Her phone rang, from where it was perched on the lip of the tub. Wu’s translucent head hovered over the phone and this time, she answered.
She said, “I’m here.”
“Did you get my messages? I completed the scan of the package. It took forever, it was specifically shielded to block scans. Someone paid a fortune for that box. I actually had to drill a hole in it so I could run a probe through. I think you need to come see it.”
“Is it a bomb?”
“No. It’s a corpse.”
7
Zoey stood in her pajamas and huge furry slippers, waiting in the foyer just inside the giant doors that probably both cost and weighed more than her old trailer in Colorado. The haunted Halloween tree moaned behind her, the little robotic plastic skeletons clicking around the branches. Zoey’s eyes wandered toward a bowl of candy near those enormous doors and she had to force herself to look away. It was full of these golf ball–sized brownie things with an ice cream core. They sat at room temperature but opening the wrapper triggered some chemical magic that froze the ice cream inside in about ten seconds, while somehow warming the brownie exterior, creating a light crust. She’d had four of them today.
Wu pushed his way through one of the giant doors and she said, “Hey, I need you to protect me from those ice cream brownie balls. If I start to take one, chop my hand off.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to just throw them out?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Carlton is bringing up the box from the gate.”
The two of them stepped out into the chilly night to see Carlton rolling up the winding driveway in one of the electric carts the grounds crew used. He rounded an enormous jack-o’-lantern the size of a small house, the fiery interior casting an orange glow around the landscaping. Zoey hadn’t bought that one, it was already in the storage building with the other seasonal decorations, including the dozens of bat-shaped drones with glowing red eyes that were currently flapping around overhead. She unwrapped a brownie ball and waited for it to cook/freeze in her hand. She had no memory of picking it up.
Carlton’s cart skidded to a stop in front of them and from behind the wheel he asked, “Did you have a specific location in mind for the corpse?”
“I guess just plop it down right here. I definitely don’t want it in the house. Should we wait for Will to get here?”
She’d texted him, knowing he’d be annoyed if they waited until morning to tell him that they’d been mailed a dead body.
“That is up to your judgment,” said Wu. “The box contains no explosives, poisons, biotoxins, or booby traps that I can detect. Just the body. But those are all of the details I have, the best scan I could get just looks like a very blurry X-ray. It is clearly a person, though, and they are very clearly deceased.”
“So no idea who sent it?”
“The return address is fake, it’s the address of the construction site of your new office tower—a lot of the hate mail uses it. But right now, I am less concerned about the box’s sender than I am its inhabitant.”
“Well they’re dead, so I think they’re beyond earthly concerns.”
“So … everyone is accounted for, then?”
Zoey didn’t quite understand the question, then she went cold.
Somehow, the novelty of receiving a corpse delivery had completely obscured the possibility that this box may contain someone she actually knew, or loved. Zoey reached for her phone, found she didn’t have it, then sprinted back inside the foyer.
Carlton had said the box arrived in the afternoon.
She hadn’t seen her mother since yesterday.
Zoey found her purse where she’d left it at the bottom of the stairs, dug out her phone, then almost dropped it with shaking fingers.
She couldn’t breathe.
She dialed her mother.
There was no answer.
That, again, was not strange. Friday night, her mother was certainly at some party, or at a bar, or passed out in some gross guy’s bed. She tried again, no answer. Of course, she could just go out there, see who was in the box, see who her enemies had managed to snatch up and mutilate to death. But in that moment Zoey was seized by a superstition that what was in the box didn’t become real until she set eyes on it, that if she could reach her mother, it would somehow make it so that it wasn’t her in the box, that there was still a chance because the death wouldn’t become final until it was observed. It was stupid, she knew. She wasn’t thinking. Zoey put her hand on her forehead and tried to force herself to think, to be rational, to be like Will. She failed.
She didn’t have any of her mother’s friends’ contacts in her phone, and in fact didn’t know their names. She could try to find her on Blink, if she was in range of a live camera …
Zoey sensed Wu standing behind her.
He said, “Do you want me to open it for you? If it is your—if it is someone you know…”
“Yes. Please.”
He went outside and, after several seconds, Zoey followed. She found Wu already at the box, working a latch. He glanced back at her.
“I changed my mind. I want to see. I want to see what they did to her. If it is her…”
Zoey hadn’t had time to take inventory of who all it couldn’t be. Will had been at the meetings with her all day, but not the rest of the crew. It could also be Echo in there. Or Budd. The box looked too small for Andre.
“Are you certain?”
She wasn’t, but for some reason she felt like it was something she needed to do. If they’d rigged a camera in the box hoping to catch the moment of despair, she’d use it to talk to them, to tell them that she’d find them all and pound them into marmalade.
Wu opened one of the two overly complicated latches, then the other. Zoey’s cat had wandered up from the lawn. They tried to keep him restricted to the enclosed courtyard out back but he always found a way out when he felt like it.
Wu lifted the lid. Zoey steeled herself.
The stench hit her first, a hot wave of it. She tried not to gag and made herself step forward, to examine the contents. It was a man, naked, compressed into the box in the fetal position. White guy, looked fairly young. Definitely dead and not recently, either. Maggots pooled in the bottom of the box. The last thing Zoey noticed before she turned her back to it was that his eyelids had been sewn shut.
Zoey put her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath. It wasn’t any of her people. Good. Then she felt a pang of guilt because of course this was still someone else’s father, son, brother, friend, whatever. Had they killed a guy just for a dumb prank? Or maybe stolen a body from a morgue, or funeral home? Maybe that was it.
Wu was still standing over the open box, leaning into it, scrutinizing the contents for clues with a small flashlight and taking photos with his phone. Which, of course, is what she should have been doing, trying to gather information. Zoey had nothing to fear from what was in the box other than a very bad smell. And, if her enemies had killed this man in her name, this was now her responsibility, like it or not.
Zoey covered her mouth and nose with her shirt and joined Wu.
“Do you see anyth—”
The corpse reached up and punched her in the face.