1
Zoey Ashe surveyed the carnage and said, “Sorry we’re late, it was my cat’s birthday.”
The man who greeted her on the sidewalk was named Hank Kowalski. He was bald and had the eyes of a man whose favorite joke is just a shrieking child falling down a flight of stairs. He wore a jacket with a flashing logo that said ASHE SECURITY—WILL USE DEADLY FORCE.
Looking a little too amused for the occasion, Kowalski said, “So, the good news is, the hostage taker knew to ask for you by name.”
“Why is that good news?”
“If it’s somebody you know, that raises the chance this ends in disaster and creates a cool scene for when they eventually make a movie about my life. Maybe the guy’s an old boyfriend? You like psychopaths, right?” He stuck a finger into the air. “He’s up there.”
Zoey looked up and then down, then up again, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. All of the buildings downtown were skinned with display panels and synced so that a giant, obnoxious ad could scroll down the whole block. For example, right now an animated banner was hopping from building to building promoting the beginning of Halloween Month in Tabula Ra$a, warning/promising that the city would not be enforcing public nudity laws for the duration of October. But the panel on the building in front of her was dead, leaving a dim gap in the display. That was presumably because of the ragged hole in the glass a few floors up, like a Godzilla had stooped down and taken a bite.
Directly below the hole at ground level, the main entrance was blocked by an overturned food truck. Zoey was familiar with the truck, just by its shape. It sold lightly charred strips of Korean barbecue on little sizzling, self-heating metal plates with a side compartment of melted cheese for dipping. It was one of the five best food trucks in the city, so this incident had already taken a terrible toll.
“Did … the food truck fly into the building?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kowalski replied. “A guy knocked over the truck with his bare hands, then shoved it across the door there, to barricade it. Then he ripped a parking meter out of the ground, jumped straight up, and, while dangling from a ledge with one hand, smashed out the glass on the fourth floor, using the parking meter like a club. Then he entered the building and declared that everyone inside was his hostage.”
Then, Zoey thought, he’d demanded to speak to her. This time last year, she’d have been restocking the muffin case at the coffee shop where she’d worked for minimum wage plus tips.
“Oh. Well, that’s, uh, pthththhbb,” said Zoey, fear causing her mouth to just give up halfway through.
“I agree,” said Kowalski. “I’m thinking either he’s gotten some implants to make him stronger or else he’s really pissed off.”
“Not an old boyfriend, then. I don’t think I could make somebody that mad.”
“Maybe you gave him a disease.”
Kowalski took a bite of a hot dog. There was a nearby vendor who was doing brisk business with the crowd of gawkers who’d shown up to watch the hostage situation unfold. The hot dog guy, who’d apparently acted quickly to seize the Korean BBQ truck’s territory, had a grilling apparatus strapped to his torso, complete with a rack of condiments. He wore a beat-up metal exoskeleton to help him carry it all and Zoey thought he looked like an old-timey one-man band. On the side of his grill was a looping animated logo of a smiling, sentient hot dog happily taking a bite out of a smaller, regular hot dog. Zoey tried to puzzle out the grossly unfair rules of the society depicted in the hot dog logo, then realized she was still a little bit high.
In words filtered through chewed hot dog, Kowalski said, “Nice outfit.”
He didn’t mean it. She was still wearing her party clothes, a black pleated skirt that an asshole at the party said made her look like a table lamp (he was right) and a black T-shirt bearing a symbol of a Jolly Roger, only the skull was replaced with a cat’s face, and the two crossed bones were a pair of fish skeletons. Her black hair was in pigtails because she had thought it was funny earlier, but it now seemed inappropriate for the situation. She had arrived in a leopard-print BMW convertible, though she could never put the top down as it made her huge, fat head a target for snipers, according to Will Blackwater and her other advisors, who did nothing but sit around imagining worst-case scenarios all day. The car could be any color she wanted (she’d sprung for the programmable skin) but she’d left it leopard print for the last month only because it seemed to annoy Will, who at the moment was emerging from the driver’s side. Will was an unreasonably white man in his late thirties wearing a suit the color of a wet sidewalk and the expression of a man who’s just realized the wetness is piss.
Will “suspiciously fake-sounding menacing surname” Blackwater shot an annoyed look at the crowd of gawkers behind him, each one representing a potential complication, and asked, “How many hostages?”
“Sixty-eight employees,” said Kowalski, “and fifty-two sad-sack customers.”
Those numbers punched Zoey in the gut. It would not be good if she got sick here in front of the onlookers and their many cameras. Not good at all. It should be noted here that no one involved in this conversation was a police officer and none were coming. In Tabula Ra$a, you got the policing you paid for. And sometimes not even that.
The building the pissed-off guy with superhuman strength had smashed his way into was the Night Inn Cuddle Theater. For $250, an attractive member of your preferred gender would curl up with you in pajamas and watch a movie in a small private room with a wet bar, snacks, and a fireplace. There was no sex. That theater was down the block and they actually charged a lot less.
Kowalski took another bite before speaking, as if he preferred to talk while he chewed. “Entrance from the parking garage is blocked, too, from the inside. We can unblock it, but the guy says he’s got a sonic device that will scramble the brains of everybody in the building if we try.”
Zoey, utterly failing to sound unsettled by this, asked, “Is that a thing?”
“Who can say? They’re inventing new things all the time. I even remember an era when a guy couldn’t jump thirty feet in the air carrying a parking meter he’d plucked from the concrete like a dandelion. Are we waiting for the rest of your people to get here?”
Will said, “They’re getting into position.”
They were all in the process of executing a plan that had been hastily thrown together after they’d gotten word that the hostage taker would talk only to Zoey. Will had advised against her coming to the scene at all and the sensible part of Zoey’s brain enthusiastically agreed. But then a key piece of information had been relayed to her: much to her surprise, she apparently owned the Night Inn Cuddle Theater. Thanks to a large inheritance, Zoey owned a lot of things she still wasn’t aware of, some of which were just incredibly illegal. So this was in fact her problem and there was just no getting around it. Still, they intended to stretch the guy’s “Only talk to Zoey” rule as far as possible. Will said hostage situations were like bad marriages, one party trying to subtly force the other to surrender, inches at a time.
Kowalski said, “I’m gonna finish my hot dog and then go supervise crowd control, unless you want me to climb up and shoot this guy real quick.”