“All of your people were responsible!”

Fred blinked. Mission accomplished. His attention is definitely back on me. “Care to elaborate? No, don’t bother. I don’t care, is the thing. I really don’t.”

“Are you being this argumentative on purpose?”

“Count on it,” Jonas said with a vigorous nod.

“If you’re trying to stall because you think people can find you via your cell phones, or if any of you think to slink away and call for help—”

“Oh, hell no,” Betsy said. “As a feminist, I hate calling for help. Plus it’d ruin everything. I’ve got a rep to consider.”

“We’re not stalling.” Fred was pretty sure that was true. “We’re also not impressed. This—whatever this is”—she waved a hand, encompassing Ran and his henchmen and the NEA building—“it all goes back to you thinking you’re special. Not like anyone else. And see, it’s a lie. I’m not like anyone else.”

“Well, I’m not like anyone else, either,” Betsy whined.

“Not now, Betsy. You—you’re just an aging hippie with a superiority complex.”

He opened his mouth but Fred cut him off. “Admit it. You think you can make decisions about hundreds of thousands of people because you’re so uniquely superior. It’s bad enough you really think you’re special; what’s worse is it’s for the dumbest reasons imaginable. Because you’re old but you have long clean hair. Because you need a wheelchair but you won’t let yourself slump in it. And because in the sixties you thought unprotected sex meant you were deep, and bragging about a three-day booze-pot-shit fest in a field in New York State meant you actually did something. And you did do something: got high, and fucked in the shit. Not the mud. The shit.”

“Woodstock was the defining moment of—”

“Of shit. They ran out of food, they ran out of water, they ran out of places to shit. Okay? Three days of starving and shitting. Women had miscarriages there, do you get that? Babies died at Woodstock but you’re all still bragging about it like it was a plan. Like it was a good idea. You were right about one thing, though: Woodstock absolutely did define a generation.

“You Baby Booming idiots did one thing, one thing, to get yourselves noticed: a whole bunch of you got born between 1946 and 1964. And . . . that’s it. That’s what you did. And it’s not even what you did. Your parents came home after driving Hitler to suicide and they all had simultaneous sex and then you guys were born. You’ve been coasting on your parents having simultaneous sex for going on seventy years.”

Fred was starting to see little black spots blooming before her eyes, evidence of a Type Three Shitfit. She staggered a little and Betsy reached out to steady her. “Are you all right?”

“My mom . . . was at Woodstock . . . and is a hippie . . .”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t know . . . you just don’t know how awful it was . . .”

“I do now. You should write children’s books. L’il Foxy and Friends Catch STDs While Fucking in Woodstock Shit. Like that.”

Hedley Ran had simply waited in his chair through Fred’s rant, his pale cheeks getting more and more flushed. His posture improved, which she hadn’t thought was possible. The Skittles Gang stood around waiting for orders, and Ran, when he saw she was done, obliged: “Kill her friend.”

“Madison . . .” Is not my friend, Fred was about to say, when Red Shirt Two produced a pistol from somewhere and shot Betsy in the chest.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fred had never been prouder of her friends in her life (except Madison wasn’t her friend). Their eyes widened, yes. Madison sucked in a breath; Jonas leveled a long stare of contempt at Ran. They didn’t scream. They didn’t cry. They didn’t beg for their lives.

So, of course, she took her example from theirs, and simply looked at Hedley Ran the way a picnicker looks at a line of ants marching toward Potato Salad Hill: annoying, but no real threat. To Fred’s intense pleasure, Ran was the one who seemed shaken and shocked.

The Skittles Boys were worse off, pale and sweating and their gazes darted here and there; none of them could settle on any one thing to look at. Betsy’s crumpled body? Noooo. Madison’s pale, sorrowful face, Jonas’s contempt? Her own scorn? No and no and no.

“Oh, starting to sink in?” she asked. “It’s real, boys. This isn’t Final Fantasy XXXVVIII. That?” She pointed to Betsy’s body. “The state of Massachusetts calls that felony murder and they get pissy about it. That’s life without parole, and it’s on all of you. I assume you’ve all got good lawyers on retainer? A cheap one in this town charges five hundred an hour.” She had no idea what a lawyer, cheap or otherwise, charged, but five hundred sounded pricey. Their blanched expressions told her the shot had hit, hard. “I’m sure Ran here will happily foot the bill. Get it? Foot the bill? Because, in case you can’t tell, he’s got no feet.”

“You see,” Ran said quietly. “It cares nothing for its friends. It’s not human, and it’s wrong to treat it as one.”

“You’re the one who isn’t human,” Madison said quietly. She had cried silently, helplessly—but had stayed with them. Hadn’t run or begged. Hadn’t flinched away from the shot, from Betsy going down. “She didn’t even know me and she wanted to help. You won’t ever understand that kind of thinking. My mother tried to tell me about people like you.” She shook her head. “I’m not a good listener.”

“Shut up, cunt.”

“Hey!” Fred seized Madison’s wrist and pulled her behind her, shoving a pissed Jonas back with the other hand along with an I’ve-got-this glare. “You’ve got us all here, you’re getting what you wanted. There’s no reason to talk to her like that when you could be calling me a cunt.”

“Yeah,” Jonas spoke out, still hovering protectively near Madison. “Fred’s used to it; call her the cunt, the whore, the bitch, the shrew, the witch, the tart, the twat, but leave Madison alone!”

“Thank you, Dr. Bimm. And, uh, Jonas.”

“My friends call me Fred, so you’d better start, Madison. There. There! You see what you’ve done to me?” she cried to the man in the chair. “You’ve made me befriend Madison Fehr! You evil bastard!”

“Enough of this.” If Ran had been rattled earlier, he was getting himself back under control now. “We need to do the test and get rid of the witnesses, then move the device. In that order.”

“That would be the doomsday device?” Fred asked. “When you’re not blaming strangers for your wife’s death and committing felony kidnapping and murder, do you sit around in your wheelchair watching old spy movies? Doomsday device. Christ.”

“It will work,” he insisted, answering Fred but speaking to Jonas. “Tell it to have no fears on that account.”

“Fred, Ran says his machine’s gonna work and not to worry about it or anything.”

“I have tolerated its presence here long enough, hers and the other fish she takes to mate. Now is the reckoning I promised my wife, and it isn’t the only one who will suffer.”

“Fred, Ran says he’ll get you, and your little dog, too.”

She could have laughed to see confusion chasing anger across Ran’s face. He can’t understand. He’s got guns and thugs and a doomsday device and he’s sure we’re in his power and he can’t understand why we will not take him seriously. And he never ever will. And that’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve heard all day.

“You won’t laugh when it works,” he hissed, rattled into speaking directly to Fred. “Doubting my design is a mistake.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll work, Dr. Ran. I’m absolutely certain your Doomsday Device will work. No problem there; your doomsday device is going to be a mechanical marvel. That’s not the issue with your doomsday device. I’m not worried about whether or not the doomsday device you’ve no doubt spent years building will work. I’m concerned about your doomsday device because it’s . . . you know. A doomsday device.”

“It can make all the mockery it likes,” Ran began.

“Thanks. You look embalmed. What’s worse is I suspect this is actually a good day for you. And you still look wretched. She’s dead.” Pointing at the “corpse.” “And she looks a lot better than you do.”

“Oh, that.” Ran looked down. “Throw that in the tank.”

“Which one?” Fred asked, honestly interested. Let’s see, there are over seventy separate tanks on the main level alone, not counting—

“The big one, of course. The one we need for the test.”

Fred didn’t like the sound of that at all.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Betsy’s dead body went in with the inevitable splash, and they all watched it sink. Fred thought she certainly looked dead, and from Jonas and Madison’s expressions, they thought so, too. Pale, blanched. Blood-stained shirt. Eyes frozen open and staring, drifting down and down and down. Please be alive, you Minnesotan blond bloodsucker; I would be losing my shit for real if I thought you were truly as dead as you looked.

“Get on with the speech.”

“What?” Hedley Ran asked, again startled into answering her directly.

She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “Oh, come on. You haven’t gone to all this trouble, making nice with Madison to trick her out of her key cards and rounding us all up in here and dropping sly little hints you think are subtle about your doomsday device and going on about how I’m not human and will pay the price, blah-blah, you haven’t set all this up to not tell me all about your evil genius plan and how we’ll rue the day we killed your wife, except no one in this building, and I’m betting no one in this state, had anything to do with that, but what are mere facts to a mad scientist?”