Ghosts of Punktown (25 page)

     He thought of the poor little android he had met in the building’s elevator, so smartly dressed and on her way to somewhere else. He half-wished that, for the first time ever, he was on his way out of Punktown with her.

     “Fuck it,” he said.

     Huck had turned back around to continue watching the tribe saunter and swagger off to another section of the Jungle, still distantly hooting and hollering like lunatics, when his wrist comp beeped. He didn’t need to look at its screen to know it was the call – and the summons -- he had been expecting.

*     *     *

     When Phlone had called saying he wanted to meet with him, Huck had told the Choom he could find him at the restaurant
Pho Paxton
, which served Vietnamese fare. A public place…not that Neptune Teeb’s people, including Huck, hadn’t hit people in public places before. And that was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

     Like Huck, Phlone worked directly under the man they called Wild Bill, right hand and heir apparent to the Neptune Teeb crime syndy. Wild Bill in turn had always called Huck -- half-jokingly – Mad-Dog Huck. “Wild Bill and Mad-Dog,” he would tell Huck. “We should be a movie.”

     Phlone, on the other hand, was known on the streets less romantically as Squash, which as a mutant his head vaguely resembled with its elongated form and yellowish color. A partly rotten and wrinkling squash at that. As both a Choom and a mutant Phlone was one of the least nondescript gangsters in Punktown, but then again there wasn’t exactly a shortage of nonhumans or mutants in the city.

     With Phlone never having tried Vietnamese food before, Huck helped him order. Their waitress was a slim woman wearing a white blouse and tight black slacks that clung to a small spherical bottom, her long hair shimmering black and face severely beautiful. Her manner was chilly, however, all business; when Huck had said, “Hello, Hien,” the woman had acted as though she hadn’t heard him. As she began walking away from the table Huck shook his head and remarked loudly to Phlone, “I used to date Hien, and now she won’t give me the time of day. You see that? A woman sucks every last drop of blood out of your bank account and then she flicks you away like a snot. I’m not saying every Vietnamese girl is a low-class childish whore who’d sell her mother’s soul for enough money to buy a designer handbag – just every one that I’ve known.”

     As she passed into the kitchen, Hien threw an even more severe glance back at their table, and Phlone warned, “Man, she heard that, you know. You want her to spit in your food?”

     “I’ve traded spit with the bitch before,” Huck said casually, stirring his thick, super-sweet coffee. “I’m sure she did worse to my food when I was fucking her.”

     “Same old Huck,” Phlone said. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “And good old Huck got the job done at the casino…but what a mess, man, what a mess.”

     Huck sucked a film of sweetened condensed milk off his spoon, and meeting the mutant’s eyes said, “I know what this is about, Squash, so you don’t have to draw it out. You’re giving me the axe.”

     “Not me, Huck. Wild Bill.”

     “Right, right. So now you’re going to give me a severance package.”

     “Yes. And a generous one.”

     “Of course. And then, a month from now, or six months from now, I get my head severed as an extra bonus.”

     “Huck.” Phlone leaned toward him across the table. “You know Wild Bill. He’s not disloyal, and he’s not ungrateful.”

     “But he’s not stupid. He sees me as a loose cannon. A risk.”

     “He just sees you as a good worker who’s reached the end of his useful employment. He doesn’t forget what you’ve done for the family. Teeb himself won’t forget what you’ve done for the family.”

     “Why am I so special?” Huck sipped his
ca phe sua
. “Mad-dog psycho killers are a dime a dozen in this town.”

     “You’re a king among psycho killers, Huck.” Phlone tried to make a joke of it to change the other man’s brooding, distrustful mood. “What was your secret, anyway?”

     “Part of my secret is never get personal, but seeing as this is my retirement party and all, I’ll tell you my life story.” Huck set down his cup, sat back and smiled crookedly. “I don’t give a mutant’s last shit about anything, Squash. I spent most my childhood in ‘care centers’ that were glorified kennels, tended by robots. I spent my teens on the streets, and you could go gang or lone wolf and I went lone wolf ‘cause it made me less dependent. So I have no love for anybody. As far as I’m concerned, I had no parents. I have no siblings. I have no friends. I’ll sell myself to the highest bidder, and that was always Neptune Teeb. If it had been someone else, I’d be taking my severance package from them, now. I guess you could say I like you, Squash, as much as I’ve ever liked anybody, but if our pretty waitress comes back here now and hands me ten thousand munits to kill you…well, you won’t leave this restaurant alive.”

     Phlone chuckled uneasily. “You’d do me for just ten thousand munits, buddy?”

     “Five thousand,” Huck reconsidered, not blinking as he held his colleague’s stare. “I’m lowering my rates, now that I’m unemployed and all.” Now it was his turn to lean across the table with emphasis. “Tell me, Squash…Wild Bill could have gone two ways with this. He could have killed me, because he’s afraid of me, or he could have let me live because he’s afraid of me. But he is afraid of me, isn’t he?”

     “Huck, come on, friend…you shouldn’t talk like that. It’s disrespectful. And you know Wild Bill – he’s not the type to be afraid, or he wouldn’t be where he is today.”

     “And I wouldn’t be sitting here with you today taking a severance package from Neptune Teeb if people weren’t afraid of me.”

     Phlone’s wide Choom mouth, made wrinkly and sunken by his condition, grimaced unattractively. In a lower tone of voice he said, “Of course he’s afraid of you, Huck. Who isn’t?”

     Huck leaned back in his chair again, as if satisfied by the meal that hadn’t arrived yet.

     “Listen,” Phlone went on, “this is a juicy severance. Get yourself a nicer apartment, up here in the sunlight. Get yourself a couple new sexy girlfriends like this one.” He hooked a thumb toward Hien, who was taking an order at another table. “Enjoy the fruits of your labors. Travel, whatever. Just do what’s right, that’s all: don’t listen to the other families if they come knocking. Don’t draw any more attention to yourself -- keep a low profile. Keep your snout clean. Hang up the guns.”

     “Hang up the guns,” Huck repeated to himself, watching a young couple who were seated nearby, swapping smiles and touching hands. They were as alien to him as those two Dacvibese sitting at another table. Hang up the guns…and yet, for the past twenty-something years, the only way he had been able to define his life was by stopping the lives of others.

     “I’m impressed with you, how reasonable you’re being about this,” Phlone continued.

     “How else could it be?” Huck muttered, averting his eyes as his cynical smile momentarily faltered. “Even I know I went too far this time.”

     “Well you’re being a good boy now, and it’s appreciated. Keep it up, and enjoy your life. It’s a
new
life for you, man! Hey, I envy you. You’re getting out young. You’re getting out alive.”

     “Right. And you be a good boy, too, Squash.”

     “How’s that?”

     “Don’t you come knocking later on, either, with second thoughts about that bonus I mentioned before.” Huck’s restored grin seemed almost as big as the Choom’s split-head mouth. “Or I’ll do you for
nothing
.” He held his right hand up in front of his eye, fingers curled in the shape of a zero – or a rifle scope.

HANAKO

3

     Returning from her trip to Miniosis in the early evening, Hanako did not stop in to say hello to Sabina, but after she had showered and changed into more casual clothes she gave the old woman a call. Sabina did not answer, but Hanako thought that she might have retired early, and didn’t call again until the next morning. Again Sabina did not answer. Hanako had to go to work, but she tried phoning at her lunch break. Once more, no reply. This was the day of their weekly shopping excursions, once Hanako had come home from work -- but she didn’t want to wait for that.

     She made some excuse to her manager about going home early. He didn’t protest; he’d been the perfect gentleman since the day she had thought she might have to kill him. (Whether or not he suspected she was not human she didn’t know.)

     Hanako did not own a vehicle herself (again, afraid to have her background checked), so she rode public transit down into Subtown, and to her neighborhood…walked briskly the rest of the way, the high heels that added a little to her 4’9” frame clicking sharply against the pavement. As she neared her apartment building, passing a section of the park they called the Jungle, she heard the rustling of vegetation and wet smacking sounds, and looked to her right. Behind the fence, several faces peered out at her from parted foliage, between the bars like animals in a zoo. They were young men, making kissing sounds at her and lapping at the air. “Hey, little girl, come here a minute,” one of the Jungle savages called.

     She faced forward again, picked up her pace a little and clicked up the front steps of her building, on into the lobby. She didn’t even waste time checking on the elevator (maybe that scruffy man in the leather jacket was in there yet, still propped up by the wall), and danced up the staircases to the fourth floor instead.

     At the far end of the hallway, Hanako buzzed the door to Apartment 12. She waited a few moments, buzzed again. Finally, she pounded the heel of her fist on the door. Still, no one responded to her summons. She stood contemplating the door, then, her arms hanging at her sides, trying to compute the possibilities. Maybe Sabina had gone on her own little trip? Perhaps she had relatives or other friends she hadn’t told Hanako about?

     Her eyes settled on the keypad, and she called to mind the password she couldn’t help noticing the first time Sabina had invited her in. She reached out her hand, and punched in N…U…R…S…E…R…Y.

     The door slid open, and Hanako stepped inside. If she had possessed a sense of smell, she wouldn’t have bothered calling out, “Sabina?” as she ventured into the dark, secret garden within.

     There was a creaking noise ahead. Hanako recognized it as the sound of Sabina’s wooden rocking chair in motion. Relieved, she felt an unwilled smile come to her face. “Sabina?” she said again, making her way to the back of the living room. “I’m sorry I let myself in…”

     Hanako saw Sabina silhouetted in her rocking chair against an open window. From outside came the sounds of traffic; hovercars close to the street, lesser numbers of helicars coasting higher. But immediately this scene registered as wrong to Hanako. In all the times she had been in the apartment, this window had been completely covered by the dark purple vines of Sabina’s favorite plant.

     “Sabina?” Hanako said, and when she advanced a bit closer two things were revealed. These incongruous revelations made her stop in her tracks so that she might clearly observe them, try somehow to assimilate them.

     Sabina lay on the floor near the rocker, her body having been obscured before by the fronds of a large potted plant. Hanako did not know how to judge such things, but she might have guessed that Sabina had been dead for several days – might even have expired the same day she had left on her trip. Her eyes and mouth were open, and she looked older than she had in life – as if some vital component had been extracted, leaving just a husk like a chrysalis. A flesh mannequin.

     The Sabina that rocked in the chair was formed of tightly woven vines and leaves of a dark purple color. It was a perfect sculpture; Hanako could even recognize the subtle shapes of the old woman’s face, with the pronounced cheekbones that spoke of her youthful beauty. If she looked closely enough she could see that the feet of wound vines were flexing ever so slightly, enough to keep the rocker in motion.