Zoey wound up in the back of an unmarked sedan. This made for an incredibly awkward silent car ride with her captors and, as she always did in such situations, she distracted herself with her phone.
She tuned in to Charlie Chopra, who was doing a broadcast from the scene of Dirk Vikerness’s crotch assault on the Black Parade and his subsequent death by hammer. He was interviewing Shonda while, in the background, Kowalski was processing Vikerness’s huge, muscular corpse, now covered with a sheet. Kowalski was carrying a tiny bloody object in a clear plastic evidence bag, presumably the capacitor someone had cut out of Vikerness’s body.
Still, Zoey stared hard at the corpse, expecting the man to spring to life and start smashing everything into oblivion. She watched intently as they loaded him into the back of an ambulance parked on the sidewalk, his face covered, a limp hand flopping sadly out from under the sheet. In he went, the doors closing behind him. He would soon be put into the ground and the worms and bugs would not note that he tasted any better or worse than anyone else.
Zoey turned off the stream, then remembered the strange request Will had made earlier, that she go back and watch the video from the night of her hostage crisis. She’d had no clue at the time what exactly he’d wanted her to see, but now, she had a suspicion …
She browsed through archived feeds from the scene a month ago, looking for shots of the crowds that had gathered to watch the Night Inn fiasco unfold. She started playback around the moment her leopard-print convertible arrived. There was the building with the Godzilla bite taken out; there was the thin yellow line of VOP guards holding back the gawkers.
She zoomed in on the crowd. She spotted some of the individual ringleaders they’d called out in their analysis earlier in the day, and in fact found the scruffy kid who’d led her into the room at the Screw to patch into her meeting (she wondered if that kid had survived the fire). When her leopard-print car pulled up, he and the rest were the first to start mooing and hurling insults. They were right by the spot where she’d parked the car, where they knew she’d hear them. Zoey saw herself get out of the car, hear the taunts, and say something about them to Will. Zoey remembered that she’d wanted to push the crowd back, but on the feed Will was saying something that she’d since forgotten, how he’d wished he could get the hecklers closer to the building.
Zoey turned up the audio, scrolled the video along the crowd by hopping across various feeds, watching every face. She counted. There were no more than twenty people actually yelling horrible things at her in that moment. About that many more stood around them, kind of looking spiteful but not really participating in the rage. Outside of that group she only found people who weren’t necessarily cheering Zoey, but they were smiling, waving, trying to get her attention. A group five times the size of the trolls. Once she got to the periphery of the crowd, she saw faces that showed no sign of knowing who Zoey was, or why this girl in the table lamp skirt was even relevant to this situation. She accidentally hopped to a feed two blocks away and found only oblivious citizens strolling out of shops or ordering food from vending machines, only vaguely aware that there was a commotion over at the Night Inn and that they should probably steer clear.
In the end, it had just been that little group of yelling guys, so few that you could stuff them all into a single van. That’s all it had taken to generate enough noise and ugliness to create the illusion that the entire species was against her. Will had wanted them even closer to Dexter Tilley to reinforce that belief that his people were an overwhelming majority, feeding his illusion of power and Zoey’s illusion of powerlessness.
Out of curiosity, she switched the focal point of the feed, calling up all of the feeds that had been pointed at her.
Zoey’s lifelong relationship with cameras was tumultuous and toxic. She could, if she was being honest, take a pretty damned good photo under the right circumstances. Looking upward a little, pushing the chest out, making her eyes big, just enough of a smile so as not to show her jacked-up teeth. But seeing her in a candid photo someone else took was like looking in a funhouse mirror, the camera turning her into a cruel mockery of herself. There was the little double chin, the fat rolls, the corpse complexion, the eyeliner that was never, ever drawn exactly the same on both eyes. An unlovable troll that would make guys turn off the bedroom lights so they could pretend she was someone else.
There, on these feeds, was that woman, only also looking scared to the point that she seemed sickly, fragile. It was horrible to see this version of herself and her impulse was to shut it off, look away. But she was also beginning to understand.
There she was, now recoiling from the wreckage of the spider robot, then steadfastly deciding to head into the building to face the monster that had done that damage. Zoey tried to see herself as the crowd would see her, this lumpy, jiggly thing in a dumb outfit, clumsily clambering up the food truck, then slowly climbing the ladder, wind whipping around her lampshade skirt and showing her fat, polka-dotted butt to the crowd. Totally unequipped to face the threat that had smashed its way into the building but facing it all the same. There was a moment where her left foot slipped on a rung—Zoey didn’t even remember that happening—and an almost comical gasp went up from the crowd. Scared that she would fall.
In his careful staging of the scene, Will had turned Zoey into an underdog, someone to root for. An everyday woman just trying to do her best in absurdly awful circumstances.
Once Tilley took her out of the room and away from the view of the cameras, the feeds had shifted to Will. He had immediately gone back down that ladder, actually sliding the last few steps, like he’d had tons of ladder practice in his life. He hit the ground already pointing and barking orders, coordinating with Andre and Kowalski. A team of firefighters dragged the food truck away and, a few minutes later, staff and customers started streaming out of the front entrance to cheers from the crowd. Cameras swarmed in as Will huddled with an armored team of Kowalski’s men, chopping the air with one hand to emphasize commands as the men checked their elaborate guns.
Before they ran into the building, he swatted one guy on the shoulder pads and said, “Get her the hell out of there.”
It was a clear narrative, and not totally inaccurate. Zoey sacrificing her own safety to occupy the superpowered psychopath so that her people could rescue the innocents. All of the important, complicating context that might muddle the story—that Zoey’s side had inadvertently supplied that psychopath with his powers, that she profited from the plight of hostage and captor alike—was conveniently invisible to the cameras.
Before she could watch any more, the car rolled to a stop and her door was opened.