Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick Read online

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I know you think you can’t. Honey, you’re not happy here. What’s here? The money? What’s the money doing for you?”

  “Other than allow me to get the absolute best medicine, food, housing, and transportation? Plus warmth in the winter and AC in the summer? And total freedom to go anywhere, anytime, plus power and influence and protection from anyone who would do me harm? Plus a whole world of men who actually have to take my opinions seriously? Other than that, you’re right, it’s just numbers in a bank account.”

  Zoey saw the look on her mother’s face and said, “Sorry. But I have to stick this out. I just do.”

  Her mother shrugged. “So do I.”

  “You know, whenever I’m being stubborn you always say I get it from my father. But I think I get it from you.”

  Her mother came over and kissed her on the forehead, for probably the ten thousandth time in her life.

  “Love you, Z.”

  “I just ask one thing. Will you at least turn your phone on? And answer it if I call?”

  “Will do. And I’ll be with friends.”

  “With that guy? Clarity?”

  “Uh, no, he hasn’t been returning my calls. As soon as he got payment for the skin cream stock, he suddenly canceled our weekend plans.”

  “I’ll buy it. The remaining stock, I mean. I don’t want you to get stuck with it.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll … give it away at parties. It’ll be fine.”

  “Honey, you don’t have to take care of me. I’ve always done okay. We’ve always done okay. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m a survivor!”

  “I know, Mom.”

  She left and soon Zoey was wincing her way through a shower, the pulsing water discovering new wounds for her. Then she got dressed in a battle-ready outfit: black jeans and a black denim jacket (she figured it’d make it harder to hit her in the dark) and a dark gray T-shirt that in big yellow letters said HOW ABOUT I SLAP YOUR SHIT?

  Zoey found everyone had congregated in the enormous kitchen for brunch. She made a beeline for the coffee bar (situated next to an actual bar complete with a mirrored wall full of liquor bottles) and its professional-grade espresso machine. She could hear Carlton working the deep fryers across the room, while Budd and Andre waited at the counter like a pair of dogs who’d come running at the sound of a can opener. Carlton was plating karaage chicken, a Japanese junk food staple—little hunks of dark meat marinated in soy sauce, rice wine, and sake, then coated in potato starch and fried, served with a creamy mayo lemon sauce. Carlton said probably half of her father’s menu requests were simply the result of him running into a street food truck somewhere in Asia and commanding Carlton to re-create it.

  Will was over by a wall of fresh herbs growing in rows of hydroponic pots, on the phone with someone, sipping something clear from a glass. It was only ten in the morning and it took a moment for Zoey to realize that the mysterious clear beverage was probably water. The bandage on his hand had been replaced by a large Band-Aid.

  Echo came over to the bar, carrying a refrigerated thermos that probably contained a ground-up seaweed milkshake or something. Her battle outfit was tan leather jacket over a sweatshirt and leggings, which made Zoey think she wasn’t taking the battle seriously considering that was the same thing she’d worn when they’d gone to an Oktoberfest thing in Snowbird a few weeks ago. Despite everything that’d happened the night before, Echo looked like a collector had kept her in her original box until just now.

  Zoey said, “My god, were you in an accident on the way home? Did your face hit a truck carrying some kind of horrible toxic waste?”

  Echo said, “Funny you should say that, because on the way home I waved to you on the sidewalk, but it turned out it wasn’t you, it was a dumpster full of butts. There was a hospital there. And that’s where they throw away their old butts.”

  “I feel like a pile of trash butts.”

  “How many bruises do you have?” Echo pulled her shirt away from her neck, showing off a splash of purple. “All over my back, too.”

  Zoey showed a blotchy arm. “We look like we’ve been playing rugby. What happened to Will’s hand?”

  “He won’t say.”

  “Probably bit himself in the frenzy of a hot dog eating contest.”

  On cue, Will approached and said, “One of you needs to put a cancellation notice together. Keep the reasoning vague.”

  “Cancellation? For what?”

  “The Halloween party tomorrow?”

  “Oh, we’re not canceling the party,” said Zoey. “Screw that. We have like five hundred kids coming.”

  “Zoey, we can’t have the setup crew coming in and out today while we’re preparing for the … siege, or whatever is happening tonight. We have a guy out there calibrating sensors and adding extra shots to the antipersonnel array. Not only would the work crews be in the way, but if these people wanted to get someone inside the barriers, by far the easiest way to do that would be to pay off one of the workers. Then you could forget about exotic tech or a VOP entry team. All it would take is one contractor putting a nail gun to your temple.”

  “Well, then we’d better get busy then.”

  “Doing…?”

  “Setting up the haunted maze in the courtyard. There’s seven people in this room right now. The walls are all prefabricated, they just snap together. Echo has the schematics on her phone. Right?”

  Echo looked to Will, hoping for a rescue.

  Zoey said, “Do I own this business, or not? We’re not letting these people run my life and we’re not letting them ruin Halloween for those kids.”

  Will said, “How is it going to be safe to have children on the grounds when you’re under this kind of threat?”

  “Then that means we have today to resolve the threat, don’t we? If the estate isn’t still standing after that, then I guess somebody can let the kids tour the charred wreckage. Look, kids, it’s real skeletons! Budd, is there any more information about what’s coming?”

  She had caught Budd in the middle of chewing some chicken.

  “Uh, Blink caught a couple of ringleaders talking about a device, made to break the gates. Maybe a battering ram, I guess. They even named it.”

  “Do I want to know what they named it?”

  “Molech.”

  “Ugh, these people. Will, what do we have to counter a battering ram?”

  “If they break down the decorative gates and also the titanium pillars that pop up to replace it? If people come charging through, they will be cut down.”

  “But what if they’re wearing armor, or are in armored VOP vehicles?”

  “Then they will be cut down.”

  “But if Titus Chobb is running the operation, he knows how sophisticated the system is, right? Maybe he knows a weakness, to defeat the system’s artificial intelligence or whatever. Then again, he now knows we know he’s involved, so knows that we know he’ll be looking for a weakn—”

  “Stop, the solution is the same no matter how far you go down that rabbit hole. We need more humans. The AI is nice, but to counter people you need people. That’ll probably always be true.”

  “The problem,” Budd said, “is that every sizable security outfit in the city is either owned by Chobb or could potentially get a buyout soon, so they have reason to sit it out. Our own security is stretched thin guarding the other properties. We could call them in—”

  “But we’d be leaving those workers vulnerable,” said Zoey. “We’re not doing that.”

  “Yep, we knew you’d say that. But that did limit our options, you understand.”

  “All right. So what do we do?”

  Andre said, “Get someone who hates Chobb as much as we do.”

  “And who is that?”

  Andre, Budd, and Will looked at Zoey in dead silence. Like they were waiting for something.

  “What are you doing?”
/>   Finally Andre turned around and looked back at the door. “Sorry, Megaboss Alonzo was supposed to walk through the door at that moment. Is … is he not out there?”

  Echo went into the hall. “No? Did anyone see him leave?”

  “Anyway,” said Andre. “We made a deal with Alonzo. Would have been a really cool reveal, we had it all worked out but…”

  “Wait, the heart-eating guy? That’s who we’re entrusting our safety to?”

  Will said, “Trust isn’t necessary when everyone has the same goals, that’s how society functions in general. As for the heart-eating thing, that works in our favor. If, as I suspect, our enemies are amateurs, that fear factor may turn out to be an advantage.”

  Zoey saw a quarter of Alonzo’s face peeking around the door frame from the hall.

  Andre noticed and said, “Come on in, we told her. You missed your cue.”

  Alonzo stepped in alongside a wiry woman with a chiseled jaw—Zoey remembered her from the counter at Alonzo’s store. Both wore tailored business suits. Alonzo’s was pumpkin orange, with a black shirt and no tie. Zoey was intensely curious about whether or not he’d chosen that suit for the holiday.

  “Sorry, Deedee needed a bathroom and I incorrectly thought I knew where one was. It took us a while to find our way back. Oh, Zoey, there you are. This is Deedee. She’s my bodyguard. Deedee, this is Zoey. You know how we did that thing with the pig heart yesterday? Well, Zoey eats people for real.”

  Deedee seemed unimpressed. “It’s a free country. This ain’t Idaho.”

  Zoey said, “Is it just the two of you, or are you bringing foot soldiers?”

  “I can get you, I’d say, fourteen capable people on the grounds within the hour.”

  “All right. And will they be insulted if I ask them to help put up some Halloween decorations?”

  “Not if you provide lunch.” He rubbed his hands together. “So, can I see it?”

  21

  Several hushed and tense conversations ensued between Zoey and Will on the subject of letting Alonzo see “it” and whether or not such an offer should have been extended without Zoey’s permission. Her compromise was that she would show Megaboss Alonzo “it” once she saw that his people had arrived and were in the act of assembling the haunted maze for tomorrow’s possibly posthumous Halloween party.

  An hour later, she led Alonzo toward the ballroom and Santa’s Workshop. They entered to find the tarp was still piled into a corner from where Zoey had yanked it off the day before. The machine was still working nonstop on her costume and, at the moment, was in the process of spitting out a curved hunk of white carbon fiber the size of a car fender. Dozens of other such parts were piled in the corner for assembly. As they passed the big monitor on the opposite wall of the ballroom, Alonzo noticed it was displaying a low, wobbly camera feed that was weaving among the feet of the workers in the courtyard.

  “Whose Blink is that? Someone have a camera tied to their boot?”

  “My cat. He’s hunting for shoelaces.”

  “Never had any use for cats myself. Tell you what, when you watch his feed, notice that cats don’t meow when there are no people around, not even to each other. They only do it to us, that’s a sound they make to mimic a human baby’s cry, to get us to pay attention to them. I have enough people like that in my life already.”

  “What are you, a dog person?”

  “I have a few I keep around.”

  “Dogs are too easy, they love anybody. A dog will love a stranger. A dog will love a log that sort of smells like a person. Cats make you earn it, it means something when they finally come around. Did Will tell you to dress up for this?”

  Alonzo looked down at his suspiciously pumpkin-like outfit as he walked. “I always suit up. Everything straight from the store; Deedee, too. See anything you like, something similar can be on your frame within the hour.”

  “First time I saw you,” said Zoey, “you weren’t even wearing a shirt.”

  They had arrived at the machine, which stank of chemicals and fire and other things you probably did not want in your lungs. It ventilated to the outside, but never quite enough.

  “See, funny story, the shirt I was wearing got a cranberry juice stain on it, but I thought it looked like blood and I imagined you guys walking in and I’m sitting there with a bloody shirt. Then I’d have to admit it was juice and Will would make fun of me in front of everyone. So I decided to just strip it off. I don’t normally hang around my office shirtless. Funny how those first impressions get frozen in your mind like that. Kind of like how everyone decided ‘Winter Wonderland’ is a Christmas song, even though it never even mentions Christmas. Song could take place in February for all we know.” He looked over Santa’s Workshop. “So this is it, huh?”

  Zoey said, “Well, the machine is just a parts fabricator, you can get one off the shelf if you have several million dollars. Andre says the Navy puts one on every aircraft carrier, it can spit out a new circuit board for the ship’s navigation computer or a replacement knob for its stereo, any part from the ship’s bow to the, uh, butt.”

  “You steal this one off a Navy ship?”

  “Nah, bought it from a tech company that used it to make prototypes. That would have made for a cooler story though, I’ll tell everybody that from now on.”

  “So it’s the designs in its memory that make it special.”

  “Also, the raw materials have to be sourced from all over the world and they’re not cheap, I’m told. Some of it comes in little barrels with radioactive symbols on them. Sorry about the smell.”

  He glanced into the corner, at the large pile of white and pink components the machine had been churning out. “What are you making right now? Or is that classified?”

  “My Halloween costume.”

  “Classified, then. You know this is the most valuable machine in the world, right?”

  “You can get Raiden gadgets elsewhere. You’ve probably run into implanted freaks yourself.”

  “No. You can’t. You can get bootleg, janky gear from exactly two locations working off shoddy hardware and glitchy software. Only one place to get the real thing, the stuff that actually works. Right here. Or so they say.”

  Zoey shrugged. “If they say so.”

  “What’s to stop someone from stealing it? You know this is worth billions, right? But look at this, Will gave me unfettered access, totally confident I’m not going to sneak my crew in to take the thing.”

  “Well, it’s really heavy, for one.”

  “I’m serious, now. What’s to stop the CIA from sending an actual army to seize it for the government?”

  “There are so many layers of security I don’t think even we could undo them all. I can tell you that part of it is tied to GPS, just moving the machine off the premises will cause the hard drives to melt. Like, physically melt. Logging in to it requires a brain scan from two members of the team and no, you can’t just chop off our heads and use them. It not only knows if the brain is alive, but if it detects we’re under duress, it automatically locks itself—we borrowed those parts off the vault downstairs. Also, it’s not connected to any kind of network at all, a hacker would have to be physically in front of the machine to try to get in and Echo says the encryption would take two million years to break. That’s really all you wanted? Just to see it?”

  “To be in its presence. You feel that hum? That’s the power to turn a man into a god. I feel like I’m in a holy place.”

  “I’m counting down the seconds until you ask for implants. Or at least a fancy gun.”

  “Ah, it’s a solid life rule that if Will Blackwater hands you a weapon, it either isn’t loaded or there is a much larger one pointed at your back. I wouldn’t let that man implant anything in my body. You shouldn’t, either. If you take my meaning.”

  Zoey fiercely pretended she hadn’t heard that last part. “Then how did he get you to do this, to act as a garrison for the estate? Did he just offer you a bunch of money? Something f
or your businesses?”

  “Will will insist that I’m here because I lost to him in a card game last night and now owe him, but that is not entirely true. He made me an offer and I took it.”

  “He didn’t, uh, promise anything he should have consulted with me about first, did he?”

  “Don’t think I don’t hear your tone, young lady. Get your head out of the gutter. Or into the gutter, I guess, since this is about politics. You probably heard, it looks like Tabula Rasa isn’t going to be an unincorporated place much longer. It’s getting worked out behind the scenes, with the county and the state. Going to be a real city, by next summer at the latest. Gonna recognize the charter and everything.”

  “Yeah, I think I fell asleep at a meeting about that.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t sleep on this. It means the city is going to need a mayor.”

  “Okay?”

  “Will promised to back my play. He has pull with everyone else who’d even consider it and by pull I mean he has dirt. The way we have it worked out, I’ll be pretty much unopposed.” He gave her a “let’s get serious for a moment” look and said, “I’m sure you know this because you work with him every day, but if you should ever decide to cut ties with Will and make him your enemy, your best strategy will be to find a time machine and transport yourself back to a point where you can undo that decision.”

  “So, the fact that you’re on video claiming to eat a human heart, you don’t feel like that will hurt you during the campaign?”

  Alonzo seemed genuinely surprised. “Why would it?”

  “Also, you run an organized crime operation. Why would you want an actual government here? People like you have made out like bandits. And before you jump on me for that ‘people like you’ phrasing, we’re standing in a mansion built by someone much worse.”

  “The fact that you don’t know why I’d run is the reason I need to run. My people are being gunned down in the streets. Beaten and harassed by private security who don’t answer to anyone but the property owners. I want real police, but to do it right this time. No sadists or bullies, no guns, no quotas, no arrests for victimless vices. A system that focuses on the real problems, not just drumming up reasons to keep poor people poor. And no prisons. It’ll be rehabilitation, education, reform. We’ll tax the tourists to death to pay for it all.”