
.”

“Think it through,” said Arthur. “Why would I have left this to chance? The moment we had a working device, I had the engineering team build in the Sauron safeguard in secret.”

Will set a simple black box on the coffee table in between the chairs. On it was a single, oversized red button.

Arthur said, “It was destroyed in the warehouse, so we needed a little time to build a new one—had to actually install a whole new factory just to build it, in fact. But it's very simple in how it works—if I push this button, you die, along with every man in the vicinity with Raiden in his bones. But I don't want that, and not just because I don't want burning chunks of you two all over my salon. I have a daughter now, as it turns out, and my goal is for her to
not
have to inherit some mindless cycle of retaliation. No, I'd prefer to make you a deal. All I need you to do is leave town. Tabula Rasa is mine. It's my baby. Take your whole Molech act and go do your demonstration in India, or China, or the Moon, I don't care. You go make your billions and leave me and mine alone. But you don't ever set foot in this city again, or else I punch the off button on your life, and that's that. You've had your fun, you can tell the city whatever you like to save face. But then you leave us alone. That's all you have to do. The rest of the world is yours.”

Molech said nothing. Zoey couldn't tell if he was considering the offer or not. These next few moments were everything. Zoey studied his face from where she sat on the floor, trying to keep her mind off her battered body. That jab of the knife in her ribs, with every breath. Sick with the blood she had swallowed …

To Molech, Will said, “There's nothing to consider. In this deal, all you leave here with … is everything.”

There was a meow and Zoey turned to see Stench Machine, trotting in to greet his owner and ask why she'd left the house without permission. She reached out to stroke him, and then he froze, staring down the men in the armchairs at the opposite side of the room. As if seeing his old nemesis.

Rage and terror filled Stench Machine's eyes. The sight of an old foe who had tormented him time and time again, haunting his dreams. Then came the steely resolve of an animal who has decided that enough is enough, that he's going to make a stand.

With a meow that Zoey had no doubt meant, “This ends
now
!,” Stench Machine darted across the floor.

Zoey screamed at the cat. He did not respond to her command, because he is a cat.

Stench Machine cleared the distance in two seconds. There was a moment when Will saw what was happening, and began to make a move to stop it, but was too late.

Stench Machine flung his body at Arthur Livingston, who did not react. The cat flew right through his torso, through the hologram. He bounced off the back of the empty leather chair and flopped haphazardly to the floor.

Molech's eyes grew wide.

“Yes! I knew it!”

Will tried to recover. “Now … this changes nothing, Molech, the kill switch is—”

Molech flew across the room. He yanked Will up by his throat, kicked the chair out of the way, and slammed Will into the wall, the wood splintering with the impact.

Zoey looked at the kill switch. She wasn't actually sure how much strength she had in her legs—she'd been dogging it with Scott, making him drag her, but she also hadn't actually tested her limbs. And this, here, was a one-shot thing.

She coiled and sprung and threw herself across the room, toward the kill switch button. She could hear Scott lunging after her—she had a moment to imagine his look of surprise, at how spry his captive was. But then she fell well short of the button and banged her chin off the floor. She frantically reached up again and swatted at the button and this time, she got it.

Molech and Scott didn't explode—the button wasn't actually a kill switch, of course (having one of those in the caterpillar would have actually saved everybody a ton of trouble). But it wasn't an empty box, either.

There was a blast and a flash that Zoey felt in her gut—impossibly loud and impossibly bright. All of her senses stopped working, her vision scrambled, her ears were filled with a mind-rending whistle. It was some kind of riot-control device, Will had said, and it really did take the fight out of a person.

Still, the fact that she had been somewhat prepared for it allowed her to recover before anyone else in the room—about two seconds before, it turned out. She scrambled to her feet—her razor-blade broken rib digging into her side as a reward—and grabbed Will's collar. Together they stumbled across the room, toward the fireplace, hearing yells and footsteps from Molech and Scott behind them. Zoey snatched up Stench Machine by the scruff of the neck and together, they dove into the fire.

 

SIXTY-THREE

The flames in the fireplace were not real, but hid a waist-high door that served as an escape route from the room. The house, Will had shown her, was full of them, all of them ultimately leading down to the garage. Arthur's race car bed had a button, for instance, that would dump you into a chute and take you straight down. Arthur had punched it in his sleep one night and wound up trapped down in the garage naked, until Carlton came to rescue him. Arthur never wanted to be more than thirty seconds from a getaway vehicle.

Zoey skidded onto the tiled floor of a narrow hallway. Wu was standing over her. The second everyone's feet cleared the fireplace, Wu punched a button on the wall and a metal door slammed down over the hatch. He rushed forward, picked Zoey up and got a glimpse of her busted-up face.

“Goodness. Are you all right?”

Will, who had blood running out of his mouth and was likely nursing several grave internal injuries, climbed to his feet and growled, “Move.”

They stumbled/ran down the hall, which appeared to be a dead end. Will tapped a spot on the wall and a door appeared, revealing a stairwell. They stepped through, and the section of wall closed behind them once again. As they ran down two flights of stairs, they heard the sound of a mechanically enhanced Molech punching through the wall of the Buffalo Room above.

Zoey asked, “Where are we going?”

Wu said, “Down. This is Plan Z, we're getting you to a car. A manual drive one, I will do the steering myself.”

Zoey said, “Oh, come on! We'll never make it. One of Molech's cyborgs is going to tear the car in half before we get off the grounds!”

Wu said, “I am an accomplished driver, Ms. Ashe.”

There was another crash overhead, Molech smashing through walls, trying to figure out in which direction his captives had run.

Will said, “Different plan—Wu, you're going to get one of the cars and take off out of here like a stabbed rat. You
won't
have Zoey with you, but you will absolutely make Molech's thugs think you do. Pick a car with tinted windows, make your escape noisy, so that you get their attention.”

Zoey groaned. “Oh, god. We're creating a diversion. This is my life now.”

Wu looked skeptical. To Zoey he said, “I work for you, not him. Are these your instructions?”

She nodded. “Drawing them away will go a lot further toward protecting me than if you stay here and smack them with your sword for five seconds before they vaporize you.”

“I appreciate your frankness in regards to my abilities. Will, I'm leaving it to you to get her to safety. Do you want me to take the cat?”

Zoey thought then said, “No. He would just worry about me.”

Wu hurried off. Something crashed overhead, another brick wall being punched into dust. Will led Zoey toward a row of three doors at the end of the room—the one in the middle was the elevator that brought them down from the library the other day, the other two were stairwells leading down from other parts of the house, the convergence of numerous escape routes.

“Damn it, Will, w
hy in the hell did you think the Arthur hologram would work
?”

“There was no reason it wouldn't. How many conversations have you had in your life where you felt the need to go touch the other person to make sure they were solid? We just didn't anticipate the cat. The lie about the kill switch was plausible enough—”

Even before he finished saying those last few words, a light went on in Zoey's brain. She felt so stupid, like when she found her car keys in her pocket after spending half an hour tearing her room apart looking for them. In the terror of having been snatched out of her home by her own car, she had forgotten what she already knew.

She said, “Wait! Stop. Can we get to Santa's Workshop from here? The, uh, ballroom?”

“Why?”

“It's not a lie! Our stupid made-up story is true! We need to get to the caterpillar!”

 

SIXTY-FOUR

Will led her to the stairwell on the far right. Up a flight of stairs, down a narrow windowless hallway, both grunting as each step aggravated at least one source of internal bleeding. Finally Will pushed open a wooden door to reveal shelves full of foodstuffs—they were inside the pantry of the kitchen, still one floor below where Molech's goons were conducting the world's most destructive search for their missing hostages. Will hurried out, trying to help haul Zoey along, her body feeling like she had been cut open and stuffed with broken glass. Will ran over to the room's one, large window.