As a target, Zoey thought, Squatterville made no sense. It was a crumbling tower full of shivering poor people—leveling it would prove nothing, considering the place looked like two guys with sledgehammers could do it over a weekend. But then again, the monster didn’t think that way, did it? The bullies she had known didn’t take on other bullies, they got high off easy wins. Zoey tried not to think about what an “easy win” would look like when the target was a rickety concrete box full of two thousand men, women, and children.
She heard the crackling of the tires rolling over broken glass, and tried to look around. They were passing through the shadow of the mountain of debris that had been Livingston Tower just a few days earlier. All of the buildings across the street had plywood and tarps where the lower windows used to be, each having taken a cannonade of debris from the collapsing skyscraper. Zoey had to admit it: her visit had been hard on Tabula Ra$a.
And then there was Squatterville, looming over them with its tendrils of smoke drifting into the cloudy December sky. In the wake of any slow-developing disaster that hits the news—a hurricane, or a flood, or a war—there’s this infuriating thing that Zoey always heard people say about the victims: “Why didn’t those people just get out of there when they knew what was coming? Why are they so stubborn?” Infuriating, of course, because of the blithe presumption that everyone actually has somewhere to go. If you’re someone to whom even a cheap hotel is an unthinkable extravagance, and all of your friends already have extended family sleeping on their living room floor, all you can do is hunker down and hope the storm takes a last-second turn. You don’t have a choice. That’s what it’s like being poor—choices are something you sit around and dream about having, some day after you strike it rich. So Zoey was not surprised to see Squatterville still fully occupied, despite the fact that word of Molech’s approach must have traveled across Blink in a microsecond. If they fled the building in a panic and somehow managed to avoid being cut down in the streets by whatever exotic weapon Molech pulled out next, where would they go? They were at the mercy of whoever happened to care enough to protect them. As always.
From where she was, Zoey could see that parked in the weedy lot in front of the decomposing building was the black League of Badass van. They had taken her up on her offer, or had come to dig up the imaginary pirate gold under the floor. Either way, this was not going to end well.
Molech’s convoy rolled to a stop, almost exactly in the spot where Zoey had held her open-air meeting with Will Blackwater and the rest five days earlier. The first person Zoey saw standing in the open first floor was Lee, red Mohawk and all. The other five members were fanned out on either side of him. Behind them was a crowd—residents of Squatterville having come downstairs to see what was happening. Or, rather, to find out what was going to happen to them. Some of them had brought weapons—knives, lengths of pipe—but neither they nor their ragtag band of vigilante protectors held guns. What guns they had owned now presumably lay in pieces, thanks to Molech’s gadget—Zoey assumed there wasn’t an intact firearm for several miles around. There were so many drones overhead that there was now a pervasive beehive buzz under everything. Occasionally a couple of the tiny aircraft would collide and tumble out of the sky, in pieces.
Molech jumped out of the truck to go meet with Doc, intently watching something on a feed Doc was showing him. Black Scott stepped into view in front of Zoey, glancing at her briefly as if to absently make sure she was still attached to the hood. He messed with his camera.
Zoey tried to clear her throat, swallowing blood in the process. She croaked, “This is stupid.”
“Shut up. Ain’t nobody likes a noisy hood ornament.”
“You’re trying to prove these gadgets can take on armies, what does it prove if you murder two thousand unarmed women and children?”
“Actually, the customers we got lined up for this gear, they need to know it can do that very thing. They just got to be sold on the efficiency of the process. Now quiet down or I’m gonna wire your whole face shut.”
“Have you seen who lives in there? These are your people.”
“‘My people’? Yeah, talk to me about racism, millionaire white girl. Your daddy buyin’ and sellin’ bitches like livestock. Well, instead of makin’ money off the filth of this city, we gonna clean it all out. Fumigate all the insects. Here, and all over the world. Scrape off the barnacles and get this ship sailin’ right.”
“I’m pretty sure in Molech’s eyes, we’re all insects. Including you. What has he told you, that he’s going to sell to the highest bidder and split the cash with you? Open your eyes.”
“Oh, my eyes are wide open. And it ain’t about sellin’ Raiden to the ‘highest bidder,’ hood ornament. That’s trailer-park thinking right there. No, it’s about deciding who gets Raiden and who doesn’t. That’s how we’re gonna shape the world.”
Molech approached, looking giddy.
Scott said, “Help, your hostage is playin’ mind games on me.”
“Ha! She probably just wants to play a solo on your pork horn.” To Zoey he said, “He’s magnificent, isn’t he? Look at him. You know, you people almost blew it. But while the whites were breeding masculinity out, you were also raising slaves and breeding masculinity into them, growing the best workers and warriors and point guards. So be thankful for slavery, it wound up preserving masculinity in the species. Isn’t that right?”
Scott said, “Uh, I just want to make it clear that the views expressed by Molech are not necessarily those of the rest of his organization.”
Molech told Scott he wanted a shot where he was standing in front of the crumbling building and its rows of frightened faces. Scott framed up the shot, and once more the feed spread itself across the skyline.
Molech said, “To the hundred and twenty million of you who have tuned in to watch the beginning of the end of your world, welcome. Before this next part happens, I want to warn you that if you have children in the room, well, keep ’em in the room, because they’re about to learn somethin’ important about the world. Behind me is a building full of termites. Oh, they look like people, but don’t be fooled—everywhere they go, the structures start fallin’ down around ’em. This here, this was supposed to be luxury condominiums. Look at it now. Our whole civilization, it’s just like this, it’s like a microcosm of a world with too many damned termites in the walls. Well, I got somethin’ for that. Here, let me do a demonstration. Let’s switch over to our friends back at the Co-Op.”
The skyline feed switched to the finger-shaped rubble of the former Co-Op HQ, now swarming with black-clad guards who probably wished they had working guns in their hands, surrounding their boss. Someone had gotten him down from the rubble and they were huddling over the star-shaped device stuck to his back, trying to figure out how to remove it.
Molech said, “Three, two, one…”
A flash, and a crackle, and a spray of meat.
When it was over, a crowd of skeletons cumbled to the steps of the Co-Op headquarters.
Zoey squeezed her eyes shut. From all around her, screams. Except for Molech. Molech was laughing. Not an evil laugh—she didn’t actually think people did that in real life. It was an honest, involuntary belly laugh. The way a toddler laughs when he sees a fat person fall down.
Molech said, “Fries the meat right off the bone, like ribs in a slow cooker. Radius up to fifty yards.” He held up his left hand and once more, his mechanical fingers transformed and changed shape, clicking and whirring into something shaped vaguely like an eggbeater. “This has a range of a hundred.”
The crumbling building in front of them was slowly draining its tenants onto the surrounding streets, some of them finally making a run for it. The rest just … waited. Knowing they had no hope of outrunning what Molech was about to do.
Zoey spat blood and rasped, “Don’t. This won’t prove anything. Don’t do it.”
Molech smiled. He pointed his hand-gun at her. Scott came around with the camera, to get them both in the shot.
Molech said, “Make you a deal. You can sacrifice yourself, and I’ll let these people live. You willing to do that? You have my word, we’re sayin’ this in front of the whole world here. Here’s your chance to be a hero. One life for two thousand.”
Zoey said, “You’ll kill all of us either way.”
“So I take that as a no. How about this: I’ll save all of these people, in exchange for your cat. Will you do that? Will you sacrifice a single cat to save these two thousand lives? Half of them kids?”
“I’m not playing your game.”
“You know damned well what your choice would be. People like you make that choice every day. You don’t care about these people any more than I do. The rest of these buildings downtown, they got armies standing guard. Them churches we’re going to next? They got a thousand volunteers, locking arms around them, turning themselves into human shields. Who did these people have? Nobody. But you know who owns this building? You. And the only protection you sent were half a dozen slapdicks in a van.”
Molech turned away from her and strode toward the League of Badass squad, the six of them now huddled with their backs together, weapons at the ready—crossbows and swords that Zoey doubted they even knew how to use.
Molech waited for Scott to get all of them on camera, then said, “So here’s what’s going to happen. I am going to air-broil the flesh off everyone in front of me. So you guys standing there in your little costumes and toys, you can either die heroically yet pointlessly in the wake of the blast, or you can walk away, and admit that you actually don’t give a runny shit about these people, which is perfectly reasonable considering any of them would slit your throat for meth money if given half a chance. I’ll give you five seconds to decide. Five…”
The LoB didn’t need five seconds.
Lee screamed, “This isn’t over, Molech!,” then grabbed a canister off his belt and threw it to the ground. It exploded into a cloud of red smoke, which actually didn’t do much to obscure the sight of the six of them running frantically toward their van. By the time Molech reached the end of his countdown, the black van with the League of Badass logo airbrushed on the side was squealing out of the parking lot.
And then it was just Molech, and the tower, and the masses trying to find cover in a building that barely even had walls.
Zoey said, “Please. It’s women and kids. Look at them! Please. Scott, tell him! This won’t prove anything!”
Molech put his back to the building. Scott framed up the shot so that the panic inside would be visible behind him.
Molech addressed Zoey, and the world.
“‘Women and children.’ That’s what they say when the boat is sinkin’, right? ‘Women and children first’? I thought you people wanted equality. Well, if the men don’t count, then nobody does. And don’t give me that crap about saving the little children. Maggots turn into flies. And that’s all I see here—you got people who can’t feed themselves, can’t clothe themselves, can’t shelter themselves without squatting like rats in a barn. In what sane species can this trash behind me be allowed to stink up the gene pool? So spare me, please. I’m looking at addicts and whores raising future addicts and whores. Enough. All you watching this, open your eyes and remember what you see here. This is what’s coming. Everything you think you know about power is about to be—OW! WHAT THE F—”
A drone shaped like a three-foot-long taco crashed into Molech’s face.