Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (54 page)

“We'll cut across the courtyard. Stand back.”

He grabbed a barstool and smashed the glass, then jumped up onto the sill—the man was actually as agile as a cat, when properly motivated. On the other hand, it took a lot of help to haul the crippled Zoey up and over, with Will's hand clamped over her mouth to suppress her screams when shards from her splintered rib started grinding into her lung. They emerged into the cold of the snow-covered courtyard and Zoey had to stop and cry for five seconds before she could move again. She sneezed, and flecks of blood flew across her shoes.

But soon she was lumbering along like a zombie, the two of them making laughably slow progress across a diagonal path toward the ballroom—Zoey could see where the shrubs over there had been flattened by the flatbed truck the other night. She fought to suck in each harsh, wheezing breath.

There was a blast behind them, and a row of windows exploded on the second floor.

Zoey said, “Who the hell is Gary? Or … was Gary? And
why the hell didn't you know about him
?”

“You ever run into a new coworker, ask them their name, only to have them tell you they've worked there for five years? That was Gary, a man so dull and forgettable that he never appeared on your radar. It's like that was his superpower. A stealth human being. We never stood a chance.”

They entered Santa's Workshop and Zoey shuffled over to the console on the caterpillar.

“Here! Take Stench Machine!”

She shoved the cat into Will's chest, who immediately set him on the floor. If he got cat hair on his suit, he would probably shrivel up and die like a salted snail. Zoey started swiping through the menus.

“How do you work it? How do you tell it to make the thing on the list?”

“Which ‘thing'?”

“Arthur
did
create the One Ring. It's on here. I saw it earlier.”

“Zoey, nobody even knows what these—”

“No, listen. He left it to me. Arthur left me the One Ring. That's why he left me the coin. Look.”

She scrolled down, and down, until she found the very last entry in the list, the one marked with her name.

“See? It's literally the only thing on here in plain English. Because he assumed we wouldn't be so dense as to not browse the whole list right away.”

Will looked at the listing and scrunched his face ever so slightly, his mind working.

Zoey said, “Come on! How do you make it go?”

“You tap that symbol, the one that looks like an owl that's on fire. But Zoey, we don't even know—”

She poked the owl. A row of numbers popped up, and started counting down.

She asked, “What does that mean?”

“It's the production time. It's going to take fifteen minutes.”

She groaned, and kicked the machine.

“We
don't have fifteen minutes.
” The house wasn't
that
big, and they'd just left an obvious trail behind them consisting of a broken window and a clear line of snowy footprints.

But Will was already on his phone, swiping through what looked like security camera feeds from around the grounds. He found one with a view of the rear of the house. They watched together as a low, flat black sports car went roaring down the drive, having emerged from the garage door Zoey had smashed a few hours ago.

Will said, “The son of a bitch took the Bugatti.”

“Well, you told him to make it noisy.”

A moment later, two of the Molech crew monster trucks went rumbling after Wu. They kept watching, but the other truck never joined the chase.

Zoey cursed.

“All right,” said Will, “this is why your plan has layers. We still have a big card to play with Molech, and that's Andre's bomb threat. All we have to do is—”

He was interrupted by a call—Echo's hologram face popped into view and immediately said, “Will! Everything is about to go to hell here.”

 

SIXTY-FIVE

Zoey said, “Oh, really? Because we've got everything under control on this end. We're breaking for lunch.”

“They're breeching the building. Tune to the LoB feed.”

Will brought it up. The League of Badass team was piled in their van, barreling toward the sideways Parkview apartments where Andre was holed up. It appeared they were looking to redeem themselves for abandoning their post at Squatterville, by recklessly charging toward a man with a weapon of mass destruction that could destroy the entire city, Squatterville included. Hey, they weren't called the League of Geniuses.

Will said, “Well, it's too late to go back in time and stop their mothers from drinking, so can you move the bomb?”

“Not before they get here, no.”

“All right, get out of there.”

Andre's voice piped up, shouting from somewhere in the room with Echo. “You need us to try to hold 'em off?”

“Do what you can. But don't get yourself killed.”

They watched as the LoB crew spilled out of their van, hustled through a low sideways window and started rappelling up a vertical hallway, their crossbows and swords strapped to their backs. Lee was in the lead, and soon pulled himself up through a sideways doorway. He found a steep drop in front of him—when horizontal, this was to be a large conference room for parties and conventions. Turn it on its side, and it became a sheer drop of about thirty feet straight down, to the wall that was now serving as a narrow floor.

Standing down there, next to his nuclear bomb, was Andre. Prowling around his feet were lots and lots of cats.

The view from Lee's camera lurched over the opening, as he awkwardly tried to climb into the room without tumbling down and breaking his neck. He tried to bring his crossbow to bear on Andre—difficult to do, while trying to simultaneously straddle the edge of the sideways doorframe.

He said, “Disarm the bomb! Do it now, or we'll … turn you into … a cactus.”

Zoey thought the man would regret not having a better line ready, once he found out that more than five hundred million people had heard him say it. Down on the wall/floor, Andre put his hands on his hips.

“You fools! This device is armed with a tremor-sensitive timer! If any one of you even gently touch the floor, you and the entire city will be vaporized instantly!”

Lee raised the crossbow and said, “Disarm it! Now!”

Andre laughed his supervillain laugh and said, “The world is watching you, mohawk! Let us test what you are willing to do to stop me!”

Andre pushed a button on his belt. With a howl, a cat few up from the floor and stuck to Andre's thigh, its metal collar clinking as it contacted his armor. Then another cat twisted across the room and clanked to his chest. Then another, then another. Within seconds, Andre was covered from the neck down with writhing, meowing felines.

“Ha ha!” bellowed Andre. “Go ahead! Skewer an adorable kitten while your fans look on! Now you know why they call me the pus—”

Suddenly the view was plummeting down, toward the wall—Lee had jumped, or more likely, fell. He crashed to the floor, cracking the plaster under his boots, then the view from the camera spun as the man rolled and trained his crossbow on Andre.

“STOP! And drop the … cats!”

But Andre was already on the move, ducking through a sideways door behind him. Lee pursued, carefully giving the nuke a wide berth. The view spun back around to the entrance, where Vixxxen was rappelling down the vertical wall after him.

Lee ran through the sideways door and found Andre had disappeared through a door-sized hole that had been sawed into the ceiling tile, allowing him to pass to the next vertical floor of the building. Lee ducked through, and found Andre running along a hallway, leaping over doorways. Lee aimed his crossbow, trying to get a clear shot. Impossible, without horribly skewering an adorable kitten in the process, utterly ruining the hero moment he would want to be played over and over again for the next century. Nobody would want to replay the video of a cat getting kabobbed onto a fleeing terrorist.

So, Lee watched helplessly as Andre bounded down the shadowy hallway, the occasional cat jiggling free and flopping to the floor as he went.

Will shook his head and asked, “Was that part your idea, or Andre's?”

“I don't even know. We were so sleep deprived at that point.”

Lee doubled back and joined his team, who had gathered around the bomb. They discussed it and decided they would try to get in contact with a bomb-defusal expert and, hopefully, get kick-ass video of them cutting the red wire at the last moment and thus saving the city. But, as they were examining the nuke to try to find the trigger mechanism Andre had threatened them about, Lee got a quizzical look on his face. He reached out, gave the bomb a gentle push, and watched it topple over. It wasn't difficult, since the whole thing was a hollow shell made out of plastic.

Will sighed.

At that moment, a news alert popped up over the feed. Hovering above the screen was a scrolling headline:

LIVINGSTON DAUGHTER BELIEVED DEAD

Will brought up video of an enormous fireball, at the bottom of which was the tiniest hint of a blackened, twisted automobile.

Zoey gasped. “Oh my god. Is Wu … was he in there?”

Will found video of the car chase that had preceded the disaster—a black Bugatti Chiron roaring through an industrial park, chased by a monster truck, both followed by a cloud of camera drones buzzing overhead, as if they had disturbed a giant beehive and were now being pursued by the swarm. The car left the road and smashed through a chain-link fence, slicing across a field and leaving a stream of dust like a contrail. The car streaked like a guided missile directly into a row of white spherical tanks that, apparently, were filled to the top with some kind of amazingly combustible gas. The gargantuan orange and black plume rose so far into the air that it consumed half of the drones. The monster truck, unfortunately, had stayed out of the blast radius.

Zoey said, “He did it on purpose. He drove right into it. Did he … sacrifice himself? For me? Was that like a kamikaze thing?”

Will said, “Well, he was a man from California raised by Chinese-American parents, so the kamikaze would surely be a treasured part of their heritage. You should hide. The henchmen are going to be calling in to report what happened and if I can convince Molech that you went up with the car, then all you have to do is stay out of sight. So you at least can make it through this.”

She shook her head. “I'm in no condition to run. I can't breathe. I think my lung is punctured, I'd get two steps outside that door and then it would pop and go whizzing around the courtyard like a balloon. No, the One Ring is real, and the caterpillar is going to spit it out. We just have to make it until then.”

“We
don't know that
. And this is coming from someone who knew Arthur better than you. It doesn't say ‘Kill Switch' or ‘One Ring' or ‘Master Key' or anything else—it just says ‘Zoey.' It could be a little Zoey Ashe action figure for all you know. It could be a plaque telling you how much he loves you. And if we go this way, we don't have a backup plan.”

“No. If
you
want to go, go. But I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not running from men like him. Win or lose, I'm not doing that.”

They watched the countdown on the caterpillar, a progress bar shrinking so slowly that Zoey was starting to think it was getting longer.

Zoey asked, “Did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Did you know I was going to wind up at Molech's headquarters? Did you know Gary was a traitor, and that he was going to rig the car and all that? Was that all part of your plan?”

“No.”

“If it was, I want to know. No more lies. I know that's what you do, and that's what you're good at, but this one time, I want to know.”

“No. I wouldn't do that.”

“Because it would put everything at risk, right? I could have broke down and told him everything.”

“No.
I wouldn't do that
. I wouldn't do that to y—”

The door to the courtyard exploded off its hinges.

 

SIXTY-SIX

It was Black Scott who had found them first. He strode into the room, glanced at Will and Zoey, then looked over the random collection of objects the machine had spat out. He absently picked up a narrow hunk of pipe to examine it. Will walked to a nearby table and poured himself a drink.

“You want one?”

Scott said, “Man, you got a drinking problem. You people know you got a living severed head out in your courtyard? Thing is out there chewin' on the snow. Gonna give me nightmares.”

Zoey said, “It's been a weird week.”

Into some unseen communicator, Scott said, “They're here. Ballroom.” Then he looked at Will and shook his head. “A fake bomb? What, did you make it out of papier-mâché? You know, you guys seem to have spent a long time on this plan and I got to say I got no clue whatsoever what it was tryin' to accomplish.”

Will shrugged. “It looked better on paper.” Will made a show of looking at his watch. “Speaking of which, we should go stand somewhere else. Sooner rather than later. Like, say, in the next six minutes.”

Scott said, “I sense you're just
waitin
' for me to ask you what happens in six minutes. So…”

“A very big boom. The nuke was fake, of course, the fabricator doesn't have the ability to create a city-destroying device. But the blast that vaporized Arthur's warehouse, we can both agree that was real?”

Scott said, “Mmm hmm.”

“That's because the fabricator does have, in its memory, the ability to fabricate a self-destruct device—one big enough to turn a city block into a crater. After Molech broke into his warehouse, Arthur set his machine to make just such a device. Well, about ten minutes ago, we set this machine to do the same.”