Punktown: Shades of Grey (20 page)

Sometime after eleven, when the bus was empty but for an old drunken lady snoring in the second row, it squealed as it came to a stop at the rain pavilion by Rumford Park. A single figure waited there, a young girl in jeans and a Kurt Cobain T-shirt. She couldn’t be any older than twelve, standing there with scraggly blond hair and sleepless blue eyes.

Stan felt himself tense. They never did catch that other Veer… He turned to stare as she climbed up into the entry booth and fed coins into the register box. The weapon scan, in one of its finicky moods, beeped halfheartedly and Stan looked quickly to a screen in his booth. Did the screen show a small pistol tucked in her pants? The image flickered and then the “clear” message showed. The scan system did not seem terribly concerned, for it admitted the kid into the seating area.

The girl slipped into the front seat, just behind Stan, and gazed out the window. Stan considered hopping out and running off down the street, but instead, acting on the numb automated impulse that carried so many workers through their
days,
he put the bus in gear and drove on.

The lights in back flickered and the air conditioner let out a groan, sputtering its musty air. Passing neon painted the walls red, then purple, blue. A police craft flew
by,
lights twitching, siren loud, then fading. Stan kept looking in the mirror at the girl but she was gazing out the window, sniffling. He wished that old lady would wake up and get the hell off the bus.

When at last the girl faced forward, Stan saw that her eyes were red from crying and there were tears on her cheeks. Relief sighed through him. Veers did not cry…the kid was for real. She saw that he was looking and rapped at the plexi-door.

“Hey, mister, does this bus go to Folger Street?”

“Yes,” Stan said. Folger Street! Why would a little girl want to go there?

“Thanks.” The girl sat back and adjusted the top of her jeans.

“Hey, kid,” Stan called through the plexi, “do your parents know where you are?”

“No parents.”

“Sorry. Guardian? Somebody?”

“My father was a rapist, my mother’s dead.”

“Geesh. Do you live around Folger Street?”

The girl was scowling now. “Yeah, yeah, I live there, okay?”

Stan did not try talking to her after that. He could not handle anger from a female, regardless of her age.

The bus rumbled along, hissing through puddles, smearing through the lights. Dark buildings towered on either side and the drunken lady coughed herself awake. She stood up as if instinctually aware that she was nearing her departure point.

There was a small bench in a waiting port at the southern end of Folger. No takers, Stan was pleased to note. The bus hissed, stopped. The girl hopped up from her seat and thumped down the steps to the street, the old lady shuffling behind.

The bus moved away quickly and turned sharply at the nearest right, then parked. Stan climbed out and peered around the edge of a building. The girl was moving toward a structure of glossy black plastic, which, as garish red neon announced, was called The Poison Apple. Stan had heard of the place; a strip joint where the dancers were dead.

Reaching to remove something from under her shirt, the girl then reached up for the
door knob
. Stan could move pretty quietly in his sneakers and the pulsing from the building helped to muffle his approach. He swooped and grabbed the girl from behind, restraining her with a move his mother had taught him. The girl’s small black revolver clattered to the ground.

“Let me go! Let me go! I’ll scream!”

“Don’t scream
,
it’s me, the guy from the bus.”

“I’ll scream, mister, let go of me!”

“No, no, screaming is bad, talking is good. I just want to talk.”

The girl kicked and struggled as he dragged her out of the red light and around the corner. She bit his wrist; human teeth only, thank God. Still, it hurt.

“Shit!”

He got her into the driver’s booth of the bus and sat her down. Realizing he had been holding onto a female made Stan shudder and he backed up a step.

“Look, kid, I just want to talk for a few minutes, okay?”

“Talk about what? You made me drop my gun. I need that gun.”

“What do you need a gun for?”

“Protection. This is Punktown; a gun is a girl’s best friend.”

“So what was that all
about,
back there? Why were you going into a place like that with a gun in your hand?”

The girl’s eyes filled up. “Because my mother is in there.”

“But you said your mother was—”

Stan understood. He remembered that the girl had said her mother was dead. The dancers at The Poison Apple were all animated corpses.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You were going to get your mother back…”

The girl folded over her own lap and sobbed. Stan wanted to reach out to comfort her but could not. After a minute the girl was able to talk, more or less.

“Last week my mom was up all night with some guy taking snap-dragons and drinking vodka. She OD’d. In the morning the man was gone and I found her on the bed. I called my aunt’s house; she lives down the street. My uncle showed up; he made me wait in the car while he called the man from the funeral parlor. Then he showed up and they carried her out to the hearse.

“They never called the police or anything, they just put her in the hearse and the undertaker drove her away. But
they didn’t bury her
,
see
? They must’ve had some kind of plan to sell her to that club, because I was at the wake and she was not in the coffin.”

“The coffin was closed at the wake?”

“Yes.”

“Did you look inside?”

“No, but I pushed it and it felt too light. I know she wasn’t in it. My uncle goes to The Poison Apple. He’s friends with those people.”

Stan looked at his reflection, pale and ghastly in the window and hissed, “Bastards.”

“My poor mother should be resting in the ground, not twitching around on a stage for a bunch of drooling losers. That’s my mother in there!”

“Sick bastards,” Stan growled.

The girl stood up suddenly, as if she were going to walk right through Stan.

“Can I go now? I want my gun.”

««—»»

Riding up in the elevator to his mother’s apartment, Stan could hear a soft tribal pulse of music coming from tiny implants in the breasts of the pretty woman standing beside him. What’s next, he wondered? His expensively dressed co-rider got off on the twenty-third floor and he continued on to the thirtieth.

Stan’s sumo-sized mother was bald, naked, oiled, doing slow karate katas in the mirror of her workout room when he arrived. She called over her shoulder, “Hi, hon.
There
’s tea in the kitchen.”

“No thanks,” Stan said.

“Have some!”

“Right.”

The parents had divorced when Stan was ten. His mother had pursued her dreams by having
herself
surgically altered so that she was the size of a sumo wrestler. A transparent half-dome in her belly looked upon a chamber of luminous green fluid where two squirrel-sized fetuses were perpetually locked in a wrestling embrace.

Stan came back in. His mother moved gracefully for one her size, her eyes on the mirror, never looking at her son.

“So what is it, hon?”

“Well, I’m sort of short on cash, Mom, and my rent is due…”

“Did you ask your father?”

“I hit him up last time.”

The woman chuckled.

“Oh, I see, so it’s my turn.”

Stan laughed nervously. “I guess so.”

“Well, my purse is in the kitchen. Don’t take too much.”

Stan pocketed some bills and rushed from the apartment. He felt like he was sinking, standing there as the elevator made its long slow descent. He always felt like he was holding his breath when he was around his mother.

««—»»

Stan had seen the Pol-dwa selling guns at the bus stop over on Webster Street. So, before heading in for the night shift, he took a cab over and was pleased to find the dealer seated there on the bench reading a newspaper.

A Hispanic woman with a cattle prod was herding her children across the street and an emaciated dog, the same color as the filth that had spilled when the pollution sucker exploded, was digging in the clumps of debris that the clean-up crews had yet to remove.

Stan sat down beside the Pol-dwa and said, “I need a gun.”

The creature turned to him, small green lights like imprisoned fireflies swirling in its bulbous white eyes. “Bullets or plasma? I can get my hands on some ray stuff in a couple of days, if you want to wait.”

“Plasma sounds good.”

When the Pol-dwa opened its mouth there was heat like a fire and a stench like rotting fruit.

“Groovy. I have a Salem Sixty, twelve-shot automatic. It’s ceramic with print-resistant grips and trigger.”

“Sounds good,” Stan said, reaching for his wallet.

««—»»

It was just after eleven when Stan picked the girl up in front of her apartment, as promised. She was wearing the same jeans and T-shirt from the night before. He had called in sick and rented a helicar with some of the money from his mother. The girl climbed in and they sped off for Folger Street.

“Fancy. Is this yours?”

“No. I don’t have a car; it’s a rental.”

“Oh. Fancy.”

“Hey, kid, my name is Stan.”

“I’m Sophie.”

“I should’ve told you last night. Say, what about your aunt and uncle?”

“They’re drunk, asleep.”

Stan sighed. “Nice. Did you bring the picture?”

Sophie handed him a photograph of her mother. She looked like an older version of her daughter, but the hair was full and clean and golden and her eyes were bright with life.

“She was pretty.”

“Yeah.”

They passed over tenements and streets, a
junk yard
and a burnt-out library. Other helicraft bobbed and hummed, insect-like, vanishing in the incandescent plume climbing up from a factory’s chimney.

Stan slipped the photo into his gray jacket, beneath which hung the Salem Sixty, snug in a holster. “I’ve heard that there’s an insider’s place like The Poison Apple, an underground place called Low, where they have the animated bodies of dead toddlers dancing. Geesh, can you believe it? What’s the world coming to?”

“I don’t care what the world’s coming to. I just want my mother back.”

The red sign of The Poison Apple glowed beneath them. Stan set the helicar down.

“Now remember, the guns are just for protection. I’m sure I can bargain or work something out with these creeps, all right? I have money…”