Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick Read online

  Andre said, “Rented it from a friend. Though you wouldn’t know he was a friend based on the deposit he demanded.”

  “Do I want to know how much?”

  “Can you really put a price on something like this?”

  “Oh god. All right. Let’s do it.”

  2

  The piano-black Zoey-ghost-face spider-drone monster clicked along the pavement to oohs and aahs from the crowd. It hopped onto the overturned food truck and then, without hesitation, skittered right up the building’s darkened facade, toward the ragged opening in the fourth floor. It pulled itself into the room with a quick, jerky movement that was much more arachnid than robot.

  Zoey held her breath.

  Even from street level, they could hear the terrified shriek of a young girl from inside. Well, Zoey thought, we’ve already traumatized the hostage.

  She watched the machine’s camera feed from her phone, and saw a brief, blurry glimpse of a young woman before a figure stepped into view and the screen went dark.

  “What happened?”

  Andre said, “He covered the drone’s camera. Threw a blanket over it or somethin’.”

  “Can we uncover it?” If not, Zoey thought that seemed like an inexcusable design flaw.

  Will said, “We can, but won’t. We don’t need to see him, not yet. As long as he can hear us, go ahead and let him think he accomplished something. Open the line. I’ll do the talking.”

  Zoey found a “Speak” icon and pointed the phone toward Will’s face. Drones swarmed around them and just about every bystander had a Blink camera pinned to their clothing. Everything they said was being streamed to an audience of maybe millions, from dozens of angles, everyone watching their follower counts tick upward. Zoey saw several people in the audience with Gadflies, the little drones everyone had been buying this year that hovered around their shoulders, livestreaming their lives in a way that could also get their face in the shot.

  Will asked, “Can you hear me?”

  From the phone, a normal human voice—the dumb skeleton filter only worked on Tilley’s own camera—said, “Who’s this? Put the cow on.”

  “My name is Will Blackwater. I work for Zoey Ashe, solving the problems that aren’t worth her time. Listen closely, because I’m not going to repeat myself. Each breath you draw from this moment forward is a precious gift granted to you by Ms. Ashe. After each said breath, I want you to silently thank her and appreciate the grace she has bestowed upon you. Her patience, however, is not boundless. I am not here to listen to your demands. I already know your demands, your true demands, even if you do not. You demand to remain alive and to be forgiven for your trespasses.

  “If you leave immediately, we will all return to our respective homes and I will plead to Zoey on your behalf for a reasonable punishment. I cannot offer any guarantees as to what her response will be. If you do not leave immediately, however, the machine before you will cut off your head and rip those implants off your bones. It will do it so quickly that you won’t even register the movement—the speed of its limbs is restricted only by air resistance. This is an A-8 Disruptor, made in Germany. It took exactly three of them to disable an entire division of Iranian tanks during the Blue Sky Raids. So let me be absolutely clear. You can still win here. But only if you define victory as leaving that building with your body intact.”

  Will stopped talking and muted their end. No response. Zoey wondered if his attempt to paint her as a cruel, omnipotent overlord was undermined by her outfit. She had wanted to change clothes, but Will had advised against it for reasons that he hadn’t had time to explain. She needed to remind herself not to accidentally press the spot on the seam of her T-shirt that would make the cat start singing a sea shanty consisting entirely of meows.

  Zoey said, “If he tries to detonate the sonic gadget, or do something else stupid, how are we going to fight back if we can’t see him?”

  Andre said, “The Disruptor’s own AI will take over and kick his ass. A human operator would just slow it down anyway.”

  In Zoey’s ear, Wu said, “I do not have a clear shot, the A-8 is between me and the target. I can just make out movement beyond the—whoa! I, uh, think the negotiation phase has ended.”

  There were crashes from inside the building. The crowd gasped. Some people even backed away, realizing that there was, in fact, no reason this conflict couldn’t spill out of the building and wipe out a dozen of the gawkers before they even had time to crap their pants. Zoey, realizing she’d made their same mistake, took a step back from the noise.

  “Uh, just to be clear, the brain-melting device he said he had, it can’t penetrate the walls of that building, can it? We’d be safe out here?”

  Will looked surprised. “Who ever said that?”

  From inside the building came a noise like a car being stomped down a manhole by an angry giant. The battered carcass of the 8-8 Disintegrator or whatever Will had called it came flying out of the hole in the wall. The crowd below screamed and scattered. Zoey ducked. The mangled black monstrosity crashed onto the sidewalk and rolled into the middle of the street. A self-driving bus detected the obstacle and braked in time, then a cherry-red human-driven convertible on monster truck tires rear-ended the bus.

  A boo went up from the crowd and there was a brief euphoric moment when Zoey thought they were booing Tilley, having come around to her side. Then she figured out that they were mooing. Will stood up and straightened his suit, standing in the spot where he’d quickly placed himself in between Zoey and the wreckage. Zoey took a long breath to steady herself and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.

  To Andre, she said, “So, do we just lose the deposit, or do we now have to pay for the whole thing?”

  “I think it’s important to remain calm in these situations, so I won’t go into detail about the exact financial toll of tonight’s operation until it’s all said and done.”

  Tilley’s animated skull appeared on the Blink feed again and in the silly skeleton voice said, “My patience is done! I want the cow. Not her lawyer, not her bodyguard, not her pathetic toys.”

  Will shot a quick, almost imperceptible glance at a nearby drone before saying, “Wu, do you have the shot, or is he back behind the window frame?”

  “He is behind the frame and also I have the shot. These rounds can penetrate the steel beam and then detonate in a spot of our choosing, perhaps inside one of Tilley’s eye sockets. The problem is the female hostage is sitting right next to him.”

  Zoey said, “Plus if you miss, or just hurt him, he’s going to activate his brain gadget for sure. You’d be giving him no choice.”

  “If he has it,” muttered Will, casting an annoyed glare at the building.

  Zoey followed his gaze and said, “Look, I know how you say you hate unknown variables more than Abe Lincoln hated ceiling fans—”

  “I’m sure I’ve never phrased it like—”

  “But I’m obviously going in there. Everybody wants something; we’ll make him an offer. It’s by far our best chance of this not ending in utter disaster.”

  There was nothing in the world Zoey wanted to do less than she wanted to do this. At this point in the night she was supposed to be extremely drunk and full of sushi, sloppily hitting on some high-society kid who was looking to do something his parents wouldn’t approve of.

  “Zoey, if you give in to this guy, next week you’ll have another one just like him holding up another of your joints making bigger demands. You’d be laying out the welcome mat.”

  “Well, tonight I’m worried about tonight. Now how do I get in there?”

  “I’m going with you,” said Will, never taking his eyes off that ragged hole in the building. “He has to know that only I can make the kind of decisions he wants made.”

  This wasn’t true, but Zoey knew why Will had said it. If Dexter Tilley was watching literally any feed about his own hostage situation, he also was listening to everything they said right now, including the exchange with Wu momen
ts ago. Being on camera every moment you were outside your home meant every conversation, facial expression, and mannerism was a performance. It was an adjustment that Zoey found difficult, because only a psychopath would find it easy. Of course, Tilley himself had to know that Will knew Tilley was listening in, and would thus deduce that this could be a performance on Will’s part. But he also knew that Will knew that he knew, so maybe Will’s performance was intentionally inauthentic, so that Tilley would think Will was lying, when in reality, he was telling the truth. Zoey was starting to get a headache.

  Will looked her in the eye, getting serious now. “You know what to do?”

  “I’ve been in a hostage negotiation before, Will. Multiple times.”

  “As a hostage, yes. This end is more complicated.”

  “Sure. So, again I ask, how in the hell do we get in?”

  It turned out their method for reaching the busted-out hole in the side of the building was, in fact, just a big-ass ladder. The fire department was on hand (they always came when called but would send a bill later) and they had one that could extend from the top of the overturned food truck up to the opening. Unfortunately, nobody had a second, smaller ladder to get them from the ground to the top of the truck, so Andre rolled over a trash can they could use as a step stool. Zoey stumbled six or seven times on the way up, even with Will awkwardly trying to help her. It was almost like Andre had picked the single clumsiest option possible. The crowd loved it.

  Will then led the way up the ladder, disappearing into the spot where most of the floor-to-ceiling window had been bashed away. Zoey followed, the rickety ladder shaking with every step. She was coated in cold terror-sweat before she was even halfway up. There were drones swarming below her and they probably had a great view of her black-with-white-polka-dot underwear (the pervs who zoomed in would find the white dots were tiny skulls). Live female wardrobe malfunction. Blink also never lacked for content or audience.

  Finally, she climbed through the opening into the room, tumbled across an end table, and thumped to the floor. She stood, brushed broken glass off herself, and smoothed down her skirt. She accidentally brushed the wrong spot and the cat on her shirt started meowing to the tune of “Blow the Man Down” (“meow-MEOW meow-meow-meow…”) until Zoey found the off switch in the seam about two full minutes later. When she finally looked up, there were three sets of eyes staring back at her.

  Zoey said, “Uh, hi.”

  Huddled in the corner was a weeping woman Zoey assumed was Shae LaVergne. Thin, pale skin, huge brown eyes, auburn hair cropped into a pixie cut that swooped down across her forehead. She had ears that stuck out a little, giving her an elven look. Silk pajamas with little cartoon bunnies. Zoey suspected the Night Inn Cuddle Theater kept Shae very, very busy.

  Sitting on the ornate bed was a chubby guy who didn’t actually look twenty years old, which was the age Budd had given her for Dexter Tilley—she’d have guessed an awkward fifteen or sixteen. Slumped shoulders, acne, hair he’d buzzed off, presumably after realizing he couldn’t do anything trendy with it. He had a wispy failed mustache. On his hands were black armored gloves, designed to let an overpowered person punch through metal without pulping their fists.

  Along his shoulders and elbows were ugly, inflamed surgery scars. The aftermath of an in-and-out back-alley procedure with no post-op care. Zoey had seen body scans and, in one case, the actual skeleton of a guy who’d gotten the implants. It was a super-strong black mesh woven through bone and tendon, like their innards were wearing sexy fishnets. Somewhere in there was also a little thumb-sized device driving it all, the tech that made the whole thing possible, called Raiden. It could generate enough power to bring down a building. She’d seen it.

  Will, softening his tone so radically that it physically startled Zoey, said, “You’re Dexter, right? How are you doing?”

  “Not good.”

  She had seen Will do this before, adopting a manner that implied he’d entirely forgotten a vicious conflict that had occurred just minutes earlier. Someone told her the technique was called “gaslighting.” Zoey assumed they called it that because it really confuses people, just like if you stopped in the middle of a conversation to suddenly light a fart.

  Will nodded. “Let’s see what we can do about that.” He turned to the girl. “And you’re Shae? How are you holding up?”

  In a tragically hopeful voice, the girl said, “You’re with the police?”

  Zoey said, “No, I actually own this business, much to my surprise. I’m Zoey, this is Will. He works for me.”

  “What? Where are the police?”

  Zoey said, “Ah. You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

  Dexter answered for her. “Shae moved here in the spring.” He turned to Shae and said, “Ain’t no laws in Tabula Rasa.”

  Zoey said, “I’m new myself, I got here less than a year ago. This actually isn’t even technically a city. And the laws do exist, whatever is illegal in the United States or the state of Utah is also illegal where we’re standing. But it turns out laws only mean something if there are flesh-and-blood people around to punish the bad guys. Most of the police here stopped showing up to work a long time ago, so security pretty much falls to whoever owns the property and, like I said, I’m told I own this place. Mr. Tilley here apparently knew that, so, here we are.”

  Will went to the wet bar and poured himself a scotch.

  Without looking up from his glass, he said to Tilley, “You seem to know who Zoey is; do you know who I am?”

  “I know enough. You’re one of her people.”

  “One of her people? Open your eyes. Zoey is twenty-three and is wearing a cat shirt and a necklace with a pendant that says MY EYES ARE UP THERE. You don’t wonder how she ended up in charge of an organization that owns buildings like this and has ‘people’ like me?”

  “I don’t think I give a shit.”

  “You should,” said Will, in his eerily friendly voice. “You see, before Zoey came along, this, and many other establishments, were owned by a man named Arthur Livingston. He helped build this city. This was all a bunch of dusty construction sites just twenty years ago. A whole lot of people tried very hard to stop him at every step of the way. None succeeded. Arthur passed away last year, unfortunately, leaving his fortune and businesses to his daughter, Zoey, who prior to that had been living in a trailer park in Colorado and working as a barista. Some parties who had previously known better than to cross Arthur wrongly decided that his passing was the time to strike. They have since found out otherwise. Do you understand?”

  “You people say ‘business,’ when you mean organized crime.”

  Zoey said, “It honestly isn’t that organized.”

  A swarm of camera drones buzzed outside the hole in the glass behind them. Surely tens of millions were watching by now, waiting to see if this situation would explode. Hoping it would.

  Will sipped his drink and seemed unimpressed. Zoey didn’t know if he was annoyed that the bottles were too watered down, or that they weren’t watered down enough.

  “Do you mind if we sit?”

  Dexter shot a glance outside. “We’re not staying here.”

  “We’re not?”

  “You think I’m an idiot? My general intelligence is in the ninety-eighth percentile. Look it up. You have a sniper on the fourth floor across the street, behind the fish. Room 412. Chinese-looking dude. Do you not see my people out there, on the street? Do you not hear them? They tracked him all the way up to his perch, reported back to me every step, listening to every word he whispered in your ear. So we’re moving to another room, away from that opening, away from your sniper, away from those cameras.”

  Tilley picked up a backpack that looked like it’d never seen a day in the wilderness. If his lethal brain scrambler existed, it was presumably in there, though it looked to Zoey like it was bulging at the seams with clothes, like the kid had packed everything he owned.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said to Z
oey. To Will, “You’re going to turn your ass around and take the long, sad climb down that ladder. This is between me and her.”

  Will said, “You don’t want that. You’re not negotiating with her, you’re negotiating with me. She doesn’t even know what she has to negotiate with.”

  “Stop with all that. I know all about this bit, the negotiation, you saying you’re going to do all the talking. I’ve seen the streams, I know what you’re trying to do. And if you say one more word in that direction I will punch your balls into space.”

  Will stared down Tilley and in a horribly casual voice asked, “Wu? You have the shot?”

  Dexter’s eyes went wide. He snatched Zoey by her shirt and yanked her over to him, his arm around her neck, using her as a human shield. Shae screamed. Zoey didn’t, but did think she was going to piss herself.

  Will, calm as wind chimes, said, “Wu, if you hit Zoey two inches below her rib cage and one inch to the right of her spinal column, you’ll punch a hole through her abdomen that she’ll likely survive. Set the round to detonate about six inches later, inside Mr. Tilley’s torso. It will blow him in half, implants or not.”

  Zoey said, “We’re not doing that! Wu, do not shoot through me! Don’t shoot at all! I’ll go with him. Will, stay here, that’s an order.”

  Dexter Tilley apparently didn’t have too much faith in Zoey’s unquestioned authority over her organization, as he kept her in the human shield position and quickly dragged her backward toward the door leading out of the room. He picked up the backpack and called for Shae to follow.

  Zoey thought this would have been a perfect time for the hostage to hurl herself out of the window, jump down to the food truck, and sprint off into the crowd, leaving the problem to Zoey. Instead, Shae climbed to her feet and voluntarily followed them into the hall. Zoey couldn’t blame her. When push comes to shove, almost everyone complies.

  3

  Tilley slammed the door behind Shae. Will did not follow them through. Zoey knew he wouldn’t.