The $10,000 Inappropriate Costume Contest was being held in the Arthur Livingston Memorial City Park, which meant making it through the Arthur Livingston Memorial City Gridlock. This was the part of being an action hero nobody had ever told Zoey about, that half of the problem is always just getting there. As such, her ICC team was taking three vehicles to get to the site. Of the three, Zoey’s was by far the least secure, but also the most discreet.
She was on the back of one of the city’s electric pay-by-the-hour Vespa scooters, Wu weaving it around stalled traffic, Zoey trying to keep the fur of his costume out of her eyes. On one hand, leaving the house in anything that wasn’t a luxury-model military vehicle felt like she was cartwheeling down the street naked. On the other, after having gotten trapped inside the overturned armored van earlier, she decided she preferred the feeling of open air around her, passing through crowds as just another nobody on a scooter. She got some glances, but they were clearly reactions to the costume, not her.
Echo’s voice spoke from her earpiece. “The guy in the Zoey costume just went live on Blink. He’s in the back seat of a car, says he’s heading to the park. The cat carrier is visible next to him.”
Zoey, hoping that her attached mic could discern her voice from the wind and traffic noises whooshing around them, said, “Can you see Stench Machine in the vehicle with him? If so, can you detect his mood?”
“Uh … no, the carrier is solid plastic on the top, that’s all I can see at the moment. We’re nailing down the make and model of the car.”
A moment later, Head of Security Hank Kowalski was patched into the line. “It’s a black Geely Series X Towncar, we just grabbed it on a traffic cam on the corner of Rhoades Road and Streeter Pike. In front of and behind the sedan are armored VOP escort vehicles. Four of them, total. Who the hell is this guy? What are you people up to?”
Zoey said, “We think they have my cat.”
“To make myself feel better, I’m just gonna tell myself that’s code for something else.”
Echo asked, “Do you know where the vehicle originated? Did they pick him up at the Screw? The old storage units on Avenue Lane?”
“It emerged from a secure vehicle switch location.”
Zoey said, “Nobody else thinks it’s strange that Chobb’s security team is escorting this random dropout kid to the costume contest? Just openly surrounding him in armored vehicles? Wasn’t the whole point of riling up the trolls that he could wreak havoc from the shadows?”
Before anyone could answer, Wu pulled onto the sidewalk and parked the scooter in the customary way, by disdainfully dumping it over right in the middle of where people were trying to walk (in this city, doing anything else would have drawn attention as aberrant behavior). He and Zoey walked the final two blocks to the park, hundreds of faces passing them on the sidewalk, every brief moment of eye contact stopping Zoey’s heart for a beat. She imagined the whole crowd suddenly swarming her, burying her, tearing her to pieces. Instead, she passed through unmolested, shoulders brushing past her, Zoey feeling like a sausage rolling through a pack of hungry dogs.
They arrived to find the park was a train wreck. Literally; that was the theme of this year’s decorations, a locomotive accident with hundreds of gruesome fatalities. A line of smashed, overturned, and burning train cars—real ones, brought over from an abandoned rail yard—snaked through the park, partygoers shuffling around and climbing over them. Unsettlingly realistic corpses and severed limbs littered the ground. Massive zombie buzzards the size of pterodactyls swarmed overhead and occasionally swooped down on tattered leathery wings, snatching up some body part in a jagged beak and hauling it back into the sky. Again: Devil’s Night was not for kids.
Zoey jumped as the nearest corpse opened its mouth to speak. Then she saw that the mouths of all of the mangled corpses were moving in mechanical unison. In a ghostly chorus, the dead announced that the Inappropriate Costume Contest was due to start in fifteen minutes.
“The five vehicles in the Stench Machine convoy were just waved through the VOP security cordon,” said Echo, in Zoey’s ear. “They’re parking now, looks like … I’m going to say eight guards.”
“Where?”
“Northwest of you.”
“What am I, a goddamned mountain man?”
Wu nudged her and pointed in the direction that was presumably northwest. They pushed their way through the crowd of costumes. She saw one guy dressed as Margot Greggor, a woman who made headlines for killing her two toddlers and stuffing them into an oven (the costume required two charred dolls). There was a couples costume, Congressman Whitley and the teenage girl he allegedly raped and murdered (the girl made up to look exactly like the recovered corpse as it appeared after five days in the Potomac, wrapped in garbage bags). Another couple was dressed as Jesus and Muhammad in fetish gear. She saw a man in blackface and an orange Afro dressed as pop star Latrell La’range, who had been arrested a few months ago for masturbating in public and the man wearing the costume was crudely simulating that.
Echo said, “You’re almost there.”
Zoey already knew. Partygoers were turning, pointing, recoiling from a team of armed guards acting like Secret Service clearing the way for the damned president. Zoey pushed through gawkers and saw the kid in the bad Zoey Ashe costume emerge, now about fifty feet away.
And it was just a kid, maybe eighteen. He hadn’t covered his face in anything but sloppily applied makeup he’d probably borrowed from his mom or girlfriend, including mascara applied to look like it was running, as if his Zoey had been crying. He was saying something to one of the guards and Zoey noticed he’d painted three of his teeth black, to look like they were missing. The real Zoey was missing a lower canine from a skateboarding accident when she was a kid and had a chipped incisor from a hard slap administered by a stepdad wearing a bulky class ring. Her tormenters loved to exaggerate her bad teeth and that was the only reason Zoey hadn’t gotten them fixed, even though she’d had a couple of unrelated oral surgeries since inheriting the money. It would feel like giving in.
Echo said, “Everyone is in position.”
Zoey momentarily panicked when she saw the kid had emerged without the cat crate, but he then turned and reached back into the vehicle and pulled it out. She caught hints of movement and fur through the narrow slots in the door and sides.
Breathe.
She forced herself to focus through a rage that was crawling through her body like fire ants. She wanted to run over and rip the carrier away from him but took some pride in the fact that she knew better. The VOP team would cut her down before she took a step. Cool and methodical wins the race.
As such, they had discussed every possibility for this part. That the crate would be empty, or contain a stuffed cat, or a bomb, or some prank device that sprayed acid or diarrhea in Zoey’s face. The first step was to have Wu scan for—
“There is no explosive device,” he said, his voice muffled from inside his costume. Under there, he was wearing glasses that sprayed threat data across his field of vision. “I see no mechanism of any kind.”
The kid walked toward them through the crowd, heading for the staging area for the contest. He was unspooling a trail of yellow-topped guards behind him and they looked ready to blaze a path back to the safety of the vehicles should he be accosted. Again, this was no ambush, this was deterrent all the way. Zoey didn’t understand, too focused on her cat to put it together.
Zoey steeled herself and walked casually toward the approaching young man who was dressed like a cruel caricature of her, on a path to intercept him but acting like she hadn’t seen him yet. She felt her heart knocking on her sternum.
She strode directly toward the kid, nearly bumped into him, and in her most shrill, drunk-girl voice said, “OH. MY. GOD!”
She made a big show of looking the kid’s costume up and down.
“You’ve even brought a real cat!” Zoey grabbed Wu’s furry sleeve. “Dana, look!”
The kid looked at Zoey, the recognition dawning on his face. Not that he was recognizing Zoey, but that he was recognizing her costume. As Zoey.
Specifically, she was dressed as Torture Victim Zoey Ashe. Echo’s latex and makeup made her face look bloodied and beaten, her features swollen beyond recognition. She wore a cheap wig that vaguely mimicked a previous hairstyle, complete with blue streaks framing her face. She wore padding to exaggerate her figure and had loops of twisted, bloody wire around her neck and each wrist, as if she’d been bound up by a psychopath. Wu, meanwhile, was dressed in a cheap cat costume with white fur. Its markings had been quickly spray-painted to mimic Stench Machine’s, a black blotch down his face and chest.
The genius in Echo’s costume design was that Zoey was utterly unrecognizable under the costume of herself. Her eye color had been changed with a blue dye applied with drops that would look natural even under a microscope. Her actual breasts were taped down (well, kind of) underneath an uneven, lumpy, overstuffed bra. Her actual missing canine was replaced by a prosthetic tooth Echo had glued into the gap, then two random healthy teeth had been crudely painted black. Under the bad Zoey wig, strands of blond leaked out. Her shoes added two inches to her height. Under the pale Zoey makeup were hints of a fake tan, the skin tone of half the girls in the city. She looked like a different, prettier woman trying to make herself comically ugly.
The kid unenthusiastically said, “Cool.”
“I had a friend do the wound makeup! She has a 3D printer in her house! I have to split the ten thousand with her if I win. The cat costume is rented, but we painted it, do you think we’ll have to pay for it?”
“I … don’t know.”
The young man was incredibly uncomfortable with the conversation and seemed like he wanted nothing more than for it to be over.
In Zoey’s ear, Echo said, “Sixty seconds out. Separate him from his detail as much as you can.”
Zoey, in her drunk girl voice, said, “I’m getting all of the Zoeys together for a picture! We’ve got four so far. Come on!”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him along. He muttered some weak objection and glanced back at his security as he slowly walked with her.
Zoey leaned in close to his ear and said, “Who are those guys? Are they in costume or are they, like, actual gunmen?”
The kid said, “Uh … they’re with me. I’m actually not supposed to—”
“They’re with you? Are you famous or something? Come on, one picture and we’ll all get drinks!”
Zoey pulled him along a little faster, making a show of casting a playful look back at the kid’s escorts, like she was making a girlish game of running away from them, inviting him to break the rules. The kid sped up to a trot to keep up with her, but glanced back nervously.
“Hey … I’m not supposed to run. I just had—hey…”
She kept urging him along, to limited success. Three of the guards were jogging to close the gap, bumping through partygoers in offensive costumes, talking into their own radios, relaying instructions. Wu ran alongside Zoey, but his role was to ensure her safety. He would not, he made it clear, actively participate in an abduction.
Zoey said, “How long now?”
The kid turned as if to ask who she was talking to just as Echo answered in her ear. “Thirty seconds. Get him away from those guards.”
Zoey looked back at the kid and said, “Hey, why don’t you have your goons wait here while we—”
The kid dropped the cat carrier.
Zoey heard a yelp and scratching from inside.
The kid had to stop and retrieve it. He seemed to be breathing hard, like this little bit of exertion had been too much. That gave three members of his security detail time to catch up. One of them pointed a gun at Zoey. Another pointed a gun at Wu.
The first one said, “I need to see some ID.”
The kid said, “It’s fine. We’re going to go take a pic—”
“SHOW ME ID, NOW.”
The wind picked up, blowing around trash and dead leaves, whipping fake wig hair into Zoey’s eyes. There was a noise from above, the sound of the air being battered to death by twin rotors. Everyone looked up. Zoey’s rented stealth helicopter had arrived.
Dangling from cables below the aircraft was an object much larger than the helicopter itself, hidden under a tarp that was flapping and snapping in the breeze. The object was lowered slowly to the ground, the helicopter setting it down in a spot in between Zoey and the row of vehicles from which the kid and his entourage had emerged. The cargo, the size of a house, hit the grass and the helicopter detached the cable and flew away. The tarp fell to the ground, revealing Zoey’s Halloween costume, the one that Santa’s Workshop had been grinding away at for more than three weeks. It stood on four huge, pink legs. The crowd gasped and hooted and laughed. The guards started shouting commands at each other.
Like all good costumes, this one required a fair amount of explaining to the uninitiated, which of course made it that much more impressive to the initiated. The design was based on a popular anime series called Our Hero Reo, which was about a little girl named Naoko and the tiny toy cat she keeps in her pocket. Thanks to a series of accidents involving magic and time travel, the toy cat had the ability to transform into a gigantic, destructive mecha-cat named Reo. The central joke of the series was that the giant cat was actually not useful for combating the many colorful, monstrous enemies that plagued that universe’s Tokyo, because even as an enormous mecha-kitty, Reo only wanted to cuddle and make people happy (Zoey figured that last bit was either part of the fantasy, or cats were much different in Japan). So, about once an episode, this giant robotic cat would go bounding around, wreaking havoc, demanding pets from friend and foe alike while puking up colorful gifts and farting pink clouds of floating hearts. The whole time, an exasperated Naoko would be frantically chasing after it, trying and failing to coax Reo into actually assisting their mission in some way. Zoey had always identified with Naoko, for some reason.
Zoey’s Halloween costume, which was supposed to have made its debut at tomorrow’s party to the delight of all of the kids in attendance, included a twenty-foot-tall mech made to look like it was part Reo and part Stench Machine. It had all of the pink-and-white highlights of the cartoon character, with the coffee-stain colorings of Zoey’s missing cat around its chest and chin, plus his spiked collar. Zoey herself was to be dressed like Naoko (that is, a twenty-fifth-century schoolgirl) and would have controlled Stench Reo by remote. Echo was operating him at the moment.
From the mouth of the giant cat robot came a booming, altered version of Zoey’s recorded voice, loud enough to shake the ground.
“MEOW! WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN IS NOT MY FAULT!”
That was a Reo catchphrase, but the Vanguard of Peace guards apparently weren’t fans of the show. They opened fire with their ribbon guns, the weapons’ bundle of six tiny barrels spraying holes into the torso of the cat-shaped mech. This had no effect whatsoever.
Stench Reo was not of course designed to be outfitted with real weapons, it was only rigged to do a few Reo-esque tricks and phrases to impress the kids. However, if the yellow-jacketed guards looked closely, they would note that a bulky rifle had been hastily duct taped to its chin. The cat took a few long strides toward the row of parked VOP armored vehicles and fired said rifle, launching a barrage of glowing projectiles the size of beer cans. Each landed on the hood of one of the VOP trucks with a clunk.
Fearing a series of explosions, both guards and bystanders quickly backed away. Instead, each canister began sparking at the base, then emitting smoke. The projectiles each cut their way through the armored hoods of the vehicles, spraying the engine compartments with a shower of thermite. A puddle of molten metal and plastic oozed out from around the front tires, like the vehicles were soiling themselves. Zoey was pretty far away from the action, but even from there the fumes were strong enough to burn her eyes.
The VOP guards went nuts. Their means of evacuation now disabled, the men rapidly tried to coordinate with each other, ready to hustle their ward out of the crowd and into some backup vehicle. The three gunmen were closing in on Zoey and the kid now, five more heading their way.
The cat, with its butt still facing Zoey’s direction, crouched down and raised its haunches into the air, just like Reo in the cartoon. A compartment opened up, revealing a circular array of barrels aimed upward.
The booming electronic Zoey voice said, “MEOW! OH NO! HERE IT COMES!”
Zoey ran over and grabbed the thoroughly bewildered kid and, trying to stay in character, said, “Oh my god, that thing is going to attack us! Let’s go!”
She tugged at him and he sort of followed.
Behind them, Zoey heard one of the guards say, “Hey! Stay in sight!”
The mecha cat said, “HOLD YOUR NOSE!” and from the barrels were farted dozens of canisters that landed on the lawn all around them. Upon impact, each spewed a thick pink cloud of smoke, belched forth in a series of heart shapes which then expanded and overlapped, reducing the visibility to zero. It smelled of strawberries, just like the cartoon cat’s farts were said to. The children, Zoey thought, would have gone wild for this part.
Zoey grabbed the kid, made sure he still had a grip on the cat carrier, and said, “IT’S POISON! GET AWAY FROM IT! DON’T BREATHE! LOOK, A GUY BACK THERE JUST DIED! THIS WAY!”
She pulled him along and this time he followed without protest. The smoke was not poison, of course, but it did have a strong scent and to a scared and confused young mind, it’d be easy to think it was getting harder to breathe, even if it was really the panic doing that.
Zoey actually got lost in the smoke for a moment but was able to track Wu’s white furry shape ahead, hoping he was heading in the direction of fresh air. As the smoke got thinner, that only encouraged the kid to run more, until he was leading the way, swinging the cat carrier around in a careless manner that infuriated Zoey.
The three of them stumbled into the clear and were immediately staring down the barrel of another gun.
It was a guard in full Vanguard of Peace riot gear—gas mask, yellow chest plates. Then there was a buzz and a large black-and-yellow drone lowered itself to aim an additional pair of barrels at Zoey.
From the drone came an electronic voice that said, “STOP OR WE WILL USE DEADLY FORCE. LAY FLAT ON THE GROUND.”
Zoey’s chest was heaving, her hands on her hips. The kid looked so winded that he seemed on the verge of passing out. She looked back at the roiling pink cloud of smoke, knowing the rest of the VOP team were back there, seconds away.
The kid said, “It’s okay! We’re okay!”
“GET DOWN OR WE WILL SHOOT. YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS.”
Wu did it first, keeping his costume paws raised, quickly going flat. Zoey followed suit, now hearing men shouting from behind her. Behind the guard and drone, another VOP vehicle rolled to a stop, having plowed its way through decorations and food stands to intercept them. The rear door popped open. The guard yanked the kid over and pressed a gas mask to his face.
“WE’VE GOT YOU. BREATHE NORMALLY.” The guard, presumably into a radio, said, “WE’VE SECURED HIM, EVACUATING NOW.”
While the drone kept its weapons pointed down at Zoey, the guard shoved the kid—and the cat carrier—into the back of the vehicle.
The guard then returned and said, “ON YOUR FEET. BOTH OF YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN DEEMED A THREAT TO OUR CLIENT AND BY LAW AND VANGUARD OF PEACE POLICY, WE ARE DETAINING YOU. MOVE!”
Zoey stumbled to her feet and the guard roughly yanked her along, dragging her and shoving her into the vehicle with the kid. Wu climbed in and the guard slammed the door.