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FOR MY FIRST ROBBERY, I’d grade the attempt a C-plus, or maybe a B-minus. From the beginning, everything went down slicker than melted butter on a waxed floor. I was one short ride away from freedom and a life of self-indulgent sloth.
It was at that moment my captive, Jamil Yamadut, CEO of Renascentia, activated a hidden protocol in the Revivant programming, and Joker Larry turned into Killer Zombie Larry. My straight flush busted with one turn of the river card, accompanied by a dangling eye and a bloody grin.
“I see ouuuu.” Larry burbled past bloody teeth. “Braaaiinnnss. Hhnh-hhnh-hhnh.”
***
“WELL,” MARAVICH SAID. “He almost made it. Should we go get him, or let the sap earn his reward the hard way?”
Ramirez frowned at the display showing the hapless Joseph Warren in the service corridor at the top floor of the Huateng Tower, blazing away with a six gun at the advancing Revivant and having all the effect of pissing at an avalanche. The jittery, frizzy image left a lot to be desired. Warren’s microchip could use the feed from the nearby security cameras—even though he had cut the signal to the cameras’ head end—and bounce the reconstructed picture off a cell tower to the Homeland field monitor. It didn’t have much juice, however, so the action appeared as if broadcast over an antique TV with rabbit ear antennae.
“I have a lot invested in this prick,” the dark-eyed agent mused. “If Yamadut kills him now, we may never get close to MacCauley. Not in time, anyway.”
“We should get up there and yank his skinny ass out of the fire?”
“Agreed.” Ramirez shut down the player and stuck it in his pocket. He whirled one finger in the air. “Let’s move out.”
***
THE OPEN FREIGHT ELEVATOR door yawned at the end of the hall, its horizontal metal doors retracted into the ceiling and floor. Between me and it stood a shambling zombie assassin and a sexually ambiguous CEO. It occurred to me—in the timeless moments between seconds, when the brain either produces a brilliant plan to keep you alive or folds up into a quivering blob of Jell-O—that ol’ Larry the Killer Guy had a problem. He held his one functional eyeball in his right hand, so whenever he tried to let go and use both hands to throttle me, the eyeball plopped onto his cheek and the Revivant lost sight of me. When he picked it back up, his free hand wasn’t enough to pin my throat for a terminal date with Mama Thumb and her four fingers.
Ordinarily, that would have been funny as hell.
We danced the Macabre-erena around the confines of the hallway for a few sweaty, cursing seconds: me ducking away, Larry one-handedly spotting me again, followed by me ducking the other way.
“Hode stih,” he grunted.
“Hold still?” I wheezed, already out of breath and lathered with sweat. “I don’t think so, Lare ol’ buddy.”
With panther-like agility, I slipped past his grasping hand, executed a balletic triple-Lutz pirouette in the tradition of Spider Man and James Bond. (It only seemed like I ducked, fell on my ass, rolled like a bowling pin past Larry, and scrambled away like a six-legged crab on meth.) I bounced up next to Jamil, who cringed and squeaked a full-on girlish squeal.
“Oh fuck, Jamil, grow a pair,” I rapped out. In a fit of meanness, I swung the nickel-plated Smith & Wesson at his head.
He ducked.
I missed.
I hot-footed for the elevator, trailing heated curses. My black work shoes slapped the tile floor in a staccato beat—blap-blap-blap-blap—and I lunged into the steel elevator car well ahead of the Revivant. Jamil was out of the action; he sprawled on the floor after whacking his head on the wall, dizzy if not unconscious.
“Waiiiiii—” cried Larry. Nano-soaked blood the color of strawberry paste streaked the floor behind the shambling, pink-suited janitor. He held his eyeball to see where he was going. Gore dripped from the crater where the top of his head once covered his brains. Braaaiinnnss, that is.
I shot him the finger with one hand and stabbed the Down button with the other.
Bad noises happened, nothing else.
“Hhnh-hhnh-hhnh.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Larry.” I finger-punched the plastic Down button like a demented woodpecker. Something groaned and clunked. A smoky reek of burned plastic filled the air, and the floor juddered. The doors most emphatically did not fucking close. “Ah, come on. This is bullshit.”
I scanned the interior of the car, hunting for anything. A breaker box, a switch... a bazooka... anything to keep Larry’s cold-sausage fingers from clamping around my throat. Loose papers and splinters of long-lost pallets littered the floor; other than that, the elevator was empty. I had about twenty or thirty scuffing steps before Larry would have me pinned. Doing the duck-around game again would only delay the inevitable. I had to get out this hall, and out of this building. In my favor, I had an expensive paperweight—without ammunition, the Smith & Wesson wouldn’t do the job.
“I need... I need a goddamned flamethrower, that’s what I need. Take this, you putz.” I threw the revolver, and it thunked off Larry’s chest and clattered to the floor. If I had access to the Net, I could enter the search term: How do I kill somebody who’s already dead? What would Google do with that? “Hey, Larry? Can’t we all just get along?”
More from prayer than practicality, I jammed my index finger into the Down button so hard, the plastic cover cracked and sliced my fingertip. Machinery whined, the clamshell door burped a few centimeters and froze, straining against an invisible force. I jumped up, snagged the upper half of the two-part door and chinned up, lifting my feet clear of the floor. The door shifted another few centimeters and groaned to a halt.
My sweaty fingers lost their grip, and I fell on my ass. Larry’s clawed hand swung through the space over my head, and he tottered, stumbled, nearly fell. His turn to growl. I kicked him in the shin from my seated position, and something cracked in his leg. Of course, the Revivant didn’t feel a thing.
I scrambled along the door jamb, fighting for space to get off another solid kick. If I broke Larry’s legs, it wouldn’t matter how little pain he felt, the sonofabitch would be stuck on the floor where I could stomp him to glue. A splinter stabbed my hand.
“Fucking ow!” is what I screamed. What I thought was: Holy shit, there’s a splinter in the door jamb! Fucking ow, that hurts.
I focused on the nexus of my elevator-door problem—a chunk of wood about the length and shape of a kitchen knife had fallen in the crack between the steel door and the floor plate of the elevator, wedging it open in much the same way I blocked the kitchen door from this side. I tore at it with ragged fingers, worming the bloody tip of my index finger under the thick end and prying at it.
“God ouuuu,” Larry gurgled. His heavy body fell on me with a linebacker’s passion and a cement bag’s finesse. Fffump!
“Jesus, Larry,” I huffed, nearly cackling with hysteria. “At least buy me dinner first.”
I elbowed the Revivant in the chin with a dull smack. Liquid bits splattered over me from his gaping cranial cavity. He oomphed, and his crawling fingers squiggled over my shoulders, seeking my neck with the single-mindedness only the dead can bring to a job. The wedge shifted a millimeter, and the doors promptly shifted enough to jam it in tighter. I turtled my neck into my shoulders and shoved the door edge down with one hand—pushing against the mechanism that wanted to close it, heaving for some slack—and dug at the embedded stick with scratching fingers.
Larry’s stink, coupled with his morning breath, made breathing a chore. Or maybe it was all his, ah, dead weight crushing the air from my lungs. Either way, my vision darkened at the edges, and my sweat-slippery fingers slid away from the chunk of blasted wood time and again. Every time I worked it loose enough to grab, the door mechanism caught up with my effort and jammed it in tight again.
“God! Damn! It!” I stabbed the fingers of my right hand so deep in the crack, skin tore and bones bent in odd places. “Come! Fucking! Loose!”
“Hhnh-hhnh-hhnh,” Larry churned out. I bowed up under him and tugged at the chunk of wood, cramming the fingers of my other hand in next to the first. Things tore... I’m not sure if it was muscles, skin, my clothing, or the fabric of the universe. The bloody stick shifted and popped loose, flying free and skittering across the floor without a care in the world.
The door mechanism chunked and moaned. It shoved up under us, threatening to pin me and Limpet Larry in a meaty sandwich. Without a handy wedge, it seemed quite happy to squish us.
I howled, a primal scream that tore the back of my throat and shattered star systems in distant galaxies. With both hands free, I bent Larry’s fingers back until they crackled like kindling wood. He moaned something an awful lot like “Aw shit,” but I could be mistaken.
“Take that, you fucktoad,” I bellowed. And heaved. Larry rolled outside the elevator doors, and I rolled inside. “Hah! I win, cocksucker. Bite me, Larry! Bite! Me!” The last I saw of him, he was trying to catch his dangling eyeball with bent, splayed fingers and having as much success as a duck playing trombone.
The doors clamped shut, and the elevator gasped and clanked to life, the floor dropping under my panting back with a blessed motion indicative of a descent to safety. Like the reverse of a trapped miner, I rode the shuddering elevator toward freedom and life, fresh air, and salvation.
And I was rich. I patted my jacket pocket. All I had to do was take my bit-stick and—
“Where’d I put the thing?”
The jacket pocket where I’d stuck my bit-stick was empty. I tried my pants, my shirt, my underwear... my jacket again... my pants. I danced up and down, thinking maybe the stick had rolled loose and gotten caught on my clothes. Nothing fell out. I scrabbled around the floor at bug level and scuffed my sore and bleeding hands across the diamond-patterned steel. I sifted bits of paper and smaller bits of wood and other trash.
Then I did it all again.
Somewhere between floor number fifty and floor number ten, the realization sank home. The bit-stick containing all the raw, untraceable cash I’d just stolen was gone.
I considered the Up and Down buttons—the latter cracked and stained with my blood—and dithered. Should I go back up? Duke it out with Larry long enough to find the missing stick? And the real question: could I manage to go another few rounds without getting my head popped off at the shoulders?
Did I have the time? The security measures I’d shunted wouldn’t last forever. Somebody may have figured out they could take a hundred and sixty flights of stairs and walk out. The cops could already be on the way, making any rematch with Larry a lost cause.
But the money!
Without burning a single brain cell, I punched the Up button with a swollen knuckle. “Fuck it, how hard could it be to get past one broken-fingered dead guy?”
The elevator shuddered, gears churned and bumped while cables twanged over my head. With a wordless protest the car shifted momentum, paused, and started back up. Based on past experience with the elevator’s blazing apathy, it would be another ten minutes before—
Ka-thunk!
The elevator jerked and stopped. I punched the Up button, and nothing happened. I punched the Down button, and nothing happened. I punched both buttons together and—
The lights went out.