Ghosts of Punktown (28 page)

     But she was still standing, and she swiveled around slowly to face the boy with the gun again.

    
“What?”
he bellowed, backing away from her and fumbling to reload his weapon with a fresh magazine as the tiny woman strode purposefully toward him. “What are you?”

    
What am I?
Hanako thought -- as she reached out for him, and as he slapped the new mag into the hand grip of his gun.
What indeed?

HUCK

4

     In his dream, Huck had wandered into the Jungle and come to the edge of its little man-made pond. Under its skin of algae he could discern shifting movement, like a restless sleeper tossing and turning under a blanket. Curious but wary, he drew closer, wading into the overgrown weeds there, until his shoes squished in slimy mud. He bent lower, hands on his knees, peering suspiciously at that troubled dreamer within his dream.

     A young girl surfaced with a splash, and seized hold of his right arm with a surprisingly powerful grip. He couldn’t make out her features well, for the coating of slime that clung to her, but her dark eyes were intense and unblinking and she seemed to be wearing a white bikini under that second skin of algae. Huck tried to straighten up, to pull away, but the girl – the naiad, the siren – pulled him off balance instead…and he plunged headfirst into the pond. Still gripping his wrist, she kicked her legs and swam down, down, into the seemingly fathomless depths of the small pond – dragging Huck along behind her, his lungs jealously clutching his last living breath.

     He awoke with a gasp, as if he’d kicked himself to the surface of a pool, but he cracked his gummy eyes and saw his familiar bedroom around him. Outside its window, he heard the crackle of gunshots, shouting and screams. It wasn’t that far away, and he figured it was what had roused him from his nightmares. From one nightmare to another.

     Artificial sunlight streamed in through the window, glaring in his face. He groaned, but was too tired – or masochistic -- to get up and take a pill that would banish his hangover entirely. Instead, he rolled onto his side, shut his eyes to the light and pulled his pillow up over his ear to muffle the gunfire. With his headache, it was as though the gunfight raged inside his own skull.

     He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but when next he awoke the intensity of the imitation sunlight had lessened so the day must be on the wane, evening drawing near. There was no more crackling gunfire, no more shouting commotion out there. What had all that been about?

     He swung his legs out of bed and sat there on its edge, hands on his knees, staring across at the window as he had stared into the restless waters of the pond. Staring as if into a mirror that showed him a visage he could no longer recognize.

     He considered going out…but go where, and to do what? He considered at least making himself a cup of coffee, but was too unmotivated to even rise from the bed and seek out his kitchen to perform that simple task. When the coffee was in his guts, then what would he do to occupy his waking hours?

     A shriek from the street below, so sudden and high-pitched it made his hand jerk toward a gun that wasn’t there. At least the cry had finally inspired him to stand, and he shuffled irritably toward the window, shifted its curtain to peer down toward the street nine levels below.

     His bedroom window faced onto the sidewalk that ran along one border of the park, its unruly plant life flooding between the bars. A young woman with long blond hair was fleeing along the sidewalk, away from an arm that had reached out to her through the fence’s bars and the dense underbrush. From this distance it appeared to be the slim arm of a woman or a child, and as Huck watched the straining arm suddenly dropped to the sidewalk and lay there, severed. From the rustling underbrush came whooping, hysterical laughter.

     “Stupid wankers,” Huck grumbled. Such were the amusements of Punktown. As a boy playing in a vacant lot he’d once found two human hands severed at the wrists, pressed together and bound with wire in an attitude of prayer. Punks playing with a body part didn’t surprise him much. But as he stared at the little limb lying there on the sidewalk like a dead fish, he noted that it appeared devoid of blood…even its torn end. So not a real body part, then? Maybe the limb of a mannequin?

     As he continued watching, a human leg emerged from between the bars, small enough to complement the disembodied arm. Its bare sole slapped the sidewalk, perhaps in imitation of dance though its audience had already fled. It was then withdrawn back into the bushes, to another mad burst of laughter.

     He was too removed to have seen it clearly, but the leg had appeared pristine, also apparently not bloodied. Had to be a mannequin, then. Or…

     Having turned back toward his bed, he squatted and drew a case out from under it. From this case he lifted a black, Kalian-made sniper rifle called a Whistler, and he carried it back to the window, lifted it and cradled its butt against his shoulder. He thumbed on its little magnifying screen and sighted on the arm on the sidewalk. Now he could clearly see that the smooth limb not only wasn’t bloody, but bore no bruising or discolorations from decomposition. From the chopped stump protruded the ends of some tubing and a glinting nub of metal, not bone.

     “No,” Huck hissed to himself. “Don’t tell me that’s
her
.” Her – the little rogue pleasure machine who’d berated him for his rudeness as she’d left the elevator they’d been trapped in together. She was of the right size and coloring. And she was pretty much a mannequin.

     A mannequin whose feelings he’d hurt.

     Huck shifted the barrel of the Whistler toward the bushes from which the leg had been extended, thumbed filter keys beside the display screen to cancel out the green hues of the leaves. With the clusters of leaves now rendered ghostly and translucent, behind them were revealed some sheets of gray plastic laid on the ground, but whoever had crouched there upon them had already withdrawn and taken the leg along with them. Too bad. Huck had considered giving the prankster some of his own brand of amusement. He lowered the rifle, returned it to its case and nudged this back under the bed with his foot.

     He glanced back at the window over his shoulder.

     Huck had killed men and women, humans and nonhumans. He’d killed robots, too – members of the rival Nuts gang. He’d once boasted to Phlone that he’d killed half of the alien races Punktown had to offer, and that was a lot, and that his goal was to kill at least one each of the other half before he retired – or died. Ha. They were really the same thing, weren’t they? Retirement and death?

     So with his score of kills, the murder of some pint-sized synthetic whore who’d insulted him should hardly matter much to him, should it? He’d done worse, seen worse, and right now worse was happening all over the city. And tomorrow was another day in Punktown.

     “Hang up the guns,” Phlone had told him. Huck snorted. Hang up your life, he might as well have said.

     Huck let out a long sigh, and a bitter smile formed in the underbrush of his beard. “Ah, why the hell not?” he said, and reached for his clothing draped over the back of a chair.

*     *     *

     Evening was descending in Subtown, but regularly spaced lights came on in the park to offer security to lovers and families who hadn’t dared stroll there for a long time. As he entered it, Huck at first felt like he had the park all to himself.

     But gradually the sounds of other beings drifted to him – laughter, boisterous conversations – and he went off the paved pathway to follow them. He was a child of the city, unused to stealth in the forest, but he soon gave up trying to lessen the snapping of twigs and rustling of branches. He entered into a field of grass grown taller than himself, and from there passed into a dense growth of tubular stalks with crowns of fronds. He paused for a few moments when he realized these clear tubes were filled with some ambery-colored fluid in which were suspended the tiny carcasses of various insect species. How long it would take for these plants to digest their prey he couldn’t guess – these bugs might have been caught minutes or days ago for all he knew. A native species, or something from another world seeded in the park? Maybe even a mutant species? Huck smiled to himself when he noted that even the plants in Punktown were killers.

     Pushing on through the stalks, shouldering his way between them, he ultimately came to a circular area where the ground looked scorched black, to prevent cleared tubes from growing anew. Here were gathered fifteen people (his experienced eyes had taken a fast head count); thirteen males and two females. All shirtless, all with the film loop tattoo of the prisoner having his throat cut and his head hacked off. Huck parted the last stalks with his arms as if passing through a stage curtain, and stepped into the clearing. Fifteen heads turned his way.

     They looked wary; hands went to the deep pockets of their fatigue pants or machetes lying on the ground beside them. A boy sitting cross-legged retrieved a shotgun he had set down by his knee. A boy who was standing hooked his thumb under the strap of an assault rifle he wore slung over his shoulder. But another boy pointed at Huck, split into a grin, and exclaimed drunkenly, “Hey, I know that guy!”

     A kind of hookah served as the nucleus of the gathering, its central clear globe containing gurgling fluid in which a live jellyfish floated. Discarded beer cans and the crumpled wrappings of fast food littered the area. And on the ground not far from the hookah, like another piece of trash, lay a small female torso, nude and without head or limbs. The places where head and limbs had once been attached looked messily hacked, where a tough inner support structure had resisted dismantling. Despite its impressive breasts and the indent of its navel – dark and wrinkled like a closed eye -- the little torso was not human. The fact that it was riddled with bullet holes, none of which leaked blood, further attested to this – though a watery liquid, a lubricant or circulatory fluid as green as sap, had trickled from several of the wounds.

     Where the limbs had ended up Huck couldn’t tell, but one standing boy with lowered trousers had impaled a girl’s head on his erect penis. He had been laughing uproariously before Huck entered the clearing, moving the head forward and back along the length of his shaft. Another boy with lowered trousers stood beside him, holding out his hands and wiggling his fingers like a child eager for his turn with a toy. This second boy was in the early stages of addiction to the drug called “fish,” as evidenced by his bulging eyes, fixed grin and most telling, the purple pigmentation of his skeletal body. Huck couldn’t see the face of the detached head, but long black hair hung toward the ground.

     The grinning boy exclaimed further, “It’s that drunken bum we talked to, Renaldo!”

     One seated figure rose to his feet, and Huck recognized him: maybe twenty, thickset and shortish, with his head shaved bald except for a patch of hair in the shape of a lightning bolt. Renaldo stepped forward, chuckling. “Hey hey, it’s my role model! I didn’t recognize you, man -- you look different today.” The clan’s leader cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. “I know why…it’s because you’re sober.”

     “Yeah,” joked another gang member, who held the nozzle of the hose connected to the hookah. “That’s why he’s here – he wants to puff our bender!”

     “That’s not what I want,” Huck said in a low, even voice. He motioned toward the torso on the ground. “I came here to get my friend.”

     Renaldo glanced toward the pathetic object, then back to Huck with a grin that reflected amusement, surprise, and wariness. The wariness was more in the eyes than the grin. “Your
friend?
”

     “Yes. I want her…and I’ll go.”

     “You got an interesting friend, there. She can’t be much fun…she’s got no fuck holes.”

     “She does now,” interjected another of the clan, pointing at the wounds that peppered the tiny carcass. “Renaldo, you missed it – Carny was fucking her in one of the bullet holes before!”