Ghosts of Punktown (4 page)

     “Sorry,” the man mouthed, dying. “Sorry...”

     Stake shot him several times in the face, to erase that haunting visage.

     But he had only transferred it to his own. As if the man’s ghost had fled his body in that instant, to possess him.

4

     He was well, they assured him. The skin of his chest was not too tight. Was he sleeping all right? Did he need some meds for that?

     Cal Williams had looked away from the doctor’s face, unable to meet his eyes. The man’s skin tone suggested some African ancestry in his mix, but his eyes had something of a slanted look, too. It seemed all the eyes of the city were Ha Jiin eyes, watching him, no matter what face they glared out of. Sometimes Cal thought he was still a prisoner, still being tortured, but this time just psychologically. Perhaps he had never been freed, but right now sat in a cell instead of an examination room of the VA Hospital. Maybe this doctor wore makeup to change his skin color. Or maybe they had drugged him, or implanted a computer chip in his brain. Played around inside his mind...

     “Do you think you’d benefit from talking with one of our counselors?” the doctor asked him.

     Cal stepped down from the examination table, resealing his shirt. “No,” he grunted. “I’m fine. Just like you say.”

     He didn’t have a car yet, so he figured he’d buy a coffee from a vending machine in the little cafeteria, and sip it while he waited for the next shuttle to Blue Station.
Blue Station
, he thought with a smirk. Yeah. How appropriate.

     In a nexus of hallways where elevators were situated, Cal paused to look at directional plaques on a wall. Arrows pointed one way for the CAFETERIA. And in another direction, toward PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES. He found himself, almost against his will, drifting down that corridor. Maybe it was the sobbing voice he heard from one of the rooms that compelled him. As it turned out, it was a man sitting in the little waiting room, his face in his hands and his elbows on his knees. The receptionist behind the counter could have been a robot for all the concern she showed him. Another vet was strapped into a cybernetic “pony” with insect-like arms and legs, as his own four limbs were missing, making him look like a swaddled overgrown infant. He met Cal’s eyes with a dazed, or maybe just fatalistic, expression.

     The nurse looked up, finally noticing Cal. “Can I help you?” she asked blandly.

     “No – I’m...just looking for a friend,” Cal stammered, and then he ducked back into the hall.

*     *     *

     Stake left the counselor’s office without his mask on, as the man had suggested. “As long as you wear it, you fortify your
need
for it. And you fortify your identification with the Ha Jiin soldier. Every time you put it on again, you reestablish that identity. This is a wound that needs its bandage off in order to heal, Jeremy. Don’t look in the mirror. Don’t fret about it. You have to ignore it, which is not the same thing as the hiding you’re doing now. Go about your life. Your mutation aside, there is no physiological reason for you to maintain this appearance.”

     Stake had nodded, listening to these words. Normally he wouldn’t have looked too long at the counselor’s face, but he had stared at him intensely, hoping, hoping to see the man’s expression change to surprise as his patient began to mimic him. Yet it did not come.

     “But you know,” the counselor had gone on, “the surest way to deal with this is to treat your brain itself with a surgical procedure, in such a way that your ability will be forever inhibited. No more shape-shifting at all. Do you think you’d be interested in that?”

     “Maybe later,” Stake had murmured. “Not...not yet.” His ability had served him well during his military stint. Might he make use of it in some future career? And then there was the matter of his heritage. He was a Tin Town mutant, like his mother. He was almost defiantly defensive about that. He didn’t need to be...
corrected
, like some freak, some abomination.

     But as he left the counselor’s office, he couldn’t help but wonder if there were something more masochistic in his choice not to have his mutation treated. Something like punishment involved in that decision.

*     *     *

     Cal Williams was waiting for one of the elevator doors to open when he looked to his right and saw the man walking toward him from the psychiatric wing. He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed him. A few other people were muttering. “Is that a Ha Jiin?” a woman said.

     “His skin isn’t blue,” her male companion hissed, as if afraid they’d be overheard.

     The man with the scarred face stopped behind the whispering couple, waiting for another of the elevators. Cal kept staring at him. He was trembling. If this were all some elaborate facade created by his Ha Jiin captors to trick him, then this one had let his mask slip. Had
overlooked a critical detail: those ritualistic scars on his cheeks.

     Even though the line he was in was a little shorter, Cal shifted over behind the man with the scars. He stared at the back of his head, so close he could reach out and take his neck in his hands. And as if he could feel those imaginary hands, the man turned around to meet Cal’s gaze. Without being asked, he said, “Yeah – I know. I did this to myself, like they do. I lost five good buddies over there
, so I...” He made a slashing movement with his hand.

    
Why lie about it?
Jeremy Stake wondered. But it was easier this way, wasn’t it? Not having to explain his mutation. Or that scene in the necropolis below the jungle floor. This way it seemed he was a good, loyal soldier, grieving only for his own dead. Not conflicted about some enemy who had murdered a teenage girl.

     Cal Williams said nothing. But there was more than just the scars. This man’s cheekbones were high and pronounced, his lips full, his eyes slanted, his pupils obsidian black, all like a Ha Jiin. His face wasn’t robin’s egg blue, but it had a bluish pallor.

     Seeing that the man behind him wasn’t going to respond, Stake faced around forward again. He felt the eyes of others on him, as well. Yes, easy for the counselor to tell him to go without the mask. And maybe it wasn’t a bad idea, really, to rid himself of that crutch. But he felt it was premature to have removed it here and now.

     The elevator arrived, disgorging one group of people and admitting the next. Cal watched the cabin fill up. The scarred man entered, then turned around to face outward. Cal was desperate to plunge inside so as not to lose track of him, but when the man faced him again he could not bring himself to move. The elevator door slid shut between them.

     But a moment later, Cal was racing toward the emergency stairwell.

5

     Stake’s new flat was on Judas Street, in a brick tenement meant to look like native Choom architecture but merely looking mass produced and cheap. At least the gang graffiti gave all the buildings on Judas Street, whatever their style, a homogenous feel. His bed was narrow, his bathroom tiny, his kitchen little more than a counter, but there was a table near the window where he set up his new computer. It would serve as his phone, his VT, and his means by which to try to find out what had become of his former prisoner. The female Ha Jiin sniper named Thi Gonh, whom her own people had dubbed with admiration the “Earth Killer.”

     He recalled her face better than he recalled his own. Yearned for it more, too. He could still smell the scent of her long hair, and of her blue flesh. He remembered the taste of it.

     What would all the vets at the VA think if they knew how he had lain with her? Not that many of them hadn’t slept with prostitutes among their allies, the Jin Haa. But this was the enemy. A killer who had trained her sniper rifle on men and women just like them, and pulled the trigger again and again.

     And what would her people think, if they knew the same about her? If they knew how she had become...confused, as he had?

     Stake had his computer on now, running in VT mode, and the news station he was tuned to reported a seemingly endless list of recent crimes. A Dacvibese had been murdered by a gang right here on Judas Street and they showed a picture of the alien in life, resembling an albino bipedal greyhound. Stake turned to look at it. Had the kids, maybe adolescents, who had ended that life for drug money felt any hesitation, any remorse? He doubted it. Were they more hardened killers, then, in their way, than he was? He thought that the difference between them was that his killings had been sanctioned, encouraged. He had been told that it was
right
, whereas they did not have to suffer such a moral dichotomy. They knew they were wrong, were evil, and were comfortable wearing that skin.

     Stake had bought more than just a computer with the first of his pension money. From the table, he picked up a black market handgun, a big and ugly Wolff .45. He hefted it as he paced his little flat. It wasn’t too light. Lightweight guns were good in the field, when you were laden with gear, but something with more weight definitely felt better at the end of your arm. It was more...
there
. He would start carrying it when he ventured from his apartment from now on. This was, after all, Judas Street. This was, after all, Punktown.

     Well, he hadn’t been able to find out anything about Thi Gonh today. Everything was in
upheaval now with most of the troops coming home, except for a security force that would remain stationed in the city of Di Noon. As a returnee, he was not privy to such information. But he would keep trying. Whether she would go on trial as an enemy or be returned to her own people, he would track her down one of these days. If nothing more, it was something to occupy his mind. A mission, now that there was no further need for his services. No more battles to fight.

     In that distant dimension, at any rate.

*     *     *

     Cal Williams stood across the street from the brick tenement, running his gaze across its windows. He didn’t know which floor the man lived on, but he knew he was there; he had seen him come and go several times by now. That day when he first met the man in the VA Hospital, he had managed to catch sight of him again down the street and follow him to the subway station, and then trail him here to Judas Street. Cal had altered his appearance along the way, by at first going bare-headed, then wearing the hood of his sweatshirt for a while, then removing the cloned leather jacket he wore over the sweatshirt and stuffing it in a balled-up shopping bag he plucked out of the gutter. Luckily, he was a nondescript person. His hair cropped close to his head, like just another soldier.

     Yes, the war was over. The Jin Haa had established their small, independent nation within the body of the resentful Ha Jiin’s land, like a tumor they must accept and live with. And in return for the help of the Earth Colonies, the Jin Haa would unthinkably allow them to extract gases from the tombs of their own dead. Now that there was a bitter peace, Earth was working to sway the Ha Jiin to become friendly, too. They had so much more gas than the Jin Haa, after all.

     But with the war over or not, it was too soon for a Ha Jiin man to be here within an Earth-established colony city. Oh, he might say he was a Jin Haa ally. With his skin color, he might even claim to be an Earther. But Cal knew better. The man was a spy. Or a terrorist. Right here, camouflaged by the city’s diversity of races, walking amongst these blind fools, and only Cal was aware of it. As though he wore his military surplus goggles, attuned to a wavelength of light that allowed him to see a creature invisible to others, but slithering through the air around them.

     There were multiple lanes of traffic thronged with vehicles of every description, hovering or on wheels. To reach the opposite shore, he had to go further down Judas to a subway kiosk, then cross beneath the street and emerge on the other side. He recognized the building – as unremarkable in appearance as he was – by its graffiti, left most predominately by a gang called the Judas Street Hangmen.

     Cal mounted its short flight of front steps, and touched a key on its entry panel. The screen displayed the names of the tenants. He was afraid that the man would have opted to remain anonymous, as some of the tenants had. He ran his finger down the list. A mix of human and alien names. He thought he could tell the alien names were Choom, with one Tikkihotto, from the sound of them. Nothing that sounded Jiinese, though from the man’s disguise that didn’t surprise him.

     A woman came clicking her shoes up the steps, and Cal stepped away from the panel guiltily to let her buzz herself in. Dark, maybe with Indian blood given that a holographic eye was pasted on her forehead like a bindi. She gave him a sideways look. He hesitated, then asked, “Excuse me, ma’am? I’m trying to find someone...he has scars on his cheeks? He dropped this in the subway and I thought I saw him go in here.” From his back pocket he produced his own wallet.

     “Third floor. I don’t know his name,” the woman said brusquely. The holographic third eye followed him distrustfully, and blinked. “But I can’t let you in with me.”

     “Oh...okay, I understand.” He didn’t want to alarm her. He backed off some more while she buzzed herself inside. She watched him through the door’s window as she pushed it closed and made sure it locked.

     Third floor. Cal activated the display monitor again. He isolated the names of those on the third floor. A few anonymous, but he copied the available male names onto a scrap of paper from his wallet. He would enter these names into his computer, in his own flat, and see what he might glean from them.

     As he returned to the sidewalk, staring at the scrap of paper, another woman came near him and said something he didn’t get. Cal looked up, a bit startled, and she smiled at him with long red lips that curled forever. From her scanty clothing he could tell she was a prosty. But she was a Choom, not an Earther, not of Asian blood. That was good. Good for her, and good for him, too. He ignored her when she repeated her comment, hurrying off down the street toward the subway so that he might descend into the tunnels below the city – like those he had fought in not so long ago, among the ghostly ancestors of the enemy he sent to join them.

6

     Neither tubes nor buses would make stop
s in the ghetto of Tin Town anymore, and any cabbie willing to do so would have to be so crazy that Jeremy Stake would have been more afraid of
him
than the ghetto’s denizens themselves – of which he had formerly been one. So he got as close as he could by hoverbus, and went the rest of the way on foot.

     He walked past a series of tenement houses that had all burned into charred skeletons, looking like they’d been bombed. Children balanced along the girders of a floorless second floor as if they were putting on a circus performance. From the hugeness of one child’s head and the weirdly bent figure of another, it was clear they were mutants. Like his mother had been. Like himself.

     Under his jacket he carried the Wolff .45. When two large men walking close together approached him on the sidewalk, he became extra-conscious of the holstered semiautomatic. But it was actually one man, with an overabundance of flesh and limbs, and he didn’t even glance at Stake as they passed each other. They were all ghosts of what they had been or what they could have been, in Tin Town.

     He located the apartment building where he had last known his father to be
living, but he wasn’t there anymore, and the tenant who had replaced him knew nothing of the former occupant. Stake was disappointed – not only because he wanted to see his father again after his four years away in another plane of existence, but because he had hoped that looking into the face of the man who had sired him would give him the jolt he needed to slip the alien mask that had fused itself onto his skull, the way a normal person’s face remained fixed. But that was not normal for him.

     The best Stake could do, before leaving Tin Town, was to next seek out and stand before the place where his mother had been living when she died. Maybe the building’s familiar face would urge the shifting of his cells.

     Yet, even the buildings were mutated. He passed through an old low income housing project, the buildings all bulging at their middles, and at their summits the plastic of which they were composed had been weirdly affected by pollution, teased out into intricate branches so that it seemed that Stake strolled down a rubble-strewn promenade of baobab trees.

     He finally found the building he sought in this now transfigured neighborhood. He stared at the third floor windows through which his mother had once gazed, as if hoping that her face might appear there. As if hoping his own, younger face would appear there. But the restorative miracle he desired was not triggered.

     Stake flinched when he heard the chatter of automatic gunfire, a few blocks over. The sky was going coppery as evening approached, and it was best even for a seasoned war vet like himself not to be out in the gangs’ combat zone after dark. So he turned back toward the border of the mutant slum. As he walked, someone called out to him and he paused warily, looked over. A man sat on the top step of a tenement doorway, arched and shadowy like an alcove. In the gloom, long appendages stirred; tentacles? The man gurgled, “Are you a Ha Jiin?”

     “No,” Stake told him. “I’m not.”

     As if he hadn’t even heard Stake, the mutant said, “You call us Earth people ghost-eaters, don’t you?” And then, without waiting for another reply, the man purposely gave out a long rumbling belch.

*     *     *

    
Jeremy Stake
.

     Cal Williams had found him, mostly by eliminating the others from his list. He learned little about the man from the net, but he had supposedly served as a corporal in the Colonial Forces in the Blue War. Oh, there was a picture...yet the man in the service ID photo looked absolutely nothing like the man Cal had followed to the apartment building. That only proved the point. This Corporal Stake had survived the war only to be killed here in his own dimension by the Ha Jiin terrorist, and have his identity stolen. In the more treacherous red tape jungle of bureaucracy, no one had become the wiser.

     The man had recently begun phone service to the apartment on Judas Street. And his number was not unlisted.

     Now, Cal felt his mission was more imperative than ever. He had to avenge this dead man. This murdered fellow war veteran named Jeremy Stake.

7

     Stake had fallen asleep in his chair, seated in front of his new comp system. He had it in VT mode and had been watching a program on the Blue War cease-fire, and the return of most of the Colonial Forces. Vets and their families interviewed about being reunited. He had wondered if the ratings were as good now with the war over as they had been with it on. Some of its battles had been broadcast live, at times from the point of view of the soldiers’ goggles. Not those battles, of course, of deep penetration teams like his, particularly skirmishes in the gas tunnels. No – battles in support of the Jin Haa’s independence.

     A staccato burst of automatic fire – from a drive-by shooting, perhaps – awakened him, and he grabbed the Wolff .45 that rested on the desk beside his keyboard. For a moment, he had thought he was back there. Not in the blue-leaved forests, but Tin Town, where he had grown up. Tin Town, from which he had escaped.

     Still gripping the big pistol, with his free hand he reached up to touch his face. He felt the raised bands on his cheeks. He did not need to set his comp screen to mirror mode to confirm it. In fact, when he set his handgun down on the corner of the bed and squeezed into his minuscule bathroom to splash some icy water on his face, he could not even bring himself to lift his eyes to his reflection.

     An extended beep from his computer system, followed two seconds later by another. Face dripping, Stake turned around. Someone was phoning him. He moved back toward his comp system, drying his hands as he went. Rather than seat himself in front of the screen, not expecting there to be anyone he really wanted to converse with at length, he leaned down over the back of his chair to check on the caller’s ID. It read: ANONYMOUS. In another mood he might not have answered, because it was likely some obnoxious marketer. Then again, what if the person who had taken over his father’s apartment had lied about not knowing him? What if that man had told his father someone claiming to be his son had come seeking him out? And what if his father had got his number, then, through the Veterans Administration?

     A too-hopeful, illogical reasoning as he tapped a key to receive the call.

     The comp’s screen changed to show him the caller, and to show the caller him. Stake saw a man leaning far back in a car seat, and pointing a rifle at him. He threw himself to one side as a dark purple beam of light launched itself straight out of the screen and burned a deep groove across his left hip.

*     *     *

     Another of Cal’s gun’s tricks.

     His new hovercar was not new. It had even been slathered with bright yellow graffiti already, last night when it was parked outside his flat. But its comp system worked fine. Before calling the imposter who claimed to be a man named Jeremy Stake, Cal had collapsed the stock of his rifle and its telescoping barrel, to make its use more practical in the vehicle’s confines. He leaned his back up against his door to give himself a bit more distance as he aimed his weapon at the monitor mounted on the dashboard.. His eye was pressed to the rubber cup shielding the scope’s tinier computer screen. His finger, on the trigger...

     But his first shot had only grazed his target. The man was quick. And why not? He was obviously a soldier, too.

     Cal twitched the gun’s barrel to follow him. He must not get excited. He must keep his cool. He was shooting fish in a barrel.

     He fired a second ray bolt through his monitor. And then a third, resisting the temptation to switch to fully automatic. It was an art. He took pride in it. It was what he had been trained to do.

*     *     *

     Stake tried to ignore the blazing pain along his hip, as he hit the floor and shoulder-rolled fast to his feet. Peripherally, as he came up, he saw a second bolt flash from the computer’s screen. It passed inches in front of his chest. He dove across his bed. A third bolt followed him, ploughing into the mattress. Before thudding to the floor on the opposite side, Stake scooped up the Wolff he had left on the bed before going into the bathroom.

     A fourth ray burned straight through his bed and hit the wall; a blind shot, based on where the caller thought him to be. He was good, too, because the bolt almost skimmed Stake’s shoulder.

     “Who are you?” Stake bellowed across the room.

     His answer was a fifth beam, that passed so close to his face he felt its heat.

     Sure that the sixth or seventh would kill him, Stake popped up from behind his bed with his own gun extended. The bulky pistol fired solid projectiles. And however elusive his unknown attacker was, the computer screen was a stationary object.

     One good shot struck the screen dead-on. But Stake shot it two times more, just for good measure.

*     *     *

     Cal swore under his breath as the connection was severed. But he had anticipated the possibility. That was why he had bought the hovercar.

     He stepped out of it. Directly in front of his enemy’s apartment building. He had hoped not to make a public display of all this, but it couldn’t be helped now. It didn’t matter. He was doing his duty as a soldier. He was protecting this city. And avenging a comrade he had never known.